“You,” Verkan Vall continued, “are a complete, deliberate, malicious, and unmitigated liar. The Lady Dallona of Hadron is a scientist of integrity, incapable of falsifying her experimental work. What’s more, her father is one of my best friends; in his name, and in hers, I demand a full retraction of the slanderous statements you have just made.”
“Do you know who I am?” the beefy one shouted.
“I know what you are,” Verkan Vall shouted back. Like most ancient languages, the Akor-Neb speech included an elaborate, delicately-shaded, and utterly vile vocabulary of abuse; Verkan Vall culled from it judiciously and at length. “And if I don’t make myself understood verbally, we’ll go down to the object level,” he added, snatching a bowl of soup from in front of the monkish-looking young man and throwing it across the table.
The soup was a dark brown, almost black. It contained bits of meat, and mushrooms, and slices of hard-boiled egg, and yellow Martian rock lichen. It produced, on the light tunic, a most spectacular effect.
For a moment, Verkan Vall was afraid the fellow would have an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Mastering himself, however, he bowed jerkily.
“Marnark of Bashad,” he identified himself. “When and where can my friends consult yours?”
“Lord Virzal of Verkan,” the paratimer bowed back. “Your friends can negotiate with mine here and now. I am represented by these Gentlemen-Assassins.”
“I won’t submit my friends to the indignity of negotiating with them,” Marnark retorted. “I insist that you be represented by persons of your own quality and mine.”
“Oh, you do?” Olirzon broke in. “Well, is your objection personal to me, or to Assassins as a class? In the first case, I’ll remember to make a private project of you, as soon as I’m through with my present employment; if it’s the latter, I’ll report your attitude to the Society. I’ll see what Klarnood, our President-General, thinks of your views.”
A crowd had begun to accumulate around the table. Some of them were persons in evening dress, some were Assassins on the hotel payroll, and some were unattached Assassins.