Robert Asprin - Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

VIP免费

2024-12-05 0 0 1.64MB 268 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

MYTH

ALLIANCES

ROBERT ASPRIN and JODY LYNN NYE

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that

this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"

to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received

any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously, and

any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

MYTH ALLIANCES

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with

Bill Fawcett & Associates

PRINTING HISTORY

Meisha Merlin hardcover edition / September 2003 Ace

mass market edition / August 2004

Cover art by Walter Velez. Cover

design by Judith Lagerman. Interior

text design by Julie Rogers.

thereof, may not be reproduced

in any form without permission.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or

via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal

and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic

editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of

copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors' rights is appreciated.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375

Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 0-441-01182-9

ACE® Ace Books are published by

The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375

Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ACE and the "A" design are trademarks

belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321

INTRODUCTION

You have in your hand something both familiar and also

new. In a way this is a bit frightening. The best selling

Myth Adventures series has had a unique place in SF liter-

ature. And a surprising number of the readers of this series

are amazingly knowledgeable about every detail and nu-

ance. This is a new novel in the Myth Adventures series.

That is the familiar. What is new is the second name on the

cover. This book is a collaboration between Robert Lynn

Asprin, who created the series and wrote the earlier novels,

and Jody Lynn Nye, the author of over two dozen other

books. It is a further adventure, or series of calamities, fea-

turing Skeeve and many of the same characters you have

enjoyed in the first dozen books. This adventure takes

place just after the end of volume 12, Something Myth Inc.

A few years ago Jody and Bob created another novel set in

contemporary New Orleans, License Invoked. They have

also done several short stories, which have been collected

in the Myth-Told Tales (a Meisha Merlin book). Inciden-

tally those stories actually set the scene for this book,

though aren't needed to read it. So why Jody Lynn Nye?

Simply put, Jody had already demonstrated the ability to fit

comfortably in other author's worlds with other collabora-

tions, most notably four novels written with Anne McCaf-

frey. She has herself written several humorous novels. It

didn't hurt that Jody and Bob have known each other for

almost two decades as well. So when the decision was

made to add collaborations to the series, Jody Lynn Nye

was first choice.

Note I said "add collaborations." This is not to say there

won't be more solo novels from Robert Lynn Asprin as

well. There will be.

So what is happening beyond this new Myth Adventure

that has both writers so busy, especially Robert Asprin?

Both contributors are also working on other books. Robert

Asprin has already delivered to Penguin Putnam the first of

two really action-filled fantasy novels in a series titled

Wartorn and as of writing this is getting close to the dead-

line for the second adventure. He is also in the process of

expanding a second mystery novel in a series not yet

placed. Jody has herself just completed a new novel in her

Taylor's Ark SF medical series, titled The Lady and the

Tiger. From that list of projects you might be beginning to

get the idea on why a collaboration became a good idea.

It's called deadlines ... and finding the time to do it all.

Both the readers and the publishers were asking for an-

other novel. You see above how busy Bob is, and it is also

hard, often slow work to write humor, and the gentle

situational humor in the Myth Adventures series is one of

the most difficult. This is not to mention the effort it takes

to keep things fresh after having already written a dozen

books in this series over what is now just short of twenty

years. The second writer adds a new perspective, a fresh

look, shared laughter... and a second pair of hands typing

away when time is limited and we cruel publishers demand

at least one new Myth Adventures book a year.

You will find many of Bob's trademark writing styles in

Myth Alliance such as the quotes starting the chapters and

Bob's penchant for rarely using the word "said" (Had you

noticed?). Since this is a collaboration you may find some

differences in the way the familiar characters and dialogue

are presented. That is inevitable in any collaboration, if

subtle. When you speak with either of Bob or Jody about

this book, the parts you really like should be assumed to

have been written by whichever author you are talking to.

Those you don't like most obviously should be assumed to

have been written by the absent one. (Hmm, now that is a

real advantage to collaborating.) Though most likely each

will credit the other with the good ideas.

So here you have it. A collaboration that once more

brings you the adventures of Skeeve the Magnificent and

his companions. This time they are taking on one of the

most frightening forces that can be found in all of the Di-

mensions in a book that will be both comfortably familiar

and a little something new as well.

Enjoy.

—The Editor

ONE

"Not much of an inn, if you ask me."

—H. JOHNSON

I stared at the candle in the brass holder in the middle of

the cluttered table. Light the candle, I thought, concentrat-

ing hard. Light it!

Anyone who might have looked in the window would

have seen a young, blond man from Klah, if they knew

Klah, gazing hard at an unlit candle. Anyone from a few

dozen dimensions might have identified that young man as

The Great Skeeve, Magician to Kings and King of Magi-

cians. None of them would have guessed that in spite of

my reputation, which was that of a wonderworker, diplo-

mat and organizer, as far as magik went, I was still a pretty

rank... apprentice.

Apprentice. I sat upright on my bench to rub my back,

and gazed at nothing in particular. The term caused all

kinds of emotions to well up in me and distract me from

my self-assigned task. The first: regret. I just walked away

from my entire life to date: money, a position as Court Ma-

gician I could have held on to infinitely just on my reputa-

tion, a business that was thriving even beyond my ability to

cover all the opportunities that came my way. But the thing

I most regretted leaving was friends. The best and most im-

portant friend I had left behind was the chief reason I had

gone. Aahz, denizen of the dimension Perv, had been my

mentor, guide, partner, teacher and, yes, friend, since the

untimely death of my master, the magician Garkin, who'd

just finished this very lesson when he'd been killed by an

assassin.

The second was fear. I hadn't mastered the candle trick

then, and though I could do it now with ease I hadn't pro-

gressed much farther than that in my studies. I'd come

back to Klahd to start over again with the basics and work

my way up. How long would it take? I had no idea. What

if, after all this time, I turned out to have no real magik tal-

ent? How would I deal with that? What if I couldn't learn

to be the wizard everyone but my partners thought I was?

The third was loneliness, but I suppose that was good, in

a way. I left behind friends who'd been my support through

thick and thin, who'd given me the confidence to take over

situations that I, as an apprentice magician (and would-be

thief) never dreamed I'd be controlling, let alone involved

in. It was time to strip away that protection and find out

who I was. I also needed the solitude to study magik. I

couldn't do it in front of a crowd. I needed to be able to

fail, and learn from those mistakes without anyone correct-

ing them for me. I needed to know my limitations, hard as

that was. I also needed to learn how to deserve the friends I

had. There had been times I could look back on now with

the shame they deserved when I had been an unimaginable

jerk to the people nearest and dearest to me. Being on my

own for a while would be good for me.

I wasn't entirely alone in my self-imposed exile. Here,

in the inn that we had sort of inherited from a madman

named Isstvan and which I now more or less owned, lived

myself and three friends. Gleep was my young green

dragon. Buttercup, a war unicorn I'd acquired from a re-

tired soldier named Quigley, was Gleep's best friend.

Bunny, a drop-dead gorgeous woman, was the niece of my

former sort-of-employer (there are a lot of sort-ofs in my

life), Don Bruce, Fairy Godfather of the Mob. Bunny, for

all her baby-doll looks, had a great brain. She'd been

M.Y.T.H. Inc.'s bookkeeper and accountant, and had come

with me to be my assistant and connection with the rest of

the dimensions.

I turned my attention back to the candle. The spell had

become too easy for me. I'd stopped feeling the connection

between will and power, the connection I'd fought to attain

to master the energies that abounded in earth and sky.

The bell rang. I heard light footsteps on the stone floor,

a pause, then more footsteps coming towards me.

"Can you handle this, Skeeve?" Bunny said, poking her

head into my room. "It's much more up your alley than

mine."

I rose from the table and the unlit candle, and hurried

toward the door. A glance through the peephole revealed a

couple of eager-faced Klahds with luggage. The inn had

been abandoned for years, but I'd cleaned it up enough to

make it habitable. Unfortunately, a rumor had gotten

around that the hostelry was operating again, not what I

had in mind. Normally Bunny would politely send them on

their way, but I understood why she wanted me to do it.

The eager-faced couple on the doorstep were the kind of

tourists who didn't take a subtle hint.

The one magikal talent I had mastered without a doubt

was illusion. Immediately I filled the hall with illusory spi-

der webs and broken beams hanging crookedly over the

gallery. I cast a disguise spell over myself to make me into

an aged hunchback with matted hair crawling with vermin.

I blotted Bunny out completely behind the image of a sar-

cophagus with skeletal hands crossed on the chest under a

skull-like face. Then I opened the door.

"Ye-ees?" I croaked.

"Hello!" the man beamed. "Do you have a room for the

night?" As he glanced over my humped shoulder at the ruin

of the room his face changed. "I mean ... er... do you

know of a nearby hotel where we could spend the night?"

"Come in, come in," I urged them, beckoning with a

gnarled hand. The man backed away. Gleep chose that mo-

ment to stick his head around the door. I changed his

scaled visage from dragon to large and mangy dog. There

was no need to alter his breath, which was bad enough to

send maggots packing. The man and woman stepped back

another pace.

"We'll just be going," the woman said weakly. The two

of them, apologizing hastily, sprang back onto their cart.

The man whipped up their horse, who lurched into a trot. I

waited until they were out of sight, and had a good laugh.

"Thanks, Gleep," I praised my dragon, patting him on

the head. His tongue lolled. I let the disguise drop, restoring

his large, round eyes to their normal baby blue. The tongue

snapped up and slimed me across the face. I gagged. He

romped away a few paces, then thundered back to me, mak-

ing the floor wobble under his weight. He looked hopeful.

"Skeeve ... play?"

"Not now. I'll play with you later," I promised. "I've got

to keep working. Why don't you find Buttercup?"

"Gleep!" He thundered off, his passage shaking dust

down from the rafters.

I turned away from the door. Bunny emerged from the

shadows. The beautiful woman with luxurious red hair had

a figure that made it hard for men to remember to look up

at her face ... which, by the way, was well worth the ef-

fort. She resembled a wood nymph appearing suddenly

from a copse of trees. I let the illusion fade away, to be re-

placed by the ordinary walls and furniture.

"Thanks," she sighed. "I just knew when I saw those

tourists pulling up they weren't going to take no for an an-

swer from me."

"No problem," I assured her. If we'd been back in the

Bazaar at Deva there was not a soul who'd give trouble to

the niece of Don Bruce, the Fairy Godfather, or to a mem-

ber of M.Y.T.H. Inc, for that matter, but Klahds, denizens

of my own dimension, were notoriously unable to appreci-

ate subtleties. It took a good scare to send them off.

I was a Klahd, too, but I knew I'd changed in the years

I'd associated with my friends, especially Aahz. Looking

back, I finally understood what the Pervect meant when he

said, "You can't go home again." In the past I'd been puz-

zled by that, since all I had to do to go home was unlock

the door of the tent in the Bazaar, and there I was. This was

the home I couldn't come back to. I knew I didn't belong

here any longer, but this was the appropriate place to do

what I'd come here to do.

"Lunch in ten minutes," Bunny said, heading back to-

ward the kitchen. I snapped back to reality long enough to

lift my head and sniff the air. Bunny's cooking was much

better than mine. It was an unexpected bonus when I'd

asked her to come back to Klah to be my secretary. I had

had visions of endless meals of squirrel-rat stew, some-

thing I could prepare with my limited culinary skills. Now I

still hunted for most of our meat and cut herbs from the

wild tangle of weeds that surrounded the inn, but she pre-

pared those simple ingredients with a gourmet's hand. She

had numerous unheralded talents, and was always surpris-

ing me with the things she knew or was studying. I had a

sneaking feeling that she'd be a much better magician than

I, though she seemed to have as little interest in the Arts

Magikal as she did in going into her own Family's business.

I sighed, glancing back into my study. The candle still sat

on the table unlit. Drawing the lines of force that ran

through the earth deep under the inn into my body, I

formed a hot spark in my mind and sent it to the wick. The

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

MYTHALLIANCESROBERTASPRINandJODYLYNNNYEIfyoupurchasedthisbookwithoutacover,youshouldbeawarethatthisbookisstolenproperty.Itwasreportedas"unsoldanddestroyed"tothepublisher,andneithertheauthornorthepublisherhasreceivedanypaymentforthis"strippedbook."Thisisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,places,andincid...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert Asprin - Myth 13 - Myth Alliances.pdf

共268页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Asprin - Myth 13 - Myth Alliances

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: