Mercedes Lackey - Anthology (19 page)

 
          
She
looked up at the barred window of her room, and saw that their entire adventure
had only taken them a yard or so beyond the bars.

 
          
Then
Deru, who had been nowhere to be seen, shot up to his old height beside her;
she stepped back to avoid catching his elbow in her chest. He staggered.

 
          
He
looked awful—and, she realized, it was her fault. He had come here to save her.
And it had been her own fault she needed saving in the first place.

 
          
She
hadn't meant for anyone to get hurt. And no one had really meant her any harm
either. She had thrown herself at Gar, and he had taken some advantage of that,
but he hadn't tried to hurt her. Even the owl, which would gladly have eaten her,
had just been hungry.

 
          
Deru
had been trying to help, but he was the one who- got hurt. It wasn't fair.

 
          
"Do
you have any healing magic in there?" she asked, as he swayed unsteadily
on his feet.

 
          
"No,"
he said, "but I've been thinking about it. The Cloak of Ethereality should
stop the bleeding and take the weight off my injured leg—I won't weigh anything
when I'm ethereal. You start walking; I'll catch up."

 
          
"How
long will it take?"

 
          
"Just a few minutes."

 
          
"Then
I'll wait," she said.

 
          
It
was still early in the morning of the following day when Princess Kirna,
escorted by what appeared to be a crippled wizard's ghost, arrived safely back
at Quonmor Keep.

 
          
Judging
by the expression on her father's face, her arrival was not half as surprising
as the first thing she said when shown in the audience chamber.

 
          
"I'm
sorry, Daddy," she said. "I won't do it again."

 
          
He
snorted. "We should hope not." he said.

 
          
"On
the way home Deru explained to me about wizards not being allowed to get
involved with royalty," she said. "I need to tell you that Gar didn't
really kidnap me; I followed him. I don't want the Wizards' Guild to punish
him." In fact, Deru had gone on at some length about how ruthless the
Wizards' Guild could be—information that Kirna knew she had heard before, but
had never paid the attention it deserved.

 
          
Tolthar
frowned, clearly puzzled. "We have nothing to do with the Wizards'

 
          
Guild."
He looked at the rather insubstantial presence
standing just behind his daughter. "Is this the wizard we hired?
He looks . . . different."

 
          
"He's
under a spell. He got hurt, and needed to enchant himself until he can get
home. You'll still pay him, even though I wasn't kidnapped, won't you?"

 
          
Deru
hadn't said anything about his fee; mentioning it was entirely Kirna's own
idea.

 
          
Tolthar
looked at Deru, who definitely did not look human just now. "Of
course," he said, with a rather forced-looking smile. "We wouldn't
want to anger a wizard. If we did, the Wizards' Guild you mentioned might decide
to show us the error of our ways."

 
          
Kirna
nodded, very seriously. That was exactly what she had been thinking on the way
home. Wizardry was powerful stuff. The Wizards' Guild, given a reason, might
well swoop down on them.

 
          
Just
like an owl, she thought.

 
          
Mike
Resnick is the multiple award-winning
author
of such
novels as Stalking the Unicorn, Ivory, Purgatory, Kirinyaga, and A Miracle of
Rare Design. His novella "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" won both the
Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1995. He is also an accomplished editor, having
edited such anthologies as Alternate Presidents, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, and
Return of the Dinosaurs.

 
          
JUSTIN
O'Toole had it made.

 
          
It
took him a while. He'd started by illustrating the Continental Lingerie catalog
("for the oomph girl!"). Then he'd worked on the daily War King Sky
Killers strip. From there he'd jumped to the editorial page in
Hackensack
, then to
Dayton
, and finally, the big time—chief editorial
cartoonist for the Chicago Beacon.

 
          
He
had wit, he had talent, and now that he was in
Chicago
, he had more subject matter than he could
use in half a dozen lifetimes.

 
          
At
first he'd gone the normal route, caricaturing everyone from the President to
the Mayor, but then a fan sent him one of Walt Kelly's old Pogo books, the one
in which Senator Joe McCarthy had been drawn as a wildcat (and which
subsequently made Kelly's reputation as a political satirist), and he realized
that no one had done anything like that for years.

 
          
So
the President became a bellicose rhino, and the Mayor became a sly weasel, and
Alderman Berlinski became a skunk, and Senator Neider-man became a cockroach,
and Police Commissioner Ryan became a sloth, and within two years O'Toole had won
a Pulitzer Prize and published his first book of political cartoons, which
became an instant bestseller, not just locally but nationally.

 
          
Of
course, not everyone was pleased with his approach. The President was above it
all (or at least pretended to be), but the Mayor actually took a swing at him
when they met outside the opera. Commissioner Ryan kept a 24-hour watch on him,
and if he went one mile over the speed limit, he could count on a ticket.

 
          
Alderman
Berlinski actually sued him for defamation, though the case was laughed out of
court. As for Senator Neiderman, he mailed O'Toole a box of dead cockroaches on
his birthday.

 
          
But
no one—repeat: no one—was more outraged than Saul Rabinowitz.

 
          
Saul
lived in Glencoe on
Chicago
's posh
North
Shore
. He wasn't a politican himself, but he
owned more than his share of them. He had no party affiliation; he'd buy any
politician of any political stripe. And suddenly farms would be condemned, to
be replaced by Saul Rabinowitz Developments, complete with golf courses and
recreation centers. Public parks would vanish, to be replaced by modern new
Saul Rabinowitz Office Buildings. Old city blocks would be replaced by
brand-new improved Saul Rabinowitz City Blocks.

 
          
It
wasn't long before O'Toole began looking into Rabinowitz's dealings, and found,
to his surprise, that the Catholic Church was no longer the biggest landowner
in
Chicago
. Rabinowitz was. He owned 3,016 apartment
buildings, 82 office buildings, 3 shopping malls, 4 local airports, and the
word was that he was the real reason the Chicago Bulls had been able to afford
Michael Jordan's salary.

 
          
It
was when O'Toole discovered that in addition to his real estate empire,
Rabinowitz also controlled most of the prostitution and drug traffic in the
Chicago
area, that he began incorporating him into
the editorial cartoons—as a buzzard, an ugly eater of the city's carrion.

 
          
Rabinowitz
was on the phone the next morning, the soul of reason, suggesting they have
dinner and discuss the situation before his lawyers were forced to sue. O'Toole
agreed, met Rabinowitz at an upscale steak house on the Gold Coast, started
listing what he had found out about the drugs and the prostitutes and the
bought politicians, and left before desert when Rabinowitz threw his main course
against a wall in a fit of rage and began threatening O'Toole's life.

 
          
The
subpoena arrived after the third cartoon appeared. A black
Lincoln
tried to run him down after the fifth. A
wild shot came through his bedroom window after the eighth.

 
          
O'Toole
kept drawing, and the people kept reading, and before long the Mayor was
serving 15 years for fraud, and Commissioner Ryan had been fired for
incompetence, and Alderman Ber-linski was sitting in the cell right next to the
Mayor, and Senator Neiderman was censured by a vote of 92-7 in the Senate (the
only abstention was Illinois' other Senator)—and Saul Rabinowitz was serving
six consecutive 30-year terms with no hope of parole.

 
          
O'Toole
soon accepted an offer, at double his current salary, from the New York Globe,
and spent the next couple of years happily turning the
New York
city
government into a new batch of animals.
Then one day he got a phone call form the Cook County Jail.

 
          
"Yes?"
said O'Toole.

 
          
"Do
you know who this is?" demanded a familiar voice.

 
          
"Hi, Saul.
How are you doing?"

 
          
"I'm
dying, that's how I'm doing!" grated Rabinowitz. "And it's
all your
fault!"

 
          
"I'm
not responsible for your bleeding ulcer or whatever the hell you've got,"

 
          
said
O'Toole calmly.

 
          
"It's
your fault," repeated Rabinowitz, "and I'm going to get you for
it!"

 
          
"I
thought you were dying."

 
          
"I'll
come back from the grave if I have to."

 
          
"Give
my regards to Hitler and Caligula and that whole crowd," said O'Toole,
hanging up the phone.

 
          
And
that was that. He saw on the wire that Rabinowitz had died the next week, and a
few weeks later the Mayor committed suicide and Alderman Berlinski contracted
cancer, and within a year everyone he'd gone after back in
Chicago
was dead.

 
          
He
didn't give it another thought, until one fall day when he was walking through
Central Park
on his lunch hour. There was a flash of
motion off to his left, and he turned and saw a weasel, which was passing
strange, since there aren't any weasels in
Central Park
.

 
          
This
wasn't just any ordinary weasel either. It looked exactly like his rendering of
the Mayor in the Chicago Beacon. Curious, he approached it. It snarled and
bared its teeth.

 
          
He
walked a little farther and suddenly came to a skunk. Not any skunk, but an
Alderman Berlinski skunk. It glared at him with red little eyes.

 
          
Frowning,
he passed under a tree, and suddenly felt a heavy weight fall onto the back of
his neck. Claws dug into the flesh, and as he reached up and tried to disengage
whatever it was, his foot hit something and he fell heavily to the ground.

 
          
It
was a sloth—the very image of Commissioner Ryan—that was tearing at his neck,
and as he tried to get to his feet he found the weasel holding one and the
skunk gripping the other.