Walking on Glass

by Iain Banks

  "Now then," Quiss said.

  "That was horrible!" the attendant wailed.

  "I'll do it again and leave you there unless you tell me where the seneschal is."

  "The who? No! Don't! I-"

  "Right!" Quiss said, and dumped the scullion's head back into the now half-full bucket. He dragged it back out. The small creature's head lolled slightly on its shoulders and its arms flopped by its side.

  "Tell you what," it said, breathing with some difficulty, "Let's both find somebody we can ask -"

  "No!" Quiss shouted. He held the weakly struggling thing by one leg this time. He considered: surely things weren't so utterly disorganised in the kitchens that the scullions no longer knew who was in charge of them, or where his office was? Had things come to such a pass? It was a bad show, Quiss thought, shaking his head. The attendant had stopped struggling. He looked down, remembered what he was doing, said "Oh," and yanked the limp scullion out, dripping gruel. He shook it for a while until it gurgled and moved its head weakly. "Are you willing to talk yet?"

  "Oh, shit, all right," the attendant said weakly.

  "Good." Quiss walked over to a large range of working surfaces, hotplates, sinks and racks; he sat the scullion down on a flat surface, only for steam to issue suddenly from its rear; it squawked and jumped up. Quiss apologised for setting it down on a hotplate, put it on a draining board instead, and splashed some water over its mask-face.

  "It's like this, you see," the scullion said, wiping its mask. "We've started this new regime to make things more interesting down here. When people ask us a question some of us always tell the truth and some of us always tell the opposite. Some of us give correct answers and some of us give incorrect answers, but we're always consistent, you see?"

  "No I don't see," Quiss said, looking into the face mask. Sitting on the tall range, its small legs sticking out over the bright brass rail which acted both as a safety barrier round the hotplates and as a place to hang grubby kitchen towels, the small attendant's face was almost at the same level as the human's. Quiss waited for the scullion to draw breath, and looked round the kitchens again as it did so.

  There were very few attendants visible. He was sure there had been more when he first arrived; they had been scuttling about all over the place, carrying implements, standing on stools stirring steaming mixtures, chopping things and throwing bits and pieces into cauldrons. Some of them had been mopping the floor; some washing plates and cups; some just running, not carrying anything, but speedy and purposeful all the same.

  Now he could see only a few shadowy figures half-glimpsed through the mists of the cooking fumes. He wrinkled his nose at the smells, thinking that the cowardly little wretches were trying to keep out of his way. He hoped their cooking burned. The scullion on the draining board started talking again.

  "Well, it means that you've got to approach the problem in a logical manner, you understand? It's another sort of game. You have to work out the right questions to find out what you want to know, see?"

  "Oh," Quiss said sweetly, smiling pleasantly, "yes, I see."

  "You do?" the scullion said brightly, sitting up. "Oh, good."

  Quiss picked up the small attendant by the front of its cloak and brought its blank face up to his own, scraping the creature's green boots over the surface of the draining board with a rattling noise.

  "You tell me how to get to the seneschal's office," Quiss said evenly, "or I shall boil you alive, understand?"

  "Strictly speaking, that isn't a well-formed question," the scullion croaked, choking as Quiss's fist tightened the material round its throat.

  "Strictly speaking, you're going to be dead very soon unless you give me the right instructions." Quiss grabbed the scullion from the range, tucked it under his arm, and walked away from the entrance, straight ahead towards the centre of the kitchen.

  The noises of the place went on around him, muffled only slightly by the mists and vapours; he could hear shouted instructions and curses, the clanking of ladles and giant spatulas, the hiss and splutter of frying, the sloshing of water and soups, the grating of giant pans being moved, the machine-gun chatter of chopping knives. Overhead, apart from the whispering air ducts, he heard a creaking noise, interspersed with a light clinking and clanking. Quiss looked up to see an overhead cable-car system of what looked like lengths of knotted string and bits of chain, running through little metal wheels set in the ceiling and carrying, on small hooks, cups and mugs and plates (so that was why they had a hole at the edge), forks and spoons and knives of every description. They sailed overhead and swayed with the slightly erratic action of the cableway holding them, bumping into each other now and again and so producing the clinking noise just audible over the din.

  Quiss heard rapid footsteps approaching through the racket, and ahead of him he saw two small scullions running towards him out of the mist. The hindmost attendant was holding what looked like a large loaf of bread, and was using it to hit the minion in front, which was running almost doubled up, its little gloved hands held over its head, where the pursuing scullion was raining blows with the loaf.

  Three metres in front of Quiss they saw the tall human and skidded to a stop, in unison. They looked intently at him, then at each other, then executed a smart about-face; the scullion with the loaf threw it at the other, who caught it and started to hit the other minion over the head with it as they ran back into the mist the way they had come, their figures - one crouched almost double, one striking out with the loaf of bread - and their running footsteps quickly absorbed by the rolling mists.

  Quiss shook his head and marched on, the scullion tucked under his arm, not struggling. He caught sight of a few others, but they turned tail and vanished when they saw him through the mist. He called out to them, but they didn't come back. There must, he thought, be thousands of these small attendants, waiters, scullions, masons, miners, mechanics and general helpers and dogsbodies in the place and around it; he knew something about provisioning and logistics, and the castle's kitchens could have provided ten-course meals every few hours for an army of tens of thousands. It all seemed too large, too over-provided-for to feed them and the stunted attendants, even if there were a few more of them than they'd seen until now (and they were always complaining about being short-staffed, anyway).

  Even the scale looked wrong. The kitchens appeared to have been designed for human use, judging from the height of the working surfaces and the sheer size of the ladles, pots and pans and other pieces of equipment. Hence the scullions having to use small stools to stand on when they wanted to do anything like wash up dishes, stir soups or work controls. They seemed to have their own stools, Quiss had observed; they carried them on their backs as they made their way from one range to another, and Quiss had seen quite violent fights and rows breaking out over the disputed ownership of one of the small three-legged platforms.

  They came to a sort of crossroads in the kitchens. They were well out of sight of the broad flight of steps Quiss had entered the kitchens from, at a point where he could continue ahead into the mist, or turn either right or left, past huge fat stoves holding great rotund cauldrons of some bubbling, frothing liquid. The soot-black metal of the stoves was carved with grotesque faces from which a dark heat beat out at Quiss. A yellow-red light jetted out from the eye-holes of the distorted faces, like a bright beam shining through a keyhole in a door. Leaking wisps of smoke wormed their way out from the sides of the stoves" doors, adding a pungent aroma of something like burning coal to the medley of smells produced by the man-high vats bubbling away on top of the bulging, flattened-looking stoves.

  Quiss looked around. He could see a few of the other scullions nearby, standing on their stools stirring pots, wiping stoves, polishing stove-fronts. They were all studiously avoiding meeting his gaze, though he thought they were watching him out of the sides of their eyes. He brought the minion he had under his arm out, lifted it up to look into its blank face. "Which way?" he asked it. It looked abo
ut, pointed left.

  "That way."

  He stuffed it back under his arm, marched off to the left past the heavy black stoves, through their radiated heat. The scullions ahead of him got down off their stools and waddled away, disappearing in the kitchens" foggy wastes. "Are you sure you wouldn't like to ask more complicated questions?" the small attendant said, muffledly, from his side. He ignored it. "I mean, 'Which way?' is a bit basic, wouldn't you agree?"

  "Now which way?" He brought it up, let it look about as they came to another junction, the cauldrons at their backs, great stone tubs set in the floor and covered with some sort of green scum on either side. The attendant shrugged.

  "Left."

  Quiss went that way. The attendant under his arm said, "That wasn't exactly what I meant; just adding a 'now' on to the start doesn't really make much difference. With respect I don't think you've got the idea of the sort of questions you have to ask. It's quite easy once you get the hang of it. Really, I'm surprised you haven't encountered puzzles like this before. Think carefully."

  "Which way here?"

  "That way." The scullion sighed and pointed with its arm. It said, "I'm probably saying more than I should, but as I'm giving you the information without you asking for it, I don't think it's covered by the rules. All I'd say is that what you have to do is to ask questions which although are apparently about what you want to do... where you want to get to, should really be telling you about the person you're -"

  "Where now?"

  "Left again. Do you see what I mean? What you're really finding out is the truth-telling status of the person you're getting the information from, so that - " Quiss half listened to all this as he watched, suspiciously, the same cableway of cutlery and cups squeak and rattle its way overhead," - you can find out two things... no, wait a minute, come to think of it you're finding... hmm. Let me think about this."

  Quiss looked at the black stoves, the strange faces cast in hot metal, the giant vats of liquid. He made a rising, growling noise at the back of his throat and brought the scullion out from under his arm, looking into its mask-face again. "We're back where we started, you lice-brained dwarf!"

  "Well, I did warn you."

  "Cretin!" Quiss screamed into its face. He saw a cauldron to one side with its lid hanging above it, suspended on a pulley. He hoisted the scullion up and threw the creature into the huge vat. The scullion's whines and yelps disappeared in a series of gruelly splashes which spurted from the top of the big tub. Quiss slapped his hands together and turned. Almost immediately he was surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of the small attendants. They flowed from every avenue of the kitchen, a waist-high tide of grubby, grey-cowled figures rushing in towards him, their coloured boots, sashes and hat-brims swirling out of the mist. Quiss experienced the tiniest moment of fear, then savage anger, and was about to go down fighting - take as many of the little bastards with him as he could - when he realised that they were bowing and wringing their hands and making apologetic noises, not howling angry ones. He relaxed.

  "I tell the truth! I tell the truth, honest I do!" one was shouting, and it and a few others tugged at the lower edges of the few furs he still had on and pulling on his under-breeches where they appeared out of the top of his boots. He let them lead him away, straight ahead between the rows of cauldrons. Other scullions were running in with ladders and lengths of rope, climbing up on to the big stove and scrambling up to the messy lip of the vat in which, judging by the amount of splashing and screaming, the small attendant still survived.

  Quiss was led by the dwarfish scullions, through the banked ranges, past gleaming tubs, boiling vats, open fires and grills, past rows of massive, wing-nutted pressure cookers guarded by blast screens, under huge n-shaped pipes, bubbling and gurgling and leaking steam, and over the dainty, counter-sunk tracks of a narrow-gauge railway until eventually he saw a wall ahead, and was led up a rickety wooden staircase to a narrow gantry, then stopped at a small wooden door set into the wall. One of the attendants rapped on the door, then they all scampered off, a display of multi-coloured boots flashing along the wooden gantry until they vanished into the mist. The door was thrown open. The castle seneschal glared out at Quiss.

  He was a tall, thin man of indeterminate age, with hairless grey skin and dressed in a long black robe without ornament save for a small silver fork with twisted tines which hung on a piece of string round his neck, and rested on the black breast of the robe. The seneschal's eyes were long, seemingly stretched out at either side as though the eyeballs within were the size of clenched fists. His right eye had two pupils in it, side by side in the grey whites. "Now what?" he barked when he saw Quiss standing there.

  "Guess," Quiss said, putting his hands on his hips and leaning forward, glaring back at the seneschal, who stood blocking the doorway into his office. "There still isn't any heat up there; we're freezing to death and we can't see to play this absurd game. If you can't get more heat up there, let us move the games room down a few floors."

  "Not possible. The boilers are being repaired. Full power soon. Be patient."

  "It's difficult to be patient when you're dying of hypothermia."

  "The engineers are working as fast as they can."

  "So they can reheat our corpses?"

  "I'll order more furs."

  "We can hardly walk for the weight of the ones we've got; what good will those do? Haven't you got any thermal underwear, or even heaters? Couldn't you build a fireplace? We could burn books. There are plenty up there."

  "Shouldn't do that," the seneschal said, shaking his head. "Aren't two the same. All unique. Don't have two copies of any of "em."

  "Well they still burn - they would still burn well. "Quiss had to be careful. He'd already burned quite a few wallfuls, and had come down, under protest, as much to keep Ajayi happy as anything else. She had complained about the waste, and said they shouldn't have to burn books to keep warm; it offended her. Besides, she had said, perhaps they would take more time repairing the heating system if they knew the two of them were able to keep warm without it. It was a bad precedent to set. He had grumbled but agreed. The seneschal said,

  "Shouldn't be too long. I'll have some hot bricks sent up."

  "What?"

  "Big hot bricks; glow red hot in the stoves; I'll have some sent up every mealtime; should last until next one; you can warm hands on them. Surprising amount of heat thrown out. When they've cooled down a bit you can put them in your bed, warm it up nice. You'll be as warm as toast."

  "Hot bricks? Is that all you can offer? Exactly how long until the boilers are fixed?"

  The seneschal shrugged, studied the carving on the edge of the door he was holding, then said, "Not long. You'd best get back to your game now." The seneschal came out of his room, shutting the door quickly and taking Quiss by the upper arm. He led him back along the wooden gantry to the steps. "I'll show you out."

  "Good," Quiss said, "there's a few questions I want answered. First of all, where does all this food go? You must make about a hundred times more than you need. What do you do with it?"

  "Recycled," the seneschal said as they came to the steps and went down them.

  "Why bother making it all, then?"

  "Never know who might drop in," the seneschal said. Quiss looked at him to see if he was serious. One of the seneschal's two right pupils seemed to be looking at him. "Keeps them in practice, anyway," he continued, suddenly grinning at the tall old man as they walked between the levels of stoves and cookers and fires. Scullions ran about the place, carrying brooms and buckets and baskets full of hidden ingredients. They were all very careful, no matter how fast they were going and how urgent their task seemed to be, to avoid getting under the feet of Quiss or the seneschal. "Yes. Keeps them occupied. Out of mischief," the grey-skinned man said.

  Quiss "hmm'd to himself. Well, he could understand that, but he still thought it was a wasteful way of keeping the lower ranks occupied, and it didn't square at all with the continu
al excuses the seneschal and his minions kept making about being under-staffed. He would let it pass for now. "Where does it come from? I've yet to see anything except weeds grow in this place,"

  The seneschal shrugged. "Where did you come from?" he said darkly. Quiss narrowed his eyes at the pupil which seemed to be looking at him, indeed out of the corner of its eye. He thought the better of pressing on that one too.

  They came to the place where Quiss had seen the inset tracks of the narrow-gauge railway. A small train, hauled by a tiny steam engine and comprising double-bogied cars carrying three sealed, hissing cauldrons each, trundled slowly by, wheels screeching and clattering over a set of points. Quiss and the seneschal stopped, watching the train pass in front of them, disappearing into the steam and smoke of the kitchens with a cacophony of rattles, hisses and clanks, and a single, strangled whistle-blast. Then they walked on, Quiss swallowing a question concerning the train's destination.

  There was a muffled explosion somewhere on their right, and a thick orange glow spread through the mist, like a setting sun. There was a clattering noise and some howls. The orange glow to their right faded but did not disappear. The seneschal glanced at it briefly but did not appear excessively worried, even when - after a few moments - the scullions running past and round them were all carrying pails of water and sand, fire blankets, cutting gear and stretchers.

  "That's another thing," Quiss said as they came closer to where he had dumped the mendacious scullion in the cauldron. "With all this equipment for moving things about the place," he gestured up towards the moving line of clinking cutlery above their heads, looping under the assorted ducting and swivelled prisms of the kitchens" ceiling, "not to mention the clock mechanism and transmission set-up and the complicated plumbing for the floors and ceilings