“Come on, baby,” Zefla said. Sharrow had handed her the binoculars; Miz watched through another pair of field-glasses.
“Put some effort in there,” Miz muttered.
Sharrow looked at Dloan, squinting in the same direction. His hands gripped the bark rail of the tavern porch, squeezing and releasing unconsciously.
She watched the stom as it struggled higher in the air, still beset by the scrappy, mobbing shapes of the monkey-eaters.
One of them was still falling.
The four of them had come out here for dinner at an inn called The Pulled Nail on the outskirts of the town after a day spent sightseeing. Cenuij hadn’t been in touch since they’d left him at the door of the monastery hospital the night before; he was supposed to be trying to get an audience with the King. He would leave word at the inn if he had anything to report.
Pharpech in daylight hadn’t looked so bad. The people seemed friendly enough, though their accent was difficult to understand, and they had decided halfway through the day that they’d buy local clothes tomorrow; theirs made them too conspicuous, and people tended to ask them—in those strange accents, and with a hint of incredulity—what had possessed them to come to a place like Pharpech.
One of the things she’d found it hard to get used to was how difficult it was to access information. All it really meant, most of the time, was that you had to resort to rather obvious methods like asking people directions, or what a certain building was; nevertheless it was unsettling, and despite all her supposed maturity and sophistication she had the unnerving feeling that she was a child again, trapped in a baffling world of mysterious intent and arcane significance, forever making guesses at how it all worked but never knowing exactly the right questions to ask.
The first thing they’d done, on the advice of their two guides who were setting off back to the border that morning, was take their jemer mounts to a stable on the outskirts of town, where they sold the creatures—after much haggling on Miz’s part—for slightly more than they’d paid for them. Then they became tourists for the day.
They had seen the great square in daylight, its flat, mostly un-roofed buildings crowded round the sloped paving stones like a strange rectangular crowd of people, all squashed up shoulder-to-shoulder, grimly determined not to miss whatever was going on in the square (and yet most of them were gaily painted and sported bright, full awnings, hiding little workshops and stalls like shiny shoes peeking out from under the just-raised skirts of their canopies).
They had found the people fairly fascinating, too. A few of them rode on jemers though most were on foot like them, the crowding majority of them colorfully if simply dressed, but—apart from their almost invariably pale skin—far more physically varied than they were used to; very fat people, unhealthily gaunt people, people in dirty rags, people with deformities…
They had viewed the castle from the outside; three stone stories that looked planned and passing symmetrical, topped by a ramshackle excrescence of Entraxrln timber stacked and tacked and piled and leaning to produce a vertical warren of apartments, halls and the occasional grudged-looking concession to defense in the shape of gawky, teetering towers and forlorn stretches of battlement, all of it dotted randomly with windows and protrusions and capped by a few creaky towers pointing uncertainly toward the layers of leaf-membrane above as though in puzzled inquiry.
The rest of the town had been confusing, repetitive, occasionally riotous. The cathedral was small and disappointing; even its bell, which rang out each hour, sounded flat. The only really interesting feature the cathedral possessed was a stone statue of the Pharpechian God on the outside of the building, having various unpleasant things done to Him by small, fiendishly grinning Pharpechian figures armed with farming implements and instruments of torture.
They had walked the narrow streets, tramping up and down narrow lanes and twisting alleys, dodging water thrown from upstairs windows, treading in rotting vegetables and worse, continually finding themselves back where they had started, and often being followed by crowds of children—so many children—and sometimes adults, many of whom seemed to want to take them home or show them round personally. Zefla smiled generously at the more persistent proto-guides and talked quickly in High Judicial Caltaspian to them, usually leaving them bobbing in her wake looking beatifically bemused.
By lunchtime they were exhausted. They returned to the inn, then kept to the outskirts of the town in the afternoon, passing the high walls of various monasteries and prisons, a school and a hospital. The monastery hospital where Cenuij had been given a bed for the night looked closed and deserted, though they could hear muted curse-singing over the high walls.
They found the royal zoo; a sad moldering of cages and pits where sick animals paced to and fro or threw themselves at fire-hardened bars, snarling. A glide-monkey troupe huddled in a corner of their net-roofed pit, their connective limb membranes wrapped round them like cloaks, their large eyes peeking out fearfully. A tangle-tooth paced back and forward in a small cage, head down, its emaciated body containing in its movements only an echo of the animal’s lithe power. One huge, bare cage contained a full-grown stom, sitting crouched by one wall, its wings tied and splinted, its snout and legs scarred and cut. Even while they watched, appalled at the size of the animal and the painful squalidness of its situation, the beast raised its meter-long head and hit it off the wall a few times, drawing dark-purple blood.
“Why is its wing splinted?” Zefla asked a zoo-keeper.
“Not exactly splinted, lady; more tied up,” the keeper replied. He carried a bucket full of something bloody and gently steaming. Sharrow wrinkled her nose and moved upwind. The keeper shook his head and looked serious. “See, she just roars and beats her wings against the bars of the cage all day if you don’t tie her up.”
They didn’t stay long in the royal zoo.
The town became farmland quite suddenly, the streets leading past the various walled institutions straight into fields, where the membrane-beds stretched like neat lines of straked, fresh wounds into the distance and the serried plants of the Entraxrln’s secondary or tertiary ecology sat troughed and still. A field-guard recommended the tavern, a kilometer away along one of the raised scar-tissue roads.
They sat on the terrace of The Pulled Nail, eating surprisingly subtly cooked meats and vegetables; then Dloan pointed out the stom as it flew down the dulling light of the evening from a distant gap in the second-highest membrane level; the beast turned, carving the air, heading for a composite trunk and the specks of a glide-monkey troupe. But the monkey-eater birds roosting further up the trunk-space had seen the reptile and stooped, their cries faint but furious through the still air, and began to mob the single black giant. It had turned, something resigned but almost amused about its delicately lumbering, slow-motion movements; a calm core of stolidity set amongst the jerky whizzings of the monkey-eaters, electrons to its weighty nucleus.
She supposed they were what people saw as noble beasts, something of their perceived authority evident in the fact they were one of the few species of Miykennsian fauna that had an original name, rather than a Golterian fix-up.
She could feel the others wanting the stom to escape unharmed, as it surely would, but only she, she thought, had seen the tiny gray-green scrap of one monkey-eater fly too close to the head of the stom; she’d had Zefla’s binoculars, and seen the bird skim daringly close to that huge head, and had a fleeting impression of the snapping jaws closing on it, wounding it, winging it as the bird was pulled off course across the air before escaping in a small, brief cloud of gray-green, and starting to fall.
It was falling still.
She could still just see it, naked-eyed now.
It was spiraling quickly down, five hundred meters beneath where it had been savaged, still trying to fly but only managing a half-braked helical dive toward the ground below.
Above it, just behind it, matching its hopeless, graceless, desperate tumble with a more controlle
d and smooth spiral of its own, another bird was keeping close station, refusing to leave its fellow.
She followed them both. The two dots were soon lost in the groundscape of undulating membrane matting in the distance. When she looked up again, the stom had made it back through the gap in the leaf-membrane a kilometer above. The other monkey-eaters gave up the chase and Miz, Zef and Dlo made appreciative noises and sat down to their meal again.
She sat down too, after a while.
She ate her meal slowly, not joining in the conversation, often glancing at the region where the two birds had disappeared, and only took a drink of her wine when one bird reappeared flying slowly, as though tired, flapping effortfully upward, toward the columnar colony that was its home, alone.
13
At The Court Of The Useless Kings
His Majesty King Tard the Seventeenth, Lord of Despite, Seventy-fourth of the Useless Kings, Lord Protector and Master of Pharpech, its Dominions, Citizens, Lower Classes, Animals and Women, Prime Detester of God The Infernal Wizard, Exchequer of the Mean and Guardian of the Imperial Charter, sat on the Stom Throne in the castle’s Great Hall, squinting narrow-eyed at the skinny, suspiciously clever-looking monk kneeling on the throne steps in front of him.
The throne room was a dark and smoky place. It was devoid of windows so that God couldn’t see in and it stank of cloying scents emanating from smoking censers because that kept His unquiet spirit entering. The throne was at one end of the room, and the King’s dozen or so courtiers and secretaries sat on small stools stationed on the steps of the throne’s square dais, their stature and significance expressed by how far up the dais steps and how close to the royal presence they were allowed to sit.
The Stom Throne—carved in the shape of one of the great flying reptiles, its wings forming the sides of the throne, its back the seat and its bowed head functioning as a foot-rest—swung gently in the air above the dais, hanging by wires from the incense-blackened barrel-ceiling of the room and held just a few centimeters off the time-dulled and threadbare carpet spread across the top of the dais.
His courtiers said the throne was suspended like this to symbolize his authority and elevation above the common herd, but he just liked the way you could make the throne swing if you rocked back and forward a lot. Two very large, quiet Royal Guardsmen stood on the broad tail of the Stom Throne, armed with laser-carbines disguised as muskets; sometimes he’d get them to join in the swinging. If you got people to kneel close to the throne and then started to swing while they were talking, you could get the big carved beak of the Stom Throne to thump them in the chest or head and make them retreat off the dais, where officially he didn’t have to listen to them. He was thinking about doing that to this monk.
It was unusual for this sort of person to be presented to him; usually his courtiers kept them out. He always got suspicious of his courtiers when they did something out of character. He knew that—naturally—they feared and respected him, but sometimes he thought they wouldn’t be beyond talking behind his back or having little plans of their own.
Anyway, he didn’t like the monk’s face. There was something too narrow and sharp and penetrating about it, and there was a look of amused contempt about his expression that suggested he found the King or his Kingdom ridiculous. He distrusted the monk instantly. People had died for less. A lot less.
One of his courtiers mumbled into his ear about the monk’s mission. The King was mildly surprised by what he was told, but still suspicious.
“So,” he said to the monk, “you are of an Order which also despises the Great Infernal Wizard.”
“Indeed, your gracious Majesty,” the monk said, looking down modestly at the carpet. His voice sounded respectful. “Our Belief—perhaps not so dissimilar from your own, more venerable and more widely followed creed—is that God is a Mad Scientist and we His experimental subjects, doomed forever to run the Maze of Life through apparently random and unjust punishments for meaningless and paltry rewards and no discernible good reason save His evil pleasure.”
The King stared at the skinny monk. The man’s accent was off-putting and his language complicated, but he had the odd impression that the monk had actually been complimentary just there. He leaned forward in the gently swinging throne.
“D’you hate God too?” he said, wrinkling his nose and frowning.
The skinny monk, clad in a black cassock embellished only with a small metal box tied on a thong round his neck, smiled in an odd way and said, “Yes, Your Majesty. We do, with a vengeance.”
“Good,” the King said. He sat back and studied the skinny monk. The monk glanced at the courtier who’d briefed the King, but the courtier kept shaking his head. One did not speak to the King until one was spoken to.
The King prided himself on being something of a statesman; he knew the value of having allies, even though the Kingdom itself was quite self-sufficient and under no immediate external threat. There were bandits and rebels in the deep country, as ever, and the usual closet reformers in the Kingdom and even the court, but the King knew how to deal with them; you asked a courtier and got them to check how they’d been dealt with in the past. Still, times changed on the outside even if they didn’t change here, and it never did any harm to have people in the world beyond who sympathized with Pharpech, and it had always annoyed the King that so few people out there seemed to have heard of his realm.
He’d quiz this monk. “How many of there are you?”
“Here in your realm, Your Majesty? Only myself, of our Order—”
He shook his head. “No, everywhere. How many of you altogether?”
The skinny monk looked sad. “We number only a few thousand at the moment, Your Majesty,” he admitted. “Though many of us are in positions of some power where we must, of course, keep our beliefs secret.”
“Hmm,” said the King. “Who’s your leader?”
“Majesty,” the monk said, looking troubled, “we have no leader. We have a parliament, a gathering of equals in which each man is his own high priest, and in that lies our problem.” The skinny monk looked up and smiled with more warmth. “You see, Your Majesty, I have come humbly, on behalf of all my fellows, to petition you to become our spiritual leader.”
Petitions petitions petitions. The King was heartily sick of petitions. But at least this one was from outside the Kingdom, from people who didn’t owe him everything anyway and so had a damn cheek petitioning him for anything…No, this came from people who were doing it because of their respect for him and what he represented. He rather liked the idea.
“Spiritual leader?” he said, trying not to sound too taken with the title.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said the skinny monk. “We seek your approval of our humble creed because you are the head of a like-minded faith which has survived for many centuries, and so gives us hope. We wish to ask for your blessing, and—if you would be so kind as to grant it—for the ultimate blessing of your becoming head of our church. We would undertake to do nothing to disgrace your name, and to do everything to help honor the name of yourself and the Kingdom of Pharpech.” The monk looked touchingly modest. “Majesty, please believe we do not wish to impose upon your renowned good nature and generosity, but such is our heartfelt respect for you, and so great is our desire to gain your approval—undeserving wretches though we may be—that we felt we would be derelict in our duties to our faith if we did not approach you.”
The King looked confused. He didn’t want to give his blessing to people who were undeserving wretches. He had enough of those already.
“What?” he said. “You’re saying you’re undeserving wretches?”
The skinny monk looked uncertain for a second, then bowed his head. “Only compared to you, Your Majesty. Compared to the unbelievers, we are the deserving and enlightened. As the saying has it; modesty is most effective when it is uncalled for.” The skinny monk smiled up at him again. His eyes looked moist.
The King didn’t quite understand tha
t last remark—probably due to the skinny monk’s odd accent—but he knew the little fellow thought he’d said something mildly witty, and so made a little polite laughing noise and looked round his courtiers, nodding at them, so that they laughed and nodded at each other too. The King prided himself on being able to put people at their ease in this manner.
“Good monk,” he said, sitting back in the Stom Throne and adjusting his day-robe around him as the great throne swung gently, “I am minded to accept your humble request.” The King smiled. “We shall talk further, I think.” He put on his wise expression, and the skinny monk looked almost pathetically pleased. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands.
How touching! the King thought.
He waved one hand graciously to the side, making a curl in the thick incense smoke. He indicated a couple of clerks standing to one side, holding cushions on which sat large flattish objects: ornate metal boxes. “Now, I understand you have brought Us some presents…”
“Indeed, Your Majesty,” the skinny monk said, glancing round as the clerks came shuffling forward. They stood in a line at his side. He took the box from the first of the clerks and held it up to the King. It looked like a larger version of the little box on the thong round his neck. “It is a book, your Majesty.” He fiddled with the lock on the metallic box.
“A book?” the King said. He sat forward in the throne, gripping the edges of the Stom’s wings. He hated books. “A book?” he roared. His courtiers knew he hated books! How could they let this simpering cur come before him if they knew he’d come bearing books? He looked furiously at the nearest courtiers. Their expressions changed instantly from smirking satisfaction to shocked outrage.
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