The Philosophical Strangler(51)
Well. No need to pursue that line of thought.
So, in the end, we wound up spending the whole week at that lodge. And, by the end of the stay, I understood why they called it a “lodge.”
“Get moving, Ignace,” hissed Jenny. “You can’t live in luxury forever.”
“Why not?” I whined. “I like this magnificent four-poster—”
Alas, Angela dislodged me from the royal bed in question. None too gently, either, I might add. And neither she nor Jenny were any gentler about the way they more or less frog-marched me out of our suite.
On our way through the door, I cast a despairing glance backward. Jenny chuckled and kissed me on the cheek. “Memories, Ignace. We’ll always have them.”
“Memories,” I muttered. “Damn things are worse than ghosts.”
Chapter 9.
Downhill
When we got back, I was in the best mood I’d been in years. But it didn’t last for very long. Sooner than you could believe, things started going downhill. Greyboar called it entropy. I called it the innate tendency of life to get fucked up. He insisted we were talking about the same thing, which absolutely infuriated me.
My way of putting it was simple common sense, backed up by long experience. It had nothing to do with any damned philosophy.
Oh, and sure, we didn’t fall into poverty. Somewhat to my surprise, even after that luxurious spree, we still had quite a bit of Avare’s honorarium left. Enough to last us for quite a while, even after Greyboar got pressured by the Cat into moving us into swankier digs. Well. Less hovelish digs, it might be better to say. I was able to hold the line somewhere.
In addition to what was left of the honorarium, business kept picking up. Partly that was because the life and times of Sfinctria—all of Grotum, in fact—was sure and purely going to hell in a handbasket. After the fiasco in Prygg—I repeat: my lips are sealed; I vow eternal silence—the Ozarines got so furious they just invaded eastern Grotum outright. No more of that namby-pamby “covert action” stuff. (Weird phrase, that. What I mean is, the action’s never covert to the covertee, who’s presumably the guy that’s supposed to be kept in the dark.)
Queen Belladonna, naturally, immediately hailed the invasion and signed about eight million treaties with Ozar. The upper classes sided with her to a man—cleaved to her bosom like newborn babes, more like—chattering about realpolitik. The middle classes more or less went along, muttering glumly about devils you know and devils you don’t. The intelligentsia—the young ones, anyhow—screamed about collaboration and rioted in the streets. The great unwashed masses went on about eight million general strikes and built barricades every other Tuesday, bellowing rowdy slogans in which the terms “boot-licker” and “toady” vied in popularity with “puppet” and—always a crowd pleaser—”worthless cocksucker.”
The Ecclesiarchy also gave their blessing to the enterprise. The Ozarine Empire was officially anointed with the title “Protector of the Faith,” which the Twelve Popes even managed to say with a straight face. Nice trick, that, given that Ozarines are notorious free-thinkers and keep the Church on a very tight leash in Ozarae. A civilized folk, the Ozarines.
The “blessing of the Ecclesiarchy,” needless to say, translated itself into an inquisitorial frenzy and priests sermonizing about the “dwarf menace.” Before you knew it, there were pogroms practically every week.
Would-be pogroms, I should say. In the event, all those years of forcing “vagrant” dwarves into the sewers paid off for the dwarves, because they had a million hidey-holes to scurry into. Stinky hidey-holes, sure, but smelling like crap beats smelling like a roast.
For a while, the pogromist mobs were enraged by their slim pickings and started whipping themselves into a bigger frenzy. But then—we heard about it, we didn’t see it—Gwendolyn and The Roach surfaced and organized a counterforce. One of the big mobs ran right into an ambush and by the time Gwendolyn and The Roach and maybe two dozen surly agitators and two hundred really surly proletarian types and two thousand really surly dwarves got finished, the pogromists had been pretty much pogromized to a pulp. I heard the sewers were clogged for a week in that part of the city.
When he got the news, Greyboar didn’t say anything. He just went into his room and spent the next three days staring at that damned portrait. “Practicing my Languor,” he said. “Practicing my Languor.”
Ah, what the hell. I didn’t feel too great myself. Even though all the reports we heard agreed that Gwendolyn had made a clean getaway when it was all over. Not that I was surprised. A completely unreasonable woman. But—