by Dave Freer
“Er. Can’t you magically just make some more money, Master?” asked Tom who still only had the vaguest idea of the relative value of these coins.
The magician scowled. Plucked at his dirty star-and-moon spangled robe. “Do these look like bats and roses to you, boy? I’m not an alchymist, and no one else wastes their time trying to defy the first law of Thaumodynamics.”
“Er. What’s that?” asked Tom.
“Hmph. ‘The value of money magically produced does not exceed the expense needed to create that money’,” said the magician. “And the merchants are all rich, meaning getting a bargain is difficult because of the second law of Thaumodynamics.”
“I er, don’t know that either. And… and it might help,” Tom said hastily, reading the Master’s expression.
“Money cannot, without magic, flow from a richer environment to a poorer.”
“I don’t know much magic,” said Tom, warily. “Or about money.”
“Well, I’ll teach you a quick translation spell,” said the Master loftily. “Pay attention.”
“How much?” asked Tom.
He got a cuff for that, and memorized the spell. “You can tell them you’re me,” said the Master, handing him a small pouch, prodding him ahead of him into the gate-room, and slamming the door behind him.
Tom had recently got the floor to that room cleaned up, after a lot of hard scrubbing, which the Master found very funny. That was always a bad sign.
So the stench in the place was a bad sign too. It was smoky and the smell was foul enough to make Tom want to gag. The smell, and the smoke came from the four large… well, possibly men. Maybe undead. Undead for quite a long time by the pong. And undead with garlic, which Tom had gathered between the Weekly Illuminati Age and Advertiser, and things the magician and Mrs Drellson’s skull said, was not a favorite of the undead, or vampires.
The Kossians had made a small fire on the floor, a floor Tom had painstakingly scrubbed those terrible stains off. “What did you do that for?” he demanded crossly, quite forgetting that he was here to bargain.
They looked at him. “No speeky Ambyrian,” said one. He, like all of them, wore strange leggings. Puffed up like a turkey’s drumsticks, but upside down, so they were much wider at the bottom than the top. Actually, even without the smoke to make his eyes water, Tom would have wanted to rub his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. They had embroidered waistcoats, and what looked like a sheet wound around their heads. And attached to their broad sashes were large curved scimitars. Tom remembered the spell, hastily muttered it, and repeated himself.
The speaker laughed and a wave of garlic pounded at Tom. “You will not magically entrap us now.” He pointed at the fire. “A spell to protect us. Very powerful witch she made it for us.” He broke another clove of garlic off the double bandolier of garlic around his neck and popped it into his mouth and chewed, open-mouthed. “Garlic very good yes,” said the Kossian spitting flecks of it as he talked.
“Er. Yes,” said Tom. The men appeared to be spreading out, rather like the smoke. “Well, I want to buy some bat-blood. I’m offering three silver Corvin a vat.”
“You him Hargarthius?” asked the Kossian, as his companions drifted sideways… it was very odd. Tom was not comfortable, besides the smell.
Mindful of what he had been told, Tom changed the automatic shaking of his head to a nod. “Yes. Now about that bat-blood…”
And then dived sideways to avoid the grabbing hands, and crashed into the second Kossian, and ducked the sweeping grasp of the third. He dived between the turkey-leg leggings and away, instinctively trying to find somewhere high, as the curving swords came out and the four, who weighted more than three times what he did, each, advanced towards him like a fleshy, sword-wielding wall.
There was no high point to jump to. No furniture. No windows…
Nowhere out at all.
No support, No help. Just an ominous creak.
Ominous enough to get the Kossians to look up, at the ceiling. It was descending.
“Magic!” exclaimed one fearfully.
“We protected,” said another. But there was doubt there. The ceiling was distinctly lower, and looked like stone.
“Anyway, we got him, Hargathius,” said the leader of the four, now tickling Tom’s windpipe with his sword. “You stop it.”
Tom shook his head. “I’m just his famulus. And the roof’s pulleys and chains are on the next floor. I always wondered what they were for.”
“We’ll kill you if you don’t stop it! We only want the brain,” said the Kossian.
Maybe they were Zombies! “I can’t stop it!” yelled Tom. “And the master will kill me too! I’m just a cat.” He understood now what he stains on the floor had been. At least cleaning them this time would not be his problem. The next famulus might find some squashed gold… It was dawned on Tom, that this might be his way out. Hargarthius might not care much for apprentices or smelly Kossians, but his gold was another matter. The roof was much lower now, and the Kossian had abandoned Tom to try and push it back. They were huge men… and their muscles bulged futilely.
Master Hargathius’s cackle filled the shrinking room. “Excellent. I’m glad I fixed the device. I’ll crush you like beetles, you stinking rogues.”
“Mercy,” screamed the straining Kossians, as the roof came down, inexorably. Tom, who knew that mercy was of little interest to magicians, yelled. “Master, it’ll crush your gold too.” The roof by now had the Kossians on their knees. “It’ll mash it into a bloody mess, and you won’t find it all.”
The roof stopped coming down, which was just as well, because it was now barely high enough for Tom to crawl. One of the Kossians had jammed his sword between the floor and the roof like a prop. It had bent, alarmingly. “Hmph,” said Master Hargarthius. “I’ll have to see if I can find the raising lever. I put it somewhere safe.”
Tom groaned. He’d been trying to find ‘somewhere safe’ for months now. It was a very elusive place which had a lot of things in it. This time it must have been less safe, because Master Hargarthius announced. “I will raise the roof and open the outer door. If you’re not out of there and running, faster than I can say ‘Rack Jobinson’, I’ll drop it again.”
The roof by creaking degrees began to go upwards. The door to the outside world swung open, and the Kossians scrambled out. The door swung closed before Tom could follow them. The bent scimitar fell with a clang as the roof ascended.
And a little later the door into the tower opened, and Master Hargarthius stood there. “Hmph. Kossians. They’ve stunk the place up,” he said, supremely unaware of his own bouquet. “Clean it up, boy. And, well done, to think of my money being crushed.”
“Um,” said Tom, entirely bereft of words just then.
“I wouldn’t use el-Zebbo’s incantation. That was a powerful spell they brought with them,” said Master Hargarthius, oblivious to fact that Tom wanted to fall over, or at least sit down. “Now, let’s see what they left behind.” He poked at the bent scimitar. “Hmph. Poor metalwork.” He looked at the bundles the ‘merchants’ had abandoned, while Tom worked on staying upright, with increasing success. “Well, well, well. It really looks like bat blood vats,” said the Master, pointing to the little barrels. “I’ll have to check, carefully. And see there are no booby-traps. Take them to the laboratory. Heh. That’s a bargain! Now, where’s my money, boy?”
Now that Tom had recovered his wits a bit, he thought he’d better make as much of this as he could. He held out the bag. “You promised me a reward if I got you a bargain,” he said.
The magician took the pouch, and felt the weight of it. “Hmm. So I did.” He opened the pouch and took out the littlest coin, a copper Zoe. For a moment Tom thought he was going to give it to him. But that was of course in defiance of the second law, so instead he used it to teach Tom a spell. “Very useful for shopkeepers in towns you never plan to visit again,” he explained. “It makes it appear to be the highest val
ue currency they are likely to accept, a golden Salabar. It doesn’t last very long, unfortunately. But if you’ve had to make a carpet-stop in a distant village, it can be very useful.”
As Tom had not made as much as a foot-stop at the nearest village, let alone a flying carpet stop in a distant one, it didn’t seem very useful to him. But that too was about to change. “That’s the second attempt to gain entry to the tower in months. It’s been more than twenty years since that last happened. I’m going to have to tighten my defenses. And the easiest way of doing that, boy, is not to let them in in the first place. You will have to walk to the village for any purchases in future. Traders can stay out… or in the gate-room.”
Tom fervently expressed support for ‘out’.
But, all in all, it was not a bad set of outcomes. Tom got to carry the heavy little barrels of bat-blood… but he also had a chance to go through the rest of the Kossian’s baggage. He found some money, which he decided, as no-one could not be richer than someone, had to move to him. Most of the rest of it was mysterious to Tom, and smelly, so he threw it out, barring a high collared cloak — which, as he did not have one, he washed — and a small dagger. The cloak was, once washed, soft and lined with red velvet. Tom liked it, and wore it, just because he could. The dagger was useful for eating with.
The village, seen from a human viewpoint and not a cat one, was… different. Tom was more than a bit nervous the first time he visited it as a human. Someone had shrunk the place while he was away. It still smelled much the same, but it looked quite different. Perhaps it was having one’s eyes so much higher off the ground that did it. Walking there he’d wondered if he should run away while he had the glorious chance. It was just that it was… suspiciously easy. And by now Tom had learned: if it seemed too easy… it was probably one of Master Hargarthius’s traps.
The locals had never recognized a ginger tabby cat from the farm dairy at the end of the muddy track on the outskirts of the village, although they had seen him about. They did recognize him as Master Hargarthius’s famulus without introduction, or having seen him before. Women drew their skirts aside, men eyed him warily. Tom rather enjoyed the latter, and wasn’t sure about the former. He did notice a couple of plump milkmaids peering speculatively at him and then tittering. Thinking about the word — another sprung unbidden into his mind — tittering was an appropriate term for it. His passage through the market-place was an interesting one, but he did manage to buy eggs and a duck. The duck seemed to know he was a cat, or at least guess what was going to happen to it, but that was the worst of it.
After a few weeks they were greeting him, and trying to cheat him. Of course even that was, Tom realized, very cautious, compared to their normal practice. They didn’t want to take too many chances with a customer who could possibly turn their cow barren, or make their wife interested in someone else. He did get questions about that, in cautious tones. And people asking him his name. He’d never thought about it. Tom was what he was, so that was what he answered.
When it came to getting yourself into trouble, thought the Wickedest Witch of the West, Alamaya could have given her a good run for her money, as a younger witch. It was lucky for the girl that she’d got away. That there had been an escape from the alley with that dog in it.
She’d actually managed to put herself into more danger than she faced from those who planned to kill her.
And Karst’s wizards and mage-guards hadn’t picked it up at all, just as they’d missed the last attempt on the girl’s life. So much for ‘organised magic’ and its superiority!
Well, let him sweat, she thought to herself. It’s time to put her in touch with her heritage.
She chuckled wickedly, reminiscently, to herself. That would be fun, if nerve-wracking.
In the meantime she’d better try another approach to acting on what the demon had told her.
Inside the cone of silence the conclave gathered. “You cannot,” said the Chief Wizard grimly, “Expect to fail us and have the organization continue to support you. Duke Karst is looking for heads to roll, and yours will be first. It was your job to watch her.”
The warlock Algorius looked around desperately for an escape. There was none. He’d walked into a trap. He could possibly have bested some of the individuals that circled him in their dark hooded gowns. But all at once… no. “I couldn’t have guessed,” he protested, desperately. “No one uses that stuff these days. It’s too dangerous. It was just on a back shelf. There were no thaumatic fluxes…”
“You were too lazy to watch. Now you will pay the penalty.”
Afterwards, when the other business was concluded, and a magical search, and various divinations organized, the Chief Wizard found himself once again, alone with his inner circle. “The Borbungs,” he instructed. “Begin to cultivate them, Bernerius. We may need them, after all.”
CHAPTER 10
ECONOMY CLASS-CARPET TO BORBUNGSBURG
Tom was barely getting used to the business of dealing with humans of the village as a human himself — it had been much easier as a cat, where all he had to understand was ‘scat’ — when his world expanded immeasurably. Well, Tom wasn’t very good at measuring, yet. But it did change a great deal.
Master Hargarthius decided that they had to go to the Court. Fortunately for Tom, the Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser had by now clarified the difference between the Court, which had Courtiers and a Duke, and court — a beast that entrapped mages and where turning witnesses, or judges, into newts was, most unreasonably it seemed, frowned on, and caught, which was something Tom tried to avoid being.
The parchment had appeared in the laboratory in front of Master Hargarthius with a sudden and startling boom which had made all of them take cover. “Show off,” the Master had yelled, before retrieving and reading it.
“The Duke is holding an in-gathering of witches, wizards, mages, spell-workers, thaumaturges and sorcerers. A good thing to stay away from,” said Master Hargarthius, waving the bit of parchment about as if it smelled bad. There might be some truth in it smelling bad. The edges were burned.
“So are we?” asked Tom.
Master Hargarthius grimaced and shook his head so that his beard waggled. “Unfortunately, that’s not a wise thing to do, even if it would be a good idea. My predecessor tried that and look what happened to him.”
“What happened to him?” asked Tom, who had actually never been told.
The Magician looked at him slightly askance. “He ended up with his brain in a jar and his body burned,” he said, tersely.
“Oh. We’d better go then.”
Master Hargarthius nodded and sighed. “I’ll just have to get the old carpet out. Drat that boy.”
Tom had worked out by now that the master was referring to Tom’s predecessor, who had stolen the new carpet, raided the pantry and fled from the tower. Tom dratted him too: if it hadn’t been for that, the magician might not have captured Tom, and the last famulus would still be cleaning and running about after Old Grumptious.
It might have made for fewer meals and a colder winter for Tom. But, well, freedom had its compensations. Tom gathered from the magician’s comments that his predecessor had met a nasty end… but that hadn’t brought the carpet back. The carpet had a second use-return spell — which was very useful for returning stolen magic carpets and for taking drunk magicians home. The fact it had never come home meant that Marcenius — the previous famulus — had met an unpleasant end before he could try to use the carpet again. The unpleasant end part pleased Master Hargarthius, but the lack of his carpet annoyed him almost as much.
So they would be flying on an elderly and frayed rug from the study. Tom knew it well. It refused to stay still and be hoomed. He had to brush it by hand, which it put up with. The flying part was more worrying. It was all very well for carpets and ravens. But as a cat, or as a human, Tom was less than sure about it. If they’d been intended to fly, cats or humans would either be woven or at least have feathers, h
e thought.
It wasn’t all bad, though. The wizard did something almost unprecedented: he washed. And dug out a robe stiff with gold embroidery, which, Tom was pleased to see, Old Grumptious found both heavy and not particularly warm. He also put on boots with extremely curled toes and tassels on the heel, that part of Tom wanted to chase and bat.
There was a further surprise. Even famuluses got somewhat better dressed for Court, in a long-sleeved dark blue robe, which was not too musty — and did not have a hole for his tail. It was, thus, uncomfortable. Tom’s suggestion that he cut a hole was not well received. And Tom got foot-wear. It was warm, Tom supposed. But his feet were most unused to being sheathed, even if they no longer had decent claws.
The raven, and a large, heavy trunk were also coming with them. The carpet and the trunk had to be hefted up a great many flights of stairs to the very top of the Tower. “It needs a jump-start,” said Master Hargarthius, grumpily, when asked why. “And don’t ask so many questions at Court. The House of Corvin hasn’t been worth much since King Uther disappeared, but they can still chop off heads. Keep your mouth shut and behave yourself. And keep behind me. And for Zoranthysus’s sake, don’t get underfoot as you always do. Now, I must finish setting the wards on this place. Can’t have thieves or trespassers in here while we’re away. And I need to make sure the demon gets his pickle. We’ll run out at this rate.”
That seemed unlikely, even if they weren’t breeding. There were, it seemed, a near infinite supply of elderly evil pickles in the pantry.
Tom liked high places and the top of the tower worried him not at all. Well, not until Master Hargarthius made him unroll the carpet onto the parapet, and put the trunk onto it. It nearly slipped over the edge, with Tom still holding it. It was a long, long way down. He was a bit reluctant when Master Hargarthius told him to get on the carpet. “Sit behind the trunk.”
“Er.”
The magician took a look at Tom, then shook his head. “Come here.”