“I didn’t say anything. I just kept walking closer to him. When I was about two feet away, he dropped his spear and ran.
“I didn’t have any trouble getting in at the palace, either. Young Nebu-al-karsig was playing checkers on a fiddle-shaped board with one of his girls when I walked into the great hall. When he saw me, he jumped up and the board fell to one side and the pieces rolled over the floor. I said, ‘My lord Nebu-al-karsig, I am harder to kill than your noble father was.’
“He had turned a dirty greenish tan. He said, ‘I saw—I saw—’
“I sat down on the floor in front of him and bumped my head on it a couple of times to show I was going to be polite. Then I said, in a deep, serious voice, ‘A magician cannot die until his time has come, my lord. Shall we discuss extending the nuse installation I made for your respected sire?’ And he said, ‘Yes, let’s.’”
“It’s a wonder he didn’t try to poison you,” I commented.
“Scared to,” the nuse man said briefly. “Anyhow, we agreed I was to increase the nuse installation by one third, and in return Nebu-al-karsig was to pay me twice as many gold artifacts each lunar month as his father had, and for half again as long. It took a lot of figuring and explaining by the royal scribes before the king could understand the terms of the agreement, but he finally was satisfied with the arithmetic. Oh, and I got my old rooms in the palace back.”
“What did the special installation do?” I poured the last of the tea into the nuse man’s cup and went out to the kitchen to put water on to heat for more.
“It made bricks,” he said when I came back. “Beautiful, even, true, symmetrical mud bricks. Nebu-kalam-dug had been crazy about those bricks, and even Nebu-al-karsig thought they were pretty neat. You should have seen the adobe junk the brickmakers had been turning out by hand—sloppy, roundish affairs, all different sizes, with straw sticking out of them. Yes, my installation made bricks.”
“What did they use the bricks for?” I asked.
“For ziggurats—stepped temple pyramids. They made the first story black, the second white, the third red, and the last blue. Sometimes, just for a change, they’d do an all-blue or an all-red pyramid.
“For a while, everything was fine. Ziggurats were going up all over the place, and the skyline of Ur altered rapidly. The priests were pleased because all those ziggurats meant more priests were needed. Nebu-al-karsig was pleased because he was going down in history as the greatest ziggurat builder of his dynasty. And I was pleased because I was getting a lot of elegant artifacts. Then things started to sour.”
“The nuse,” I murmured. “I knew it.”
The nuse man glared at me.
“It… was… not… the… nuse!” he said, biting off the words. “What happened was the brickmakers sta rted to get sore. They were out of jobs, you see, because of the nuse. And the bricklayers were almost as badly off. They were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, without any overtime, trying to use up all the bricks. Pretty soon there would be riots in the streets.
“Nebu-al-karsig asked me what I thought he ought to do. I told him, let the brickmakers into the bricklayers’ guild. That way he’d have twice as many men to build ziggurats. So he issued a decree. And then there were riots in the st reets.
“‘What,’ said the bricklayers, ‘let those dirty sheep’s livers into our union? When they haven’t served a seven years’ apprenticeship?’ ‘What,’ said the brickmakers, ‘be forced to give up our noble art, sacred to Nintud since time immemorial, in exchange for slicking mud paste over heartless mechanical bricks?’ Then both sides shrieked ‘Never!’ and barricades, made out of brick baskets and cobblestones, began to go up everywhere.
“I suppose the fuss would have died down in time. People—as your age has learned—can get used to anything. But Nebu-al-karsig was sleeping badly. Palace gossip had it that he’d wake up screaming from dreams about his father. He asked the priests what the cause of the trouble was, and they told him that some of the minor gods, those who hadn’t got ziggurats yet, were mad at him. The people in Ur had about four thousands gods. So he decided to have the nuse installation turn out more bricks.
“Every morning, as soon as it was daylight, a bunch of shave-headed priests would file into the nuse factory. They’d stand in front of the installation, concentrating, for an hour, and then a new batch of priests would come. They kept that up all day. Nuse, of course, is basically a neural force. By the end of the day, bricks would be simply pouring out of the brick hoppers. Even to me, who had nothing to do with laying them, seeing all those mountains and mountains of bricks was very discouraging.
“I tried to argue with Nebu-al-karsig about it. I told him as politely as I could that he was endangering his throne. But he’d never liked me, and after the episode of the brickmakers’ guild, he hadn’t trusted me. He wouldn’t listen. I decided it was time I got out of Ur.
“I had one more installment of artifacts due me. I would collect that and then leave. By now the chest of artifacts in my bedroom was almost full.
“The day of the installment came and went, and no artifacts. I mentioned it to Nebu-al-karsig and he showed his teeth at me. But on the next day, ten or twelve priests came to my rooms with a little box. The head priest opened it and gave it to me. In it were the missing artifacts.
“They weren’t quite what my contract called for, but I was glad to get them. I thanked the head priest for them as nicely as I knew how, and he smiled and suggested that we have a drink. I said, fine, and he poured it out. One of the minor priests was carrying goblets and the wineskin. I put out my hand for the cup and the head priest—did I tell you I’d put a small general nuse installation in my rooms?”
I thought back. “No, you didn’t.”
“Well, I had,” said the nuse man. “I wasn’t going to be bothered with slow, stupid slaves waiting on me. I put out my hand for the cup and the priest went sailing up in the air. He hit on the ceiling with a considerable thump. Then he went around the room, floating just at eye-level, and whacked solidly against each of the four corners. He hit the fourth corner harder and faster than he had the first. I could see that his mouth was open and he looked scared.
“There was a kind of pause while he hovered in the air. Then he went up and hit the ceiling, came down toward the floor, up to the ceiling, down again, up, hovered, and then came down on the floor for the last time with a great crashing whump! He landed so hard I thought I felt the floor shake. I knew he must be hurt.
“I stood there frozen for a moment. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. Then it came to me. The drink in my cup had been poisoned. I suppose Nebu-al-karsig hadn’t had nerve enough to do it himself. And the nuse installation in my room hadn’t let the head priest get away with it.
“A nuse never makes a mistake. ‘The airy servitor. Don’t think, use nuse.’ The more I sell it, the more I’m convinced that it’s wonderful stuff. This time it had saved my life. I couldn’t help wishing for a minute, though, that it had just tipped over the poisoned cup quietly, because banging a priest around like that was sure to be sacrilege.
“The other priests had been as surprised as I was. Now they began to mutter and heft the clubs they were carrying. The nuse might be able to handle all of them at once, but I didn’t wait to find out. I made a dash into the next room and bolted the door.
“I was wearing my chronnox. All I had to do was grab my chest of artifacts and go to some other time. I made a dive under the bed for the chest. And it wasn’t there.”