It took another twenty minutes to locate the place, ten of which were spent in a small square, the centre of which was a compact but beautiful garden, arranged around a statue of a middle-aged man of patrician features, dressed in a toga. The statue was of striking craftsmanship, but the reason for the pause there was because all of the party – Cabal included – were astounded to discover that they were able, at some curious subconscious level, to hear the statue think. Several people were gathered around, sitting on the pale wood benches that bordered the square, in poses of deep concentration, ‘listening’ to the thoughts and occasionally nodding in slow comprehension.
When one of them arose from his meditations to make a few notes upon a waxen tablet, Corde asked him, ‘That statue, how is it that we can hear its mind?’
The man laughed, a small polite laugh of the type reserved for ignorant foreigners, and said, ‘That is not a statue. It is the great thinker Arturax, he who has travelled so deeply into the inner realms of thought and intellect that he has been transfigured by the very nature of his ideas. He has no need of food, drink or rest because such things are animal and unsuited to a man of thought. Thus, he has dispensed with them. He is a hero to all mankind, as he addresses question after question, slaying them with his wisdom.’
‘These problems,’ asked Johannes Cabal, ‘I was wondering, do they include how to deal with urban pigeons?’ But his colleagues shushed him and took him away before the student of Arturax could hear.
The inn was called the Haven of Majestic and Bountiful Rest and, worse yet, deserved that name. Cabal rarely visited inns, except to secure the temporary services of ratlike men with names like Tibbs, Feltch and Crivven to do the basic shovel work in moonlit cemeteries when he was in too much of a hurry to do it himself. The inns such men frequented in turn had names like the Friendly Gibbet, the Sucking Wound and the Sports Bar, vile places with vile clientele. The Haven, by contrast, was a lively, bustling place full of open-faced men and more than a few women, all wearing bright silks, drinking golden mead and ice wine, singing risqué but by no means obscene songs, and never getting more than pleasantly tipsy. Even the sawdust upon the saloon-bar floor was fresher than that in a busy woodwork shop. Bose and Shadrach were delighted to see it thus, Corde seemed slightly disappointed, and Cabal simply scowled, as was his wont.
The food was good, the drink was good, and the company was bearable, so Cabal bore it where once he might have gone to bed, leaving the others with an unspoken curse to be visited upon their next of kin. Two hours later, Bose waved over Captain Lochery, fresh from completing the offloading of the Edge of Dusk’s cargo and looking for a soft berth for the evening. As they were buying, he joined them with the practised alacrity of a seaman who scents free booze and, in return for a drink and a meal, regaled them with tales of the Dreamlands’ seas. These frequently ended with the words ‘. . . and he was never seen again’ so Cabal quickly lost interest. He was on the point of going to his room when he noticed that Lochery was – while cheerfully telling nautical tales of shipwrecked desperation, ingestion by sea monsters, the sodomite proclivities of pirates, and some unexpected combinations of these elements – feeding his right leg.
‘Captain Lochery,’ said Cabal, as he watched the man offer a piece of sour bread to his calf, which gratefully devoured it, ‘I cannot help but notice that you are feeding your leg.’
‘Aye,’ said Lochery, unabashed. ‘It gets hungry.’ In explanation, he rolled up his right pantaloon leg to reveal what Cabal had assumed would be pale flesh but was actually a beautifully carved wooden prosthetic. In the outer right calf there was a small hole, and from this hole an inquisitive rodent’s face was peering out at them.
There were cries of astonishment from the others, but Cabal went down on one knee to look more carefully. ‘I don’t recognise the species. It looks a little like a guinea pig, and a little like a dwarf rabbit, but is barely bigger than a hamster. What is it, Captain?’
‘Guinea what was that? Rabby? I don’t know anything of those, Master Cabal, exotic though they sound. But this is a dreff. They’re only found on this island.’ He slapped his thigh, but gently, so as not to disturb the creature. ‘I lost this leg when I was a lad. One day out from here. The weather was strange, and the creatures of air and water were disturbed. My ship – she was the Fool’s Wager out of Ulthar, under Captain Mart, dead these twenty years – was attacked by seagaunts.’ Some interested bystanders made a sympathetic groan. ‘Twenty or thirty, driven mad by the green sun.’
‘I’ve heard of nightgaunts,’ said Cabal. ‘Slick, rubbery, faceless black creatures with horns and wings. What are these seagaunts?’
‘Much the same,’ said Lochery, ‘except at sea. They fell on us. I saw poor old Jecks Pilt borne off by them. They tried to do the same to me, filthy flapping things, but I got a deadman’s grip on the rigging of the foremast – she was lateen rigged, by the bye – and I was not going to let go, not with Jecks’s screams still echoing in my ears. But the ’gaunts, they wanted something for their trouble. So . . .’ He waved at the wooden leg.
‘Well, Captain Mart, he was a good man, he said to me, “You’re a sailor through and through and no leg-thieving seagaunts are going to take that away from you.” At least, that’s what he said later, ’cause I’d flaked out at the time from loss of blood. Anyway, he had a favour owed to him by a sorcerer in the city, and he took me to him – big tower at the northern end of the Spice Quarter, some dodgy evoker’s got it now, last I heard – and he comes up with this little beauty. See, dreff live in trees from the Sinew Wood, south-east of the Lake of Yath. The trees can move, but they got no brains. The dreff have brains – pretty good ones, considerin’ how little they are – but they can’t look after themselves. So, the dreff and the sinew trees are sort of . . .’ He looked for the word.
‘Symbiotes,’ supplied Cabal, intrigued by the insight into an alien ecology.
‘Pals,’ continued Lochery. ‘Now, this sorcerer says dreff are clever and they know a good thing when they see it, which is a roundabout way of saying that they train up easy. Keep ’em fed and happy, and they’ll be your pals for life. This little fella in here, Checky, he knows that when I throw my hip forward, it’s walking time, and he makes the leg – finest sinew wood, this is – shift at knee and ankle. Fact is, that he just seems to know now, we been together so long.’
He fed the dreff the last of the sour bread before gently nudging its head back in and bunging the whole with a stopper perforated with air holes. ‘They live about ten years. Takes about six months for you to understand each other, and they go a bit mad a few weeks before they die, sleeping a lot, making the leg bend all ways, so you know it’s time to get to the Sinew Wood with a box trap and some sour bread. They love the stuff.’
He looked off into the middle distance, lost in the past. ‘But you know the worst part of all of this? Not my leg, no, there’s people suffer worse. No, I still think of Jecks, the poor sod. You know what?’
The rhetorical question was interrupted by Cabal rising. ‘He was never seen again. Goodnight, gentlemen. An early start tomorrow.’
Chapter 7
IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION EXPLORES A NAMELESS CITY OF EVIL REPUTE
‘Wamps,’ said the sergeant, as he checked the ties on his scabbard.
‘Wamps!’ replied Bose, hand held up.
‘Wamps,’ said Cabal, ‘are a species. Not a greeting.’
‘Oh,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘They sound rather harmless, though, don’t they?’ He tested the name several times with different intonations, each implying wamps were cuddly, warm, docile and fun to have around the house.