The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers coaaod-6 Page 14

  Chegory found the stairs, climbed them and reached the chamber with its seventeen-fold choices.

  Where now?

  He chose a tunnel at random and set off down it, charcoaling the occasional mark on the walls so he would be able to find his way back if he ran into a dead end or danger.

  As he walked, he began to worry. Had Aquitaine Varazchavardan recognised him? He doubted that Varazchavardan knew him by name. Nevertheless, Justina’s Master of Law might remember seeing young Chegory on Jod, in which case he would know where to start looking for a name. Gods, what a mess!

  ‘Still,’ said Chegory, ‘it was quite funny, really.’

  It was not funny at all. It was an unmitigated disaster. Nevertheless, Chegory allowed himself a little Shabble-like snigger when he recalled Varazchavardan slapping at his burning robes. Fool of a sorcerer! To set his own liquor alight by exercise of magic!

  His own liquor?

  Chegory corrected his mental slip. That had not been Varazchavardan’s liquor. That had been the property of some foul unscrupulous drug dealer. And Varazchavardan, well, he must have been leading a raid on the place.

  ‘Great,’ said Chegory, with dry irony. ‘I’m a wanted man. Incinerator of soldiers. Consort of drug dealers. Fugitive prisoner. Looter. Rioter. And now I’ve got enemies in high places to boot! What worse could happen?’

  Much, as he found out before he had taken another three footsteps. Lights dimmed, lights darkened, then violet shadows rose around him, weaving, writhing, sharpening into monsters with glaucous eyes and jacinth teeth. One glance at their slavering jaws told him they were car-nivorously inclined. He had no time to scream before they were upon him.

  Razorblade teeth bore at his raw flesh, shattered his bones, ripped open his gut then sliced his orchids in half with a lacerating pain which sent him swooning into unconsciousness.

  For some time he knew nothing.

  Then, blunder by blunder, he began to recover thought and sensation both. He was walking. His eyes were open a crack. Grey light hinted at walls, floor, a door past which he strode.

  ‘Stop walking,’ he told himself.

  But his legs made progress without him. Strong legs they were, hardened to labour by toilsome labours in the rockfields of Jod. His arms immobile at his sides. Strength he had in those arms, the mighty strength which comes from sledgehammering rocks and ruthlessly pursuing sparetime practice with a killing blade. But he was powerless to control that strength.

  I am an Engine.

  Thus he thought, comparing himself to Ivan Pokrov’s Analytical Engine, remorselessly driven by coded algorithms, exercising operations of the most complex precision without possession so much as a shred of free will.

  By an extreme effort of such will he at last succeeded in closing his eyes.

  Now I will…

  Now he would nothing.

  Will and consciousness blundered away together. His eyes cracked open again. A part of Chegory’s brain which in truth could scarcely be called Chegory needed sight that it might control the passage of his corpse through the underworld beneath Injiltaprajura. It is scarcely extravagant to think of Chegory as being just then a corpse, for, though his body breathed, walked, and possessed both blood and a heartbeat, no will was resident in his flesh. No will, no thought, no sentience.

  By the time sentience, will and consciousness returned, Chegory’s automative fit was long since over. He found himself lying in the dark. Vampire rats! Downstairs, dark meant rats. Were there any? He listened carefully for scrabbles or squeaks. Heard none. Nevertheless his heart was racing. He had been asleep, asleep and helpless, quite unconscious and at the mercy of any four-legged marauder. In the dark Downstairs that could have been suicide.

  He stood up, wincing as something went grik! in his spine. He flexed his back cautiously. It was okay. He closed his eyes. Opened them again. Sought light but saw not the slightest leam. Instead, dark absolute, a smothering black velvet shrouding all. Was he blind?

  He clicked his fingers. The quality of the echoes suggested he was in an underground room. Quite a large room. He was surprised. Thanks to the dark, he had got the impression he was confined in some place no larger than a coffin. He felt around. Barrels. A smell of — alcohol!

  Gods!

  Here… a board. Something… something soft. Friable.

  Too coherent to be turd. Lift it. Smell. Cheese. Not the goat cheese from the vats of Beldysobros, sole local supplier. No, this was imported stuff. Very nice, too. Needed that. More? No, just metal. Ow! Sharp. Knife. Good.

  Chegory tested his new-found knife then slipped it into the larger of his boot sheaths. He’d need it if he ran up against vampire rats. Or Malud marauders. Or mad elven lords with strange foreign companions. Idly he wondered what had become of his best-beloved fighting blade, his skewer-shiv and his knuckle-lance, lost when soldiers had stripped him of that protection when they arrested him outside the Dromdanjerie.

  Okay. Explanations.

  How had he got here?

  Sleepwalking.

  Sleepwalking? Hardly!

  Zen.

  That was his next thought.

  Flashback.

  Got it in three!

  Indeed, Chegory now realised exactly what had happened. He had breathed of the zen burning in the amphorae in the temple of Elasmokarcharos, shark-god of the Dagrin. The hallucinogenic herb had made him imagine that the jaws of shark floated through the air to tear away his arm. Later, he had made a temporary recovery. However, some time afterwards he had been overwhelmed by the phenomenon known as flashback.

  Zen is a strange drug for, unlike alcohol or opium, its effects do not dissipate in direct relation to time. Instead, once one has used the drug the potential exists for sudden, untimely recurrences of the initial drugshock. Hallucinations may partially or totally swamp the sensorium. Worse, the drug may lead to the acting out of desires known or unknown, to murder or rape, incest or arson, shark-swimming or suicide.

  In Chegory’s case, his one overwhelming desire had been to get the hell out of the mazeways Downstairs, and this was the desire the drug had activated when it had reduced him to an unthinking zombie.

  Okay. What now?

  He was still tired. Very very tired. Else the knowledge of his vulnerability to horrifying flashbacks would have had him running round in circles screaming in terror. As it happened, he was so shagged out he did little more than acknowledge his vulnerability as a last refining touch to his day of disaster.

  Fatigue suggested sleep.

  What else could he do?

  Was there anything to be gained from a quick release from imprisonment Downstairs?

  No.

  Since so many prisoners had escaped from the treasury with so much loot there would doubtless be dozens of soldiers scouring the underground mazeways right now, so there was scarcely any point in Chegory rushing to the pink palace to advise the authorities that the pirates who had thieved the wishstone were still below decks. If a search could catch those Malud marauders then it would. Nobody caught Downstairs at a time like this would be presumed innocent, so there was no reason for Chegory to dare his life into the sunlight just so he could accuse the wayward foreigners.

  Meantime, he was safest here.

  Safe from hunting soldiers?

  Probably, since he had stumbled into some storeroom for liquor. Such places were chosen by experts for their invulnerability to search.

  But what if said experts find me in my sleep?

  There was a risk of that, true. But life had become so dangerous, so fraught with peril, so stressed and unpredictable that Chegory accounted that little additional risk as next to nothing.

  He sat back against a liquor barrel, closed his eyes and promptly dropped off to sleep.

  Elsewhere, in the Temple of Torture in Goldhammer Street which was serving as a detention centre, Shabble burnt free of a clay pot at a bottom of a well. Steam boiled out of the well as Shabble ascended, shining bright and
singing brighter yet.

  It was night. Soon the sun would rise and the sun bells would ring out from the belfries at the four corners of the pink palace to announce the end of bardardomootha and the start of istarlat. But, for the moment, dark reigned, and Shabble’s localised attempts to subvert that legitimate reign drew protests from adherents of the ruling regime.

  ‘Blow out the light, you nuk!’ screamed an angry fishwife. ‘I blow out not,’ said Shabble. ‘I’m a candle not.’ Torrential abuse followed, as if Fistavlir had ended and the long-awaited trade winds had brought downfalling curses rather than downfalling water. Shabble, entirely unperturbed by this onslaught, darted about the temple, seeking friends.

  ‘Oh, there you are, there you are,’ said Shabble, shining sun-bright light on a comatose Ivan Pokrov.

  The head of the Analytical Institute woke. Stared at Shabble. Mumbled incoherently. Then Artemis Ingalawa said, in very wide awake tones:

  ‘Shabble! Get out of here! Vanish!’

  She Who Must Be Obeyed was obeyed. Shabble’s light dimmed immediately to nothing and the demonic one soared up, up, up into the night sky. The humid darkness of Injiltaprajura and of the polluted Laitemata fell away below. All Untunchilamon came in sight, a mass of dark within dark, reaching away for league upon league from Justina’s capital to the desolations of the north.

  Higher and still higher yet flew Shabble, ascending imaginary mountains in nary more than a couple of heartbeats. Exulting in pure speed flew Shabble. So does the dolphin exult when from the water it explodes in joy shimmering. So does the dragon rejoice when in its strength it holds the heights then plunges, diving with a scream, with power ferocious, with speed controlled and absolute precision, terror matched to beauty as it stoops. Up rose Shabble in such triumph until the very curvature of the planetary surface was clearly to be perceived, and the sun also, the sun of the new day.

  Then sang Shabble, then Shabble sang, louder and then louder yet, pouring out music unheard for twenty thousand years, rejoicing in the Symphony of the Sun, a song of joy to exult and honour all those who argue with mortality, a paean of praise for the will to be and to become, for ambition unlimited, audacity vaulting and the triumph of the moment.

  Shabble rose yet higher. Singing singing singing to the rising sun, the local star, the star itself delighting as it sang with a song fiercer and braver yet than any known to creatures of the flesh, its joy a blaze of energy unleashed, exploding light outburning in vacuum wastelands a hundred million luzacs distant.

  Glory to life!

  Glory to us and our becoming!

  And to the sun, glory!

  And to the rising sun, glory!

  Thus Shabble, singing as if to rival the sun itself.

  Non servium.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘What’s this?’ said Log Jaris, holding aloft a lantern.

  No answer came from Chegory Guy who was deep in dream. At that very moment his noncqnscious fantasising was modulating from horror ad nauseum to mere absurdity. He dreamt of an acanaceous cabbage with thaumaturgic tendencies multiplying onyx and zircon to the lapidarian delight of a quivering grannam.

  ‘What is cabbage but a form of aliment?’ said Chegory, imagining (in his dream) that he had never seen such except in woodblock prints of foreign origin, though in point of fact he knew cabbage well enough since it grew (albeit poorly) in the market gardens of Injiltaprajura.

  ‘Cabbage is god,’ said cabbage.

  Already the cabbage was inimically exerting its granitic will to crush him, all goodwill gone, just badwill remaining, its cassava cyanide, its perfume dung. Crushed, he fell. Yattering ants mocked his valour useless, his courage absurd, his pride misjudged, his skin tarnished with undeniable Ebrell Island red.

  ‘Wake up, boy,’ said Log Jaris, outside his dream.

  ‘I am awake,’ said Chegory (or imagined he said) within the dimensions of dream.

  Where his unicorn speared her, where she moulded his mangos soft in her hands, her fingers palpating, his banana vomiting, his ants talking the language of sea slugs and carrots as they crawled across her nipples, her hair trailing across his cheeks as Varazchavardan aped monkey in the blue-stained topsails of a coconut tree.

  ‘Must I kick you awake?’ said Log Jaris.

  Answer came there none.

  So he kicked.

  Not too hard, but hard enough.

  Young Chegory Guy snorted, gasped, jerked awake, remembered his knife and grabbed for it, only it was the wrong boot he grabbed for.

  ‘A blade?’ said Log Jaris, observing the empty boot sheath by lamplight. ‘No blade there, boy! Who are you?’ Slowly Chegory got to his feet. Looked Log Jaris full in the face. Then turned away.

  ‘Don’t turn your back on me, boy!’ said Log Jaris, grabbing him by the shoulder and spinning him round. ‘I’m not that ugly.’

  ‘You’re a hallucination,’ said Chegory calmly.

  Quite a reasonable assumption, under the circumstances. For Log Jaris was a monster with the body of a man but the head and horns of a bull.

  ‘What?’ said Log Jaris in startlement. ‘I’m a what?’

  ‘A hallucination. I don’t believe in you.’

  ‘You don’t believe in me!’ said Log Jaris, slapping a heavy hand on Chegory’s shoulder. His heavy hand gripped hard then shook the boy. Not much — but enough. ‘You don’t believe in me? What about this? Do you believe in this?’ Log Jaris grasped Chegory’s collar bone between thumb and finger. He increased the pressure. ‘Hurts, doesn’t it? You’re awake, right? Not dreaming! But drunk, perhaps. Are you drunk, my boy?’

  ‘I’ve dosed on zen,’ said Chegory.

  ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘The temple. Temple of Elasmokarcharos. There was zen, zen, burning, huge amphorae, you know, drugs in smoke, in clouds, clouds of it. And… I don’t have to argue with you. You’re a flashback. You don’t exist.’

  ‘I wish I didn’t!’ said Log Jaris. ‘It would make life that much simpler. All right, come along, boy. Indulge an old hallucination for a bit and let your story keep him company till he’s got the truth out of you.’

  Chegory looked hard at Log Jaris. He was in sharp focus. The yellow candlelight shining shining through the lantern’s windows wavered ever so slightly but the shadow-mass bulk of the bullman did not. Tentatively Chegory dared his fingertips forward. The bullman grunted with displeasure as Chegory fingered the black bullhair. Chegory flattened his hand against the coarse hairs. Felt the warmth of living meat beneath. Pushed. Encountered unyielding mass, bulk, weight, inertia.

  The bullman was huge.

  A huge unyielding mass smelling of bullsweat. Hot breath outsnorted across Chegory’s face as he withdrew his hand from the bullman’s hide. Gold gleamed bright in the quivering moistness of the bullman’s nostrils. The outthrust ears, which looked a little like black tubes of hair with their ends sliced off along a diagonal, twitched as the bullman attended to some distant sound. Chegory raised his gaze to the huge ivory horns uplifted high.

  For a hallucination, the thing was impressively detailed and uncommonly stable.

  ‘Are you quite finished?’ said the bullman. ‘My patience is great, but not infinite.’

  ‘You look real,’ said Chegory slowly. ‘I mean, you’re not wavery at the edges or anything. You feel real. You smell real. You talk as if you were real. But, if you are real — how do you explain yourself?’

  The bullman snorted.

  ‘You’re the one who’s got some explaining to do,’ said the monster. ‘This is my cellarage, after all. So I suggest you get on with it, lest I obtruncate your loathsome corpse without ceremony further.’

  Chegory had no wish to be obtruncated, whatever obtruncation was, since it sounded as if it might be painful. He had already learnt that the pain of hallucinations can be at least equal to that of physical existence. So he had best placate the monster whether it was a free-willed entity in its own right or merely a projection of his ow
n psyche.

  ‘I, well, I’m here because I got lost, basically,’ said Chegory. ‘Lost underground.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘Doubtless,’ said the bullman. ‘A story which you will tell in my torture chamber. Gome!’

  So saying, the bullman overturned a barrel and began rolling it out of the room in which Chegory had been caught sleeping. The young Ebrell Islander was bitterly disappointed to realise he had not evaded another ordeal of pain, but nevertheless followed without protest. Torture, torture! Thus he helplessly mindsaid, silently wailing with despair as he followed his massively muscled captor. Drump-thrump echoes rolled into the darkness ahead of them as the bullman kicked the barrel over flagstones and cobblestones then up a series of ramps.

  Then the bullman stopped.

  ‘Here,’ he said, passing Chegory the lantern. ‘Hold this.’

  Chegory held it. This was his chance! To smash the lantern, punch the bullman on the snout and then go haring off into the darkness. But he did not seize that chance. He had at last run up against one challenge too many. His resources of courage, initiative and daring were exhausted entirely.

  Of course, he should have dared. He should have tried. He should have attacked — then fled. Since the alternative was to endure monstrous horror in the bullman’s torture chamber he had nothing to gain by cooperating with the hideous thing. Yet cooperate he did, holding the lantern while the bullman bullhandled the heavy barrel up through a bullhole, grunting bullfully as he did so. Then he hauled himself up through the same hole, reached down for the lantern and uplifted it.

  Run!

  Thus spoke Chegory’s last reserve of daring. But already the bullman was reaching down, and Chegory, helpless to resist, found himself extending his own hand to the monster. The bullman hauled Chegory into the darkshadowed room above then closed a heavy trapdoor on the bullhole and bolted it.

  Chegory was trapped.