"It's rude to answer your own questions," the girl responded pleasantly. Lifting her cup, she proposed a toast: "To other people's weddings! I'm not losing a sister, I'm gaining closet space." She drained her drink to the dregs.

"You know," the troll murmured, "she really is an exceptional child."

"Since she's had her Maiden Morn, she's an exceptional adult," Zoli corrected him. "And as such, she'd best be thinking about her future."

"Don't you start in on me about marriage," Ethelberthina spoke up.

"Me? Never. But you will be wanting something to do with your life. You can't sell any more of Mama Ethina's Elixir-your stock's as good as all gone-so what will you do?"

Ethelberthina tapped her lips with a fingertip thoughtfully. "Well, I'm not exactly the physical type to enter the Swordsisters' Union, much as I'd like to, and I don't fancy further dabblings in alchemy-too stinky. What I would like is power: Great honking heaps of unmitigated power, the ability to make people fear me, to cringe before me, and most especially to never, ever think they can bully me and get away with it. Not even Mummy. So I suppose what I'd truly like to be is-"

"-a wizard?" Zoli suggested.

"-a bursar?" The troll tried to be helpful.

"-a priestess?"

"-a queen?"

"-a lawyer," said the girl.

And the shrieks which burst from the storeroom of the Crusty Boar caused Goodwife Eyebright to go into labor, so that Ethelberthina did not lose a sister that day after all.

Looking for Rhonda Honda by William Sanders

The minute she clanked into the office I knew she was trouble.

Okay, she didn't clank, not really; body armor hasn't clanked since before I was born. But people like her always seem as if they ought to clank, or at least jingle a little. Maybe it's the attitude they all seem to wear with it.

She said, "You're Johnny Noir?"

I sat back in the creaking old swivel chair and looked at her. That wasn't hard work at all. She had pale skin and nice small features, maybe a little on the sharp side. Short-cropped reddish-brown hair showed beneath her squared-off black beret. She was a little on the short side, but what there was of her, under that snug-tailored black one-piece suit, looked pretty good. Of course it was hard to tell, with so much of her upper body concealed by that damned bulky vest.

Which was silly, since nobody really needs to wear that kind of heavy protective gear any more-you can buy a vest off the rack, now, capable of stopping anything short of an antitank projectile, and light and thin enough that your own tailor couldn't spot it-but then that wouldn't send the message: My job is so important, people try to kill me to stop me from doing it.

I couldn't guess her age. Who can, nowadays? She looked somewhere in her middle twenties, but for all I knew she was old enough to be my grandmother. For all I knew she could be my grandmother; the old dear had been talking lately about getting a new morph job.

I said, "Yes, I'm Johnny Noir. And you're not, are you?"

She ignored that. So much for dry humor; it wasn't my best subject at detective school. She was looking around the office with an expression that might have indicated either scorn or routine professional paranoia. I couldn't really tell with those wraparound mirror shades hiding her eyes.

She finished her inspection and looked at me again. "My name is immaterial," she said in a dry flat voice. "You can call me Margo."

She didn't offer her hand. I had a feeling that wasn't all she wasn't going to offer. I said, "Well, Ms. Immaterial-uh, Margo-what can I do for you?"

"We need you to find somebody," she said.

"We?" I looked past her but I didn't see anybody else.

Her mouth pulled tight at the corners. "I… represent the interested persons," she said reluctantly. "Please don't ask questions. You'll be told everything you need to know."

She took a quick step forward and leaned across my desk. For a second I thought she was warming to the Noir charm after all, but she was merely reaching for the battered old phone. She picked it up, jabbed quickly at the buttons, and handed it to me. I held it up to my ear just as a familiar voice said, "Noir?"

"Chief." I caught myself sitting up a little straighter.

"Listen closely, Noir." The Chief's voice was high and hoarse, with an edge like a cheap steak knife. About the same as usual, in other words. "Somebody is going to tell you what she wants you to do. Do it."

I said carefully, "I see."

"The hell you do. You got no idea at all-Christ, I don't know how far up this comes from. The person in your office right now? She's not really there. Anything she says to you, you never heard. Whatever you wind up doing for the people she works for, it never happened. Am I getting through, Noir?"

I said, "Is this an order?"

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the Chief's wheezy breath. "Of course not, stupid," he said finally. "How can I order you to do something that's never going to happen, for people who don't exist? Especially when I'm not even talking to you right now."

He hung up. "Yes, sir," I said to the dead phone.

Margo was undoing the front of her bulletproof vest. Hope sprang to life again, but she was just getting something out of an inside pocket. "Here," she said.

She reached across my desk again, this time holding a disk which she popped into the ancient computer with a gesture that sneered. She tapped a few keys, her fingers moving faster than I could follow, and the page I'd been working on disappeared, to be replaced by a head-and-shoulders portrait of a blond-haired woman.

"This," Margo said, "is the person we want you to find."

The face that looked back at me was pretty, maybe even beautiful if you liked that tanned-SoCal-goddess look. There was a time when I would have said she was in her late teens or early twenties. Now, I wouldn't even bother trying to guess.

"She have a name?" I queried.

"Immaterial," Margo said immediately.

"Related, are you?"

Margo grimaced. "I know, but I'm serious. Her birth name really is immaterial, because she's not using it now."

She reached out and touched the keys again, and the picture changed to a full-length shot of what appeared to be the same woman, standing next to a purple-and-black motorcycle. She was dressed in elaborate protective gear: full snug-fitting leathers, high-topped racing boots, lace-on plastic knee and elbow guards, even a shiny perforated breastplate, all of it neatly color coordinated to match the bike. Other figures, similarly dressed, stood around in the background, or sat on other bikes.

Jesus, I thought. A roadgrrl.

"According to our information," Margo went on, "she is now known as Rhonda Honda."

Marvelous. Now it was beginning to add up. You get these cases all the time: somebody's darling daughter runs off to join a roadgrrl gang, and the distressed family wants her back. Or now and then it's somebody's darling wife; that happens too.

Damn unusual, though, for somebody like me to catch a case like this. Not if the people concerned could afford anything better… I said, "You know, you'd do better to take this to one of the big private agencies, like Herod Foxxe or Gabriel Mallet-they've got the staff and the facilities, I'm just a-"

"No." She was shaking her head. "We've already tried that. It's been six months now since she disappeared, and it took a private agency most of that time to find out the little we know now. You're familiar with the Peter Pick Agency?"

I nodded, repressing a couple of adjectives and a noun that came to mind. Margo said, "Their man was able to determine that she'd joined up with these bikers-"