Ergates the ant is in her box in the left breast pocket of my jacket-with-lots-of-pockets, all safely buttoned down. You all right, Ergates? I whisper as we bounce along the road.
I’m fine, she tells me. Where are we right now?
Um, we’re on a truck, I sort of half-lie.
Are we hanging off the back of a vehicle? she asks.
(Blimey you get nothing past this ant.) What makes you think that, I asks, stalling.
Must you always maximise the danger of any given mode of transport? she asks, ignoring my stalling.
But I’m Bascule the Rascal, that’s what they call me! I’m young and I’m only on my first life I tells her, laughing; Bascule the Teller nothing, that’s me; no I or II or VII or any of that nonsense for yours truly; am good as immortal for all intents and purposes and if you can’t act a bit daft when you never died not even once yet, when can you?
Well, Ergates says (and you can just tell she’s trying to be patient), aside from the fact that it is folly to throw away even one life out of eight, and the equally salient point that in the present emergency it might be foolish to rely on the efficient functioning of the reincarnative process, there is my own safety to think about.
I thought you was indestructible to a fall from any height on account of your scale and mass-to-surface area given the relative size of air molecules? I says.
Something like that, she agrees. But if you landed the wrong way it is conceivable I might be crushed.
Ho, I’d like to know what’s the right way to land from this high up, I says, leaning out over the drop with the wind in my hair and gazing down the way at the treetops of the forest-floor, what must be a good couple of hundred metres below.
You’re missing the point, says Ergates the ant, sounding sniffy.
I thought for a moment. Tell you what, I says.
Yes? she says.
When we take the hydrovator up the cliff, this time we’ll go on in the inside; how’s that?
Your munificence astonishes me, she says.
(She’s being sarcastic, I can tell.)
The hydrovator car is one of the old wooden ones what creaks a lot and it smells of rope-oil and varnish and the empty water tanks underneath the deck make big boomy spooky noises as it climbs up the wall of the hall. The floor of the car is mostly taken up with six big military vehicles which look like airships with wheels. They’re guarded by some army lads who’re having a game of pinkel-flip and I’m thinking of joining in because I’m a pretty good shot at the old pinkel-flip and I probably could stand to make a deal of gambling tokens on account that I’m so young and innocent looking and yet a bit of a hustler really but then Ergates says, Don’t you think you should make those calls like you promised brother Scalopin? and I says, O I suppose so.
I’m a teller, so the calls have to be made, I suppose.
I find a quiet spot near the gates where the wind ruffles in, and I sit down and lean back and let my eyes go mostly closed and I tap into the crypt where the dead people are.
From the top of the hydrovator I cross the marshaling yard on the frieze near the roof of the hall and head into the wall through various passageways and tunnels and take a tube along the inside of the wall to the far end of the great hall. I get off at the corner station and climb up some steps; I come out in a galleria on the outside of the wall what extends out from the greenery and bluery and etcetery of the babil plants. From here I can look down onto the terraces and little villages on the roofs of the parapet merlons with the little fields on the crenels and if I look right down I can see the flat green valley that is the allure but I expect none of this terminology means much if you don’t know much about castles.
Anyway, it’s a pretty impressive view, and sometimes you’ll see eagles and rocs and simurgs and lammergeiers and other big funny-looking birds wheeling about just to add a bit of local colour, and further below there’s more walls and towers and allures and steep roofs – some of them terraced too – and below that the forests and hills of the bailey, then the curtain wall in the distance and further away still there’s the hazy scenery of the far beyond. (They reckon you can see the sea from the very highest heights of the habitable castle, but though I seen this screened I never seen it with my own eyes.)
A rickety old chair lift takes me up and along, through a sort of tunnel in the hanging babil plants, and before long I arrive at the corner of the great hall and the place under the eaves where the Astrologers/Alchemists hang out, and hang out is exactly what they do, especially Mr Zoliparia, who being an important old gent of some note has got one of the prime positions in all the town for his apartments, viz. the right eyeball of the septentrional gargoyle Rosbrith.
The gargoyle Rosbrith looks out to the north, but because it’s on the corner and there’s nothing in the way, you can see east too, where the sun is prone to rise of a morning and the nastiness of the approaching Encroachment is popping up saying ‘Hi there folks – it’s lights out soon by the way!’
I hit a snag; Mr Zoliparia doesn’t appear to be in. I’m standing at the top of a rickety ladder inside the body of the gargoyle Rosbrith abanging and abashing on the little circular door of Mr Zoliparia’s apartments but for all my hammering there’s no answer. There’s a wooden landing below me what the ladder’s perched on (it’s rickety too, by the way. Come to think of it most stuff in the Astrologers/Alchemists town seems to be pretty rickety) but anyway there’s an old lady scrubbing the damn landing with some horrible bubbling stuff that’s bringing the wood on the landing up a treat even if it is dissolving most of it and making it even more rickety, but the point is this stuff’s making fumes go up my nose and causing my eyes to water.
Mr Zoliparia! I shout. It’s Bascule here!
Perhaps you should have told him you were coming, Ergates says from her box.
Mr Zoliparia don’t hold with modern-like implants and that sort of stuff, I tell her, sneezing. He’s a dissident.
You could have left a message with somebody else, Ergates says.
Yes yes yes I says, all annoyed because I know she’s right. I suppose now I have to use my own bleeding implants and I’ve been trying not to apart from contacting the world of the dead because I want to be a dissident like Mr Zoliparia.
Mr Zoliparia! I shouts again. I’ve got my scarf up round my mouth and nose now because of the fumes coming up from the landing.
O, bugration.
Is somebody using hydrochloric acid? Ergates says. On wood? She sounds mystified.
I don’t know about that I says but there’s some old girl down there scrubbing away at the landing with something pretty noxious.
Odd, Ergates says. I was sure he’d be in. I think you better get down – but then the door opens and there’s Mr Zoliparia in a big towel and what there is of his hair’s all wet.
Bascule! he shouts at me, might have known it was you! Then he glares down at the old lady and waves at me to come in and I scramble over the top of the ladder and into the eyeball.
Take your shoes off, boy, he says, if you stepped in that stuff on the landing you’ll be rotting my carpets. When you’ve done that you can make yourself useful and warm me up some wine. Then he pads off, hoisting his towel up around him and leaving a trail of water behind him on the floor.
I start to take my shoes off.
You been having a bath, Mr Zoliparia? I asks him.
He just looks at me.
Mr Zoliparia and me and Ergates the ant are sitting on the iris balcony of the gargoyle Rosbrith’s right eyeball having respectively mulled wine, tea, and a microscopic morsel of stale bread. Mr Zoliparia’s in a chair what looks a bit like an eyeball itself, suspended from an eyelash above; I’m on a stool sat beside the parapet where Ergates is tucking into the bread Mr Zoliparia gave her (and what I moistened with some spit) – it’s a whole huge lump of crust and far too much for her really, but she tears crumbs off and works them with her mouthparts and front feet until she can swallow them. I heard Ergates say Thank you to Mr Zoliparia when he gave her the crust but I haven’t told him she can talk yet and he didn’t seem to hear her.