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Script Master:
Back in the ruins, no one dared touch the dead man’s hand, yet it vanished. Dull people say it was eaten by crows.
Lively people say the Innkeeper’s Widow chopped off the extremity and pickled it and by wicked magic made it into what Alchymists call the Baneful Hand, a sentient tool for finding gold, invoking invisibility, and perhaps warding off mortality.
Why not believe such storytellers? For as the Hand vanished, so did the Widow, never to be seen again. Some say she absconded with purse and Hand to a Western Country where she rules as the immortal despot of an underground city. Others say the Baneful Hand is too powerful for any one person and that, yes, she took it, but the device delivered her to an evil end.
I say, and I have it on the best authority, that a Baneful Hand cannot be owned, and this one maintains an unusual affection for the body to which it once belonged. The Learned Man under the stone is shackled inside stoney dreams. Fallen rock appointed him, quite against his wishes, poor sod, to be guardian of the Giantess’ gold, and the Hand lurks nearby to assist.
Script Master finished speaking. His placid face radiated satisfaction.
“So which is it?” asked Bear Boy.
“Which is what?”
“Which is it I’m to believe? Did the Widow make the Baneful Hand, or did she not? Does she have it, or is it here in the ruin?”
Script Master shrugged. “I told you. On the best authority. The Hand is anchored here, marking the spot of the treasure, but invisible until we say Baneful Words of dreadful power.”
“You did not say that,” the boy protested. “You are saying it now. And if it’s so, why did you tell the other bits, about the Widow and the underground city?”
“Because that’s how the story is told.”
“But which is true? Is she a queen or did she die badly?”
The little Beggar said to the boy, gently and with utmost sincerity, “A story is not one way or the other. All the ways are true.”
Script Master nodded. Dancing Bear put her nose to the ground and devoured the pear in one bite.
Bear Boy thought about this and looked at his benefactor. Here was the man who had taken them in, boy and bear. He’d found them, asleep in a ditch, two meager bags of bone-filled skin. “Then why,” the boy ventured, “when we Players play — when you give me lines to recite that go one way, and I tell the lines another way — why, if all the ways are true — why do you, after the audience has departed, choose to beat me?”