'Then I'll be the first,' said Drake, thinking if it was safe for him to drink firewater then it was safe for him to drink anything.He took the glass and downed it.
Almost immediately, several things happened. His legs went rubbery. He fell off the chair, and found the view from the floor hilariously funny. Then he started to float upwards.
'Whoa, boy!' cried Jon Arabin in alarm, grabbing him by the trouser leg before he could float away entirely.T can fly!' cried Drake. 'Look at me!'
And he waved his arms like a bird, and, pretending to be an experimental navigational aid, started flapping in the direction where he guessed the Greater Teeth could be found. He broke free from Arabin's clutches, but was brought up short by the ceiling.
'I always thought you were full of hot air,' shouted Bucks Cat, who had long since forgotten that he was supposed to be a deaf mute.
'Aye,' shouted Whale Mike. 'Full of fart-flame and belly-gas.'
And Drake, looking down on them all, and admiring -in particular – the look of utter stupefaction on Sully Yot's face, collapsed in hysterical laughter. Collapsing thus, he fell toward the drinkers, who shouted in alarm and scattered from their chairs. Then Drake burped, and floated up toward the heights again.Was he tipsy?He was drunk!
Yes, truly, wildly, gloriously drunk, the world around him softened to the luxury of velvet, his body and psyche immune to the pull of gravity – it was wonderful!
The wizard brew he had drunk had been truly enchanted, and its enchantment, being an anomaly beyond the control of the normative functions of the universe, was not subject to detoxification by his body-worms. Drake was not aware of this technicality, but he did rightly guess – even though he was guessing drunk – that somewhere in the world there must be a further source of this ambrosia.
'Wizards,' muttered Drake to himself. 'Aye, wizards . . . that's the answer.'
22
Drake woke next morning to find himself floating just off the floor, arms outstretched and fingers trailing. Staring at the ceiling, he wondered which hell had claimed him. His head was full of broken glass, his eyes hurt, and his throat felt as though someone had rammed a dirty mop down it. Aye, and left that mop soaking there overnight.
Feeling sick, he rolled over, in case he had to vomit. He hung just above the bare floorboards, observing, without striving for cognition, a dead wine skin, half a salted sprat, a splattering of fish scales, and a solitary cockroach making a hesitant tour of inspection. Then saw, out of the corner of his eye, a green cut-glass bottle lolling on its side.
Now he remembered. Now he knew where he was. This was the bar run by old Gezeldux in Brennan, on Carawell. He was not in hell at all – he just had a hangover. Just! He had forgotten how bad they were.
Clutching a table leg, Drake hauled himself to his feet. He took a couple of steps forward, walking on nothing but air, then slipped. He grabbed the table to steady himself,
then worked his way round the bar. Slowly. Investigating. He opened shutters. Winced as harsh sunlight streamed inside. The cockroach-scout broke off its patrol and fled for shelter.
Motes of dust drifted in the sunshine. Shadows sprawled from mugs, tankards and dead wineskins. A fly, flitting through an unshuttered window, began to dizzy around with an irritating hum. Shading his eyes and peering outside, Drake saw the backside of a boatshed, a couple of houses, and a large stone building which, on the basis of a familiar clanking-hammering sound which started to issue from it, he identified as a forge.
Drake's head began to pound rhythmically in time with the hammering of the unseen blacksmith. Somewhere, quite close, a cockerel began to crow:'Co co rico! Co co rico!'
The fly settled momentarily on the table. Drake brought his hand down with an almighty thump, sending more dust swirling into the air. He examined his stinging palm for corpse mash – but the insect in question was flying happily round his head. It settled shortly oh a shutter. Drake picked up a wineskin and hit it, hard and accurate. The fly dropped dead, the shutter fell off its hinges, and two more flies came bumbling in through the window.
Drake grunted in disgust, and, head hurting worse than before, looked for a hair of the dog which had bitten him. But there was no such dog. The little green bottle was empty, and even a hearty swig of vodka failed to have the slightest impact on his hangover, which, being a consequence of enchanted liquor, was naturally beyond the reach of all ordinary remedies.
The only instant cure for that hangover was a drachm of fresh blood drained from a living salamander of the blue-gilled variety. But these were extraordinarily rare: even the salamanders sometimes seen in the flames of Drangsturm were but the more common green-gilled variety, which has blood useless for anything except removing wine stains from linen (and even the evidence for that use is dubious, consisting as it does of a reference in Cralock which is ambiguous, an assertion in the 'Regiment of Reptiles' which cannot be given much weight since the scholarship of Prenobius has thrown doubt on Gibble's corpus in its entirety, and a mention in Zoth which in all probability – and despite the claims of Elkstein to the contrary
– actually refers to the taniwha of Quilth, an altogether different creature).
Drake knew nothing of salamanders of any variety, but did know his booze. He sampled all types available
– which did not take him long, as the bar had been almost drunk dry the night before – then concluded he could not kill his hangover but must suffer it. He did not know it, but he would go on suffering from that hangover for the next five and a half days. If he lived that long.
Drake grunted, stretched, yawned, scratched his scalp, rubbed his head, pulled on the few hardly noticeable ginger hairs which these days straggled out from his chin, burped, farted, yawned again, took off his boots so he could pull the wrinkles out of his socks, pulled on his boots again, and felt as ready to face the world as he was likely to be on that particular day.
He felt by now that he had got the knack of walking around with his heels touching nothing but air, so it was with some confidence that he stepped outside. The sunshine was warm. The cockerel had shut up – with any luck, someone had strangled it. The blacksmith had quit hammering; a busy sound of filing now came from the forge. Within a shuttered house, someone – a big, big fat man, by the sound of it – was snoring loudly.
Drake grunted to himself, his grunt meaning, 'Demon's thanks, the racket's died down.'
The next moment, a small blac'k-and-tan dog ambushed him, jumping from beneath a propped-up dinghy, barking wildly. It snapped at his heels, almost dared itself to bite, then backed off growling ferociously. Drake liked dogs – usually – but today he was not in the mood. He swung a kick at the cur, lost his balance, fell over, threw out an arm to save himself – but never hit the ground. He just hung there, floating. He was not amused. The dog leaped forward and started worrying his wrist.'********!' said Drake, shaking it loose.
Or, to be precise, to give (in the interests of accuracy) form to that which a misguided prudery would rather suppress:
As he regained his feet, Drake said a few other words of similar nature. Then tore a fishing-float free from a drying net, and threw it. The float scudded past the dog's left ear, and the mongrel turned and fled.
Drake's throat was too sore to allow him the satisfaction of hurling abuse at its scampering heels.
He walked between forge and boatshed to the waterfront. A couple of dozen fishing boats were drawn up on the sandy beach; several larger ones lay at anchor in the harbour bay. Further out was the
Drake looked around for a boat so he could row to the ship. He saw a number of dinghies, all lying clear of