He desired the wonder-workers to do their own thinking; he sought to avoid taking explicit responsibility for generating Crab-defeating stratagems, lest the Crab some day call him to account for his misdemeanours.
Ek rolled himself a ‘cigarette’, which is a quantity of tobacco compressed by finger-strength and rolled in a tube of paper. Standing by Ek’s chair was a tri-table, one of the notoriously rickety and unstable pieces of furniture favoured by Janjuladoola culture; this civilization considers the gross bulk of the earth to be unclean, hence scorns any object which is or which appears to be solidly rooted to the earth. Atop the tri-table was a casket of green bamboo. Ek opened this, withdrew a hot coal with a pair of soot-tipped tweezers, blew upon the coal until it glowed cherry-red, then lit his cigarette.
While Master Ek smoked, the wonder-workers considered the possibility of placing the island of Jod under quarantine. It was certainly not impossible. A quarantine would cut off all news to the Crab; and, providing its suspicions were not aroused, those forces loyal to Aldarch Three could do as they wished with the monstrous Thrug.
‘One anticipates,’ said one of the sorcerers carefully, ‘that meticulously planned quarantine regulations could resolve many of our present difficulties.’
‘However,’ said another, ‘there is a danger that a certain person will escape justice before such quarantine measures could be put in place.’
Ek smoked impassively. A casual observer might have thought that the nicotine of his addiction had somehow succeeded in staining his eyes, for these were a pale orange strangely flecked with green. However, this oddity had a genetic foundation. Ek was a mutant, though his divergence from the Janjuladoola norm began and ended with his eyes. He had never passed on this trait, and indeed was doomed to die without progeny; which was unfortunate, since those eyes had proved their superiority by retaining their acuteness right into his old age.
(Ek was seventy. Is this old age? His flesh would answer in the affirmative. And, while many of the old complain that they inwardly feel as fresh as they did at twenty, Ek himself felt worn, weary and infinitely ancient.)
While Ek thus smoked, his audience waited in an uncomfortable silence. Ek’s strategic silence tempted them to take further risks, to propose plots, schemes and conspiracies; but even the boldest spirits amongst the wonder-workers felt they had dared sufficient dangers already.
Ek pursed his lips, as if to speak. The sorcerers waited for revelation. Ek blew a smoke-ring.
‘Thrug,’ said one of the sorcerers, pushed into speech by the tensions generated by silence, ‘may escape.’
Ek stared at him through a haze of grey smoke. Slowly, slowly, the curling-coiling smoke dissipated. Ek outbreathed again, once more veiling his face.
‘She may escape,’ continued the sorcerer, ‘because her tame wizard is building her a ship. A special ship. An airship, we believe. It looks like a — a bird’s nest. It is being constructed atop the pink palace.’
The end of Ek’s cigarette glowed red as he drew upon it. A crinkling brown line moved fractionally, eating its way down the cigarette. Ek breathed out, studied the lengthening ash at the end of his cigarette, tapped the ash into a clam shell, coughed harshly, spat, then said: ‘Priests have no powers. No temporal powers. That may change. When Aldarch the Third triumphs in Talonsklavara, it may change with remarkable rapidity. For the moment we priests merely watch. What others do is their business. But what they do and what they do not will be noted. Noted and remembered. In time.’
At the conclusion of this speech, Ek folded his hands in his lap and studied the sorcerers assembled in his presence. Studied them as if he were committing their faces to memory. He had given them a clear message. He had not told them to move against Justina Thrug; fear of the Crab had restrained him, though the letter of the law was his excuse. But he had given them clear warning that he would remember everything they did or did not do.
And, in due course, would give evidence.
‘Go,’ said Ek. ‘You are dismissed.’
The sorcerers made reverence to Master Ek then departed with troubled minds. Ek had made his wishes clear. They were to move against Justina Thrug. Furthermore, he had indicated how it could be done without arousing the wrath of the Crab; a meticulously maintained cordon sanitaire around the island of Jod would suffice to keep the Crab in ignorance. As for the question of the flying ship, that was something for the sorcerers to attend to themselves.
It could be done.
But the prospect of a head-on clash with Justina and her allies was scarcely something the wonder-workers welcomed, for they feared her abilities greatly, and suspected that moves against her might well compromise their own health and happiness.
Not to mention their lives.
As the sorcerers departed, the idling winds strengthened to a purposive breeze which held the promise of better things yet to come; but this good omen failed to lift the spirits of those upon whom Ek had laid such a heavy burden.
While Master Ek had been conducting his lengthy and theatrical audience with certain senior wonder-workers, a much younger and comparatively inexperienced sorcerer, Nixorjapretzel Rat by name, had been waiting for a personal interview with Ek. When Ek dismissed the wonder-workers, Rat heard them depart, their footsteps clunking down the stairs on the southern side of the house, their querulous voices raised in unintelligible conversation which faded out of earshot as they trooped along Hojo Street.
But Rat himself was not called to Ek’s presence.
Instead, he was left to stew.
Nixorjapretzel Rat was sitting on a chair. The chair was on a verandah. This shaded portico was on the northern side of Master Ek’s mansion atop Pokra Ridge, and afforded the outlooker with a view across Master Ek’s back garden, across a steeply descending slope largely given over to market gardens, and then across a great many leagues of the wastelands of Zolabrik.
Nixorjapretzel Rat had scant appetite for the view.
Another desire temporarily dominated his existence.
Nixorjapretzel Rat wished to urinate.
This urge possessed him sixty times a day, though until the present troubles he had scarcely needed to relieve himself more than twice or thrice between the sounding of the sun bells and bat bells. Young Nixorjapretzel had already taken himself off to a quack, who had pronounced him the victim of boblobdidobaltharbi (for which read nervous enuresis). The quack had recommended a long holiday combined with a programme of massage and sunbathing. Unfortunately Rat had no time for a holiday, had suffered a slipped disk on his first and only visit to a professional masseur, and already endured regrettable side effects as a result of his exposure to the sun.
‘Excuse me,’ said Rat to a passing servant, ‘is there a place where I might avail myself of the second minor pleasure?’
The grey-skinned servant expressed incomprehension in the Janjuladoola manner; that is to say, he raised his hands to nipple-height and twiddled his fingers.
‘Have you no ears?’ said Rat, mortally offended.
It happened that Nixorjapretzel Rat was of the Janjuladoola people. Not only was he of that race: he also had the honour of having been bom in Obooloo itself. While he had dwelt in the cold and mountainous realms of Ang, his skin had always displayed the luxuriant grey which was his birthright. But Untunchi-lamon’s harsh and relentless sun had wrought curious changes in his pigmentation, giving his skin a slightly reddish tinge. In consequence, young Nixorjapretzel was sometimes mistaken for an Ebrell Islander, which led members of the Superior Race to pretend that his efforts to speak the Superior Tongue fell short of comprehension.
The servant twiddled his fingers some more. Then departed. Rat raised his hands, pointed in the direction of the retreating racist, and muttered:
‘Vo. Vo bigamo. Vo bigamo skoreeth. Japata!’
On an instant, the back of the servant’s shirt disintegrated into a mass of seething colours. The servant cast a startled glance at Rat. Then fled. Leaving a cloud of harlequin butterflies flicker-floating in the air. Nixorjapretzel Rat was somewhat disappointed, for he had meant the servant to be incinerated on the spot. On reflection, though, the sorcerer was inclined to be glad that his magic had gone wrong, for Master Ek might have been annoyed had one of his servants been reduced to a heap of smouldering ashes, and Ek’s annoyance might swiftly have proved
