Sergeant Holk, a man with his experience measured in scars and a hard, weather-beaten face, looked at Bose as a father might look at a child who wants a wolverine for Christmas, ideally one with rabies. ‘They’re bigger than a man. They have nine legs and heads like great bats with no eyes at all. They’re disease-ridden killers . . . Just a scratch from one can kill you, even if it takes a year of miserable, agonising sickness to do it.’
‘Do be quiet,’ said Corde. The sergeant’s predilection for gruesome hyperbole was proving counterproductive. It was Corde who had found him at one of the ill-regarded dives he was becoming quite adept at locating. The sergeant had agreed to tell them what was known of the empty and partially ruined city to the east in exact, non-folklorish terms for he had been there.
So far his advice had been very much of the ‘Don’t go there’ variety, of which the presence of wamps was the newest variant. Warming to his theme, the sergeant said, ‘Six years ago, I went in there with a platoon to raid the old library. Special commission, you see. We got the scrolls we went in for, but it was dusk by the time we were ready to move out. The wamps ambushed us. They’ve got a few brains, and they don’t fight like animals. They’re cunning, see? They can creep up walls and drop on you from above. That’s what happened to us. Thirty of us went in, only four of us got out.’
‘Without a scratch, I presume?’ said Cabal, drily.
The sergeant just laughed and pulled up the left side of his jerkin. Beneath, the flesh was not simply scarred but missing down to the ribs, which showed as slats beneath a thin covering of skin. His audience watched, fascinated, as the slats rose and fell with his breathing. ‘No, sir. Not without a scratch. Within half a day, that scratch was a mass of worms. The chirurgeon had no choice but to cut out all the tainted flesh before it spread. I cursed him. Gods, in my delirium, I cursed the eyeballs from his head. But he saved my life.’
Shadrach was caught in the flux between repulsion and fascination. ‘Worms? You mean maggots, surely?’
‘I mean worms. Filthy, fat things that swallowed strings of my flesh at one end and shat out pus at the other.’
‘But where did they come from?’
‘From the same place a worm that causes a toothache comes, Shadrach,’ said Cabal.
Shadrach looked sourly at Cabal. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, man. Worms don’t cause toothache. That’s an old wives’ tale.’
Cabal made a noise often heard from the parents of ungifted children just before explaining for the tenth time why it’s bad for Timmy to put Timmy’s arm in the big fire. ‘Herr Shadrach . . . this is a world in which old wives are authorities. How many times must I reiterate this, gentlemen? This is the Dreamlands, where theories of micro-organic infection carry far less weight than the realities of myth. In the waking world, one may profitably avoid plaque and gingivitis. Here, dental hygiene consists of avoiding the attention of tooth worms.’
The sergeant listened to this, nodding with approval. ‘Flossing helps,’ he added. ‘They hate that.’
‘It all sounds a bit dangerous,’ said Bose, quietly.
‘It all sounds remarkably dangerous,’ corrected Cabal. ‘We don’t even know if this marvellous hermit is still alive, or can help us if he is. Perhaps we should look elsewhere for data.’
Shadrach took a firm grip on the edges of his simarre and jutted out his jaw. ‘Mr Cabal. We have crossed a sea to find this man. If you had any caveats with this plan, the time to say so has long since passed. We are committed, sir! We are committed!’
‘Are we? Are we indeed?’ Cabal could feel an old and pleasant feeling stirring in his breast. He had shown great patience with these fools to date. He had not failed them or abandoned them. Neither had he murdered even a single one of them. Yet for all these kindnesses he had received no thanks, only whining and, now, undiluted stupidity. The delightful sensation he could feel was his temper slipping the leash.
‘Your argument is as specious as it is fallacious. I do not give a damn that we have crossed a sea to be here. By your logic, if one was to circumnavigate the globe before being given the option of jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a cliff, you would fling yourself off immediately because – oh, my goodness – you’ve gone all that way and it would be a shame not to do something memorably stupid at the end. Not memorable to you, of course: you’d be dead. But everyone for miles around will always remember the day the idiot from afar threw himself to his death because, well, it would have been a shame not to.’
‘Mr Cabal!’ Shadrach was scandalised.
Bose, meanwhile, had become very wide-eyed and was muttering, ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ under his breath, while Corde and the sergeant were smiling.
Shadrach was appalled that Cabal – a hireling, for heaven’s sake – should be so . . . ‘The impertinence, sir!’
‘Are you going to challenge me to a duel, Shadrach?’ Cabal drew back the edge of his jacket to show the hilt of his rapier. ‘I very much hope you are.’
Corde stirred himself enough to step between them. ‘That’s enough, gentlemen. I think Mr Cabal is simply giving vent to some inner issues.’
Cabal’s face tightened. ‘I am angry, Herr Corde,’ he said, in a severely calm tone. ‘Not flatulent.’
Corde ignored him. ‘But he makes a valid point. Rational caution, eh? Remember that? These ruins out by the lake are not safe, not even close to safe. I think we must still go there – pace, Herr Cabal – but we must take every precaution and learn all that we may. For example, Sergeant, you said the wamps only attacked you on the way out. Was that because darkness had fallen?’
The sergeant nodded. ‘Like I said, they don’t have eyes. They don’t see like we do. They can see in the dark, and they know we can’t. I can’t say if they hate the light, but I’m sure they love the dark.’
‘There, then.’ Corde held his hands wide in a supplicatory gesture. ‘We have the beginnings of a plan. Nobody has to go jumping off any cliffs.’ He considered momentarily asking Shadrach and Cabal to shake hands and make nice, but one look at their faces, Cabal’s particularly, dissuaded him immediately.
Cabal released the edge of his jacket to cover his sword’s hilt once more, and as it was apparent that this – a tacit agreement not to run Shadrach through right this minute – was the closest he would be offering in the way of an olive branch, it was duly accepted by all present, again tacitly.
‘So,’ he said, his narrowed eyes never leaving Shadrach, ‘of what does the rest of this plan consist?’
As it transpired, it was not nearly so much a plan as a list of things to be careful about. They would be careful about the wamps. They would be careful to get in and out during daylight. They would be careful never to split the party. They would be careful not to tickle any dragons, antagonise any ogres, irritate any trolls. They would also – and this was Cabal’s contribution to the plan – be careful to let somebody else go first.
Sergeant Holk was apparently used to the role of professional Judas goat and was easily able to lay hands upon a likely trio of bullyboys to traipse into danger in return for a decent reward. Shadrach was irked that he had to use more of his gold than he felt comfortable about to change what had first been envisaged as a relaxing stroll into a scenic set of ivyentwined ruins to seek the counsel of a wise old man, and had now taken the character of an armed assault upon a Hellmouth.
Certainly the logistics of the matter had stretched out over three interminable days while equipment and mounts were secured. That the mounts were zebras did nobody’s humour much good.