TOM

by Dave Freer

  Tom was still trying to work out exactly how this reading was supposed to work, and trying to grasp ‘magic’. It could be very useful, it seemed. And quite dangerous… but then he’d been a fast cat and was a lot quicker as a human than Master Hargarthius was. He wasn’t so sure about the raven, or the Magician’s staff. Those could both move with a great deal of speed, all by themselves.

  There was a great deal for him to think about while doing the many chores that fell to his lot. That was a good thing, because most of the chores were very tedious. As a cat he objected to chores. Cats did not do such tasks, they were for dogs, horses, donkeys or humans. As a boy, and a famulus, he found he had little choice about doing them. Whether it was cleaning up after the raven — or scrubbing floors (a pointless exercise, someone was bound to walk on them again) there was always something that the skull of Mrs Drellson felt he ought to be doing, every waking second. The one advantage about being called to the laboratory was that Master Hargarthius sometimes forgot he was there. It was like watching a mouse-hole. Tom kept quiet and thought… and he watched. Of course sometimes he ducked and ran too.

  And then he swept up the results.

  Tom finally discovered the back door. It was carefully hidden… from the outside. From the inside it was just another door that did not open. There were quite a lot of those. Tom naturally wanted to know what was behind all of them.

  He regularly tried the door-handles, just in case… This was not always a good idea, as he found out when the one door revealed a bed with a snoring Master Hargarthius in it. But most of them stayed obstinately closed and tantalisingly mysterious to Tom.

  Then, one day, he thought of trying the opening spell.

  He did his best to remember it precisely. He was fairly good at that. He recited it, complete with the passes of the hand.

  The door… grew long wooden fangs, a mouth… and snapped at his reaching hand. Then, as Tom watched from where he had thrown himself back against the opposite wall, the mouth yawned theatrically, and then faded back into the woodwork. Tom wasn’t that easily fooled. He’d played games like that himself! But he did try the opening spell again, this time trying something that he’d possibly heard wrong, differently.

  The door stayed shut.

  Cross, and still somewhat shaken, he decided to kick it, sneakily and quickly in case the wooden mouth was just waiting its chance. It might have been, but the door swung open anyway, bringing an un-mistakable scent of outdoors and an icy cold wind blowing in… along with a flurry of snow.

  That snow was enough to temper Tom’s immediate instinct to flee. He’d always thought the inside of the tower bitterly cold, except for the kitchen, where it was his task to keep the fire going… but the kitchen had the skull of Mrs Drellson to make sure that Tom never just curled up in front of it. So instead of running out, and then running as far and fast as his legs could carry him, he just looked. Tasted the air of freedom, and thought about it.

  Besides, he had the uncomfortable feeling something was watching him.

  Turning around cautiously, Tom realized that he was wrong about something watching him.

  It was two somethings who were watching him, silently. From a perch on a wall-sconce the raven looked at him, head askance, beady eye as unblinking as a cat. And back in the dimness of the passage, betrayed only by the green glowing eye sockets, the skull hovered. Staring at him. Waiting to see what he would do.

  Tom closed the door, forgetting the mouth and teeth he had conjured. Fortunately, it seemed they’d also forgotten him. He remembered the teeth suddenly and pulled his hand away.

  The raven shook its head, and said, again, all that it ever said. “Nevermore.” It was a mournful comment at the best of times, and right now it sounded despairing. It fluttered away up the passage, as silent as it could be when it chose to be quiet.

  That left Tom alone to face the wrath of the skull of Mrs Drellson.

  Maybe he should have run into the snow.

  But this time the skull did not inflict the lash of pain on Tom. She just said in a tone that might almost have been sad: “You can never escape a magician, boy. It’s not as easy as just running out of the door.”

  “But, but what about the other famuluses?” Master Hargarthius had mentioned Tom’s predecessors often enough. Some of them had come to unpleasant ends in those mentions. But not all… his immediate predecessor had fled on a magic carpet, with the contents of the pantry and certain other treasures, Tom knew, from Master Hargarthius’s irritated comments about him. “And all the servants. The housemaids that you used to boss around.”

  “Magicians live a lot longer than we do,” she said tersely. “And they have ways of making sure escape isn’t worth it. He’ll have some of your cat-hair, somewhere, in a little jar. That’s enough for the likes of him to put a terrible fate on you, but Estethius was worse.”

  According to her, Estethius, the previous master of the tower, was always worse. And better too, better at having wealth, servants and at nastiness. The skull seemed rather proud of that. Tom did wonder at times how anyone could be worse than Master Hargarthius. Old Grumptious — as he and Mrs Drellson’s skull called Hargarthius when he wasn’t around — had a fierce temper, and could certainly be as irritable as a spring-time viper. But the part about the hair, all tied too well with the nasty comments the magician made from time-to-time. Hair, skin, finger-nails, blood, even tears all had magical properties. The magician was very careful about what happened to his own.

  Tom had to face that most un-catlike of things again: not doing precisely as he wished. He’d have to find out more, much more.

  And a magic carpet probably would not be enough. Tom liked carpets. They were much warmer under his cold feet than stone flags. He liked to dig his toes into them. He wasn’t sure, just yet, how magic carpets worked, but he’d heard the master curse the loss a good few times. It had been supposed to come back of its own accord, but hadn’t ever returned, not with or without the famulus.

  The skull was in an unusually generous mood when he got back to the kitchen, after looking out at the snow. She set him to polishing brass and then the silver, in front of the fire. “It’s bitter out in the snow,” was all she said, before lapsing into almost silence — just the occasional snap to tell him to polish something better, or to put a bit more elbow-grease into it. He’d looked long and hard for that elbow-grease in the pantry. He concluded it must be on the shelf patrolled by the cheese. Polishing was rather like washing oneself is for a cat. A task that left the mind free to think about things. He dared a question, eventually. “Do all the closed doors have teeth?”

  The skull cackled. “You need to get your cadences better, boy. Magic’s more than just words. Most humans can’t do it at all.”

  Tom thought about that, for a while. If most couldn’t… it must mean he was better than most. That was a bit of satisfaction derived from it all. Unfortunately, the warmth and comfort were far too good to last. Old Grumptious awoke and bellowed for coffee. It was something that the Skull disapproved of in particular. “New-fangled foreign rubbish. That wicked witch Emerelda brought the trees for it back from who-knows-where. Small beer was good enough for Master Estethius. Get the milk, boy.”

  Now, the milk was one of the mysteries of the magician’s tower that Tom had not understood. He knew where this kind of milk came from, by the smell. He rather liked it.

  But there was no cow, and no dairy maid in the pantry, nor any obvious connection to one. Yet there was always milk in a wooden jug set in the back corner of the pantry. Sometimes it was still warm.

  Tom went across to the pantry, his thoughts somewhat distracted as to whether he could get away with stealing more than a mouthful of milk — which, as long as he remembered to wipe his upper lip, and make sure that he was out of the line of the skull of Mrs Drellson’s sight, he had mastered quite well. He always almost closed the door, so she couldn’t see in. As he picked up the jug, after glancing behind him, she yelled, nearl
y making him drop the jug as he lifted it to his lips. But she was yelling. “Bring honeycakes”, not “stop that, you revolting boy”.

  With a sigh he put the jug on the shelf and reached down the sweet honey cake canister. On turning back, to pick it up in the other hand, he realized to his horror that he’d set the milk jug down on the cheese’s shelf… and the cheese had moved from its dusty hiding place among the old pickle jars to right up against the jug.

  He snatched it away, slopping some of the milk onto the shelf.

  “What’s taking you so long?” demanded the Skull. “You’re drinking the milk again, aren’t you, boy? Don’t make me come in there…”

  “No,” protested Tom. “It’s this cheese. It’s…” He swallowed, unable to quite deal with what the cheese actually was up to. It was lapping the milk with a little blue-veined tongue.

  “Oh. You be careful of that thing. The old master’s nasty jokes will be the death of us.”

  Tom didn’t point out that it was a bit too late for her, but retreated from the pantry, pushing the bolt across with his elbow as best he could without spilling any more milk.

  “Put the jug down and do it properly,” said the skull sternly. “We don’t want that dratted thing sneaking out of there.”

  So Tom did. He’d noticed before that the skull of Mrs Drellson was nervous about the cheese. Well, so was he. Cheese should not have a tongue of its own. He wondered if he’d imagined it. But there was a milk ring on the floor, which he’d have to clean as soon as possible, before Mrs Drellson’s Skull’s empty haunted orbits noticed it. He had spilt milk, that was for certain. He’d check it later. It might be useful anyway. “I’ll have to close the door while I’m in there,” he said. “I had to push it back with the milk jug. It was trying to climb out.”

  The Skull’s snaggly teeth chittered in agreement. “But you can’t close the door completely, no. Not ever! Take a wedge with you, in future.” And then she started yelling at him to get a move on. So he did, heating milk, brewing coffee, carrying the bitter-smelling brew to Master Hargarthius, propped up in bed still with his nightcap on. Tom noticed it wasn’t the same door he was called to as the one he’d looked in, once and found the Master asleep behind. Perhaps Master Hargarthius moved bedrooms. Perhaps there was more than one door. Perhaps the doors moved. It seemed to Tom that could be possible too.

  But he noticed, when he finally got back to the pantry with what was left of the milk, that the shelf where he’d spilt milk was dry. There was no sign of milk ever having been there. So Tom took a chance and poured another splash onto it, and the cheese came oozing from its hiding place with quite remarkable speed. Tom didn’t have time to watch it, but it definitely drank milk. Tom was a little vague on cheese-making but he was sure that the cheese didn’t normally help itself to milk.

  He had to spend the rest of his day, and quite a lot of the night assisting in the laboratory, while the master ‘tried a new approach’.

  Like several other approaches that Tom had witnessed so far, this one also ended in a messy explosion. Tom was fairly sure that wasn’t the point, even if it was a frequent result. The Master’s cursing and swearing was as usual spectacular and educational. It was the one thing that any cat would have wanted to learn from a human.

  Tom had been human for long enough now to think of a few other things that might be useful — how to turn cats into other things, and how to make milk appear in the back of the pantry — came to mind. But Tom could see there might be others.

  Reading appeared central to what the master did. But it was just squiggles on paper or parchment or vellum to Tom.

  Tom had stared in frustration at the book left open on the work-bench, as he did his usual chore of cleaning up. Meaningless!

  Well… it was to a cat. Except that, to his shock, Tom realized that his human memories knew the letters. The little parts of the black squiggles that repeated. And repeated. Tom realized he did know each of them… and the sound they represented. It was still a long, long step between each letter and the words. But Tom did puzzle out a few of them.

  And then he got a terrific headache — which is what a cat-boy earned from a clout from the staff of Master Hargarthius for not having finished cleaning up the laboratory, and standing daydreaming. He might have got worse, if old Grumptious had realized he was staring at the words in the grimoire.

  But headache or not, Tom had worked out just what books were, and how they worked. Now he just had to get good at this reading.

  He suspected it wasn’t going to be that easy. He was right about that. He wouldn’t have minded being wrong, for once, which was very un-cat-like, really. Perhaps the human body was affecting his thinking. It was plain to any cat that being in a human body affected humans’ ability to think. It could be the posture. That had to make it harder to get sufficient blood to the brain.

  ‘The best laid plans of mice and men oft were gang astray’… they said. The wickedest witch muttered angrily to herself. It was all very well for the plans of mice or men. That was acceptable as far as she was concerned. But now even hers had gone astray. And that was just plain annoying and intolerable.

  No wonder so many witches got into the habit of eating children. They were just so damned annoying. Unreliable too. Nearly as bad as demons.

  Within the protective cone of silence the Chief Wizard of Ambyria said: “There is something to be said for quiet, biddable rulers. Honestly, between Duke Karst and this foolish Princess, I am hardly able to do any work.” The post of Chief Wizard was a government post, which had been largely ornamental as mages were historically very independent, and did not take well to governance. He was still working on it.

  The Sorceress Melania nodded sympathetically. “What does the vapid girl want now?”

  “Transformation spells. I told her that she had insufficient skills as yet. She annoyingly does have some natural talent for magic. She has no discipline, though.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DEMON AND TEMPTATION

  Tom hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the chamber pot with its pink pansies, for a few weeks since he and the Master had entrapped the demon in it. Another pot had taken its place, less decorative, but just as unpleasant, to be part of Tom’s morning chores. The garderobe where he emptied the vessels — and relieved himself, was a smelly place, full of elderly fur coats. It was supposed to keep the moths out of the fur, and Tom could quite understand why. It was also a place that the skull of Mrs Drellson did not visit, or at least not while Tom was in it. She would tolerate him being in there for a time before she started yelling at the door.

  It was a good place just to sit, even if it did smell. It was, Tom worked out, an even better place to read. He’d found something besides grimoires to practice on. He’d suddenly realised that sounding out the words to a spell might, possibly, not be the cleverest thing he’d ever done. It might even be stupider than thinking he could safely take fish from a magician. He’d yet to find out where the fish had come from. He hadn’t seen any since then. What he had seen was the material used to put under the raven’s perch. The raven perched everywhere else, and mostly used everything but the material provided to relieve himself on. He had no need. He had Tom to clean up after him, after all.

  Tom had not realised it was readable for some time. The occasional raven dropping did not encourage a fastidious cat-boy to look too closely. It was off-white and had black marks on it, regular, similar shaped marks, most unlike the erratic writing in some of the grimoires.

  Once Tom had recognized the letters however, it was a short step to words and realizing that the material was in fact the Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser, and it gave Tom something he had not had before, besides practice reading matter, a supply of paper for the garderobe, and something to put under the Raven’s perch —which he seldom used, and some of the other spots he did use frequently.

  It gave Tom a window onto the human world, something he’d poorly understood before. After reading t
he Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser, he knew a lot more about it, but understood it even less well.

  It did help his reading — even if news of an unseasonal cold snap, due to thaumatic induced sphere warming, causing a sharp spike in Southern Salamander prices were a mystery to him. So were the results of the broomstick hurdles championship. The fact that the Duke of Novaria reducing his thaumaturical spending and how that meant Irrendia’s Count Morgoth was untrustable, or that Ambyria needed stronger leadership than the Prince Regent was providing, and that the Joringian Empire’s threats were empty — were all about matters outside of his ken. The tax advice column, on various deductible things to turn tax collectors into was fascinating. It didn’t include cats.

  For obvious reasons transformation was an interesting subject to Tom. It seemed something most of the Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser’s readers considered commonplace, so much so that they never explained just how it was done.

  Tom realized that those sorts of instructions had to be in the library of grimoires that Master Hargarthius read. The trouble was getting to read them himself. Some of them were under lock and key, and Tom was sure those had to be the best ones.

  Mind you, that too was something Tom was less sure about after he saw Master Hargarthius belabouring one particularly fat grimoire with his staff, until it spat out a quill pen and a bottle of ink, and the magician could get the latch for the padlock to close again.

  Master Hargarthius kept the bunch of keys for the books, and other fascinating mysteries, on a ring on the ratty old velvet sash he wore. Thus, barring him leaving one open on the desk or in the laboratory, Tom wasn’t going to get a chance at those.

  He was hopeful of one of those chances, when he took a detour while on one of his errands for the skull, to look in at the laboratory. The magician had worked late the night before and wasn’t up yet. Tom knew about the lateness, because he’d been called to assist, and eventually Old Grumptious had sent him to bed in a rage, because Tom had fallen asleep for the third time, mid-experiment.