Myth 13 - Myth Alliances by Asprin, Robert (ebook reader online free .txt) 📕

your names to Officer Koblinz, and we'll notify you when we've fin?ished our investigation. Move along! Move along! Clear the road!”

The Scammies, grumbling, obeyed the first policeman's commands. Officer Two, Koblinz, took a pad of paper out of his pocket. Names magikally limned themselves down the index. He nodded and put it away.

“You can better believe we're going to get to the bottom of this,” he promised.

“That's a relief,” I breathed. Very quickly traffic re?turned to normal, and the complainants departed. “Well, thanks a lot.” I spotted an alley where I could retrieve the D-​hopper out of my boot in private, and started towards it.

“And where do you think you're going?” Officer One

asked, grabbing me by the back of my collar. I struggled to pry myself loose, even using a flick of power, but he had a good grip on me.

“I've got to get back to my work,” I told him. “I told you, those Pervects have a grip on another helpless dimension.”

“You're not going anywhere!”

“What? Why?”

Officer One looked at me as though I was an idiot. “You're still under arrest for destroying personal property.”

“But, gee, I said I'd pay for them,” I protested.

“Nothing doing,” he said, hauling me by my collar down the sidewalk to a waiting rat-​horse cart. “Restitution will be part of the sentence. You're still being held for as?sault on sixty or eighty persons, destruction of property, causing a nuisance on the public highway with that sick rorse of yours, creating an affray ...”

“A what?” I asked.

The officer sighed, as if he had never met such a stupid being in his life. “Causing a riot, if you prefer it like that. The judge is really going to throw the book at you.”

“What's the usual penalty for causing an affray?” I asked.

“Oh, thirty or forty days. But with all the other charges added on you're likely going to spend the rest of your life in here.”

“Perhaps I could talk to the judge,” I offered, stumbling as I climbed into the cart. “Arrange a payment schedule, and apologize to the Scammies I have offended?”

“I doubt it,” Officer One said, gesturing his companion to whip up his animal. “Senior Domari was the first person you assaulted.”

Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

FOURTEEN

“Maybe I should have kept my nose out of it.”

C. DE BERGERAC

I paced from one side of my small cell to the other. It looked just like your average cell, but it smelled good for a change, like roses and new mown grass. Except for the fact that there were bars on the hand-​sized window, iron bands wider than my torso on the door, and, oh, yes, walls of big rough stone in between them, I could have been walking in a delightful garden.

Officers One and Three, whom I now knew were called Gelli and Barnold, had left me the D-​hopper and all of my other magikal paraphernalia, including the sample pair of glasses we had picked up in the Pervects' headquarters.

“The whole place is magik-​proofed,” Officer Gelli in?formed me, at my puzzled expression when he handed me back the D-​hopper. “You can use that as a backscratcher, or whatever you like, but you're staying here until your ar?raignment.”

“Do I get a lawyer?” I said.

“Sure. Who can we call to get one for you?”

But there was no answer to that. My companions had es?caped. I was thankful for that: there was no point in all five of us being locked up. Thanks to the disguise there was no way they could be identified as fellow perpetrators if they returned. When they returned. I knew my friends. They would not leave me here to rot.

The cell door had a huge, primitive key lock, the kind I had practiced opening hundreds of times back when I thought I wanted to be a thief. My fingers were small enough to reach the tumblers, but not strong enough to turn them through the keyhole. If I could only have summoned up a thread of power I could have shrunk the shaft of the D-​hopper to use as a lock pick, but nothing doing.

It wasn't as though magik was scarce. Strong lines of power abounded on Scamaroni. I could see a huge blue ar?row running directly underneath the police station, but it was as untouchable as the shutterbugs behind the glass of Zol's little magik mirror. I tried a thousand times to reach that power, or the bright golden one I could see arching like a monochrome rainbow over the main street of the city, or the paler green one that crossed the blue one at some dis?tance from the jail. Some big, tough wizards had created the containment spell around this building, wizards hun?dreds of years older and far more accomplished than I was. There would have had to be sixteen of me to make any dent in it. I certainly tried.

I pictured a magikal crowbar prying out the grille over the window. Sweat poured down my face as I constructed the spell over and over again. The bars didn't even grow warm. I pictured a magikal rope tied around the door drag?ging it off its hinges. Not a creak, not a quiver. I sat down, exhausted. I was just going to have to wait until someone came and let me out.

It didn't take a genius to tell me that I had made a mess of my opportunity to free the Scammies. Zol Icty may have had the utter adoration of every self-​help book reader in