The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (51 page)

"Ah yes, Councilor, I believe we met this morning."

Dieter jerked a nod. "We did. And now that the rest of those ninnies aren't around we can talk seriously."

Wiz put on his blandest expression and nodded. One thing consultants never had to search for was the political factions in an organization. Sooner or later they came searching for you. Usually sooner.

"I'm sorry I can't offer you a seat," Wiz said, "but you see—"

Dieter cut him off. "What you can offer me is your support, since just now you seem to have the council's favor." He eyed Wiz. "I'm a plain man, Wizard, and plain-spoken. We can do a lot together, you and I. And I can do a lot for you."

"You mean you can help me with dragons?"

"Dragons," the councilor snorted. "What do I care about dragons? I'm a practical man and we both know there's nothing you can do about them, eh? No, what I'm interested in is revenues. Do you realize this city hasn't had a revenue increase in near a generation? There's all sort of projects, wonderful projects, just stalled because there's no revenue. Why, there's streets, and fountains, and bridges. All just crying out to be built. And they've gone crying for years because of lack of revenues."

"What do you expect me to do about that? I'm an expert on dragons."

Dieter waved that away. "Tell them you need more money to fight the dragons, that's what. They already agreed to pay you a tenth of the city's revenues. Tell them you need more, and now."

"They'll only pay me if—when—I succeed."

"And you know what they'll do to you if you
don't
succeed, eh?" The Councilman leaned close and glared up at Wiz. "Well, let me tell you, you won't succeed without my help. I have weight on the council and me and my followers, we want those revenues increased."

Wiz wondered how much of those revenues would wind up in the pockets of the councilor and his cronies. Considering what the guy was like he decided a better question would be how much of the money would make it past those pockets.

"Now, I'm not a greedy man, Wizard," Dieter continued in what was obviously supposed to be a placating tone. "When the money flows there'll be help for those as helped us. Sort of finder's fees, you might say."

"It certainly sounds like a worthwhile program. What seems to be the obstacle?"

"The mayor's the obstacle, him and that Rolf who's behind him. All they ever do is cry about 'tax burdens' and 'fiscal responsibility.' " The little man snorted. " 'Fiscal responsibility.' What about our responsibility to them as support us I'd like to know?"

Wiz nodded. "It sounds as if you have a very strong case. I can assure you I'll give the matter serious consideration."

"You'll give the matter more than that if you want to stay off The Rock," Dieter said. "I'll be watching you, Wizard. And I'm a man who remembers his enemies as well as his friends."

After his visitor left Wiz spent the next several minutes working the front door back and forth to free up the rusted hinges. The hinges squeaked and groaned in protest and that suited his mood perfectly.

"The runt leave?" Malkin asked when she breezed back in a bit later, her arms loaded with cleaning supplies.

"He's gone. Did you pay for all this stuff?"

"Charged it to the council," she said, dropping everything in the middle of the hall. "Someone will be around later with bedding and stuff. What did the little rat want anyway?"

"My help in raising taxes."

"Figures. Of the whole money-gouging lot Dieter's about the worst." She paused and considered. "Well, anyways the most obnoxious."

"That's a problem for another day," Wiz said as he stooped to pick up a broom. As he stood back up he saw the flash of gold in Malkin's hand. "What's that?"

"Oh, something I picked up in the market," she said breezily, holding up an ornate gold ring with a big green stone. "Do you like it?"

"I thought I told you not to steal anything."

"You told me to pay for the cleaning stuff. And I did—leastways I charged it all legal-like. But this," she said, popping the ring down her bodice, "isn't cleaning stuff."

Tomorrow,
Wiz told himself.
I'll worry about this tomorrow.
"Come on, let's try to make this place habitable."

Malkin turned out to be a surprisingly hard worker. She obviously didn't know much more about house cleaning than Wiz did, but she went at it with a will and before long dust was flying in all directions. In a little less than two hours they had the front hall and two of the upstairs bedrooms more or less clean.

"Woof! You don't have any spell to clean this place, do you?" Malkin said as she plopped down on the stair beside Wiz to take a break.

"Not really. Well, I do know one, but it takes everything out of the room."
And sends it off in all directions with roughly the velocity of machine gun bullets
. He remembered the time in the ruined City of Night when he and the others had hacked the spell together to move rubble and how they'd ended up cowering in the dirt from the resulting barrage of missiles. That reminded him of Jerry, Danny and most of all Moira, and sent a pang through him.

"You all right?" Malkin asked, catching his mood.

"Yeah, I'm fine." He focused his attention on her. "Tell me about this widow who used to live here."

"Widder Hackett?" Malkin chuckled. "She was a salty one, even for a witch. She had a tongue, that one. If you so much as sat down on her stoop she'd come flying out waving a broom and chase you off. Always complaining about dirt and such, she was." The girl looked around the house and shook her head. "What she'd think if she could see this place now! We could clean and polish until the end of time and we'd never get it back to what it was."

"I'll settle for getting it to where it's habitable," Wiz said. "Let's do some more on the upstairs and then knock off for dinner."

"Let's knock off for dinner and then do some more upstairs," Malkin countered. "It's near evening and I haven't eaten today."

"Now that you mention it . . ."

Malkin looked at him. "Well?" she said finally.

"Well what?"

"Well aren't you going to magic us up food?"

"I'm not very good at that—unless the kitchen's got a microwave?"

Malkin snorted. "Fine wizard you are. I don't suppose you can cook either."

"I do all right," Wiz said defensively.

Malkin snorted again. "I know what
that
means, coming from a man. Look here then, I'll go back to the market and get a few things—charge a few things," she amended hastily before Wiz could say anything, "and I'll cook tonight. I don't want food poisoning on top of everything else today. But tomorrow you do the cooking. Now help me get this miserable door open so I can get back to the miserable market before the last of the miserable stalls closes."

With Malkin's help he tugged the door open again and he watched her as she disappeared down the street. Then he leaned against the door and pushed it to again as the hinges protested like souls in mortal agony.

The door, Wiz thought. I've got to do something about that damned door. 

Wiz went down the worn stone steps into the kitchen. It had to be the kitchen, he decided, because private houses don't usually come equipped with torture chambers.

It was a high, narrow room in what he would have thought of as the basement of the house. A couple of thin barred windows high up lit the place dimly. The walls and floors were dank stone and the ceiling was rough beams and planks. There was a huge fireplace with a wicked-looking collection of iron hooks and chains hanging under the mantel, plus a contraption of iron spikes and gears and yet more chains off to one side that he vaguely recognized as some kind of spit for roasting meat. There was a stone sink in the opposite wall and in the center of the room a heavy wooden table with a rack full of hooks above it.

Gee, he thought, clean this place up, light a fire in the fireplace, put some flowers here and there, I'll bet you could brighten it up to, oh, say, dismal. 

Among the pile of supplies Malkin had purchased was a small bottle of oil. Wiz took the oil back upstairs to the door and poured some on the hinges as best he could from the inside. Then he tugged the door open to get them from the outside.

He barely had the door open six inches when a furry gray streak shot through and dashed between his legs.

"Hey!" Wiz yelled, but the streak ignored him. It was halfway up the stairs before it stopped and resolved itself into a cat.

It was a rather bedraggled and quite large cat. A tiger-striped tabby cat, Wiz thought, dredging the terms out of his subconscious. A tiger-striped tabby tomcat, he amended as the cat turned its backside toward him.

The cat sat in the middle of the stairs and looked back over its right shoulder at Wiz.

"What do you think you're doing?" Wiz demanded of the cat. The cat continued to study Wiz with its great yellow eyes as if to say, "I live here. What's your excuse?"

Wiz opened his mouth to say more and then shut it again when he realized there wasn't anything he could say. Not only is arguing with a cat a lost cause, this cat was halfway up the stairs and could easily outrun him if he tried to give chase. Wiz didn't like looking foolish any more than the average cat does, so he decided to leave it for now.

Wiz didn't dislike cats, but from observing his friends who had cats he had arrived at a couple of conclusions. The first was that cats, not being pack animals like dogs or people, do not have consciences. That meant that if you had a cat you were sharing your life with a furry little sociopath.

The second was that every animal had evolved to exploit an ecological niche and in the case of cats that niche was people.

"Well, all right," Wiz told the cat. "But don't get the idea you're staying."

"Who are you shouting at?" asked Malkin as she came in the door with a basket of food.

Wiz nodded toward the stairs. "That."

Malkin studied the cat and the cat studied Malkin. "I think that's Widder Hackett's cat," the tall girl said finally. "Handsome enough."

"So is a leopard, but that doesn't mean I want to share quarters with one."

Malkin grinned at him. "Looks like he's decided to share quarters with you. And if you're planning on catching him to throw him out you can do it yourself. He's a scrapper, that one, and I've no fancy to get myself clawed up to put out an animal that will come right back in every time you open the door."

"Hmmf," Wiz snorted, weighing his ambivalence toward cats against the obvious trouble it would take to get rid of this one. "Does he have a name?"

"Widder Hackett called him Precious, but I think his name is Bobo."

"Bobo, huh? Looks more like Bubba to me." The cat narrowed his yellow eyes and glared at him as if to say "Watch it, bud."

It turned out there was a stove in the kitchen. It was a ceramic tile box next to the fireplace that Wiz had dismissed as a waist-high work counter. There was also a wooden hand pump that drew water into the sink. Malkin got a fire going with the help of a fire-starting spell from Wiz and she quickly threw together a grain-and-vegetable porridge that turned out surprisingly well. They ate in the kitchen under the glow of a magic light globe Wiz conjured up.

The only excitement came when Bobo cornered and caught a rat in the upstairs hallway. He came trotting down the stairs, head high, with the limp furry corpse dangling from his mouth and settled himself under the sink to eat with the humans. Wiz turned his back to the sink and tried to ignore the occasional crunching noises from Bobo's direction.

"Cat's got his uses," Malkin observed.

"Unfortunately I don't have a violin that needs stringing."

"I don't suppose you've got a spell to clean dishes either," Malkin said as she scraped the last of the stew from her bowl.

"I can probably whip one up tomorrow."

"Let it be for tonight then. But one way or another, Wizard, you'll clean those dishes tomorrow. And tomorrow it's your turn to cook."

"Who's the boss in this outfit anyway?"

"Depends," Malkin said lazily, "on who needs who the worst, don't it?"

Tomorrow, Wiz thought. I'll worry about this tomorrow. 

Actually there was a lot to worry about tomorrow, Wiz admitted to himself as he crawled into bed later that evening. He had to get things set up here so he could work, and he had to figure out a way to keep Dieter pacified. And he still didn't have the faintest idea how he was going to solve the village's dragon problem. That last was really beginning to gnaw at him.

Well,
Wiz thought as he drifted off to sleep,
it could be worse I suppose.
 

"Look at this mess!"

Wiz jerked bolt upright in bed.

"Look at it, I tell you," the voice repeated.

Wiz looked around frantically, but the room was empty.

backslash light exe!
he called out into the darkness. The room filled with the warm yellow glow of a magic globe, but there was still no sign of anyone else in the room.

"I don't suppose you're going to do anything about it, are you?" the voice rasped again. It was a particularly unpleasant voice. It reminded Wiz of a rusty door hinge or slowly pulling an old nail out of a piece of very hard wood.

"What are you carrying on about?" came another voice. Wiz whirled and saw Malkin in the doorway, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"There's someone in the room. I can hear her but I can't see her."

There was a loud snort from the corner.

"There," Wiz said.

Malkin's eyes narrowed. "I didn't hear anything."

"It was a snort. A definite snort."

"Are you sure you've been getting enough rest?"

"I tell you there's someone here. It sounds like an old woman and she's complaining that the house is dirty."

"Well, look at this place!" the voice came again. "It's a pigsty, an absolute pigsty! And what are you doing about it, I'd like to know? You're sitting there in the dirt and not making a move to clean it up."

"Probably Widder Hackett," Malkin said judiciously. "I guess them as said the place was haunted was right."