and wake me because the more I think about people the less I like them and the more I like being a bird.
Been almost a week now; what's keeping the man? My own fault for entrusting my safety to an old geezer. That's the trouble with old persons; slow reactions. Probably dropped the pen I asked him to catch and is even now scrabbling about on the floor for it, forgetting the important thing is to wake me, not to get the bleeding pen. But it must have been a minute in real time by now; surely even an old person can't take that long to look for a bleeding pen for goodness sakes.
How am I going to wake up? I'm below the level where you get asked in your sleep automatically and my own wake-up code was taken from me by that big bastard bird what slapped me down here in the first place and even though I've remembered it since it just doesn't seem to be working no more.
My goose, like they say, may well be cooked.
I'm on a perch in a sort of little dark cave.
If you can imagine a giant black brain in an even bigger dark space, and then zoom in on the brain and go down in amongst its corrugations and folds and see that the walls of every fold is made out of zillions of little boxes with a perch in it, well, that's what this bit of bird-space is like, in the crypt.
My little box looks out onto a huge hanging dark space all filled with shadows and the occasionally passing bird flapping slowly past (we all flap slow — the pretend gravity is less here). Well, I'm saying it's all dark but maybe it isn't really, maybe that's just me because truth to tell I've not been very well; in fact I'm half blind, but that's better than what I was a couple of days ago, which was half dead.
There's a dainty flutter of wings at the entrance to my box, and in comes little Dartlin, who's the friend I've made here.
Hello, Dartlin, how's it going?
Fine, Mr Bathcule. I been terribly busy, you know; terribly busy bird I been. I flew through to the parliament of the crows and picked up some gossip, would you like to hear it?
Dartlin is my spy, sort of. When I imagined myself in here in the first place, back in Mr Zoliparia's pad, I just naturally somehow took on the appearance of a hawk, which is what I still am now. Dartlin's a sparrow, so in theory we should be raptor and prey respectively, but it doesn't actually work that way here, not in this bit anyway.
Dartlin found me on the floor here. I'd just got back from the level beneath where the real fun in the crypt starts and I was in a sorry state, let me tell you.
The first couple of days were the worst. When the big bird slapped me down through all them levels I thought my time was up; I mean, I knew I'd wake up in the eyeball of the septentrional gargoyle Rosbrith sooner or later, but I thought I was going to die in here, and that's a hell of a thing to take back to your waiting mind; scar you for life, that can.
It's very difficult to explain what it's like when you go that deep in the crypt, but if you can imagine being in a snow storm, flying in a thick snowstorm only the snow is multi-coloured and some of it seems to be coming at you from every angle (and each snow-flake seems to sing and hum and sizzle and hold little flashing images and hints of faces in it and as they go past you here snatches of speech or music or you feel a emotion or think of a idea or concept or seem to remember something) and if one of the snow-flakes hits you in the eye you are suddenly in somebody else's dream and it's an effort to remember who the hell you are, well if you can imagine experiencing all that when you are feeling a bit drunk and disoriented then that's a bit like what it's like, except worse of course. And weirder.
I don't actually remember much about that bit and I don't think I want too, either. I learnt to navigate by the flavour of the surrounding dreams and gradually sorted some sense out of the gibberish and though I got blinded by the abrading impact of all those snow-flakes and lost the wording of my wake-up code, I finally broke back through to the darkness and peace and quiet here, and lay exhausted on the floor amongst lots of scraggly dead feathers and solidified droppings and that's where Dartlin found me.
He'd been terrified by something and lost the memory of how to fly and so ended down on the floor too, but he could see and so once I'd got my strength back he got onto my back between my wings and guided me to where the sparrows gather. They told him how to fly again but they didn't feel comfortable having a hawk around so they found me this place down here and that's where I've been the last four days, getting my sight back while Dartlin flits about making inquiries and being busy and nosy and gossiping, which is what sparrows like doing anyway.
Why I certainly would like to here what you heard, little friend, I tell Dartlin.
Well, it's terribly interesting and I hope you don't get frightened but, though you are a
By all means, Dartlin, I says, shuffling along a bit on my perch.
Thank you. Now; I says, now I don't want to make you nervous anything — like I say, with you being fierce I can't imagine you know the meaning of the word — but it would appear that there's a bit of a disturbance in the air — oh, it gives me a shiver just looking at those big fierce talons of yours — what was I saying? — oh yes, a disturbance in the air, affecting everybody, near enough — you know I think I felt it begin myself even though I was down on that horrible floor at the time with other things on my mind — wasn't it horrible down there? I hated it. Anyway, it seems the raptors and carrion-feeders and most
That's the trouble with sparrows; they got a very limited attention span and are inclined to go wittering on for ages before they get to the point, always fluttering off at tangents and keeping you guessing what it is they're actually talking about. It's very frustrating but you just have to be patient.
Anyway, I better paraphrase or we'll be here all bleeding day listening to this sparrow-crap.
First, some of the birds is looking for somebody and I get a funny feeling it might be yours truly. The song goes that there's a hunt on for somebody who's loose in the system, existing in the crypt and/or the base-world and there's a price on their head. Apparently this person's a first-born, which fits me. Fits lots of people, you might say, but apparently this person's got something a bit different about them; they have some peculiarity, some strangeness, and they're a signal carrier, carrying a message they might not even know they have.
Oh I know it's probably not me, but you know how it is; I always felt I was special — just like everybody else — but unlike everybody else I got this weird wiring in my brain so I can't spell right, just have to do everything phonetically. It's not a problem because you can put any old rubbish through practically anything, even a child's toy computer and get it to come out spelled perfectly and grammatisized too and even improved to the point where you'd think you was Bill bleeding Shakespeare by the language. Anyway, you can probably see why I got a bit paranoid when I first heard all this, and it gets worse.
The story goes that this person — maybe a bird, maybe not — is a contaminant from the crypt's nasty old nether regions, a virus come to corrupt even more levels, which is quite a thought and might even be a bit worrying just in case it was me, only not everybody seems to believe this bit of the rumour because it's reckoned that the story comes from the palace and the King and the Consistorians are behind it and they can almost be guaranteed not to tell the truth.
Some folk reckon it's all to do with the approaching Encroachment; they think the chaotic levels of the crypt have somehow woken up to the fact that things could eventually get a bit hazardous even for them.
You see, everybody's assumed that the crypt's chaotic levels quite liked the idea of the Encroachment; something that ushered in a new ice age (at the very least) and cut off the sunlight and killed off practically the whole planetary ecosphere and just generally gave humans and biological stuff a hard time sounded right up the crypt's tree thank-you-very-much, but now that it looks like the Encroachment might be even more serious than that and possibly threatening the existence of the sun, the planet, the castle and the crypt, well the beasts of the chaotic zones have finally sat up and took notice and things have been stirring ever since.
Why it should be happening in the realm of the birds specifically is a good question but there you are; not much point trying to figure out the crypt.
Exactly
