TOM

by Dave Freer

  Tom found out, thus, that that was what he had carried to the kitchen: Ham, more of the heavy, solid bread, and more soft cheese. That was good. Better than braving the cheese that lurked in the far corner of the pantry, anyway.

  The ham, once he’d learned not to burn it, or his mouth, was good too.

  That was not something Tom found true of the second visitor to the tower.

  “The Princess must die,” hissed one voice.

  “She’s going to. You need to learn patience,” said the other, coolly.

  The problem with a bespelled rat as a spy, was that it remained a rat. It wasn’t, for all that she drove it, going to go beyond the arras. She could not see the conspirators. And her vessel heard as a rat hears, which was entirely different to how a human hears, she’d found. The witch could not work out just whose voices they were, from what she heard with the rat-ears.

  “How do you know for certain?” asked the first. The listening witch was almost sure that that was a woman speaking. “It’s only demon-gossip. They lie.”

  “So do humans, and yet one can learn to discern the truth from them.”

  Then the rat-ears heard another sound. A cat’s footfall is not loud to a human, but to a rat… so it fled.

  The witch sighed. So they knew about the demon. She’d have to use it, and soon, to get what she needed.

  CHAPTER 3

  IN WHICH THERE IS A DEMON

  Tom had nearly finished another day, down in the bowels of the kitchens, when he was summonsed into the presence of the second visitor. Well, Master Hargarthius bellowed for food and drink, for him and his guest… and he actually sounded pleased.

  Mrs Drellson’s skull had the time of her… afterlife, telling Tom what to do, where to find the good silver, and making him polish crystal wine glasses and run down to the cellar — something he hadn’t known existed, to fetch wine. And then run back down again, for a different bottle, one slightly less than three centuries past its prime.

  Mrs Drellson’s skull had revelled in entertaining the nervous nobility, gentry and other magicians for her master. The skull seemed to hope that time had come again. “Oh you should have seen them, all trying to be polite, trying to guess which dish was poisoned and how.” The skull laughed scornfully. “Poison’s always in the cabbage, if it’s in anything. It can hide the smells of poisons, best. Now get on with it. The good sausage, I told you. Hmph. It’s not what I’d call an adequate feast.”

  It still looked that way to Tom as he carried the heavy platter up the stairs to the Master’s study. Some of the items arranged in the little bowls smelled decidedly odd, and cat-unpleasant. The wine however… that had a lovely scent, reminiscent of something. It made him feel combative, and was a little distracting. It took Tom a while to work out what it was rather like: The scent with which male cats mark their territory. So humans drank that? How odd.

  He was still rather deep in this distracting thought when he took the platter in to the room, where his master was standing talking to the visitor. The master was pointing to a complicated diagram on the wall with his staff. The visitor wore bright coloured clothes, and his collar was trimmed with martin-fur — that was different enough — but what was really strange… well, he wouldn’t have commented if it hadn’t been for smell of the wine. That had temporarily distracted him from the reality of his place here in the tower, where asking questions meant dodging a cuff on the ear.

  So he just asked the visitor, unthinking. “Why haven’t you got a shadow?”

  At which point a lot of things happened, very fast.

  Even very fast for a cat.

  The stranger stopped looking human, unless humans were able to suddenly transform into fluid, flame-like creatures, and no-one had told Tom about it. It dived out of its now-burning clothes and reached for Master Hargarthius. Then it shrieked and flung itself at the high window. But Master Hargarthius, muttering furiously, lifted his staff and… the staff grew, and the magician used it to scratch a line on the floor, completing a pattern there.

  The fluid flame fell to the floor, and Tom dodged back, dropping the platter, scattering food, breaking the plates and shattering the wine bottle. He looked at the result in horror. Now he was in for it. He looked for the best route to flee.

  But the door had closed itself. The air in the room was thick and smelled of lightning and cat…wine, and somehow the atmosphere tasted metallic. Tom settled for backing up against the wall, the one that had a bookcase against it, and was solid books. He wished he could back right into them. Some of them did seem to be nuzzling against his back, but right now he wasn’t prepared to turn around and find out just how a leather-bound book could do that. What was happening in the middle of the room was too worrying.

  It involved a strange and malevolent creature… who had always been strange and malevolent, and usually cross and hitting Tom. He was now fighting with a ball of flame that sometimes became a tiger, or a warrior, or an enormous striking serpent. Master Hargarthius did to it just what he always did to Tom, only quite a lot harder… With added lightning. “Avaunt, Demon,” he yelled. “Avaunt, I command you!”

  Tom wasn’t entirely sure what avaunting was, or how he was supposed to do it, when it occurred to him that maybe the stranger was actually also a demon, and that, for a change, Master Hargarthius was not actually yelling at him. No wonder the man from the village had been afraid of demons! Tom rather liked the tiger, and wondered when he would get to being able to turn himself into that. It didn’t seem to be helping the demon though. Under the rain of blows it had contracted to being a mere ball of flame.

  “Quick boy,” yelled Master Hargarthius, “Get me a containment vessel!”

  Tom knew by now that saying ‘what?’ would be a mistake. But he had no idea what his master wanted. So he scrambled to find the only containment vessel he could think of, close to hand, the large chamber-pot the magician kept under the corner of his desk, which it was Tom’s unenviable duty to empty.

  Fortunately, it was not in need of emptying just then. Tom rushed forward with the florally painted pot and held out to the master.

  “Not that you idiot… oh, well. It’ll have to do. Put it down. You’ll need to walk widdershins, seven times, saying ‘Melba Aristo Otsira Ablem’, forty-nine times, while I keep him here.”

  Tom’s counting skills hadn’t moved a long way past ‘one, two, many,’ before he had been trapped into this human body. But between his master and Mrs Drellson’s skull and their requirements for various numbers of things he had learned the elements of arithmetic. That could work for the seven part. He had enough fingers for that. The forty-nine part… well, at least he had some idea what ‘widdershins’ meant. He had thought it involved the spoiled, white, fluff-ball cat in the village who had a human that other humans called ‘widder’ and it was always winding its way between her shins.

  Fortunately for Tom’s survival it appeared that Master Hargarthius could both count and keep demons entrapped at the same time… “Another three, fool boy,” he yelled when Tom would have stopped. Tom looked inwards, warily, at the end of the three final repetitions. He was amazed to see a golden cone above the chamber-pot, gradually sinking into it. This might seem quite normal for the chamber-pot, but none of it missed. Then the Master stopped his muttering and the room was silent, except for the faint rocking of the chamber-pot on some shards of broken glass.

  Master Hargarthius exhaled and tottered over to his chair and flopped into it, wiping his brow. “That was too close for comfort.”

  Tom had to agree with him. It had all been far too close for his comfort. He would much rather have been anywhere else, even the kitchen. And there, shattered on the floor were the precious crystal glasses, the wine bottle, and several plates and bowls that the skull of Mrs Drellson was going to have the fur singed off his tail for breaking, if he was lucky. He was trying hard to think of options, preferably for escape.

  Then, to his utter surprise, Master Hargarthius looked at him.
“Well spotted, boy. Maybe they’re right, cats are less affected by enchantment and demonic manipulation than humans. Get a broom and clean up this mess, and get back to the kitchen. I’ll have some beer. Hmm. Maybe I can use you more in my spell-work, and give you a little training in magic.”

  And then Master Hargarthius got up and picked up the chamber pot. Himself. Not even telling Tom to do it. That was very strange indeed. Tom walked to the door, still trying to make sense of it all, on his way to fetch the brush and dustpan, and to receive the inevitable yelling at by the skull.

  The door wouldn’t open.

  Tom kept trying. Eventually the magician noticed and laughed. There was something very affronting to a cat-boy’s dignity in being laughed at, but it was better than being hit.

  “I’ll have to unseal it, boy.” He put the chamber-pot on the desk — something Tom had been walloped for doing — and came over to the door, and started muttering again. This time Tom was close enough to hear his words, and to watch the passes Master Hargarthius made with his hand. Tom stashed the memory away very carefully in his mind. It could be useful someday. He had to wonder if it opened other doors… like the front door. The door to the outside world, where a cat might not have to be the slave to an old curmudgeon who hit him, and attracted dangerous creatures.

  On the other hand it was also a world where — if the village-man was like the rest of them, they might take his tail as an indication that Tom was a dangerous creature. Tom was strutting down the passage to fetch the dust-pan enjoying this idea, revelling in the dream of chasing the villagers off and eating all their fish, when it occurred to him that he’d seen the village men shoot a wolf, that they also considered a dangerous creature, full of arrows. He could wear his tail under his robe… but it was so uncomfortable, Tom couldn’t keep it there for too long.

  That was why he’d pulled apart the stitches on the back-seam of the robe to make a hole, to let his tail enjoy its freedom, instead of being crammed down inside the robe. It was far better than lifting the robe over his tail. The weight of the fabric was a constant irritation to his tail, and doing it that way it let the cold breeze in.

  Tom had decided, reluctantly, that escape would have to wait a little longer. Perhaps until he’d learned a bit of magic himself. He quite fancied being able to turn himself into a tiger. There was a bigger, older tom-cat in the village that Tom would like to pay a visit to, in that form. And a few other girl cats might be more impressed with him, then. As a cat, Tom had just been at the stage of realizing that he was a tom-cat. That, it seemed, hadn’t entirely changed, when he became human. The thought of girl-cats distracted him from the fear of Mrs Drellson’s skull, until she screeched at him.

  “Do they want more wine? They always want more wine. And take that blasted raven away. It has been flying around the kitchen, like a thing demented, which it is of course. But it is driving me mad.”

  Tom managed to avoid saying ‘which you already are, of course’ and said: “Er no. There was a demon. Things got broken.” It was a hopeful slither out of ‘I dropped the platter, and everything got broken’. Tom had learned by now that a direct lie to either the Master or the skull tended to end badly. But perhaps an indirect approach might work better? Like stalking a bird while pretending you hadn’t actually seen it.

  And it seemed that this was the case, or she could have been distracted by the mention of the demon. “A demon!” the skull chittered its snaggly teeth in what Tom had learned was delight, usually at Tom’s suffering. “What order?!”

  “It didn’t order anything. I was told to fetch the master some beer, and I need a brush and dustpan to clean up the mess.”

  “Fool-of-a-boy!” He got a trickle of her green-lightning pain — but nothing compared to what he’d been expecting. “What was its rank?”

  “I don’t know. It smelled pretty bad. The air tasted like tin.”

  “For a magician’s famulus you are a most terrifyingly ignorant boy,” said the skull of Mrs Drellson. Tom got the feeling that if it could have rolled its eyes, it would have. “Get the beer and the dust-pan and get on with it, before we have Old Grumptious down here boasting about how he defeated a demon. Esthetius used to have half a dozen captive, in my day.”

  Tom had only thought of himself being very well-informed, for a cat, before. It did rather depend on where you looked at things from, and Tom still wasn’t quite ready to look at anything from a human point of view. It seemed quite inadequate, despite being, Tom reluctantly had to admit to himself, more complex than the way a cat would have seen things. That didn’t have to mean it was better, did it? “Well, I think he’s got this one captive too. It’s in the chamber pot.”

  “That’d give someone a nasty surprise in the middle of the night,” said the skull, with more teeth chittering. “Get a move on, boy.”

  So Tom did.

  The Raven fluttered up the passage ahead of him.

  Inevitably it said ‘Nevermore’ as it flew.

  Princess Alamaya had held high hopes of the magic classes she had cajoled her Uncle into allowing her to be given. They had at least offered the possibility of escape.

  She should have guessed that he wouldn’t allow her to be taught anything useful. And the laboratory was a horrible old dump, full of ancient equipment from the time of the Enchantress Saliana, who had used this room in her disappeared grandfather’s time. Its shelves groaned with the nasty chemicals and potions of yesteryear. It was dusty, tedious and hard work.

  It was true that transforming — albeit temporarily — obnoxious and unprotected people into green frogs was not entirely useless. But the transformation spell didn’t work on yourself. And anyway, what use to her was becoming a frog?

  Within the protective cone of silence that the conclave of plotters always employed, Melania said, unctuously, “Magic use provides us with all sorts of possible ways of getting rid of her.”

  “She will die. It’s not really necessary at this stage for us to intervene. It’s not so much a question of how she dies, but when it will be most convenient for us,” her Master replied, steepling his long fingers. “Possibly the biggest mistake Esthetius made was that he wanted to be the visible ruler. I am content with power, for now. And there are still a number of magic workers who are not suitably committed to organised magic. Old reactionaries, who are not ready to go with the new ways.”

  “How can they not see that our ways are much better, much better for the people?” Melania asked unctuously.

  He shrugged. “They will see sense or be dealt with.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE OPENING SPELL

  If there was one sure thing about being a cat-almost-completely-transformed-to-human famulus to Master Hargarthius that Tom had established; it was that nothing was sure. Well, that and the fact that Master Hargarthius and the Skull of Mrs Drellson had it in for him. He would have said that was true of the cheese that lurked on the third shelf of the pantry, and the raven, too, but Tom had discovered that they could be bought off. Or at least distracted with suitable bribes. Tom decided everything else was uncertain, and was out to get him at least some of the time.

  The demon in the chamber pot was an entirely different matter. It didn’t just want to kill Tom sometimes. It had it in for everybody, all of the time. That, as Tom learned over the next few weeks, was normal for demons, not just ones trapped in a pale blue chamber-pot, painted with rather garish pansies. Its power was constrained by the magics that bound it, but it still managed a little local malevolence. The pansies changed colour, and, subtly, shape, from time to time.

  Tom found his ‘promotion’ from pure kitchen and house slave, merely under the lash of the skull of Mrs Drellson, to being permitted in the laboratory to be sworn at, to have pointy and hard objects thrown at him… and to assist, and in theory, to learn some small magical skill, was a mixed blessing. Mostly it wasn’t a blessing. But he was learning more, both of magic, and of humans and their world, which was not quite the same as
the world cats bestrode.

  Humans had other ideas about who ruled it, for starters. Tom was coming to the conclusion that the human world was actually bigger and more complex than the cat world. And while it was perfectly obvious that humans didn’t run it, or at least not as far as the cats were concerned, they did have ‘rulers’ like Dukes and Kings, who thought they did, and magicians who thought they should.

  In the process they could make things very unpleasant for cats, and more so for cat boys. Tom had only the human part of his memory to rely on but he gathered that Dukes were powerful, and inevitably evil, and that Kings were even more powerful. Tom was still a bit hazy about the precise meaning of evil. However, Dukes who wanted to be Kings, and Barons who wanted to be Dukes, and Knights who wanted to be Barons… provided money to magicians like his master, to help them reach their goals. Master Hargarthius had been deceived into thinking that the Demon was a Duke, and one that he was acquiring from another magician, as a dissatisfied customer. Magicians disputed ownership of these providers of money with other magicians. The demon had been a competitor’s attempt to put Master Hargarthius out of business, permanently.

  Or that was at least how Tom had worked it out, so far. It was in all, a puzzling business that no-one explained much of, to him. Magicians such as Master Hargarthius spent a lot of time experimenting with things they weren’t good at, and reading. Tom had already tried a fair amount of experimenting with things he wasn’t good at, at least not immediately. Reading was still something of a mystery, but Tom was determined to work at it.

  A great many answers seemed to lie in the books. Except — in some of the books — it didn’t so much ‘lie’, as actively try to get out. Those ones were padlocked, and in some cases, were chained to the shelf.