Hugh Cook - The Walrus and the Warwolf

Drake did not wake to clarity, but to fever. Hot, flushed and thirsting, he endured cramps, spasms and hallucinations. He was fed strange foods and stranger fluids, which sustained life but did not cure him.

'Arabin,' he said. 'Get Arabin. Jon Arabin, understand?'

' O-fo-lo-mo-lee, ' said one of the young women who fed him.And smiled, and left him.But did not return with Jon Arabin.

Time and again Drake repeated his demand. He had to get a message through to his captain. If he stayed in this crazy place, he would die.

'I'm sick, yes,' said Drake, to one of his handmaidens, 'but I'll do as well on the Warwolf as I would here. Honest. It's the sea air, I need it to keep me alive.'The response was another smile.Nothing more.

He could see, through his sickroom's embrasure, a slice of blue sky, occasionally decorated by patches of high cloud. Fair weather cloud, yes. In the little time he'd spent on the Warwolf, he'd already got into the habit of taking a right healthy interest in the weather.

'Those idle sons of sodfish will be playing around the anchor cable again, I suppose,' said Drake.

Yes. Or practising sword under the hard gaze of the ship's weapons muqaddam. Or patching sails. Or splicing ropes. Or-

But no matter. Whatever they were doing, Drake wanted to be with them. Aye. In the company of his comrades true. Quin Baltu, Shewel Lokenshield, Goth Sox, Lee Dix, Hewlet Mapleskin, aye, and Jon Disaster – he remembered them as brothers.

Finally, the day came when Drake was well enough to quit his bed and venture to the embrasure. Squinting into the brilliance of a world lit by real honest sunlight, he looked down on Ling Bay – and saw that the Warwolf was gone.

No! Surely not! Surely Arabin's ship of green sails lay close to the cliff, hidden by the limitations of the embrasure!

On rubbery legs, Drake staggered from the room, questing for a better view.

'Jon, Jon,' he said, as he stumbled down white-lit corridors. 'Jon, you can't have left me. No, say it's not true!'

How often did ships come to Ling? The Warwolf, or so it was alleged, visited once every two years. Apart from that – nothing.

'You'd better be there, Jon Arabin,' threatened Drake. 'You'd better be there, you and your ship. Or I'll damn you to fifty hells for seventy times eternity!'

Finally he found a square door cut in the side of the cliff, high above the sea. He stepped outside, into the warmth of the sun. Below lay all of Ling Bay: innocent of any ship. Clear shone the sparkling waters, as beautiful as the women of a poet's dreams. And empty.Drake wept.

Saba Yavendar. one of the Nine Immortals; won poetic fame with Winesong and Warsong, written in the Stabilized Scholastic Standard (later adopted as the High Speech of wizards) of the Technic Renaissance.

Survived Genetic Mutiny and Interregnum. Joined Institute of Applied Theology (later destroyed by Founders in Wars of Suppression). After Famine Years, was adviser to Lords of the Eightfold Way (forerunner of Confederation of Wizards).

Gained great power in Empire of Wizards after Long War against Swarms, but lost all in Years of Chaos. Disappeared after offending Talaman the Torturer (aka T. the Castrator, T. the Eye Gouger and T. the Baby Strangler).

Later works (including notorious Victory of the Prince of the Favoured Blood) popular crowd-pleasers scorned by scholarship, which must concur with Larftink that Yavendar 'lived too long and wrote far, far too much'. Indeed, Gatquip's long-disputed claim that the Complete Works can be reduced to a canon of a dozen lines demands positive reassessment.

Drake's wound healed to a crinkled red scar. His fever abated. Abandoning his bed (yes, by now he recognized a heap of stones and sand as a bed) he explored. Questing. Seeking. Searching for a way out of this warren, a way back to civilization. He found rooms packed with dusty old bones. A mortu

ary, where the unkempt dead, anointed with wild honey, lay waiting for the Funeral Winds. A strange globular room with silver walls where his weight left him, and he hung weightless in the air like a fish in water.

He took stairs which descended as well as those which went up, thinking there might be tunnels which travelled deep underground before breaking out to freedom. He found dank, gloomy, ill-lit places flooded with slimy water.

Once, he found a door which opened on a huge, utterly silent hall perhaps three leagues in length, where a dozen bulbous grey shapes, each hundreds of paces long, lay half-submerged in pitch-black water.

'Grief of suns!' said Drake. 'Will I never get out of here?'

He lost his way a dozen times, and once wandered for a whole day in waterless tunnels before chancing his steps back to the inhabited areas. Nothing daunted, he set out again – but this time he carried a chunk of charcoal with which to mark his way on the walls.

At last, he squeezed out through a narrow vent to stand in harsh clifftop sunshine. He had won a view of some of the meanest terrain in creation, a desolation of stone pillars, razor-sharp shadows, thornbush, cactus, sparce acacia, gulleys, buttes, sinkholes, escarpments and ravines.There was no sign of water.'Desolation,' muttered Drake.

He had never before seen a landscape so lonely. Utterly unmarked by human hand. He longed to be on Stokos again, ah yes, back on his home island where the terrain had been civilized by mines, quarries, slag heaps, ash pits, and other comforting signs of human activity. I'd die of loneliness if I tried to walk across this.

He saw something glinting a few paces away. What? His hot black shadow crabbed across the rocks as he ventured to the glitter. It proved to be a chunk of sharp-cut white crystals. Very hard.

'That quartz stuff Disaster talked about,' said Drake.

And wished he had Disaster with him. Or Ika Thole, yes, or even dim-witted Harly Burpskin.

'Anyone,' said Drake, 'as long as we've language in common.'

He was talking to himself a lot, these days. Was that a sign of madness?'I'll talk when I want!' yelled Drake, suddenly angry.

And he hurled the chunk of quartz into the wilderness. Then it occurred to him that maybe the stuff was worth having. Disaster had called it 'cheap', but perhaps Drake could bluff an unwary buyer into thinking it valuable.'Where did my quartz go?' he said.

He scrambled onto a small rock, and, from that eminence, swiftly discovered his quartz, which he duly retrieved.'A bigger rock,' said Drake. 'That's the thing.'

Yes. From a bigger rock he might see – well, running water, if he was lucky. Or maybe an old road which he could follow east through the wilderness,- in the general direction of Drangsturm.

Drake dared a perilous scramble to the top of the nearest house-sized rock. From there, high above thorn bushes and other rubbish, he had a much better view. No road. But. . .

Was that a building he saw? Yes. Half a league distant lay a square tower of thrice tree-height, built from massive white, blue and ochre blocks. A spike rose from each of its rooftop corners. Drake studied it doubtfully.Could it be . . .?Surely not!

And yet . . . it did look remarkably like the legendary Wishing Tower known to every child of Stokos from fairy stories. And he was on Argan, was he not? Argan, the true homeland of all improbable things?

'Improbability is not impossibility,' said Drake to himself, and, abandoning his chunk of quartz, he set off for the tower with all possible speed, i.e. slowly – the ground being regular leg-breaking territory.

At first he was all enthusiasm, dreaming of the marvellous things he would wish for. Fresh vegetables! A real live cucumber! A piece of lettuce! Then – well, the larger things. The throne of Stokos. The fair Zanya Kliedervaust, she of the red skin and the high-lofted breasts. And more height, yes, at least five extra hands of height.