"So," Raspu said smugly as he stepped outside the door and confronted Gwendylyr. "Have I won the challenge?"
A maid brushed past them, her face terrified, a pile of neatly-folded linen in her arms.
"You have made a good start" Gwendylyr said, "but the challenge lies in being able to keep the staff at work. How will things be in a month, Raspu? In two? Will the house be running efficiently, or will it, its staff, and its butler have slid into irretrievable sloth?"
"A month! I don't have to do this for an entire —"
"I'll give you two," Gwendylyr said. "Have fun."
And she vanished.
Enchantment gripped Raspu and the house into which he'd walked, and the sun and moon whirled overhead.
"Interesting," Qeteb remarked. He and DragonStar now inhabited the same hilltop, although there was more than five paces between their respective positions. "She's not someone I'd care to meet over breakfast."
DragonStar turned his head slightly and looked at Qeteb, but he did not reply.
The two settled down to wait, and to watch.
The sun and moon twirled overhead, moving so fast the shadows fluttered unceasingly across the hilltop.
Raspu found he did not like being a butler. The staff had remained in awe of him for an entire three days, and then subtle changes slowly crept into the daily routine.
The maids who once had wept at the very sight of him, now smirked and moved more insolently when he appeared. They still swept and scrubbed and polished, but their mouths curled in ..secretive smiles as he passed, and their eyelashes dipped in flirtatious fans over the curve of their soft cheeks whenever he paused to shout more orders at them.
Raspu found that his voice noticeably softened whenever they did that, and one day he found himself reaching out to caress the cheek of one particularly fetching lass.
He jerked his hand back, but not before he saw her mouth arrange itself into a seductive pout.
Moist, red, beguiling.
With just the hint of pearly white teeth behind those plump, tempting ...
Raspu jerked away, roared, and vanished down the corridor in stiff-legged (and almost unbearably frustrated) affront.
The maid giggled, and wriggled her hips in anticipation.
In the kitchen the cook pounded and rolled and sweetened and basted to Raspu's satisfaction, but after a week or so he noticed that not all the meat he put out from the now-locked cold room appeared at table. When he accused the cook of stealing, she wept and wailed and wrung her hands and fell down in an epileptic fit.
The Demon repressed a sigh. It was too much effort to continue with the harangue, and only a small bit of meat had gone ...
Raspu turned his back and left her massive mound of flesh to twitch and quiver triumphantly on the rug before the fire.
As soon as the kitchen door slammed behind him, the cook's flesh trembled to stillness. She smiled, and her hand drew out the small joint of meat she'd secreted in the voluminous pocket of her apron, and she began to chew vigorously, setting her flesh to trembling all over again.
But however much the staff managed to annoy him, Raspu found that the household accounts managed to drive him almost insane with exasperation.
Every morning Raspu had to check the shelves and count all the packets and cans and wedges and jars.
Then he had to check them all off in his account book.
Then he had to consult with the cook and the downstairs cleaning maids to see what would be required for that day's cooking and cleaning. Then he had to dole out with solemn precision, from the cans and jars and wedges and packets, the portions of starches and wood oils and fireplace blackeners and flours and sugars and yeasts required.
And then he had to mark all those off in his account book.
Then the upstairs maids needed linens and sheets and pillowcases and dusters, and so Raspu must march to the linen closet and carefully count out the articles required.
And mark it off in his account book.
Then, after only a brief respite — not even long enough for a cup of tea and a sit down — they were back with the dirty linen. Raspu must be out again with his account book to check that the dirty linen numbers and quantities matched the clean numbers and quantities he'd dispatched yesterday, and if they didn't, then everything must be dumped into piles and carefully sorted out under his supervision to find the missing pillowcase, and if the numbers still refused to tally, then Raspu must needs conduct a room by room search of the upstairs corridors, seeking under every bed and in every dirty clothes hamper for the pillowcase.
And when he'd wasted four hours in that fruitless search, and was nigh tearing out his hair in almost unbearable frustration (and determined to tear the offending pillowcase to shreds, together with the maid who'd lost it, when it was finally found), Raspu sat down to a late and very cold lunch with his account book only to find that he'd miscounted the number of pillowcases on yesterday's tally, and that in fact this morning's count had been correct. He'd wasted an entire morning — and let his lunch grow cool and congealed — over a simple error that if he'd not bothered with the cursed accounting and tallying in the first instance would not have bothered him!
Raspu threw the account book across the room, his plate of disgustingly congealed lunch close after it, and the cook lowered her head and grinned into the pots atop the stove, and the footmen by the door raised their eyes to the ceiling and smirked inwardly.
Things were going well.
The challenge was falling into place.
The days spun by.
"Who is that little girl you sent off with the red-headed birdman?" Qeteb asked conversationally. He could sense Raspu's dilemma, and it made him rabid with fury.
But not incensed enough to lose his vision of overall destiny.
Nothing he said could have dismayed DragonStar more.
"What little girl?" he said. Behind him the Alaunt shifted, and one or two growled softly.
