by Galen Wolf
THE HORRID TRAGEDY OF THE COUNTS BEROK
Galen Wolf
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Contents
Firstpiece.
A Finding.
A Rude Awakening.
A Frequent Visitor.
The Fleeting Years.
Good Times, Bad Times
In the Autocrat's Parlour
The Murder
A New Life for Zventibold
Trouble for Axtos III
Mavis has Problems
The Attack
Another Finding
Helena Lends a Hand
An Unexpected Lift
Mince for Supper
The Blow
A New Animal and a Bit of Bad Luck
Mango Lizard Cookery
A Date in the City of Death
Through the Mountains of Doom
The Realms of Wormoria
The Return
Echoes of the Past
Could it be this?
A Meagre Victory
Melissa's Question
The Breach
Happenings in the Imperial Palace
A Slight Improvement
Hard Luck Zventi!
1. Firstpiece.
Turvius Sullius, apprentice sorcerer, twisted dwarf and self-styled ladies' man, knew he was caught red handed; above him the blue Pirakteshi sky, in his hand a carving knife. He had been carving the words 'Axtos is a Puff' on the wall in the Torture Garden of the Imperial Palace when he heard the fat lad Axtos, heir to the Diamond Throne, come wheezing round the corner. "You hideous dwarf!" yelled fat Axtos, his face beetroot with exercise and anger. "I'll tan your arse for you!"
Suddenly panicked, and not wishing any of this arse tanning, Turvius tried a disappearing spell, but he was yet young in his studies and with a wet fizzle, he remained unvanished and standing in the path of Axtos who was raging like a bull and sweating like a pig. And then, perspicacious as he was young, he noticed Axtos carried a half-brick in his hand and wielded it as if he meant business. Axtos snarled, "You've been writing comments about me in the men's toilets again," and he swung the brick.
But Turvius was quicker; he sidestepped, with surprising grace for a lad with a hunch, and Axtos sailed by, as if the bull had met his matador. "Olé!" shouted Turvius, and then activated the rocket boots, which his father Srakosi had given him. With a whoosh, off he shot into the sky in a sparkle of gold and red fire. When the power died, he landed heavily on one of the high roofs of the Imperial Palace and looked down. Far below Axtos was still searching among the gibbets, brick in hand.
Turvius's brow furrowed: he had got away. But for how long?
It all happened long ago, when the world was younger and while you were yet a twinkle in your great-grandfather's eye, or as the common folk have it - still in his knacker bag. These two boys were set by fate to be at each other's throats; the underdog Turvius versus the over-privileged Axtos. And this is what this book is about: truth, honour and justice. It tells how a man can snatch at goodness, and find it run through his fingers like the Pirakteshi desert sand. It speaks of how a man can bend to evil, and find the price was more than he could afford. Is it more than you will pay reader? Is this a journey you will take with us? To travel from the fabled city of Piraktesh across the burning desert, to cross the steaming jungles of Wamawama and hear the rabbity-blurger's song? To climb the Mountains of Doom and find redemption in the ice gripped lands of Wormoria? To watch the dead rise? To lead an army of hamsters? To finally face your soul?
ut perhaps I have already told too much. So turning again to my story I will merely say: it all happened like this:
Turvius's father - the aforementioned Srakosi, was a man of great authority at the Court, but he died one night in puzzling circumstances whilst tinkering in his alchemical laboratory. Tiny Turvius had been left an orphan. He had no mother because was brought forth from a spotted toadstool in one of his father's bizarre experiments. Even so, Srakosi had loved the wee lad, despite him being a by-product, and had given him ether and jungleweed from an early age: too early some warned, but Srakosi would hear nothing against any of his disputed practices - taking drugs and free love was how he rolled. After all he was the inventor of the game of hog-riding, whereby he injected pigs with steroids and watched them work out in the Alchemical Gym.
The official story of his death was that Srakosi had died of an ether overdose - a substance to which he was unfortunately addicted. But others said he had been murdered by agents of the Autocrat - his liege lord - Shabbler the Hideous.
But why? Turvius had to know. He cast cards; he gazed into scrying stones; he called beings of the wind and dark to aid him - to help him find the truth. And slowly he pieced together the true narrative of his father's death. What he uncovered shook him. The chattering demons told him that Axtos had poisoned the Autocrat's mind against Srakosi by intimating unspeakable things. And all this because Srakosi caught Axtos at it - whatever 'it' was (the demons were too prudish to say; they just giggled and put their hands over their mouths) - at it with an artifact of ancient power that shook and vibrated with its own arcane energy. Srakosi had used this knowledge to blackmail Axtos, and Axtos hated him for it.
As Turvius grew, fatherless and neglected, he mourned the tragically premature death of Srakosi. If he had lived what mysteries would arch sorcerer have uncovered for him? What fun games might they have invented together? This loss - these things - that should have come forth from his father's fecund brain were denied him and Turvius became bitter. He grew more and more strange - totally convinced of the conspiracy theory of history - rejecting all evidence, rejecting common sense and believing any crazy nonsense a crystal carrying Kriptashi hippy told him in return for a Pirakteshi Jell and a bag of salted nuts.
He became obsessed with his father's murder. It was true that their relationship had been twisted, but Turvius loved Srakosi and forgave him his many excesses. He forgave him his plentiful lies, even the ones that cut deepest, such as when Srakosi refused him peanuts on the grounds that they were magic ones (which they were not). But Turvius knew there was no court in the land that would convict Axtos, the Heir to the Diamond Throne. And so he bided his time and he held his wheesht.
Then one day, down in the lower Palace, he opened a broom cupboard to find Axtos's hunched figure engaged in some foul practice with a lady's glove. Of course Turvius roared with laughter. Who wouldn't? Axtos protested his innocence of whatever foul habit Turvius supposed him to have been indulging in. But, in truth, he had stolen the glove from the palace cook, the only woman not afraid of thrashing him because she had something on his father. Axtos yelled that things were not as they seemed, but Turvius listened not to his protestations. In a flash, he saw that this was his opportunity for revenge on Axtos for killing his father and so he took to writing inappropriate things about Axtos and gloves on the Palace walls and in the deep cisterns and in the foulest garderobes.
And Axtos fumed. He saw the writings, and he guessed who wrote. If there was a thing that Axtos could not stand, that thing was graffiti. And if there was another thing Axtos couldn't stand, it was ridicule and so the ridiculing graffiti tore at his mind and he gnashed his teeth and rent his garments. In those days his power was smaller and Turvius was held in high regard by the Court so he had to find a pretext to wreak his revenge on the dwarf sorcerer.
And so we return to the scene where Axtos stood in the Torture Garden with Turvius on that hot summer day in Piraktesh. This was a long time ago - when you, dear reader, were yet a delight of your mothe
r's mind as she lingered in the bath, imagining your father's strong arms and burning glances; thinking of how she would come upon him by chance as it were (though long planned) as he sweated at his labours with the horses and how her musical giggle would turn his simple male mind. Though you - unaware of these bathtime fantasies of hers - were yet an innocent, slippery egg in her tubes and are not to blame for her wily feminine machinations. But I digress.
And that day, in the garden, Axtos was rehearsing for a part in a play he had written about himself whose main theme was the murder of a man suspected of peanut theft. He was declaiming loud and long to the corpses in the gibbets, who were way past caring, and to the carrion crows on the gibbets who found it all quite interesting. There, unexpectedly he saw Turvius carving rude things about him on a gibbet. He exploded in rage and picked up his brick. But as we have seen, Turvius lifted off in front of his eyes and escaped to safety.
But this was not the end of it. Axtos got his daddy the Autocrat to order that Turvius leave the palace and all the realms of Piraktesh. The Great God Hector, Lord of the Apes, knows that all things were written and so it was that Axtos knew his father, Shabbler, would indulge him in this as he was an extremely spoiled prince.
And so, mere hours after his escape with the boots, with tears in his eyes, Turvius left the Palace, walking out of the garden, through the dining hall and then out of the gates into the teeming city. When he was almost out of the gloating Axtos's sight he turned and shook his fist at the grinning princeling perched on the high palace balconies watching him go. Turvius wiped his mouth and spoke a mighty curse, "I'll get you Axtos!" Then he was lost in a crowd of passing camel dealers.
The years tell that Axtos became the most feared and hated of all the Autocrats - the terrible Axtos III. Little Turvius Sullius, however, after a failed career as a camel dealer, went to study sorcery in the glittering city of the wizards - fabled Kharkesh. Occasionally, he would return to Piraktesh in disguise and have affairs with women from the lower classes of society. It is from this came the root of the downfall of the noble house of Berok, and incidentally the ruin of his own house of Sullius. It is this story which this narrative will attempt to trace.
In all those long years there were good times and there were bad times, but never in the good times, and certainly not in the bad times, did Turvius ever put from himself thoughts of revenge upon the most hated Axtos III, in his mind forever branded That Fat Bastard.
2. A Finding.
It was one of those hot dry afternoons so typical of the Pirakteshi Summer. The fetid river Szerkia wound in ruffled slow curves through the scorched desert towards the city. Gradually as the river flowed onwards, the small dusty huts became more common until they could be called a town of sorts. The Szerkia travelled slowly on until at last it flowed under the huge city walls through a rusted, beweeded culvert. Here it was exceedingly broad but contained by man-made embankments. It flowed under numerous bridges and along its banks the houses changed in character; from the shabby huts of the working classes, through the middling houses of the merchant class until it reached the opulent mansions and palaces of the aristocracy. Greatest of all of these was the Imperial Palace - home of the Pirakteshi Autocrats for thousands of years. Here the river moved beside the ornate lawn and gibbets set piece garden. Between the scummy water of the Szerkia and the multiple white and gilt domes of the palace, flies buzzed lazily around the wilibongo trees. Occasionally they alighted on one of the gibbets. which swung slowly and cast a gruesome shadow on the burnt brown grass this afternoon in high summer.
But one man, passing outside the Palace walls, had dared to denounce the obscenity of such a torture garden. And that day, as the waxed ebony carriage of the Count Zamborg Berok passed through the high cobbled streets of Piraktesh, even the Augustr wind seemed to pause and last summer's leaves, yellow and wrinkled, huddled in gutters as if to mutter and gossip at the passing of a man so great. This man, of all men in the Empire, dared to question the decisions of the Autocrat. He alone had dared to damn the harsh slaving laws from the high balconies of the Palace Berok - and he of all the Pirakteshi nobility had declined his ancestral rights and refused to attend the lavish winter banquets thrown by the aristocracy where they feasted and reveled while outside the poor stood in their rags and shivered with hands extended in the hope of wresting a scrap of well chewed gristle from the jaws of some nobleman's hound.
As he passed them today on his homeward journey, those same poor smiled and made signs of blessing - cheering their hero: the protector of the downtrodden, the Count Berok.
Zamborg reached the splendidly decorated Palace Berok and observed the ancestral flag of his family fluttering above it - the Silver Cup of Justice against a sky blue background. He shivered a little as he observed and remembered that it stood for truth, honour and justice. The carriage pulled inside the mighty gates and they were shut behind them. As the valet opened the door he dismounted from the carriage and gave a gold sovereign to the coachman, saying, "Thanks Jack and don't mention this little gift. I know your wife is ill and you have little Bertie, Simon, Trude and Jock to feed."
The coachman tugged his forelock with tears of gratitude in his eyes and he shambled back to the coach, muttering "Thank 'ee, sir."
Count Berok stood a while, the wind caressing his proud aristocratic face. He regarded the burning plains stretching away from the mighty walls of the city of Piraktesh. "One day," he said, half to himself - half to the wind, "one day, I will see justice and freedom brought to this land."
Turning, he strode manfully between the marbled pillars of the doorway, the black leather of his tall riding boots creaking as he did so. He pulled the crushed silk of his yellow and blue cloak from his shoulders and handed it to the doorman. "Thank you William, how's the wife?" He passed on as William muttered something, his words drowned in his gratitude that a man so great could even notice his existence. Inside the hall, a million candles burned - the light shattering into a billion slivers as it struck the heavy chandeliers of crystal coloured by a domed ceiling of Lapis Lazuli and gold. He walked down a long corridor lined with statues in classical poses. As he neared the living room, he heard the voice of his lovely wife, Helena, gently humming a lullaby. She, no doubt hearing the click of his spurs, ran to meet him.
Helena! He thought - as lovely as the day we first met. There she stood before him, her long blonde hair twisted in plaits and held with golden snakes made by the most skillful jeweler the world had ever known - Eric the Cunning.
"Hello, dearest," he exclaimed happily, "is supper ready?"
"I think Gertie is making it now, dear heart. Did you have a nice day at the Assembly of Piraktesh?"
Berok paused. He scratched his chin as if in a daze. Then he said, "Do you know darling? One day I will see justice and freedom brought to this troubled land of ours. I have terrible trouble trying to convince some of the aristocracy that the lower classes are human. But I am determined to see right prevail in the end."
The maid overheard all of this and, although she didn't understand many of the bigger words, she marveled at her great good fortune at finding employ with such liberal and progressive people. She muttered a blessing.
"Pardon?" asked Count Berok.
"It's all right, dear," assured his wife. "She was just muttering a blessing."
"Thank 'ee, sir," muttered the maid.
Countess Helena turned away, somewhat coyly. "Well," she said, "aren't you going to ask me what sort of day I've had?"
"Oh forgive me dear," said the Count absentmindedly. "I did mean to enquire. What sort of day have you had?"
The Countess smiled and stroked her husband's cheek. "I had a funny sort of day. I went down to the market to comfort the starving beggars and give them soup and rolls as I usually do on a Wednesday. I had already spent some two hours doling out soup to the poor wretches when I noticed an old woman hobbling along towards me. In her crinkled and hideous hands was a grimy and blackened bundle which I natu
rally took to be a heap of revolting scraps which she or her husband had gleaned from the Palace dustbins."
"Of course," concurred her husband, by now thoroughly enthralled in his wife's tale.
"When she was less than six feet from me she held out her hands, and I, thinking that she was about to make a present of this disgusting mess, quickly moved to refuse. She was however, insistent, and, grunting, extended the bundle again, at the same time pointing with one hand to her open mouth, indicating, through rotting teeth, the lack of a tongue. It was then that the foul sack covering fell away to reveal the dirty, but unmistakably beautiful, head of a baby boy. Seeing my wonderment, she smiled and gave me the child along with a greasy scroll of parchment. I took both, opened the scroll and read:
"To whomsoever it may concern - I Turvius Sullius, dwarf sorcerer, have undertaken to write references for this boy child, which was the product of an unfortunate coupling at the yearly goose fair. Know then that this child is mine and heir to the sorcerous line of Sullius. He shall be recognised by a birth mark in the shape of a dark star on his left buttock. This portends a great future for him - for good or for ill."
"It was signed, Turvius Sullius," said Helena. After recounting this, Helena broke off and stared into her husband's eyes. "I have promised myself to look after this orphan, or bastard, as I suppose we should call him. I will bring him up to love the principles we have cherished and one day maybe he will overthrow the foul Autocratic Regime which is so evil in our land today."
