‘Against my fees?’

‘Naturally.’

‘I sense you are no longer playing the game, Master Bugg.’

‘Which game would that be?’

‘The one where winners win and losers lose.’

‘Oh, that game. No, I suppose not. Assuming, of course, I ever did.’

‘I have a sudden suspicion-this very real truth behind all the rumours of impending market collapse-it is all your doing, isn’t it?’

‘Hardly. Countless winners jumped in, I assure you. Believing, naturally, that they would win in the end. That’s how these things work. Until they stop working.’ Bugg snapped his fingers. ‘Poof!’

‘Without those contracts, Master Bugg, there will be chaos.’

‘You mean the winners will panic and the losers will launch themselves into their own feeding frenzy. Yes. Chaos.’

‘You are truly insane.’

‘No, just tired. I’ve looked into the eyes of too many losers, Sleem. Far too many.’

‘And your answer is to make losers of us all. To level the playing field? But it won’t do that, you know. You must know that, Bugg. It won’t. Instead, the thugs will find the top of every heap, and instead of debt you will have true slavery; instead of contracts you will have tyranny.’

‘All the masks torn off, yes.’

‘Where is the virtue in that?’

The Elder God shrugged. ‘The perils of unfettered expansion, Advocate Sleem, are revealed in the dust and ashes left behind. Assume the species’ immortality since it suits the game. Every game. But that assumption will not save you in the end. No, in fact, it will probably kill you. That one self-serving, pious, pretentious, arrogant assumption.’

‘The bitter old man speaks.’

‘You have no idea.’

‘Would that I carried a knife. For I would kill you with it, here and now.’

‘Yes. The game always ends at some point, doesn’t it?’

‘And you dare call me the cynical one.’

‘Your cynicism lies in your willing abuse of others to consolidate your superiority over them. My cynicism is in regard to humanity’s wilful blindness with respect to its own extinction.’

‘Without that wilful blindness there is naught but despair.’

‘Oh, I am not that cynical. In fact, I do not agree at all. Maybe when the wilful blindness runs its inevitable course, there will be born wilful wisdom, the revelation of seeing things as they are.’

‘Things? To which things are you referring, old man?’

‘Why, that everything of true value is, in fact, free.’

Sleem placed the coins in his own bulging purse and walked to the door. ‘A very quaint notion. Alas, I will not wish you a good day.’

‘Don’t bother.’

Sleem turned at the hard edge in Bugg’s voice. His brows lifted in curiosity.

Bugg smiled. ‘The sentiment wouldn’t be free now, would it?’

‘No, it would not.’

As soon as die hapless advocate was gone, Bugg rose. Well, it’s begun. Almost to the day when Tehol said it would. The man’s uncanny. And maybe in that, there lies some hope for humanity. All those things that cannot be measured, cannot be quantified in any way at all.

Maybe.

Bugg would have to disappear now. Lest he get torn limb from limb by a murder of advocates, never mind the financiers. And that would be a most unpleasant experience. But first, he needed to warn Tehol.

The Elder God glanced around his office with something like affectionate regret, almost nostalgia. It had been fun, after all. This game. Like most games. He wondered why Tehol had stopped short the first time. But no, perhaps that wasn’t at all baffling. Come face to face with a brutal truth-with any brutal truth-and it was understandable to back away.

As Sleem said, there is no value in despair.

But plenty of despair in value, once the illusion is revealed. Ah, I am indeed tired.;

He set out from his office, to which he would never return.

‘How can there be only four hens left? Yes, Ublala Pung, I am looking directly at you.’

‘For the Errant’s sake,’ Janath sighed, ‘leave the poor man alone. What did you expect to happen, Tehol? They’re hens that no longer lay eggs, making them as scrawny and dry and useless as the gaggle of matronly scholars at my old school. What Ublala did was an act of profound bravery.’

‘Eat my hens? Raw?’

‘At least he plucked their feathers.’

‘Were they dead by that point?’

‘Let’s not discuss those particular details, Tehol. Everyone is permitted one mistake.’

‘My poor pets,’ Tehol moaned, eyeing Ublala Pung’s overstuffed pillow at one end of the reed mat that served as the half-blood Tarthenal’s bed.

‘They were not pets.’

He fixed a narrow gaze on his ex-tutor. ‘I seem to recall you going on and on about the terrors of pragmatism, all through history. Yet what do I now hear from you, Janath? “They were not pets.” A declarative statement uttered in most pragmatic tones. Why, as if by words alone you could cleanse what must have been an incident of brutal avian murder.’

‘Ublala Pung has more stomachs than both you and me combined. They need filling, Tehol.’

‘Oh?’ He placed his hands on his hips-actually to make certain that the pin was holding the blanket in place, recalling with another pang his most public display a week past. ‘Oh?’ he asked again, and then added, And what, precisely and pragmatically, was wrong with my famous Grit Soup?’

‘It was gritty.’

‘Hinting of most subtle flavours as can only be cultivated from diligent collection of floor scrapings, especially a floor pranced upon by hungry hens.’

She stared up at him. ‘You are not serious, are you? That really was grit from the floor? This floor?’

‘Hardly reason for such a shocked expression, Janath. Of course,’ he threw in offhandedly as he walked over to stand next to the blood-splotched pillow, ‘creative cuisine demands a certain delicacy of the palate, a culture of appreciation-’ He kicked at the pillow and it squawked.

Tehol spun round and glared at Ublala Pung, who sat, back to a wall, and now hung his head.

‘I was saving one for later,’ the giant mumbled.

‘Plucked or unplucked?’

‘Well, it’s in there to stay warm.’

Tehol looked over at Janath and nodded, ‘See? Do you see, Janath? Finally see?’

‘See what?’ «

‘The deadly slope of pragmatism, Mistress. The very proof of your arguments all those years ago. Ublala Pung’s history of insensitive rationalizations-if you could call anything going on in that skull rational-leading him-and, dare I add, innumerable unsuspecting hens-into the inevitable, egregious extreme of… of abject nakedness inside a pillow!’

Her brows lifted. ‘Well, that scene last week really scarred you, didn’t it?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Janath.’

Ublala had stuck out his tongue-a huge, pebbled slab of meat-and was trying to study it, his eyes crossing with the effort.

‘What are you doing now?’ Tehol demanded.

The tongue retreated and Ublala blinked a few times to right his eyes. ‘Got cut by a beak,’ he said.

‘You ate their beaks?’

‘Easier to start with the head. They ain’t so restless with no heads.’

‘Really?’

Ublala Pung nodded.

‘And I suppose you consider that merciful?’

‘What?’

‘Of course not,’ Tehol snapped. ‘It’s just pragmatic. “Oh, I’m being eaten. But that’s all right. I have no head!”‘

Ublala frowned at him. ‘Nobody’s eating you, Tehol. And your head’s still there-I can see it.’

‘I was speaking for the hens.’

‘But they don’t speak Letherii.’

‘You are not eating my last four hens.’

‘What about the one in the pillow, Tehol? Do you want it back? Its feathers might grow back, though it might catch a cold or something. I can give it back if you like.’

‘Generous of you, Ublala, but no. Put it out of its misery, but mind the beak. In the meantime, however, I think you need to get yourself organized-you were supposed to leave days ago, after all, weren’t you?’