Shabble-like snigger when he recalled Varazchavardan slapping at his burning robes. Fool of a sorcerer! To set his own liquor alight by exercise of magic!
His own liquor?
Chegory corrected his mental slip. That had not been Varazchavardan’s liquor. That had been the property of some foul unscrupulous drug dealer. And Varazchavardan, well, he must have been leading a raid on the place.
‘Great,’ said Chegory, with dry irony. ‘I’m a wanted man. Incinerator of soldiers. Consort of drug dealers. Fugitive prisoner. Looter. Rioter. And now I’ve got enemies in high places to boot! What worse could happen?’
Much, as he found out before he had taken another three footsteps. Lights dimmed, lights darkened, then violet shadows rose around him, weaving, writhing, sharpening into monsters with glaucous eyes and jacinth teeth. One glance at their slavering jaws told him they were car-nivorously inclined. He had no time to scream before they were upon him.
Razorblade teeth bore at his raw flesh, shattered his bones, ripped open his gut then sliced his orchids in half with a lacerating pain which sent him swooning into unconsciousness.
For some time he knew nothing.
Then, blunder by blunder, he began to recover thought and sensation both. He was walking. His eyes were open a crack. Grey light hinted at walls, floor, a door past which he strode.
‘Stop walking,’ he told himself.
But his legs made progress without him. Strong legs they were, hardened to labour by toilsome labours in the rockfields of Jod. His arms immobile at his sides. Strength he had in those arms, the mighty strength which comes from sledgehammering rocks and ruthlessly pursuing sparetime practice with a killing blade. But he was powerless to control that strength.
I am an Engine.
Thus he thought, comparing himself to Ivan Pokrov’s Analytical Engine, remorselessly driven by coded algorithms, exercising operations of the most complex precision without possession so much as a shred of free will.
By an extreme effort of such will he at last succeeded in closing his eyes.
Now I will…
Now he would nothing.
Will and consciousness blundered away together. His eyes cracked open again. A part of Chegory’s brain which in truth could scarcely be called Chegory needed sight that it might control the passage of his corpse through the underworld beneath Injiltaprajura. It is scarcely extravagant to think of Chegory as being just then a corpse, for, though his body breathed, walked, and possessed both blood and a heartbeat, no will was resident in his flesh. No will, no thought, no sentience.
By the time sentience, will and consciousness returned, Chegory’s automative fit was long since over. He found himself lying in the dark. Vampire rats! Downstairs, dark meant rats. Were there any? He listened carefully for scrabbles or squeaks. Heard none. Nevertheless his heart was racing. He had been asleep, asleep and helpless, quite unconscious and at the mercy of any four-legged marauder. In the dark Downstairs that could have been suicide.
He stood up, wincing as something went grik! in his spine. He flexed his back cautiously. It was okay. He closed his eyes. Opened them again. Sought light but saw not the slightest leam. Instead, dark absolute, a smothering black velvet shrouding all. Was he blind?
He clicked his fingers. The quality of the echoes suggested he was in an underground room. Quite a large room. He was surprised. Thanks to the dark, he had got the impression he was confined in some place no larger than a coffin. He felt around. Barrels. A smell of — alcohol!
Gods!
Here… a board. Something… something soft. Friable.
Too coherent to be turd. Lift it. Smell. Cheese. Not the goat cheese from the vats of Beldysobros, sole local supplier. No, this was imported stuff. Very nice, too. Needed that. More? No, just metal. Ow! Sharp. Knife. Good.
Chegory tested his new-found knife then slipped it into the larger of his boot sheaths. He’d need it if he ran up against vampire rats. Or Malud marauders. Or mad elven lords with strange foreign companions. Idly he wondered what had become of his best-beloved fighting blade, his skewer-shiv and his knuckle-lance, lost when soldiers had stripped him of that protection when they arrested him outside the Dromdanjerie.
Okay. Explanations.
How had he got here?
Sleepwalking.
Sleepwalking? Hardly!
Zen.
That was his next thought.
Flashback.
Got it in three!
Indeed, Chegory now realised exactly what had happened. He had breathed of the zen burning in the amphorae in the temple of Elasmokarcharos, shark-god of the Dagrin. The hallucinogenic herb had made him imagine that the jaws of shark floated through the air to tear away his arm. Later, he had made a temporary recovery. However, some time afterwards he had been overwhelmed by the phenomenon known as flashback.
Zen is a strange drug for, unlike alcohol or opium, its effects do not dissipate in direct relation to time. Instead, once one has used the drug the potential exists for sudden, untimely recurrences of the initial drugshock. Hallucinations may partially or totally swamp the sensorium. Worse, the drug may lead to the acting out of desires known or unknown, to murder or rape, incest or arson, shark-swimming or suicide.
In Chegory’s case, his one overwhelming desire had been to get the hell out of the mazeways Downstairs, and this was the desire the drug had activated when it had reduced him to an unthinking zombie.
Okay. What now?
He was still tired. Very very tired. Else the knowledge of his vulnerability to horrifying flashbacks would have had him running round in circles screaming in terror. As it happened, he was so shagged out he did little more than acknowledge his vulnerability as a last refining touch to his day of disaster.
Fatigue suggested sleep.
What else could he do?
Was there anything to be gained from a quick release from imprisonment Downstairs?
No.
Since so many prisoners had escaped from the treasury with so much loot there would doubtless be dozens of soldiers scouring the underground mazeways right now, so there was scarcely any point in Chegory rushing to the pink palace to advise the authorities that the pirates who had thieved the wishstone were still below decks. If a search could catch those Malud marauders then it would. Nobody caught Downstairs at a time like this would be presumed innocent, so there was no reason for Chegory to dare his life into the sunlight just so he could accuse the wayward foreigners.
Meantime, he was safest here.
Safe from hunting soldiers?
Probably, since he had stumbled into some storeroom for liquor. Such places were chosen by experts for their invulnerability to search.
But what if said experts find me in my sleep?
There was a risk of that, true. But life had become so dangerous, so fraught with peril, so stressed and unpredictable that Chegory accounted that little additional risk as next to nothing.
He sat back against a liquor barrel, closed his eyes and promptly dropped off to sleep.
Elsewhere, in the Temple of Torture in Goldhammer Street which was serving as a detention centre, Shabble burnt free of a clay pot at a bottom of a well. Steam boiled out of the well as Shabble ascended, shining bright and singing brighter yet.
It was night. Soon the sun would rise and the sun bells would ring out from the belfries at the four corners of the pink palace to announce the end of bardardomootha and the start of istarlat. But, for the moment, dark reigned, and Shabble’s localised attempts to subvert that legitimate reign drew protests from adherents of the ruling
