you take it for yours,’ said Volospion, amused. ‘I believe it is customary to throw a heavy glass bust of Napoleon into a blast furnace upon agreeing a wager. But we can forego it.’
‘A wager! I’ll participate,’ said Bishop Castle, licking his fingers, ‘if a similar buffet is provided.’ He bit some flesh from a chicken drummer and threw the chog over his shoulder. It bounced off the skull of his bone companion and the Bishop gave an impatient sigh, demolishing the walking skeleton with a twist of a power ring. The change in fashion was instantly contagious – bone companions exploded to dust throughout the gathering.
‘Rich farewell to dry company,’ hailed Baron Coma, and rode away on two glum-looking horses, one of which was mounted and copulating upon the other.
‘He’s got that wrong,’ Volospion confided to the Iron Orchid. ‘Those things are called palindromes – they’re meant to have a head at each end.’
‘Now, Doctor, how do we make sense of the Duke’s intent?’ Lord Jagged asked. ‘We must if we are to resolve this flutter of yours.’
‘Wager, Jagged,’ Volospion corrected him, pleased at the opportunity for scorn.
‘Principal Krill,’ said the Iron Orchid. ‘He helped the Duke with his research.’
‘That mound of nostrils?’ Volospion exclaimed. ‘But, well, I suppose he does know more “history” than most of us. And I confess I respect his skill with wooden birds and furniture.’
‘I haven’t seen the birds. Are they good?’
‘They do everything a – what was it? – a “meat” bird used to do. They fly, shout very concise bits of advice to people down on the ground, lay beautifully carved little eggs, and rot down to a delicate wooden skeleton!’
‘Ah, that’s art, you see, Volospion,’ Jagged remarked. ‘He’s not all “history”.’
'Oh I admit he has skill.’
The party was breaking up as they strolled toward one of the docking areas. A strange sound alerted them to the sight, far behind them, of Bishop Castle sucking the entire remaining fare from the table into a massively distended, fluming mouth. ‘Will you join us, Bishop?’ Jagged called, but received no response.
When they reached the landing field, Volospion piped up. ‘We’ll take my gaseous insect,’ he told them. Towering behind him was a cherry glass mantis with a scarlet gas mask for a face. ‘This is the Mantis Malamatis. It handles well – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It’s red glass with a rubber mask, you see?’
‘Does this use that ion wind idea you were talking about?’ Jagged asked.
‘I don’t really know. It goes, anyway.’
‘It’s lovely, Doctor,’ offered the Iron Orchid, as they walked up a thin wing to the entrance. ‘Glass is with us for at least another day or so.’
The wings buzzed into pink motion and disappeared, the insect rising up and canting as its legs folded away. Soon the vehicle was flitting over a wasteland littered with fragments of purple flint. Seated inside, the three idly observed the bending landscape through the red lens around them.
Volospion was still wondering what material would replace glass, when the Iron Orchid made a striking remark.
‘Doctor, your fine rigidity of view has at all times included a tempering rigidity of etiquette and manners.’
‘Thank you, dear Orchid,’ he replied, surprised.
‘Yet I have noticed,’ the Iron Orchid continued, ‘today, a distinct increase in your level of, shall we say, inventive scorn.’
‘Indeed?’ Volospion said, and he needed only an instant’s thought to see the truth of it. ‘Well yes, now that you point it out I perceive I have been more caustic than usual. What is it, most rigid of blooms? Jagged, is something wrong with me? With my face and jaws?’
‘Perhaps you are wanting for something,’ suggested the Iron Orchid.
‘How could I be? The very idea is fantastical.’ He frowned. Had somebody re-animated some mind disease from the past? Was it a new jest? ‘I shall have to think on this. In the meantime, friends, forgive me any untoward outbursts.’
‘Perhaps you are deciding gradually to become a social disaster,’ said the Orchid, looking outward at the plain, ‘like Profumo the Monkey.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ muttered Volospion distractedly.
4 A Curious Kraken
Showing What Level of Illumination May Be Expected When a Squid is Consulted
The clockwork detail of Krill’s seashore Silence came into view. Its green dome swiveled like an owl’s head, one big eye observing them. Volospion sent out a mental inquiry. ‘May we enter, Principal Krill?’ He received a glutinous assent and the mantis deployed its many legs, settling softly upon Krill’s air jetty. The three disembarked and entered the Silence through a trapezoidal opening. As they descended through levels of lexicons, smudged portholes and silverine map tubes sealed with wax, Lord Jagged resumed his reasoning regarding the interloper. ‘I wonder, Volospion, that you don’t consider his speech.’
‘A couple of transposed phrases abutted together,’ Volospion declared. ‘It was tedious.’
‘He spoke our language – which would suggest he was the Duke’s creation. Or had been given a translation pill by the Duke.’
‘Or by someone else!’
‘Not very likely, if he is the wild thing you assert.’
They smelt the mix of salt water, artificial age-dust and pickled knowledge that hung around Krill and his enthusiasms – Krill had found a way for damp and dust to co-exist without sludging – and entered his green silverine chamber. Mechanical cases held books bound in muscle, books which opened with a key, books thicker than they were wide and books rotten as fruit. In one corner stood a russet world globe like a giant conker tattooed with cryptic empires; behind this, prospering fungi had made a wall of skin shelves. On a small platform in the circular chamber’s centre was a pile of draped tentacles crowned with a brain like a crumpled hat. Krill had presented this guise for so long that nobody, himself included, remembered if he was human, alien or artifice. Behind him a bay window thundered low with a sea of recent vintage, overlooking the crest of a fluorescent reef. Undersea animals like intestines touched the stained glass and moved on. A coil of eyes drifted amid palmate fronds in rich yellow, and a lovely grace note was a rose of suspended blood which roiled like a tornado above the reef. Volospion found it very tranquil and sinister. ‘Greetings,’ he said, ‘prime pullulator.’
‘Hail,’ Jagged took up, ‘tantacular tutor.’
‘I bid you halloo,’ said the Iron Orchid, ‘oceanic expositor.’
A mouth tore open like a pocket, trailing rinds of green skin like seaweed. ‘Welcome, eternal friends.’
As was customary, the visitors spent a brief time examining Krill’s newest acquisitions. Jagged inspected an ancient platter player which could emit
