When we got back, I was in the best mood I'd been in years.
But it didn't last for very long. Sooner than you could believe, things started going downhill. Greyboar called it entropy. I called it the innate tendency of life to get fucked up. He insisted we were talking about the same thing, which absolutely infuriated me.
My way of putting it was simple common sense, backed up by long experience. It had nothing to do with any damned philosophy.
Oh, and sure, we didn't fall into poverty. Somewhat to my surprise, even after that luxurious spree, we still had quite a bit of Avare's honorarium left. Enough to last us for quite a while, even after Greyboar got pressured by the Cat into moving us into swankier digs. Well. Less hovelish digs, it might be better to say. I was able to hold the line somewhere.
In addition to what was left of the honorarium, business kept picking up. Partly that was because the life and times of Sfinctria—all of Grotum, in fact—was sure and purely going to hell in a handbasket. After the fiasco in Prygg—I repeat: my lips are sealed; I vow eternal silence—the Ozarines got so furious they just invaded eastern Grotum outright. No more of that namby-pamby "covert action" stuff. (Weird phrase, that. What I mean is, the action's never covert to the covertee, who's presumably the guy that's supposed to be kept in the dark.)
Queen Belladonna, naturally, immediately hailed the invasion and signed about eight million treaties with Ozar. The upper classes sided with her to a man—cleaved to her bosom like newborn babes, more like—chattering about realpolitik. The middle classes more or less went along, muttering glumly about devils you know and devils you don't. The intelligentsia—the young ones, anyhow—screamed about collaboration and rioted in the streets. The great unwashed masses went on about eight million general strikes and built barricades every other Tuesday, bellowing rowdy slogans in which the terms "boot-licker" and "toady" vied in popularity with "puppet" and—always a crowd pleaser—"worthless cocksucker."
The Ecclesiarchy also gave their blessing to the enterprise. The Ozarine Empire was officially anointed with the title "Protector of the Faith," which the Twelve Popes even managed to say with a straight face. Nice trick, that, given that Ozarines are notorious free-thinkers and keep the Church on a very tight leash in Ozarae. A civilized folk, the Ozarines.
The "blessing of the Ecclesiarchy," needless to say, translated itself into an inquisitorial frenzy and priests sermonizing about the "dwarf menace." Before you knew it, there were pogroms practically every week.
Would-be pogroms, I should say. In the event, all those years of forcing "vagrant" dwarves into the sewers paid off for the dwarves, because they had a million hidey-holes to scurry into. Stinky hidey-holes, sure, but smelling like crap beats smelling like a roast.
For a while, the pogromist mobs were enraged by their slim pickings and started whipping themselves into a bigger frenzy. But then—we heard about it, we didn't see it—Gwendolyn and The Roach surfaced and organized a counterforce. One of the big mobs ran right into an ambush and by the time Gwendolyn and The Roach and maybe two dozen surly agitators and two hundred really surly proletarian types and two thousand really surly dwarves got finished, the pogromists had been pretty much pogromized to a pulp. I heard the sewers were clogged for a week in that part of the city.
When he got the news, Greyboar didn't say anything. He just went into his room and spent the next three days staring at that damned portrait. "Practicing my Languor," he said. "Practicing my Languor."
Ah, what the hell. I didn't feel too great myself. Even though all the reports we heard agreed that Gwendolyn had made a clean getaway when it was all over. Not that I was surprised. A completely unreasonable woman. But—
Heh. I'll admit I laughed, thinking about it. Gwendolyn had been a tough cookie even when she was a kid. I could just imagine what she was like now!
After a day or so, I bucked myself up. Life is what it is, and that's all there is to it. What else do you ever get?
Philosophy, my ass. Greyboar could call it entropy till he turned blue in the face, and practice his Languor, and pretend he was discerning the secrets of the eightfold whatchamacallit in the profound depths of the foursome whosit. Me, I stuck with the wise man's most profound saying: "Shit happens."
And, I reminded myself firmly, it was great for the trade! Business was absolutely booming, and nobody had to worry about the porkers anymore. Not stranglers and their customers, at any rate. Oh my, no. The porkers were running their tails off stamping out riot and revolution, ferreting out subversion, grappling the serpent of anarchy, etc., etc. Likewise, the army. Likewise, the Inquisition.
Greyboar, of course, refused to look at it rationally. He called it fin de siècle something or other—angst, I think. Me, I knew it was just that everybody—especially in the upper crust where most of our customers came from—was swept up in the sagacity of the wise man.
Shit was happening, indeed. At which time, as the wise man says: "Better to be the shitter than the shittee."
We were swamped with prospective clients. Greyboar's reputation was now sky-high. Nobody was in his league anymore. Nobody ever was, actually; but now even the cloddies knew it. Greyboar had always been famous in the scholarly journals, mind you. The Journal of Contemporary Assassination, Asphyxiation Quarterly, Garrote Gazette—one or the other always had a reference to him in a current article. And, year after year, like clockwork, Jane's The World's Perps listed him as, and I quote: "the state of the art in the trade" and "the standard by which professional thuggee must be measured."
But now there was a flurry of articles about him in the popular press, too. Most of which—brace yourself—were titled something like "World's Greatest Strangler A Recluse!" and "Greyboar Spurns Another Offer!"
I swear, it broke my heart. More business than you could shake a stick at—more potential business, I should say—and Greyboar turned down 99% of it.
He was—keep a straight face—"bored." He was—don't laugh—"not challenged." He wanted—are you ready for this?—"only jobs which are epistemologically valid, ontologically rigorous, and adhere to ethical entropic axioms."
I'm serious. The guy made a living crushing windpipes—this is not, as a rule, considered intellectually demanding labor—and he insisted on philosophically correct chokes.
Of course, I protested. I denounced. I sermonized on sloth. I whined. I groused.
None of which did the slightest bit of good. Then, seeing starvation looming, I scrounged up what jobs I could which satisfied the great philosophe's dignity.
Weird, weird jobs. For instance: The Royal Astronomical Society hired us to strangle a vampire who was bumping off its members in an observatory. I kid you not. Actually, as it turned out, the whole thing was really on account of the fact that the telescope in the observatory in question was—
Never mind. Some other time. I just bring it up now to illustrate the woeful life of a strangler's agent.
Then, naturally, it got worse, because I made the mistake of complaining to Jenny and Angela about it.
"Pooh," sniffed Jenny. "Sniff," poohed Angela.
The next thing I knew, the two of them were hauling me down to Benvenuti's studio, insisting that I get my own portrait painted alongside their own. "In order to improve my spirits," they said.
I protested at the cost, but that turned out to be a bad move because Benvenuti was making a ton off of his portraits of Jenny and Angela. Which astonished me, since they weren't nudes. Turned out there was a market for great portraits of youthful innocence, if you can believe it. What a weird world. Oh, sure, he gave them several free of charge, which would have been worth a bundle—except Jenny and Angela refused to let me sell them. Which, I'll admit, is not something I pushed very hard. After a while, I got to like having the portraits around.
Then—then!—Benvenuti offered to do a portrait of me. And—brace yourself for some vulgarity here—free of charge. Artists, I decided, had the most disgraceful set of professional ethics I'd ever heard of. A scandal, what it was.
Well, I could hardly refuse under the circumstances. Especially after Jenny and Angela threatened to, ah, "withhold their affections." So there I sat in a studio, day after day, sulking on a stool next to a table loaded with silly fruit. What made it all the worse was that Benny got really into the project.
When he finished, I took one look at the damn thing and flat refused to accept it. What an utterly slanderous portrayal! Jenny and Angela couldn't budge me an inch. Benvenuti just shrugged and put the stupid thing on the market where, to my outrage and disgruntlement, it brought in an astonishing price. Eventually, I heard, it even wound up in some hoity-toity museum.
A Study in Melancholia, indeed!
Nonsense. What was involved here was my reason, not my emotions. Logic, pure and simple. Greyboar could sneer at my rude, crude, lewd and uncouth intellect. Crap. I knew cause and effect when I saw it.
If Greyboar hadn't taken up philosophy, we never would have gotten involved in l'affaire Prygg. If we hadn't gotten into that mess we never would have gotten into that other idiot business in Blain and Greyboar never would've gotten hooked up with Schrödinger's Cat. If he hadn't gotten the hots for a crazy woman, he never would have dreamed of mixing it up with an artiste. If he hadn't mixed it up with high-falutin' artist types, he wouldn't have gotten soul-sick with the realities of a perfectly reasonable trade. If he had developed what he started calling weltschmerz, we never would have looked twice at doing jobs for out-of-town eccentrics. If he hadn't been out of town doing a weird job for a heretic abbess, his girlfriend wouldn't have run afoul of Church and State. If his lady love hadn't managed to get herself into the silliest scrape you ever heard of—you'll hear about it, hold your horses—he wouldn't have made an even sillier attempt to rescue her. If he hadn't tried to rescue her, we wouldn't have gotten involved in the dwarf business. If we hadn't gotten mixed up with the dwarf business, his sister Gwendolyn wouldn't have developed a soft spot in her heart for the clown. And if Gwendolyn hadn't decided maybe Greyboar wasn't the absolute pure scum of the earth, after all, she certainly wouldn't have—
Never mind. I'm getting ahead of myself. Just take my word, for the moment. Without philosophy, our life would have stayed on an even keel. Instead, like being sucked into a whirlpool, we wound up where we are today.
You'll see.