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With that necessary unpleasantness out of the way, let's settle down and continue the story...
The moon had set now. From time to time, Julia thought she could hear the dawn chorus, but perhaps it was just the protests of the stagecoach's joinery. "Mister Ferret..." she said sleepily.
"Yes?" snapped their captor.
"How much further have we got to go before we reach this isolated spot where you're planning to kill us?"
"Don't worry, my little heretic," the Ferret replied, "we're almost there now. The sun will rise in about two hours, but I don't think you'll see it."
"Why's that, Mister Ferret?" asked Jack, yawning.
"Then again," muttered the Ferret grimly, "maybe you will... I don't find my name in the least bit amusing..."
A few moments passed in silence. Then, from somewhere up ahead, came the sound of a clock in a tower striking three. The last stroke had barely begun to fade away when there was a buckling and warping all around them, as though the coach had got bored with existing in its usual set of dimensions and decided to try some new ones. A second or so later, they found themselves hunched together atop a large pumpkin in the middle of the trail. Julia just had time to notice four or five white mice fleeing towards the undergrowth, before the Ferret became really angry.
"Damn, damn, damn, two bloody hells and a large side order of cow dung!" he shouted. "You just can't trust a second-hand stagecoach dealer these days!" He kicked at the pumpkin, knocking Jack and Julia into the dirt. "I should have known there was something suspicious about that guy - seemed altogether too eager to get rid of the bloody thing." He drew his ambiguous knife and stabbed the pumpkin several times. Jack found himself wondering whether this would invalidate the insurance claim, and how you went about insuring a vehicle against unexpectedly being transformed into a large piece of fruit, and whether the insurance company would try to wriggle out of paying by claiming it was an act of God.
"All right, you two," said the Ferret, having calmed down a little, "on your feet."
"Why?" asked Jack.
"We've lost our wheels," the Ferret explained, indicating the remains of the pumpkin, "so we're going to have to walk."
"How far?" asked Julia.
"Seven or eight kilometres."
"How far?" asked Julia.
"At night?" chipped in Jack.
"Then again," said the Ferret, his face-splitting grin returning, "if you don't fancy the journey, I can always kill you here and now."
Julia shrugged. "Fine by me."
"Julia!" Jack reproached her. "You can't give in, just like that! Where's your survival instinct?"
"Right beside my bruised, battered body in Sergeant Stazi's office."
"Look, we could overpower him," Jack suggested. "There's two of us and one of him."
"I've beaten odds far greater than two to one," the Ferret grinned, tapping the flat of his blade against the palm of his left hand. The effect was spoiled a little when he realised that he hadn't wiped the pumpkin juice off it.
"We don't have to fight him," said Jack. "We could run away - if we go in opposite directions, he can't catch both of us."
The Ferret grinned at him. He considered casually tossing the knife from one hand to the other, to demonstrate his manual dexterity, but thought better of it. Most of the knife techniques he knew relied on having at least two fingers and a thumb on the same hand in working order. He settled for: "I've had plenty of experience of putting knives into the backs of fleeing enemies."
"Well, err, maybe if we... err..." Jack's train of thought came to a stop several hundred metres short of the platform, having run out of the coal of ideas and the water of hope. Eventually, a shunter came along and pushed it into the sidings, and the passengers made their way to the station master's office to demand a refund and a sizeable sum in compensation.
"Jack," said Julia firmly, "will you stop arguing with the man and let him get on with his job?"
"Yes, stop arguing and..." The Ferret turned to Julia. The driver of his train of thought had just been told to go from Exeter to Penzance via Vladivostok.
"As far as I'm concerned, Mister Ferret," she explained patiently, "this whole 'Felintor' lark is just one crazy dream. The sooner I wake up from it, the better."
On hearing that a purpose-built route direct from Exeter to Vladivostok had just been opened to cater for the tourist trade, the Ferret leered and said: "I'll be happy to oblige."
Jack was still stuck in the sidings, but his driver had caught sight of a helicopter overhead. "Help!" he shouted. "Fire! Robbery! Murder! Help! Police! Fire! Ambulance! Help! Heeeeeelp!"
Still leering, the Ferret said: "Scream all you like, heretic. Scream your lungs out. Nobody will hear you. We're kilometres from anywhere." Jack appeared not to have heard him.
From one side of the trail came a voice. It was an old, irascible voice. It didn't quite whine, but it suggested that whining was a definite option. It sounded as though its owner wore carpet slippers and gloves with the fingertips cut off, and had a hot water bottle even in the middle of summer. It sounded as though its owner hated what he had become, or perhaps what he had always been, and lived alone, because the only company he could be sure of was that of other men just like himself. What the voice was saying was this: "All right, all right, hold your beasts of burden, I'm coming as fast as I can." The bushes parted, and the voice's owner stuck his head out, apparently indifferent as to whether this would attract an arrow. His face matched his voice. It looked like something that had been left out in the sun for several weeks. He had grey-white hair even longer than Jack's, and a beard that he could easily tuck into his belt. "Lorgrim preserve me," he asked, "why can't you young people make a few allowances for an arthritic old man?" The eyes were incongruous: they seemed too alert and far-sighted for someone of his age, as if the rest of his face was just a mask worn by someone much younger. He pushed the bushes further apart. Hitching up his robe, he stepped over the ditch, wincing as he did so. He was about one metre sixty, although he seemed to have a slight stoop, and so was probably a little taller than that. In places, his robe was something resembling its original white, but mostly it was the same shade as his hair. Jack somehow knew that the black fur trimmings around the collar and the cuffs were not synthetic: synthetic fur kept its lustre better than that. The robe was further decorated with complex, wiggly symbols, in patchy gold and silver thread. Apart from the decoration, it looked like the kind of clothing people used to be buried in, back in the days when there was room to spare for cemeteries, and wood to spare for coffins. This one looked as though somebody had been buried in it - possibly more than once. Maybe it was a family heirloom. The man walked slowly, but determinedly, towards them. Jack wondered if he was a wizard, but he didn't have a pointy hat, or a staff, or a demon familiar, or anything like that. He didn't even have any magical-looking rings on his fingers. He stopped about five metres away, and took a good look at the three of them, raising an eyebrow when he noticed the pumpkin. "Right," he said. "The emergency services have arrived. Where's the emergency?"
"Err... right here, actually," said Jack sheepishly.
"The Ferret? Outnumbered?" asked the old man. "Hardly an emergency - not for you, anyway. Or is the woman on his side?"
"Old man, you just keep out of this," said the Ferret, pointing his knife at him, "unless you want to meet the same unspeakably nasty end as these two here."
"Oh, come on," said the newcomer, "carving little bits out of people is hardly unspeakable, even with two knives. If you're in the right frame of mind, you can sleep through most of it."
"I'm warning you - I have no qualms about torturing and killing defenceless old men."
The man gave a wry little smile, as though this was the best joke he'd heard in ages. "Oh," he said softly, "I'm far from defenceless..." [picture]
The Ferret took three determined steps towards him, saying: "Would you like me to test those defences?"
"By all means." The man made a careless twisting motion with his hand, as though he had an apple in it, which he was throwing a little way into the air and catching again.
The Ferret gave a surprised noise of pain, and his knife fell to the ground. His left hand went to his right wrist. He held it firmly for a moment, as though fearing it was broken. He looked at his hands, and then at his knife. Probably even a slow-motion replay wouldn't have settled the matter, but Julia would have sworn she had seen the Ferret's hand twist as he dropped his knife, just as if the old man had reached across the space between them and grabbed it. "An old trick," said the man nonchalantly. "Mind over matter, you know."
Keeping his eyes on the man, the Ferret scooped up his knife and snarled: "You'll pay for this..."
"Perhaps I will." The old man gave as much of a shrug as his arthritis would let him. "But I won't pay now, and I certainly won't pay you." After a moment he added: "I really don't think that your continued presence is necessary to this conversation. Be a good villain and clear off, would you?" He thrust his hand out at the Ferret. There were no sparkly lights or smoky explosions. The Ferret simply became much smaller, as though seen from a long way off, and then vanished. The overall effect was similar to what happens to the picture on an old TV when you switch it off.
There followed an awkward silence from Jack and Julia. Several explanations were going through their minds, and both of them were worried that one might be right. The old man said nothing. He seemed to think that they ought to understand the situation perfectly. Finally, almost together, they asked: "Where did he go?"
"I transported him back to the village that you've just come from," he answered. "It was the only place that's far enough away from here that I could be sure wouldn't put him inside a hill, or a hundred metres above the ground. It was a bit difficult to get a fix on the co-ordinates, though - that was why I had to keep him talking. Anyway, I don't imagine he'll cause us any more trouble. He's wanted all over these islands for several pretty vile murders." He paused briefly, and continued: "Well, shall we be going?"
"Where?" asked Julia.
"My cave, of course. All real wizards live in caves. Part of the image of being close to nature."
"Why should we go with you?" she asked.
"Well, you've got nowhere else to go," he explained. "I don't imagine you want to go back to that village - or the Castillon monastery, come to that."
"Well, no..." said Jack and Julia together.
"And you haven't got a clue where you are. So you haven't really got much choice, have you?"
"I guess not," said Julia.
"Just a minute," put in Jack. "How do we know you're not an agent of the nameless evil?"
The old man shrugged again. "You'll just have to take that on trust for the time being. But if I am, then why did that Ferret fellow try to attack me?"
Jack could think of several answers to that which didn't require the Ferret and the wizard to be on opposite sides, but settled for: "It'll do for now."
"Well, shall we be going then?" asked the wizard.
"I guess so," sighed Julia. Sarcastically, she added: "We haven't got much choice, have we?"
Jack awoke from a dream about being a clerical assistant in a labyrinthine Energy Tax Assessment office, which ended just after the public address system had told them that an earthquake was coming. He gradually realised that someone was shaking him. He heard Julia's voice, and raised his head to see her crouched over him. "Something wrong?" he yawned.
"Hanndrakk's gone," she told him. That was the name of the wizard who had rescued them. He had at least given them that information without having to be asked.
"Gone?" He pushed the blanket back, and sat up. "Where?" He swung his legs out over the edge of the bed, and tried to put his feet on the floor. This was a mistake, as he'd been sleeping on a mattress on the floor. He winced as his heels jarred against the uneven stone surface.
"That's just the point, I don't know," she said. "I woke up about ten minutes ago, and he just..." she shrugged "...wasn't around."
"You woke me up for that?" he asked. She nodded. He stood up and, having made sure of his balance, walked over to a large, tatty armchair in one corner of the room. It was the kind of upholstery found in old people's homes: designed to be sat on, rather than in. The pattern and colours of the fabric probably hadn't been very exciting even when they hadn't been obscured by a uniform layer of dirt.
Jack sat down carefully: you never knew what surprises might be hiding in a seat old enough to be moulded into the shape of its owner's body. He looked around the room. There was another mattress next to his, which Julia had slept on. Next to the chair he was sitting on was a round wooden table, about a metre across, with a few pieces of paper scattered over it. At the table was a high-backed dining chair. The only other thing in the room was a large wooden box in the corner opposite the armchair, of about the size and proportions of a chest of drawers. It had a dark glass top, and the upper half of its front was covered with industrial-looking knobs and meters and switches. The rest of the front was occupied by a complicated cut-out pattern, inlaid with a white, slightly iridescent substance. This might have been writing, or simply abstract decoration; Jack couldn't tell. Attached to the box by some complicated wiring were a pair of smaller boxes, also made of wood, with black fronts. These were placed on stands, to make them about level with the head of the person sitting on the armchair. He wondered if Hanndrakk used the apparatus for scrying, or maybe summoning demons and forcing them to submit to his will. If so, its appearance was disappointing. He would have expected something that looked a little more... well, magical, to be honest. This looked like a sideboard for those on a tight budget, designed by Fabergé and NASA.
"Honestly, Julia," Jack said, trying to wave his hand dismissively at her, "these mysterious hermits who live in caves are always doing things like that. He's probably just gone to see if the coast is clear, or something."
"Indeed I have," said Hanndrakk from the doorway. Jack and Julia turned to look at him. Neither of them had heard him approach.
Suspecting that the answer would make her feel rather foolish, Julia nevertheless asked him: "How did you get here?"
"Well," he said, gently patting his right thigh, "these still work over short distances, you know." He had that wry smile on his face again. "As I expected," he continued after a moment, "the hotel staff have found the Ferret, and have come to the conclusion that he had something to do with your disappearance. One of the other guests has... volunteered herself for the job of extracting the relevant information from him." Rubbing at his chin, he added: "She's good, I'll grant you that - a real dab hand with the hot wax, and her whip technique is the best I've seen in a long while - but I don't think she'll get much out of him."
"Oh," said Julia. "Why not?"
"Well," he shrugged, "for one thing, his employers - the nameless evil, that is - will make sure he lives to regret it. Their tortures make hot wax and a whipping seems like a hot bath and a massage, and he knows it. And for another, he's not really all that loyal to them, and they know it. So they told him no more than was absolutely necessary."
"This guest who was... extracting information from the Ferret," Jack asked carefully, "did you catch her name, by any chance?"
"Samantha, Samanda," Hanndrakk replied uncertainly. "Something like that."
"I might have known," Jack said.
"Been at her sharp end yourself, have you?" the wizard asked.
"Well..." Jack squirmed, "not exactly..."
Hanndrakk sniggered - an unpleasant sound, like someone trying to start a lawnmower on an empty tank. "Say no more. It would also seem that the Castillon Monks decided to try to rescue their beloved Unbeliever." He indicated Julia. "A party of about eight of them were wandering around the hotel late last night, and they managed to break into your room just after the Ferret abducted you. They would probably have given chase, but a couple of the security guards caught up with them just then. They're Dissenting Lorgrites, so they didn't waste any time letting the monks know how upset they were about the damage." Again, he gave that wry smile.
"I'm sorry," said Jack, "I don't quite follow you."
"Oh, I was forgetting," said Hanndrakk, "you're not from these parts, are you? Well, officially, Dissenting Lorgrites follow the God Lorgrim, but most of the time they're so far off his straight and narrow that they'd need a flying carpet to get back on to it. It wasn't a schism over a point of doctrine or anything like that. They don't dissent from anything in particular. They just dissent, almost as a matter of principle. They tend to be built like reinforced concrete, and as broad as they're tall. When they're upset about something, they tend to make it known in very physical ways, and as you can imagine, they get upset quite easily. It's just as well for those monks that they think eye-glasses are decadent, because they wouldn't have been able to wear them after the security guards had finished with them."
"Anyway, as far as I can tell, there are no more agents of the nameless evil in the vicinity, but that's likely to change once the Ferret's employers hear about his indisposition."
"Why is this evil nameless?" Julia asked.
"Well," the old man replied, "some people say that it's a ploy to avoid attracting its attention. Others maintain that it's nameless because it doesn't exist. Both theories are a load of priest's bathwater, of course. The truth of the matter is that it's nameless because the only name it's ever had is about thirty-five syllables long, and six of those are physically impossible for humans to pronounce."
"Why not translate it?" she asked.
"Oh, people have tried. Some of the attempts make very amusing reading, if you like that sort of thing. [35] But the name embodies several philosophical concepts which have proven impossible to express in any human language so far devised." He paused, and went on: "Well, as I said, we're safe here for the time being. I think I ought to tell you a bit about Felintor. The more you know about this world, the better your chances of saving it."
"Do you think we could have something to eat first?" Julia asked. "I'm starving." She had toyed with the idea of dream-death by hunger if all else failed, but suspected it would take too long, besides which she doubted if she would have the willpower to go through with it.
"Sure. The kitchen is through there." He gestured behind him, to another doorway across the corridor. "There are some Oven Snacks in the fridge - just give them three minutes in the microwave."
"Fridge?" asked Jack, wondering if that word meant something different here.
"Microwave?" asked Julia, hoping that that one didn't.
"Yes," said Hanndrakk, puzzled by their surprise. "You know what they are, don't you?"
"Well, yes," Jack began uncomfortably, "but..."
Julia picked up the sentence and tried to finish it. She managed: "...we just assumed that..."
Hanndrakk's smile slid smoothly into a sneer. "That because we still have practising wizards and working monasteries, our technology must be correspondingly primitive," he concluded scornfully. "Granted, technology always seems sophisticated to people who've just invented it, but we had steam power three hundred years ago, and AC electricity a century later. We've had digital computers for the last seventy years. We invented sound recording a hundred and fifty years ago, and vision recording thirty years after that." His expression mellowed a little, and he asked: "Shall I go on?"
Grammar and vocabulary twisted in Julia's grasp, taking on new and unfamiliar shapes as she tried to reply. "No... it's just that... well, we just assumed that... what with you living in a cave,... and being... close to nature and... stuff like that..."
"I did say, didn't I, young woman, that living in a cave is just part of the image of being a wizard. You surely don't expect me to live out my last days in a cold, damp, unfurnished hole - I've had raging arthritis since I was sixty. I might wake up one morning to find my limbs had locked solid. That's why I have central heating, and running hot water, and a remote control for the hi-fi - that's rather good, actually. Let me show you..."
Hanndrakk walked past Jack, and took a small, flat box, about the size of a paperback novel, from the table next to the chair. He held it close to his face, squinting at it, and pressed a few of its buttons. He then pointed it at the large wooden box in the far corner, and pressed another button. The box made some ominous clunking and whirring noises, and then a lush stream of music began to flow from the small boxes on either side of it. The main instrument sounded something like a viola, but had a wider range of pitch. It was accompanied by something that sounded at times like a piano and at times like a harpsichord. Every now and then there was a bit of intricate, tinkly percussion, and what could have been someone saying "dum" through a two-metre-high rack of electronic processing that the band would need a platinum album to pay for, or maybe a bass drum recorded through a karaoke microphone at the other side of the room.
Things are sometimes exactly what they seem, one part of Jack's mind said to another . Just what made you think that any wizard would leave his demon-summoning apparatus lying about in his living room, where you and Julia could start buggering about with it and allow Beelzebub to banish you to the nethermost hells? Of course it's a bloody hi-fi, you pillock.
"Now, if you've no objections," Hanndrakk said, turning the volume down a little with another button-press, "we'll fetch you something to eat - although if you insist on being 'close to nature,' you could always go and kill a rabbit, or something, and have it raw..."
[Author's note: This scene doesn't follow on immediately from the end of the previous one. I need to write some more at the start of this scene to link them together. I just thought you might like to know :-) ]
There came a long screech from a corner of the room. It sounded like a rooster trying to imitate an alarm clock. "Oh, Lorgrim," said Hanndrakk, looking towards the source of the noise, "is it that time again already? Well, there's no wriggling out of it, is there?" He stood up, and motioned Jack and Julia to follow. He led them outside, and a little way along the wall of the cliff that the cave was set into. About twenty metres from the cave entrance was a narrow, steep staircase cut into the rock. "I'll go first," he said. "That way, if I slip, one of you will break my fall."
They made their way up without mishaps. The staircase led to a large, flat expanse of rock, with occasional patches of sand and grass. About ten metres from the top of the stairs was a small, rickety hut, rather like a birdwatcher's hide. Hanndrakk went over to the door and unlocked it. He turned to Jack and said: "I'm sorry there aren't any magical locks or bound demons guarding this place. They're more trouble than they're worth, in my experience. It's far too easy to forget the sequences of gestures or the words of command, and then you've got things with too many teeth and not enough eyes trying to gnaw your legs off. With one of these" - he waved the key - "the worst that can happen is that you forget to oil the lock. And besides, there's nothing here that any self-respecting thief would think worth the bother of stealing." He went in.
Once Jack's eyes had adjusted to the dark interior of the hut, he saw that it was rather sparsely furnished. In one corner was a contraption that resembled a Victorian gas stove, with a fire-blackened kettle sitting on its hob. Underneath a small, letterbox-shaped window in the opposite wall was a rectangular table, with a contorted piece of apparatus that looked like something built by a medieval plumber who'd had a vision of an oil refinery in a dream. Much of it was made out of brass, and what wasn't brass was glass or crystal. It had rather more knobs and dials and levers than was reasonable for something that was operated by one person. Next to it was a large, leather-bound book, with a pen attached to its spine by a piece of string. There was a worn chair in front of the table. The hut was clearly somewhere intended for one specific activity, and nothing else. Hanndrakk evidently wanted to spend as little time as possible in here, although the presence of the stove suggested that he spent longer than he would like to.
"You two may as well make yourselves useful," Hanndrakk said. "Juliahewlett, you sit down and watch the far-seer. Jackhenderson, you write down what Juliahewlett tells you she sees. I'll make us some tea."
No-one moved.
"What are you waiting for?" asked Hanndrakk.
"What's a far-seer?" asked Julia.
"What's she supposed to see?" asked Jack.
There was a pause while Hanndrakk adjusted his assumptions about them to take account of what they had just said. "That thing there," he told them, pointing to the model oil refinery, "is a far-seer. You look through the eye-piece" - he pointed to a bit of tubing that stuck out - "and it makes things seem nearer than they really are."
"Oh," said Julia, "you mean a telescope."
"What's a tel-e-scope?" said Hanndrakk, in a frighteningly good imitation of Julia's voice. "As for what you're supposed to see - well, it's pointing east, out to sea."
"Ah," said Jack, "we're keeping watch for the agents of the nameless evil, in case they decide to launch a sneak attack by ship."
"No," replied Hanndrakk. "The far-seer is focused two thousand kilometres away, or about one hundred kilometres back from the edge of the world."
"The edge of the world?" said Julia. "But... the world's round."
"Round like a ball?" asked Hanndrakk.
"Julia," whispered Jack, "be careful. This could be a severe shock to him."
"Don't worry about sparing my feelings, please," said Hanndrakk, sarcastically. "I don't know about your planet, but this one is indisputably as flat as the proverbial Krathto pudding. The question was settled nearly two hundred years ago. Not long after that, Rimwatch was set up, in an effort to recover at least some of the material that falls over the Rim. There's a group of rescuers with flying carpets based on the Necklace - that's a long chain of small islands about two hundred and fifty kilometres back from the Rim. They're directed by a team of watchers further back, who keep a lookout for anything valuable going over the Rim."
"How do you define 'valuable'?" asked Jack, a little uncomfortably.
"Anything that floats, and is big enough for a watcher to see, and small enough for a couple of flying carpets to tow back. I watch a fifty-kilometre stretch of the Rim for two hours every other Grollsday."
That's it, so far. If you want to read more, pester me at fiction at pembers dot net and tell me how much you enjoyed the first third of the book. Ta.
[35] Imagine someone who speaks only English trying to translate a VCR manual from Japanese into Urdu, without having seen the actual machine (not that that helps much in this case anyway). This will give you some idea of the general standard of such attempts. [Back to main text.]
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