“These aphorisms,” Guivric conceded, “may be judicious, they may be valuable, they may even have some kernel somewhere of rational meaning. But, in any case, they do not justify my living’s having been upset and generally meddled with by a lecherous and immodest Sylan who goes about wearing not even a skeleton.”
Horvendile replied: “I can see no flaw in your way of living. You are the chief of Emmerick’s barons now that Anavalt is gnawed bones in Elfhame: you have wealth and rather more than as much power as Emmerick himself, now that your son is Emmerick’s brother-in-law, and poor Emmerick is married to a widow. You are a well-thought-of thaumaturgist, and you are, indeed, excelled in your art by nobody since Miramon Lluagor’s death. And you have also, they tell me, a high name for wisdom and for learning now that Kerin has gone down under the earth. What more can anybody ask?”
“I ask for much more than for this sort of cautious and secondary excellence.” Guivric seemed strangely desperate. He spoke now, with a voice which was not in anything prim and wary, saying, “I ask for the man whom I can hate, for the priest whom I can believe, and for the woman whom I can love!”
But Horvendile shook his red curls, and he smiled a little cruelly. “Successful persons, my poor careful Guivric, cannot afford to have any of these luxuries. And one misses them. I know. The Sylan too is, in his crude and naïve way, a successful person. He is now almost human. He cherishes phantoms, therefore, and I suspect these phantoms have been troubling you with their nonsense, since it is well known that all illusions haunt the corridors of this mischancy place into which phantoms alone may enter.”
“Yet I have entered it,” Guivric pointed out.
“Yes,” Horvendile said, non-committally.
“And I now enter,” Guivric stated, “to the heart of it, to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic.”
40.
Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones
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