Hugh Cook - The Wazir and the Witch

Idaho accepted this invitation, and swallowed the drink Ek proffered him.

A mistake!

Immediately Idaho’s head began to spin. The room swelled, stretched, blurred and hummed. Phantasmagoric dragons flickered across his field of vision then collapsed into tinkling rainbows.

Ek had fed Idaho a drink containing a carefully measured dose of oola, that truth drug also known as babble tongue. This is made from opium and alcohol mixed with a special extract obtained from the scorpion fish, and mixed also with zen, a dissociative drug which has devastating effects on the mind.

‘Now,’ said Ek, ‘speak to me.’

‘I speak to you,’ said Idaho.

‘Tell me all,’ said Ek. ‘All that I shouldn’t know.’

Thus spoke Ek; and, with very little further prompting, the Yudoni c Knight began to blabbermouth secrets. ‘Froissart is false,’ said Ida ho.

‘Nonsense,’ said Ek, even though he believed as much himself. ‘Froissart can’t be false. He proved himself in trial by ordeal.’

Juliet Idaho grinned a drunken grin and said:

‘Froissart proved the powers of conjuring. The executioner who waited upon him was the conjuror Odolo — who had Shabble up his sleeve.’

‘That can’t be so,’ said Master Ek. ‘I saw Shabble myself at sunset, spinning above the Xtokobrokotok.’ ‘So?’ said Idaho. ‘Shabble needs no guides to find Shabbleself s way from Marthandorthan to Pokra Ridge. Shabble came privily to Odolo shortly after sunset. Oh, they fooled you nicely!’

This infuriated Ek, because he had been fooled indeed; and, now he understood what had happened, it was blindingly obvious. Had it not been for his arthritis, Ek would have kicked himself severely.

‘But,’ protested one of the acolytes, who knew more of sorcery than of prestidigitation, ‘I was there! I saw! It wasn’t Shabble, it was a ball of iron. We smashed it to pieces afterwards.’

‘Long sleeves,’ said Idaho. ‘Long sleeves.’

He giggled.

Then the Yudonic Knight fainted, and slid beneath the table.

Leaving Ek and his acolytes looking at each other.

‘The Thrug thinks us children,’ said Ek in rage. ‘Children, to be fooled by a cheap trick. But she’s gone too far this time! And her Froissart thing! What they did was blasphemy. For that I’ll have Froissart butchered.’ Slowly, Ek recovered his temper. Then he kicked the unconscious Juliet Idaho and said:

‘Strip him.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Master Ek, without much surprise. ‘It is as I thought.’

Then the High Priest stubbed out his cigarette in Idaho’s omphalos.

‘We’ll keep this thing here in our holding cells,’ said Ek. ‘Hold it under constant observation in a lighted cell. Give it no chance to commit suicide. I want to dispose of it myself. By way of sacrifice. In public. When the time is right.’

‘When will that be, master?’ said one of the acolytes.

‘When I say so!’ said Ek, irritated by a question so witless. ‘Now, I have another job for you. Our congregation must be roused, for I wish to celebrate the Festival of Dark. Yes, here, tonight, this very night. Not in our Temple on Hojo Street. That’s unsafe. No, we’ll hold it here.’

‘But,’ said one of the acolytes, ‘this building is consecrated to the-’

Ek kept his temper.

Instead of losing it, he merely said:

‘I will formally dedicate this building to Zoz before the Festival of Dark commences. Now go and rouse our people!’

The rousing shortly commenced.

The acolytes woke certain Janjuladoola people who were adherents of the Temple of Zoz the Ancestral. And these woke others, who roused more fellow worshippers in turn. Soon people in their dozens were flocking to Goldhammer Rise, where they thronged into the Temple of Torture. This could not accommodate them all, so the unaccommodated gathered in the street outside, with acolytes relaying Master Ek’s words to them once the Festival of Dark began.

In the Most Holy Calendar, the Festival of Dark falls a few days before the Festival of Light. The precise timing is at the discretion of the local High Priest, and Master Ek was within his rights to schedule it for that very night.

It is traditional for the High Priest of the Temple of Zoz to celebrate the Festival of Dark by preaching on the conflict between anarchic chaos and that countervailing redemptive power which brings order. In contrast, the Festival of Light is devoted solely to a celebration of that prosperity which naturally flows from the triumph of order, to the general benefit of all.

Nadalastabstala Banraithanchumun Ek performed his duties as tradition decrees, and held the required service. In the course of his preaching, he declared the worship of Power to be the ultimate aim of humanity; and described Aldarch Three as Power incarnate.

‘The natural instinct of the natural man is to ravage, savage and despoil,’ said Ek, getting into his stride. ‘To preserve the world against such destructions, the State gives each man incentives to support the ruling order. In the way of incentive, in return for allegiance to the ruling order, the State allows each man the power over his women, his children, his slaves and his other chattels.

‘As it is a man’s privilege to dispose of his wife, his children and his slaves, so it is a Temple’s privilege to dispose of its priests. And so, as the Festival of Light draws near, I name Jean Froissart, priest of Zoz the Ancestral, as the sacrifice of the year.’

A remarkable honour! But Jean Froissart, as yet unconscious of the great privilege which had been bestowed upon him, slept on in ignorance; and he would not learn his fate for some time yet.

By this time, certain students of history may be ready to raise an outcry about the disproportionate amount of space which has been given to insignificant people such as the Yudonic Knight named Juliet Idaho. Why, they will ask, is this so? And why, in contrast, has a person of such importance as Jon Qasaba been allowed to disappear from this Chronicle? Why has no effort been made to show his role in these events?

Certainly it would be interesting to follow Jon Qasaba’s fortunes. But this is not Qasaba’s biography: instead, this is the history of the final days of the rule of the Family Thrug on Untunchilamon.

And, despite what he later became, Jon Qasaba played no role whatsoever in those final days. For Olivia’s father, feared by many to be dead, had been taken prisoner by Ms Mix.

You will remember that Ms Mix was an ogre, one of the twenty-seven creatures of that breed then dwelling on Untunchilamon. You will doubtless further remember that this Ms Mix was the mother-in-law of the escaped lunatic Orge Arat, Arat himself being the author of a Secret History known as the Injiltaprajuradariski.

Or perhaps you will not remember.

If you have no mother-in-law of your own, you may fail to understand the formidability of the breed; and hence the particularities of Ms Mix may have failed to lodge in your mind.

Regardless of what has or has not been remembered, the fact remains that Jon Qasaba was in the hands of a mother-in-law (admittedly someone else’s, not his own) and was doomed to suffer much before he escaped and regained his freedom. Yes, Jon Qasaba was a man much cursed by adventures. Now adventuring is greatly to the taste of an adolescent, but Qasaba was a scholarly Ashdan who had long outgrown desires for such overinvolvement in life. So he did not take kindly to what was happening to him. But that was his doom, and there was no way for him to avoid it.

While we are on the subject of adventuring, let us note that Jon Qasaba was by no means the only person undergoing adventures in and around the city of Injiltaprajura. Many were the people who were undergoing sore trials in the wilds of Downstairs; or who had found themselves in grave danger after retreating into the wastelands of Zolabrik; or who were caught up in the currents of mutinous conspiracy which flourished and festered aboard the ships which were conveying looters, deserters and other such rabble away from the shores of peril.