milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Maybe they don't want High Courts," El says.

He imagines his fingers running a tune.

"Duty," he snaps, "is more important than want. When you're born to a station you cannot forsake it, and Random is one of the Nine Princes of Amber. His father will sort it out, if it needs sorting, he'll have no qualms about another human's blood on his hands. You all die eventually."

"Duty. Yes," El says.

"But that does not mean that he wants it."

"If he wanted it, he'd have been killed by now. He's not good enough to last through the political struggles."

His lips twitch in a slightly mocking smile.

"Youngest of the bunch. Barely nine thousand years old."

El blinks. Wets his lips. "And you are his grandfather."

"I watched your ancesters slip out of their puddle, and stepped on the first scuttling creatures as I walked about your planet in its first days. I watched them form the pathways in their brains, I watched them struggled with and kill each other."

His eyes are shining.

"I held the specks of dust that became your universe in my hand, and released them into the abyss as I walked past, and cherished the peace before the clamour of humanity began."

A shrug. "Gracias."

"Say something interesting."

He sounds petulent.

"I am sorry, Senor," El says.

He's not.

"How perfect."

He stands.

"You'll not get far here, not like this."

"I won't?" El asks. "Por que no?"

"The key here is the people. The most have been about so long that they jump at a new face, spill their stories in hopes of the given and take, to learn any thing they can to break the monotony. The key here is the people, and the power all of them hold at the tips of their fingers, the stories they have to tell, the things they have to offer in exchange for so little."

"Mmmmm." El drums his fingers on the side of his glass. "You offer me nothing for my story," he observes."

"I have a pet lizard?"

He rolls his eyes.

"Incidentally, I paint portraits for money."

El considers. "I have never had a lizard."

"It's here somewhere."

He pats the pockets of his robes down.

El waits patiently.

He eventually cheats- he didn't have a lizard- and pulls one out of shadow.

It's an intriguing shade of fuschia, and has a forked tongue that it flickers out. In all, the creature is as long as a man's thumb.

"His name is Bennett."

"Is it poisonous?" El asks. He doesn't reach for it, yet.

"Only if you eat it."

He strokes the creature's head.

"Toxins in the liver."

El nods, "I am not fond of liver. Too salty."

"Then?"

He sets his hand on the bar, and lets the lizard scuttle along to where El is sitting.

"I kill bad people."

El nods and offers out his hand to the lizard.

"What makes you the person to say who's right?"

The lizard skitters up his hand and starts climbing his arm.

El watches it and then his eyes go back to Dworkin.

"I only kill men who have killed many before. Men of the Cartels."