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“I hope you’ve got deep pockets,” said the shopkeeper ominously and with a trace of annoyance, as the line behind me was becoming longer by the second.
“How about the arrival of a distant and extremely eccentric ex-military uncle upsetting the delicate balance of the ordered household?”
“That sounds like just the thing. How much?”
“He was pulled out complete and unused a few days ago. Took a lot of skill to pluck him out of the narrative without damage, and with all ancillary props and walk-ons—”
“Yes, okay, okay, I get the picture—How much?”
“To you, a thousand guineas.”
“I get the uncle fully realized for that, yes?”
“He’s over there.”
I turned to see a slender and very jovial-looking gentleman sitting on a packing case on the other side of the shop. He was dressed in a suit of outrageously loud green and yellow checks and was resting his gloves on the top of a cane. He inclined his head in greeting when he saw us looking at him and smiled impishly.
“Perfect. I get a full backstory as well, yes?”
“It’s all here,” said Murray, placing on the counter a glass jar that seemed to be full of swirling colored mist.
“Then it’s a deal.”
We shook hands, and I gave him my BookWorld ChargeCard. I was just standing there in that blank sort of way you do while waiting for a shopkeeper to
complete a transaction, when the hair on the back of my neck suddenly rose. It was a sixth sense, if you like—something you acquire in the BookWorld, where jeopardy is sometimes never more than a line away. I surreptitiously slipped my hand into my bag and clasped the butt of my pistol. I looked cautiously from the corner of my eye at the customer to my left. It was a freelance imaginator buying powdered kabuki—no problem there. I looked to the right and perceived a tall figure dressed in a trench coat with a fedora pulled down to hide his face. I tensed as the faint odor of bovine reached my nostrils. It was the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull son of Queen Pasiphaë of Crete. He’d killed one Jurisfiction agent and tried the same with me several times, so consequently he had an “erase on sight” order across sixteen genres—there were few these days who would dare harbor him. I stayed calm and turned toward Thursday5, who was looking at a pair of toucans that were a job lot from a scrapped bird-identification handbook. I caught her eye and showed her three fingers, which was a prearranged signal of imminent danger, then gave an almost imperceptible nod in the Minotaur’s direction. Thursday5 looked bewildered, I gave up and turned slowly back.
“Soon be done!” muttered Murray, filling out the credit form. I stole a look toward the Minotaur again. I could have erased him there and then, but it was always possible that this wasn’t the Minotaur we were hunting. After all, there were thousands of Minotaurs dotted around the BookWorld, and they all looked pretty much alike. Admittedly, not many wore trench coats and fedoras, but I wasn’t going to dispatch anyone without being sure.
“Would you like that frying pan wrapped, Mr. Johnson?” asked the lady serving the Minotaur. I required nothing more. He’d been using the “Mr. Johnson” pseudonym for many years—and the frying pan? Well, we’d darted him once with SlapStick as a tracking device, and it seemed to have crept into his modus operandi of assassination. Steamrollers, banana skins, falling pianos—he’d used them all. In the pantheon of SlapStick, the close-quarters hand weapon of choice was…a frying pan. Without waiting another second, I drew my pistol. The Minotaur, with a speed out of all proportion to his bulk, flipped the frying pan to his other hand and swiped it in my direction, catching the pistol and sending it clattering to the other side of the room. We paused and stared at each other. The frying pan had a two-foot handle, and he brandished it at me in a threatening manner. He removed his hat, and as the other customers realized who he was, there was a cry of fear and a mass exodus from the shop. He had the body of a man but the head of a bull, which had a kind of humanness about it that was truly disturbing. His yellow eyes gleamed at me with malevolence, and his horns, I noticed, had been sharpened to wickedly fine points.
“We can talk about this,” I said in a quiet tone, wondering if Thursday5 had the wits to try to distract him.
“No talk,” said the Minotaur in a basso profundo. “My job is to kill you, and yours…is to die.”
I tried to stall him. “Let’s talk for a minute about job descriptions.”
But the Minotaur wasn’t in the talking vein. He took a pace forward and made another swipe at me with the frying pan. I took a step backward but even so felt the breeze of the pan as it just missed my head. I grabbed the object nearest to hand, which was a golf club, and tried to hit him with it, but he was faster, and the wooden shaft of the club was reduced to splinters and sawdust with the ferocity of his blow. He gave out another deep, hearty laugh and took a further step toward me.
“I say,” came a voice that sounded like crumpets and tea at four o’clock sharp. “You, sir—with the horns.”
The Minotaur looked to where the voice had come from but still kept me within his vision. The interloper, of course, was the eccentric relative I’d just purchased for Landen’s book. He had left his packing case and stood facing the beast armed with nothing more than his walking stick.
“Now, run along, there’s a good chap,” he said, as though he were talking to a child.
The Minotaur curled a lip and breathed a threatening, “Begone!”
“Look here,” replied the character in the green and yellow checks. “I’m not sure I care for the tone of your voice.”
The Minotaur was suddenly a whirling mass of demonic destruction. He swung the frying pan toward the gentleman in an arc that could never have missed. But he did miss. There was a flash of silver, a blur of green and yellow, and the frying pan clattered to the floor—with the Minotaur’s hand still clutching it. The Minotaur looked at the frying pan, at the severed hand, then at his stump. He grimaced, gave out a deafening yell that shattered the windows of the shop and then evaporated into nothing as he jumped off and away.
“By gad, what a to-do,” exclaimed the gentleman as he calmly cleaned his sword-stick and returned it to his sheath. “Anyone know who he was?”
“The Minotaur.”
“Was he, by George?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. “Would have expected a better fight than that. Are you quite well?”
“Yes,” I answered, “thanks to you. That was a nifty piece of sword-work.”
