'Can we get started, my friend Phant?' Merdok asked, dabbing his kerchief around the sweat runs on his face. 'It's midday and bloody hot out here/
'And I have murders to do and blood to drink!' Erotik cried. Her plump and unhealthy minders oohed and aahed and tried to get their nipple-spikes and bondage straps comfortable.
'Oh dear God-Emperor… they're never going to make it out alive…' whispered Bequin.
'More fool them…' I whispered back.
Phant's men used force-poles and electrolashes to goad the sale item from the back of a crop-runner track onto the stage. It was a rangy human, straitjacketed and bindfolded, with a heavy psychic-damper muzzle buckled around his head.
++Alpha-plus quality. One only. S'bids, now?'++
'Ten bars!' cried Erotik at once.
Twenty/ said Vassik.
'Twenty-five!' cried Merdok.
Fybes cleared his throat. His cough blew cold steam out from the private atmosphere generated by his suit. 'I think that's established the common level here. I do hate mixing with proles. One thousand bars.'
Erotik and her minders gasped.
Merdok looked pale.
Vassik glanced round at Fybes with a curt look.
'Ahh. At least someone sees the true worth of the item on sale. Good. We can begin serious bidding.' Vassik cleared her throat and her cyber-skull dutifully issued white noise. 'Twelve hundred bars/ she said.
Thirteen hundred!' Erotik cried out, desperately.
'Fifteen/ said Merdok. 'My best offer. I had no idea this meet would be so hungry… or so rich/
Two thousand/ said Vassik's hovering skull.
Three/ said Fybes.
Merdok was already shaking his head. Erotik was walking away towards the edge of the site, complaining loudly to her pudgy sex-toys, who bustled around her.
Three five/ said Vassik.
'Four/ said Fybes.
'Anything?' I whispered to Bequin.
'Not even the slightest latent push. But those baffles could be doing their job/
'So it could be Esarhaddon?'
'Yes. I doubt it. But it could/
'Nayl?'
Harlon Nayl looked round at me.
'Nothing. The Phant's minders are getting edgy because the old witch and her sad hump-muffins are trying to leave before the auction's finished. But nothing else…'
'Five five/ Vassik's servitor-skull rasped.
'Six/ said Fybes.
Merdok had withdrawn to one side of the site with his minders, and was taking a sustaining puff of obscura from a portable water-pipe one of the war-rena slave ferns was holding for him. Erotik and her chubby concubines were arguing with Horn-head and another couple of twists on the other side of the burned acre.
'Eight five!' Vassik was announcing.
'Nine!' returned Fybes.
'Fifty!' I said quietly, tossing a huge pile of ingots down onto the stained soil.
There was a pause. A long, damned pause.
++Fifty bid++
Phant looked down at us all.
Merdok and Erotik and all their people were simply dumbstruck. Vassik turned away, screaming, and her minders had to hold her down as she went into fits of rage.
Fybes just looked at me, his breath coming slow and short in clouds.
'Fifty?' he said.
'S'fifty, count 'em. You got better?'
'What if I have, Eye-gor? And please… stop it with the "s'stupid s'twist" talk. It's getting on my nerves/
Fybes walked towards me. He reached up and pulled his face off. The flesh disintegrated like gossamer as he pulled it away, revealing his blank, piercing eyes.
'Oh, Gregor. You do so like to make an entrance, don't you?' said Cherubael.
ELEVEN
Face to face.
No witnesses.
Death along the line.
His was the last face I had expected to see here, though it had been in my mind and my nightmares for nearly a hundred years.
'It's been a while, hasn't it, Gregor?' the daemonhost said softly, almost cordially. 'I've thought of you often, fondly. You bested me on 56-Izar. I… held a grudge for a while, I must admit. But when I learned you had survived after all, I was quite delighted. It meant there would be a chance for us to meet again.'
The orange cooler-suit began to burn and collapse off him in molten hanks until he was naked. He rose gently, arms by his side, like a dancer, and hovered on the wind a few metres above the churned soil. He was still tall, and powerfully made, but the aura that shone from him was more sickly green than the gold I remembered.
