As they went up the stairs, Guest Gulkan took the lead, with Sod and Thayer Levant falling behind. At the head of the stairs, the Weaponmaster halted, and surveyed the weirding room of the Safrak Bank, which was lit by a lantern hung from the very arch of the Door itself. On the floor of the weirding room, Shabble was sleeping, nestled beside the star-globe, like a kitten at sleep beside a sister-kitten.
While sleeping, Shabble dreamed. Dreaming, the immortal bubble changed color, glowing first silver then gold. A fragmentary image of sleek-sea depths brightened on Shabble's surface. A dolphin flashed across the sea then shattered to diamonds. The diamonds fell, tinkling sharply as they burst to a brightness of blood. The blood darkened. Shabble darkened. Became black blood. Black opal. Coral black in the night-dark depths of a whale-belly sea.
In darkness, Shabble was silent. Guest Gulkan found the spectacle of this dreaming Shabble aroused in his soul a delicate sense of wonder. But Banker Sod was dead to the minor enchantments of this spectacle-in- miniature. Sod most certainly had a soul of his own – though the asset in question was mortgaged three times over to the tutelary gods of Chi'ash-lan – but there was no seat for a sense of wonder in the frosty iron from which the dourness of that soul had been forged.
Banker Sod was a banker indeed, banker in blood and banker in bone, and when Sod saw the Shabble asleep with the star-globe he wailed:
– Loss loss loss loss loss!
While Shabble slept, the Doors were denied to the Banks, and while the Banks were banned from the Circle they could not proceed with the transit of chocolate and opals from Dalar ken Halvar, of Stokos steel from the Orsay Bank, of leeches from Wen Endex and silk from Tang, of rice from Voice, of snow and ice from Chi'ash- lan. Sod's commercial sense was geared up to accommodate the intricacies of contractual order, so Sod could not begin to encompass the calculations necessary to assess the financial devastation wrought by Shabble's piratical irresponsibility.
As Sod calculated – despite the impossibility of the task, he could not keep himself from trying – smoke from the burning staircase began to fill the room.
As the room started to fill with choking smoke, Thayer Levant cocked his crossbow. Then Levant lay down – carefully, for his crossbow had a hairtrigger, and could easily be set off by accident – and loaded the crossbow with a quarrel. Levant lay flat, and took aim at Shabble, lining up Shabble with one of the open floor-to-ceiling windows which connected the weirding room with the night of fog and clouds outside.
Then Levant fired, unleashing a blunt-tipped quarrel which went hurtling in Shabble's direction.
The quarrel smashed into Shabble.
Shabble was slammed across the room and knocked through the nearest arched window.
'Go!' yelled the Weaponmaster.
Sod charged across the room, grabbed the star-globe, then rushed to the window. Guest Gulkan followed, as did Levant. Levant gave a piercing whistle. In response to that whistle, Sken-Pitilkin's airship swooped down. Guest, Sod and Levant joined Sken-Pitilkin, Eljuk and Ontario Nol in Sken-Pitilkin's stickbird. Sken-Pitilkin took the starglobe into his own hands – for he thought Sod an unreliable custodian of such a treasure – then sent his stickbird whirling to the skies.
As Sken-Pitilkin and his passengers climbed toward the heights, there glowed in the fog behind them an arc of fire, an arc which marked the wrath of the burning of the exterior stairway built out from the side of the mainrock Pinnacle.
For Shabble, it was all very confusing. Shabble was happily dreaming, bobbing up and down in seas of silver- sharded dream music, when the world suddenly bucked and buckled, and the bubble of bounce found itself unceremoniously smashed into wakefulness.
'Squa!' squeaked Shabble, in shocked amazement.
The entire world appeared to have unaccountably vanished.
Gone was the mainrock Pinnacle, gone the kitten-friendly company of wishstone and star-globe. Instead, Shabble was lost in a formless blackness-in-grayness-in-blackness, a nothing-in-nothing, a primordial pre-Creation chaos.
The world had ended!
The universe had ceased to be!
Time was at an end, and Shabble had suffered the misfortune of surviving that end!
Shabble had time to think just this:
– Woe!
Then Shabble realized that Shabbleself was falling.
A moment later, the bubble was struck by the slam-shock impact of the Swelaway Sea. The falling bubble hit the waters hard and fast, and plunged deep into the watery darkness.
Lost.
Bewildered.
Utterly confused.
In many ways, Shabble was much smarter than any human, but Shabble had been short-changed in the matter of unreasoned orientation. A human shocked awake in unfamiliar circumstances will orientate itself to new surroundings almost instantaneously.
A cat or dog will do likewise. But Shabble had been designed to run on logic – albeit the logic of a child rather than that of an adult – and hence was poorly equipped to deal with any alogical ellipsis.
And what is more illogical than to go to sleep in a tower and wake to find oneself in water?
– But it is water.
So thought Shabble, still sinking, and still trying to work what had happened and where it was.
– I'm in water.
– I think.
– But what kind of water?
Then Shabble steadied itself. Once stable, Shabble spat out a fireball to mark its place, then let itself sink again. Using the quick-fading fireball as a watermark, Shabble computed the rate of sinkage, deduced the salinity of the water, and pronounced the water fresh.
– I'm in fresh water.
– The Swelaway Sea is fresh not salt.
– So maybe.
– Maybe…
The hard-thinking bubble decided that maybe – indeed, probably – it had been violently displaced from the mainrock
Pinnacle and precipitated into the waters of the Swelaway Sea.
Which meant…
Why, it meant that in all probability someone had attacked poor Shabble with a weapon from the Nexus or the Technic Renaissance. Perhaps a force-shock projector such as a Maverick IV slam-gun.
'Well,' said Shabble, loudly, 'you're going to pay for that.'
Having issued that threat – easy enough to do underwater, since Shabble lacked any mouth or other orifice, and hence could speak as easily to the fishes as the birds – Shabble quested upwards to the surface.
Won the night air.
Spun thrice, to rid itself of excess water.
Then started to climb.
Somewhere out in the fog of the night, a fire was burning, high, high above the water. Shabble sent flame flaring through the baffling fog, fire answering to fire. Then Shabble homed in on the flames, and found the stairway outside the mainrock Pinnacle to be burning.
It had been the hope of the conspirators that Shabble would be confused by the fire, and would waste valuable time in searching the burning stairway for clues as to the loss of the star-globe. But Shabble had lived through much human disorder, and on the grounds of grim experience the bubble of bounce had come to associate arson as a customary and essentially motiveless manifestation of all other forms of disorder.
Therefore, when Shabble saw the stairway burning, Shabble thought thus:
– Oh, the stairway's burning!
