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 passersby, but he was at the end, talking to an old lady covered by long, silver hair about a flowered china chamber pot.

The voice murmured again. "Thank the Smith, I thought you were never going to listen to me!"

"I heard you," I said, pleasantly. "Have a nice day."

I prepared to pass on to the next pile of goods.

The voice grew frantic. "Pray, friend, don't go! You may hear something to your advantage!"

My ears pricked up. Pervish ears are well designed to hear things to our advantage, being shaped not unlike those of bats, who can hear noises up into the highest decibels. We can hear sums well up into fifteen figures.

"What could you possibly do for me?" I asked, keeping whatever interest I might have out of my voice.

"First, friend, cleanse me of the grime of this place."

"How?" I asked.

"If there be no enemy to strike, a sharp rap upon a stone will do it."

"Why not?" I said.

I don't carry weapons. Pervects like myself are well furnished by nature with defensive armaments, such as hide tough enough to turn a fairly sharp blade, yellow claws that could as readily disembowel an opponent as poke open a can of beer, and four-inch, pointed teeth capable of ripping into anything including the cheap steaks at a truck stop. Still, I know how they're used.

Scaring the pair of arachnoids next to me into dropping their egg sacs prematurely, I swept the sword up over my head and knocked the blade on the ground. It hummed. The corrosion just exploded off it. I covered my eyes to protect them from flying rust. When the dust storm ended, I found I was clasping a gleaming brand with a blade of white-hot silver and a hilt of chased gold studded with cabochon gems of the pure colors of ruby, amethyst, emerald and sapphire that made my palms itch with unrealized profits.

The eyes, now free of the film that had veiled them, were sharper than ever. I had seen eyes like that while playing Dragon Poker, over the top of a hand of cards, as my opponent wondered if I really held an Elf-high flush, or if I was bluffing. These made an intelligent search of my person from head to feet.

"A Pervert," it said. "I have both aided and killed your kind."

"It's Pervect, you hunk of tin," I snarled.

The eyes closed briefly as if the unseen being was bowing its head in apology. "As you will. Your people have attained a higher status, then, than they had when last I saw Perv. Pray, friend, buy me, and hastily. I would be away from this place. I will see to it that you will be reimbursed tenfold."

"Tenfold, eh?" Well, that was a pretty good return on an outlay. Still, I didn't have amniotic fluid clinging to me anywhere.

"In case you didn't know it, Skinny, you're a sword. Where are you going to get the money?"

"I will tell you my story, if only you will remove me from this locale. I fear that danger may lurk about us soon."

I observed just then that more people than I had taken notice of the transformation of the flea-market sword from letter opener to museum piece. I gave them a good glare and showed my teeth. They backed away, careful to keep their hands and feet far away from my mouth. I shoved the sword back into its shabby sheath and dragged it carelessly over through the dirt to the being who owned the stall.

"Ah, good…sir," the Ittschalkian said, turning his mass of braided fur my way. He eyed me nervously, but he wasn't about to drive away a potential sale. He peered at the weather-beaten tube of leather in my hand. I kept my fingers wrapped tightly around the hilt. "I see you have chosen one of my favorite artifacts. I am sure you appreciate its value."

"I sure do," I said. "Five gold pieces, and not a copper more."

"Five?!" the man asked, his face transforming spectacularly from oily accommodation to outrage. "How could you ask me to part with a family heirloom for a mere five coins, scaly sir? It's worth at least forty!"

I always thought it was amusing how a shopkeeper could set out a tableful of crap, ignore it unless it was being openly stolen, abuse it to his friends and family as the garbage it was, then instantly start spouting the woe-is-me-my-family-will-starve line. I'd heard the litany so often I could recite it along with him. If the guy's a good salesman, I will sometimes join in the banter just to enjoy the show, but this clown had no natural style. He was clearly one of the guys who'd bought the course advertised on the back of a magazine that was headlined, "If you can draw Sparky, you, too, can be a filthy huckster!" He just didn't have it in him. Besides, I wasn't in the mood.

"Too high an opener, brother," I said, shaking my head reprovingly. "A Deveel wouldn't have had the nerve to ask me for twenty for this pig sticker."

"Pig sticker!" echoed the voice in the scabbard. It was muffled, but there was nothing wrong with its hearing. "I'll have you know, varlet…"

"Shut up. Not you," I said to the merchant. "Five's my offer."

"Then I will say fifty!"

I sighed lustily. He had not seen the sword's transformation, and not only was I not going to tip him off about it, I gave a warning eye to everyone in the crowd gathering around us to make sure they didn't, either. "Six."

"Sixty!" the merchant responded.

"Seven."

"Seventy!"

"Four."

"E…what?" The runaway freight train just piled into a brick wall.

"You've just tripped into absurdity, brother. The price goes down from now on."

"Why, you can't do that!" His braids flapped with outrage.

I grinned, giving him the benefit of my last dental prophylaxis. He blanched at the sight of my Pervect smile.

"Sure I can. Do you want to make a sale or not?"

"That's the stuff, friend…!" the voice from my hand mumbled out.

"Shut up. Where were we? Four."

"Nay, good Pervect, I am worth at least a hundred times that!"

"Shut up!" I growled out of the corner of my mouth. "Do you want me to leave you here?"

"Nay, I beg you!"

"Then, zip it before someone hears you! Four," I repeated.

"No, sir, please!" The merchant was aghast. He wrung his hands together. "It cost me far more than that! I obtained it from a hairless, old soldier down on his luck."

"Probably out of drinking money," I said, coolly. I had the upper hand, and I wasn't letting it go.

"Give me twenty, at least."

"That's more like it," I said approvingly.

"Then you'll pay it?"

"No way. My original offer was five, and you're going to be lucky to get that."

"Fifteen, friend."

"Nope."

"Ten. That's just a single coin more than I paid for it. That's my last offer."

The truth rolls out if you give it time, and so does the local police force. I noticed a quartet of hairy pikemen trotting down the street towards us with purpose. Someone in the crowd must have decided that I looked dangerous. I could probably get away with stiffing the merchant at nine gold pieces, after his admission, but I didn't feel like tangling with the constabulary. This was supposed to be my vacation!

"Done." With an air of magnanimity I felt in a pocket for the right change and tossed the money onto the table. The coins rang as they clattered to a stop on a brass commemorative coronation platter. "Nice doing business with you."

I turned away nonchalantly, tucking the sword under my arm. In a cloud of hair, a bunch of people rushed toward the table to talk to the merchant, probably to tell him what a sucker he had been to sell a prize piece of cutlery like that at cut rates. I sauntered idly toward the inn.

"By heaven, friend, you are a frighteningly good businessman even for one of your kind."

Normally, flattery feels good, but it had just occurred to me that there was now a ten-coin-shaped hole in my purse that hadn't been there before. I snarled.

"Shut up. I just paid out good money for a sword that I don't need."

I needed a drink. I stalked into the inn, took sole possession of a corner table, planted myself with my back to the wall and my eye on both the front and back doors, and signaled to the barmaid, a fetching lass with long red hair all over her shapely form.

"Hey, babe! Whaddaya got on tap?"

A moment passed while I persuaded the girl that the egg-cups that Ittschalkians drank out of wasn't enough to keep a Pervect alive over lunchtime. By the time she reappeared with a hastily scrubbed bucket filled with beer, the sword could no longer restrain itself.

"By the Smith, it is good to be away from those pathetic artifacts and their master! Unsheath me, friend. I sense that we are in a reasonably defensive location with few potential foes nearby."

It was exactly the same assessment that I might have made of the situation. The main room of the inn was empty except for a few locals chatting earnestly over the long table right in front of the bar, and a couple of oldsters with thinning, gray locks playing a board game under the window on the opposite side of the room. I felt mellowed enough by the first mug of beer to indulge the sword's whim. I pulled it free of its case.

"What hight you, friend?" it inquired, giving me another one of those summing, X-ray looks.

"You mean you can't read it off my underwear band?" I countered. "Aahz is the name."

"Oz?"

"No relation."

"Ah. It was the green color that put me wrong. I hight Ersatz."

"Yeah, sure," I chuckled, taking a pull at the second bucket of beer. "So is every other talking sword in the dimensions, and most of the ones who can't talk."

"But I am THE Ersatz."

"That, my shiny friend, is what they all say." I looked down at the eyes. They were angry. "Okay, maybe the guy who forged you and set the intelligence spell in your metal told you your name was Ersatz, but I gotta tell you, you couldn't be the real one. That sword was made about ten thousand years ago. It fought in about a million battles…"

"One million, four hundred thousand, eight hundred and two — no, three. I have never been defeated."

"Listen, pal, you can spout off fake statistics until you're blue in the…er, steel, but there are hundreds or thousands like you."

The eyes blazed. "There is no one like me! I am unique! I, the leader of the Golden Hoard, am nothing like those hundreds or thousands who may have followed. They are named for me! I was at the side of the hero Tadetinko who saved Trollia from the blazing monsters from Lavandrome! I was in the hand of the conqueror who bested the usurper of the Deveel Corporation! I, and I alone, was the weapon who held back the gate that protected the capital of your very dimension and kept it from becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of that very business concern. I am no imitation! I am the REAL Ersatz!"

At that moment I remembered where I had seen a sword that looked like Ersatz. It was woven into a tapestry that hung on the wall of the Perv Archaeological Museum in the city where I grew up. In particular, I had noticed the unusual pattern of jewels in the golden hilt. About two or three thousand years before I was born, a Pervect named Clonmason had defended the dimension against the invasion of Deveels that had attempted to occupy our main city. He drove them back to their infernal regions with a legendary sword named…

"Nah…" I breathed. "The Golden Hoard is a myth!"

"Indeed," said the sword, "we are not."

I sat back, forgetting even to drink my beer. The Golden Hoard had been renowned throughout the dimensions for thousands of years. It was a collection of fabulous animated treasures whose who seemed to find their way to people who were about to be heroic, so they could save the world from whatever peril had arisen at that time. I knew all about the Hoard. It consisted of all the traditional goodies, one of which some hapless knight comes across just when he was hoping to avoid a major conflict, and finds himself at the heart of a battle royal to save the world, turning up just in time to ransom a fair lady, or in the hands of a wet-behind-the-ears wizard enabling him or her to make the prophecy that saved a kingdom from certain disaster. They had all been around for thousands of years. I rarely feel awe for anyone living, and almost never for anything inanimate, but I had to admit I felt respect for the slip of steel in my hands. If it was the real Ersatz, it had led more generals than the hope for glory. It was worth a big chunk of change, making ten gold pieces a cheap investment against a potentially enormous return.

"So the crystal, the cup and the book…?"

"Aye, the ring, the flute and the endless purse of money also are members of our order. I am the eldest. The great shield is all to brast," the sword added. "He gave his all for the Liberation of Klahd, four thousand years past. The harp was crushed, stringless, in the rout that followed the Taming of the Centipede Giants. The Great Key was melted down in the fire that destroyed the treasure house at Nox. Yet, that is our fate. I have seen great treasures join us, only to depart this existence, yet satisfied that they had been crafted for just such a moment."

"Weren't there some more treasures?" I asked. "I heard about a golden mace some guy was hauling around some years back. It was supposed to be part of the Golden Hoard."

"We have an ongoing problem with wannabes," the sword said, with a sigh. "For a while, Heroic Treasures were coming out of the woodwork, so to speak. No mace was ever part of our number. There was a claim from the Bagpipes of Fear, but it turned out there was really nothing magikal about them. Their sound just naturally made anyone hearing them turn and flee, something any one of ten billion sets of bagpipes could do."

I shuddered at the thought of ten billion bagpipes. I examined the sword again.

"Looks like katae," I said, admiring the metal. It had been folded over itself again and again to make layers katae that were many times stronger and more flexible than any poured blade could be.

"Katae!" the blade shrieked. "My smith predated katae by ten thousand years! He devised and forgot about more techniques than any swordsmith since his day!"

"Don't get your quillons in a braid," I said, continuing my examination. The sword, "Ersatz," was once famed as the sharpest, most intelligent sword around, but so many fakes were made that the name became a byword for cheap and shoddy. "You look like you can still hack with the best of them."

"I'm still as sharp as I ever was," the sword insisted. "But I can't get anyone to believe it. YOU didn't believe it."

"The jury's still out, as far as I'm concerned," I said, but I was starting to take his word that he was what he said he was. "Where are the others?"

"I know not where most of my companions be," Ersatz admitted, the steel-blue eyes dropping slightly. "Many of us haven't seen one another in over a century. If truth be told, most of us don't care for each other. Kelsa — she is the great scrying crystal, the most accurate viewer of the future ever crafted, and she has never made a direct statement since the day she was carved. When time is of the essence, she cannot get to the point!"

"That's your specialty." I grinned.

"You have a sharp wit yourself, my friend."

"So, what am I supposed to do with you?" I asked. "I don't really need a trophy for my wall, especially not a talking trophy."

The blue eyes looked alarmed. "Nay, friend, I wouldn't want to be a fixture. For a time I was embedded in the wall of yonder eating establishment," the sword managed to glance in the direction of the street. Out the inn's door I could see a red-walled hut with customers emerging carrying flat, gooey comestibles that were this dimension's equivalent of pizza. "I lived side by side with a wain's worth of junk from all over this dimension. I was only freed from the endless chatter of 'tonight's specials' and 'two-for-one dinners' when the patrons finally decreed that they would no more sit at the table beneath my prisoning brackets. I think they did not like my comments upon the resemblance between their meals and the guts of enemies I have slain. That is when I was vended unceremoniously to yonder merchant."

"They just didn't appreciate good dinner conversation," I said, grinning. "I know a couple of pretty good swordsmen who would take care of you in your old age. Keep you all buffed up, listen to your stories."

The sword got huffy. "I do not need shielding! I need to be cast forth into fate's way once again, so that I may end up where I am needed next. Friend, you have proven to be an intelligent being who sees more than a few ducats at the end of the next trade."

"Who says?" I interrupted him.

"I need your help."

"Mine?"

"Aye, yours."

"Forget it, bud," I said. "I'm on vacation. I'll take you as far as the next war, then we part company."

For the first time the eyes bore an expression of appeal.

"Honorable master Pervect, I beseech you. Listen to my story. Then, if you must place me in the hand of some mudstained lad who is throwing himself into the battle, I will accept it."

"Fine. Suppose you can't buy me a drink." I glanced around for a likely spot.

"Nay, such is not my talent. I am sorry. I have been waiting for one such as you. I have heard word from a passing dagger that my fellow Hoard members are being collected. One greedy individual is gathering all of them up. This must not happen. We cannot gather dust upon a shelf for all eternity. We must be free to blow in Fate's wind."

I chugged the last of my second bucket and signed to the lass for a third one. She delivered it with some dispatch, and retreated. Guess that not many of her customers took a table for the purpose of talking to their weapons. "Sorry, skinny, but I stopped doing freebies, especially big, legendary freebies, not long after I stopped being an apprentice myself."

"Did I mention that one of our members is the Endless Purse of Money?" the sword asked, the reflected eyes gleaming.

I stopped in mid-gulp, entranced by the memory of that legend. There wasn't a Pervect child who heard it in school who didn't have itchy palms and avaricious dreams about it. "Well, yes…"

"Whatever you can get out of her, that shall be your reward."

"I've heard offers like that phrased before, and not just about money," I said. "Forget it."

The sword's eyes dipped with understanding. "Very well, I shall persuade her to give you whatever sum you require. On my honor, we will reward you more than adequately. Thousands of gold pieces shall be yours. Tens of thousands. But, first, we must find her."

The offer sounded better the longer I hesitated. "Well…all right. What do we do first?"

"You must take me to Kelsa. She is the only one of the Hoard whose location I know, and the only one who could tell us the location of the others. Then we will find each of them and free them from their captivity."

"Not part of the deal," I said, seeing visions of money bags winging away from me. "Forget it. I'm not going off on a quest just because you want to put the band back together. You wanted out of the flea market, and you're out. From my point of view you owe me a hundred gold pieces. That's all."

"But…care you nothing for the greater good?"

"Just because you and your buddies get cabin fever?" I snarled. "I don't think so. I'm just going to hang out here and have a little snack, then I'm…"

At that moment, the door burst inward. In a flurry of hair, the crowd from the square came rushing inside, the junk merchant at their head.

"There he is!" the Ittschalkian exclaimed. "The one who cheated me! We'll tear the hairless one apart!"

I had already sprung to my feet. Somehow the hilt of the sword sprang into my hand.

"Draw me, friend!" the sword shouted. "Let me drink of their blood. We will be victorious! Have at you, varlets!"

The mass of Ittschalkians was closing in. As a matter of course I have all the exits from a place scoped out in advance in case of just such a moment as this. I made for the rear of the establishment, only to come face to face with the local gendarmes bounding toward me with purpose in their eyes. One of them was raising a particularly nasty-looking magikal wand from its hip holster. I had no choice. I reached into my pocket for the D-hopper that had brought me there to Ittschalk, and hit RECALL.

BAMF!