by Dave Freer
So he dropped it into the funnel. And then he ducked fast, faster than the old man, because he still had some cat-reflexes. The grey goop in the bath erupted with an explosive woomph! It wasn’t grey anymore but burning. The suspended wheel spun so fast it shook itself loose and crashed into the wall in a shower of glass. The old man danced around stomping on burning bits, swearing in a way that filled Tom with a degree of admiration and awe. Cats instinctively understand the value and power of cursing and swearing.
Tom was less admiring about the smell of roasted rat… although it made him hungry, which was odd.
Eventually, the magician stopped swearing, and turned on Tom. “I’ll need another rat,” he snarled. “And get a broom and clean this mess up.”
Tom was still new to the job of being a human famulus. “It took me ages to catch that rat. It was my dinner!”
He got a clout on the ear that was so unexpected he didn’t even manage to dodge. But it did obviously set a train of thought going in the old man. “You’ll have to eat bread and cheese. I need the rats. But I could use some food too. I hadn’t thought of it for a while. Humph. I will have to arrange for you to learn to cook.”
Tom stood wary, ready to duck any more blows, and ready to run again. He would have run a good few heartbeats back, if he’d still been a cat. But his new human thinking said it would be a really bad idea. Best to run when he wasn’t being watched. Especially by the raven in the corner, which had him transfixed with one unblinking eye.
“Nevermore!” it said… and flew over to the human’s shoulder, where it perched, and clacked its dagger-like beak, viciously.
The old man scowled and tipped his head away. “Get off. We’d better go and feed the foul fowl,” he said to Tom. “Another job for you, boy. Last time I forgot to feed it, it took a bite out of my ear.”
In a castle far away, a princess wept. She did that when she was livid with fury. She clenched her fists in rage. A helpless rage, which made it worse.
Princess Alamaya was neither pampered nor indulged.
She didn’t have a wicked stepmother, but had to make do with a wicked Uncle, if by ‘wicked’ one meant conscientious and over-protective. Someone had plainly forgotten to tell Duke Karst, the Prince Regent, that he should be trying to secure the throne of Ambyria for his own revolting son. His son was revolting, Alamaya thought. All babies were. Plump, pink and making people go braindead and coo over them. Even her, and she was disgusted at herself for doing it. He just had such tiny fingers and toes.
She wished desperately that her fairy Godmother would come to her rescue. Or even just visit. The old hag at least wasn’t safe. Or nice. Or planning to marry her off suitably to protect the Royal House of Corvin. Godmother liked to drink too much and make rude suggestions to the footmen, or anyone else who was male and not running fast enough.
Alamaya just didn’t see the sense of the latest edicts for her protection.
If she were cursed, and if her enemies were trying to kill her, she might as well have a good time first.
CHAPTER 2
THE HAUNTED SKULL OF THE KITCHENS
Down in the kitchen Tom was introduced to the pantry. It was to be a very important place in his life, seeing as it was where their food came from. This was very important to a young cat, who had spent a lot of his life hungry. The being hungry part seemed to go with being a young human too. There wasn’t a lot to be said for being human, but Tom was willing to grant that short of domesticating your own one, being able to be human, at least around meal times, had advantages.
The old man sat down at the bench next to the table. “You haven’t made much progress, boy. Not even lit a fire yet, let alone cleaned the place up. Get the bread and cheese. I’ll have a mug of ale.”
“I don’t know where to get anything, old man,” said Tom, still rather sullen at the thought of the rat.
He got an impatient cuff, which, this time, he managed to dodge. “Hmph. Show a bit more respect, boy. I am Master Hargarthius. You will call me that. Or Master.” He creaked to his feet. “It’s cold in here. I suppose you’ve never lit a fire before either. Follow me.” He led Tom to a heavy, tight-fitting bolted door, which opened into a side-room, shelved from floor to just beneath the roof. “You must never ever quite close this door when are in the pantry. It does not open from the inside.”
With the door only open a crack, it was dim in the pantry, and the old man leaned his stick against the wall, fumbled in his robe and produced a jar with virulent green squirming things inside it. He opened the lid, and then dug around inside his robe some more, until he came up with a small pair of tongs. He reached into the jar, and snapped up a writhing green thing — it looked like a fat, damp, angry mottled green lizard with a paddle-tail. Tom leaned in, curious. He’d eaten quite a few lizards. And a few more lizard-tails.
If he’d been a cat, still, he’d have had his whiskers singed as this creature’s steaming tail suddenly flared into flame. As it was, he just staggered back and Master Hargarthius thrust the burning creature into a lamp-wick. The lamp lit up a rather chaotic little room. The shelves were full of bottles, bags and jars, and the floor-space crowded with sacks, a couple of barrels, and several tin canisters.
“Hmph!” That seemed to be Master Hargarthius’s favourite noise. “I’d forgotten your predecessor indulged in a little looting before his… flight.” That was followed by a nasty chuckle. “I do hope he enjoyed making the food last! You’ll have to tidy up this mess. I hope he tried some magic in here. It would have served the filching chawbacon lackwit right.”
Tom felt something nuzzle his elbow, and jumped back. It was, Tom recognised from his one lucky venture into the cool room behind the dairy, on the farm that he’d been born on, a cheese. It smelled like cheese. It looked like cheese. But it was moving. Moving towards him…
Master Hargarthius saw what Tom had retreated from, and snatched up his stick and hit it. Then he stomped on the still burning lizardy thing as the flame licked at a sack. “Malfecium! What a waste of a perfectly good salamander!” said Master Hargarthius crossly. “Be warned by that creature, boy. You must never try a spell of any kind in here. Magic works… differently in here. You never know what might happen. I made that mistake once.”
The cheese, Tom noticed, had somehow retreated right back along the long shelf, and was now hiding behind a large jar of something cloudy.
Master Hargarthius paid it no mind, but instead took a couple of items off another shelf and handed them to Tom, and took a mug from a hook, and drew some frothy beer from a barrel. “Go on. To the table. Get some plates. And you’re not to drink my beer and you’re to keep the pantry shut at all times, when you’re not actually in it, to keep the vermin out.”
So Tom did as he was bid. He got another clout for bringing a dirty plate, as the old man hacked slabs off the coarse loaf with a long glittering knife he drew from somewhere in his robe. The raven swooped down and snatched the first piece, and retreated to the corner of the mantel above the cold fireplace to tear it apart and eat it.
Tom was a little doubtful about the bread part. Cheese… maybe. To a cat it seemed wrong. But he was hungry enough to try the food, and to the human mouth it tasted very good indeed. He ate eagerly and greedily once he’d started — to the point that even the old man noticed. “Were you a wolf or a cat?” he asked dryly. “There is more. Don’t lick the plate.”
Tom had another slab of the bread, and more of the soft cheese. He realized that his captivity — which still absolutely had to be escaped — at least meant he would get food. He looked curiously at the beer the old man was drinking. It didn’t smell cat-attractive, but then he’d changed his mind about both the bread and the cheese. He was still too wary to push asking for it, though, even if food and beer appeared to have had a mellowing effect on the old man, and on the raven, sitting on the mantel-shelf, cracking its beak and picking at crumbs.
“I think,” said Master Hargarthius, rubbing the crumbs deeper into
his beard, perhaps to save for later, “That you need a teacher, boy. I don’t have the patience or the desire to instruct you properly, and you don’t know enough to be useful. Wait here.”
Instinct said to Tom that this would be a very good time to run. Besides instinct, cats don’t take kindly to the concept of ‘instruction’. It was like taking orders: All very well for humans and dogs… But the raven was watching him, unblinking. And even if it wasn’t, Tom wasn’t too sure where he could run to. There was no smell of outdoors, and the several doors could lead anywhere.
So he waited. He was to regret that, in the next few weeks. Not that running would have helped, but at least then the old man or the raven might have killed him outright.
That would have been better than enduring the skull of Mrs Drellson. Anything had to be better than the skull of Mrs Drellson.
Master Hargarthius returned and put down on the table… a skull. It still had a few wisps of hair attached to it, and the jaw had been wired on. Unfortunately it hadn’t been wired shut. For a moment the skull just sat there. It was bone. Tom had seen bones before, even skulls. He was not particularly impressed or perturbed. And then Master Hargarthius tapped the skull with his staff, while muttering again.
The remaining snaggly teeth clacked together, and the skull of Mrs Drellson said, in the kind of thin, screechy voice that seemed to go right through Tom’s head, without bothering to go via his ears. “Why is this kitchen such an awful mess? Answer me!”
Master Hargarthius pointed a bony finger at the skull. “Boy. This is Mrs Drellson. Mrs Drellson was the housekeeper here… once. She’ll see that you learn what you have to do.” He got up and walked out, while the black skull sockets stared at Tom.
As soon as the old man was through the door, the skull spoke again. “Well. Don’t just sit there! There’s work to be done! On your feet. Up, up, up!”
Mrs Drellson never stopped talking… except when Master Hargarthius was in the room. Even as the re-animated dead, the old housekeeper of Estethius’s Tower of Art and Magic (which, she insisted, was what this place should be called) was wary of the magician. She called him ‘Old Grumptious’ contemptuously enough when he wasn’t on hand to hear her. And she was horrified by the state of her old domain, the kitchens. There were several of them, it turned out, all, bar this one, were long unused and dusty and filled with rusty implements. Soon they were also full of the sound of Mrs Drellson’s shrill voice echoing around the vaulted ceilings, as she drove Tom to dust and scour and polish and clean. The rats hated it, and so did Tom, and not just because it drove all the rats away.
Tom had wanted to run away from the first. After Mrs Drellson came into his life, he wanted to do so, desperately. But it wasn’t possible, as he very soon established. And, dead or not, Mrs Drellson could make a cat-boy’s life very unpleasant indeed.
Later, Tom worked out that if he’d been human by birth and experience, the levitating, talking skull — a skull that could send out little green whips of pain to torment him— would have frightened him witless. But as he had had no experience of being human, he assumed that every human household had something similar to her. He had wondered why humans were so needlessly industrious before he met the skull of Mrs Drellson. When he finally found out that work was normal in all human homes, even though they did not have levitating undead skulls driving the famulus to work, he was mystified about it all over again. Humans were a strange thing for a cat to be transformed into. Strange and very unpleasant.
By the time he went to his stone cell-room that night — and she chased him all the way — Tom was too tired to care. But the kitchen at least was a warmer place. Only part of that was due to his running about. Some warmth was due to the fire he had learned to kindle in the hearth.
It was all a learning process. Tom learned a great deal that he didn’t want to know, including that “I licked myself as best as I can” was not an adequate answer to “You stink. Have you washed, boy?”
Immersing himself in water was just un-natural. And humans did stink. Every cat knew that. They were obviously used to it, so just didn’t notice. Perhaps they couldn’t smell as well as a disembodied talking skull, which made him wash by sitting in a tin bath half full of water, and washing his body not with his tongue as nature intended but with water, soap, and a cloth.
“That’s not good for you!” he complained, when she told him to do so.
“And why would I care what’s good for you, boy!” cackled the skull. “You’re in the wrong place for good. Now wash. Or else!”
So, shivering in front of the kitchen fire, Tom had washed, watched by the empty skull-eyes, to make sure he did not neglect any spots — or wash any spots for too long. It was a horrible experience, and the skull seemed set on making him repeat it regularly.
Maybe Mrs Drellson’s skull thought the water would numb his mind. But it didn’t. He learned. He learned to start her boasting too. She told him a great deal more about his prison, that way. He also learned a little more about the human who had captured him.
“Oh, old Grumptious is a bad, bad magician,” Mrs Drellson’s skull informed him. “Nothing like as bad as Lord Estethius, of course,” said the skull, proudly. “Lord Estethius was pure untrammelled evil. He always had at least fifteen house-slaves for me. And that was not including the magical servants.”
Tom was not sure how a skull managed to sniff in disdain. “And he was always having somebody suitably whipped. Or turned out in the winter snow for dire-wolves to hunt. Old Grumptious has let the standards slip.”
Gradually Tom worked out that it wasn’t just the standards that Master Hargarthius had let slip, but some of the walls too. The tower was old and made of stone, part of it quarried into the mountain itself, part of it built stone on stone, back when this had been the wild country, full of dire-wolves and worse. Mrs Drellson’s skull disapproved of the state of the tower. She said it had been bigger once. She disapproved of the wild-lands too. They’d been properly wild when she was a girl, unlike the inferior wildness of these degenerate times. Actually, it was hard to find anything she did approve of. But she disapproved most of the raven and of the cheese that lurked in back of the pantry. It seemed the skull was actually afraid of both, which Tom learned to use to his advantage.
They weren’t his idea of great friends, or allies, either, but a cat-boy had to use what a cat-boy could find. He also began to learn what magic was, and that it was not something all humans had. It could be very useful to a cat. Or very dangerous. One could end up as a human… with a tail.
There were some visitors to the magician’s rotting old tower. The first one took Tom a few seconds to recognize. He seemed a lot smaller than the vast human who had thrown things at a feral kitten he was chasing, at least when seen through human eyes. He looked as terrified as Tom had been, then. Tom wondered what he’d been stealing.
He plainly had whatever it was in the sack he was carrying. Tom, who had answered the Master’s irascible bellowed order to come to the study, waited for Master Hargarthius to kick him, or better still, hit the man with his staff. Tom had learned to fear that staff.
Instead Master Hargarthius grumpily told Tom to take the sack to kitchen.
The man clutched the sack. “Not until I gets my money,” he said in a voice of fearful defiance. “No money, no goods, Mister.”
“Hmph,” snorted Master Hargarthius. But he fumbled under his robe, and came out with a leather pouch. Tom saw the look of naked greed on the visitor’s face, but the Master did not notice. He was busy counting out little clinking bits, which Tom’s mind said were coins. They did not smell tasty.
The Master handed them to the man, who put down the sack and examined each coin and transferred them one-by-one into the other hand. He shoved them in a pocket, and nodded, grudgingly. “He can take the sack.”
Tom reached down and took hold of it, and turned…
The visitor screamed. “He’s got a tail! Monster! Demon!”
Tom n
early dropped the sack, getting away from the demon monster… before he realized that it was him. He turned slightly, looking back at the man, who was gibbering against the outer door. He thought he’d tell the village man he was a cat… but Master Hargarthius was laughing, and waved him away. Walking down the passage with the heavy, smoky-smelling sack, Tom had a bit more time to think about it. ‘Monster’ he understood. ‘Demon’… that was more complicated. Whichever human the words in Tom’s head had come from hadn’t really understood demons. But he had been powerfully afraid of them. That made Tom strut a bit.
“Where have you been you lazy good-for-nothing boy?” screeched the skull of Mrs Drellson as he pushed open the kitchen door.
“I’m a demon monster,” he informed the skull. “I have a tail.”
It didn’t have the same effect on the skull as it had had on the man from the village. The skull just cackled. Then it said: “And I’ll burn that tail off slowly if you don’t work harder and faster, you worthless hobgobbin.”
Tom wasn’t sure what a hobgobbin was either. However, he was fond of his tail. It was all that was left of him, in a way. He made haste into the kitchen.
“What have you got there?” demanded the skull, empty orbs fixed on the sack. “What nasty dirty rubbish are you dragging into my clean kitchen?”
“I don’t know. Master Hargarthius told me carry it down here.” Immediately he’d said it, Tom regretted it. If he’d thought quicker, he could have got her to order him to throw the sack out… but she’d have found a way to blame him, most likely. She did that. She was quicker at it than Tom. Maybe she had had more practice.
“Well. Put it safely somewhere then,” she said. “The fire needs more wood. And fill the rack next to it, while you’re at it.”
So Tom hauled wood, until Master Hargarthius came down. “I thought there’d be slices of ham cooking by now,” he said with his usual grumpiness. “Gold-plated ham, at what it cost me.”
