The Wazir and the Witch coaaod-7

by Hugh Cook

  This is how it happened.

  The newcoming ship dropped anchor in a harbour otherwise utterly empty of any significant sailpower. The crew lined the decks and gazed with astonishment upon the devastated city, which looked for all the world as if a herd of firedrakes had ravaged it at will.

  As the wind had been blowing from the south-west when the mob had indulged itself in a day and a night of looting and arson (a factor which had favoured the survival of Marthandorthan), those ships which had fled the Laitemata had naturally chosen to escape up the eastern side of Untunchilamon; whereas the newcoming ship had been venturing down the western coast. It follows that the strangers had no advance news of Injiltaprajura’s disaster.

  They therefore greeted the arrival of Shabble’s canoe with the greatest of curiosity.

  Nobody went shipboard with Shabble but the corpse-master Uckermark. Shabble needed no bodyguards, for sword and crossbow alike were weapons incapable of harming the Holy One. Nor could Shabble be harmed by fire, for the shining one was perfectly capable of staying as cool as ice in a raging furnace. While there were weapons Downstairs which could have injured Shabble most grievously, for practical purposes the master of verbal delights was effectively immortal in the face of any wrath likely to be encountered in the light of the sun.

  When the Holy One and his lawyer boarded the ship, the crew crowded around them with a thousand questions. But order was at last restored; the crew fell back; and two foreigners stepped forward to greet their guests.

  One of these foreigners was a man in his forties whereas the other was a decade or more younger. It was the older man who spoke first.

  ‘Where is the harbour master?’ said he, addressing Uckermark and ignoring Shabble entirely. ‘And where the ladipti man?’

  ‘Elsewhere,’ said Shabble brightly.

  ‘Where elsewhere?’

  ‘We should be asking the questions,’ said Uckermark. ‘This is our harbour.’

  ‘And this is my ship! Who are you?’

  ‘I,’ said Shabble proudly, ‘am the High Priest of the Holy Cockroach.’

  The corpse-master Uckermark introduced himself as Shabble’s legal counsel, then asked:

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I,’ said his interlocuter, ‘am Manthandros Trasilika. I am the new wazir of Untunchilamon.’

  ‘And I,’ said his companion, ‘am Jean Froissart.’

  ‘Your resurrection has changed your appearance remarkably,’ said Uckermark dryly.

  ‘My what?’ said Trasilika in astonishment.

  ‘Your resurrection,’ said Uckermark. ‘Have you not heard? You’ve been killed already. Yet you have returned, though in different flesh entirely.’

  Both the foreigners were children of Wen Endex.

  But in place of the well-muscled heavyweight who had been executed in the Temple of Torture, there was a paunched, obese glutton. And the previous Jean Froissart had been replaced with a square-jawed model of stronger build which had not the weak and watering ever-blinking eyes of the original, but gazed on the world instead with bitter and relentless tension.

  ‘Yes,’ squeaked Shabble, ‘they’ve changed a lot. But they’ll die the same as the others.’

  ‘I know not what trick of ventriloquism animates the voice of your shining bubble,’ said Trasilika, ‘but I do know that I am not amused.’

  ‘The bubble is not mine,’ said Uckermark. ‘I am its. It is the High Priest of the Cult of the Holy Cockroach, as I have said. You would do well to speak of it and to it politely.’

  ‘I’ll speak as I like,’ said Trasilika wrathfully. ‘I am the rightful wazir of Untunchilamon.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure,’ said Uckermark. ‘The rightful wazir. The last wazir of Bolfrigalaskaptiko, no doubt.’ ‘Indeed!’ said Trasilika.

  ‘Well, so was the last one, or so he said. The last wazir, I mean. He came here using a name identical to your own. A name nice enough, I suppose, but he still lost his head. Have you ever heard of a man called Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Manthandros Trasilika. ‘He rules the temple of Zoz the Ancestral on Untunchilamon. He is the High Priest of the Source who will confirm me as wazir.’

  And pulled from his pocket a miniature portrait showing a wizened oldster with the strangest eyes of pale orange flecked with green.

  ‘Strange,’ said Uckermark. ‘The last Manthandros Trasilika had a portrait just like this one.’

  ‘Master Ek is no stranger in Yestron,’ said Trasilika. ‘Obooloo remembers Ek well.’

  ‘As Obooloo will remember you, too,’ said Uckermark. ‘In times to come, Obooloo will remember you as another man executed in the presence of Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek.’

  ‘He threatens us,’ said Jean Froissart quietly.

  ‘Because he is a fool,’ said Trasilika, unshipping a weapon from its sheath.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said Uckermark calmly.

  ‘But you’re not me,’ said Trasilika, drawing back the weapon so he could chop off Uckermark’s head.

  Whereupon Shabble spat white fire which melted the weapon in Trasilika’s hand. Splashes of molten metal singed the deck. Trasilika yelped and dropped the hilt of his useless weapon.

  ‘I think,’ said Uckermark, ‘it might be to your advantage to accompany me ashore.’

  ‘We are your prisoners,’ said Froissart, accepting the inevitable.

  ‘No,’ said Uckermark. ‘You are my guests.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Manthandros Trasilika and Jean Froissart, believing themselves to be very much Uckermark’s prisoners (or, more precisely, captives of the sword-melting Shabble), consented to being conveyed ashore. Whereafter their route took them through the streets of Marthandorthan, which were hot and unbearably humid.

  ‘Drums,’ said Trasilika. ‘I hear drums. But why? Is there some religion on Untunchilamon which demands this rhythmic celebration?’

  ‘It is a cult,’ said Uckermark shortly. ‘A cult of the young. Think nothing of it.’

  Then Uckermark and Shabble guided the newcomers into the Xtokobrokotok, then down a plungeway leading from that warehouse-temple into the depths Downstairs.

  ‘This is the braloch, I take it,’ said Manthandros Trasilika.

  ‘The what?’ said Uckermark.

  ‘The braloch,’ said Trasilika. ‘You know!’

  ‘If I knew,’ said Uckermark, ‘I wouldn’t ask.’

  ‘Has it fallen out of use, then?’ said Trasilika.

  ‘We use Downstairs for purposes in multitude,’ said Uckermark. ‘Ice is mined here and liquor stored against the depredations of the law. Here sewage flows to its private doom, and here too our water is sourced.’

  ‘But not as a braloch?’ said Trasilika.

  ‘What means this braloch?’ said Uckermark.

  ‘A temple,’ said Manthandros Trasilika. ‘My ethnology texts make heavy mention of it. They say the Dagrin come here to temple in the dark. Zen, they say. The Dagrin use it. A drug. You must know of zen, surely. But what of the Dagrin? Have you not heard of them?’

  ‘On Untunchilamon,’ said Uckermark shortly, ‘we do not talk of the Dagrin. No, not that way. Up here. These steps.’

  ‘You don’t talk of the Dagrin?’ said Trasilika. ‘But why not? My texts, they-’

  But Uckermark was climbing the steps so swiftly that, following him, Trasilika found himself too short of breath for lectures. The stairway debouched into a tunnel where black grass flattened itself shortly underfoot then rose in silence after the three men had passed. The light was first green and then red. Shabble sang a happy song and played at being an anti-chameleon, challenging green light with yellow and red with white.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Froissart.

  ‘Elsewhere,’ said Uckermark.

  And refused to explain further as he guided his guests through long and arduous subterranean walkways. Black grass gave way to a strangely spongy gre
en felt, then to a silvery metal laced with streaks of red and gold. By which time Froissart had started to feel himself trapped in an inexplicable doom lifted straight out of nightmare.

  Jean Froissart had feared much; but he had never expected to be confronted by a miniature sun which could melt forged steel as fire melts ice; or to go meekly from his ship in the company of a complete stranger to meet an unknown ruin in depths of strangeness.

  Giving way to nostalgia, he remembered the sewage canals of the city of Bolfrigalaskaptiko, that mighty stiltland metropolis which lies on the River Ka just upstream from the great lagoon of Manamalargo. He felt an unexpected pang of homesickness for that miasmal city of floating corpses; for the mosquitos which drench the air like a black fog; for the wail of the water seller and the cry of the professional child beater; for the smells of the crocodile market where flies blacken exposed meat and first-class knobbed leather sells for no more than fifty damns the fangle. -

  Froissart recalled his last night in Bolfrigalaskaptiko.

  He had dined upon tolfrigdalakaptiko, that delectable dish of fried seagull livers anointed with basilisk gall and served with baked yams and lozenges of dried jellyfish. Then he had taken himself off to the House of Priestly Pleasures, there to enjoy a full seven of the Fifty Open Delights before retiring to his hammock.

  He had slept restlessly that night. The mosquito fire had been over-oiled; furthermore, one of his fits of angst had been upon him. The next day, he had at last visited a heart specialist, a doctor of the Ola caste; and, with fears about his fitness somewhat eased, had then joined Manthandros Trasilika aboard the ship which was to ‘-hear what I was saying?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Froissart.

  As he spoke, he committed himself to another step. But the much-scarred corpse-master flung out a brawny arm. That meaty weapon thumped into Froissart’s gut with such emphasis that a spasm of nausea momentarily discomforted the young priest. Yielding to the arm’s compulsion, he stepped backwards.

  ‘If you don’t listen,’ said Uckermark, ‘you put us all in danger. This is not the safest of places.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Froissart; though in truth he felt he owed no such duty of apology to his kidnapper. ‘I was dragon-chasing.’

  The idiom he used may not be universally familiar. Therefore, let it be known that, when Jean Froissart declared himself a chaser of dragons, he meant that he had been feeding on rainbow and fishing for clouds; that his feet had been chancing as wings and his fingers as fins; that he had swum in the desert as the dolphin’s escort and danced upon fire with a statue of ice.

  Uckermark, who understood his mode of expression perfectly, warned him thus:

  ‘Less salt and more flour lest your ginger curdle.’

  Jean Froissart, who was of course familiar with this classical admonition, accepted the rebuke, and said, as a child says:

  ‘I have ears.’

  ‘Good,’ said Uckermark. ‘What I said, when you were away dancing your phoenix and tickling your basilisk, was that you must watch your footing. Here the floor has certan studs, like this one.’

  So saying, Uckermark pointed to a red, slightly raised, coruscating button on the floor. The floor itself was now a slightly convex stretch of what looked like sea-blue stone.

  ‘If you step on that, or anything like it,’ said the corpse-master, ‘we’ll vanish from sight, as others before us have.’

  ‘Vanish?’ said Froissart in bewilderment. ‘To what? To where?’

  ‘To the afterworld, for all I know,’ said Uckermark.

  Manthandros Trasilika coughed, hawked, spat. His phlegm splattered against the floor. Hissed. And was gone.

  ‘Don’t touch the floor, either,’ said Uckermark, as an afterthought. Then: ‘Make your choices. If you want to die, run on ahead of us and die in your own time. There’s plenty of death in a place like this. I won’t grudge you your share if it’s what you really want.’

  Uckermark spoke the truth. This was indeed a hazardous realm. While most of the mazeways Downstairs were innocuous, their greatest dangers being vampire rats or disorientation, Uckermark was daring his guests through a frequently fatal part of the labyrinth.

  Jean Froissart, having decided that Uckermark’s warning was sincere, started paying more attention to where he was going and where he was placing his feet. Though he was half-certain that this netherworld would claim his bones whatever he did. Half-certain? He grew a full three-quarters-certain when a huge and angry monster started roaring in the distance.

  Uckermark halted abruptly. Froissart and Trasilika did likewise.

  ‘What is it?’ said Froissart anxiously, meaning the roaring thing.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Uckermark truthfully.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Shabble gaily. ‘It’s only a dorgi.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Froissart.

  ‘A killer of men,’ said Shabble.

  ‘And you tell us not to worry,’ said Trasilika.

  ‘I was telling myself not to worry,’ said Shabble. ‘It eats only men, not shabbies.’

  Then Shabble sniggered.

  In truth, Shabble feared dorgis greatly; but the bubble of light guessed the revenant from the Golden Gulag to be fully occupied by the delights of hunting refugees.

  ‘What’s it saying?’ said Uckermark.

  ‘It’s saying it’s angry, that’s all,’ said Shabble.

  This was a guess, for the dorgi’s uproar was so distorted by echoes that its clamour was completely unintelligible.

  ‘Here,’ said Uckermark. ‘This way.’

  And he led them up more stairs.

  ‘The pink palace,’ said Manthandros Trasilika. ‘That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?’

  ‘Guess again,’ said Uckermark.

  ‘We’re going up, at any rate,’ said Trasilika. ‘Up towards Pokra Ridge.’

  ‘And we’re near the surface,’ said Froissart.

  ‘You think,’ said Uckermark.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Froissart. ‘I can smell sewage. It flows no depth at all into the underworld, or so say my guidebooks.’

  ‘Trust less to books,’ said Uckermark. Then: ‘Stop.’

  They halted.

  ‘Shabble,’ said the corpse-master. ‘Take a look ahead.’

  The imitator of suns emitted a low hum, spun thrice, then floated round the corner up ahead.

  The humans waited.

  For some considerable time.

  Froissart took stock. The floor underfoot was a fine-meshed brown. He scuffed at it with his boots. It distorted, then reformed itself as before. Strange. Overhead, a dull grey ceiling of puddled roughwork plaster, or something which looked strangely like it. The walls were a sunset orange mottled with growths which looked like lichens and slit with jagged cracks like the crazed knifework of a manic murderer. From those wounds there slowly oozed gross globs of green and grey.

  As Froissart speculated on the nature of that flux, he laid two fingers alongside his windpipe. Felt the skin hot, sweaty. Pushed in. Felt his pulse heavy-thumping. Slow, slow. Slow again. A pause. Lengthening. Had his heart stopped? No, for there it was again.

  Slow-thump, slow-thump… pause… slow-thump.

  He lived.

  For the moment.

  And that slow and steady rhythm spoke of strength and health, did it not? For he had paced long through the underworld, ascending stairs and up-tilted tunnels; yet his heart spoke more of sedentary peace. But then, that organ had been allowed plenty of recovery time by now, for the free-floating sun which was exploring ahead had been gone for an unconscionable time.

  Froissart reached out and touched the slow outbirth of strangeness, finding the globs of green and grey to be gelid and slightly tacky. He brought his fingers to his nose. Smelt no odour. If the oozing stuff had a scent, it was not strong enough to defeat that of sewage.

  At last, the floating bubble returned.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Shabble. ‘The pergot’s elsew
here.’

  ‘Pergot?’ said Trasilika. ‘What’s a pergot?’

  ‘A thing which drinks blood,’ said Uckermark.

  ‘It would seem you risk much to bring us this way,’ said Froissart, wondering at Uckermark’s motives.

  ‘Much I may dare when Shabble is with me,’ said Uckermark. ‘Otherwise, there’s many tunnels down here that I’d not chance on my own.’

  As for Uckermark’s motives, these were scarcely mysterious. The advent of a new wazir (or someone claiming to be a wazir) was sure to change the history of Untunchilamon. Given first access to such a dignitary, Justina Thrug and her minions could alter events in their own favour. And Uckermark, while his future was bound to that of the Cult of the Holy Cockroach, was nevertheless prepared to grant Justina her chance on account of certain residual loyalties and acknowledged debts.

  Besides which, Uckermark both feared and disliked Master Ek. It was Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek who had granted the Cockroach Cult its present status as a Protected Religion. As legal counsel for the High Priest of a religion of such status, Uckermark was safe from the wrath of Aldarch Three. However, what Master Ek had given he could take away; and Uckermark grimly suspected that any absolute triumph for Master Ek might lead that dignitary to take freely and without hesitation.

  Thus Uckermark sought to prolong the life and liberties of the Empress Justina for at least a little longer; for, in his present role as Shabble’s advocate, the corpse-master was doing very nicely for himself, a full three per cent of all Shabble’s monies finding their way into Uckermark’s pockets.

  As Uckermark and his guests continued on their way, the bright-bobbing Shabble, confident that they were past those dangers which truly demanded vigilance, began to indulge Shabbleself in the preaching of holy doctrine.

  ‘Worship the cockroach,’ said Shabble, ‘and you will be reborn as cockroach. Such is the bliss! Never to know hunger, never to pay rent, never to endure the multitudinous pangs and pains of the human form. Holy is the cockroach and hallowed is His name. Happy is the cockroach and happy are we who will become cockroach.’

  All this said Shabble, and more; but the newcomers had yet to be converted to the Cult by the time they reached the Moremo Maximum Security Prison, where guards intercepted them as they ascended from the lower dungeons. Uckermark knew these warders, and held them to silence with a gesture; seeing that Shabble was with him, they obeyed without question, falling in behind the corpse-master as an honour guard.