The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (11 page)

       
A light wind got up,
sending the ilpses drifting away. The battle between the machines continued.
Many of them sought refuge underground. The others followed, and the
continuation of a very ancient war proceeded underfoot. The ground shook with
muffled explosions.

       
The flow of blood
diminished to a trickle. The last few stag fawns jumped out of the odex. The
last thing to come forth was a female human dressed in silk. She slithered out
of the odex and landed on her backside in the mud and muck.

       
"Day!"
screamed Togura, with the very last of his voice.

       
Heedless of the danger,
he raced down the roof and leapt into the courtyard. He landed, fell, and went
sprawling into the soft, reeking squilg of blood and mud and water and bird
droppings. As he hauled himself out of the ooze, the human female regarded him
with distaste. She was, he saw, most definitely not Day Suet; she was taller,
older and wore diamonds. Despite her muck-stained backside, she carried herself
with all the hauteur of an empress.

       
"Help me,"
said Togura, shambling through the mud toward her.

      
 
She took a tiny oddment
from about her person and pointed it at him. The air sizzled. His limbs
discoordinated and dropped him down in the filth. Slowly, cautiously, he raised
his head, blinked, and peered at the woman. She asked him a question in a very foreign
language.

       
"I don't
understand," said Togura, in a voice made of dry straw, sand, wood
shavings and iron filings.

       
The woman looked around,
taking stock of the situation. She wrinkled her nose with distaste at the
shambles around her. She had nothing but contempt for everything she saw.
Picking up her skirts, she began to pick her way toward the nearest exit.

       
"Wait!"
screeched Togura, wallowing through the filth on knees and elbows. "You
have to help us. Don't go!"

       
The woman turned,
sneered, aimed her weapon again and fired, this time giving him a blast which
knocked him unconscious for a day and a night. Then she turned on her heel and
left, and was never seen again in Keep.

Chapter 9

       
The servitor lanced one
last blister. Clear fluid eased out, forming a painless tear which the servitor
wiped away with a fleece-white dabbing cloth. Togura flexed his hand, which
felt stiff and sore.

       
"Another time,
bandage your hands before you fight," said the servitor, a rough-bearded
man with a strange accent. "Until such time as your hands are
battle-hardened."

       
"Where did you
learn that?" said Togura.

       
"In another place,
another time."

       
"Tell me about
it."

       
"Not today. No -
don't get up. Rest. I'll be back soon with something good."

       
"What?"

       
"Wait and
see."

       
The servitor departed.
Togura lay back in bed, staring at the cobwebs sprawled across the timbers
overhead, and listened to the fury of the autumn storm which raged without. The
wilderness weather was scattering the ilpses far and wide across the land, or
blowing them out to sea; it was killing or dispersing the mobs of birds; it was
grounding most of those quarrelsome machines which had not yet run out of fuel.
The war weather was dealing with the pests and enemies unleashed by the odex,
bringing a kind of peace back to the city state of Keep.

       
The servitor returned,
bringing a two-handled drinking jug filled with something hot and sweltering.

  
     
"Drink," he said.

       
Togura did so. Warmth
paunched in his belly and invaded his veins. His senses slurred. The colours of
the darkened timbers overhead began to drift.

       
"Drink," said
the servitor, encouraging him.

       
Togura drank his fill.
Though he was lying in bed, he felt that he was floating. He tried to ask a
question. On the third attempt, he managed to curl his tongue round the word.

       
"What is it?"

       
"Quaffle,"
said the servitor.

       
"And what's
that?"

 
      
"A
mixture of all good things. Alcohol, opium, hemlock, dark nightshade, the
red-capped mushroom and the blue, a foreign herb called ginseng and a little
oil of hashish. And honey, of course."

       
"I could learn to
like it."

       
"You could learn
too well," said the servitor, with a laugh. "But it's good for the
sickness. Sleep now."

       
And, at his command,
Togura drifted off into silk-blosomed drug dreams which suckled him with nectar
and fed him on honey-basted melody cats.

       
He woke later, in
darkness. The rain and the wind were still at work beyond the walls. He was
alone, without the company of so much as a candle. Lying there in the darkness,
he remembered Day Suet, in spring, cradling a tiny bird in her little hands,
and laughing when it stained her fingers with a tiny bit of lime. Hot tears
blistered his eyes.

       
He wept.

       
Later, in the darkness,
he found the two-handled drinking jug. What was left in the bottom was cold to
the touch. It sidled down his throat, cold as a snake, then transmuted itself
to living fire. Sweating from the heat of the fire, and reeling from weariness,
he allowed his bones to compose themselves once more for sleep.

       
When he woke, it was
morning.

       
The servitor brought him
mutton chops, swedes, rutabaga and water cress. He ate, ravenously. For lunch,
there was leek soup, venison and the brains of a pig, with a side-helping of
fried snails and pickled slugs. He devoured everything. In the evening, there
was a slab of bread loaded down with beefsteak and a gill of milk, with
blackbird pie to follow. He polished off the lot.

       
"Why am I so
hungry?" said Togura.

       
"Good health makes
you so," said the servitor.

       
For days, as Togura
recovered from the effects of the unknown weapon which the strange woman from
the odex had used to knock him unconscious, the cold rains of autumn lashed the
town, washing away dead fish, drowned rats and the smells of blood and cheese.
While Togura ate and slept, while the days shortened and the rains pounded
down, the townspeople counted the cost of their orgiastic disaster with the
odex, and argued whether it was a blessing or a disaster.

       
"Of course it was a
disaster, no question about it!" said Shock the Cobbleman, who had broken
both legs on the Night.

       
But not everyone was
quick to agree.

       
On the debit side, at
least thirty-four people had been killed, fifty houses flooded, seventeen other
properties damaged or demolished, and incredible devastation wrought
underground by war machines fighting to death in the mines. Through autumn and
winter, the miners would be able to retrieve little gemstock; they would be too
busy repairing and shoring up mineshafts.

       
On the credit side,
three of the fighting machines, burrowing deep into the rock, had finally burst
out into the daylight at the very bottom of Dead Man's Drop. Water was now
cascading out of their escape tunnels. The problem of flooding in the mines,
which had worsened as the miners delved deeper over the years, was now easing.
This unexpected solution to the drainage problem meant that the total amount of
gemstock available in the long term had greatly increased.

       
Bankers at banquet,
gleaming with perspiration, toasted Togura Poulaan - also known as Barak the
Battleman - with goblets of diluted ambrosia or strong mulled wine. The
Gonderbrine mine, the largest in Keep, which had been threatening to default on
its loans because assets underground had proved to be also underwater, had now
negotiated a very satisfactory repayment schedule.

       
"To chaos,"
went one of the more drunken toasts. "To havoc."

       
That was daring, but
another toast capped it.

       
"To the
unexpected."

       
Now that, for a banker,
was truly extraordinary.

       
While bankers
celebrated, and while mienrs, though grumbling, admitted that they ultimately
stood to benefit, a few dour, incorrigible pessimists argued that drainage
would hasten subsidance, leading to a swift collapse of the town. They were
ignored.

       
Meanhile, also on the
credit side was the personal wealth so many had garnered. Many houses in Keep
were now glutted with venison, and also with cheesestock, the name the people
invented for the unholy mish-mash of half a hundred different cheeses which had
resulted from the excessive generosity of the odex.

       
Others had gained
birdmeat, fishmeat, gold, silver or interesting articles of metalwork. And many
of those who had gained nothing had, nevertheless, abandoned themselves shamelessly
on the Night; aware that they had fought and scrabbled and kicked and clawed,
squabbling over the loot like so many carrion eaters, they were, for the most
part, too ashamed to speak out and criticise the Wordsmiths, the odex or Togura
Poulaan. Collective benefits and collective guilt served to nullify the chance
of retribution.

       
Togura scarcely thought
of the damage to the town and its people, but was deeply worried about the
probable reaction of the Wordsmiths.

       
"Will I be punished?"
he said.

       
"No, boy,"
said the servitor. "They're quite pleased with you, if anything."

       
Indeed, within the ranks
of the Wordsmiths there was general agreement that the Night had been a good
thing. For more than three decades they had explored the odex in a slow,
cautious, deferential fashion, learning little of its practical use. Now, in
one wild, rampaging Night, Togura Poulaan had taught them something very
important about its use.

       
Brother Troop, the new
Governor - the old one had died from an allergic reaction to an unfamiliar type
of cheese - codified their new knowledge in Brother Troop's First Law of Odex:

The volume, variety and reality of production of the odex increases in
proportion to the length of unbroken linguistic stimulation and the variety of
linguistic excitement employed for that stimulation.

       
In other words, a long
shouting match with the odex, with plenty of people shouting, would lead to a
great many things being produced, lots of those things being real objects
instead of ilpses.

       
Brother Troop, pleased
to be wearing the Governor's pink felt jacket and fur-lined codpiece, had his
First Law of Odex inscribed on a piece of the finest timber available. He
ordered it to be done in letters of fire, by which he meant red paint; what he
actually received was a fine example of poker-work, but he decided that his
words looked splendid even when rendered in charcoal.

       
Now that he was head of
his little empire, Brother Troop set about a little empire-building. Even
though the Wordsmiths were having little success with the Universal Language
they were trying to develop, there was still the possibility of recovering
great wealth from the odex. However, as Keep might not take kindly to further
frenetic experiments being conducted within city limits, a new location was in
order.

       
Brother Troop sent
scouts out into the surrounding countryside to search for a high, well-drained
place where they could build a new stronghold, well away from inhabited places.
A suitable spot was soon found on the estate of Baron Chan Poulaan, who
objected violently to Brother Troop's proposal.

       
"My estate,"
said the baron, "is not uninhabited. Even if it was, I would not permit
vermin to spawn and fester upon my freeholding. I demand the return of my son,
the disbanding of the Wordsmiths and the destruction of the odex."

       
Brother Troop thus
became aware that his order now had an enemy. He decided that the baron was
upset at the fame and acclaim his son had won by killing a monster, slaying a
dragon and so on and so forth. That was true, but there was more to it than
that.