The Stranger - Max Frei [282]
“Whatever you do, try to stay alive,” Lonli-Lokli said all of a sudden. “Death is a horrifying prospect if you’re dealing with Kiba. I know that for a fact.”
“I have a long lifeline,” I said, glancing stealthily at my right hand. “Do you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, save it for later, Max. He’s there in that house. Let’s go!”
The house Lonli-Lokli pointed to was a small, two-story structure with a signboard that read Old Refuge on the façade.
“A rooming house?” I asked in surprise. “A dormitory for dead Magicians, room and board for a modest fee?”
“I think it is some sort of hotel. Do you really consider that to be important?”
“No, it’s just funny. A dead man living in a hotel. Where does he get the money, I’d like to know? Or did he have an account in a local bank when he was still alive?”
“Well, he had to be somewhere,” Lonli-Lokli murmured glumly.
I threw open the heavy lacquered door for him with a determined gesture.
“After you.”
The ancient steps creaked under the weight of his tread.
“Here we are,” Lonli-Lokli observed calmly, stopping in front of a completely nondescript white door with the vestiges of a number 6 in faded gold—something only I would notice, with my habit of paying attention to random nonsense.
“Open it, Max. Don’t hold back.”
“Oh, I forgot—your hands are tied up, in a manner of speaking.”
I grinned, and opened the door. Somewhere in one of the numerous magazines I devoured long ago in a previous life, I read that they asked Napoleon what the secret of his victories was. “The main thing is to throw yourself into the fray. After that you can sort out the details,” he quipped. Or something to that effect. Quite a fellow, that Napoleon—though he met with a rather unfortunate end.
By the window, with his back turned to us, sat a completely bald, withered old man in a bright looxi. Suddenly, a ball of lightning, white as snow, flew out from under Lonli-Lokli’s looxi. It struck the bald man right between the shoulder blades, and he flared up with an unpleasant pale light, like an enormous streetlamp. The ball of lightning didn’t seem to hurt the stranger in the least, but he turned around.
“Greetings, Fishmonger,” said Sir Kiba Attsax, the former Grand Magician of the Order of the Icy Hand.
The most horrifying thing was that Kiba Attsax looked very much like Lonli-Lokli himself. I remembered that Juffin had said our Shurf had an unremarkable appearance—that people who look like him are a dime a dozen. Blockhead that I was, I hadn’t believed him!
The many years he had spent in a non-living state had not made him more attractive. The bluish, pock-marked, unnaturally gleaming skin was what really compromised his charm.
The whites of his eyes were dark, almost brown, and the eyes themselves were light blue—a lovely combination, it can’t be denied. I even felt a bit calmer when I got a good look at him. How could such a pathetic, dilapidated old creature possibly harm the fearsome Lonli-Lokli?
Oh, how wrong I was!
The dead Magician, it seemed, welcomed the opportunity for a chat. Completely ignoring another ball of lightning, which struck him in the chest this time, he went on with the performance.
“You succeeded very well in hiding from me, Fishmonger. You hid yourself very well indeed! But you weren’t smart enough to stay away from a place like this. Did it never occur to you that a newborn World is like a dream? Here your powers don’t work. You don’t believe me?”
I turned to Lonli-Lokli. I still thought that this dead man would put the fear of the Magicians in us, and then we would make short shrift of him, as the genre required. But the expression on Sir Shurf’s face—Sinning Magicians, what’s happening to him? I wondered, starting to panic. He was really afraid, and—it looked like he was falling asleep!
The jangling voice of Kiba Attsax jolted me back to reality. “I have no quarrel with you, boy. You may leave. Don’t interfere. We have old accounts to settle,” he said. The dead Magician waved the stump of his left arm in front of my nose. “He stole