The Horrid Tragedy of the Counts Berok: A Comedy Fantasy

by Galen Wolf

  "Pardon Lord?" he enquired.

  "This toad Sullius he must be stopped. He is a criminal madman. Think what would happen if he were ever to gain authority in Piraktesh."

  "How can we get him, o master?"

  "I've told you - we, or rather you, must get Berok first,"

  "Aye 'tis so." agreed Vardo.

  Long they schemed, bent over maps and charts they consulted sorcerers and astrologers seeking a plan that could not fail. After three days thereto they had it. Captain Vardo would sit outside Zventibold's window with a gun and shoot him.

  The news of this plot however came even to Turvius' ears as he walked the corridors of the Palace Berok; whispered to him by a black imp from the outer darknesses keen to make mischief. He had been ignored by Zventibold and Mavis for the past week or so. They had walked past him, eaten at the same table as him but all without words. She had been the worst - she kept Zventibold away from him and would make pointed remarks about hunch backed dwarfs addressed to no one in particular but Turvius knew who she meant. She was the new mistress of Palace Berok and she made a misery of William's life by making him do all the cooking in addition to opening the door. She was cruel in whim, expansive in form, and ignorant in manner. Indeed what she did at the breakfast table often upset Turvius's stomach and William was loath to cook for her. She hated Turvius and Turvius hated her but he knew that in the battle for control over Zventibold she was winning. Tonight however, Turvius smiled inwardly to himself as he chomped slowly through his artichokes. Tonight he would show who had authority. Could this vacuous whore save Zventibold's life from the plots of the Autocrat ? Half way through his truffle pie, he decided on his opening gambit.

  " I say Zventibold do you mind if I accompany you to your study tonight.lt is a matter of grave import."

  Zventibold looked at his wife who scowled and shook her head furiously. Zventibold cleared his throat, preparatory to refusing.

  "'T would be best if I were to - I assure you," said Turvius.

  Zventibold looked worried and turned again to Mavis seeking further support. She drew him close and whispered in his ear. He turned back blushing red. "No," he said "I think not"

  " Heed my words son, that is all I ask."

  At this point Mavis whispered again. The only word Turvius caught was 'banana'.

  Zventibold seemed convinced by Mavis' reasoning and after a few seconds he managed to control his smile and said: "No Turvius....I think not. I nave much business to attend to."

  " If that is what you will my son I will honour your decision."

  He turned then in a swirl of his fuliginous cloak. A slight breeze moved the crystal chandelier. Zventibold felt fingers walking up his spine. At the door Turvius turned and said quietly, " What colour stockings should I wear to your funeral ?" This was his subtle way of telling Zventibold that something was amiss.

  " What do you mean father?" queried the young man.

  " Only this: When you go into your study tonight do not switch on the light but rather hide your light under a bushel if you can find one. Then hurl a spear through the window at the great yew tree that stands outside it."

  " Tis strange counsel this father."

  " Aye 'tis," said Turvius and without another word he winked at Mavis who sat there puzzledly carving her name on the mahogany table and he walked out into the gloomy corridor.

  When Turvius had gone Zventibold sat in silence for a while - to say the least he was worried by his disfigured father's cryptic talk. Anxiously and with clammy palm, he clasped his beloved's hand. "Do you think there is anything in his crazed talk Mavis ?" he said.

  "I think that he be tryin' to unseat your reason and gain control of your mind,' was her answer.

  Zventibold paused for a long while and then querously turned to Mavis. "Do you believe that this is so ?" he asked.

  "Ar." was Mavis' laconic reply.

  Zventibold was baffled, could his long lost warlock father really intend him ill ? In the end he got up from the long table and brushed breadcrumbs from his colourful silken trousers.

  Mavis who had just sunk her teeth into a luscious peach had not expected this. " Where be you goin' husband mine ?" she seemed upset." Did I not promise you a night of fleshy paradise if you remained by my side?"

  "Yes Mavis but Turvius's words have deeply troubled me, what if his health is suffering?. He is not very high off the ground you know - it leaves him susceptible to all manner of animal diseases that taller people would not get. You know like mange or "The Thrung" that got one of the donkeys last year. I must go to see him."

  "Go if you must Zventibold but do not expect me to wait up for you," said Mavis curtly.

  Go Zventibold did. The moon cast its eerie light through the windows as he walked along the corridor to his study. The light was so bright that he did not need to light his candle to find the door key. It turned easily in the well oiled lock. He saw the dark leafy shape of the great yew tree, which his grandfather had planted, through the study's many paneled window. It moved slightly in the breeze, but apart from that he could detect nothing strange about it. Zventibold remembered his mother telling him of how she had met his father Zamborg for the first time under its leafy branches. She had been walking home one night alone when Zamborg had leapt on her from the tree eager for her love. It turned out that Zamborg, a very romantic Count of Berok had been desperately in love with Helena and watched her for many months before he been able to summon up the courage to leap on her from a tree. It had been love at first sight more or less and they had lived happily together for many years until that fateful night in the garden, until his mother's lust had proved the key to their undoing.

  When Zventibold thought about the night of his father's murder his head began to swim and strange memories crawled up from the pits at the back of his mind. He frowned and dismissing these thought he went over to his desk and made to light a candle. By the light of the candle he noticed that there was indeed something strange about the yew tree: there was a cloaked and hooded man sitting in the lower branches even now pointing a heavy pistol at Zventibold's heart. Zventibold's first reaction was to invite him in for a drink out of the cold - he was a kind hearted lad under all the layers of sickness and perversion. Then he thought perhaps the man had a message for him and had been unable to get in at the main gate ?

  Just at that moment the study door was broken open and there stood the dwarf sorcerer Turvius Sullius, his hands emitting a double death ray spell; one of his specialties. A dazzling ray jetted from his fingers and out through the window; blowing it completely away and then hitting the lower branches of the tree, causing them to explode into flame. There was a scream as the sinister stranger fell, engulfed in fire, to the ground below him.

  " I've saved your life." exclaimed Turvius jubilantly. He smiled smugly and nursed the bleeding gash in his forehead that had been caused by pieces of flying glass.

  "Yes," said Zventibold slowly " I believe you have."

  11.

  12. Mavis has Problems

  From that evening when Turvius had saved Zventibold's life he had the youth's ear in all matters and was constantly by his side. Turvius devoted his time to instructing the lad in the dark arts. Most of their work was in the alchemical laboratory in the West Wing but they also spent much time when it was nice sitting in the palace gardens eating cucumber sandwiches brought to them by William and poring over the heavy tomes that contained the secrets of wizardry.

  Zventibold showed no delight in the things that were usually the joy of the apprentice mages - fireball spells and spells to undo ladies' clothes. Instead his pleasure was learning about those who have passed away - the dead. He would spend many hours engaged in 'repairing' moldering old corpses that he and Turvius had collected from the public dismembering ceremonies or that they had pulled down from the frequent gibbets that lined the leafy streets of Piraktesh. His weekly visits to the executions had earned him a bad name among the families of the executed. Particularly
when he asked for permission to use the remains in his hideous experiments. "At least I asked," he would say when returning with black eyes and soiled clothes.

  Lately he had taken to travelling by night to get his bits - just him and Turvius and their trusty corpse trolley. They were often very late in coming back and this upset Mavis greatly.

  Mavis was perturbed by the eclipse of her influence over Zventibold. She rarely saw him and she spent her time in a whirl of balls, parties and illicit liaisons with cavalry officers. This was what she had always wanted - and Zventibold either did not know or did not care that she was often unfaithful to him. This being the case, Mavis really did not have a reasonable cause for complaint against Zventibold spending time with his dwarf father, but Mavis hated Turvius and was jealous of the way he had won Zventibold's trust.

  Her way of expressing her displeasure with the situation was to sit in her bedroom with a tray of sugared apples, of which she had lately become inordinately fond. She would alternately weep and scream at a portrait of Turvius Sullius which he himself had given to the couple as a wedding present. The likeness was not a good one. It had been done, so the dwarf sorcerer had said, when he was 'young and good looking'. It was considered by everyone else however to be the portrait of another man altogether that Turvius had got cheap in a sale.

  Turvius, for his part, was not fond of Mavis either and often played foul tricks on her with her beloved bananas - a fruit she loved almost as much as sugared apples or courgettes - called by some - zucchinis. Mavis did not know for certain that Turvius had tampered with her bananas - opening them up to put small charms or prickles in them and then stitching them back together with fine thread so that she would not guess. But she suspected - by Hector, she suspected - and this caused her hatred of him to grow even greater, almost as big as a magic beanstalk.

  Months passed and Zventibold despaired of any way to reconcile them. He could not choose between them - his only love - the beautiful Mavis and his dear father Turvius. Again and again Turvius thwarted attempts by Captain Vardo of the Imperial Secret Police to kill the lad, and Zventibold could not but love him for it. But he loved Mavis in deeper and more passionate ways - ways that happened in the dark, with our without candied fruit. He could not give this up willingly.

  It was the beginning of the long Pirakteshi summer and the city was as hot and sticky as a camel's groin. The hot weather aggravated the hatred between Mavis and Turvius. Soon they had decided each to kill the other. Turvius intended to do it in beastly way, probably with something blunt covered in nails and Mavis, being the more delicate female, had decided to poison him with a toxin that would leave Turvius totally paralysed for twenty four hours and then we had got used to not being able to move it would kill him and give him a big surprise. The secondary reason she wanted him alive yet incapable of escape was that she was a lusty girl with strong natural urges. She had never before seduced a hunch backed dwarf and had heard they had tricks up their sleeve; she was hungry for that experience.

  Both of them had thought of their final plan by coincidence at the same time. It was when they were having one of William's special porridge salads that inevitably put them in a bad mood. Having the thought of dreadful murder, they both smiled at each other for the first time in months as they stirred their Wilibongo tea.

  William was a wiser fellow than his face would at first suggest. He had a military background - having served in the Firth Pirakteshi Lancers, a crack cavalry unit, at the time of their most famous victory - the Battle of Nevermore - where they had defeated a gang of card sharps with raven servants. This may not sound a great event, but these enemies were bigger than they looked and who had run William and his Lancer comrades close.

  After leaving the military with an honourable discharge, William had met Nora, or was it Maureen? In any case she was his one and only true love and they had settled down to raise a family. They had to put his youngest son out to stud (when a respectable age) to make ends meet but when he got taken on by Zamborg and Helena Berok, things had been easier and his family gave him great pleasure until, as has been previously recounted, he had to sell them off into slavery due to lack of space at the Palace Berok.

  William was only too aware of the seething hate between Turvius and Mavis but he was loath to disrupt Zventibold's peace of mind by telling him of their plots to kill one the other. Instead he got on with his business of cooking, gardening and opening the door. Hector knew that left him weary enough at the end of the day without getting involved in other peoples' quarrels. As he sat after work in the cupboard in the West Wing that he called home - William wondered who would win. In the end he reckoned that in the death stakes Turvius had the edge, as he had done a lot of murdering in his time, while Mavis was still a comparative novice at death, if not at loving.

  In the end it had been a sordid business. One afternoon Mavis was out for a walk with the sachet of poison she had bought from Jimmy Spots. She kept it close to her at all times in the hope that she might get the chance to filter it in Turvius's daily mead. That day, the day it happened - the small birds sang in the trees. The horses snickered to her from the small paddock where they were exercised. The trees shimmered, their blossom casting a delightful fragrance all around. William dug compost by the shed. Upon rounding a huge Wilibongo tree, Mavis came upon Turvius standing with a huge gnarled club gnarled with door nails. He had called this club 'Mavis Basher' in anticipation. The name proved strangely prescient. Although she attacked him manfully, giving him a nasty slap with the sachet of poison such that he felt it sting mightily, it availed her not. For an hour they stood, trading blow after blow but the outcome was that Turvius was not poisoned, while Mavis was beaten to death.

  Turvius had the smashed corpse of Mavis cleared up by a reluctant William who protested he had not yet done all the compost.

  As William loaded Mavis into the wheelbarrow, Turvius said, "Now William, if you keep this quiet there's a Jell in it for you." He could see from William's troubled frown that he was disquieted. "You needn't worry about any of this William - I'll go and tell the master myself."

  William scratched his nose and pulled at the tufts of hair in his ears. "Well, I don't know, see. There'll be trouble over this, you mark me well. You shouldn't 'ave killed 'is wife. 'E's bound to be upset. What are you going to say?"

  "I'll say she slipped." The dwarf scratched his head. "No, that won't do. I'll just say she had an accident."

  "It was some accident. 'Er 'ead 'as clearly been staved in with your famous Mavis Basher."

  "I see your point."

  "'E's bound to ask, ain't 'e?" said the helpful doorman.

  "I'll find something to say. I'm am tricky and well versed in wordplay."

  "Ar, mighty sorcerer," said William as he trundled the wheelbarrow toward the garden shed.

  "And William," shouted Turvius. "Don't burn her!" With this cryptic statement he went off in a swirl of his gold lame cloak to find Zventibold.

  He finally came across him in the laboratory where the young man was sitting patiently stitching a severed hand to a ragged forearm. "Ah, Turvius," he greeted the dwarf. "Excuse me if I don't get up but I've just about finished this and I don't want to lose my place."

  The dwarf stood where he was in the semi-darkness of the laboratory. The flame of the Bunsen burner powered by corpse gas from the heap of bits in the room downstairs, caused an evil glinting on the arcane symbols that decorated his cloak. Turvius shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He didn't know how to break the news. "Zventibold…" he began. "I…" and then he stopped.

  Zventibold, for his part, did not seem to notice the hunchback's consternation. "Do you know Turvius," he said, "there's no future in these severely mutilated corpses. There's too much needlework to be done. What we need is a nearly whole corpse." He chuckled. "That, however could be rather difficult to obtain with the Autocrat's fad for mutilation. Once he started it all the lesser nobles followed his lead and began to mutilate their victims too. Tho
ugh luckily for us not all of them mince the fellows up small. Nevertheless it has made it a lot more work than it needed to be - the repairing I mean."

  Turvius' face lit up. "In that case, I may have some good news for you. That is - some good news and some bad news if you take my meaning."

  "Some good news and some bad news you say?" queried the young mage.

  "Yes," answered the arch-sorcerer.

  "I see. Well, could I have the good news first?"

  "Of course you may. The good news is that I have a new corpse such as you mention. It is in almost mint condition. With a new head or so it should be perfect for your needs."

  Zventibold got up and laughed out loud. "Oh joy! Oh happy day!" He chuckled and danced slowly round the room. It would be obvious to even the most casual observer that Zventibold's movements were becoming increasingly slow and cumbersome due to the phenomenal development of a sorcerer's hump on his back. The more he studied the black arts the faster it grew. He seemed quite pleased with it even though it did slow him down a little. Perhaps this is what he was thinking as he bobbled in a dance of joy around the specimen tables and half finished bodies he was working on. Then a thought seemed to cross his mind. He stopped and turned towards Turvius Sullius. A terrible idea seemed to be forming itself in his mind. Zventibold was not as stupid as people took him for. The blackness of the idea was enough to dampen his former eager happiness and dismiss the smile of this normally jolly little chap. "Turvius, where did you…?"