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the honey-yellow mead before him. "A taste of aqua vitae no more! that's been distilled by the flame
of a silver burner and added to the flux. Once cooled, I stirred in" and here he added three pinches
from the salt cellar "a measure of powdered dragonelle scale, and the whole solution precipitated "
"Preposterous!" croaked a frog-faced Calimshite, alchemist to the recently arrived consular of
Calimport. "Scale as a precipitate? Ludicrous! You might as well
have used gravel for all of scale's suitability as a precipitate. Your whole theory's unsound!"
The blunt attack set the onlookers to buzzing, so much so that the proprietous and meekly disposed
wizards of the swarm recoiled in pinch-faced distaste only to collide with those who surged forward at
the first hint of the senior enchanter's hypothesizing weakness.
Only the challenger's basso voice rose above the polite cacophony that filled the royal salon. Fully
aware, he pressed his assault with apparent obliviousness. "Undoubtedly it was another
reaction perhaps some containment in the powder... ."
The Calimshite's thrust was not lost on the Ankha-purian, but the older man guarded against the sting
with the shield of dignity. "My powders were pure. I will gladly give you some if what you brought from
Calimshan will not react." Wiping his damp fingers on a cloth, he coolly swatted back at this annoying fly.
"Good wit" and "Fine touch" hummed his supporters in the crowd.
"Scale never precipitates! Even apprentices know that," fumed the alchemist in his bubbling deep voice.
He waggled a fat, pale finger across the table at the other, his stung pride, emboldened by drink, making
him undiplomatically firm. He sputtered for words and finally blurted, "Why ask your royal magister, if
you doubt me!"
A chill swept the assembled collegium to a silence broken only by the tremolo titter of impudent
apprentices from the back benches of the knot. The rest fingered their goblets and took great interest in
their wine (forgotten till that point for the heat of the debate) while struggling to make their just-gay faces
as bland as coal. In most cases, it only made them the more uncomfortably conspicuous, until they
resembled no more than a line of hungry monkeys caught with the food.
Only the graybeard seemed unperturbed, arrogantly confident of his station. With a knowing smirk, he
turned the baffled Calimshite's gaze toward the adjacent table an island from their company. A lone
woman, overladen
in finery ill-suited to her age or itself, stared numbly at the air or perhaps at the half-empty bottle
before her.
"Our royal magister," the enchanter sneered in an intentionally loud whisper. "An adventuress nothing
but a hedge wizard. Never properly schooled at all." The last he added with overemphasis. "And fond of
her drink."
At her table, Brown Maeve Magister to His Royal Highness King Janol I (aka, Pinch), the
Lich-Slayer, the Morninglord Blessed knew what was said even before it was finished . . . even now, in
her cups. The collegium's contempt was hardly a secret. She had heard the words and seen the smirks all
before: hedge wizard, upstart, rogue's whore adventuress! Not a true wizard in any case no scholarly
talent, no proper training, wouldn't even know an alembic from a crucible. Worse still, there was no
denying most of it. A prestidigitous courtier she was not.
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It didn't make their words right, though. They were a pack of poxy charlatans to lay their airs upon her.
She'd done more than the lot of them, including helping Pinch lay down the lich Manferic, and it weren't
their place to look down to her.
The smugness of their lot spoilt her wine, and so she figured they'd earned a little present of her own
making. She could research too, as they'd soon remember. It was just a simple spell, nothing like their
fine studies after the philosopher's stone or any of that, but Maeve kept it handy forbestowing on
arrogant asses.
With a wicked good cheer, the royal magister pushed aside her glass, rose majestically, and managed to
trundle like an old cart toward the salon doors. As she lumbered past the wizard-thick table, that
hypocritical lot fell into a hushed silence, as if they had been discussing the weather, Maeve nodded,
smiled, with excessive politeness greeted them all by name, and serenely extended her hand to the worst
offenders to her dignity. As each took up her hand, a faint warmth flowed from her fingers, and Maeve's
smile grew and grew until she was beaming with genuine satisfaction.
"Good morrow, and may the dawn bring you new dis-
coveries," at last she said, disengaging herself from their group. Oh, they'd have discoveries, all right. She
could scarce keep from hooting it out loud. There was no forgetting when you broke out with sores
overnight big ugly ones that were sure to put off wives and lovers. "Old drunk, am I?" She chuckled as
she parted their company. Her gleeful echoes joined her as she wandered down the hall toward her own
apartments.
*****
Fiddlenose, sitting in the shade of the big fern that grew just in back of Goodman Uesto's granary,
yawned a yawn that for his wee size threatened to transform the whole of his face into a single pit of pink
throat ringed by fine white teeth. He could veritably swallow another brownie half his size as if
brownies were inclined to go around swallowing up their own kind. He was bored, and the big yawn was
just one way he had to show it. As if part of a flowing wave, the yawn descended into a sour pucker of
pinched irritability.
Where was that baleful cat?
Fiddlenose the brownie was tired of wasting his morning like a dull huntsman squatting in his blind. This
was supposed to be fun a prank and revenge on old farmer Uesto's calico torn. The twice-, no,
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