::Ankh-Morpork::
Disclaimers: See Part 1.
*****
::Ankh-Morpork::
It was dark in the abandoned building. Not pitch-black, mind, but the sort of deceptive half-light that leads you to believe that you can see better than you can, at least until you bark your shin against a piece of furniture or fall down a flight of stairs. Holmes was, of course, perfectly comfortable in dim light, so once he had gotten to his feet, brushed himself off, and sneezed a few dozen times, he was able to navigate his way to a flight of stairs and make his way down towards the ground floor.
He found the man, after some searching, curled up in the crawlspace beneath the stairs. He had apparently taken some precautions when settling in, because the hand that Holmes could discern was gloved, while the other one was tucked underneath the man's arm. Holmes coughed, and the man jerked awake as though he'd been poked with a spear. The man backpedaled away from Holmes, trying to work his way further into the shadows, and as he did his bare hand came down on the floorboards. Before Holmes' eyes, a wave of sparks rolled over two of the uneven planks, leaving behind planks of gold, textured in every other way like warped floorboards.
"You, sir, appear to be in a bit of trouble," Holmes observed, "I am here to help you."
"Who are you?" the man asked, betraying a heavy accent that Holmes thought was French but was actually Genuan (a).
"My name is Sherlock Holmes." He held out the gold glove. "I believe you lost this somewhere in the vicinity of Gleam Street."
The man with the golden touch snatched the glove away and pulled it on. As his arm and sleeve emerged from the deep shadows, Holmes saw that the man's shirt had transmuted into the same sort of gold cloth that the gloves were made of.
"I suppose you want me to change something into gold for you," the man said sullenly, "Everyone does. I'm about sick of it and sick of gold in general. If I never see another flake of gold in my lifetime, I'll be perfectly happy."
"To judge by the local economy, you could be perfectly happy living here, sir. I would, however, like to know the circumstances leading to your unusual talent, to satisfy my own curiosity. But first, what is your name?"
"My name is Delacroix. Clarence Delacroix."
"Clarence?"
"Ma mere was from Ankh-Morpork. It was her uncle's name."
"I see. Pray contin—"
There was a shout from outside. It was Ponder.
"Mr Holmes! We've got dwarves coming!"
Holmes looked up sharply, then back at Delacroix.
"They must have followed us. Do you know of any other way out of here?" the detective asked urgently.
Ponder went to pick up Gaspode, but the terrier was already gone; he'd weighed the benefit of a steak dinner versus the risk of getting trampled by dwarves and decided that he could get his steak later. Ponder sighed and dove into an alley, just as a dozen dwarves, led by Cheery, zeroed in on the abandoned building already containing Holmes and the man with the magical signature. He hoped Holmes had heard his warning in time as the dwarves proceeded, with the destructive efficiency of a species born and raised to extract precious metals from difficult places, to hack the front door apart.
It was not long before the door collapsed outward with a floury POUF under the weight of the barricade: two hundred pounds' worth of sacks of flour, transmuted into golden sacks containing a quarter ton of gold dust. The sacks burst as they hit the cobbles and the dwarves, causing a rather pretty fog in that area, as well as massive confusion when bystanders noticed and tried to spread the wealth amongst themselves. Dwarves, however, will defend a new vein of gold like wolverines, the fact notwithstanding that it was not a vein but a cloud and therefore much harder to defend.
In the confusion Holmes, shielding his eyes with one hand and dragging Clarence after him with the other, darted and wove his way through the battle on the doorstep. The two escapees slipped and skidded in the gold dust, making progress tricky. They had almost left the fray when a dwarf's random swing with a mace caught Holmes a glancing blow to the ribs. The detective staggered, catching himself with one hand against the wall.
"Are you all right? We have to go!" Clarence urged.
"I'm fine," Holmes replied, "I don't have time to be injured right now. Come." He grabbed Clarence's sleeve and dragged him onward.
"Hey! You there!" someone shouted in the battle.
"They're getting away!" someone else, undoubtedly a dwarf, shouted.
"Get em!"
"All right, Mr Wizard, let's see you get us out of here!" Holmes snapped rhetorically, moments before Ponder dragged him and Clarence into the alley, and cast a hurried teleportation spell. There was a soft *bamf*.
By the time anyone else managed to get into the alley, their targets were already gone. The gold-tinged footprints that Holmes and Clarence had left behind simply ended.
*
(a) To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to, really.
*****
::Still Ankh-Morpork::
"Why on earth didn't you do that in the first place?!" The question, snarled by Holmes, heralded the arrival of all three men at Pseudopolis yard. "It certainly would have saved me having to get levitated up for a fourth-floor window!"
"I'd never been in that building before," Ponder retorted, "and it's dangerous teleporting into unknown environments. I suppose you wouldn't be any happier if you'd arrived stick halfway through a wall."
"Never mind," Holmes sighed, the motion causing him to grunt and clasp his side where the dwarf mace had glanced off him.
Presently Vimes entered the room and looked at Holmes like he really wanted to find a reason to berate the detective for lack of results. Holmes silently pointed at Clarence Delacroix with the hand that wasn't clasping his side. Vimes turned to the Genuan, who waved feebly.
"Are you sure he's the one?" Vimes asked, "He doesn't look like much."
"If you like I can have Mr Delacroix touch you with his bare hand," Holmes replied coolly, "Though if I recall I'm supposed to be the sceptic around here."
"This man, he rescued me from some dwarves," Delacroix said in Holmes' defence, "I think he was injured as we were running away."
"I told you, I'm fine!" Holmes growled.
"You have time to be injured now, n'est-ce pas? In the meantime I know you must want to know how I came to be this way."
"Your situation is rather unique," Holmes conceded readily, "Commander, if you would fetch me a doctor or whatever equivalent you might have in Ankh-Morpork?"
Vimes frowned at Holmes' continued cultural snobbery. "I'll get you our Watch surgeon," he responded, "He probably can't fix what's *been* wrong with you the whole time you've been here, but he can deal with any injuries." Vimes walked out before Holmes had a chance to give him a dark look.
"I get the distinct feeling he doesn't like me," Holmes observed dryly, "In any case, M. Delacroix, I am very eager to hear your story." He pulled up a chair and sat down gingerly.
"I was born in Genua to a poor family. My father was a fisherman, which allowed us to take care of our needs, but we never had very much. So, when I became a man and took a wife, I resolved that I would find a way for my own family to live comfortably as I had not. Now, my father had taught me as a lad how to play Cripple Mr Onion, and I soon became proficient at cards. Naturellement, I thought it would make the perfect profession – playing cards with others for money and living well on my winnings. I found, however, that my skills at Mr Onion that were so high against my father were in fact rather poor against other players, and I frequently lost more than I won. Granted, I was becoming better at it, but I owed money to many powerful people in Genua, and I could not afford to lose very much more. At that point I resolved that I would play one more game and then I would quit and become a fisherman like my father.
"It was my misfortune that I found the opponent I did for my final game. He was sitting alone in one of the gambling-houses, shuffling a deck of cards. He wore a cloak with a hood, drawn up so that his face was in shadow, and when I entered the gambling-house he beckoned to me with a finger tipped with what I hesitate to call a fingernail, so long and hooked it was. I was uneasy but I obeyed his summons and sat down across from him.
"'I hear you like to play Cripple Mr Onion,' he said to me, only in fluent Genuan. I told him that this was so, except that I was only going to play one more game and then quit. He said that was good, for it gave me the chance to play the best hand I ever had. He dealt the cards, and I remarked that we hadn't established a wager yet. He told me that if I won he would give me anything I wished. Now, I only had a few coins in my pocket at the time, and I lamented to him that I had nothing of like value to offer in exchange. He said I did – I had something that he collected as a hobby. Of course I asked him what it was.
"'Your soul,' he responded, and I just such a chill down my spine as I can't describe to you, because it was then that I saw his eyes for the first time – and he had the most awful, dead, predatory eyes, like if a crocodile wore the skin of a man. I knew then that I was in great danger, because if I lost, or if I tried to refuse at this point, I would concede the game and he would get my soul. Monsieur Holmes, I was playing the game of my life against an Efreeti!"
"An Efreeti?" Holmes asked, as blandly as he could manage.
Clarence nodded. "A devil. I'd heard stories out of Klatch that they sometimes grant wishes, but that's only if they're bound to servitude, and even then it's a dangerous game to gamble against demons."
Holmes waved for Clarence to continue.
"Well, I don't need to tell you how afraid I was for my life at that point, but I played the best round of cards I'd ever played in my life, like you always run faster when you're running for your life. Anyway, I think that both of us were surprised when I got a nine-card Onion, and here he had only a triple Onion, and I knew in the pit of my stomach that he wanted to tear me apart, but we'd made an agreement, so he asked me what my wish was, even as he was baring his fangs at me.
"I was trembling badly, but I managed to explain that my family had always been poor, and I only wished to have plenty of money at hand to take care of our needs. He grinned then, and I knew at that moment that I was damned.
"'Your wish is my command,' he said, and he bowed and vanished. I looked around, and nobody had even noticed what had happened, and the deck of cards we'd used was just sitting there, all squared up like nobody'd used it all day. I went to stand up, and in so doing I touched the table with my bare hands, and right before my eyes it turned from wood to gold. That was all well and good, but I'm not a dull man, and after a bit of experimenting I realised that if everything my hands touched turned to gold, I would never be able to touch my wife or my children again. Anyone I touched would turn into a gold statue, and if anyone found out I had this power I would never be a free man again.
"I decided in the end that I should just disappear from Genua, and let people assume what they would. It was well-known that I was in trouble with loan sharks, and I expect everyone thinks I'm at the bottom of the swamp with rocks tied to my feet."
"And so your wanderings took you to Ankh-Morpork," Holmes observed, where you were the victim of an attempted mugging
Clarence nodded. "I found out that only my hands were affected, so I started wearing gloves to prevent any accidents. I didn't mean to touch that man in the alley… it just happened."
Holmes nodded and turned to Ponder. "What do you think? Can this man be cured by any magic you know of?"
"Well, if he was cursed by a demon, it may take a priest to cure him. Maybe the temple of Om or Small Gods or something."
"Fine," Holmes replied, "I'll leave it up to you to make the necessary arran—"
"Did someone call for a medic?" a voice at the door interrupted. Holmes, Ponder, and Clarence all turned to regard the newcomer, and Holmes couldn't conceal his shock at the man's state.
"What on earth happened to you?" he asked, forgetting tact in the midst of his surprise.
"I died," Cpl Shoe replied, "What the hell happened to *you*?"
Holmes glanced uneasily at Ponder, who shrugged.
*****
End of Part 21.
Disclaimers: See Part 1.
*****
::Ankh-Morpork::
It was dark in the abandoned building. Not pitch-black, mind, but the sort of deceptive half-light that leads you to believe that you can see better than you can, at least until you bark your shin against a piece of furniture or fall down a flight of stairs. Holmes was, of course, perfectly comfortable in dim light, so once he had gotten to his feet, brushed himself off, and sneezed a few dozen times, he was able to navigate his way to a flight of stairs and make his way down towards the ground floor.
He found the man, after some searching, curled up in the crawlspace beneath the stairs. He had apparently taken some precautions when settling in, because the hand that Holmes could discern was gloved, while the other one was tucked underneath the man's arm. Holmes coughed, and the man jerked awake as though he'd been poked with a spear. The man backpedaled away from Holmes, trying to work his way further into the shadows, and as he did his bare hand came down on the floorboards. Before Holmes' eyes, a wave of sparks rolled over two of the uneven planks, leaving behind planks of gold, textured in every other way like warped floorboards.
"You, sir, appear to be in a bit of trouble," Holmes observed, "I am here to help you."
"Who are you?" the man asked, betraying a heavy accent that Holmes thought was French but was actually Genuan (a).
"My name is Sherlock Holmes." He held out the gold glove. "I believe you lost this somewhere in the vicinity of Gleam Street."
The man with the golden touch snatched the glove away and pulled it on. As his arm and sleeve emerged from the deep shadows, Holmes saw that the man's shirt had transmuted into the same sort of gold cloth that the gloves were made of.
"I suppose you want me to change something into gold for you," the man said sullenly, "Everyone does. I'm about sick of it and sick of gold in general. If I never see another flake of gold in my lifetime, I'll be perfectly happy."
"To judge by the local economy, you could be perfectly happy living here, sir. I would, however, like to know the circumstances leading to your unusual talent, to satisfy my own curiosity. But first, what is your name?"
"My name is Delacroix. Clarence Delacroix."
"Clarence?"
"Ma mere was from Ankh-Morpork. It was her uncle's name."
"I see. Pray contin—"
There was a shout from outside. It was Ponder.
"Mr Holmes! We've got dwarves coming!"
Holmes looked up sharply, then back at Delacroix.
"They must have followed us. Do you know of any other way out of here?" the detective asked urgently.
Ponder went to pick up Gaspode, but the terrier was already gone; he'd weighed the benefit of a steak dinner versus the risk of getting trampled by dwarves and decided that he could get his steak later. Ponder sighed and dove into an alley, just as a dozen dwarves, led by Cheery, zeroed in on the abandoned building already containing Holmes and the man with the magical signature. He hoped Holmes had heard his warning in time as the dwarves proceeded, with the destructive efficiency of a species born and raised to extract precious metals from difficult places, to hack the front door apart.
It was not long before the door collapsed outward with a floury POUF under the weight of the barricade: two hundred pounds' worth of sacks of flour, transmuted into golden sacks containing a quarter ton of gold dust. The sacks burst as they hit the cobbles and the dwarves, causing a rather pretty fog in that area, as well as massive confusion when bystanders noticed and tried to spread the wealth amongst themselves. Dwarves, however, will defend a new vein of gold like wolverines, the fact notwithstanding that it was not a vein but a cloud and therefore much harder to defend.
In the confusion Holmes, shielding his eyes with one hand and dragging Clarence after him with the other, darted and wove his way through the battle on the doorstep. The two escapees slipped and skidded in the gold dust, making progress tricky. They had almost left the fray when a dwarf's random swing with a mace caught Holmes a glancing blow to the ribs. The detective staggered, catching himself with one hand against the wall.
"Are you all right? We have to go!" Clarence urged.
"I'm fine," Holmes replied, "I don't have time to be injured right now. Come." He grabbed Clarence's sleeve and dragged him onward.
"Hey! You there!" someone shouted in the battle.
"They're getting away!" someone else, undoubtedly a dwarf, shouted.
"Get em!"
"All right, Mr Wizard, let's see you get us out of here!" Holmes snapped rhetorically, moments before Ponder dragged him and Clarence into the alley, and cast a hurried teleportation spell. There was a soft *bamf*.
By the time anyone else managed to get into the alley, their targets were already gone. The gold-tinged footprints that Holmes and Clarence had left behind simply ended.
*
(a) To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to, really.
*****
::Still Ankh-Morpork::
"Why on earth didn't you do that in the first place?!" The question, snarled by Holmes, heralded the arrival of all three men at Pseudopolis yard. "It certainly would have saved me having to get levitated up for a fourth-floor window!"
"I'd never been in that building before," Ponder retorted, "and it's dangerous teleporting into unknown environments. I suppose you wouldn't be any happier if you'd arrived stick halfway through a wall."
"Never mind," Holmes sighed, the motion causing him to grunt and clasp his side where the dwarf mace had glanced off him.
Presently Vimes entered the room and looked at Holmes like he really wanted to find a reason to berate the detective for lack of results. Holmes silently pointed at Clarence Delacroix with the hand that wasn't clasping his side. Vimes turned to the Genuan, who waved feebly.
"Are you sure he's the one?" Vimes asked, "He doesn't look like much."
"If you like I can have Mr Delacroix touch you with his bare hand," Holmes replied coolly, "Though if I recall I'm supposed to be the sceptic around here."
"This man, he rescued me from some dwarves," Delacroix said in Holmes' defence, "I think he was injured as we were running away."
"I told you, I'm fine!" Holmes growled.
"You have time to be injured now, n'est-ce pas? In the meantime I know you must want to know how I came to be this way."
"Your situation is rather unique," Holmes conceded readily, "Commander, if you would fetch me a doctor or whatever equivalent you might have in Ankh-Morpork?"
Vimes frowned at Holmes' continued cultural snobbery. "I'll get you our Watch surgeon," he responded, "He probably can't fix what's *been* wrong with you the whole time you've been here, but he can deal with any injuries." Vimes walked out before Holmes had a chance to give him a dark look.
"I get the distinct feeling he doesn't like me," Holmes observed dryly, "In any case, M. Delacroix, I am very eager to hear your story." He pulled up a chair and sat down gingerly.
"I was born in Genua to a poor family. My father was a fisherman, which allowed us to take care of our needs, but we never had very much. So, when I became a man and took a wife, I resolved that I would find a way for my own family to live comfortably as I had not. Now, my father had taught me as a lad how to play Cripple Mr Onion, and I soon became proficient at cards. Naturellement, I thought it would make the perfect profession – playing cards with others for money and living well on my winnings. I found, however, that my skills at Mr Onion that were so high against my father were in fact rather poor against other players, and I frequently lost more than I won. Granted, I was becoming better at it, but I owed money to many powerful people in Genua, and I could not afford to lose very much more. At that point I resolved that I would play one more game and then I would quit and become a fisherman like my father.
"It was my misfortune that I found the opponent I did for my final game. He was sitting alone in one of the gambling-houses, shuffling a deck of cards. He wore a cloak with a hood, drawn up so that his face was in shadow, and when I entered the gambling-house he beckoned to me with a finger tipped with what I hesitate to call a fingernail, so long and hooked it was. I was uneasy but I obeyed his summons and sat down across from him.
"'I hear you like to play Cripple Mr Onion,' he said to me, only in fluent Genuan. I told him that this was so, except that I was only going to play one more game and then quit. He said that was good, for it gave me the chance to play the best hand I ever had. He dealt the cards, and I remarked that we hadn't established a wager yet. He told me that if I won he would give me anything I wished. Now, I only had a few coins in my pocket at the time, and I lamented to him that I had nothing of like value to offer in exchange. He said I did – I had something that he collected as a hobby. Of course I asked him what it was.
"'Your soul,' he responded, and I just such a chill down my spine as I can't describe to you, because it was then that I saw his eyes for the first time – and he had the most awful, dead, predatory eyes, like if a crocodile wore the skin of a man. I knew then that I was in great danger, because if I lost, or if I tried to refuse at this point, I would concede the game and he would get my soul. Monsieur Holmes, I was playing the game of my life against an Efreeti!"
"An Efreeti?" Holmes asked, as blandly as he could manage.
Clarence nodded. "A devil. I'd heard stories out of Klatch that they sometimes grant wishes, but that's only if they're bound to servitude, and even then it's a dangerous game to gamble against demons."
Holmes waved for Clarence to continue.
"Well, I don't need to tell you how afraid I was for my life at that point, but I played the best round of cards I'd ever played in my life, like you always run faster when you're running for your life. Anyway, I think that both of us were surprised when I got a nine-card Onion, and here he had only a triple Onion, and I knew in the pit of my stomach that he wanted to tear me apart, but we'd made an agreement, so he asked me what my wish was, even as he was baring his fangs at me.
"I was trembling badly, but I managed to explain that my family had always been poor, and I only wished to have plenty of money at hand to take care of our needs. He grinned then, and I knew at that moment that I was damned.
"'Your wish is my command,' he said, and he bowed and vanished. I looked around, and nobody had even noticed what had happened, and the deck of cards we'd used was just sitting there, all squared up like nobody'd used it all day. I went to stand up, and in so doing I touched the table with my bare hands, and right before my eyes it turned from wood to gold. That was all well and good, but I'm not a dull man, and after a bit of experimenting I realised that if everything my hands touched turned to gold, I would never be able to touch my wife or my children again. Anyone I touched would turn into a gold statue, and if anyone found out I had this power I would never be a free man again.
"I decided in the end that I should just disappear from Genua, and let people assume what they would. It was well-known that I was in trouble with loan sharks, and I expect everyone thinks I'm at the bottom of the swamp with rocks tied to my feet."
"And so your wanderings took you to Ankh-Morpork," Holmes observed, where you were the victim of an attempted mugging
Clarence nodded. "I found out that only my hands were affected, so I started wearing gloves to prevent any accidents. I didn't mean to touch that man in the alley… it just happened."
Holmes nodded and turned to Ponder. "What do you think? Can this man be cured by any magic you know of?"
"Well, if he was cursed by a demon, it may take a priest to cure him. Maybe the temple of Om or Small Gods or something."
"Fine," Holmes replied, "I'll leave it up to you to make the necessary arran—"
"Did someone call for a medic?" a voice at the door interrupted. Holmes, Ponder, and Clarence all turned to regard the newcomer, and Holmes couldn't conceal his shock at the man's state.
"What on earth happened to you?" he asked, forgetting tact in the midst of his surprise.
"I died," Cpl Shoe replied, "What the hell happened to *you*?"
Holmes glanced uneasily at Ponder, who shrugged.
*****
End of Part 21.