She snatched a pot of rouge off the table and threw it at me. Out of reflex I trapped it in mid-air with a tendril of power. The Deveel's eyes widened.
“Who are you?” she hissed.
“Uh, my name's Skeeve,” I said. The way her face closed I knew she had heard of me. I grabbed the jar and set it gently down on the table. “Look, this is not about me. My friend Bunny …”
“Forget it!” she said. The others sneered down their long noses at me. “She has Skeeve the Magnificent working for her? And you want us to give up our advantage? You're insane. We're going to do whatever we have to to win. What are you going to do about that?”
Shoulders sagging, I went back to where Bunny was sitting, reading through her much-revised script. What would I do? What could I do?
The force line under the arena was big enough for me to use if I wanted to enforce honesty in the remaining phase of the competition, but did I have the right to impose my views on the others? If I had no stake in the contest, perhaps, but I was there as a partisan for one contestant who would benefit if everyone stopped interfering with one another.
“How did it go?” Bunny asked, then interrupted me before I could speak. “Never mind, let me tell you: they all told you to go peddle your papers. But thank you for trying. I'm proud of you for wanting to stay on the straight path. With your powers you could outstrip every one of them. That wouldn't be fair. I've decided I'm going to be honest in my essay, and face the judges on my own merits. Crom knows what they'll do to me — anything is possible, from throwing tomatoes to transformation spells.”
“What's a tomato?” I asked curiously.
“A fruit that's been convinced it's a vegetable,” Bunny said, mysteriously. “Look, Skeeve, I am sure to lose, but at the very least I can find out who wins the Bub Tube and let Uncle Bruce know whom he has to buy it from. I'm sure he'll be able to make her an offer she can't refuse.”
“What's so important about it?” I pondered, staring up at the rectangular piece of glass on its plinth high above the judges' table. The magik that made it run drew constantly on the force line under the auditorium. Even at this distance I could clearly make out the pictures on its surface. People in brightly colored clothes performed appallingly embarrassing tasks for money. Bad singers that I could just hear over the din in the hall wailed out their tunes, and bad dancers tripped around, all within the confines of the glass box. And over all the noise coming from the Bub Tube was the inexplicable presence of raucous laughter. I hated it, but it was as fascinating to watch as a basilisk, and just as capable of freezing its prey in place. Darkness suddenly enveloped me. “Hey!” I protested.
“Sorry,” Bunny said, pulling her cloak off my head. “You fell into its spell.”
“That's dangerous,” I said. “Is there a way to control it?”
“Yes, there's a guide.” Bunny rose from her seat and went to the foot of the plinth. She came back with a small book featuring an amazingly lifelike illumination on the cover.
I opened it and began to read the instructions. For a magikal item it had amazingly good documentation, down to a listing of the times various images would appear on the surface. “Wild Kingdom” interested me, “being the exploits of his noble yet mad majesty King Roscoe the Disturbed, and his Knights of Chaos.”
“Bunny,” I said, an idea dawning on me, “if it's possible for you to win based on your essay, I'm going to see that you do. And I won't cheat at all.”
The contestants were unusually subdued as they prepared for the essay portion. None of the expected sniping was going on, dropping the sound level so low I could hear the inane chatter from the Bub Tube. Every one of the women were dressed in formal costumes, even the Trollops, for whom formal meant fewer body parts showing than usual. Bunny emerged from her assigned cubicle in a red gown that fit her as if it had been painted on her body. A frown wrinkle was fixed between her eyebrows. I took her hand and swirled her, gracefully for me, around the corner of the room.
“You look wonderful,” I said. “You're going to be a smash.” Bunny blushed.
I was, unfortunately, more immediately correct than I had anticipated. As soon as Bunny made her appearance, the Deveel women appeared out of nowhere in an angry cloud like sting-wasps.
“Who do you think you are?” they demanded. One of them pushed her back against a mirror. “Red is our color! Klahds like you get blue!”
“I'm not a Klahd,” Bunny said, standing her ground. “I'm half Fairy!”
“Then violet!” the chief Deveel woman said, in a tone that brooked no argument.
“No, green!” shouted another.
“Yellow! Yellow's for the Fay!”
The room stewards arrived, shouting to everyone to break it up. By the time I caught sight of her again, Bunny's dress was a rainbow of anything but red, and her face had been dyed in stripes to match. I enveloped her with a web of power and pulled her out through the crowd, which disbursed with angry looks at me. Bunny's spine was straight as a tree. If the Deveels had intended to shake her confidence, they'd failed. She was more determined than ever to get through the contest honestly. I used a little power to dispel the color in her face, but a pink flush remained in her cheeks. She flatly refused to let me change her dress back.
That was the last attack, magikal or otherwise, until the essay portion began. The first woman on stage was a Klahd.
“Good evening,” she said, curtsying to the judges. “If crowned the winner of this marvelous contest, I will use the Bub Tube for the benefit of all beings …”
Out of nowhere a red sphere came hurtling, and splatted in the contestant's face.
“That's a tomato,” Bunny pointed out.
It was a free-for-all. The poor Klahd hopped all over the stage, avoiding hot feet, kicking at snake-spiders that suddenly appeared and tried to crawl up her legs, shouting to be heard over booing from the audience, flushing sounds and greatly amplified intestinal noises. Swarms of sting-wasps buzzed around her, zooming for her face, her hands, any exposed flesh. The judges sat at their table, calmly marking score sheets and sipping tea poured for them by their attendants. They didn't move a finger to prevent the humiliation of the first contestant. Or the second. Or the third. The fifth essayist, the Gnome, simply wasn't there when rotten fruit came flying her way, but her continual disappearing and reappearing interfered with the delivery of her speech.
“… A benefit to all beings … used only for good … personally promise to dedicate the device …”
Except for the direction the missiles were coming from, stature and skin color of the victim, er, participant, the speech, the ducking, and the humiliation of each woman was nearly identical. I began to feel sorry for the contestants. It would have tried even a seasoned politician to survive a pelting like that. I glanced at Bunny. Her face was set.
An Imper woman slunk off the stage, covered with yellow paint that had sloshed down on her from a bucket that clanged to the floor after depositing its contents on her head. The Pervect woman shoved past her, speech clutched in one scaly hand. She strode to the center of the stage, showed all her teeth and stuck a clawed finger out in the direction of her fellow contestants.
“If one single rotten vegetable,” she roared, “one bucket of anything or one spell comes my way until I have finished reading this speech, every single one of you is going to be sorry!”
My ears rang with the sound of her voice, but she'd made her point. Except for resentful muttering, it was quiet in the auditorium. She showed all of her long teeth in a feral smile. I felt her build up a spell and cast it upon herself. It didn't feel like a charm of protection, rather one to aid eloquence.