Robert Asprin's Myth-Fits Read online

  Praise for Robert Asprin’s MYTH-ADVENTURES series

  “Stuffed with rowdy fun.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Give yourself the pleasure of working through the series. But not all at once; you’ll wear out your funny bone.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Hysterically funny.”

  —Analog

  “Breezy, pun-filled fantasy in the vein of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series . . . a hilarious bit of froth and frolic.”

  —Library Journal

  “Asprin’s major achievement as a writer—brisk pacing, wit, and a keen satirical eye.”

  —Booklist

  “An excellent, lighthearted fantasy series.”

  —Epic Illustrated

  “Tension getting to you? Take an Asprin! . . . His humor is broad and grows out of the fantasy world or dimensions in which his characters operate.”

  —Fantasy Review

  The MYTH-ADVENTURES Series

  by Robert Asprin

  ANOTHER FINE MYTH

  MYTH CONCEPTIONS

  MYTH DIRECTIONS

  HIT OR MYTH

  MYTH-ING PERSONS

  LITTLE MYTH MARKER

  M.Y.T.H. INC. LINK

  MYTH-NOMERS AND IM-PERVECTIONS

  M.Y.T.H. INC. IN ACTION

  SWEET MYTH-TERY OF LIFE

  MYTH-ION IMPROBABLE

  SOMETHING M.Y.T.H. INC.

  by Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye

  MYTH ALLIANCES

  MYTH-TAKEN IDENTITY

  MYTH-TOLD TALES

  CLASS DIS-MYTHED

  MYTH-GOTTEN GAINS

  MYTH-CHIEF

  MYTH-FORTUNES

  by Jody Lynn Nye

  ROBERT ASPRIN’S MYTH-QUOTED

  ROBERT ASPRIN’S MYTH-FITS

  The DRAGONS WILD Series

  by Robert Asprin

  DRAGONS WILD

  DRAGONS LUCK

  by Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye

  DRAGONS DEAL

  by Jody Lynn Nye

  ROBERT ASPRIN’S DRAGONS RUN

  ALSO BY ROBERT ASPRIN

  The PHULE’S COMPANY Series

  PHULE’S COMPANY

  PHULE’S PARADISE

  with Peter J. Heck

  A PHULE AND HIS MONEY

  PHULE ME TWICE

  NO PHULE LIKE AN OLD PHULE

  PHULE’S ERRAND

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Copyright © 2016 by Bill Fawcett & Associates Inc.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE® is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The “A” design is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 9780698188716

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nye, Jody Lynn, 1957– author.

  Title: Robert Asprin’s myth-fits / Jody Lynn Nye.

  Description: New York, NY : Ace, 2016. | Series: Myth-adventures ; 21

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039367 | ISBN 9780425257029 (softcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3564.Y415 R63 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039367

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Ace trade paperback edition / June 2016

  Cover illustration by Walter Velez.

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Lynn Abbey,

  with affection and respect

  CONTENTS

  PRAISE FOR ROBERT ASPRIN’S MYTH-ADVENTURES SERIES

  TITLES BY ROBERT ASPRIN

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  CHAPTER ONE

  “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”

  —A. EMANUEL

  I looked up at the gentle tap on my door. Guido leaned in, filling most of the doorway. The enormous enforcer looked dismayed and concerned.

  “Hey, boss, got a minute?” He aimed a thumb over his shoulder. “I need you to come and talk wit’ dis broad.”

  “Sure, Guido.”

  Curious, I set my book down and rose to follow him. It wasn’t often that my fellow Klahd and partner in M.Y.T.H., Inc., ever found himself in need of assistance or advice when it came to handling people. I presumed that he needed a “bad cop,” as another of our partners, Aahz, might say, to balance his “good cop” in striking a deal. Grabbing a handful of magik from a force line that ran directly underneath our tent in the Bazaar at Deva, I put on the appearance of Skeeve the Magnificent. It was this austere, gaunt, imposing wizard that entered the office.

  Guido had not, in fact, been inaccurate or disrespectful in referring to our visitor as a “broad.” I had never seen someone who so resembled a wall as she did. Front to back, she wasn’t that much thicker than I was, but from side to side, she was, well, broad. Her posterior took up three chairs. She had no neck to speak of. Her head sat squarely, or, rather, rectangularly on her shoulders. My outstretched arms, and I have long arms, could not have spanned her face. Brick-red skin added to the resemblance of the side of a barn. The perky hat with a small yellow bird in it tilted to one side of her head threw me a little. I recovered my wits
and stalked in to loom over her.

  “Miss Flowers here’s got a problem wit’ our pricing structure,” Guido told me. “I figured you could explain it to her a little.”

  “As you wish,” I intoned in my most sepulchral voice.

  She glared at Guido and waved an angry hand at me.

  “Oh, yeah, you’re gonna try to put me off by bringing in a cute guy! Well, I tell you, it won’t work!”

  I blinked my eyes. They appeared to be set cavernously under arched black brows. Cute guy?

  “What seems to be the difficulty?” I asked. I admit, I was taken aback at having my best disguise referred to as a “cute guy.” How could she think I was cute? I must be slipping. I held myself even more upright and caused my eyes to withdraw more deeply under my brow ridges.

  It was the wrong move to make. Miss Flowers’s expression softened even more. She batted thick pale eyelashes at me, and her very wide mouth pursed itself in a heart shape. I gulped. Instead, I mitigated my demeanor somewhat, making me look less austere. That made her sit back on her three chairs.

  “The difficulty, Mr. Fancy Pants, is that you want like three times the going rate to find out who’s invading our pastures and taking our yakaroos,” she said. “This skinny lout here quoted me a fee of six gold pieces.”

  I nodded slowly and deliberately as I considered. Six for a simple livestock surveillance program, with possible additional expenses if we had to apprehend the thieves ourselves.

  “That is our price for a mission such as you describe it. Our organization is the top-rated institution of its kind.”

  “Top-rated doesn’t always mean the best,” Miss Flowers said. “I got a quote just the other day from another party, and they said they’d do it for two.”

  “Top-rated does mean the best, in our case,” I assured her. “If you wish cut prices rather than effective execution of a task, go to those others.” I shook my head sadly. “Very well. When you require us to correct the errors of this other party, we will allow you to return.”

  Miss Flowers made a fleering noise that sounded like two bricks rubbing together.

  “I’ll come back to this penny-ante establishment when Deva freezes over,” she said. “But you can call me,” she added with a wink.

  She had to ease out the flap of our tent sideways. Straightening her small hat on her large head, she sashayed up the street, knocking Deveels and other denizens of the Bazaar out of her way.

  “She wasn’t really a good fit for us,” I said, shedding my disguise. I resumed, to all intents and purposes, my normal appearance, which was that of a young Klahd: straight yellow hair, tall skinny frame, and large blue eyes that Aahz told me made me look like a deer in the headlights, whatever “headlights” were. My real face might be considered cute. The innocent expressions I could muster with my ordinary features had occasionally kept me from being beaten up by larger boys in the farm community where I had grown up. On the other hand, my features had sometimes caused me to be beaten up, as when a girl in our small school decided she liked me better than her big, hulking boyfriend. By that time I had already decided to leave home.

  But my memories were less important than the reality of the client who had just left.

  “She ain’t the first to mention this other quest-takin’ organization,” Guido said. It was his turn on the desk, receiving visitors and assessing potential clients. In spite of his hulking, even threatening demeanor, he was a decent soul, with a fairly soft heart. He wasn’t as prone to a sob story as I admit I was, and his fib-meter worked a good deal better than mine. He didn’t like M.Y.T.H., Inc., to waste its time on jobs that wouldn’t turn out to be lucrative, but he wouldn’t sign us up with someone whose intentions he doubted. We’d done work like that; still, better the Deveel you know than one you don’t.

  I sighed and poured myself a glass of wine, my one for the day. I offered some to Guido. He held up a massive hand to forestall me.

  “No, t’anks. I just had a cup of coffee. Real good stuff. Got it from Jaynek’s.” I nodded acknowledgment. A Caffiend, a member of the sinuous species whose forms resembled Klahds but with long serpent bodies from the waist down, had set up a shop just down the street from our tent, one of many that had popped up around the Bazaar in recent weeks. “Pretty soon dere’s gonna be one on every corner. We oughta buy into the business before it gets too big. Could make us a mint. I could look into it if you want. Or if Miss Bunny so desired,” he added. Most of the time he remembered that I was no longer running M.Y.T.H., Inc.

  “Bunny could run an analysis and see if it’s worth our while. Hope it doesn’t put the Yellow Crescent Inn out of business,” I said. “Gus counts on those morning coffee drinkers to help keep him in the red.” Or the gray, since Gus was a Gargoyle, and made entirely out of stone.

  “Dere’s room for more than one purveyor of ground beans in dis Bazaar,” Guido said. “Gus’s coffee is good, too. But when I want somethin’ fancy, it’s nice to have Jaynek’s close by.”

  “There’s room in this world for other groups like us, too,” I said. “We don’t need to take on every client. Don’t worry about the ones who are looking for a bargain, Guido. When they need us, they’ll come back. We have resources and experience that I think are unique. We certainly get results.”

  Guido smiled.

  “You don’t gotta convince me, boss. But I hate to t’ink a coupla lousy gold pieces stood between a potential client and a successful outcome.”

  At the sound of the words gold pieces, my dragon’s head popped up. He blinked his large blue eyes.

  “Gleep!” he announced, looking around hopefully. Like most of his kind, he liked to eat gold.

  I leaned over and scrabbled my fingernails among the scales between Gleep’s ears.

  “Sorry, fellow,” I said. “False alarm. We were just talking.”

  “Gleep!”

  He slurped out with his long pink tongue. I tried to avoid it, but he left a wide trail of stinking slime on my face. I wiped it off with the edge of my sleeve. I loved my dragon, and I was glad he loved me, too. I just wished that he had a less smelly way of showing me.

  “Miss Flowers probably doesn’t need our special services to find out where her animals are going,” I said. “I bet they’re just hopping the fence in search of better tundras.”

  “We lost another one?”

  The front flap of the tent opened, and Bunny stepped in. M.Y.T.H., Inc.’s president came from Klah, as Guido and I had, but you would be excused in thinking she came from another dimension where the people were more beautiful and ethereal. Her red hair was cut short around small, delicate ears, her cheeks were rosy apples beneath blue eyes almost as large as my dragon’s, and her rather top-heavy figure attracted the avid interest of males no matter what she was wearing. Not that Bunny was flighty. She had a college degree in accounting and could keep her wits about her under almost any circumstances. That day, though, she looked worried.

  “She wasn’t serious,” I said. “She said our price was too high, but the one she quoted from the other company sounds much too low.”

  “She’s window-shopping,” Aahz said, coming in behind Bunny with a tray of paper cups marked with Jaynek’s name. Aahz was the utter opposite in terms of looks from Bunny. Hailing from the dimension of Perv, his skin was covered with green scales, his ears like bat wings, his teeth four-inch fangs. I raised my eyebrows.

  “But we don’t have any windows,” I pointed out. Nor did most of the sellers, vendors, and hucksters who maintained premises in the Bazaar. Those who wanted their goods displayed had open-air tents.

  “That’s why she left,” Aahz said, his expression surly. I saw it but deliberately did not take the hint. In case such expressions ever became useful, I liked to know what they meant.

  “Couldn’t she see that before she came in?”

  “She’s not looking f
or real windows, kid. It means she’s browsing but not really intending to buy.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Well, she couldn’t be in a lot of trouble, or she’d be serious about hiring us.”

  “That’s true,” Bunny said. We followed her into her office. She sat down at her desk, her spine erect. We settled in the various chairs that had been designed for each of us. Mine was a big upholstered chair with a footrest long enough for my legs. I hoisted my feet onto the cushioned rest and crossed one ankle over the other shin. Aahz set the tray on a table near his chair and helped himself to one of the cups. “Our clientele tend to be on the desperate side.”

  “But we ain’t seein’ a lot of dose lately either,” Guido said. He perched on the edge of his black leather seat.

  Bunny tapped a pencil to her lips.

  “I know. I don’t understand it.”

  “Why are you worried?” I said. “We have lots of money, much more than we know what to do with.”

  “Kid,” Aahz said, with an exasperated look on his face, “you never have too much money.”

  “But we’re not getting a lot of new money,” Bunny said. She looked very concerned.

  “I’ve never heard of money going bad,” I said. “I could always see about exchanging it with some of our neighbors, or trading it at the Even Odds.” The Even Odds was the local casino in which we had a partial ownership.

  “Dat would be money laundering,” Guido said. “. . . Not dat I have a particular objection to the process thereof.”

  “Well, you’d have to launder it,” I pointed out. “Some of those coins have gotten pretty disgusting by the time the Deveels let go of them.”

  “Kid . . . !”

  “And it wouldn’t help,” Bunny said with a sigh that tore at my heart. “In the end we’d have only the same amount we started with.”

  I exchanged looks with Aahz and Guido. I sat down on my chair and scooted it close to her desk.

  “Bunny, what’s wrong?” I asked. “We’ve been doing well. Half of the partners are out on jobs. At least one of the clients is an old friend, and we know he’s good for the money.”

  She nibbled at a fingernail. I noticed that her fingertips were a little ragged. That was unusual. Bunny normally projected the most polished and professional of appearances, in contrast to, say, me. I had had to learn at her knee, and a very attractive knee it was, the importance of sartorial perfection.