A Farce to Be Reckoned With by Roger Zelazny & Robert Sheckley

Author:Roger Zelazny & Robert Sheckley [Zelazny, Roger & Sheckley, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General, Fantasy Fiction, Angels, Angels - Fiction
ISBN: 9780553374421
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1995-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

She smiled. Her dark hair was lovely and tousled, her breasts high and well rounded. Oliver followed her inside.

They passed through several rooms, all decorated in scarlet and black and silver and containing armorial bearings, arms, and dark portraits of stern-looking elders. In each fireplace a fire sparked and glowed gaily. They walked through six rooms altogether. In the seventh a table was set with a gleaming white cloth and silver service.

"Oh, I say, this is rather decent!" Sir Oliver said, rubbing his hands together. There were wonderful-looking foods before him, goose pate and gooseberry jam, eggs and seed bread, and a great variety of drinks. The table was set for two, and Oliver began to wonder if the table were not the only thing that had been set up for him.

"Do take a seat," Alwyn said. "Make yourself comfortable."

A white kitten came under the archway and pranced and danced its way into the room. Alwyn gave a merry little laugh and bent to play with it. As she did so, Oliver seized the opportunity and exchanged plates with her. The two plates were almost identical, the only difference being that his had two radishes on the side and hers but one. He quickly placed one of his radishes on her plate to disguise his substitution. When she straightened up, Alwyn appeared to have noticed nothing.

They ate, and Alwyn poured two glasses of Burgundy from a great bottle on the damask-covered table.

Oliver found a moment when Alwyn's attention was taken up by a small foxhound that came into the room with a definite gamboling motion. Seizing the moment, he switched glasses. She didn't notice a thing.

Congratulating himself, he now turned to his assault on the provender, his favorite sort of a battle by far. He ate greedily and drank deeply, for the food was of a luscious perfection. This was fantasy food, magic food, just nothing in the world like it. Soon he felt the unmistakable sensation of some opiatelike drug attacking his sensorium and making him dizzy and faint.

"Is anything wrong, sir knight?" Alwyn asked as he slumped low in his seat.

"Merely a moment of fatigue," Oliver said.

"You've switched plates!" Alwyn said, staring at the knight's grimy thumbprint on her plate—proof enough of what he'd wished concealed.

"No offense intended," Oliver said sleepily. "Old custom of my people. You take this stuff on purpose?"

"Of course. Without my sleeping potion, I have a devil of a time dropping off at night," Alwyn said.

"Damned sorry I took it," Sir Oliver said through rubbery lips and eyes that seemed already to be rolling back into his head to reveal that passage into dreams that he would rather not take. "How long before it wears off?"

Her reply was lost in a crashing wave of sleep that broke over Oliver's head. He struggled in it like a man caught in raging surf; then he was out of the surf and falling deep into the black pool that lapped around him like a warm bath. He struggled to keep his head above the soapy marble waves sent by Morpheus.

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