"I must also tender my polite regrets." Nunzio, Guido's cousin, a slightly smaller but no less formidable ally, was equally adamant. He also dressed in dapper zoot suits, and was just as heavily armed. "We can lend you armaments, but it would be impolitic, if not impossible, for us to participate in your enterprise. Even if we were still seconded to your command, Don Bruce would say 'No' to this one. He does not tangle with Perverts if he can help it. Still, we would not want anythin' to happen to you, so if you insisted we would accompany you in spite of our orders." When I said nothing, he sighed. "We wish you the best of luck."
I returned to our tent and looked at my small army, much smaller than I'd hoped, and frowned. "Maybe we can recruit on Amazonia," I suggested.
"Nonsense!" Zol exclaimed heartily. "A Trollop, an intelligent maiden and a Klahd—between you you have experience, ingenuity and leadership that will far exceed your needs. Add to that the malleability of the Wuhses and my own expertise, and you have nothing to fear!"
I'd been in the adventure business far too long to take a comment like that at face value, but I did know the skills of my two companions. If it was a simple matter of figuring out the weaknesses of a given group, an Assassin and an accountant might well be all I needed. Besides, Tananda and Bunny were watching me carefully. I didn't want to let them down by showing them I didn't have faith in them.
"Surveillance first," I asserted, firmly. "Let's find out just how their operation is structured, and see if we can figure out their plans before we make a move of their own."
Bunny smiled. I'd said the right thing.
"Surveillance," Tananda mused. "Where are they based, Wensley?"
"Oh, in the castle," the Wuhs informed her. "The prince wasn't using it. He prefers to live in the suburbs, and it's just too centrally located. It's very sturdy, he said. Stone walls and tiled ceilings with big heavy beams. Very protective. We Wuhses like protective buildings."
"Good," stated Tananda.
"Good?" I echoed. "It's not like they're out in a field somewhere, where it would be easy to hear what they're saying."
She gave me an amused look. "That would make it impossible to eavesdrop on them. Have you ever tried to sneak up on someone in the middle of a field?"
"Of course not," I replied indignantly. "They'd see you coming for miles ... oh."
"Exactly, exactly," Zol beamed. "See? You're already building on one another's strengths. So the Pervect Ten feel very secure and certain no one will sneak up on them. It should be a simple matter to find a good listening post and learn all."
FOUR
"One's biggest problems are almost always of one's own making."
-V. FRANKENSTEIN, MD
"Run those figures again for me, Caitlin, darling," asked the elderly Pervect in the flowered dress. She tapped the side of the console with her cane.
"Don't do that, Vergetta," snapped the very young female at the keyboard. She turned deepset amber eyes at her senior. "It upsets the gremlins in the motherboard."
"Well, they need waking up, if those are the answers you're giving to me," Vergetta remarked peevishly. "They shouldn't talk this way to anyone's mother. This is a wrong answer. It has to be."
"I think she's right," declared Oshleen, a tall, willowy Pervect, sashaying into the room with a slighter, shorter compatriot in her wake. She waited for the skirts of her floor-length silk gown to settle around her manicured feet. "I've done the calculations myself, and Tenobia has checked the store rooms. About ten percent of the treasury is gone." "Again?" Vergetta roared. She slammed a hand down on the console, earning a glare from Caitlin. "What is it with these Wuhses?"
"I told you you ought to let me confiscate that D-hopper," sneered the narrow-eyed Pervect in black, who was filing her claws to razor points in the corner of the room.
Vergetta turned to her patiently. "It's a toy, Loorna. It gives them pleasure."
Loorna sprang up, her long yellow fangs bared. "Every time they use that toy they end up spending money! Money they don't have! Money we don't have. They're such idiots."
"They're Wuhses, what do you expect? They're going to pull business acumen out of the ground?"
"If they'd dig up some self-control, then I'd set every one of them up with shovels and tell them to get to it. As it is, if you yell at one of them, he folds up and points at everybody but himself."
"If I could get my hands on the Deveel who sold them that D-hopper I'd park it under his pointed tail," Tenobia growled. "I've tried to get them to put it back in the treasury and sign it out when they want to use it, but no. They don't want to let us hold it for them. We might not give it back, and that's 'uncooperative and unfriendly'. So it gets passed secretly from hand to hand, never in the same place for five minutes. If we don't control it, we can't tell them where they can and can't go. And they do: they flit off to any dimension that takes their fancy. And every time they go off they come back with a souvenir. Every single time. So suddenly everyone has to have one of the new gizmos, and we have a flood of imports. Then, because this stuff isn't free, they raid the treasury to pay for it. No one ever asks—they're not assertive enough for that. So they sneak it out. Every single one of them feels entitled to spend some of the money. No one has ever had the backbone to take all of it, but they might as well. The trouble is that they don't check, in case someone says no. Like us."
"We made a mistake telling them we were close to solving their problem," Oshleen sighed, polishing her nails on her sleeve. 'They think the money shortage is over."
"It's not over!" Caitlin snapped. "I keep a spreadsheet going of input and output."
"I know that," Oshleen retorted. "I recalculate the balances every day, too, you know."
"On paper!"
"And if your gremlins stop working, what record do you have? Nothing!"
"Girls, girls," Vergetta chided them. "Enough!"
"It's natural to be interested in new things," Nedira interjected, soothingly. "They're curious. They like toys."
"It's not the toys that are the problem," Tenobia insisted. "It's paying for them. They don't sell their used toys when the novelty's worn off. They just accumulate them, and think that the money's going to fall out off a tree."
Paldine drummed her fingertips on her lip. "If we could only head off the trend before it catches on kingdomwide, we could control the flow and make a percentage on the value. Not to mention making sure they're not being cheated. As it is, they always pay too much, then they can't admit it. Sooner or later one of them sneaks in with the janitors and abstracts the coins when we're not looking. I told you we should have put a wyvern in the treasury."
"So they're not so good at personal responsibility either," Vergetta shrugged. "That's why they hired us."
"They need keepers, not financial managers," Loorna countered. "Shepherds, that's what, and maybe a bunch of border collies. Yes, that's it. Put them all in pens until we're finished straightening them out."
"If they would just have let us do our job," Oshleen drawled, bored with the never-ending arguments, "we could have been out of here six months ago. They're mak- ing it impossible. Paldine should never have agreed to a milestone-based contract, especially one that prevents us from taking any other consulting contracts in the meantime. It should have been strictly time-based."
Paldine, pristine and elegant in a two-piece skirt suit and flowered scarf pinned at the shoulder, jumped up from the couch and grabbed Oshleen by the neck of her silk gown. "If you say that one more time I'll rip your head off! Where were you when I was negotiating it? Sashaying around looking for more clothes? Strutting around on a runway?"
"I was humiliating myself for this group! We needed that device! We could have used the Bub Tube for mass hypnosis, and maybe broken the habit they've gotten into. That Deveel created a nation of shopaholics!" Oshleen said with a dangerous scowl.