Hugh Cook - The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers

‘Sure. Or get my head hacked off on the spot. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’

‘Then do you want to start walking for Zolabrik?’ ‘That’s my other option, isn’t it?’

‘There’s a third.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Chegory. ‘Tell me about it!’

‘You work on Jod, don’t you? So you know the island’s ruler. So why not seek help from him?’

‘There’s no point going there,’ said Chegory. ‘Ivan Pokrov’s in jail, I’ve told you that.’

‘But that’s not who I was thinking of,’ said Odolo. ‘Who, then?’

‘The Hermit Crab, of course!’

Chegory shuddered.

‘You,’ he said, ‘have got to be crazy. Have you ever seen that brute?’

‘No, but-’

‘It’s, let’s see, it’s intimidating, that’s the word. When you know what it’s done it’s not just intimidating it’s bloody terrifying. I have to give the thing meat and stuff. Oh shit! And I haven’t! It’s missed lunch, that’s, that’s, gods, maybe it’s turning people inside out right now.’

Chegory wheeled. A marvellous view! But he wasted no time admiring it for his eyes were all for Jod. It still existed. That was something! The marble buildings of the Analytical Institute were still there, and so was the harbour bridge. But how much longer would it be before the Hermit Crab poured out the vials of wrath and inverted the island entire, or shattered it into just so many chips of scatter-stone?

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Odolo. ‘Someone else will feed your happy little friend. Or is it sacred? A sacred ritual, and you its priest?’

‘Priest?’ said Chegory, startled. ‘Me? No, it’s not that, it’s not sacred, but it’s a — a — it’s a trust, that’s what it is, thousands of people, all Injiltaprajura, but it’s me they trusted, so it’s, yes it is sacred, it is, a sacred trust, and I blew it, the Crab’s starving right now, it’s-’

‘But someone else will-’

‘They won’t! They’re all slaves, that’s what, no more sense than a coconut, or they’re mad algorithmists, just cogs and wheels and binary logic, that’s all they think of, not, not keeping two legs two arms stopping from getting turned inside out that kind of, of important stuff. I should-’

‘You should come inside,’ said Odolo, trying in an avuncular way to calm his intense young companion. ‘If you’re consecrated to the cause of victualling our crustacean-in-residence then you’d best look after yourself.’ By such talk the imperial favourite persuaded young Chegory to climb the steps and pass within the portals of the pink palace.

‘Business?’ said a guard, one of seven on duty within the foyer.

‘Petitions,’ said Odolo, and nodded pleasantly, and led Chegory onwards.

One of the guards had a black eye and a heavily bruised cheek, suggesting he might have been one of the unfortunates who had been overwhelmed during the rioting in the treasury in the night just gone. Chegory expected the man to leap forward and arrest him, but no such thing happened.

‘Up here,’ said Odolo. ‘Up the stairs.’

Up the stairs they went to the Grand Hall where the petitions session had already started. For a moment, the world wavered, and Chegory imagined he saw a fanged monster coming to quench its thirst upon his flesh. For that moment, reality tottered. Even as it did so, he knew what he was enduring: a flashback consequent upon his nighttime indulgence in zen.

Then the outlines of the world hardened again into the everyday, the quotidian, the expected and the expectable. The Grand Hall with unlit chandeliers hanging from its high ceiling. An unruly press of petitioners being held back by guards with scimitars naked. The Empress Justina high-seated upon a throne of ebony. Her white ape, Vazzy, even now being dragged away after perpetrating some (temporarily) unpardonable misdeed. Expressionless slaves standing to either side of the throne, their muscles working huge feathered fans to cool the ruler of Injiltaprajura.

Behold Justina! Vigorous her lips and big her nose, high her brow and plump her cheeks. Massive are her breasts, their weight threatening the carmine silk which binds them in. Stalwart are her thighs and thick her wrists. Surely she is the daughter of a mighty father!

Behind Justina’s ebony throne stood a huge cage with bars of black iron. Even Chegory Guy knew it for a starvation cage. It had long fallen out of disuse, for Justina was true to the traditions of her forebears, and the Yudonic Knights prefer disciplinary solutions which lead to sharp and bloody death rather than the exquisite forms of lingering agony brought to such perfection by the connoisseurs of the Izdimir Empire. Nevertheless, the lock on the door to the cage glistened with a sheen of oil which spoke of loving maintenance.

‘This way,’ said the conjurer Odolo.

Chegory let himself be led. His mouth was agape. He was staring at the battle-shields on the walls. The shields were objects of outright wrath adorned with the bloody coats of arms of the Yudonic Knights of Wen Endex. A riot of monstrous jaws, skulls, bones, sundry decapitations, hacked amputations, dripping blood and worse.

Odolo, by taking advantage of his status as imperial favourite, soon led young Chegory closer to the Seat of Mercy than he would otherwise have got in the course of the whole afternoon. For the petitions session had attracted an uncommon number of supplicants, since the searches, seizures, raids, captures, inquiries and interrogations of the last five quarters had flushed an extraordinary tally of criminals, sinners, law-breakers, tax avoiders, deserters, traitors, drug-dealers, miscreants, vandals, delinquents, runaways, truants, swindlers, perjurers and embezzlers from their caves, sewers, cellars, lairs, pits, attics, hideouts and houseboats.

Notable among those crowding close to the scimitars was a big man massively scarred by burns. Where skin remained one could see the remnants of once-glorious tattoos of dragons, sea serpents and such.

‘Who’s that?’ said Chegory, pointing him out. ‘Uckermark, the corpse master. A regular visitor.’ ‘Why?’

‘He’s always offending one religion or another.’

‘He’s a — a blasphemer?’

‘No, it’s just his job. It-’

Chegory never received an explanation of the theological disputes which interfere with the smooth flow of a corpse master’s work (certain treatments of the dead which are essential to one religion are anathema to another, and Injiltaprajura is rich indeed in religions) because he interrupted, saying:

‘Gods!’

‘What is it?’

‘Just someone I know.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, nobody, nobody, don’t worry about it.’

The someone who was nobody was actually Chegory’s uncle Dunash Labrat, upright beekeeper and dutiful taxpayer, who was moving through the crowd in company with his son Ham. They had some of their apiarian gear with them, for bees were swarming in the pink palace and the two had been summoned to remove them.

Chegory did his best to make himself inconspicuous. This was just what he had dreaded! Publicity! The embarrassment of declaring himself and his circumstances to the Empress Justina in full view of his uncle. A nightmare come true! Then the Labrats were gone, ushered deeper into the palace by a guiding guard, and Chegory breathed easy once more.

’ ‘Well,’ he said, eager to get his ordeal over and done with now he was irrevocably launched upon the petitioning path, ‘what’re we going to do? Push in ahead of those people?’

‘No,’ said Odolo. ‘We wait. The Empress takes breaks at intervals. Then we’ll join her in a place more private and plead your case beyond the mob’s survey.’

Serendipity!

This was more than Chegory had dared to hope for!