Fool's Errant Read online

  A long and bitter debate ensued. Some proposed a division according to the respective populations of each city. Others insisted on the sanctity of wills, demanding that Jever Smee’s creations be distributed as specified, and any remaining parts consigned to the scrap heap. A convocation of fellows of the Institute suggested that the machines be left where they were, under Institute control, and that their output of rare substances be shared according to Smee’s formula. Meanwhile, some merchants who imported and sold such precious wares, in small but profitable amounts, rioted and had to be put down by the provost.

  It happened that the Illumino Liw Osfeo was at that time attached to the Institute as a visiting lecturer in applied metaphysics. When the imbroglio over the will had reached its fiercest pitch, and social war brimmed throughout Keraph, Liw Osfeo put it about that he could adjudicate the dispute for a handsome fee.

  Calling together the Syndics and Integrators, he declared that he was in possession of Jever Smee’s prototype. This had been given him by the late emeritus in recompense for certain kindnesses, he said, and it had remained unused in his study. Osfeo volunteered to add the prototype to the other seventeen, thus making eighteen in all: a number divisible by Smee’s formula, without the necessity of reducing any of the mechanisms to fragments.

  The Syndics and Integrators readily paid Osfeo’s fee, and the division was immediately made. One half of Jever Smee’s machines -- nine of them -- went to Caer Lyff; one third -- that is, six -- were loaded into wagons and transported to Alathe; and one ninth -- or two machines -- were taken to the grange hall in Dai. Osfeo then ruled that the disaffected merchants be allowed to purchase a monopoly on the export of the machines’ products beyond the county’s bounds, and pronounced the dispute satisfactorily resolved.

  The Syndics and Integrators made much of the sage’s wisdom, until it was pointed out by one of his detractors -- for he always had detractors -- that the nine, six and two machines added up to the original seventeen. There remained one unaccounted for.

  “Of course,” answered the sage. “That is the one in my quarters, which naturally reverts to me.”

  It was agreed that Osfeo should retain his property, since it did not reduce any of the three portions of Jever Smee’s estate. But the enemy was not mollified. While the illumino was being feted by the dignitaries of Keraph, he stole into Osfeo’s rooms and determined that no such mechanism existed. Returning to where Osfeo sat among the magnates, his purse weighty with their contributions to his net worth, the enemy revealed the deception and denounced the sage for a fraud.

  The cream of Keraph were outraged and demanded restitution. Osfeo rose to defend himself. It was true, he said, that the eighteenth mechanism was a mere figment. But what did it matter whether or not a thing existed, so long as it served a useful purpose?

  Reason, however, was of no avail. Judging the temper of the crowd correctly, the illumino wisely exited through a nearby window. The magnates pursued him, their retainers and flunkies joining the chase. But the fleet and wily sage soon distanced them, and departed the county by little-used paths.

  Filidor turned the page to continue, but was interrupted by the sound of the study door opening. The dwarf had returned, alone.

  “We are too late,” said the little man. “It seems your uncle has been called urgently away on business.”

  Filidor rose in both body and spirit. The evening could yet be saved. “How unfortunate,” he murmured. “Doubtless he will require me upon his return, but in the meantime...”

  The dwarf approached and set his hand in its former grip on Filidor’s arm. Two of Filidor’s fingers tingled and went numb from the pressure, although the dwarf displayed no sign of exertion. “The Archon requires a service of you, and has charged me to bring you to him without delay. He is presently some distance down the peninsula, in the hamlet of Binch.”

  “In that case,” Filidor grunted as he attempted to free his deadening arm, “I will make haste to arrange transport.”

  The little man moved easily to retain his balance, and his grip did not slacken. “Your uncle again wondered if circumstances might conspire to detain you, should we somehow become separated. Consequently, I have already laid on a suitable vehicle.”

  Filidor essayed one last time. “A few necessities for the journey, a brief visit to my chambers,” he proposed.

  “Such a large palace, so easy to lose one’s bearings and miss appointments. Besides, all necessities are in hand.”

  The dwarf produced from beneath his tatters a small satchel of scuffed leather, and opened it to display its contents. Inside was a selection of ingenious artifacts from the Archon’s personal effects. There was the wand of perpetual sufficiency, which could engender nutrition from any organic matter. There was the ward-web, which conferred invisibility and impregnability upon whosoever rested beneath it. And there was the traveler’s aide, a small cylinder which telescoped into a staff, and which envigored its wielder on the road or in self defence, besides having several other remarkable properties.

  Filidor’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the satchel’s contents, which were surely more than would be needed on a short jaunt over well-known roads between the palace and Binch. But the dwarf rebuffed all queries, saying that each item had been specifically requested by the Archon himself.

  “There is also this,” the little man continued, drawing from a concealed pocket a hand-sized box of tuka wood inlaid with ivory runes. “You are to carry this upon your person at all times, and deliver it into your uncle’s hands when he requires it.”

  Filidor had no time to examine the box. No sooner had he taken it than the dwarf shifted his weight, and Filidor was propelled toward a bookcase which slid silently aside to reveal an unlighted corridor. The little man dragged him through, and the portal closed behind them. They stood in complete darkness, until with a rustle and a series of brief clicks, the dwarf deployed the traveler’s aide and raised a light from its upper tip. He then set off down a dust-choked, sloping side corridor and Filidor had to hurry to follow the wavering glow.

  Their way took them through level below level of the palace, through suites of apartments and vast echoing halls sealed in decrepitude. Though he had lived within the palace walls more than twenty years, and explored it with all the dedication of boyhood, Filidor had seen none of the myriad rooms and passageways they now passed through. Nor had anyone else in living memory, to judge from the unbroken dust their footsteps disturbed into waist-high billows.

  At some point in their passage, Filidor realized that he was still carrying the slim blue volume he had picked up in his uncle’s study. His first impulse was to drop it and leave it behind, but that seemed a petty spite. Besides, his uncle might later send him unescorted into this dark warren to retrieve it. He tucked the book away, next to the mysterious box in an inner pocket of his mantle, and pressed on after the dwarf.

  The little man offered no conversation, nor did Filidor seek any. Their barely seen surroundings afforded no sights of interest, so for lack of occupation, the young man took to counting his footsteps. Some time after his second thousandth imprint in the dust, Filidor felt the first stirrings of moving air from ahead. A little while later, he followed the dwarf around a moss-shrouded boulder and discovered that he was outside. It was now almost full night, the last ocher gleams fading on the highest reaches of the Devinish Range above them. A few steps from the concealed exit and the dwarf extinguished the glow from the traveler’s aide. In the dimness, Filidor could discern the outline of an old surface car.

  The vehicle’s flared skirts, scarred from encounters with untended pavements, settled almost to the ground as Filidor eased his weight into the passenger seat. The little man scrabbled spryly into the operator’s position, and after some initial difficulties encouraged the vehicle’s drive system to revive itself. The whine of untuned gravity obvertors set Filidor’s teeth to painful vibration.

  With a lurch, the car surged toward Binch, thrusting Filidor against the protruding frame of his seat. The wind rushing across the open compartment and the protesting drive made conversation impossible. The little man was in any case intent upon the controls, gnarly hands yanking levers and swinging the steering bar like a war-crazed pilot on a suicide run, whistling tunelessly through the teeth dotting his gums as he rocked the vehicle past imaginary obstacles. Occasionally, he lined up the car’s lights on stationary objects beside the road and steered directly for them, emitting noises that imitated some rapid-fire weapon, then swerving away a finger-breadth from fatal impact.

  Filidor’s sang-froid evaporated in the chill night air. As the dwarf skimmed a derelict retaining wall with barely an eyelash’s separation, the young man screamed and wrenched at the controls to bring them back toward mid-road.

  “We are going to die!”

  “Eventually,” agreed the dwarf, shrugging Filidor’s grip from the steering bar. He steadied the vehicle’s course and grinned at his passenger. “In the meantime, however, why not live life to its fullest?”

  The words struck an embarrassing chord within Filidor. Had he not once thrown some such remark at his uncle, rejecting the Archon’s urgings toward a sense of duty? He eyed the dwarf’s face for some sign of ironic intent, but the little man’s features were as inscrutable as an ancient god’s.

  “Nonetheless,” Filidor shouted above the slipstream, “I would prefer to reach my uncle with all my parts in their present arrangement.” The dwarf grunted a noncommittal reply, but slowed the car a little, and deleted some of the wider arcs from his course.

  Filidor settled back. Irritation at being denied his pleasures was now giving place to stirrings of fear. He knew that he did not like his austere uncle overmuch; it was possible that his sentiments were reciprocated.

  The Archonate had no reputation for inflicting harm upon its subjects, but those arbitrarily pressed into its service might not fare so well. Filidor watched the moldering hummocks of the old city’s ruins sweep through the car’s lights, and began to wish he had paid more attention to his lessons. Whatever the inner workings of the Archonate, he sensed he was about to be drawn more deeply into them than ever before.

  Chapter 2

  The lights of Binch were dimly clustered on the horizon when the car suddenly coughed and lurched. The dwarf punched at the controls without interrupting his monotonous whistling, and the vehicle roused itself unwillingly to a last effort. But ominous clangs and flutterings were rising from the engine compartment, backed by shudders that rattled Filidor’s spine.

  “What is amiss? Will we make it?” he demanded.

  “As to the first question, I have no idea,” the little man replied. “This conveyance was commissioned for the Archon Ondovar IX, now some centuries dead along with those versed in its maintenance. Your second query is best answered by eventualities. All else is futile conjecture.”

  Filidor looked out into the full black of night. They were well beyond the bounds of the derelict city, passing now through orderly fields worked by the people of Binch. To Filidor, raised within the city’s confines all his life, the densely planted crop lands were no less alien than the colony zones where ultramonds had revised portions of the Earth to resemble the planets of their ancestors.

  For him, the dark concealed a jungle thick with vines and tubers. He thought to hear fleshy creepers rustling at him above the wind and the protesting engine. He looked back to the faint glow of the city now far down the Olkney peninsula, and wished himself secure again in its brilliant, hard-edged streets.

  Steadily, the few lights ahead grew closer until, shuddering in mechanical despair, the car staggered down Binch’s single street and expired in front of the hamlet’s business centre. This was a rough-cast country inn hard by an open-air market, whose bare wooden stalls bore a flood of light from the hostelry’s garish tavern sign. More light, and a clamor of voices, spilled from the inn’s open door, which carried a small placard high on the lintel to advertise the building as a district office of the Archonate.

  Seizing satchel and Filidor, the dwarf sprang from the dying vehicle before its final gasp, and hustled the young man through the tavern door. Inside, a fug of smoke, unwashed bodies and yeasty liquors hung from the rafters. The after-market-day crowd ground elbows the full length of the bar, and filled the close-packed tables. Intent upon their drink and shouted conversations, the men of Binch paid scant heed to the little man who nudged his way through their mass, nor to the dandy he dragged behind him. To Filidor, the composite odor of sweat, soil, and undefined agricultural material was overpowering. His passage through the densely packed crowd left him feeling as if he had been processed through some fleshy machine.

  The little man ducked beneath a raised glass and scrambled atop the bar to speak to the publican. Filidor could hear nothing above the din. He attempted to bore closer, only to be stopped by a picket of elbows and fustian clad shoulders. The barman, a large Bincher with a porous nose and migrating eyebrows, was nodding in agreement at something the dwarf had asked, and raising a stumpy finger toward the tavern’s ceiling. They exchanged a few more words, then the dwarf clambered back over the front rank of drinkers, bringing with him a pot of dark ale, which he pressed into Filidor’s hand. Some of the jar’s contents slopped onto the young man’s pearly chemise.

  Filidor had to stoop to hear what the little man was saying. “Wait here. I must see if your uncle is upstairs.”

  “Here? You expect to find the Archon amidst this ill-smelling country rabble?” cried Filidor. One of the rabble, overhearing, fixed the young man with a measuring stare. Filidor attempted to return the look in kind, but the effect was diminished by the kinked posture necessary for hearing the dwarf’s next words.

  “The Archon is found where he chooses to be found. Now remain here, endeavoring to give no further offense to persons both larger and more numerous than yourself.” The little man then squeezed into the crowd like a bird diving through water, and was lost to sight. The small space he had occupied was instantly filled by a towering, leather-clad farmer, Filidor was jostled, and more ale was added to the spreading stain on his front.

  The young man elected not to protest. Adopting an air of noblesse oblige, he resolved to appear as if he frequently enjoyed a rustic celebration. He tasted the drink in his hand, to learn whether it eased thirst as effectively as it discolored apparel; but the ale was warm and bitter, and foreign to a refined palate. With a grimace, Filidor sought to return the pot to the bar. Finding his best efforts easily blocked, he at last poured the liquid onto the tavern floor, where it quickly bleached the strewn rushes a pristine white. Filidor did not care to consider what it would have done to his stomach.

  The noise and press of bodies was becoming more than he could bear. Filidor began to insinuate his way toward a staircase that departed the room from its far corner. He was making laborious progress through the crowd, when suddenly the crush parted before him and the barman blocked his way. A beefy hand flattened against Filidor’s chest, and the publican said, “You owe for the ale.”

  Filidor fumbled for his belt clutch, but found it missing. As he felt with growing alarm through the folds of his mantle, he saw the barman’s eyebrows migrating southwards into foul weather range. The tavern fell silent, then was swept by a murmur of low growls.

  “My money is gone,” Filidor said, casting a look about the cluttered floor. “Has anyone here...”

  He had intended only to ask if anyone had seen his lost purse, but the Binchers took his words for the beginning of an unjust accusation. He was shouted down amid several threatening gestures. The publican exchanged his arresting palm for a handful of Filidor’s chemise, and the young man’s heels left the floor.

  “Now, now, gentlemen,” said the innkeeper, “I’m sure this is nobbut an honest misunderstanding.” But he pulled Filidor into the shadow of his nose and said, “Yet you must pay.”

  “I have rings,” offered Filidor, displaying a jeweled hand.

  “Not like to fit,” said the barman, showing a hand larger than Filidor’s face.

  “My companion will pay.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “He just went upstairs.”

  “I did not see him go. Did anyone see this one’s companion?” the barman asked the room. The response was a ripple of snorts and “nay’s”.

  Filidor regathered a portion of his dignity, despite the lack of floor beneath his feet. “I am the Archon’s nephew, and you are obstructing the discharge of my duties.”

  The Binchers laughed. A number claimed they too were various relations of Dezendah Vesh, one old gaffer attesting to be the Archon’s saintly grandmama. The innkeeper quieted them after a moment. “All right, then,” he said. “Where’s your sigil, where’s your plaque? Identify yourself.”

  “My companion can verify all. Allow me to seek him upstairs, and I will...”

  “Seek out an open window, more like,” cackled the Archon’s granny. The barman’s face closed, and he shook Filidor slightly.

  “We rustics have simple ways, easily grasped by our betters. The rule here is: those who can’t pay in coin pay in kind. You may wash pots, serve at table, or entertain the paying clientele. Choose.”

  There was neither escape nor succor reflected in the faces of the Binchers. “It has been said that I own a fair voice for a ballad,” Filidor said.

  The barman lowered him at last to the floor. “The lad will sing,” he informed the crowd. “Clear him a table.” A clatter of pots told Filidor that a space was being made behind him, then he was hoisted by several hands onto a shaky platform of rough boards.

  “Now, sing,” said the taverner.

  The room’s hubbub subsided somewhat as the Binchers settled themselves to listen. Filidor smoothed his garments and contemplated for a moment, while the rustics sniggered and nudged each other. Then the young man raised his voice in a thin but serviceable tenor.