by Dave Freer
One of the knights responded by spurring his horse and dropping his lance point. “A-Bor… And then dropping his lance to the ground because newts, even newts riding newts don’t hold lances very well.
King Uther looked at the fallen armour, and then pointed to the nearest battering-ram footman. “You. Catch that newt. Take off your helmet and put him inside. There are going to be some very difficult questions asked when he recovers. Duke Karst. Dismount. We have various matters to discuss.”
“Who are you?” demanded the Duke. But even his iron composure was…less sure of itself.
“We are your King, Duke Karst. King Uther, the second of that name, of the royal House of Corvin.” He said it loudly, so the all knights could hear. Half the encampment could probably hear. He’d had a loud voice as a raven, and it hadn’t got any softer or gentler because he wasn’t just saying ‘Nevermore’.
“You’re an imposter,” said Duke Karst. “King Uther would be an old man now.”
Uther looked at him. “You’re looking at being shortened by a head, Duke Karst. We have been under an enchantment, from which my loyal servitors have helped to free me. We do not like your doubts, but none-the-less we will prove it to you. Meldro.”
The grizzled knight three along from the Duke looked startled. “Me?”
King Uther nodded. “Even after all these years we recognized you, Melchius Meldro. Once a podgy squire who used his knight’s sword to knock apples off the tree on the other side of the wall of the royal orchard. I was a prince of the realm, then. I came around the corner and startled your horse and you nicked the blade on the wall. I got you out of trouble for that. I helped you turn the grindstone and polish it.”
The elderly knight dropped his lance with a clatter… and clutched his pommel and then dismounted.
He walked forward, drew his sword turned to face his companions. He touched the polished blade with a gauntleted hand. His voice was thick with emotion: “Here is the place I polished that nick out.”
Then he turned again and dropped to one knee. “Your Majesty! Welcome back. Zoranythus be thanked that I should live to see you restored! Ambyria rejoices, Your Majesty!”
Several other Knights had dismounted. “Someone could have told him the story,” said Duke Karst, loudly. “But I will treat with you, test your assertions with our Chief Wizard. Knights Kelvinius and Porbittius, escort her Highness to the rear, and you… gentlemen may accompany us to the Chief Wizard and his staff. He has magical ways of divining the truth.”
One of things about being a cat was one was more aware of things going on around you than most humans were. Tom had noticed the improbably long flowers dangling down the wall. Hundred foot long pansies are more noticeable than normal sized pansies.
“If we suddenly had an army… there might be pickles,” he said, loudly.
“What?” Several people looked at him, people like Duke Karst, that he’d rather didn’t. But the flowers vanished. And a trumpet sounded behind him, and the sound of drums and other instruments. And marching feet. Many marching feet.
“Dam Busters March,” said Emerelda, cheerfully. “Our troops. I think you’re being told you’re in a pickle, Karst. I’d dismount before you’re dismounted.”
Of course nothing ever ended tidily. That was a famulus’s job, to clean up the mess, and right now Tom was feeling a bit fragile for it. Anyway, he was an apprentice now. The new famulus, once a bouncer in a Goth club, was very lucky the skull of Mrs Drellson had not been resurrected to instruct him. Or not yet, anyway.
First there were more important matters to deal with. A curse. And a Chief Wizard and his surviving cronies.
“First the curse,” said King Uther. “It’s blighted my line. I want it gone, Hargarthius.”
He’d been good at getting his own way as a raven. He was even better at it as king. “It’s a simple matter, your Majesty. The tears sapped the courage and nobility of your line, the blood tied it into the breeding, making your heirs all female, all unable to rule, and all dead within a year of childbirth.”
“I just need it remedied, not explained.”
“Well it is part of the same thing. The tears and blood need to mingle, freely given and freely accepted, the spell read.”
“I don’t see the golden vials doing any volunteering in the giving or accepting,” said King Uther. “Get on with it. The golden vials.”
Alamaya still had the vials.
What they didn’t have was anything in them.
The King, the witch, and the magician looked in horror at the rip the Roc’s claw had left down the side of both vials.
Eventually, Tom broke the silence.
“Excuse me,” he said warily.
“Hmph,” said Master Hargarthius. “What is it, boy? We’ve important matters to ponder. Go take the demon a pickle or something.”
Tom pressed on. “Does have to be here and now that the two mingled?” he asked.
“Well, it can’t be later,” said Emerelda, sadly. “It was a pity you didn’t know sooner. When the injury happened.”
“Well. I think it did. You see… the vials were disguised as the cheese… but Estethius must have done that spell IN the pantry. Things work differently there. And when I took the cheese into… what did you call the place? Gnomandy, it became the snow-leopard. It was strong and brave and noble… it got injured risking its life for all of us. And Alamaya was crying, and bleeding trying to save it. And the leopard was crying and bleeding too. And… um she hasn’t been quite the same since.”
“I had noticed that,” said Emerelda.
Alamaya shrugged. “I didn’t want to be a princess, let alone the Queen of Ambyria, before. Then things happened. Tom nearly died. I grew up,” said Alamaya. “I am a Corvin, whether I like it or not.”
Emerelda chuckled. “Seeing as you told me you wanted to just stay in the other-world, and just be a party-girl, and never come back to Ambyria… I think Tom may be right. It’s odd about the cheese, though.”
“Revenge,” said Master Hargarthius. “Estethius always hated cheese — so he made the finest part of the line of Corvin into something he hated. I suspect… now, that the curse could only be broken in Gnomandy — where the tears and blood were in a form that expressed the nature of what they were magical symbols of. It is part of you, now, Princess.”
Alamaya looked at herself. “I rather like the idea of being part snow-leopard. I am not so sure about being part cheese,” she said with a small smile.
“I was fond of the cheese,” said Tom, rather sadly. “I used to feed it milk and stroke it. It used to purr at me.”
The Princess patted his arm. “You know, you might be right, Tom. I’ve decided I really like milk, and I didn’t used to.”
Emerelda decided to lead the discussion on before the two of them got busy with the subject of stroking and purring. She was, in herself, fairly certain the curse had been broken. “Well. There are tests I can do. But now I think we’d better go and deal with that last sore: the Chief Wizard — before he runs off and is hard to find. I think, Tom, you should lie down for a bit and rest that wound. No, Alamaya. You do not need to help him to lie down. But you do need to stay here. You’d be a prize worth capturing, and you need to learn more magic. Uther, I think we’d better have a few troops.” She refused to call him by a title, after all, in hierarchy terms they were equals, but her subjects were harder to command, which is why she seldom did. It suited both sides
She had expected the Chief Wizard to have fled. His acolytes had. But he was sitting in a kind of throne, in the middle of his pavilion.
“I suppose you think you’ve won,” he said as they entered the tent. “I was waiting. I knew you’d come. It’s a pity you didn’t burn, Emerelda. But this will be worse in some ways.”
“He reminds me of my old master when he didn’t get his way,” said Hargarthius.
“I always admired Estethius. Why he picked a dead loss like you for a famulus I will never know. I begged h
im for the position,” said Kolumnus bitterly. “And now you will both die. You are in bespelled quicksand. It will draw you down to your death. And by all means try your worst spells against me, before I leave. I have put a great deal of research into my ethereal shield,” he sneered.
Emerelda’s feet were already sinking, trapping her.
But she had her trusty shoulder bag with her. It was an alternate universe fashion accessory that she really liked. She had thought that it and its contents might be useful for the problems they faced on returning here.
So she took her Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum out of her bag, calmly, and put three rounds through his body-mass just as her instructor had taught her, and two more through his head. The throne kept his body more-or-less-upright, and she was proud of her grouping. Kolumnus, however, was too dead to appreciate it, and his brain was too scattered for a jar.
The noise was enough to call soldiers.
And one thing about camps and soldiers, was that they had ropes to haul her out of the quicksand.
It was quite un-necessary for Hargarthius to have stripped his robe off, laid his staff on it and used it to spread his weight and get out of the quicksand by leaving his boots in it. How like a man, she thought. He had to prove he could escape all by himself, even if he only had socks to wear afterwards.
EPILOGUE
Being an apprentice, Tom discovered was entirely different from being a mere famulus. It meant you got to share the washing up. Tom wasn’t ready to trust the bouncer to a hoom-broom, but at least he was quite a good cook. Tom hadn’t realised he wasn’t, as he hadn’t much experience of what good cooking ought to taste like, and disembodied re-animated skulls don’t do much food-tasting.
He was also expected to spend time reading. Of course, that was extra time that he had to find somewhere.
Some things had, however, returned to normal. The demon had returned to his chamber-pot in the lab. When Tom asked him why —as he was no longer bound, the demon had given a smoky shrug. “The pansies dig the place. And it’s easier than providing my own pickles.”
Tom wasn’t sure that was the whole answer, but it was all he was getting from Hariselden.
Emerelda, King Uther, and Alamaya had all left for Borbungsburg castle, along with the army. “Why don’t you change the name?” Tom asked, ever curious.
King Uther had looked puzzled. “Why? The Borbungs built it. I can’t go back in history and build it instead. And it must gall them every time they think of a Corvin on the throne there. Besides, everyone with any intelligence would know it a lie, a claim to have built something we did not.”
They were due to go to the castle soon. Tom heard a great deal about it from Alamaya, who had introduced him to a magical messaging system called Txt. It was a gr8 help with spelling, if not with spells. Being human was hard on cat. But there were times he had to admit it was better. And in three days they’d be taking the new carpet, and repaired trunk to the castle. King Uther had decided to make Hargarthius the new Chief Wizard. “But I have no desire to be that. I don’t believe in organized magic. Even less than I believe in government being involved in magic,” the Master had protested.
“Exactly. That’s how we knew you were the ideal candidate. After nearly thirty years of watching you, we know you’d be terrible at it,” King Uther informed him, regally.
Human politics were difficult to understand, and in Tom’s opinion, needlessly complicated. He had a catlike impatience with the Master not doing precisely what Tom wanted right now, which was to go there.
In the meanwhile he at least had the thought of Alamaya’s farewell to comfort him. Her theory was, now that King Uther was doing the serious business of being King, being courted by all the court ladies from half the kingdoms around, in between executing Borbung sympathisers and going about the normal declaring of war and signing of peace and the other hack-slash-and-mutilate of good government, that the two them could slip off to go clubbing sometimes, just as soon as they both could get away. He was looking forward to it. A lot.
He was very much more boy than Tom cat these days. But, when Alamaya had rubbed up against his chin, before kissing him goodbye, part of him was definitely still a tom-cat.
Or human boys were more like tom-cats in this respect than he had realised.
If you enjoyed this book, you may want to try some of Freer's other books.
For a similar style of humor, the Bolg PI books.
Bolg PI: Away with the fairies
Or for fantasy
A Mankind Witch
For more see his Amazon Author page
Table of Contents
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
THE CAT WHO CHANGED
CHAPTER 2
THE HAUNTED SKULL OF THE KITCHENS
CHAPTER 3
IN WHICH THERE IS A DEMON
CHAPTER 4
THE OPENING SPELL
CHAPTER 5
THE DEMON AND TEMPTATION
CHAPTER 6
THE SUCKER
CHAPTER 7
EYE OF NEWT
CHAPTER 8
USE ONLY AS DIRECTED!
CHAPTER 9
IN WHICH THERE IS GARLIC. ALMOST CRUSHED GARLIC.
CHAPTER 10
ECONOMY CLASS-CARPET TO BORBUNGSBURG
CHAPTER 11
IN WHICH THERE ARE HIGHWAYMEN, NEWTS AND DIVINATION
CHAPTER 12
TOM GOES CLUBBING
CHAPTER 13
TROUBLE AND THE QUEEN OF CATS
CHAPTER 14
A WITCH IN THE DOOR
CHAPTER 15
BRAINS’ TRUST
CHAPTER 16
‘LIFE! LIFE AT LAST. MWAHHHHA HAA!’
CHAPTER 17
TO GNOME IS TO LOVE ME
CHAPTER 18
BETWEEN A ROC AND A HARD PLACE
CHAPTER 19
UP, UPPITY, ONTO THE RING OF FIRE
CHAPTER 20
IN WHICH WE ARE NOT AMUSED
EPILOGUE
If you enjoyed this book, you may want to try some of Freer's other books.
For a similar style of humor, the Bolg PI books.
Bolg PI: Away with the fairies
Or for fantasy
A Mankind Witch
For more see his Amazon Author page
