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  “All is as it should be. At your disposal,” Kadil cackled, spreading wide his pasty, pixie-thin arms at the unholy mess. He waded through the crinkly flotsam, pages disintegrating and sheaves sticking to his charged robes as he did so, and tried to heft the mightily-engorged Tithle, and failed. “I assume it is with this tome that you’d like to begin?” he brayed, caressing the unwieldy, rusty-hinged volume of revenue procurement regulations.

  “You know what happens when you assume, don’t you?” Ihor replied, both rhetorically and insolently. “I am already familiar with all that lies between the covers of that manual, Wizard.”

  Kadil gasped. “What!? What is this!?” he jabbered, his jaundiced orbs darting around the muscled periphery of the giant, striking the delegation of artisans cowering behind. They vanished yet further into the wake of their gargantuan representative. “How can one such as yourself be familiar with what lies within the Tithle – an artisan!?”

  Ihor did not respond, for he was keenly observing Kadil, seeking physical manifestations of malfeasance, the scent of fear a thing sharp to his sensitive nose, the body-language of deceit a thing naked to his shrewd eyes.

  “You have one week,” Kadil gritted.

  And the battle was joined.

  The Wizard Kadil behaved as any resentful being being audited would behave, which is to say, badly. And as someone arrogantly used to getting his own way, to unquestioning obedience, he behaved that much worse. He was recalcitrant in addressing even the simplest of Ihor’s questions, such as where documents lay and journals were to be found, misdirecting his inquisitor to the appropriate ledgers, then feigning ignorance and absent-mindedness, and then outright hearing impairment.

  Ihor was undeterred, however, and he dug through the mountain of material on his own, sifting and shovelling, exhuming the items he would require for a thorough examination. Kadil saw Ihor’s expert documentation-gathering techniques, his unflagging processes of polished audit evidentiary accumulation, and he went into action. He commenced showering the giant with paperwork, in a confusatory, perverted spirit of cooperation, tearing open drawers and cupboards and cabinets and flinging out chits and chats and receipts and invoices, whole anvil-weighted subledgers packed with notations and numbers, foot-wide logs thick with spidery figures, calculations arcane and convoluted, striving to bury Ihor and his clarity of thought and purpose in a blizzard of apocryphal records, some germane to the warrior’s purpose, most obfuscatory.

  And when still Ihor slogged onward through the fibrous onslaught, his brow furled like a sweat-stained battle flag, his teeth clenched as the steel jaws of a trap are clenched upon their hapless prey, his eyes gleaming with the bloody zeal of the battle-hardened number-disciple driving ever-forwards on the rocky, ragtag audit trail – checking and rechecking and crosschecking, calculating and comparing, balancing and booking – Kadil gripped his flowing, eunuchian robes and swirled them about, as if in disgust, the real purpose being to send the entire chattered heap of documentation swirling about tornado-like, the slashing, ink-jotted paper spinning and spinning, sorting and resorting, coming together and apart without rhyme nor reason either.

  But Ihor stood his ground inside the dervish of debris, bleeding copiously from paper cuts yet unbowed, snagging and hauling down the scraps of information he sought, cunning orbs scouring pages and columns for relevancy and revelation. He did not compromise nor did he skimp, performing his examinary tasks fully and completely, with a dour doggedness that would have left lesser men dulled and lifeless.

  The artisans stared from behind their oak-ribbed door shield, in dumbfounded awe, never before dreaming that the world of accounting and taxation could be so violent and variable. They cheered lustily when Ihor ticked, clapped gustily when he bopped, watching wide-eyed and wonder-struck as their heroic warrior reaped the pulpy, number-scrawled whirlwind.

  “Finding everything you need!?” Kadil howled above the tumult. “Everything agreeing!?”

  “So far,” Ihor replied, nonplussed, his fleet fingers manipulating the beads of his abacus with blinding speed, scratching down figures in his folio fast and furious and on the fly. His abacus and charcoal, and the brilliant mind that drove them, were the weapons of Kadil’s possible math destruction.

  Hours and then days dragged by, the battle raging on and on, Kadil unleashing his full arsenal of audit-thwarting techniques. He counted out loud, over and over, playing havoc with Ihor’s mental arithmetic, his powers of concentration, reciting random numbers in a shrill, sing-song voice that had the dead-tired delegation clutching their ears in stultified terror. And to Ihor’s legitimate and legal inquiries of clarification, Kadil responded in a tongue as forked as a serpent’s, his answers doubling and trebling back upon themselves, meandering around and around and going nowhere, their points blunted and lost, in a voice now hale now hushed. Still Ihor plucked out the gems of information and assurance he needed from the fractured responses and fractious paperwork, his spirit strong, his senses heightening rather than fading.

  Six days so passed, each grinding hour like the one preceding, the world of life and light beyond the stale, stone walls a long-forgotten thing. The Wizard Kadil grew desperate. Ihor was tying things together as surely as a butcher binds a pig to a spit and then fires it into oblivion, inching unrelentingly ever-closer to conclusion, questions becoming answers, to do points resolving, calculations being proved. So, Kadil sneezed, and sneezed again, imparting from his suddenly runny nose, his treacherous nostrils, a mystical secretion that settled like a fine mist over the maelstrom, blurring everything within the cloistered compartment. The figures on the documents Ihor was studying, the numbers in his folio, seemed to fade and jumble, mix and mismatch, rendered shapeless and potentially meaningless.

  Ihor looked at the wizard and gave his rugged head a shake, clearing the cobwebs of confusion. Then he grinned a ravenous grin, his bloodshot eyes clouded now only by wretched remembrance. “I’ve seen all such tricks before, Wizard,” he snarled. “And more. I’ve pieced together ledgers frozen by icy coughs and shattered to shards of their former selves, been swept out to sea in roiling red ink swells engendered by the waves of a wizard’s arms, and had lead-jacketed account books rained down upon me like square-shaped hail by the telepathic wobbling of dry-rotted shelves. I’ve seen it all and worked through it all, till, by Gods, I got my audit satisfaction! And now I render my opinion on your records, Kadil!”

  The musty, paper-strewn room was suddenly shrouded in silence, the delegation of artisans pricking up their ears, the wily Wizard Kadil clutching a trembling hand to his quivering lips.

  “It is a qualified audit opinion!” Ihor intoned, passing a doomsday judgment, a wizardly death sentence. He threw aside his charcoal and abacus and advanced on Kadil, consulting his notes. “I give, as but one example, the June 23rd transaction between Ewt the engraver and Wund the whittler, wherein Ewt performed engravement on one of Wund’s whittled wind instruments, and you, Wizard, applied a 2.5 per cent transaction levy on the sale of service, as per the Tithle.”

  “As per the Tithle,” Kadil breathed.

  “Then you rebated Wund at the rate of 3.25 per cent of the 2.5 per cent levy that he’d paid, again as per the Tithle.”

  “As per the Tithle,” Kadil chanted, mesmerized.

  “But then Wund subsequently sold the whittled wind instrument to Mord the musician, the 2.42 per cent remaining levy now forming part of the cost of the blowpipe. And yet you had Mord pay the full 2.5 per cent transaction levy on his purchase – on the full cost and mark-up of the product without giving credit for the input tax already paid! Tax on tax! Double-taxation, Kadil! Something expressly forbidden by the Tithle!”

  Kadil recoiled in horror, and the enraged mob surged forward.

  Zaric, Wizard of all Wizards, fled to the throne room of King Dorn upon receiving news of Kadil’s treachery, of the burgeoning tax revolt in the Province of Sull. The King, however, had already been informed, and he greeted Zaric wi
th his palace guards, who promptly seized the wizard.

  “What is this, my lord!?” Zaric shrieked, struggling in vain to free himself.

  Dorn shrugged his heavy, fur-mantled shoulders and said, “Your wizard in Sull has been proven a tax cheat, Zaric. He lies dead and the province lies in rebellion. And his failure is, of course, your failure, and thus you, too, must be executed, as his superior and collaborator.” Dorn smiled reassuringly. “But fear not for the Kingdom of Ronn, for I have dispatched an army to crush what little revolt the artisans can muster, and the tax warrior, Ihor, will soon be impressed back into my legion of accountants. All will then be well again.”

  “What about me?” Zaric wailed. “I knew nothing of Kadil’s treachery!”

  “And, indeed, you should have.”

  Dorn waved one of his jewelled hands and his guards dragged the kicking and screaming Zaric away, to the chopping block, for a mandated tax cut. The King then shook his crown-mantled head and chuckled, reflecting ruefully on the vast sums of money lost to him in the form of kickbacks, now that the Wizard Kadil’s scheme had been exposed. “Death and taxes – inevitable, indeed,” he mused.

  CHRISTMAS GAMES

  David Langford

  Christmas at Shambles Hall! It was a picture of Olde English festivity, of Yule logs and paper chains and the traditional tree with all its ornaments, candles and festoons. The fireplace in the great entrance hall sent out endless pulsing warmth and cheer. Outside, the local robin strutted in the snow . . . the seasonal snow that filled up the estate and draped the leafless trees on either side of the long carriage-sweep. The unmarked snow.

  “Of course,” murmured Felicity as she snuggled against the Hon. Nigel in the window-seat, “we are quite, quite cut off from the outside world. If anything were to happen . . .”

  Over the mantelpiece in the lofty dining-room hung the one statutory reminder built into every sequence: here, a probe’s impression, done into oils, of the dim landscape to be expected on a certain world circling Barnard’s Star. It was topped with a sprig of mistletoe.

  Lord Blackhat the City financier had ruined countless men and tried hard to ruin as many women, yet he had a lingering sentimental streak and always invited his victims to Christmas at Shambles Hall. It was his whimsical way of dicing with Fate. He never troubled to remove or secure any part of the weapon collection from his youthful, sporting days which so extensively adorned the oak-panelled walls. Broadswords, crossbows, rapiers, shotguns, bludgeons, morningstars, garrottes and vials of prussic acid were always to hand at the Hall. Today he had added spice to the festive season by blackmailing the crusty old Colonel and forbidding his own son’s intended marriage to Felicity.

  This year, the Duchess of Spong’s fad was fortune-telling with a wicked pack of cards. As an old family friend who had swindled her out of her inheritance, Lord Blackhat liked to humour her. “This covers you, this crosses you,” she intoned as she dealt out the pattern. “This is your heart and this is your head and this your destiny as of approximately supper-time.”

  “Funny,” said his lordship without real surprise, “how all of them seem to be the ace of spades.”

  The Colonel and the Professor were taking a turn along the Yew Walk, swapping anecdotes of relativistic physics and the tiger hunt at Poona. “My God,” said the Professor suddenly. “These seem to be . . . the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

  “Lodge-keeper’s dog, I believe. Bloody great animal.”

  “For a moment I thought that, even though it is Christmas Day, some sinister element might yet enter our revels, ha ha.”

  The Colonel laughed shortly. “Someone here’d make short work of any mystery, Prof. Funny thing, really, that we should have with us as a fellow house-guest the eminent amateur detective Chester Dix who’s sent so many foul murderers to the dock!”

  “Oh, yes, in my absent-minded way I had almost forgotten. But Colonel, surely Dix couldn’t be here on . . . business?”

  “Nonsense! Balderdash! Pull yourself together, man!”

  The Professor started. “Er . . . what was that?”

  “Just an ominous magpie, Prof. Flying across our path. Symbol of sorrow and bad luck, they say, like those thirteen black cats over there.”

  “The scientific mind is above such nonsense,” the Professor said conscientiously, walking under a ladder. From within the Hall came a crash as the tween-maid broke another mirror.

  “Such a thing as overdoing the atmosphere,” muttered the Colonel. “Oh well, it’s only Christmas once a subjective year.”

  * * *

  Chester Dix examined himself in the dressing-table mirror. Waxed moustache, deerstalker, monocle, magnifying glass – all seemed adequate. “One employs the little grey cells,” he said experimentally. “By Jove, what? When you have eliminated the impossible, then what remains, no matter how improbable . . .” Losing the thread, he began again.

  “Mortimer,” said the dashingly handsome but amnesiac stranger who had so mysteriously turned up at Shambles Hall before thick snow isolated it for all practical purposes from the nearby village of Mayhem Parva. “Sebastian. Cholmondeley, pronounced Chili. It was something like one of those.”

  “Aldiborontiphoscophornio,” Felicity suggested at random. “Chrononhotonthologos, pronounced Chris. You ought to recognize your own name when you hear it.”

  “I’m sure I shall. Fred. Fred! No . . . no, not Fred.”

  The Hon. Nigel Scattergood, son and heir to the tainted Blackhat fortune, stared moodily into the great fireplace. “Four bloody Christmases since launch day. I wish someone else got a chance to play detective just for once.”

  Felicity said, “Well, he is the infosystems chief, darling.”

  “Victor. Vitamin. Vitellus. Virtual Reality,” muttered the stranger. “No, I’m fairly sure that isn’t it either.”

  “Can we all try to stay a trifle more in character?” said Felicity. She tweaked at the hem of her short skirt. “Nigel, I shall be seriously annoyed with you if you don’t do something about Lord Blackhat’s pig-headedness. I want to marry a man of action. I . . . was that someone listening at the door?”

  “That amnesiac chap,” mused the Professor to the Duchess, “reminds me oddly of our host’s younger brother; you know, the one long thought dead under suspicious circumstances in that Antarctic expedition from which only one survivor, Blackhat himself, returned. Odd how one gets these fancies.”

  “Another odd thing that few people know,” said the Duchess, “is that identical twins run in that family.”

  * * *

  The Christmas dinner was excellent as ever: the turkey vast and succulent enough to feed a family for a fortnight, the plum pudding flaming in brandy, the crackers exploding with satisfying bangs which, this year, did not once serve to cover a pistol-shot. But there seemed to be a strange atmosphere at the merry table. After pulling crackers with all twelve guests, Lord Blackhat idly unfolded the screw of paper bearing the last amusing cracker-motto. It proved to have been constructed from letters cut from a newspaper and pasted down, reading: “yOU will DiE to NIGHT”.

  The other eleven were substantially the same.

  “One recognizes, does one not, the characteristic Baskerville typeface of the Wessex Methodist Gazette?” murmured Dix at his elbow. “Alors, my friend, we progress.”

  “Bah, humbug,” said his lordship, and beckoned to the butler. “Starveling, I shall retire to the library and pass the evening altering my will. You might look in towards midnight with a whisky-and-soda, and see that I am . . . in good health.”

  “As your lordship pleases,” said Starveling.

  Firelight flickered in the dining-room where Chester Dix, brilliant amateur detective, brooded with steepled fingers and half-closed eyes over the remnants of the feast. No doubt each member of the party in turn would be paying a deviously motivated visit to the library. In due course there would follow a resounding crash of silver tray and shattered glass as the impeccable Starveling str
ove to be surprised at what he found slumped over the antique mahogany desk in Lord Blackhat’s library. And then the investigation would . . .

  There was a frightful discontinuity.

  “Lightning?” said the Professor.

  “In a dead clear sky?” said the Colonel.

  Upstairs, Felicity and the Hon. Nigel had been busy failing to establish a convincing alibi. “Did the earth just move for you?” she asked.

  “Dash it all, I’d hardly touched you.”

  In the smoking room, the amnesiac stranger explained to Starveling, “I had it, I had it right on the tip of my tongue, and then that earthquake distracted me.”

  “Most regrettable, sir.”

  Alone in the Heliotrope Room, the Duchess turned over the thirteen fateful cards and found that all of them were Mr Bun the Baker. She frowned.

  Lord Blackhat, caught unawares in mid-disinherit, felt himself all over. He seemed intact. “Thought they’d got me with an electrified codicil that time. Be a damned clever notion . . .”

  “I have gathered you here,” spluttered what seemed to be the brilliant amateur sleuth Chester Dix, “because one of you is guilty. Before twenty-four hours have passed I shall name the guilty person.” He had a shaky, semi-transparent look.