"Oh, I say!" he muttered shyly. "Me mean, Crunch glad see you!"

I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that Bee and the Pervects had followed me into the room. Chumley, like most Trolls from the dimension of Trollia, tended to conceal his intelligence, lest the whole package overwhelm denizens of more insecure dimensions. He supplied hired muscle on a freelance basis under the nom de guerre of Big Crunch. Crunch, unlike Chumley, who was extremely well educated and possessed an erudite manner of speaking, expressed himself mainly in monosyllables. Around strangers, he maintained the subterfuge.

"Let me introduce you to my new apprentices," I said. "From left to right, that's Jinetta, Pologne, Freezia, and Bee."

Bunny looked startled for a moment then smiled. "See, Chumley, there's no problem. I told you."

"Good!" Chumley exclaimed, clapping his big hands together heartily. "See? Tolk!"

From the inglenook at the side of the big fireplace, an irregular brown-and-white shape unwound itself and trotted to Chumley's side. It rose to its hind feet and regarded me with large, chocolate-colored eyes. Tolk looked rather like a big hound with a slightly flattened face, jowls hanging down on either side of big black nose and long mouth. His paws had thick black nails, but fingers instead of pads. Chumley pointed at me.

"New teacher!" he boomed.

"Now, wait a minute, Chumley," I said.

He regarded me with a question in his big moonlike eyes. "Four, why not five?"

I didn't have a good answer for him. Tolk didn't wait for my approval. He trotted over to the Pervects and panted happily at them.

"I'm Tolk!" he yipped. "I'm from Canida! Nice to meet you, eh!"

"Jinetta," the tallest Pervect said, fending off a slurp from the newcomer's long pink tongue. "Give paw?"

"Hey, I'm better trained than that," Tolk barked. He grinned, showing teeth halfway as sharp as the Pervects', and shook hands all around. "Where you folks from?"

"Chumley?" I asked, as the five young people introduced themselves. "Who is he, and what's he doing here?"

"Sorry to descend on you without notice, old chap," Chumley murmured abashedly, keeping his voice down. "No time to explain, what? Tolk was in just such a hurry to find some decent training. I thought of you."

"Why? You have a lot more experience than I do." Trolls and their sister Trollops tended to have a lot of magikal talent, much more than Klahds possessed overall.

"Well, I don't practice much, as you know, preferring to depend upon sheer muscle. I consider it more reliable, what? I tend to leave the hocus-pocus to Little Sister. I wanted Tolk taught by someone who is in the field, so to speak."

I eyed him. "Then why didn't you go to Tananda? She's most definitely in the field, more than I am, lately. In fact, she might even be a better instructor for the Pervects."

"I wouldn't say this to anyone but a very close friend," Chumley confided, with a glance over my shoulder at the group, "but Tananda isn't much of a teacher. She is not at all interested in taking on a pupil. I might add that she is engaged upon a job, and does not want to confuse Tolk with moral issues."

"I see," I said. I did. Tananda, besides being a pretty good magician and a very dear friend, was also occasionally an assassin for hire. It was a facet of her talents I didn't want to know more about, and she had never forced me to examine the matter more closely.

Chumley continued, "I must add, Tananda feels that you are a better all around magician than she is, with the potential for greatness."

That was going too far. I scoffed. "She never said that."

Chumley favored me with an earnest expression. "I assure you, she did. I also feel that it is true. Tolk could not be in better hands."

"Forget it," I said, feeling foolish. "Find another tutor for him."

The big purple head wagged slowly from side to side. "I'm afraid I am committed. Tolk has invoked a debt I owe his family. I need to forward his education, and swiftly. He has a good deal of untrained talent, and it would be worthwhile to guide him forward."

I shook my head. "You can do it, Chumley. I can't. No."

Chumley fixed his big, irregular eyes full of hope on me. "Skeeve, have I ever asked anything of you before?"

The question stopped me cold. I gave it my best shot, searching back through my memory. Chumley had always been there for me and the rest of the M.Y.T.H., Inc. crew, but had never put us to the test on his own behalf.

"No, you haven't," I said. "Not a thing that I can recall. On balance, we owe you. I owe you plenty."

"Well, I wouldn't put it that way," Chumley said modestly. "I know I'm imposing, and I would be terribly grateful to have the matter taken care of. It's temporary, old chap. Five or six weeks, what?"

"All right," I sighed, hearing an echo in my head of my capitulation to Massha. "He's in."

Chumley slapped me on the back. The blow nearly flattened me. "Thank you, old shirt."

"Would you consider an application from someone to whom you don't owe a favor?"

The familiar high-pitched voice behind me practically shot me into the air. I think I turned all the way around before I landed.

"Markie!" I exclaimed.

It was. My one-time ward and would-be character assassin stood a couple of paces away. She still looked as cute and helpless as ever, with her adorable big blue eyes, her mop of golden hair, her tiny frame, all concealing a mind that could strike like a cobra's.

"Get out of here!" Bunny stormed. My assistant pointed to the door with a magenta fingernail. I recalled that she had borne the brunt of a good deal of Markie's Macchiavellian machinations. Markie didn't, as she once would have, let her pink rosebud of a lower lip tremble fetchingly. Instead, the genuine pathos on her face surprised me.

"Please hear me out."

"Wait a minute, Bunny," I said. "What are you doing here, Markie?"

"As I said, Skeeve," she said ruefully, "I've come to ask a favor."

"Forget it. Skeeve doesn't do favors for people like you," Bunny said, her eyes flashing. "He did you the only favor you deserve in not blowing your cover."

The Pervects, Bee and Tolk stared at the tiny child before them, but I wasn't about to enlighten them as to Markie's actions and subsequent unmasking.

"I thought you'd feel that way," Markie said, nodding in resignation. "I'm so sorry about my behavior when we last met, but it was a job I'd been hired for. You don't like what I do, but it's my profession, like being a Mob moll."

Bunny's face turned purple, and she started toward Markie with her nails out. I leaped to grab Bunny around the upper arms and hold her back.

"That was a low blow, Markie," I said.

Markie looked genuinely distressed. "I didn't mean it as one, Skeeve. I apologize again, Bunny. It's just a statement of fact, isn't it?"

"Not any more." I thought it best to intervene before Bunny took matters into her own claws—I mean, hands. Any moment my assistant could break loose from my grip. She worked out daily with weights, and was probably stronger than I was. "This is about you, not her. Why have you come?"

"It's not for me," Markie said, beckoning over her shoulder. "Come in here, Melvine."

A boy wandered into the room and favored us with a four-toothed grin.

"This big lug is my nephew, Melvine." Markie shoved him forward. He stood about one and a half times her size, but with his soft features, round tummy and nearly hairless head he looked like a big baby. For the first time I could really tell that Markie had to be much older than the five or six Klahdish years she looked. "You can see what he did to himself, and now he can't undo it. No Cupy ought to be that big. Even I am above average height for a doll in our dimension."