Mrs. Sanderson was sitting at a desk almost as impressive as Dalgliesh’s. She had two trays, one on each side of her. Paperwork appeared in one with a pinging noise. It was then picked up, read, and amended with her blurring quill in fractions of a second, then finally placed in the outgoing tray. Documents immediately vanished with a pong noise as they hit the other tray.

  PING!

  “Baronet Bob. You’re position at court has allowed me some leeway–” PONG, “–to deal with your situation. You are obligated to attend the Mages Academy within three days in order to have your magical signature logged.” PING.

  “I can do that. Can you do the paperwork?” PONG.

  “It’s already done.” PING. “My Lady is not pleased with you.” Oh yeah, Karen, Goddess of Summoning The Manager and Paperwork. “However, as a professional courtesy–” PONG, “–to Bulb, she is willing to allow me to act in your favour in this instance.” PING.

  “So I need to go straight to the Academy?” I could steal some more spells! This sounded like an excellent opportunity. Greed-demon was also enthused; clearly, my greed extended beyond shiny things.

  “No. Bulldo has a temporary license for you. Should the Quaestors approach you again, show them the badge.” PONG. “Perhaps you could simply pin it to your tunic as intended?” PING.

  I thanked her, backed away, and left the austere office. I found Bulldo leaning on a wall just outside the portal room, trying to chat up Samantha, Dalgliesh’s very attractive maid.

  “Sir Bob, a pleasure to have you with us again. Bulldo, I’m really not interested. Besides, Agatha has her teeth in you, and I’m not going to risk upsetting the Blood Mare.” She turned and sashayed away towards the boss's office.

  “Blood Mare?” I asked Bulldo.

  “The Library offers a lot of services, not just teleportation safezones. One of them is, ah, unsanctioned unaliving for profit?”

  “Assassins?”

  “The Thieves Guild hates them; the pair are in direct competition in several areas.” He shrugged. “We’re semi-legit. Brothels are legal, most drugs are legal, or so batshit insane no one wants to use them anyway. You ever seen someone on Blushtack?”

  “Should I have done?”

  “I guess not. They feel great but lose all impulse control.”

  “Like booze?”

  “Booze on steroids. Say anything, do anything. They usually die on their first trip by jumping from a roof or eating hot tar. Before you ask, some people take it under very controlled conditions, as in being locked alone in a room with no way out. Highly addictive, like instantly hooked. Mostly it’s used in unsanctioned unaliving for profit, though.”

  “Marvelous. You’ve got a badge for me?” He pulled it out of his pocket and tossed the thing to me. It was a flat kite-shield shaped piece of grey metal with a large TL cut into the surface. He moved into the portal room.

  “Drop the gear in here, and I’ll drop you off somewhere. The badge will keep the Quaestors and the local constabulary, not that they’re much use for anything, off your back. Make sure you get to the Academy in three days; otherwise, you’re going to the Cells, and it isn’t as insignificant as Aggie made it sound. Not for the likes of you, at least. So where are you headed?”

  I dropped off the Arkendrite and had Bulldo leave me in the little alley behind Phillpot’s place. A short walk later, and I once again entered the rundown middle terrace and found myself in something that could easily pass for a mix of supermarket and hardware store on earth. This place just had more enchanted daggers and cheap love potions on sale. Thinking about it, Bacardi Breezers on Earth served much the same role as the ‘passion philtres’.

  “Welcome to Phillpot’s. I love you,” said the miserable greeter.

  I wandered down the aisles, my greed demon occasionally sneering at the shoppers or berating me as I was picking up most of the items on the lists Jenny and Esme had given me, but it was still distracted by my payment from Dalgleish. Might as well kill two birds with one shop. I shuddered as I scooped up a pile of seeds and weighed out the amount Jenny had wanted before tipping them into the paper bags provided for the purpose.

  I soon found my hands were filled with bags of seeds, rare spices, and a few kitchen utensils, so I returned to the door and picked up a basket. It was soon depressingly full. I’d checked off the bulk of the items, though, so a bit like ripping off a plaster, I was getting it out of the way in one unpleasant burst of spiritual and fiscal pain. Greed-demon was still largely focused on touching itself at the thought of the cool million now safely stored away in my belly pouch.

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  I queued patiently, and when I got to the front, a green homunculus looked up and gave me something that approached a smile. It had tiny hands for teeth, which rather spoiled the intended effect. The rest of it looked more like a stereotypical alien from the movies, but with tiny wings on its back.

  “Hi there, putrid sack of fleshy ooze. I’m Sterald Gevens, and I’ll be your cashier today. Do you have any controlled items in the basket?”

  “It was all on the shop floor?”

  “Hmm. Well, puny mortal, what the goop in your pathetic skull failed to appreciate, perhaps due to the inevitable flaws of organic evolution, was that there are a lot of items that are on watch lists. If you wish to purchase Gipil’s Generic Gastric Gusher, for example, you need to be approved by the Dunnikindivers. Hartley’s Homeopathy Kit for Beginners is only available to paid-up members of the Mendicant’s Agency of Marvelous Mixtures. You don’t seem to have the mercury-fume-induced thousand-mile glaze those repulsive excretors always have.”

  “Thousand-yard stare,” I corrected.

  “I know what I said flesh-sack. And I was correct. Right, let’s see what you’ve got…” The little bastard floated about, placing items into bags and bashing keys on his till.

  “...Altogether that will be seven gold, five silver, please, you putrescent dripping from the loins of the dirt.” I counted out the coins carefully. The abuse was not helping me keep my greed under control, nor my urge to find out what a demon tasted like.

  “I need to speak to Phillpot as well, Sterald.” Keep it short. Don’t give him an opportunity to parrot you or find an excuse to insult you.

  “The master doesn’t associate with decrepit, disgusting–” My hand flashed and clamped down around his throat, yanking him across the counter and close to my suddenly glowing purple eyes.

  “I’ve had a trying day. One. More. Word. You little shit, and I'll find out what you taste like. As in eat you, not anything weird.” I started to squeeze but was yanked away, my hands falling loosely to my sides. Nothing was touching me, but the air around my body had turned to stone.

  “The master would be delighted to entertain you briefly, but I must insist you don’t handle the staff. While they are merely imps and demonettes, they are time-consuming to enslave. Please and thank you.” The voice was like nails dragged down a chalkboard. The pressure locking me in place vanished. I turned to the source of the nightmare-fuel words and wished I hadn’t.

  “Jesus!” I jumped backwards, bumping into the counter.

  A tear in reality had opened behind me, and from it, tentacles covered in eyeballs and tiny snapping mouths extended a few feet into the world. The other shoppers had moved back a ways but didn’t seem overly perturbed by what looked like a Lovecraftian nightmare forcing its way into reality.

  “Rather the opposite, actually. Sterald, please take a fifteen-year break in the Seventh Circle. Sir Bob is a valued supplier.”

  “Aw, Nyal the stinking skin-blob laid its filthy mortal paws on me first! I didn’t even do anything! I followed the Law of the Cashier to the letter,” complained the imp.

  “Seventh Circle. Now.” Reality quaked at the words. The tone suggested this entity was one who ate worlds. Sterald shot me a dirty look, which I responded to with a smirk, blipped away, and then immediately reappeared.

  “Righto, who’s next? Please move on, you pathetic sputum of pointlessness, lower than the bowels of the least implet,” he said to me, and I reached out again, but the looming nightmare behind me stopped me in my tracks.

  “I’ll await you in the master quarters.” Nyal withdrew through the crack in the universe, and I caught a brief glimpse of hell that caused a far more urgent need to piss than even Kenny had managed. That was just wrong. I was going to have nightmares for weeks.

  A section of the counter disappeared, and I made my way through the impossible corridors to Phillpot’s boudoir. Thankfully, this time he was already wearing his kimono as I entered.

  “What have you got for me?” he asked without preamble.

  “Nice to see you too.” This was becoming an annoying habit of my business partners. “Loot and treasures galore. I’m a regular travelling peddler.” I spilled out my goods onto the floor, and he leaned forward in interest.

  “Help yourself to a drink; this might take a while.” He waved a hand at a drinks cabinet, and I accepted the offer. Free was free, after all. A glass full of Golden Jack in my hand, I settled down on a pink loveseat and waited as he pawed through the goods, sorting them into piles and chuntering under his breath as he did so. There were a lot fewer ‘this is shit’ comments than the last time, which I felt boded well.

  After ten minutes or so, he was done and went to get himself a glass. He sat down on the edge of his heart-shaped bed and took a sip.

  “Not too shabby.” My greed-demon rubbed its claws together. “But not too great either. Ten gold for the lot. If it keeps improving in quality like this, you’ll be making some real money soon.” I locked my thoughts onto the pouch with a million hiding in my storage space. What a colossal waste of my time this trade deal had been. Next time I caught up with Tex, I was going to have words. He could run this shit around for peanuts.

  “It’ll do.” I didn’t sound happy, and Phillpot laughed.

  “Oh, don’t sweat it, Bob. You’re onto a winner with me!” He winked, and the thing in his eyes swam from the one that winked to the open one, and then, I swear, it waved at me. “Fine, I’ll bloody tell him! Nyal says not to worry about the glimpse of her realm you caught. Hell is a dimension; it’s not a punishment for the dead. If you get another downgrade, you’ll go somewhere much more interesting.”

  “It was…” I stuttered to a halt and took a large gulp of whisky, then got a hold of myself. “It was not somewhere I would choose to vacation.”

  “Ha! No shit! You get used to it, though. Anything above the Ninth Circle is a party for me these days. So, Baronet Bob the dragon. Back in the big city and outside the masquerade. That’s a great thing. Gives us hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “There are more than a few of us hiding in the shadows, or plain sight, as is my case. A pathway to going legit… It’s earned you some goodwill, my friend.”

  “What are you?” I asked bluntly.

  “I’m… complicated. Technically, I’m a Mantisman, or at least that's what I started as. Took some funny evolutions in my time that kind of veered me off that course, though.”

  “I ate a Cuttleman King not too long ago. Good brains. What are you now?”

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”