Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [44]
Vailadez Rench rapped upon a door he could not open. “They were given their documents. They should be gone. There was some kind of disaster … Well, we must be merciful, I suppose, and thank the stars we are not ourselves sliding towards the board-hold and the eternal tramp.”
The door was opened with a snap—wide—and there stood before them a disheveled, round-eyed, red-faced fellow, almost as tall as Elric, with a quill in one hand and an inkpot in the other. “Dear sir! Dear sir! Bear with me, I beg you. I am at this very moment addressing a letter to a relative. There is no question of my credit. You know yourself what delays exist, these days, between the villages.” He scratched his untidy, corn-coloured hair with the nib of his pen, causing dark green ink to run down his forehead and give him something of the appearance of a demented savage prepared for war. While his alert blue eyes went from face to face, his lips appealed. “I have such clients! Bills are not paid, you know, by dead people. Or by disappointed people. I am a clairvoyant. It is my vocation. My dear mother is a clairvoyant, and my brothers and sisters and, greatest of all, my noble son, Koropith. My Uncle Grett was famous across the Nation and beyond. Still more famous were we all before our fall.”
“Your fall, sir?” asked Wheldrake, very curious and taking to the man at once. “Your debts?”
“Debt, sir, has pursued us across the multiverse. That is a constant, sir. It is our constant, at least. I speak of our fall from the king’s favour, in the land my family had made its own and hoped to settle. Salgarafad, it was called, in a rim-sphere long forgotten by the Old Gardener, and why should it be otherwise? But death is not our fault, sir. It is not. We are friends to Death, but not His servants. And the king swore we had brought the plague by predicting it. And so we were forced to flee. Politics, in my view, had much to do with the matter. But we are not permitted to the counsels of the steersmen, let alone the Lords of the Higher Worlds, whom we serve, sir, in our own way, my family and myself.”
This speech concluded, he drew breath, put one inky fist upon his right hip, the second, still holding the bottle, he rested across his chest. “The credits are,” he insisted, “in the post.”
“Then you can be found easily enough, dear sir, and reinstated here. Perhaps another house? But I would remind you, your credits were based upon certain services performed by your sister and your uncle on behalf of the community. And they are no longer resident here.”
“You put them to the boards!” cried the threatened resident. “You gave them up to the marching boards. Admit it!”
“I am not privy to such matters. This property, sir, is required. Here are the new renters …”
“No,” says the Rose, “not so. I will not be the cause of this man and his family losing their home!”
“Sentiment! Silly sentiment!” Vailadez Rench roared with laughter that held in it every kind of insult, every heartless mockery. “My dear madam, this family has rented property it cannot afford. You can afford it. That is a simple, natural rule, sir. That is a fact of the world, sir.” (These last addressed to the offending debtor.) “Let us through, sir. Let us through. We uphold our time-honoured Right to View!” With which he pushed past the unfortunate letter-writer and drew the puzzled trio behind him into a dark passageway from which stairs led. From the landing peered bright button-eyes which might have belonged to a weasel, while from the stairs another pair of eyes regarded them with smouldering rage. They entered a large, untidy room, full of threadbare furnishings and old documents, where, in a wheeled chair made of ivory and boarwood, a tiny figure sat hunched. Again only the eyes seemed alive—black, penetrating eyes of no apparent intelligence. “Mother, they invade!” cried the besieged householder. “Oh, sir, you are cruel, to practise such fierce rectitude upon a frail old woman! How