Split Heirs (11 page)

Chapter Ten

Clootie was really quite thoroughly pleased with himself as he looked over the assortment of wildlife that roared, scampered, and shrieked on the hillside. For once, it had been his very own magic, rather than Wulfrith's, that was responsible for the chaos he now watched.

That eagle, just moments before, had been a mouse; it was now screaming in confusion as it tried to run on talons and wings, rather than its four familiar feet. The rather puzzled lion had begun life as a spider; the rabbit in its jaws had been an earthworm, while the frantic cow, trying unsuccessfully to burrow under a rock, had been a rabbit. A pigeon had become a chipmunk, an ant had become a garter snake.

And Clootie had done it all, all by himself, in a matter of minutes!

His old master would have been utterly appalled. Clootie could almost hear the old fart now, muttering, “No grace, no style at all! So hasty! So
messy!
”

And that was all quite true; in the good old days, under King Fumitory, no self-respecting wizard would ever have done such a thing.

But under King Gudge, style and grace were not exactly at a premium. Whatever worked, worked, and no one gave points for finesse or flair.

Well, this spell worked.

Which was, Clootie thought, rather amazing. Even with Wulfrith's help, it had been quite a job coming up with this little stunt. If it hadn't been for Corinalla's birthday party, all those years ago…

His thoughts flew back to that long-ago morning, when his master had received the letter at breakfast and slit it open with the handle of his grapefruit spoon
—
Clootie still remembered the muttered prayer to Spug Pagganethaneth that had accompanied that inappropriate use of the implement. The old man had read through the brief note, and had let out a groan.

“Revered and honored master, font of wisdom and glory of the ages, beneficent lord and source of all blessings,” Clootie had remarked, “what failing of your miserable apprentice evokes this sound, for surely nothing else but my misbegotten self is so worthless as to trouble you?”

At the memory he glanced at Wulfrith, who was on the verge of hysterical laughter watching the spider-lion try to figure out what to do with the earthworm-rabbit. That boy had never learned a tenth of the Old Hydrangean forms and procedures; in the old days he'd have been sent packing long ago, talented or not.

Nowadays a wizard couldn't afford to be so particular.

But back then, Clootie had observed the rules
—
he'd asked his question in the formal style, then bowed his head to await a reply.

“Useless toad of an apprentice,” his master had answered, “it's that damn fool Horin. His spoiled brat daughter Corinalla is having a birthday celebration, and he wants me to show up and bless it, maybe do a few tricks.”

“A few tricks?” Clootie had been aghast at this disrespect.

“Oh, he puts it in flowery words, but that's what it comes down to,” old Master Quankle had said
—
Quannikilius, really, but Clootie had always thought of him as Quankle.

And old Master Quankle didn't want to go, but he owed Horin a debt
—
some six thousand florins
—
so he couldn't very well refuse outright.

Instead, he had sent his apprentice. And when Clootie had protested that he didn't know any good tricks suitable for use at a ten-year-old's birthday party, Quankle had quickly taught him one, a very old-fashioned and out-of-date spell that had been abandoned decades before as insufficiently elegant for modern sorcery.

It was really quite a clever spell, much simpler and more effective than any of the others Clootie was ever taught. With a mere ten minutes of ritual, and only half a dozen arcane tools, the spell transformed white mice into doves
—
any number of white mice would, neat as you please, grow wings and feathers and, transformed to doves, flutter about in dazed confusion, trying to figure out what had befallen them.

Corinalla had almost been impressed, and Clootie had managed to survive the party without any major disasters.

Of course, the spell wasn't much use anywhere else
—
certainly not against Gorgorians, who bore very little resemblance to white mice (beyond a certain cheesy odor in some cases). It didn't even serve to rid the kitchen of vermin, since the mice helping themselves to the odd crumb were usually not white.

It was when he found mouse footprints in the butter, even before the Gorgorians came, that the idea of somehow generalizing the spell had first occurred to Clootie, but it was not until he had set up cavekeeping in the hills outside Stinkberry that he actually worked on the problem.

And it wasn't until he watched Wulfrith at work, and began noticing the patterns in the various transformation spells the boy came up with, that he got the first clues as to just how the spell's effects might be broadened. That very first day, when little Wulfie had turned an endtable into a fish, had been the beginning.

And now, more than a decade later, Clootie finally had the spell perfected, generalized and streamlined into a magical weapon the likes of which Hydrangea had never seen. He stood, hands on his hips, and admired its effects.

The spider-lion finally stopped trying to either tie the earthworm-rabbit up or suck out its innards, and more or less by accident bit down. Wulfrith let out a loud, “Awww!” as the rabbit thrashed once and died.

The mouse-eagle, still not having caught on that it could fly, had managed an odd stumbling run down the hillside and into the forest; Clootie did not expect it to last long in there. The other creatures had all scattered.

The spell had worked on every bird, beast, or bug he had tried it on; he was confident that he could now, in less than a minute, transform any living creature he could see into something else. That would presumably include Gorgorians, though he had not had any handy as test subjects.

It was rather a shame, he thought, that he had no way of knowing what any given creature would turn into. In some cases, such as the spider that had become a lion, the new creatures were more dangerous than the old.

It was rather difficult to imagine a Gorgorian turning into anything more dangerous, but Clootie supposed it might be possible. Even so, he thought the spell had obvious military applications; no matter how dangerous they were individually, turning all the Gorgorians into random wildlife would seriously disrupt their command structure. Even Gorgorian officers relied on speech sometimes, and unless they all became parrots or dragons…

No, he was making assumptions there. He couldn't be sure that a transformed Gorgorian wouldn't be able to talk.

But still, the spell was a success, and disposing of the Gorgorians was now just a matter of logistics. Clootie smiled broadly.

The spider-lion chewed noisily, and Wulfrith backed away.

“What do we do now, Master?” he asked.

“We celebrate, my boy,” Clootie said, “we celebrate!”

Together they retreated into the cave, Clootie slapping Wulfrith on the back. Giddy with success, the wizard grinned and held a finger to his lips as he hauled a case of dusty bottles from a concealed niche that Wulfrith had somehow, in all his years of exploring their shared abode, never discovered. “A little secret of mine,” Clootie explained. “When I first fled my home in the city, the vintner down the street begged me to hide these treasures from the Gorgorians
—
or at least, I'm sure he
would
have begged me, but he wasn't around at the time, so I decided to take the risk on his behalf without being asked. Just trying to be a good neighbor, of course.”

“What are they?” Wulfrith asked.

“Ah!” Clootie grinned again as he twisted at a complicated wire device that adorned the neck of the first bottle. “A real treasure, all right, my lad! These are Elsinium Palace's Finest Western Slope Special Reserve Sparkling Divine Nectar, Demi-Sec. The '23 vintage, a
very
good year!”

“Huh?”

“
Wine
, you booby, sparkling wine! The very best!” The wire cage came free.

“Oh.”

The cork popped, and wine frothed up; Wulfrith snatched up glasses and caught the spilling foam.

“Oh, good lad!” Clootie said, filling the two receptacles. “
Do
join me!”

Wulfrith eyed the stuff in his goblet warily. It was bubbling and foaming in a way that reminded him of the water elemental he kept in the sink, or perhaps of the thing that had oozed out of the kettle and eaten the footstool when one of Master Clootie's transformation spells had gone wrong the year before.

Prior to this, Wulfrith's only experience with wine had been drinking dark red stuff that just sat there in the glass and that tasted like charred cabbage. That sort might develop an oily film on top sometimes, but it didn't shoot out tiny explosive bubbles or make crackling noises.

“Drink up, boy!” Clootie said, tossing down the contents of his own glass.

Wulfrith attempted a cautious sip.

Clootie smiled, poured another glass, and drank it.

Wulfrith took another sip, as Clootie refilled his own glass again.

“You know, lad,” Clootie said, staring off into space and smiling crookedly, “it's been a long time, a
very
long time. I might even miss this place, once I'm back in my old house on the Street of Roses the Color of the Edges of Clouds At Sunset.”

Wulfrith made a polite little noise. He was still trying to decide whether he liked the taste of the stuff they were drinking. It certainly didn't burn his throat the way the red wine did, but the flavor was very peculiar.

Clootie poured himself another glass, then settled onto a divan.

“Or maybe I won't go back to the Street of Roses at all,” the wizard mused. “Maybe I'll have a place at the Palace of Divinely Tranquil Thoughts
—
after all, if my spell,
our
spell, saves all of Hydrangea from the yoke of the hated Gorgorians, I'll be a hero, won't I? And all the court mages who served under King Fumitory are dead, dispersed, and decapitated.”

Wulfrith nodded warily. The wine was interesting, he thought, but he didn't think he would care to drink very much of it. He was about halfway through his first glass and his head already felt a trifle unsteady.

Clootie filled his glass again.

“Who knows what a grateful populace might not do?” Clootie asked a white-streaked stalactite. “Wine, women, and song, Wulfrith
—
I expect we'll be given anything we ask for.” He drained the glass.

Wulfrith felt as if he ought to say something, to hold up his end of the conversation. As Clootie poured more wine, Wulfrith said, “I wouldn't know what to ask for, Master Clootie.”

Clootie grinned. This was not a phenomenon Wulfrith was familiar with, and he found it more than a little disconcerting.

“Wine, women, and song,” Clootie repeated. “Those
are
the traditch…trazish…tra…
traditional
pleasures.”

Wulfrith looked dubiously at his glass. He saw no particular reason to ask for wine as any part of his reward. As for women, he had seen a few on his rare trips accompanying Master Clootie to Stinkberry Village, and while he had some theoretical knowledge of what women were for, he wasn't clear on why he, personally, might want one or more of the creatures
—
though in recent weeks he was beginning to think he'd like to experiment a little.

Still, he admitted to himself, if someone were to give him a woman, at present he wouldn't know what to do with her.

Song might be nice, if the master was right and they were to be rewarded, which he was by no means convinced of. He was not at all clear on just who was going to do what to whom that would make Clootie and himself heroes. After all, Clootie had always assured him that the magic they used around the cave was nothing very extraordinary; why was this transformation spell, which didn't seem all that special to him, so important? If these Gorgorians were the monstrous brutes that his master had always said they were, why hadn't someone turned the lot of them into newts years ago?

There was so very much he didn't understand about the outside world.

“I wouldn't know, Master,” he said.

“'Course not, you're just a boy!” Clootie gulped wine. “Don't know much of anything yet, you don't, stuck up here in this cave instead of carousing in the fleshpots of Bentmuro. When I was your age…when I was…how old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“Fourteen years old,” Clootie marveled. “and stuck here in a cave in the middle of nowhere, with nobody but me, all because those damned Gorgorians don't have a proper respess…repesk…respect for magic!”

“Um,” Wulfrith said.

“Tell you what, lad,” Clootie said. “The Gorgorians are not long for thish…this world, or at least, not for human form, if you can call a Gorgorian human to begin with, which I suppose you have to because you can't very well put them anywhere else taxonomically and they do interbreed naturally with humans, which means they must
be
humans, unless there's some question about whether it's natural, which I suppose there might be except that if you start saying that rape isn't natural you're going to get into all kinds of trouble, and then…what was I saying?” His free hand, which had begun to wave about wildly, fell into the wizard's lap; he looked down at it as if startled to find it there, and put it to use draining the last of the wine bottle into his glass.

“I don't know, sir,” Wulfrith replied.

“Don't know,” Clootie said. “Of
course
you don't, because you've been stuck in this cave! Well, enough of that, Wulfrith, my boy! We're celebrating, and a lad your age should get out more, so you just take the day off and go down to the village and have fun
—
take your time, and a dozen coppers from the box by the stove, and you go have a good time!”