by Dave Freer
Dairymaid to sylph - five drops orally, and one behind each ear, 35 seconds.
Maiden to eagle - seven drops, 19 seconds.
Famulus to cat… His eye caught that one, dwelled on it - eight drops, 20 seconds.
Maiden to eagle - seven drops, 19 seconds.
The list went on. There was even a dose for creating cockatrices, and apprentice-to-tiger — that came with an advisory that the apprentice should be caged first.
And at the end of the list… ‘Extreme care should be taken to avoid contact with ye liquid. Always wear dragon-hide disposa-gloves. Store in a dry place away from exposure to ye full moon or sudden actinic light. Apply Doctor Mirabellus’s patent fixative powder to freeze changes. In case of an overdose contact your nearest Apocalypse Room. Use before the Century of the Horned Toad.
*Apprentice may occasionally eat flies, a great saving.’
“Huh. They always say stuff like that. All the same, it might be risky,” Tom said to the raven who fluttered clumsily back to its favorite perch, its claws scrabbling for purchase on Athena’s marble hair. He tried not to think of the graceful curve of the girl-cat’s tail. “Anyway, she’s probably gone elsewhere by now.”
“Nevermore,” agreed the raven.
“And I might wreck my chances as a human, where I get to work like a slave for Old Grumptious, with an old raven for company, not a sexy cat. I could be turned into a frog, or a cheese… or, using the same potion, into whatever ingredient he was short of right then. I’d be crazy to try transforming myself back into a cat.”
“Nevermore!” said the raven, nodding his beak sympathetically. Well, maybe he was trying to scratch his chest. An ex-cat believes what he wants to believe, especially when thinking about girl-cats. It tended to skew Tom’s thinking a lot. Tom took the jar down from the shelf. What was the worst it could do? Tom opened the jar. It was another advantage to being human — or at least to having opposable thumbs.
The goop inside it was a virulent green, bubbled and shivered with purplish scintillations, and it stank badly enough to make skunks and rotten cabbages envious. That was reassuring: It looked and smelled like any good magical potion.
He went and fetched a pipette, and then, on thought, a mirror. He avoided the one that told him he was fairest of them all, and the one with the odd frame that showed your image… and an entirely different background. He wasn’t sure that was actually a mirror. Old Grumptious looked into it and sniggered a lot. Anything that made the magician laugh probably wasn’t pleasant. The mirror he chose was mostly quite well behaved, and new. It came from the hallway, where Old Grumptious had installed it to examine possible customers after the incident with demon, to make sure they had reflections.
He read the instructions carefully, took a deep breath, closed his eyes… exhaled. He couldn’t put a drop in his mouth with his mouth closed and eyes shut. He began the process, counting drops. The raven had flapped over to the mirror to watch. It was naturally utterly revolting and each drop made him feel exceedingly strange. He was just lifting his finger to release the last drop, when the raven hopped across from the mirror-top onto his shoulder in a flop of black feathers and shrieked “Nevermore!” in his ear.
Inevitably his finger had slipped a little. He flung the pipette aside, spluttering and spitting. And changing. Shrinking.
His robe fell off. If he hadn’t hastily scrambled up onto the workbench, in a few moments he wouldn’t have been able to reach it.
He’d understood what a fetus was, but before he returned to being one… he hadn’t realized how small they were. If this kept going he’d disappear! He started frantically counting seconds, and then decided to rotate three times, counterclockwise, yelling “Sator-Hathaway-Yawahtah-Rotas” at the top of a very tiny voice.
He stopped shrinking. That was the only substantive improvement in the matter.
He was very tiny, and very weak, and trapped on the top of a workbench with a vast raven peering down at him. Somewhere across the ridges of splintery wood, was a spilled pool of ontonogenic reflux liquid. He started crawling while he could. It was a long way, and it was revolting stuff to crawl into.
Once into it, he felt himself growing again. That was a relief. That girl-cat had better be worth it. Still, he could hardly wait to taste fresh mouse again…
Only it had all ended with croak not a meow. And a desire for fresh fly, and romantic hours of amplexus with another fat toad, floating in the green pond-slime… The once-cat and the once-human parts of Tom knew two things now. Firstly, there were actually worse things than being a famulus. Secondly, this had to be the raven’s fault.
For a few minutes he just sat there and croaked and thought dark thoughts about ravens. But he knew too well what happened to toads in a magician’s laboratory. He had to get out here, and preferably not as a toad. And that meant doing something before toad thoughts took control of him completely. The only way out was back to the ontogenetic liquid… The jar still stood on the counter, and there was some in the bulb of the pipette. He read the instructions on the jar, his toad-mind wrestling with the reading. There was no toad to cat. Toad to famulus, yes. Magicians were always running out of famuluses it seemed.
He got his nose under the pipette, tilted it and the drops ran out.
“Nevermore!” exclaimed the raven.
“Croak,” answered Tom and drank. He hoped those were the right number of droplets…
Being a bat had to be better than being a toad, he supposed, a little later. And they were better at reading in the dim light of the laboratory. It must be getting on for evening. Master Hargarthius could get up any moment now from his post lunch nap. That thought drove him back to the last of the spilled ontogenetic liquid. This time he was closer. A lemur, fortunately just big enough to pipette out some more fluid.
“Nevermore,” said the raven, shaking his head.
But it had to be once more.
Tom’s relief at being in human form again, even still with a tail — It had been there when he’d been a toad, a bat, and might have been when he’d been a lemur, was tempered by the fact that the muttering and swearing down the passage had to be Old Grumptious, and here he was, naked, on the workbench. He leaped off and pulled on his robe, and was just hastily putting the jar back when his master arrived.
“What are you doing with that?” The wizard demanded, fixing his apprentice and the jar of Doctor Mirabellus’s Original with a very jaundiced eye.
“It’s, er, date expired, master,” said Tom. “Due to be used before the century of the horned toad.”
Old Grumptious sniffed and scratched his straggly beard. “Hmph. Just a hundred and three years past its safe date then. But the stuff is dangerous anyway. I thought I’d transform a plump milk-maid into a sylph once. Er, strictly for experimental purposes. And I ended up with a gorgon who gave me no end of trouble. I’d forgotten about it. Toss it out, Boy.”
“Never… more!” said the raven as he walked past.
“Never ever!” agreed Tom.
Alamaya had thought being an eagle would be liberating… and would mean she could fly. Fly wherever she wanted to, away from Borbungsburg and the guards, and Duke Karst being a miserable old misery.
Finding herself to be a cat was a shock. A measuring error… but once she was a cat and not an eagle, she’d discovered that suddenly being a cat did not mean you could run… or even walk like a cat. It was the four feet thing! And doors had a whole new problem factor to them. Footmen needed better training. They should open them to cats. But when she tried to tell the footman that, it came out as a plaintive ‘Meeeow.’
The footman had tried to kick her. Had it not been for her frantic guards, searching for her, she would never have got through. They weren’t paying much attention to a cat, just then. One of them was carrying the gown which had fallen off her when she became a cat.
She’d headed for her rooms, wondering if maybe this had been less of a good idea than she thought at the time. At least
there were more clothes there.
There was also a dead maidservant hidden behind the drapes she’d scampered for instinctively — cat-instinct- on hearing a sound she really had not expected.
What had alarmed her was men, speaking in whispers… in her bedroom. Men never went in there! Cats, it seemed, were able to hear, and smell far better than she could as a human.
“…patient. She’s not due for a little while yet.”
“It’s not being patient that worries me. It’s getting out of here after we kill her.”
“It’s all arranged. Hist… what was that?”
‘That’ was an outraged and somewhat frightened meow, from a rapidly departing cat. The meow had been an attempt at shouting for the guards. It didn’t come out right. The running did, even if it looked a bit odd with a cat lunging onto its hind feet.
She might have no clothes, but becoming not a cat — it wasn’t permanent without the fixative the instructions had said — in a room with at least two murderous assassins was less attractive than being naked.
It occurred to her, when the panic subsided, and she was well and truly out of the gates of Borbungsburg Castle, that she really had no idea just how ‘not permanent’ it was, or just how long she was going to have to stay a cat, and quite what would happen then. But she didn’t have much time to worry about it, because a nasty-looking dog, who had been investigating some garbage in the alley, had spotted her.
Alamaya had to think about what to do. The dog didn’t. The dog didn’t care if he was a common mongrel and the cat that he could see was transformed royalty. She was a cat and the dog chased cats. If it caught one it would kill it. And this was not a very agile cat. It kept standing on its hind legs and meowing at him before running very ineptly — but fast. It did swipe his nose with a claw, before jumping up onto a fuller’s barrel, put there for the convenience of the visitors to the tavern just beyond. The tavern’s drunks got relief, the fuller got a source of ammonia… until the large angry dog knocked over the barrel, lunging for the cat. A cat that jumped clumsily from the tipping barrel for the tavern door, hotly chased by a dog now wet with decayed urine that the fuller had wanted and the dog had not.
Alamaya dodged kicks — mostly, and fled between the human legs, upstairs. A man was just entering a doorway there, and Alamaya shot between his legs and into the room — which was rather small, full of a bed and that bed was full of a woman, without any clothes on.
Well, she couldn’t spare Alamaya any — even if she hadn’t flung a pillow at the princess-cat that had bounded up onto her unmade bed. The man had tried to grab her — the cat — or maybe the woman. Alamaya didn’t stay to find out. The window was open, and un-shuttered.
Alamaya forgot she wasn’t an eagle.
But she found herself flying anyway.
Someone or something had her by the scruff of the neck, and was hauling her up into the sky, cackling with laughter.
CHAPTER 9
IN WHICH THERE IS GARLIC. ALMOST CRUSHED GARLIC.
Master Hargarthius had become absorbed in a new line of research, which, Tom realized, meant that the old one hadn’t worked. This, according to the skull of Mrs Drellson, was perfectly normal for magicians, who had the attention span of a fraction of a gadfly. “It kills them, yes,” the skull cackled gleefully. “Spend more time and effort looking for a short cut than they do in achieving anything.”
Tom could understand that to some extent. The hoom-broom… and the super hooom, so long as he kept his finger ready on the neep’s eye, had made clean-up so much faster and easier, that the rest of it seemed more tedious than ever. And the trouble with new lines of research was that they seemed to be — automatically — messier than old lines.
Added to this was a new and recent discovery of his own. Tom had learned the value of finding good hiding places for a famulus in trouble, a situation he knew so well he wondered what it would be like not to be one. It must be odd, he thought, to not have a magician’s temper tantrums or the vindictive driving of the skull constantly chasing him on to the task he would fail to perform to her satisfaction. He didn’t know what it would feel like, and he was given no chance to find out.
It appeared he was not the first famulus to have this problem, to find hidey-holes, or the first to be trying to learn enough mage-craft to get out of here. The stone cistern on the top floor — bar the roof — was refilled by water spewing from a pipe attached to a strange metallically squeaking device. Tom went to fetch buckets of water for cleaning from it. He noticed a small gap between the cistern and the wall one day, and promptly squeezed through it. In the tangle of pipes there, some long-ago famulus had made himself a nest of blankets and the remains of an old chair, and laid in supplies of food and drink, now long decayed, and reading matter, still intact. A book: ‘Elementary spell-craft for ye Dunderheads’
It might have seemed the best find in the whole of Ambyria to Tom, if it wasn’t for the fact that it had also been written by ye Dunderhead, a long time ago. Ye Dunderhead had written a how-to book to make a living because he wasn’t very good at magic. It also was long on the use of expensive and rare ingredients — Tom knew they were expensive and rare because Master Hargarthius said so every time he used them. Tom had seen he marked at least one of the bottles. The book was short on spells that were either relevant or simple. Still, Tom studied it, carefully, and was suitably confused by it.
None of the spells related to transformation. It mostly seemed concerned with attracting one’s true love, and revenge on one’s true love for also being attracted to others. The cat side of Tom found that hard to understand, unlike the spell for ye summonsing of mice from other dimensions. That he got. The “Make ye staff into a magickally propelled rod of chastisement for ye lazy apprentice” seemed hauntingly familiar in some of the words. Tom still wasn’t going to try it on Master Hargarthius.
There was however one spell which had some applicability. By the fact that the book opened itself to that page — as it did to ‘ye visions of a state of disrobement of a nubile sylph’ — and the dirty thumb marks the book’s previous owner had found it so. And the previous owner had not scrawled ‘Ye rubbish’ or “Dothe not worke!” on the page, as he had in other places. It was titled “Ye el-Zebbo’s simple incantation for ye harde-to-clean surfaces. Contains ammoniacal micro-daemons to get to those harde to reach places. Pine scented. Will clean up to five square cubits in a single application.”
Hard to clean… That was all the places he had to clean, as far as Tom was concerned. The disrobing spell was… interesting, but Tom wasn’t too sure why. Cats didn’t wear clothes anyway, and were not much excited by seeing other cats also not wearing clothes. Smells were something entirely different. He decided he’d better try the cleaning spell, cautiously, in an abandoned room — there were many of those — with the door soundly locked.
To his immense surprise it worked. There were no complications, other than a faint smell of ammonia and distant pine forests mingling uneasily, and those soon dissipated. The room was clean enough to make Mrs Drellson’s skull speechless, something much to be desired. Tom was very pleased with his success.
So much so that he tried it out in the laboratory after the next failed experiment. That, it turned out, was a serious mistake. Only his yelling and the raven’s rapid response, and the fact that the master was still in the passage beyond saved him. Hargarthius would certainly have killed him, otherwise.
As he held Tom for his staff to beat him, in a laboratory full of an eye-watering stench of ammonia at war with a vast fresh-cut pine forest, Hargarthius told Tom exactly why you did not let micro-daemons loose in a magically charged environment. He told him loudly and clearly and re-enforced the message with a selection of bruising staff-stripes.
It was only much later, in his small stone room, trying to find a comfortable way to lie that didn’t make the bruises hurt, that it occurred to Tom that Master Hargarthius had known it was el-Zebbo’s incantation that he’d used.
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He asked Mrs Drellson’s skull the next day. “Old Grumptious. Yes, he was one of Esthetius’s famuluses. Lazy little hobgobbin he was. Always skiving off. Like you.”
Tom made a mental note that behind the cistern was probably not a safe place to hide from the Master. Still, the spell was useful for cleaning empty passages. He was busy doing that one day when Master Hargarthius came bustling down the passage. “A task for you, boy,” he said in a tone that made Tom wish he was in a better place to run. “You’re always on at me to teach you the trade. Well, here’s your chance. We have some merchants that you must go and bargain with. I shall be entrusting you with money. It’s an important part of the practice of magic.”
By now Tom had worked out how Master Hargarthius felt about money. Tom had even found a few small coins himself, which had come to light in the process of his cleaning. Gold, copper and silver were at least known values, as what they were used for, even if Tom had had no physical experience of this ‘spending’. He knew that Master Hargarthius regarded it as the equivalent of having his nose hairs pulled… at best. This wasn’t just suspicious, it was very suspicious. “Er. Why?”
Master Hargarthius scowled. “Because I told you to. They’re from Kos and they nauseate me. But they claim to have bat-blood to sell.”
The Master had been putting adverts in the Weekly Illuminati Age and Advertiser, attempting to buy some. So far the results had been enough to make him pull his beard out in lumps and curse and swear a lot. Tom ventured to ask why this should be any different. “They’re from Kos. They’re full to the back gills with moonbats down there,” said Master Hargarthius. “Now listen, on no account are you to pay more than one golden Salabar for a vat. Bargain them down. Offer them three silver Corvin, let them counter offer. Edge it up, but I’ll reward you for every copper Zoe below the Salabar. Money is tight,” he grumbled, “and prices are just ridiculous!”
