The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (10 page)

       
"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.

Chapter 8

       
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.

       
A woman darted out of
Togura's audience, snatched up the child and carried it off. As if a spell had
been broken, people started to scrabble for the valuables ejected by the odex,
and soon the central courtyard was filled with a turmoil of bodies and voices
pushing, shoving, complaining, shouting, scratching, wrestling, pinching,
pulling. Fish were torn apart or trampled underfoot or eaten raw on the spot
before they could be snatched away. The courtyard, lit by the unearthly
phosphorescent glow of more than a thousand ilpses, became a seething,
pullulating mass of mud, bodies, greed, avarice, jealousy and outright violence.

       
Oblivious to the anarchy
all around, Togura, sword in hand, continued to fight the odex. Now, excited
not just by his voice but by the raging, screaming, shrieking crowd, it spat,
pumped and ejected, spraying the crowd with parts of dead animals and mangled
bits of human bodies, with lumps of gold and chunks of silver, with mine
tailings by the bucket-load, with peaches, leeks and baby hedgehogs, and then -

       
A monster!

       
Lurching out of the odex
it came, a fearsome beast with scales of jacinth and claws like knives, with
three snake-like heads on long and weaving necks. Togura swung with his sword
and chopped off one of its heads. Fleeing from his death-bright blade, it ran
straight into the clutches of a rabble of housewives, who swamped it, strangled
it, tore it apart and crammed its separate pieces into their bargain bags.

       
The ilpses were now
popping out from the odex in a never-ending stream. Togura, filthy,
bloodstained, stinking, reeking, was shaken by a fit of riotous madness, and
laughed. His laugh provoked an onslaught of birds which battered into the night
sky. Some struck out for the darkness while others went looning around in the
light of the ilpses, or fluttered here and there and everywhere, bewildered, shocked
and disoriented.

       
The air was a daze of
feathers, a cacophony of screams, cries, chirrups and distress calls. Togura
was lost in the swirling maelstrom of sparrows, thrushes, fan tails, gulls,
gannets, petrels, budgerigars, huias, yodel birds, cockatoos and laughing owls,
moreporks and dancing fins, ravens, jackdaws, crows, keas, sparrow hawks,
skypes, mynahs, skylarks, starlings, strutting breckons, hens, wood pidgeons,
nymphet skarks, muttonbirds and dark lartles.

       
The feather-storm cleared.

       
An egg fell out of the
odex, bounced, and rolled to one side; it was hard-boiled. A penguin, very hard
from home, hobbled away as best it could. Togura cried in a hoarse, cracked
voice:

       
"Give me Day
Suet!"

       
A horde of ilpses
stormed out of the odex. As he ducked and covered his head, the noise of the
crowd of looters rose to a fresh peak. The odex responded with cheeses,
showering one and all with a stream of weird, bizarre and alien concoctions -
green mould and yellow stink, cheddar and kray, cantal, marolles, olivet,
port-salut, livarot, limbourg, skwayjeg, soo, parmesan, brie, gournay,
roquefort, troyes, romantours, brazlets and mont d'ors.

       
The air filled with
screams of delight as the housewives packed into the cheese.

       
Togura, hit, thumped,
battered, plastered and knocked almost senseless by cheese, fell to his knees
and crawled away through the sour, dank, fetid reek of cheese. Soon the odex
was buried in cheese, and Togura was adrift on a steadily-growing mound of
cheese, which pulsed, twitched and billowed, forcing itself ever-upward.

       
Forced upward till he
was level with the guttering, Togura hauled himself onto the roof and crawled
upward to the roof-ridge. There, exhausted, he slumped down, collapsing under a
sky now elbow to elbow with giggling ilpses. Eventually, he roused himself and
looked downward.

       
The night was fading. It
was growing light. The cheeses were no longer piling themselves up to the sky;
the courtyard full of cheese began to empty rapidly thanks to a bucket brigade
of citizens. It seemed that everyone in Keep who was not crippled or
bed-ridden, and several who were, had gathered in the stronghold or on its roof
or in the surrounding streets or on the surrounding roofs. As the cheese-level
fell, survivors were hauled out of the wreckage, choking and gasping or shocked
and silent.

       
Suddenly cries of rage,
fear and horror rose to Togura's ears. He saw that a tide of red was rising
fiercely, swamping cheeses and people. The hot reek of blood rose to his
nostrils.

       
Soon torrents of blood
were pouring out of the courtyard, which was a swirling red maelstrom. The
blood swept out into the streets, drowning down into the mine shafts, flooding
the cellars, racketing knee-deep through the alleyways, piling up at the
squeezes and pinches, then shooting away into the gulf of air beyond the brink
of Dead Man's Drop. The slow, the lame and the unwary were carried away down
the streets, swept into mineshafts or, thrashing and screaming, tossed over
Dead Man's Drop.

       
The blood-letting
subsided, until finally the odex itself could be seen, standing in the
courtyard. It was still pumping blood at a steady rate; a stream ankle-deep ran
from the courtyard.

       
From the odex there then
emerged a steady stream of clanking cantankerous machines and cute little stag
fawns with ear tags of blue or green or gold. The stag fawns wandered out into
the streets, picking their way through the blood and rubble and the litter of
corpses with their delicate bloodstained feet. The machines, some taking to the
air, others lumbering along the ground, began to fight each other.

       
As the machines fought,
the air filled with the sullen cough of projectile weapons, the shubilant hiss
of energy beams, the hollow, booming thud of contact explosions, the thud of
collisions and the high-pitched intolerable scream of despairing steel.