Inigo didn’t much want to answer that, since it might have sounded strange admitting they’d only met once alive, and then to duel to the death. “How do you mean exactly?” he replied.
“Well, for example,” Max said, “was he ticklish or not?”
“Ticklish?” Inigo exploded angrily. “Ticklish! Life and death are all around and you talk ticklish!”
“Don’t you yell at me,” Max exploded right back, “and don’t you mock my methods—tickling can be terrific in the proper instances. I had a corpse once, worse than this fella, mostly dead he was, and I tickled him and tickled him; I tickled his toes and I tickled his armpits and his ribs and I got a peacock feather and went after his belly button; I worked all day and I worked all night and the following dawn—the following dawn, mark me—this corpse said, ‘I just hate that,’ and I said, ‘Hate what?’ and he said, ‘Being tickled; I’ve come all the way back from the dead to ask you to stop,’ and I said ‘You mean this that I’m doing now with the peacock feather, it bothers you?’ and he said, ‘You couldn’t guess how much it bothers me,’ and of course I just kept on asking him questions about tickling, making him talk back to me, answer me, because, I don’t have to tell you, once you get a corpse really caught up in conversation, your battle’s half over.”
“Tr… ooooo… luv…”
Fezzik grabbed onto Inigo in panic and they both pivoted, staring at the man in black, who was silent again.” ‘True love,’ he said,” Inigo cried. “You heard him—true love is what he wants to come back for. That’s certainly worth while.”
“Sonny, don’t you tell me what’s worth while—true love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. Everybody knows that.”
“Then you’ll save him?” Fezzik said.
“Yes, absolutely, I would save him, if he had said ‘true love,’ but you misheard, whereas I, being an expert on the bellows cram, will tell you what any qualified tongue man will only be happy to verify—namely, that the f sound is the hardest for the corpse to master, and that it therefore comes out vuh, and what your friend said was ‘to blove,’ by which he meant, obviously, ‘to bluff’—clearly he is either involved in a shady business deal or a card game and wishes to win, and that is certainly not reason enough for a miracle. I’m sorry, I never change my mind once it’s made up, good-by, take your corpse with you.”
“Liar! Liar!” shrieked suddenly from the now open trap door.
Miracle Max whirled. “Back, Witch—” he commanded.
“I’m not a witch, I’m your wife—” she was advancing on him now, an ancient tiny fury—“and after what you’ve just done I don’t think I want to be that any more—” Miracle Max tried to calm her but she was having none of it. “He said ‘true love,’ Max—even I could hear it—’true love,’ ‘true love.’”
“Don’t go on,” Max said, and now there was pleading coming from somewhere.
Valerie turned toward Inigo. “He is rejecting you because he is afraid—he is afraid he’s done, that the miracles are gone from his once majestic fingers—”
“Not true—” Max said.
“You’re right,” Valerie agreed, “it isn’t true—they never were majestic, Max—you were never any good.”
“The Ticklish Cure—you were there—you saw—”
“A fluke—”