by Dave Freer
Master Hargarthius had fetched the requisite grimoire himself, and the witch had prepared the circles and symbols. The cat had done exactly what cats always do: watch, and occasionally get in the way. Tom was faintly irritated, and he knew, irrationally jealous at this. It made no sense to feel that way. He knew, better than anyone that cats were like that, just as water was wet. But still, that should have been his job, his role, instead of being the dogsbody. They didn’t call that position ‘dogsbody’ for nothing.
In time however the spell was complete, the last line drawn, the owl fewmets scattered onto the flames… and voices, one of which Tom recognized came out of the ear.
It certainly sounded as if they were angry and upset. Tom felt that that was how things ought be. He did not approve of having to clean up the mess, and this was his tower! Which was an odd thought too. It wasn’t his prison anymore. But most of all Tom was vengeful because they had been out to hurt Maya.
That was a very human way to feel. Listening to the conspirators on the other side of the ear did not make Tom feel any more kindly disposed towards them.
“…knew the risks. Go into any magician’s house and there are traps,” said Kolumus.
“Why didn’t you go then?” said another resentful voice.
“Because Benita was the heaviest weight we could magically transport, Targonius. Do you ever remember anything?”
“Now gentlemen,” said a voice, chilly and autocratic, and female. “It appears from what they said that we have succeeded in our task. Yes, we showed our hand, and yes, it is possible that Hargarthius may be able to identify Benita’s remains. But the brain is destroyed. The curse endures, and our cause triumphs.”
“How do we know it was destroyed?” asked someone.
“Benita broke every jar there when she couldn’t identify it. The disguising spells aside, it’s destroyed. It has been exposed to air, removed from its sustaining liquid,” replied Kolumnus
“And if Hargarthius lied, and it was somewhere else?”
“Unlikely. But we will take steps, none-the-less. Now I am going to rest. It’s been a long enough night.”
There was a silence. “When do we meet again, to take steps against Emerelda?” asked a female voice, tinged with hatred.
The autocratic female voice replied. “She will have fled by now, we will obtain a writ to search her premises, and work from there. Williana can try her divining again. The woman can’t hide forever. Her appetites will betray her, bring her into contact with people. We’ll find her. And then we’ll find the Princess.”
“So when do we meet again?” asked Kolumus.
“Tomorrow night. In my chambers,” said the cool voice. “Now go.”
There was the sound of people walking, and of a door closing.
“Well,” said Emerelda finally breaking the silence. “Now we know.”
“The Royal Council of Mages?” said Hargarthius.
“At least a number of their prominent members,” said the witch. “I never did approve of magicians working together.”
“That is what we may have to do, to defeat them,” said Master Hargarthius, heavily.
The witch was silenced. Then she pulled a face, and picked up her cat. “Yes. Unfortunately. But it’s this living together in Borbungsburg Castle that’s unhealthy, in my opinion. Now I need to take a few steps to protect my demesnes, and my responsibilities.”
“And I will take a few steps to protect mine,” said Master Hargarthius. “Estethius always said this place could hold off an army, he just failed to see why he should.”
“Uh. What?” asked Tom.
“He said there were easier ways to do it, which would achieve the same, but with less cost, damage or materiel. Now, carry that trivet down to the laboratory, boy. And the jar of golden flakes.”
“Yes Master,” said Tom, wishing for breakfast, his bed, the cat snuggling into him, and no work to do… not necessarily in that order. But at least, despite it all, old Grumptious seemed in very mellow mood.
“By the way — Where did you hide the brain?”
Tom looked around warily, and then whispered in the Master’s ear. “The pantry, master. With all the other jars there.”
“Ah. A good choice. Estethius referred to it as no-man’s land. A good place for him to be.”
“Er. Why?”
“I have no idea. He called the broom cupboard ‘the netherworld’, although the only demon that ever came out of it was the raven.”
“The raven?”
“Yes, I opened the door one day and there he was, looking very sorry for himself. It must have been about ten years after I took over the Tower. No idea how the silly bird got himself shut in there. He’s been here ever since.”
“He won’t go near the broom-cupboard,” said Tom, who didn’t like it himself.
“Can’t blame the bird, having got himself trapped in there. I wondered if Estethius had put him in there, but I’d opened it often enough in the time between. Besides, nothing to eat in there for ten years… I think he must have escaped the netherworld,” said Master Hargarthius, with a slight laugh. “Yes, Estethius was a hard and strange master. Most places in the tower he had strange names for, sometimes more than one, which made no sense, and my life more difficult. He used to call the tower gate-room the ‘the winepress’. Come to think of it that makes sense. I always thought it was his odd sense of humor. Anyway I will see you in the laboratory, shortly.”
So Tom went there, and not to bed or the kitchen as he would rather have done. But he was in the kitchen in a few minutes, fetching another pickle for the demon. It gave him a chance to check on the pantry. The brain was still there, on the shelf, exactly where he’d left it. But all the other bottles had moved away from it on the shelf. So Tom got a pickle, grabbed a bit of bread to eat, and gave the cheese a bit of milk and a pet, and ran back up to the laboratory to help in setting up yet another fiendish device, after giving the demon his pickle.
This went on for some hours, before there was a halt for food, and Tom had to get to cleaning up — first the study, and then back to his general routine.
The witch was noticeably absent. So was the cat, which upset Tom more than the witch being missing. He was still, as a cat rather than as a human, somewhat resentful of having the Queen of Cats giving orders. He knew she was entitled to, but orders from Master Hargarthius were already a great deal for his cat nature to have to bear.
He did want to know where she’d gone though. Her broomstick was still parked in the Tower gate room. It was faintly tempting to use for sweeping — as a broom it was in a better condition than his. He had a feeling she had somehow slipped off to the place he’d ended up clubbing in.
“It is singly annoying to have been so wrong,” said Emerelda, as they sat on the subway, as it clacked its way away from the city.
Alamaya smirked, but said nothing.
“And I do hope you had a pleasant night,” she said crossly.
“In bed with my paramour,” said Alamaya. “And neither of us able to do anything about it.”
“I have used my powers, as the Queen, to make sure he is unaware of the fact. He remains very much a cat in some ways. I doubt if that deception can continue indefinitely. Cats are not very subject to magic, which is why it is the safest form for you.”
“And being a cat has its charms. They just weren’t quite the ones I was looking for,” said Alamaya. “So what now, God-mama?”
“Well, I don’t suppose you could have carried the brain away with you. So we will have to go back. We could remove it from them, I suppose.”
“Tom gave them to a very vicious creature to guard. I don’t think it’ll let anyone else take them. Its… quite strong smelling.”
“Well, I was about to say I thought it would be something of a betrayal of trust. And I think we may need allies.”
“Like a cat and a magician who taught himself. And a skull and a raven. That is a very strange bird.”
“I�
�d guess at one of Hargarthius’s less successful experiments,” said the witch, with a yawn. “Being self-taught is not all bad. At least he approaches things quite differently. And he inherited one of the largest libraries of magical tomes in Ambyria. It was the reward promised to whoever brought Estethius to justice, dead or alive.”
“A sort of make-up for Estethius’s not having taught him anything, you think?”
“Certainly a temptation not to go through with that revivification that Hariseldon was supposed to power. For which I suppose we should be grateful.”
CHAPTER 16
‘LIFE! LIFE AT LAST. MWAHHHHA HAA!’
Tom was surprised, but not amazed, to have the ominous chime announce that the witch and her cat were back. He was pleased, though. His grasp of the politics of Ambyria was not great, but with his reading of the Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser — which he had gathered was not the perfect source of knowledge — he knew that he and his master were in all sorts of trouble, gravely outnumbered, and probably going to be on the front page. Deaths of wicked enemies of the state always got onto the front page. The Weekly Illuminati Age and Magical Advertiser liked gruesome deaths, with woodcut illustrations. Tom found them interesting to read about, but did not want to have others reading about him. At least, with the witch and the cat, he and the master would have company in their grisly fate.
It might not have been tactful to tell them that as he escorted them to the top of the tower. Even the cat turned her back, and the witch had an alarming fit of coughing. “We’ll have to do our best to disappoint them,” she said eventually. “Now, if we’re to do that, we’ll need to break the curse, and restore the Princess to the Castle. Which means we need to question Estethius’s brain.”
“They don’t talk much,” said Tom. “The mouth parts are missing. And I’m not sure the mouth and brain are connected.”
“Hmph. That is often true,” said Master Hargarthius. “Especially in your case, boy.”
“Well, yes, but Tom has a point” said the witch. “We have the brain, I assume it is still alive. But how do we communicate with it? Do you still have the apparatus he had ready for his return? We’ll have to constrain him somehow.”
Master Hargarthius tugged at his beard. Shook his head. “No. I dismantled it, and destroyed the components very carefully and thoroughly. It cannot be rebuilt and nor would I.”
“Er. Why?” Tom asked, in the silence after this statement.
“Hmph. Always the questions, boy. Well, just because he would not answer mine, I’ll tell you. Estethius always assumed I was an idiot. I could read, and I could think. He saw this process as a way to get precisely what he’d always wanted and to get away with it without any consequences. He knew the prophecy as well as anyone else: the seeress had prophesied that the raven, the symbol of the noble house of Corvin, would conquer Estethius. The seeress was not wrong, ever. So he knew, despite his defences, he would lose. So he had to make losing a victory. Estethius would die. I would open the tower to the King’s armies, and give them his body… that I had apparently killed. The reward was well known, and he had hidden his best and richest treasures anyway. I would take charge of the tower. A year and a day later I was to haul the segments of the apparatus to the top of the tower, place the brain in it and enact the spells he had prepared. The magic would draw down lightnings from the skies, and, together with the power and control wielded by the captive demon prince… he would be reborn. His brain transferred to a new body, its brain transferred by Lambeth’s substitution into the hypo-amniotic suspension fluid in the jar.”
“Ah. I think I begin to understand,” said the witch. “Where was the new body to come from?”
Hargarthius looked at her in silence. And then said: “That, in the end, was why I decided not obey those orders. There was only one place it could come from and one person who had possession of all Estethius had owned. He could, of course, break the curse spell he had put on the Royal House of Corvin, and claim the reward for doing so. I was just supposed to be too stupid to work it out.”
“Nevermore!” exclaimed the raven, and clacked his beak savagely.
“In this case, yes,” said Master Hargarthius. “You weren’t around then, bird. But, no.”
“I think,” said the witch, “that we’ll have to try for a somewhat different approach. And I was wrong. Again. What did he promise you?”
“A great reward for my loyalty, of course. That was why I was suspicious,” said Master Hargarthius. “Had he promised me horrible torture if I failed to do it less than perfectly, I would have fallen for it.”
“Well, I would say you were right to have been suspicious! I’m for tipping his brain down the garderobe, when we’re done,” said the witch.
“Nevermore,” said the raven, shaking his head.
“I suppose we could give him another body,” said Tom. “We still have the leaper… bouncer. From the Goth club. Or… or we could get one of the zombies from the Goth club. They’re all falling apart and studded and chained to stop them losing bits. Even their tongues and lips. We could just snip a few studs and chains and just give Estethius a mouth. That’d make him a bit more harmless.”
“Merely disarming him is not enough with Estethius. He could still speak spells. Still, I like your thinking boy,” said Hargarthius. “Although I think we’ll keep him away from the leaper’s body. It is entirely too large, and we need to avoid any physical strength being available to him. Likewise with any demonic energy.”
“I suppose with enough galvanic energy we could do without demonic,” said the witch. “And we could get by with…Lizard lips. We can get the porcelain ear hooked up to the nerves.”
They got to planning between them. Most of it was over Tom’s head, but he did his best to follow, while stroking the cat. The cat seemed to like that.
Once they got to the construction of the magical apparatus stage, Tom’s rest was over, and he had two irascible masters to yell at him instead of one.
Two was not twice as good as one, but at least when they were yelling at Tom, they weren’t yelling at each other. It was probably less dangerous to have them yelling at him, Tom eventually decided, even if it wasn’t pleasant. Still, despite the arguments, the strange device took shape. It was a good time for storms too, and great galvanic collectors were soon buzzing with energy and making Tom’s tail-hair stand on end when he walked too close to them.
The witch and Master Hargarthius worked — and argued, and shouted at him, relentlessly. It took nearly three days before it was ready, and by then Tom was just about ready to run off… except for the cat. He couldn’t leave her. And the cheese. And it was for Maya… he’d love to go clubbing again.
They had decided on lizard-lips after considering all sorts of alternatives. A mouth shaped of soft leather, bellows and a long pipe — it was to be Tom’s job to work the bellows to provide breath for Estethius’s brain to speak, and tongue that had had to be borrowed at midnight from a recently buried corpse, and suitably be-spelled and re-animated completed that part of the device… but that was only a small part.
The lager part seemed to be making sure that it didn’t end up killing them all and destroying Ambyria. Tom was quite keen on that part. And quite nervous in the midnight hour as the wild thunderstorm raged outside and the great bolts of lightning struck the copper rods and made the huge glass magnetromes in the laboratory shudder with pulses of violet fury, until the switch was pulled and the galvanic energy stored in them poured into the brain and its apparatus.
It did not explode as Tom worked the bellows.
Instead, it shrieked in triumph: “Life! Life, at last! Mwahhhaa haa! I triumph! Now you will pay my price, fools. Now is the hour at last! Mwhaha…uh.” The maniacal laughter was cut short. “Where is my body? That fool of boy must have wired it wrong! I will summons the demon…”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” snapped Emerelda. “The vat your brain is suspended in is connected to a thaumatic f
ield indicator. The slightest trace of magic… and, well, I won’t tell you. But you won’t like it.”
“Who are you?” demanded the brain. “Who dares to do this to me? You will suffer… woman.”
“I’m here to ask you questions, Estethius. Not answer yours. You have a mouth to speak, and an ear to hear with. That is all. Now, on pain of… well, pain, you will tell me about the curse. All the details. How it was done.”
“Saliana?” said Estethius. “It must be you. I’ve done for your little king. You’ll never see him again. Mwhaha haa. You thought shape-shifting would give him an advantage.”
“I am not Saliana. She’s been dead for many years. Everything you tried for, all your planning, all your scheming, all failed,” said Emerelda.
“Except, obviously, my curse,” said Estethius. “So they killed the boy. It was the one risk. Expendable idiot, killed too soon.”
Master Hargarthius opened his mouth to speak, but Emerelda put her finger across his lips. Pulled the lever attached to the copper wire that led into the brain in its seething basin.
The mouth shrieked.
“And that’s a warning. A start. I want answers. I can keep this up for as long as it takes,” said Emerelda.
“So can I,” replied Estethius’s brain, the tone grim, vengeful. “My revenge has endured, has it? And it will, generation after generation. She should not have slighted me, false jade.”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Emerelda
“Queen Athena. Who else? Or has she been forgotten in the mists of time? Just the suffering goes on. Mwhahaha… arghhhh!” The brain got another blast of pain.
“You will tell me how the curse was made,” said Emerelda, when she’d decided that it had learned a lesson.
It hadn’t. “Oh I will tell you. Simple but powerful and beyond your undoing. Once the demon brought me the tears and blood she was doomed, and every child a girl, likewise doomed. With the year and a day of agony from the birth of that child, generation unto generation… and the wantons will not be able to stop breeding.”