Hugh Cook - The Walrus and the Warwolf

'Oh yes!' said Arabin, with a grin. 'Tell me another one!'Drake, who needed no further invitation, promptly did.

'Enough of your nonsense,' said Ish Ulpin, entering the courtyard in time to hear the end of Drake's second joke. 'The peasants are running, so let us be hunting.'

'Nay,' said Arabin. 'Whatever's scared the locals, they may recover their wits in a moment. Let's be getting back to the ship while the getting's good.'

Bucks Cat supported Ish Ulpin's stance, but the pair of them were outnumbered. So back to the ship they all got, carrying Sully Yot and friend Chicks between them. Which made their journey mighty long, even though Yot recovered his senses after scarcely half a league.

D'Waith: extremely small community with large-scale pretensions (this walled village claiming to be a city state); commands most easterly harbour of Ravlish Lands, some 100 leagues north of Lesser Teeth, 50 leagues west of Argan and 70 leagues (as the fish-bat flies) south of Island Drum.

The pirates ravaged Brennan in a half-hearted way. Stone buildings thwarted arson; the haunted metal in the forge (which they did not dare enter) disturbed them; the thought of their damaged ship lying at anchor in a hostile harbour disturbed them more. In the end, they burnt every boat in reach and left it at that.

A few hardy souls (such as Bucks Cat and Ish Ulpin) wanted to go on a search-and-destroy mission into the hinterland, seeking candidates for skinning alive, but most thought (rightly) that this would be rank foolishness.

'Those so arrant in their anger can stay behind to hunt lonesome,' said Jon Arabin. 'The rest of us are going.'

And go they did. The Sky Dancer slipped to sea that evening, ghosting all night on the moth-wing airs of a preternaturally smooth-browed sea, the loudest sound aboard being that of the pumps still working to keep them afloat. Jon Arabin planned to put in to D'Waith, in the north, to make repairs he had originally thought to encompass at Brennan.

That night, Drake worried over what he had seen at Bildungsgrift. The next morning, he questioned Yot about it.

'You tell me what happened,' said Yot. T don't remember anything. Except – yes, there was some lightning. And I got hit by it, or so my burns would suppose. Look!'Yot had nasty burns on his hands.'And the same on my feet,' he said.'Go see Jon Arabin,' said Drake. 'He'll doctor you.'

And Drake himself went looking for Rolf Thelemite, who insisted on showing him a nicely drawn sketch map of the backside of Bildungsgrift, with places marked for siege ladders, and a diversionary assault, and fall-back positions in case of a sally from within.

'That's very, very professional,' said Drake. 'You must show it to Menator back home, for he'll need it doubtless when we take the Lessers in earnest, which we must, them being anchored so close to us. Now tell, man – what saw you yesterday? In the way of strangeness, I mean. Just before the enemy ran.'Rolf Thelemite frowned.

'A … a colour in the sky,' he said. 'Though I don't remember what. A squall, but no rain that I remember. And a windspout, aye, a bit irregular in colour, but wind all the same.'

'Windspout?!' said Drake, who had never heard of any such thing.

'Aye, and I've seen them in desert before, only sand. They rain fish sometimes, but that's at sea, or the near-land. Yes. Big, sometimes. Suck up horses and houses. Why, there was one I remember in a battle once – won us clean through to victory when we was close to defeat.'

'But yesterday's … I mean … it was strange, wasn't it?'

'Oh, there's many things strange, by land and sea,' said Rolf Thelemite. 'Windspouts, aye, and rainbows round the midnight moon. The green flash at sunset, aye, most will tell you it's myth, but I've seen it, man, I've seen it. And fire which walks through swamps without burning, and balls of fire which sit on masts in a storm – and that does burn, man, I've seen the strongest shaken by it.'

'But this was stranger than those other things, surely,' said Drake. 'The sky changing colour, for a start. You've never seen that before!'

'Oh yes I have,' said Rolf Thelemite. 'When I was in the far north of Tameran – and not many Rovac have gone campaigning there, believe me, for all that we're said to battle in every war that's going – why, up there in winter I saw the sky, aye, and the sky was as many colours as a corpse five days after it's been kicked to death, the colours not still but moving. Aye-'

And Thelemite was off again. Drake left as soon as he decently could (or, to be pedantically exact, just a finger-length of time before then – but Thelemite was so deep in his tale of headless bodies and lopped-off limbs that he didn't notice his shipmate's departure) and sought out other witnesses, such as Jez Glane.

'It were lightning,' said Glane: 'Lightning stretched out a bit, that's all.''Stretched!' said Drake.

'I thought you pulled yourself often enough to know about stretching,' said Glane.

T should have let Ish Ulpin knock you senseless back at that castle place,' said Drake.And went looking for Bucks Cat.'The earth farted,' said Bucks Cat. 'That's all.'

Drake did no better with the others, all of whom knew little and cared less.

Unable to get a proper explanation of the manifestation he had witnessed at Bildungsgrift, Drake was left to trouble out the Higher Problems of theology on his own. He was trying very hard, but not entirely successfully, to persuade himself that he had not really had a run-in with the Flame.

Drake's introspective spiritual wrestling, while perhaps a good mental discipline in its own right, was entirely unproductive of truth. It won him no wisdom. Indeed, his correct course of action would have been to run up and down the ship shouting:'Is there a theologian on boafd!'

Eventually, if he had persisted thus in the face of the predictable reaction from the ship's crew, Morton Seligman ('Foreskin' to all his friends) would have taken pity on him, and would have explained. Seligman was old, yes, and by afternoon had trouble remembering events of the morning, but his mind was as sharp as ever when it came to recalling his past.

For decades – until aged 52 (or 53 if one counts age from conception, as many peoples do, and with more logic than their enemies will admit) – Seligman, essentially a gentle individual (the scalps dangling from his belt had been acquired by way of trade) had studied earnestly under a wizard of the Order of Seth.

Seligman had failed his Trials, as do many. However, unlike most such failures, he had lived to tell the tale. If asked, he could have told Drake (and would have done so willingly) that:t many a place has its genius loci, an entity low in the hierarchy of spiritual beings yet capable of exerting temporal power;t such a genius loci has no true form of its own, far less any true understanding of the nature of the world of events, and therefore can only manifest itself (and act) in terms of the perceived expectations of human intellects;f that such expectations are usually too blurred, fuzzy and diffuse for a genius loci to make anything of them;t that religious ceremony, with its combination of intense mental concentration, precise expectations (often emphasized by prayers, chants, songs etc.), designed to harass a 'god' into doing something useful, e.g. striking down enemies of the state, making rain, bringing wind, annihilating unbelievers and withering the bodies of their children, etc. was the most effective way to get positive action from a genius loci.

Drake would have complained that his mind had not been concentrated and his own expectations had been non-existent. To which Morton Seligman would have replied (once he had elicited a full account of the facts, which, as a trained Investigator, he naturally would have) that the mind of Sully Datelier Yot would have been concentrated most wonderfully by Drake's sacrilege, and Yot would have expected some reaction from the Flame.