You might think that all the natural felixite would be gone by now, since dwarves have been looking for it (among other things) under the earth for as long as mankind has been on the face of it; but you would be wrong; felixite is so lucky that even the earth feels blessed by it and tends to produce more of the stuff from time to time, ecstatically, as it were, but always in small amounts.

"Felixite!" Rognir gave a small, unconvincing laugh. "What makes you think there's any around here?"

"A little mouse told me," Azzie said, making a clever al­lusion to Hermes' former occupation as Mouse god, before he was abolished or transformed along with the rest of the Olym­pians. This was completely lost on Rognir.

"There's no felixite around here," Rognir said. "The place was mined out long ago."

"That hardly explains what you are doing here."

"Me? I was just taking a shortcut," Rognir said. "This place happens to be on the underground great circle route from Baghdad to London."

"If that's the way it is," Azzie said, "you won't mind if I look around?"

"Why should I mind? Dirt's free for everybody."

"Well put," Azzie said, and started nosing around. His keen fox's nose soon picked up the faintest strand of a smell that once, not long ago, might have been associated with some­thing else, itself associated, perhaps only fleetingly, with felixite. (Demons have great powers of smell in order to render their time of service in the Pit all the more onerous.)

Sniffing like a fox, Azzie followed this elusive scent around the cavern and directly to the lemur-skin bag that rested at Rognir's feet.

"You don't mind if I take a look in this, do you?" Azzie asked.

Rognir minded very much, but since dwarves are no match for demons in equal contest, he decided to let discretion reign and to hell with valor.