Cook, Glen - SS - The Seventh Fool

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Glen Cook was born in 1944 in New York City and moved to Indiana in I 94& He began writing sf in
1967 and published a novel The Heirs of Babylon, in 1972. He writes that he is employed by General
Motors, 'lives in a very old three story house with a wife and five cats and 10,000 books, own a
farm I manage on weekends and get very little time to write, though it is a pursuit of love."
The Seventh Fool
by GLEN COOK
Cantanzaro sang as he walked along the road to Antonisen. Occasionally, he glanced back,
smirked. The road remained an empty, meandering scar of brown on springtime's green. The Maniarchs
of Kortanek hadn't yet picked up his scent.
Then he frowned. He had been compelled to flee without the Jewels of Regot.
He grinned again. The thousand gayly colored spires of Antonisen pricked the sky ahead. The man
who had flummoxed Regot's pragmatist priests could, surely, make his fortune in a city ruled by a
Council called The Seven Fools.
Springtime was spreading through Zarlenga like a happy disease. The Hundred Cities were opening
like bright flowers. Travelers buzzed among them like bees. His reception at Antonisen's Harlequin
Gate wasn't the least unfriendly.
Serendipity! he thought moments after penetrating the dusty streets. He had arrived just in time
to witness one of Antonisen's fabled elections. A Fool had retired. Half the men of the city were
vying for his Chair.
A clever man should be able to find an avenue to profit in that.
Antonisenen reasoned that, since government was evil but necessary, it ought, at least, to be
entertaining. Those who wished to become Councilors, therefore, had to convince the voters that
they could provide the most amusing show.
There was a clown on every corner. Antoniseners were partial to humorists. The more inspired
were winning votes with scandalous libels on the retired Fool's manhood.
Cantanzaro ventured from clown to clown, observing fingers and toes. Theft was the swiftest
path to wealth. And in Antonisen it was the custom to flaunt one's fortune in the form of rings.
His natural impulse was to palm a few while shaking hands. But that, he noted, could be tricky
business. Antoniseners seemed preternaturally sensitive to such maneuvers. Whenever a foreigner
made a try - there were a good many in town for the election - the victim would shriek, a gang
would fall on the thief, pummel him senseless, hoist him by the arms and legs, run him to a nearby
low, shadowed archway, and chuck him in with a cry of "Hornbostel!"
Whatever it meant, Cantanzaro had no curiosity. He had had his encounters with the mysteries of
the Hundred Cities before. Few had been pleasant.
He needed a better idea and one came.
Cantanzaro seldom lacked for ideas, only for means.
He dug into his tattered purse. Still only four green-tinged copper alten of Kortanek, and one
useless map.
So he sought a market with an antiquary. All Zarlenga was deep in the rubbish of its ten-
thousand year history. Every city had its junk men.
This one was typical, an old man whose place of business was a filthy blanket spread in the
square, piled high with history's leavings. He probably went home to a palace. Zarlengans were
suckers for anything ancient.
"Your wish, Grace?" The old man wrinkled his nose at Cantanzaro's shabbiness, but at election
time one was rude to no man. That he himself was grubbier didn't faze the man. Poverty was part of
his act too.
"A book."
"Ah. Yes. I've got a dozen. A hundred. Cook books, romances, histories, journals, magic by the
right hand, magic by the left...."
"It should be unreadable."
"Unreadable?" A live one, the merchant thought, rubbing his hands together. "Li Chi." He held up
a scroll. "Got caught in the rain....
"No. In a forgotten tongue." Cantanzaro smiled. The old man kept gawking at his ringless
fingers.
"This, then. A genuine antiquity, recovered at great personal risk, by a tomb-miner working the
Mountains Dautenhain."
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