Guards! Guards!

the walls, portraits of earlier city rulers holding scrolls and things.
    The chairs were still there. The portraits were not. Or, rather, the stained and cracked canvases were piled in a corner, but the gilt frames were gone.
    The councillors tried to avoid one another’s faces, and sat tapping their fingers on their knees.
    Finally a couple of very worried-looking servants opened the doors to the main hall. Lupine Wonse lurched through.
    Most of the councillors had been up all night anyway, trying to formulate some kind of policy vis-à-vis dragons, but Wonse looked as though he hadn’t been to sleep in years. His face was the color of a fermented dishcloth. Never particularly well-padded, he now looked like something out of a pyramid.
    “Ah,” he intoned. “Good. Are you all here? Then perhaps you would step this way, gentlemen.”
    “Er,” said the head thief, “the note mentioned lunch?”
    “Yes?” said Wonse.
    “With a dragon ?”
    “Good grief, you don’t think it would eat you, do you?” said Wonse. “What an idea!”
    “Never crossed me mind,” said the head thief, relief blowing from his ears like steam. “The very idea. Haha.”
    “Haha,” said the chief merchant.
    “Hoho,” said the head assassin. “The very idea.”
    “No, I expect you’re all far too stringy,” said Wonse. “Haha.”
    “Haha.”
    “Ahaha.”
    “Hoho.” The temperature lowered by several degrees.
    “So if you would kindly step this way?”
    The great hall had changed. For one thing, it was a great deal greater. Several walls had been knocked into adjoining rooms, and the ceiling and several storys of upper rooms had been entirely removed. The floor was a mass of rubble except in the middle of the room, which was a heap of gold—
    Well, gold ish . It looked as though someone had scoured the palace for anything that shone or glittered. There were the picture frames, and the gold thread out of the tapestries, and silver, and the occasional gem. There were also tureens from the kitchens, candlesticks, warming pans, fragments of mirror. Sparkly stuff.
    The councillors were not in a position to pay much attention to this, however, because of what was hanging above their heads.
    It looked like the biggest badly-rolled cigar in the universe, if the biggest badly-rolled cigar in the universe was in the habit of hanging upside down. Two talons could be dimly seen gripping the dark rafters.
    Halfway between the glittering heap and the doorway a small table had been laid. The councillors noted without much surprise that the familiar ancient silverware was missing. There were china plates, and cutlery that looked as though it had very recently been whittled from bits of wood. Wonse took a seat at the head of the table and nodded to the servants.
    “Please be seated, gentlemen,” he said. “I am sorry things are a little…different, but the king hopes you will bear with it until matters can be more suitably organized.”
    “The, er,” said the head merchant.
    “The king,” repeated Wonse. His voice sounded one dribble away from madness.
    “Oh. The king. Right,” said the merchant. From where he was sitting he had a good view of the big hanging thing. There seemed to be some movement there, some trembling in the great folds that wrapped it. “Long life to him, say I,” he added quickly.
    The first course was soup with dumplings in it. Wonse didn’t have any. The rest of them ate in a terrified silence broken only by the dull chiming of wood on china.
    “There are certain matters of decree to which the king feels your assent would be welcome,” said Wonse, eventually. “A pure formality, of course, and I am sorry to bother you with such petty detail.”
    The big bundle appeared to sway in the breeze.
    “No trouble at all,” squeaked the head thief.
    “The king graciously desires it to be known,” said Wonse, “that it would be pleased to receive coronation gifts from the population at large. Nothing complex, of course. Simply any precious metals or gems they might have by them and can easily spare. I should stress, by the way, that this is by no means compulsory. Such generosity as he is confident of expecting should be an entirely voluntary act.”
    The chief assassin looked sadly at the rings on his fingers, and sighed. The head merchant was already resignedly unshipping his gilt chain of office from around his neck.
    “Why, gentlemen!” said Wonse. “This is most unexpected!”
    “Um,” said