“That’s right! I’m not waiting around like some … peasant. Vrunak’s out; well that’s just too bad. Obegarde can come back when it’s dark; do the job himself.”
“Yep. Sounds fair.”
“Right.”
“Let’s be off to meet him, then. Shall we?”
“Fine.”
“Great.”
The duke headed back up the garden path, Jimmy in tow. They were passing a dense thicket when Modeset tripped on a crack in the paving stones. He went down hard, and Jimmy, who hadn’t managed to anticipate anything from the Dafisful incident onward, landed in a crumpled heap beside him. Modeset groaned. He was bruised, his pride still ached, and he felt awful.
He tried to get to his feet, but Jimmy, suddenly alert, dragged him back down again and pulled him off the path. They rolled over one another before Modeset wrestled an arm free. “Let go! What’s with you?”
“Shh … there’s someone coming.”
Still flat to the ground, the duo watched as Vrunak’s gate creaked open. A straggly and bedraggled man stepped into the garden, closed the gate behind him, and carried on up the path.
“It’s the gnome from last night,” Jimmy whispered. Mixer had reached Vrunak’s front door, where he made straight for the flowerpot. When the key was found to be missing, he looked both ways and then flew into a rage, shaking his fists at the windows, kicking the door, and cursing Vrunak’s name in a variety of different languages. Modeset thought that he heard the words “treacherous old git” mentioned more than once.
Eventually the gnome seemed to come to a decision and made his way around the side of the cottage.
“Should we try and capture him, d’you think?” Modeset ventured.
“Nah, I doubt we could. I know I couldn’t.”
Modeset looked affronted. “Speak for yourself, coward,” he snapped. “I’ve had one fight already this week, so I—”
“Did you win?”
“Um … yes, sort of. In fact, the other chap didn’t get a single blow in.”
“Really? You’re that good?”
“No, actually I ran away before he could react. Now, come on!”
The duke nodded toward the house, but his determination was interrupted.
“Oi!” Jimmy whispered. “Get down! He’s comin’ back.”
Mixer, apparently unsuccessful in his quest to gain an illicit entrance to the cottage, emerged from the side of the building and stomped back up the path. When he reached the gate he took one last look at the house, spat on the ground, and headed off along Royal Road.
“We could follow him,” said Jimmy doubtfully.
Modeset looked astonished. “Follow him? In order to achieve what, exactly?”
The gravedigger shrugged. “To see where he goes, of course. Why else would you follow somebody?”
“No,” snapped Modeset. “I’ve got a much better idea. We split up, and you go after the gnome. Then you can come and find me at the inn.”
“Why me?”
“You suggested it.”
“So?”
“Just get a move on. Quick, before you lose him.”
THIRTY-NINE
IT WAS EARLY EVENING in Dullitch, and the Diamond Clock on Crest Hill struck six.
Flicka, who had been sent onto the old, half-rotted balcony of the inn to watch out for Jimmy Quickstint, whistled a tune that provoked jeers from the weary market traders.
The innkeeper had guided Modeset into the basement of the Steeplejack Inn to wake Obegarde.
The duke sat on the bottom step of the basement staircase, fidgeting nervously and trying to keep his eyes off the coffin on which the loftwing had placed his early-evening pick-me-up; freshly squeezed beetroot juice.
“Thins the blood,” he explained, when he saw Modeset’s expression. “Have to keep healthy, don’t you?”
Modeset shifted his buttocks to the top of a small wine barrel, but after a few minutes, looked about ready to give up and sit on the floor instead.
“So we’re waiting on Jimmy,” said Obegarde, savoring the juice with poorly concealed glee. Modeset had already filled him in on their expedition to Vrunak’s house. “I’ve been researching the Grinswood,” Obegarde continued, “and I fear we don’t know the half of it, yet.”
“Oh?”
“According to Jimmy, the barrowbird said it was a servant of the forest. That would also make it a servant of the Dark Trinity. ‘Watchers,’” Obegarde explained, holding up a hand to stop Modeset interrupting. “Those that make sure everything stays as it is, more or less.”
“Okay. And these watchers sent the bird when Jimmy’s friend took the lizards, correct?”
“As far as I can make out, yes. But the point is, this all started up because our city’s lunatic fringe group wanted ’em; we now know why.”
There was a knock on the basement door, and Flicka poked her head around it. “A friend of yours,” she said.
Jimmy staggered into the basement.
“Any luck?” said Obegarde, offering the gravedigger some beetroot juice, which he quite rightly refused.
“Yeah, he went home,” Jimmy said. “Lives in a hovel west of the palace; a right old slum. I’ve seen better windows in a doll’s house. Rump Lane, it’s called. I waited till he went out before I came back. Maybe we can search the place.”
Obegarde got to his feet. “Right. Who’s with me?”
No one made a sound.
“I’ll assume that’s just myself and the duke, then.” He glared at Modeset, who looked about ready to explode and then simmered down considerably.
“I’m up for it,” said Flicka.
Jimmy realized he’d have to go, too, and groaned.
FORTY
RUMP LANE WAS ONE of the first roads to be built when Dullitch had laid its foundations on the ash-lands of Illmoor. Now, more than two hundred years later, it looked about the same.
“What a dump,” said Obegarde.
“Absolute abomination,” said Modeset.
“Used to rent a little place along here,” Jimmy muttered. “It was all right. Bit of damp in the walls, but nothing worth condemning it over.”
Obegarde put a finger to his lips. “I’m going in first,” he said. “Just in case our friendly neighborhood gravedigger got it wrong, and Mixer’s still home. The rest of you can wait here until I give the all clear.”
They watched as the investigator walked over to the door and gripped the brass door handle. There was a brief pause, and then he disappeared inside. Seconds later he came flying backward out of one of the ground-floor windows. He had a gnome on top of him.
Flicka and Modeset rolled their eyes in sync.
The battle landed on the cobbles. After taking a few minor blows, Obegarde threw the gnome into a pile of rubbish bins and followed up his offensive with a well-aimed boot.
“I hate this guy,” he said, panting as he pulled the unconscious gnome onto his feet. “I absolutely, unutterably, one hundred percent hate him. Jimmy, can you give me a hand getting him to the militia? He’s got a nasty habit of giving me the slip.”
Jimmy nodded, and hurried over to help.
“We’ll meet you at the palace in one hour; get this mess sorted out,” Obegarde called.
Modeset made to enter the hovel, then stopped and put a hand on Flicka’s shoulder. “You stay here and watch for the militia,” he commanded. “We’ve got until Obegarde gets to the guardhouse to search the place; after that, it’ll be crawling with the district’s finest.”
FORTY-ONE
THE AIR IN THE hovel was musty.
“I’m up here,” called Flicka from the top of the staircase. She’d abandoned her sentry post at the front door for a preferred position in the attic. It still afforded a fine view of the road, and she could search at the same time.
“Okay,” Modeset shouted back. “Tell me if you find anything.”
“Sure.”
“Right.”
Modeset stepped through a l
ow door and looked around with unconcealed distaste at the room beyond.
The kitchen, like the rest of the hovel, was a threadbare affair. Rats congregated in the corner of the room, and Modeset was sure he could see a vole in the bargain.
The only decent piece of furniture in the room, as far as he could tell, was an aging iron stove that looked as though it might have value as scrap metal. It looked a little out of place and, Modeset was sure, a little out of sync with the wall. He stepped over to the dresser, hunkered down, leaned a shoulder against it, and, after several attempts, moved it aside. The wall sported several deep cracks. Modeset saw something wedged in the largest of these, and reached inside to pull it out. When he finally managed to wrench the obstacle free, he discovered it was in fact a book, and it weighed a ton.
He struggled over to the table and dropped the volume down with a spine-juddering smack.
“What was that?” shouted Flicka.
Modeset sighed.
“I’ve found a book,” he bellowed back.
Groaning with effort, he heaved the book over and allowed it to slam down. On the cover etched in golden letters, were the letters:
EA I G
LE N S
Modeset squinted at the outline of the missing letters, blinked, and looked again, but he still couldn’t make any sense of the title. Then he rubbed the palm of his hand over the gold lettering and, losing patience, brushed a mountain of dust from the cover. Thus revealed, the writing read:
LEAVING
LEGENDS
Modeset frowned.
“Leaving Legends?” he said aloud.
“What’s that?” asked Flicka. She emerged from the doorway and slumped down, out of breath, on a crooked stool beside the table.
“It’s one of the Yowler holy books, or some close approximation. As I recall, they were always dropping leaflets into the guild; some rot about paying weekly for a copy if your earnings couldn’t make the stretch.”
“Except that this can’t be a copy,” Flicka commented, nodding at the tome. “I mean, look at it. It’s got to be an original with all that braiding. I bet it was stolen. Nobody who lives here could afford a book like that.”
“Hmm … as a matter of fact, it was stolen. From Karuim’s Church, though by all accounts the theft was arranged.”
Flicka scratched at a cut on her chin. “How do you know that?” she asked. “Obegarde?”
“Yes. He paid them a visit last night. Whatever this whole, twisted mess is all about, I’ll make a fair bet it has more than a little to do with this book.”
“You could be right, Lord M. What does it say?”
“I don’t know. But I’m not going to read it here, that’s for sure.”
Modeset tried to pick up the book, but it was clearly too heavy to carry halfway across the city. Only the gods knew how a gnome had managed it.
He sighed, opened the top leaf, and began to read. After a few minutes, he looked up.
Flicka was staring expectantly at him. “What does it say?”
Modeset shrugged. “It’s the usual religious drivel; starts off with some crazy prophet who’s decided to resurrect Yowler, God of Scones—er—that might be Stones, I think. Yes, it is. Right, anyway, he tries to bring Yowler back to life by turning an entire town to stone.”
“How?”
Modeset continued to turn the pages. “Erm … well, apparently, he took six special lizards called Batchtiki, and he put them into some kind of magic machine. There’s a drawing of it here.” He thought back to the hulking monstrosity in the shadows of Warehouse Six, but the illustration looked nothing like it.
“It’s totally different,” he muttered. “Totally. There’s not one similarity in the design.”
“I don’t understand,” Flicka said, watching the duke as if lipreading his words. “What are you talking about?”
Modeset pointed at the tome. “Obegarde found and destroyed a gigantic machine in one of the warehouses down at the harbor. It definitely had something to do with the Yowlers, because the church was logged as the receiver. I saw it with my own eyes, but it bore absolutely no resemblance to this thing in here.” He jabbed a finger at the illustration. “This looks more like a lighthouse.”
“That’s because it is a lighthouse,” Flicka ventured, peering over his shoulder. “If you look closely, there’s an arrow next to the word ‘machine.’ You’re on the wrong page.”
The duke reached down and turned over a leaf. On the new page was a picture that Modeset recognized immediately.
“That was it!” he exclaimed. “That was the thing in the warehouse!” His gaze fell to the writing beneath it.
“The lighthouse,” Modeset continued, “having been powered by the glare of a Batchtiki-holding device, fired a charge of energy into the target—our machine at the warehouse—freezing everything within a five-dinat radius.”
“What’s a dinat?”
“Uh … about twenty miles,” Modeset guessed.
Flicka looked suddenly aghast. “Th-they were going to turn the whole of Illmoor to stone!” she cried. “Those crazy, cretinous murderers! If Obegarde hadn’t destroyed the machine—”
Modeset snapped his fingers for silence. “So,” he began, brows knotting with the effort of deduction, “if this was the receptacle in the warehouse, and we can now reasonably assume that it was, then we no longer have that portion of the problem to worry about.”
“There’s a ‘but’ coming, isn’t there?”
“I’m afraid so,” Modeset warned. “Because it also says that the secondary machine is used to magnify the beam’s resulting discharge. So one machine fires into the other, which magnifies the beam and explodes. Now, even allowing for the destruction of its magnifier, we can comfortably assume that the remaining beam’s strike would still take in all of Dullitch and a little more besides.”
“B-b-but that means we’re all going to get tur—”
“All it means, Flicka, is that we need to find the primary machine. Pronto.”
As the girl’s smile froze, the duke read on, turning pages with increasing fervor.
“Ha! Here is where it gets interesting,” he said. “Distance and Trajectories’: according to Doiley’s first law, the machines have to be at least seventy miles apart.”
“That’s an incredible distance,” said Flicka, who’d excelled in geography during a brief stint in cartography school. “Especially since the whole of Illmoor is only eighty miles, north to south.”
“Okay,” said Modeset, eyeing her carefully. “For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s right. You’re good at geography, yes?”
“Yes,” Flicka replied confidently. “So?”
“Well, what’s at the other end of the continent?”
“Sorry?”
“Well, Dullitch occupies the southernmost point of eastern Illmoor, right?”
“Right.”
“So, is there a town in the extreme north, past Grinswood?”
Flicka’s face creased as she tried to recall the outline of the big wall-mounted map in the chief cartographer’s office, but it was Modeset who answered his own question.
“Plunge!” he exclaimed. “Plunge is the northernmost town on the continent. Arrrgh!”
Flicka nearly jumped out of her skin. She gawped at the duke, who suddenly looked as if he were about to kill someone.
“What’s wrong?” she said dubiously.
“Plunge falls within the jurisdiction of Fogrise,” snapped Modeset. “My land!”
“Well, not technically yours, Lord M,” Flicka pointed out. “At least not anymore: those old boundaries haven’t existed for years! Besides, it’s miles away from Fogrise.”
“Yes, but it’s still my land, my birthright, and it’s as though they’re firing a deadly beam from my back garden to destroy Dullitch! It’s the principle of the thing! I’d feel responsible!” Modeset let out a long, depressed sigh. “What am I going to do?”
“Stop them from turning
us all to stone?” Flicka hazarded. “It’s just an idea, but—What? What did I say?”
Suddenly a light flickered in the duke’s eyes, as if he’d been sitting in a corner for years and someone had just remembered to plug him in. Destiny beckoned. It told Modeset, in the confines of his head, that the time had come to take a stand, to do something truly heroic.
“C’mon, Flicka,” he snapped. “We’re going to avert a catastrophe. Your first, my second.”
“Okay, Lord M. What’re we going to do?”
“Well, I’m going to begin by reading this book from cover to cover, and then we’re going back to the Steeplejack to fetch my battle attire. After that, I need to speak with my cousin.”
“Are we going to get Pegrand?”
“Yes, among other things; now, keep a watch for those guards while I catch up on some history!”
FORTY-TWO
VISCOUNT CURFEW WAS SURPRISED to see his cousin march into the palace throne room wearing a full suit of Fogrise armor. To increase the level of bewilderment (made evident by the shocked gasps of the royal bodyguards lurking in the shadows of the room), Modeset saluted.
“Apologies for the disturbance, my lord,” he said. “But Dullitch is in grave danger, and I feel I owe it to the city to warn you.”
Curfew licked his lips. For some reason the duke’s renewed strength of voice concerned him.
“Um … grave danger, you say? Any chance you could be a little more specific?”
“A plot is underway—”
“Yes, I’m quite awa—”
“—to resurrect a dark god.”
Curfew paused, lowered his hand. “Oh—” was all he could manage.
“This resurrection,” Modeset continued, “may involve the people of Dullitch being turned to stone.”
Curfew swallowed a few times and steepled his fingers. “You have proof of this, I assume?” he said unsteadily. “Such accusations are fruitless without—”
“Eyewitnesses can be provided later. Right now my needs are great. If I’m to stop this plot I will require a mage of some considerable skill to teleport a small company to Plunge.”
Yowler Foul-Up Page 11
