She giggled again. “I was a little centipede running along the floor. They didn’t see me. Anyhow, the king wants me to find out why you were bored last night. Were you”—she sighed and looked at him hopefully—“were you being true to me?”
Tony felt a sort of inward jolt. Nasim, in his mind, was associated with beetles and moth eggs and grease spots. Now centipedes, too.
“I guess that was a sort of—mm—by-product of something else, Nasim,” he said forlornly. “I just didn’t feel romantic last night. That’s all. Did the king say anything else about me?”
“He’s going to execute Es-Souk for trying to kill somebody he’s decided he wants to be friends with,” said Nasim virtuously. “And he wants you to watch. I feel sorry for poor Es-Souk! He couldn’t help being jealous of me! And also the king’s terribly anxious to find out how to make you his friend instead of a general for Barkut.”
“Do you know,” said Tony, “I’d give a lot to know why he’s so anxious!”
Nasim beamed at him; just a plump little whirlwind three and a half feet tall, spinning in the middle of Tony’s bedroom, which itself looked something like the foyer of a super-plushy hotel at thirty-five dollars a day without bath. She looked, Tony reflected dismally, rather cute for a whirlwind. A bit on the chubby side, to be sure, but anybody who cared for whirlwinds would appreciate Nasim. Such a person would be eager to have her for a pet. Still—
“I’m going to whisper in your ear,” said Nasim coyly. “And I’ll have to take human form to get close enough.”
The whirlwind enlarged a little. Tony watched in alarm as a human figure began to show pinkly through the mist which was Nasim as a whirlwind. He grew apprehensive. He called anxiously:
“Clothes, Nasim!”
His cry came almost too late, but not quite. The very last of the mist which was her whirlwind form materialized about her as a Mother Hubbard wrapper of absolute shapelessness. Then she beamed at him breathlessly.