Cugel shook his head in sad abnegation. "One taste of this elixir and I never again could tolerate ordinary drink." He dipped a biscuit into the wine and tendered it to Ettis, who again had paused to gnaw at his leg. "Ettis of course has a wider discrimination than I."

Iucounu jumped to his feet with a protest, but Ettis had already gulped down the morsel, thereupon to perform a curious contortion and fall down on its back, with feet raised stiffly into the air.

Cugel looked questioningly at Iucounu. "You have trained Ettis well in the 'dead dog' trick. He is a clever beast."

Iucounu slowly subsided into his chair. Two sylphs entered the chamber and carried Ettis away on a silver tray.

Iucounu spoke through tight lips. "Let us get down to business. While strolling Shanglestone Strand, did you meet a certain Twango?"

"I did indeed," said Cugel. "An extraordinary individual! He became perturbed when I would not sell him my little trinket."

Iucounu fixed Cugel with the keenest of scrutinies. "Did he explain why?"

"He spoke of the demiurge Sadlark, but in such an incoherent fashion that I lost interest."

Iucounu rose to his feet. "I will show you Sadlark. Come! To the work-room, which of course is dear to your memory."

"'Work-room'? These episodes are lost in the past."

"I remember them distinctly," said Iucounu in an easy voice. "All of them."

As they walked toward the work-room, Cugel tried to sidle close to Iucounu, but without success; Iucounu seemed always a yard or so beyond the reach of Cugel's gloved hand, in which he held 'Spatterlight' at the ready.

They entered the work-room. "Now you shall see my collection," said Iucounu. "You will wonder no longer as to my interest in your talisman." He jerked up his hand; a dark red cloth was whisked away, to reveal the scales of Sadlark, arranged upon an armature of fine silver wire. From the evidence of the restoration, Sadlark would have been a creature of moderate size, standing on two squat motilators, with two pairs of jointed arms ending each in ten clasping fingers. The head, if the term were at all appropriate, was no more than a turret surmounting the keen and taut torso. The belly scales were white-green, with a dark green keel tinged with vermilion swinging up to end at the frontal turret in a blank and eyecatching vacancy.

Iucounu made a grand gesture. "There you see Sadlark, the noble over-world being, whose every contour suggests power and velocity. His semblance fires the imagination. Cugel, do you agree?"

"Not altogether," said Cugel. "Still, by and large, you have recreated a remarkably fine specimen, and I congratulate you." He walked around the structure as if in admiration, all the while hoping to come within arm's-length of Iucounu, but as Cugel moved, so did the Laughing Magician, and Cugel was thwarted in his intent.

"Sadlark is more than a mere specimen," said Iucounu in a voice almost devout. "Now notice the scales, each fixed in its proper place, except at the thrust of the keel where a staring vacancy assaults the eye. A single scale is missing, the most important of all: the protonastic centrum, or, as it is called, the 'Pectoral Sky-break Spatterlight'. For long years I thought it lost, to my unutterable anguish. Cugel, can you imagine my surge of gladsomeness, the singing of songs in my heart, the crepitations of pure joy along the appropriate passages, when I looked at you, and discovered there in your cap the missing scale? I rejoiced as if the sun had been conceded another hundred years of life! I could have leapt in the air from sheer exhilaration. Cugel, can you understand my emotion?"