Myth 13 - Myth Alliances, Asprin, Robert [microsoft ebook reader TXT] 📗

Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

ONE

“Not much of an inn, if you ask me.”

ÑH. JOHNSON

I stared at the candle in the brass holder in the middle of the cluttered table. Light the candle, I thought, concentrat?ing hard. Light it!

Anyone who might have looked in the window would have seen a young, blond man from Klah, if they knew Klah, gazing hard at an unlit candle. Anyone from a few dozen dimensions might have identified that young man as The Great Skeeve, Magician to Kings and King of Magi?cians. None of them would have guessed that in spite of my reputation, which was that of a wonderworker, diplo?mat and organizer, as far as magik went, I was still a pretty rank... apprentice.

Apprentice. I sat upright on my bench to rub my back, and gazed at nothing in particular. The term caused all kinds of emotions to well up in me and distract me from my self-​assigned task. The first: regret. I just walked away from my entire life to date: money, a position as Court Ma?gician I could have held on to infinitely just on my reputa-

tion, a business that was thriving even beyond my ability to cover all the opportunities that came my way. But the thing I most regretted leaving was friends. The best and most im?portant friend I had left behind was the chief reason I had gone. Aahz, denizen of the dimension Perv, had been my mentor, guide, partner, teacher and, yes, friend, since the untimely death of my master, the magician Garkin, who'd just finished this very lesson when he'd been killed by an assassin.

The second was fear. I hadn't mastered the candle trick then, and though I could do it now with ease I hadn't pro?gressed much farther than that in my studies. I'd come back to Klahd to start over again with the basics and work my way up. How long would it take? I had no idea. What if, after all this time, I turned out to have no real magik tal?ent? How would I deal with that? What if I couldn't learn to be the wizard everyone but my partners thought I was?

The third was loneliness, but I suppose that was good, in a way. I left behind friends who'd been my support through thick and thin, who'd given me the confidence to take over situations that I, as an apprentice magician (and would-​be thief) never dreamed I'd be controlling, let alone involved in. It was time to strip away that protection and find out who I was. I also needed the solitude to study magik. I couldn't do it in front of a crowd. I needed to be able to fail, and learn from those mistakes without anyone correct?ing them for me. I needed to know my limitations, hard as that was. I also needed to learn how to deserve the friends I had. There had been times I could look back on now with the shame they deserved when I had been an unimaginable jerk to the people nearest and dearest to me. Being on my own for a while would be good for me.

I wasn't entirely alone in my self-​imposed exile. Here, in the inn that we had sort of inherited from a madman named Isstvan and which I now more or less owned, lived myself and three friends. Gleep was my young green dragon. Buttercup, a war unicorn I'd acquired from a re-

tired soldier named Quigley, was Gleep's best friend. Bunny, a drop-​dead gorgeous woman, was the niece of my former sort-​of-​employer (there are a lot of sort-​ofs in my life), Don Bruce, Fairy Godfather of the Mob. Bunny, for all her baby-​doll looks, had a great brain. She'd been M.Y.T.H. Inc.'s bookkeeper and accountant, and had come with me to be my assistant and connection with the rest of the dimensions.

I turned my attention back to the candle. The spell had become too easy for me. I'd stopped feeling the connection between will and power, the connection I'd fought to attain to master the energies that abounded in earth and sky.

The bell rang. I heard light footsteps on the stone floor, a pause, then more footsteps coming towards me.

“Can you handle this, Skeeve?” Bunny said, poking her head into my room. “It's much more up your alley than mine.”

I rose from the table and the unlit candle, and hurried toward the door. A glance through the peephole revealed a couple of eager-​faced Klahds with luggage. The inn had been abandoned for years, but I'd cleaned it up enough to make it habitable. Unfortunately, a rumor had gotten around that the hostelry was operating again, not what I had in mind. Normally Bunny would politely send them on their way, but I understood why she wanted me to do it. The eager-​faced couple on the doorstep were the kind of tourists who didn't take a subtle hint.

The one magikal talent I had mastered without a doubt was illusion. Immediately I filled the hall with illusory spi?der webs and broken beams hanging crookedly over the gallery. I cast a disguise spell over myself to make me into an aged hunchback with matted hair crawling with vermin. I blotted Bunny out completely behind the image of a sar?cophagus with skeletal hands crossed on the chest under a skull-​like