Hugh Cook - The Wordsmiths and the Warguild

"You have outlived your life," snarled the Zenjingu fighter, raising his sword.

The baron snapped his fingers. An archer standing behind him unleashed an arrow. The Zenjingu fighter lurched, dropped his sword, threw up his arms, then waddled round in circles, gasping as he clutched at the arrow, which had pierced his throat.

"Thus we do in the highlands," said the baron, striding forward with an easy gait.

As the Zenjingu fighter tottered, the baron hacked into the unruly fellow's head. On the third blow, the man dropped dead at his feet. Whistling tunelessly, the baron turned his attention to the remaining trespasser.

"Get back!" shouted the survivor. "Get back, or I kill the girl."

"The life of a female Suet is nothing to me," said Baron Chan Poulaan, who saw no harm in telling the truth. "Go ahead. Make my day."

"No!" screamed Togura, launching himself at the Zenjingu fighter.

The fighter threw Day Suet into the odex, which had been described to him as a Door. Then he jumped in after her. Both were briefly visible, then gone, disintegrating – with a jangle of music – into a storm of colours. An ilps, popping out of the odex, celebrated the occasion with hearty laughter.

"So much for that," said the baron crisply, wiping his sword then sheathing it. "Come along, Togura, we're going home. What is it, boy? Not crying, are we? Now now, don't be a baby."

"I loved her," said Togura wretchedly.

"I'm sure you did," said the baron, unsympathetically. "We all suffer these fevers in our youth. Stop snivelling, boy!"

"You killed her!" screamed Togura.

"She's gone into the odex," said the baron. "I've heard the Wordsmiths say that it stores whatever's fed into it. If that's so, then get them to unstore it. Or do it yourself. Or if it can't be done, forget about it. Suets copulate like ferrets. There's plenty more where that came from. Come come, there's no use crying over spilt milk."

When Togura continued crying, the baron slapped him briskly. Togura clenched his fist and smashed him. His father fell unconscious at his feet, poleaxed. There was a murmer amongst the bowmen and the spearmen.

"Take him," said Togura, in a thick wet ugly voice. "Him and his sword. Take him, and get him out of here!"

The men obeyed.

The two wordmasters who had tried to prevent Baron Chan Poulaan from entering their stronghold muttered to each other. Togura Poulaan, now of the Wordsmiths, had made war on the head of the Warguild: no good would come of this.

They had more to mutter about shortly, for Togura, bloodlust in his heart, began to attack the odex.

The night was cold, but Togura Poulaan was hot, feverish, burning. Armed with a sword which had recently graced the hand of a Zenjingu fighter, he was attacking the odex, hacking and slashing at its soft, yielding surface. It bled colours and music. As he fought, he became lost in a cloud of jangling rainbows, in a delusion of humming auras, in sprays of pealing orange and rumbling red, in veils of hissing mist and belching steam.

Finally, he stopped. He was panting harshly. His legs were shaking. Blisters had puffed up hard and ripe on the palms of his hands where the hard labour of battle had taken its toll on his innocence; he had never used a sword before, except in the occasional desultory half-hearted sparring match. The odex reformed and repaired itself, effortlessly, making itself perfect once more. The last free-floating colour died with a chord of music.

Togura hawked, and spat, and swore.

As he swore, an ilps jacked itself out of the odex and hoisted itself to the sky, smacking its bulbous lips, which were seven in number.

"Who are you?" cried Brother Troop, who had been standing to one side watching Togura's performance.

The ilps wavered.

"Where do you come from? Who owns you?"

Half of the ilps collapsed with a brief stench like a twinge of silage; the rest escaped.

And Togura, having recovered his breath, began to attack the odex with his voice. Once started, he did not stop. Seeking the words which would recover Day Suet, he poured out the language of love, hate and obscenity, of eating and drinking, of battle and war, of farming and forestry; he cried out the names of birds, trees, mountains, rivers, seas, lakes, weapons, cities, people, pets, insects, stars and uncouth diseases; he called upon gods known and unknown, upon the powers of earth and sky, air and water, fire and stone.

Anything that served his purpose was pressed into use. He bawled out snatches of drinking songs and musical bawdry; he sung half-remembered phrases of love songs and madrigals, inventing his own words when memory failed him. And then, yielding to despair and fury, he poured out meaningless word-strings, shouting, demanding, pleading, screaming, commanding.

As he excited it, the odex threw forth random assemblages with multiple heads, voices, smells, legs, arms, teeth, tentacles, manes, pseudopods, carapaces, eyes, ears, tongues and tails. As each ilps escaped, it drifted away, giggling, chuckling, snoring, roaring, swelling, pulsating, gleaming and shining, until the night sky above the stronghold of the Wordsmiths was cluttered with a positive fantasia of shapes and forms.

Sometimes, as Togura's words accidentally hit upon some transient code of retrieval, the odex sent real things out from its storehouse. Once it spat fire. Once it ejected a tiny corn-coloured disk which swelled in a couple of breaths to a huge wheel of hay the height of a man and the girth of a bullock. Once a shower of coins blasted their way into the air, stinging and burning where they hit, for they were red-hot.

As the night wore on, an ever-changing audience watched Togura's frantic performance. Servitors, scribes, translators, wordmasters and even the governor himself joined the gathering crowd. Togura, scarcely aware of their presence, cursed, stormed, raged and pleaded, as if immune to all embarrassment.

Alerted by the plague of ilpses above the Wordsmiths' stronghold, the citizens of Keep began to wake; it would have been hard for them to sleep, as all the dogs were howling and barking, for an ilps had the peculiar property of being very disturbing to dogs. Muttering imprecations, many hauled themselves out of bed and went to investigate. Picking their way through the night, wary of mineshafts and made dogs, citizens began to gather outside the stronghold, a conclave of lanterns and speculations. Some infiltrated the stronghold to become astonished witnesses to an unprecedented scene.

They saw Togura, harsh and hoarse and sweating, berating the odex, threatening it and lashing it with the iron-edged fury of his tongue. As his non-stop attack continued, the odex no longer manifested one object or apparition for each of his assaults, but spat them out in twos or threes, and then a dozen at a time. More and more of its productions were real things rather than randomly-formed ilpses.

A little red snaked, folded like a concertina, jumped out of the odex and hopped around on the ground, rupturing itself with a string of explosions. Then Togura was drenched and almost swept away by an onslaught of water, foam and spray in which a horde of fresh and saltwater fish kicked, thrashed and jumbled – pike, snapper, bream, bluefin, dogfish, cod, carp, smelts, dabs, haddock, lampreys, flounder, trout, salmon, catfish, whitebait, gurnet, mullet, groper, flying fish, mau mau, rays, eels, gudgeon and perch, all mixed in a slurry with sea slugs, sea urchins, crayfish, lobsters, gaplax, whelks and seaweed. While he was still thrashing round in the water, screaming and yelching and screeching and yelping, he was hit by a blast of vegetable scrapings.

Then a child fell bawling at his feet.

A newborn child, swaddled in a kind of soft white sheet.