Free The Exotic Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp, Lyon Sprague de Camp, Christopher Stasheff

his fall. In another moment he was as soundly asleep as his friend, the only difference being that the second man was facedown.
    Those two were the first Shea saw go down from drinking too much breakfast, but they weren't the last. Between them, breakfast and lunch took out a good half of the visitors.
    By early afternoon, they were coming in dribs and drabs instead of whole bands. Some bought drink and rode off with it; Shea hoped it would at least knock the fight out of them.
    A Polovets lurched up, his arm around a merchants apprentice and brandishing an empty cup in his free hand.
    "More wine! This—hish mastersh a pig. Won't—no more."
    "You've had enough, friend," the young man said.
    From his voice and breath, Shea thought that the apprentice could also skip the next few cups. But the spell was working on both of them; they were going to drink themselves under the table, under the wagon, or wherever else the drunks were ending up.
    Shea personally refilled their cups. They emptied those cups twice before reeling off, thanking Shea with embraces that left him badly wanting a bath. Drunken Polovtsi were adding assorted stinks to a camp already ripe from the horde of sober ones.
    Good thing I didn't turn the mead to whiskey , Shea thought. I wasn't planning to kill the Polovtsi from alcohol poisoning. Now, if the drink just holds out—
    It did. A few Polovtsi seemed to realize what was happening, and tried to mount and ride off. Most of them fell right back off, and none of them got more than five hundred paces from the camp.
    A few also didn't survive the afternoon—brawls, falling into streams and drowning, breaking necks falling off horses or wagons, and so on. Even that didn't sober up their surviving comrades.
    Shea had seen alcoholics, people who couldn't stop drinking, and they weren't a pretty sight. Neither were the Polovtsi, as his spell drove them to pour more and more down their throats.
    He reminded himself that Chalmers being executed or Florimel spending her life in some potentate's harem would be a much uglier sight.
    By the time the sun was halfway down the sky, the work was done. Mikhail Sergeivich leaped on a wagon and waved his sword over his head three times, the agreed-on signal for the soldiers to set on the Polovtsi. Then he jumped down, joined Shea in pulling a sheaf of rawhide thongs from their baggage, and went to work.
    Not all of the soldiers had obeyed orders to avoid the liquor, and those the two leaders left lying where they'd fallen. A few drunken soldiers didn't make much difference, anyway. The Polovtsi were either sprawled flat or sitting slumped against something, and none of them could have stood unless tied to a tree. As for fighting, they were so obviously past it that in a few minutes the sober merchants came out and began helping the soldiers bind the prisoners.
    A few of the Polovtsi who'd been sleeping off their breakfast woke up before they were bound. They only stared dim-eyed at their captors; Shea wondered how many of them (especially the ones who'd drunk kvass or mead) would be paralyzed by hangovers.
    They'd run out of thongs and were raiding the leather merchants' stores for more material, when Igor rode up at the head of his warriors. The prince stared at the acres of helpless Polovtsi, and laughed so hard that anyone but a Hero would have fallen off his horse. Then he dismounted and embraced Shea.
    "You are a bogatyr like none ever named in song or story! The Polovtsi are finished and Rurik Vasilyevich has his life, by all the saints!"
    "Did you capture the slave train, Your Highness? And what of that other wizard? And Yuri Dimitrivich's family? And—?" Shea hoped his day's victory entitled him to a few straight answers.
    "We captured it, all right," the prince interrupted. "Word of your drinking party reached the guards, and half of them rode off to join it. They are out there," he added, waving a hand at the field of drunks.
    "The rest seemed to suspect something,