by Hugh Cook
When these officials were assembled upon the deck of the good ship Oktobdoj, two children of Wen Endex came forth to meet them. One was a heavyweight in his forties, a confident brute with a cauliflower ear. The other was younger (in his early thirties), lighter in build (indeed, he was positively slender) and less confident (much less, for his watering eyes blinked nervously at the too-bright sunlight).
Had these two men been of Janjuladoola breed, their dealings with the officials might have been delicate and protracted. But, as they were children of Wen Endex, their approach was blunt, direct and unsubtle. It was the heavyweight who did most of the talking.
‘I am Manthandros Trasilika,’ said he. ‘I am here for a reason.’
‘So am I,’ said his slender companion. ‘I am Jean Froissart, a priest of Zoz the Ancestral.’
‘A priest of Zoz?’ said the Janjuladoola-skinned harbourmaster. ‘You a child of Wen Endex yet you claim yourself for Zoz?’
‘He is,’ said the heavyweight, answering before his companion had time to hesitate. ‘For a wazir needs a priest, and I stand before you as your new wazir.’
This pronouncement was so abrupt and unexpected that it was greeted with total silence among the ranks of the officials. The heavyweight betrayed a momentary and uncharacteristic nervousness by tugging at his cauliflower ear. Then his ever-confident voice rolled on:
‘Aldarch the Third has triumphed in Talonsklavara. All dispute in the Izdimir Empire is at an end. To celebrate his victory, Aldarch Three has sent me to Injiltaprajura to assume command of Untunchilamon and to punish those who have usurped rightful authority during the years of civil war.’
‘Then,’ said the representative of the Combined Religious Guild, the first of the officals to adapt to this startling intelligence, ‘you should by rights report to Master Ek immediately.’
So said the worthy Guild representative, then waited. This was the first test. If the newcomers did not know who Master Ek was, then they could hardly be the wazir and priest they claimed to be.
‘Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek has long been in my thoughts,’ said the heavyweight. He pulled a miniature from his pocket and tossed it to the Guild representative. ‘That’s him, isn’t it?’
The Guild representative fielded the miniature. It hurt him to do so, for such an abrupt athletic gesture was not consonant with dignity; nevertheless, he caught the portrait adroitly, moving with an agility which betrayed his secret and shameful addiction to the outlawed sport of ping-pong. The Guild representative studied the miniature. There was no mistaking that face. Gnarled, wizened features. Black teeth. Eyes of pale orange flecked with green. It was without a doubt Master Ek himself. The newcomers had passed the first test.
‘Manthandros Trasilika,’ said the Guild representative. ‘I am Hoboken Ik Tau. In the name of the Combined Religious Guild, I bid you welcome. Welcome to the Laitemata. Welcome to Injiltaprajura. To the shores of Untunchilamon, welcome. Thrice welcome you are. And to you also, Jean Froissart, to you, welcome.’
That was the start of the speech made by Ik Tau, a long speech which it would be tedious to relate in full. But the upshot is that in due course the newcomers were conducted to the presence of Master Ek himself. They took with them a present for that formidable dignitary: a death warrant commanding the immediate execution of Justina Thrug.
CHAPTER NINE
Aquitaine Varazchavardan, wonder-worker of Injiltaprajura, woke late after bad dreams. He had slept beneath a mosquito net without so much as a sheet across his naked body; nevertheless, his skin was greased with sweat as if he had laboured all night at the oars of a galley. He had dreamt that his leucodermic flesh had become tainted with the bloodstone red of Untunchilamon’s native rock. Why? Because he had been hanging suspended from a million spider-threads, each attached to a microscopic fish-hook. While he dangled in agony, a torturer—
‘Enough!’ said Varazchavardan, dismissing the memories of nightmare as he slid out of bed.
Varazchavardan stood upright. A mistake, for the blood escaped from his head. As all colours swooned toward ebony, Varazchavardan sank to a crouch, his right knee protesting with an ominous grikle-grakle-gruk. He squatted like a foetus in the womb. Perfume-padded heat enfolded him. A choking, sweating heat which made him claustrophobic, which made him want to shout and hit out, to rip the air and claw his way to freedom. He felt as if he had been swallowed by a carnivorous flower which was even now crushing the last remnants of sanity from his psyche.
The crisis ebbed, receded.
His moment of near-blindness passed.
Cautiously, he stood.
Then, barefoot and naked, padded across his bedroom’s rough coconut matting to the smooth and slightly slippery wooden slats of the bathroom. Even though the day was so advanced, the bathroom was nevertheless pleasantly cool. Its moist shadows had found favour with a mosquito, an insect swollen by vampiric night-feeding; it clung to dank wooden panelling with a stillness which mimicked paralysis. Varazchavardan, resentful of the Janjuladoola grey of its skin, that grey which had been denied to him by his unfortunate albinism, crushed it with the heel of his hand. Such was the delicacy with which Varazchavardan approached this exquisite task that he actually felt the momentary, slightly rubbery resistance of the mosquito’s tumid flesh. Then the carbon-charcoal of its integument gave way and its body burst asunder, flesh becoming corpse as Varazchavardan smeared a miniscule bloating of someone else’s blood across the panelling.
Varazchavardan smiled slightly, his mood marginally improved by this first pleasure of the day. A second pleasure followed as he pissed upon the shower slats, taking an obscene and somewhat guilty delight in offending against one of the taboos of his people. Then he stepped beneath the first of three gravid shower-sacks, reached up, gripped a plunger between two knuckles and pushed it upwards. This unplugged the nozzle of the shower-sack, aborting its contents. Cold water began to sprinkle down around Varazchavardan. As delightful shocks thrilled through his flesh, he eased the sweat from his skin, careful lest his talons tear his own chalk-white epidermis.
The first shower-sack shrivelled, slackened and collapsed in on itself. The water-flow diminished to a dribble-drip. The pink-eyed albino began lathering his wet, hairless body, whistling as he sent a slippery amber egg glissading over his skin. This egg was pure (unscented) palm oil soap, bought at considerable expense since the product requires considerable chemical ingenuity for its formulation. Despite the pleasure Varazchavardan took in this daily ritual, his whistling was on one note; it sounded for all the world like a monotonous mountain wind lancing through a crack in the roof of a mountain shelter in the high snows of the uplands of Ang.
The second shower-sack served to wash off the soap suds, while the third was reserved for pure sybaritic bliss, letting Varazchavardan devote himself entirely to the exquisite raptures of actually beihg cold, a sensation which allowed him to pretend he was back in Obooloo in winter, a world away from this accursed island of fever dreams and suffocating heat.
He dried himself on a towel of rough cotton then stepped from the cool of his bathroom to the heat of his bedroom. Outside his shuttered windows there bloomed a much-flowering vine, profligate with aromas, one of the myriad plants of the tropics whose names he had never bothered to learn. Once again he considered having it cut down. Once again he rejected the notion, for the cloying, oppressive scent of the plant at least kept him from imagining (as he did at times when his fears took him unawares) that he smelt hot wet blood guttering down the walls.
Varazchavardan dressed, adorning himself in silken ceremonial robes most marvellously embroidered with serpentine dragons ablaze with goldwork and argentry, with emerald and vermilion, with incarnadine and ultramarine. He had once had five such robes, each identical to each, but one had been stolen and three others damaged beyond repair in sundry alarms, confrontations and disasters of the last year.
Then the wonder-worker left his bedroom and ascended to the uppermost store
y of his villa, which was devoted to one single room of prodigious size. Shutters had been taken from the windows, giving him uninterrupted views to the east (a street of grand mansions, including Master Ek’s), the west (Justina’s pink palace), the north (market gardens and the wastelands of Zolabrik beyond) and the south (portside Injiltaprajura and the Laitemata Harbour).
The view gave Varazchavardan no pleasure, for, though this was his sixteenth year on Untunchilamon, he could not look upon its landscapes without aesthetic discomfort. The colours were too hot, in particular the red of bloodstone, the red of red coral, the red of red seaweed, the red sands of Scimitar and the malevolent reds of bloodshot dawns and the slaughter-bath sunsets. Varazchavardan feared that another year with such reds would send him mad. In contrast, the greens (the exuberance of market gardens and deep-gashed overgrown gullies) and blue (sea and sky at times other than dawn and dusk) were minor discomforts.
Nevertheless, while the outlook was not pleasurable, it was most marvellously informative. Varazchavardan saw at a glance that the number of ships in the Laitemata had increased from three to five. A slave was kneeling by Varazchavardan’s breakfast table, and the wonderworker addressed the slave thus:
‘What news of the ships?’
‘Nixorjapretzel Rat waits to make report,’ answered the slave.
‘Show him in once I am finished,’ said Varazchavardan, who had never found young Rat to be an asset to his digestion.
Breakfast was papaya. One papaya. The big, bulbous, yellow-skinned fruit yet awaited the knife. Varazchavardan liked to cut. He felt a special pleasure when he butchered the thin-skinned fruit, quartering its substance to reveal the smooth and succulent orange flesh. Once he had toyed with the idea of dispatching Justina Thrug and her father Lonstantine with equal ease; but when, after long meditation, he had finally tried to realize his fantasy, the task had proved impossible. And now it was too late. Now his reputation was irretrievably soiled and stained by the protestations of loyalty he had been forced to make to Justina.
Varazchavardan dug into the helpless flesh of the papaya. It yielded with much less protest that is made by the surprisingly muscular pulp of an eye when a torturer scoops it from its socket with a sharpened spoon.
‘Ah, Justina, Justina,’ crooned Varazchavardan. And then, adjusting his fantasy: ‘Or shall we say, my dearest beloved Crab.’
‘My lord?’ said his still-squatting slave, not quite catching the import of these words.
‘Ice,’ said Varazchavardan, raising his voice; he did not want even a slave to know that he had taken to talking to himself. ‘Ice, that’s what I want.’
‘My lord,’ said the slave, and erranded away for the desired substance.
On ate Varazchavardan, imagining he was eating crab, or, more precisely, Crab. It was the dreaded Hermit Crab who had compelled him to swear loyalty to Justina. Had Varazchavardan refused, then the Crab would have played unpleasant topological games with the wonder-workers’s flesh. But Aldarch the Third, notoriously stubborn in anger, was unlikely to heed such niceties; as far as Aldarch Three was concerned, Varazchavardan was most surely a traitor. Hence the news brought by the incoming ships was of vital interest and importance to Varazchavardan.
Nevertheless, the sorcerer ate slowly. Surely the ships had brought no news to upset the status quo. For surely any decisive settlement of Talonsklavara (in favour of Aldarch Three or against him) would already have been greeted by public uproar, general riot, arson and execution as adherents of the victorious faction celebrated their triumph at the expense of those loyal to the losers.
Varazchavardan finished his papaya.
Unlike Justina Thrug, the wonder-worker did not proceed to pineapple and flying fish, but crunched some freshly arrived ice and ordered that Nixorjapretzel Rat be shown into his presence. This was done.
Rat, Varazchavardan’s erstwhile apprentice, was now (in theory, at least) a fully fledged sorcerer in his own right. Wonder-working, however, was not young Nixor-japretzel’s strong suit. His endeavours in this direction tended to be disastrous; to give but one example, when Rat had first joined the members of Injiltaprajura’s Cabal House in their traditional quest to turn lead into gold, he had managed to turn every piece of gold in the building into fragmented lead.
Rat had lately found employment with the Empress Justina; he was working as her liaison officer, which at least had the advantage of keeping him too busy to get into mischief. Furthermore, this arrangement gave Varazchavardan yet another source of intelligence, albeit a somewhat unreliable source.
‘Greetings, achaan Varazchavardan,’ said Rat, making reverence to his teacher.
Varazchavardan made no reply whatsoever. He merely crunched some more ice.
‘The Empress Justina has received reports of the latest arrivals,’ said Rat. ‘One is a general trader; the other, a brothel ship.’
So said Rat. However, he spoke in Janjuladoola, therefore his report was not as brief and blunt as it may appear in translation. For Janjuladoola is a language which lends itself to studied elegance and considerable prolixity; and Rat availed himself of both those features, using for ‘general trader’ a circumlocution which translates literally as ‘dealer-in-all-from-lapis-lazuli-and-fresh-spinach-to-the-aroma-of-mountain-clouds-of-the-Singlaramonoktidad-region-and-ballast-of-that-type-in-which-conglomerate-rock-predominates’.
Varazchavardan’s reply was similarly embroidered, though it can be translated very simply, thus:
‘Whence comes this knowledge?’
‘Canoes were on the water when the ships arrived,’ said Rat. ‘They asked, they were answered.’
‘And what of the Izdimir Empire?’ said Varazchavardan.
‘Of that they say only that it is as it was,’ said Rat.
The ships had claimed they departed from Yestron shortly before a decisive battle, a battle which must surely have become a part of history by now. Rat had heard this rumouring yet failed to report it to Varazchavardan. No deep plot, conspiracy or manoeuvring was here involved; the Rat had simply forgotten this detail.
‘Is that all?’ said Varazchavardan. ‘Or is there some small yet important detail which you have forgotten?’
Rat thought about it then answered:
‘Oh yes. That’s right. The brothel ship is called the Oktobdoj and there’s a two-dragon fee just to get aboard to inspect.’
‘Then,’ said Varazchavardan, ‘I suggest you exert yourself by turning ice cubes to dragons. Or damns at least.’
‘My master flatters me with his confidence,’ said Rat, entirely missing the ironic force of this invitation.
Rat, intending to attempt the transformation on the spot, focused his attention on the amphora which held Varazchavardan’s ice cubes, extended his hands and said:
‘Bamaka! Ba—’
‘Not here!’ said Varazchavardan in unconcealed alarm.
‘Oh,’ said a somewhat crestfallen Rat. ‘Then where?’
‘I suggest you make the experiment on Island Scimitar,’ said Varazchavardan. ‘That way, if it should succeed, your wealth will be less likely to come to the attention of the Inland Revenue.’
‘Oh,’ said Rat. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Oh, and there’s one more thing. The conjuror Odolo waits without, whatever for I’ve no idea. He craves an audience.’
‘Then show him in,’ said Varazchavardan moodily.
Whereupon Justina’s messenger boy withdrew, returning shortly with the conjuror Odolo, an oliveskinned foreigner of unknown nationality.
‘Your mission?’ said Varazchavardan bluntly.
‘I come from Justina on a mission of some sensitivity,’ said Odolo, glancing at Rat.
‘Nixorjapretzel!’ said Varazchavardan. ‘Vanish!’
‘As you wish,’ said Rat, somewhat offended by this abrupt dismissal.
Then the young sorcerer raised his hands and cried out in his most imposing of voices:
‘Foo! Fa-brok! Fajanthamoglostima! Ka!’
Thunder burped, lightning fizzled through the air with a sound similar to that made by a fire when it is abruptly extinguished by a bucket of water, and Nixorjapretzel Rat vanished. Where he had stood, nothing whatsoever could be seen except a boiling cloud the colour of octopus ink.
‘Oh, get out of here!’ said Varazchavardan in disgust. ‘As you wish,’ said the cloud in a muffled voice.
Then it perambulated away to the stairs and descended. Perhaps it could not see properly, for its departure was followed by the heavy sound of someone falling downstairs and a brief cry of pain (or was it surprise?). Then there was the sound of loud-voiced argument between cloud and house slaves, a hiatus, the sound of a door slamming emphatically, another hiatus, then the confused sounds of combat between a purple cloud and a bewildered but belligerent mange dog.
All that time, Aquitaine Varazchavardan sat chewing ice cubes, endeavouring to intimidate Odolo through application of silence. Odolo displayed no anxiety, but waited patiently until Varazchavardan deigned to speak.
‘Now,’ said the wonder-worker, as the noise of that battle receded into the distance, ‘what was it you wished to talk to me about?’
Odolo then explained about the destruction of the airship.
‘The Empress Justina saw it,’ said Odolo. ‘The thing came apart and was carried into the sky.’
‘It was poorly made, then,’ said Varazchavardan.
‘The wizard who built the thing protests that such spontaneous destruction is impossible,’ said Odolo. ‘He declares it must have been masterminded by the Cabal House.’
‘Very likely,’ said Varazchavardan sourly.
He did not elaborate. He had no need to. Both Odolo and Varazchavardan knew that Injiltaprajura’s wonderworkers were largely loyal to Aldarch Three, the dreaded Mutilator of Yestron. It was an open secret that Varazchavardan would have liked to give his loyalty to the said Mutilator. Unfortunately, the Hermit Crab of the island of Jod had forced Varazchavardan into an alliance with the Empress Justina. And Aldarch Three, a notable exponent of unreason, was most unlikely to forgive that alliance.
