“If they do, I won’t allow it,” Klarnood replied. “You deliberately provoked Honorable Marnark, but the offenses of provoking him at Honorable Sirzob’s table, and of throwing Honorable Yirzol’s soup at him, were not given with intent to provoke. These gentlemen have a right to challenge, but not to consider themselves provoked.” “Well, I choose knives, then,” Marnark hastened to say. Verkan Vall smiled thinly. He had learned knife-play among the greatest masters of that art in all paratime, the Third Level Khanga pirates of the Caribbean Islands. “And we fight barefoot, stripped to the waist, and without any parrying weapon in the left hand,” Verkan Vall stipulated. The beefy Marnark fairly licked his chops in anticipation. He outweighed Verkan Vall by forty pounds; he saw an easy victory ahead. Verkan Vall’s own confidence increased at these signs of his opponent’s assurance. “And as for Honorable Sirzob and Honorable Yirzol, I chose pistols,” he added. Sirzob and Yirzol held a hasty whispered conference. “Speaking both for Honorable Yirzol and for myself,” Sirzob announced, “we stipulate that the distance shall be twenty meters, that the pistols shall be fully loaded, and that fire shall be at will after the command.” “Twenty rounds, fire at will, at twenty meters!” Olirzon hooted. “You must think our principal’s as bad a shot as you are!” The four Assassins stepped aside and held a long discussion about something, with considerable argument and gesticulation. Klarnood, observing Verkan Vall’s impatience, leaned close to him and whispered: “This is highly irregular; we must pretend ignorance and be patient. They’re laying bets on the outcome. You must do your best, Lord Virzal; you don’t want your supporters to lose money.” He said it quite seriously, as though the outcome were otherwise a matter of indifference to Verkan Vall. Marnark wanted to discuss time and place, and proposed that all three duels be fought at dawn, on the fourth landing stage of Darsh Central Hospital; that was closest to the maternity wards, and statistics showed that most births occurred just before that hour. “Certainly not,” Verkan Vall vetoed. “We’ll fight here and now; I don’t propose going a couple of hundred miles to meet you at any such unholy hour. We’ll fight in the nearest hallway that provides twenty meters’ shooting distance.” Marnark, Sirzob and Yirzol all clamored in protest. Verkan Vall shouted them down, drawing on his hypnotically acquired knowledge of Akor-Neb duelling customs. “The code explicitly states that satisfaction shall be rendered as promptly as possible, and I insist on a literal interpretation. I’m not going to inconvenience myself and Assassin-President Klarnood and these four Gentlemen-Assassins just to humor Statisticalist superstitions.”