Honches, dogs, mules . . . now poots. The mythical bestiary grows. Are such creatures mere beasts, unable to become, or are they humans? Their formscommon simian typesare akin to Achibol's and Benadek's, but is something lacking? Are they ancestral archetypes, perceived to lack some critical spark that kindles the human fire?
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)
Benadek's return to his old life was harder than before. Achibol had showed him what life could benot just enormous, delicious meals or clean, well-kept surroundings, nor the ale and wine that Achibol bought so freely. It took the boy a while to decide what he missed most: the hope that he could become, through listening and learning, more than just an older urchin, then later a cozy doing odd jobs for minute-coins, and finally a useless oldster, ready for a final templing.
Achibol's dismissal was so abrupt. Just when he'd begun to believe he was a real apprentice, with direction and purpose, all had fallen apart.
He moped about the town the following day, passing by the inn several times, and by the alley where he'd first encountered the sorcerer. Peer as he might through the gate, and into the recesses of the alley, and into shops and stalls in the bazaar, he saw no tall, pointed hat, no gaudy robe, and no brown face.
By the end of the day, having exhausted his store of self-pity, he decided that he would not be thrust away without a fight. Achibol had told him not to bother him: "not tomorrow nor the day after." But "tomorrow" was almost over. Another day, and he'd return to the sorcerer as if nothing were wrong. He'd fight for what he wanted. He did not know how, but there had to be a way.
He sat in his burrow and tried to sleep, but speculations, visions of success and failure, swirled and entwined before his closed eyelids. Finally, he gave up.
"A poot," he decided. "I'll find a poot, and forget the old codger."
Benadek never had luck with poots. Females found his slight body and ratty eyes unappealing, and rejected, with catcalls and laughter, his most determined efforts to seduce them. Still, with the optimism of youth, he continued to pursue.
After all, the attraction to poots was the one thing all the kinds of male people had in common. Whether cozies, (ordinary illiterate laborers and tradesmen all), or unstable, fidgety, intelligent boffins, or sullen, tough, methodical honches, they all wanted poots, and poots reciprocated their desiresso why not him? He too was male, and though he wasn't old enough to tell whether he'd be a boffin or a cozy when he grew up (he couldn't even imagine becoming a surly honch), he was old enough to burn with desire. Somewhere out there was a poot who felt similarly toward him . . .
This night turned out no differently than most. The first unescorted poot he approached, a pretty one with impressive hips and thighs, ignored his soft-spoken greeting, swung into an open doorway, and slammed the door in Benadek's face. The second, a slender brunette, laughed outright and made obscene suggestions that in no way implied her participation. Benadek faded into the deep shadows.
Frustrated and indignant, he returned to his burrow and dug up his pitiful hoard of coppers, hiding them in his clothing.
He walked down the river road then. As he left the central town, the size and solidity of the buildings decreased. More were wood, fewer stone, and the road between them grew wider, even grassy in spots. Courtyards became small farmyards confining four- and eight-legged wool-beasts. Some had spiralling horns that swept backward the length of their bodies; others displayed branched horns, or none at all. They blatted their dislike of him, a stranger, and he walked swiftly past. His destination? The house of Agby, a poot of advanced years who, he'd been told, might accept a copper or two in exchange for her acquiescence.
Her house was marked by an ancient brass bedstead, long turned entirely green in the weather, atop the roof ridge. What if she were with someone? What if she were really old and ugly? What if she laughed at him? He did not think he could stand thatto be laughed at by even the lowest of all the poots. The young and pretty ones . . . he was used to that.
Agby's door swung open. She came out on the arm of a brutal city guard whose reputation Benadek knew. His trousers were still unbuttoned. Agby hung on his arm, cackling. She ran ancient spotted hands up the honch's arm, and wheedled "Wasn't that worth a little tip?"
The honch saw Benadek. "What are you staring at, boy?"
Benadek saw the poot's sunken eyes in a face that looked to be one solid bruise, and said, "I've come to the wrong place." He backed away, then turned as he reached the street. Even several buildings away, he could hear the honch laughing at him.
"At least I still have my money. Tomorrow I'll buy a fat sweet roll and some fried meat." The thought of such a meal, with a cup of spice-bark tea, helped him sleep, for the imagined tastes and aromas drove out bleak thoughts and optimism alike.
When morning came, the thought of sacrificing his meager assets for a mere breakfast had less appeal. He settled for crusts left out for a neighbor's chickens. Though he could have snatched one of the birds as well, Benadek was careful to behave in this, his own neighborhood. His claim on his burrow was tenuous, and if a hue and cry should go up, even over someone else's folly, he could lose it to thief-hunters who would burn his blankets and kick down his dirt walls.
The day promised to drag on and on. Purposeless, he wandered squares and marketplaces, never spending too long in any oneurchins were always suspect whether they pilfered or not, and guards acted first, and invented incidents to sustain their arrests as they needed them.
Before midday his perambulations took him by the inn, where he saw six strange honches in black leather, bedecked with trail gear and strange weapons. When he saw the objects of their interest, his heart sank: they surrounded two mules, one carrying the leather trunks from Achibol's chamber. His dismay was multiplied when two more honches exited the inn, propelling a protesting and expostulating Achibol between them.
The honches surely bore his hoped-for master no good will. That was an unhappy circumstance, not likely to cheer the magician or make him receptive to the importunements of a skinny urchin.
Achibol should be able to use his spells and magic to free himself, but he seemed to be doing no such thing. He fumed and jerked in his captors' grasps like any cranky boffin, helplessly. Is he a fraud? Why doesn't he destroy his persecutors?
What grieved Benadek most was that Achibol had been leaving without himthe laden mules told the tale. Affecting an air of nonchalance, he strode by within the mage's sight. The honches did not notice him, but Achibol's voice rose above the city sounds . . .
"I've decided to teach you what you wish to know," he said abruptly. "To enter the inner temple, you must find the talisman with five and twenty keys." He directed his voice past the honches. Benadek understood: he saw the sorcerer's talisman hanging from a thong on the riding mule's saddle, and lifted it free. Achibol's fleeting grin rewarded him. He slipped back, still within earshot, and pretended to doze against a water trough on the far side of the street.
"The keys, used in the proper order, will open the inner temple doors. But any one of them, used in improper order, could destroy you and all you strive for!" The speech was clearly intended for Benadek, not the honches, but Achibol was at pains to conceal that from his dusty leather-clad captors.
"Wait!" one honch grated. "A scribe has been summoned." Even as he spoke, an eighth honch came around the corner dragging the boffin Benadek had victimized before.
Achibol sneered. "Are you ready, now?"
"Tell us how you enter the temples," snarled the honch leader.
"You heard my warning: touch only those keys I tell you."
"I heard that, old man. Scribe! Note down that caution."
"The first key will be marked with four crossed lines, the second with a star." Benadek peered at the talisman, and found two buttons so marked. He extended a finger and cautiously touched [#], and then [*].
"Keep this simple, now," the honch cautioned.
"Would you have me miss a step? You'd end up lost in eternal night. Listen well, and hope your scribe does too." The honch, chastened, leaned a bit less closely. "The next key will be marked with an upright cross. Touch it once, and then once again."
Benadek saw a button marked [x]. No, an upright cross! He touched the [+] key twice. Blue letters on a white ground began marching across the tiny window over the keypad:
REDIRECT OUTPUT: READY.
ENTER INSTRUCTION SEQUENCE.
Achibol risked a glance in Benadek's direction. The boy nodded slightly. "Find the keys numbered one, three, nine, and two, and touch them in that exact order. Scribe! Have you written that?" The scribe, his brow furrowed in concentration, nodded even as he scratched at his paper. "Make sure of it," Achibol stressed, "for should one of these guardians be inundated in demon-fire that burns forever, or turns inside out with his bowels to the breeze, those who survive will fetch you to correct your error."
The scribe paled. "The numbers, good master. Say them again." Achibol repeated them. Benadek tapped the sequence: [1] [3] [9] [2], and nodded again. The numbers appeared in the window, after the message already there.
"The next sign has the form of a bent arrow which points leftward . . ."
"A moment, old man! Just how will we know left from right? Won't it depend on how the key is held?"
"These are no ordinary keys." Achibol sniffed. "You'll know."
"Perhaps we'll keep you here, old fraud, until we enter a temple or two, and your words prove out."
Benadek touched the key. Numbers scrolled too rapidly to distinguish individually. The talisman emitted a chirp. A surreptitious glance told him that no one but Achibol had noted it. The magician allowed himself a faint grin. Benadek saw that the scrolling numbers were gone, replaced with another cryptic message:
INTERFACE: NERVESYNC MODULE 4:
ENGAGED.
CAUTION: PROJECTOR IS WITHIN ACTIVE RANGE OF
CONTROL UNIT. IS
OPERATOR SHIELDED?
1: ABORT 2: PROCEED
3: DELAYED ACTIVATION
Benadek did not understand the message in its entirety, but its urgency did not escape him. He raised a questioning eyebrow toward Achibol. The old man looked at him and said, "You must delay your progress then, for guardian spirits of sleep will seek freedom, and you stand in their path. Remove yourself from the vicinity of the keys for a time."
"How long? How will we know it's safe to return? And how far must we go? Try no tricks or clever words, old man. You alone will suffer for them."
"When the `3' is touched, walk away at an ordinary pace. Forty such paces, and you'll be safe. As soon as you've gone the distance, you may return at once."
Both the honch and Benadek nodded. Benadek touched the [3] key, and walked away. He fought a strong impulse to run, and another to look back over his shoulder. He counted off thirty paces, then lost track and started over.
He crept back along the path of his flight. To his amazement, the honches were all prone, and the scribe as well, his paper fluttering away. "Here, Master. Your talisman. I know I was not to return to your service until the morrow, but sensing the urgency of your situation, I disobeyed. I'll accept whatever punishment you command, Masterbut consider that my disobedience was out of loyalty to you. I am, after all, your bound apprentice"
"Punishment? Nonsense, boy. Apprentice? Did I say that? Never mind. Such things will sort themselves out. But now, we must go. They'll not sleep forever. Here. Help me mount this mule. The stubborn beast sidles away as I approach."
<Foolish old men who feed loyal mules only straw deserve such treatment,> the mule muttered. Benadek, after all that he'd seen in his new master's service, was hardly startled by the beast's speaking.
"Shall I mount behind you, Master?" he asked. "Or is my place with the pack mule?"
<Your place is with both feet on the ground and your nose in our dust,> snorted the saddle mule.
"Master?" Benadek questioned plaintively, putting on his best beggar's face.
"Ignore this surly mismatched horse. Ride behind me in the saddle."
Benadek sprung over the mule's hindquarters and grasped Achibol by the waist. He was happy to ride so, where his face could not be seen, for his gleeful grins alternated with grim, fearful looks into the future ahead. Perhaps it was only the stress of the day, and not a premonition, but he was convinced that his association with Achibol would not be easy, and that honches might be the least fearsome dangers he would face.
Kaledrin was uncomfortable with his boss's lack of visible reaction. Saphooth had hardly shown himself outside his office in weeks, unusual in one whose habitual prying tormented those who worked for him. This whole project, which Kaledrin had hoped would lead to his own name engraved over the gate of the Great School's tenured-faculty residence, was moving in unforeseen directions.
The tone of letters and comments in the simulnet were noncommittal or downright negative. Kaledrin all too easily pictured himself, a year or three older, as an impoverished data-collector on some sunless world, exchanging his photosensitive chitin for wooly fur and his carefully tuned energy-tapping antennae for a rude protein-engine of a body, running on the heat and ferment of decaying, half-chewed meat. He shuddered, rattling his chitin. Perhaps he was only tired. Too much work, too much energy expended, and no time to spread his radiation-absorbing body-plates beneath the bright, white rays of the star Midicor, the local sun. He should not work so hard, he scolded himself, nor live entirely on energy supplements in this dark, academic womb.
He considered the latest submission from the biocybes: Chapter Four. Fringe cultists would consider it sacrilegious. With Saphooth refusing to communicate, he would have to send it for publication under his name alone. But that was not all badif the biocybes explained themselves in future chapters, and if the project gained the respect of highly placed academics, then his, Kaledrin's, name would stand alone on several chapters, And if future chapters degenerated from inexplicable to ridiculous?
"Dictation!" Kaledrin ordered, words forming in his mind even as the office AI readied itself for voice input.