“Well,” muttered Ignace. “Well.”
“Well, nothing! Ye olde sorcerer over there”—a massive thumb indicated Zulkeh—”can wax as eloquent as he pleases on the hoary traditions of my ‘most honorable and prestigious profession,’ but you know as well as I do that the plebes we hang out with don’t think choking’s anything more than a fancy name for the same stuff what gets them pitched in the hoosegow at the drop of a hat. I get away with it for two reasons.” He held up a pair of fingers like cucumbers. “First, I only do it for money. That makes it a respectable profit-making enterprise, rather than a hideous crime of vulgar passion. Second, and more important, I only choke rich people at the request of other rich people, which makes it classy and haut cuisine.”
“That’s not true!” denied Ignace. “You’ve burked lots of lowlifes!”
“Most of ’em loan sharks or pimps. Or their bullies.”
“Well. Well, even so!”
“Loan sharks and pimps don’t count. Or their bullies. Makes even the porkers yawn.”
“I don’t care!” shrilled Ignace. The dyspeptic little agent began hopping up and down in fury. “Forget the philosophy, then! That miserable dwarf pisses me off! Choke him, I say, choke him! Throttle the little runt—as a personal favor to your old friend and faithful agent.”
“Not a chance,” replied Greyboar. “Three reasons.” He held up three fingers like a stack of logs. “First, right now the favor I owe’s to the kid, on account of how he just got through providing me with more entertainment than I’ve had in years.” Another sorry round of merriment ensued. “Second, I don’t choke people as personal favors to anyone, you included. Professional ethics, you know. And finally, I don’t choke shrimps.”
“I don’t care!” shrilled Ignace. “You—”
“Although,” mused Greyboar, stooping over Ignace, “there’s always a first time.”
Silence fell over the agent. Ignace peered up past Greyboar’s great hook of a nose, his beady black eyes visible at a distance. So does the mouse examine the eagle’s beak just before lunch.
“You’d be without an agent,” he squeaked. “Business’d suffer. You’d go hungry—starve—have to go back to work in the—”
“Nonsense!” cried Greyboar. “Soon as word got out I was throttling obnoxious little loudmouths there’d be a line outside my door. A long, long line. Wouldn’t need an agent! Just need to hire a few bouncers to keep the line orderly. Big, beefy lads, phlegmatic types, you know, the kind won’t start fights for no reason.”
Pondering this line of logic, Ignace soon came to the conclusion that there was some truth in Greyboar’s argument. He was perhaps helped along in drawing this conclusion by the learned debate which promptly erupted between Magrit and Zulkeh over the precise length of the line of customers which would form to seek the asphyxiations of offensive twerps. Here the wizard leaned toward the conservative side, opting for a line no more than two miles long, while the witch—exhibiting a more sanguine temperament—firmly placed twelve miles as the lowest conceivable limit.
The argument waxed hot and heavy. Zulkeh, in a rare lapse into empiricism, cited for authority his long experience with the aggravations caused him by his diminutive apprentice. For her part, Magrit ridiculed this selfsame hard-won expertise, advancing the—to your narrator’s mind—dubious premise that the dwarf Shelyid was “rather a fine and sprightly little chap.” She went on to depict the sorcerer Zulkeh as a narrow-minded pedant whose cloistered existence had given him no concept of the true essence of the obnoxious little loudmouth, so well-known and despised by the common run of mankind, the which would eagerly scrape together their few coins to see the world rid of this plague.
In the event, the question was settled by the grotesque little salamander. For once again, it rounded up the multitude of mice and put the question to them, asking the rodents what they would offer for the privilege of ringside seats at the apparently-soon-to-be-forthcoming throttling of Ignace at the hands of his client. This question—though obviously framed in a weighted and unscientific manner—soon resolved the dispute, not to mention Ignace’s mind. For ’twas but a moment later that the mice, having disappeared into their holes, came pouring forth in a great horde, chittering with glee, dressed in holiday finery, bearing in their tiny paws various crumbs, treasured trinkets, and bits of succulent cheese. One enthusiast went so far as to offer, in a squeaking little voice, “the pelt off my back.”