still, listening. Then realized a faint hum, which he had dismissed as a noise within his own head, had ceased to be. He could hear … a tiny creak from his own knees . . . the complex sounds of deglutition as he swallowed some saliva . . . and that was it.
Drake mobilized some more saliva in his mouth, then spat.
His spittle splattered against the skeleton's skull. Reaching out, he found the invisible barrier had gone. He glanced at the metal plate in the wall, and the raised circles he had fingered. Cause and effect. Yes.'Score one for theory,' muttered Drake.
With reluctance, for he hated to concede anything to Gouda Muck – or, indeed, to any other of that age group.
'But I'll give him this,' muttered Drake. 'Even if he was mad, the old bugger did make bloody good swords.'
And he took a couple of steps forward.Then stopped.He could hear something. What? Yes: that hum.'Oh no,' said Drake. 'Oh no, tell me it's not so.'
But, on turning and trying to retreat back downstairs, he found the invisible barrier barring his way. He did another Investigation, a comprehensive one. There was no magical cause-and-effect device on this side of the barrier. Now he knew why the bones were there.'The poor old sod starved to death,' said Drake.
And, looking at the yellow bones, had a sudden intimation of his own inevitable death. Even if he got out of this alive, he would die some day. For the first time in his life, he truly understood his own mortality.
'That's the trouble with bloody-well being sober all the time,' said Drake. 'You gets some weird old thoughts breaking loose.'
Yes. The sooner he got back to civilization and got decently drunk again, the better. If he stayed here much longer, brooding about Knowledge Theory and Mortality and such, he'd be a regular mad philosopher by the time he escaped. Stokos had had two of them, and a sorry old sight they were, too.
'Onwards!' said Drake boldly, appropriating for his own purposes the motto of the Guild of Navigators, which was not strictly his to use at all.
He swiftly found himself in a machine-cluttered room at the top of the tower. He could not tell what these amazing devices did, or where they were from, or what they were worth – but none attacked him, so he didn't rightly care.
What he wanted was a way out. Which he found, soon enough: a square hole in the ceiling. So up he went. And, after he had gazed again on the desolation of the Deep South, he started wondering just how the hell he was going to get back to ground level. If he had a rope, it would be easy.Otherwise . . .
The walls were sheer, impossible to climb. If he jumped, the odds for breaking something were excellent. If he broke something, he was dead.'Hoy!' shouted Drake. 'Anyone here?'
He listened, but heard only a faint hissing, which could have been the sun trying to weld his shadow to the roof. Shading his eyes, he scanned the landscape. Nobody. The clifftops lay only half a league away. From this height, it scarcely looked any distance at all.
Then came the blue of the sea, and, to the north, the humped mass of the island of Ko. There was something odd about Ko. Yes: its ends were curling up in the hot sunshine, floating above the sea. Drake squinted, trying to bring them into focus. No change.
He was horror-struck. It was his fault! He must have somehow unleashed some enormously evil power which had been lurking in this tower. Perhaps that power was, right now, making all the lands and islands of the whole wide world turn up at the edges and curdle.'Nonsense,' he said to himself. 'Impossible!'
Yet: some of those ancient Causes were known to have amazingly grandiose Effects.
'Well,' said Drake, 'we'll worry about the world when we're free in the world to worry. Right now we need a rope.'
And, without waiting to worsen his sunburn, he went below decks to make another Investigation.
He found nothing remotely worth having, but for twenty-seven identical amulets. Each, together with its necklace-chain of smooth-flowing black links, had the weight of a walnut. Each amulet was a cool, glossy lozenge of jet black. On one side, a golden sun disc. On the other, raised silver decorations in the form of seven stars and a crescent moon. On Investigating the silver stars, Drake found the amulets could be made to talk.
'. . . strong voice,' muttered Drake. 'Man's voice . . . strange … no language I know . . . worth a pretty, I bet . . . magic, perhaps? Spells, perhaps? . . . well … no harm trying . . .'
He took the amulets downstairs. Crouching by the yellowed skull of the long-dead stranger, he let the invisible barrier listen to each amulet in turn, knowing well enough that many such charms had magical powers. The barrier held firm. Drake attacked it one last time, thumping it hard with his fists.No good.
'Still,' said Drake, putting the amulets round his neck for safe keeping, 'these charm-things will be worth something if I ever get out of here. Yes, wizards would pay for them, if nobody else.'
He was right about that, for each amulet contained the voice of Saba Yavendar himself. The great poet of the days of yore had once lived in this tower for half a millen-ium, and had whiled away some of those long years of exile by making multiple recordings of all his early works, including his
Wizards valued such things, and the High Speech of wizards was near-identical to the Stabilized Scholastic Standard which Yavendar had recorded in.'Still no rope, though,' said Drake.
But, before he slung the last amulet around his neck, he tested its strength. It was beyond his power to break it.
'With enough of these woman-fancy faggots,' said Drake, 'I could make a chain to get me out of here.'
So he resumed his Investigations, but with no more success than-before. He got angry.
'You see, Muck?' he yelled. 'You see, you groggy old bugger? You can't make rope from Investigations!'
Then stopped yelling, for his throat started hurting. Thirst. Yes. That was it. He was going to thirst to death, and soon. No doubt about it. Since he was definitely doomed to die, he was all the more bitter about those afternoons wasted studying the Theory of Knowledge, the Theory of Lists, the Reductive Crisis of Categorizations and all the rest of that pretentious old rubbish which never yet helped put a sharper edge on a sword, and never would.
'Missed out on all those sacrifices, too,' said Drake, gloomily.
The human sacrifices organized by the temple of Hagon had mostly been in the afternoons. Everyone agreed they were top-notch religious experience, but because of his schoolwork, he had never managed to see one.'All those days breaking my brains,' muttered Drake.
Arid hit a machine with his fist, hard. Then kicked it, but hurt his foot.'Ganch,' said Drake, viciously.The machines were obviously built to last. Otherwise he would have relieved his feelings by smashing them to pieces. Breaking. Smashing. Yes, that rang a bell. What was it? Yes … the final Rule of Investigation:'The last Test of Limits is Destruction.'
At first he was chary of breaking the place up. After all, something was making Ko island curl at the edges, and the only thing he could put it down to was his own Investigations. If he started some Destruction he might end up in serious trouble.
'But there's no other way,' muttered Drake, picking up the lightest available machine. 'Don't take this the wrong way, little thing – it's sanctioned by the Theory of Investigations, don't you know.'
And he hurled the item against the wall. It was fragile, having been designed only to store, sanitize and dispense tooth-brushes. It shattered. A toothbrush (perfectly preserved for millenia by a low-grade stasis field) fell from the wreckage.
'A little jewel-cleaner of some sort,' said Drake, frowning. 'What was that doing in there?'
And he Investigated, carefully, looking for jewels. There was none. But there were some thin, finely woven metal wires, sheathed in pliable jackets of different colours.
'Hmmm,' said Drake. 'Maybe the last rule is the best of all. . .'
And he went downstairs to retrieve the larger bones of the skeleton, thinking to use them as levers to help pry apart the larger machines.
He was still hard at it when night came. He got little sleep, for the topmost room of the tower became amazingly cold by night. By the time dawn came, his stomach was seething with acid hunger. His mouth was thick, dry, furry. He sucked on the knucklebone of a long-dead man, generating saliva to ease the dryness of his throat.'To work,' said Drake. 'To work . . .'By noon, he had smashed every device in the room, and had woven a rope of wires
