Читать книгу Fain The Sorcerer - Steve Aylett - Страница 5

In which Fain pushes his luck with a real sorcerer

At first the Warlock seemed to be a pillar of innards, and then a rearing black serpent with transparent wings— and finally a fork-bearded skeleton, each bone of which was wrapped individually in its own snakeskin envelope. In the tradition of wizard kings, a living coat of arms was massed on the wall behind him, operative lengths of bone and muscle levering like a water clock. The Princess knelt near to Thorn’s throne, her hands chained behind her.

‘Who let the gardener in here?’ bellowed the cloaked cadaver, and Fain thought the remark appropriate, as the hall’s walls were encrusted with gargoyles so over-elaborate they looked like cabbages. ‘Guards— take this wretch to the bird room and let him rot there.’

Fain was about to protest when he saw that the gargoyles were climbing down from the walls and crouching toward him.

Fain was still wondering about the clothing situation. ‘Next time I’ll have to specify that my clothes go with me from place to place, as well as from one time period to another. Does that magical madman keep landing me in it deliberately?’

Three of the gruesome sentinels took him down a maze of corridors past a hellhound kennel, a torture chamber, a green monster standing idle with an exploded face like a thistle, and a kitchen, and finally into the bird room, a high chamber with dove skeletons flying about the place and stone windows open to the air and sea. Fain was thrown into a domed cage and the door swung closed upon him. Two of the guards departed and the last, a hulking mutant with the scrolled horns of a goat, winched the cage upward to the ceiling. ‘He can pull out your soul like a cork,’ said the creature. ‘You will die more slowly this way. My name is Tefnut. Goodbye.’

‘Wait!’ Fain called out. ‘Give me a coat or shirt for warmth. That long-coat on the wall, perhaps.’

‘Why?’

‘I swear, Tefnut, the instant you give me ownership of that coat, I can reward you with a hundred gold coins.’ For Fain knew he could draw endless cash from his pockets, if only he had any pockets.

‘You’re raving,’ said Tefnut.

‘Very well. Then tell me this—did this cage lay upon the floor a half-hour ago?’

‘You should be in a cuckoo clock, I think,’ laughed Tefnut.

Fain wished himself a half-hour back in time and fell from a point in mid-air, with no cage about him, for at this point in time the cage had yet to be winched upward. He was alone. Fain dressed himself in the coat and set out toward the great hall, stopping off at the kitchen to steal a cabbage. ‘Invisibility would be useful for this lark,’ he thought. ‘I’ll bear that in mind for the next time I meet the old cave-dweller.’ As he arrived at the hall, Thorn was entering by the opposite door, dragging the Princess after him. Fain, with the outer layers of the cabbage shoved over his head, hunched over and shouted something like ‘Master—the hellhounds have escaped, the apes are rebelling, a dragon has decided to bite your face, a tornado is coming, flowers everywhere have unclenched like fists, there’s a fire in the kitchen and everywhere else, and the King has discovered the location of your lair and sent armies against you.’

‘Well, I haven’t got any apes,’ said the warlock, ‘but anyway I suppose I’ll have to postpone my demand for marriage, m’dear.’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Fain, but the warlock was too busy to become enraged. He was giving the order to send out the fleet and guardgoyles were scampering in all directions. Fain grabbed the Princess and soon they were rushing aboard a warship and casting off. ‘Gold coins for everyone in return for not killing me!’ he cried, pulling cash from his pockets and ordering the crew to head toward Envashes. Soon they had left behind Thorn’s island and his departing fleet.

At sunset, Fain met the Princess on deck. ‘I seem fated to be hauled back and forth like cargo,’ she snapped.

‘My apologies, madam,’ he told her. ‘If I had planned ahead, this journey would not have been necessary. What is your name?’

‘Aleksa.’

‘How did Thorn bring you here?’

‘He flew.’

‘Flight, of course! And here I am wishing merely to keep my trousers on!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Fain felt he had squandered his wishes—and now he had to travel by normal means, at a normal rate, for a whole month before he would get another chance to add to his gifts.

And all the while the ship was heading in the wrong direction.