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Robert Asprin, Jody Lynn Nye

Myth-Gotten Gains

Chapter 1

"PSST! HEY, FRIEND! Yeah, you with the green scales! Buy me!"

I looked around.

I was browsing one of the myriad jumble sales that beckoned to me, not in the Bazaar, where the voice was probably that of the innocent-looking Deveel vendor behind the table, but on market day in the town square, in a dimension called Ittschalk. I'd stopped off on a tour of the provinces just for the hell of it, where the people were covered by masses of long, wavy hair like Rastafarians and the wide-open skies were greenish.

For the first time in years I wasn't dependent on anyone else for a ride to the next dimension — thanks to a gift from a friend. I was enjoying the novelty of being able to travel in my own company, staying as long as I pleased, where I pleased. If I felt like having a weeklong drunk in Pookipsie with the Pookas, I could do it. If I discovered the annual Broaching of the Casks festival in Harv was a bust, I could book out of there without having to wait around for a magician to give me a boost. liberty was more of a kick than any champagne I'd ever drunk.

The Prounvip Annual Village Fair was a forest of tents set up in a wide-open square, amid the few scattered buildings on the dusty prairie plain. An oom-pa-pa band was tuning up under a conical, blue tent in the middle of the clearing. The savory smell of frying sausages and bubbling pots of spicy chili drew my nose's attention to the stringy-haired cooks laboring over pit stoves under an adjacent pavilion. Kids were having their long locks plaited into tiny dreads and tipped off with colored beads by nimble-fingered hairdressers, or sprayed in undulating patterns with glitter that their mothers were undoubtedly hoping would wash out easily later on.

Off to one side the hairy denizens were trying their luck at shying coconuts, trying to hit inflated colored bladders with darts, or attempting to knock down a pyramid of amphorae with a stuffed cloth ball. Pretty primitive games, to my sophisticated Pervish eye, but the locals seemed to be having fun trying their luck. I wasn't sucker enough to throw away my coppers on the games, which were always rigged, at every fair in every dimension, or, from what I could see, on the merchandise set out for sale on rackety tables arranged under the hot sun for my delectation.

I surveyed it all with a phlegmatic eye. Most of the stuff for sale was unmitigated junk, but I was enjoying a look anyway before checking out the quality of the local brew in the hostelry across the way. Enough of the patrons were staggering out to give me a good feeling about the place.

"Hey! Look down! Please, good fellow, get me out of here!"

I looked down. An eye peered up at me. It was reflected in the inch or so of dull silver blade protruding from the worn leather scabbard on the table. I glanced up. There was no one nearby from whom it could be reflected. Intrigued, I grasped the darkened brass hilt and pulled the sword out a few more inches. A second eye appeared reflected in the blade. They were long, steel-blue orbs outlined in black, keen and summing. I glanced up to see if it was the black-braided merchant casting a spell on the blade to make it more appealing to pass-ersby, but he was at the end, talking to an old lady covered by long, silver hair about a flowered china chamber pot.