The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (14 page)

“The picture at the end of the healer's strange spectacles?” she said.

I shook my head, “What became of that muddle that dripped from Ingess's ear?”

She clapped her hands to send the birds scurrying away and sat forward. “You mean you haven't seen it?” she asked.

“No.”

“Come now,” she said and stood. “You've got to see this.”

She actually took my hand as we walked through hallways, and it made me somewhat nervous to find myself behind the protective field of her dangerous laughter.

We ended our journey in the small chapel at the northern end of the palace. The Ministress of Sleep, old Mrs. Kofnep, was just lighting a last votive candle as we entered. Beyond her, resting on the altar atop a satin pillow of considerable size was a huge ball with fine white hair growing all over it.

“There it is,” said Frouch.

“That thing?” I asked, pointing.

Mrs. Kofnep greeted us and then turned her own gaze on the strange object. “I haven't decided if it's an egg or a testicle or a replica of the world,” she said with a self-mocking smile.

“It took that form of a perfect sphere the day after it came from His Royal's head,” said the countess.

“The white hair wasn't there two nights ago,” said Mrs. Kofnep.

“I had it moved here to protect it,” said Frouch.

We stared at it for some time, and then the Ministress of Sleep left us with the usual complaint about her insomnia.

The next day I was busy with preparations for the feast, but before turning in, I went back to the chapel to have another look at the oddity. Changes had obviously taken place, for now it was stretched out and tapered at either end with a large bulge in the middle. The white hair had grown profusely, and wrapped itself around to swaddle whatever was there gently undulating at its core.

The feast was held in the grand ballroom and the Exalted Culinarity had outdone himself with the exotic nature of the dishes served. Crow-liver pâté on paper-thin slices of candied amber was the appetizer. For the main course there was fowl, hog, beef, and even crocodile done up with fruit and vegetables to appear like tropical islands floating in calm seas of gravy. On each table was placed a punch bowl of Princess Jang's Tears, the drink that had of late become all the rage at Reparata.

Ringlat gave a benediction in which he likened the loss of Josette to highway robbery and our combined efforts to revive Ingess as the true power of the Law. With the exception of Mrs. Kofnep, none of us was overly religious. I looked around as Ringlat finished to see bowed heads and all manner of halfhearted religiously symbolic hand gesturing. When Durst took the podium, I was relived, knowing his drivel would cast out the seriousness of the Bishop's sermon. He did not disappoint. His gift to Ingess, as he put it, was the discovery of the meaning of Time. To represent his tangled ball of musings in a nutshell, he surmised from one side of his mouth that Time existed to make eternity pass more quickly, and from the other side that it served to make it pass more slowly. We gave him a standing ovation and then started drinking.

Through the entire gala, His Royal sat on the dais, neither eating nor drinking, but nodding with a mechanical smile to one and all. By my third serving of the Tears, I forgot about my concern for him and stepped out on the dance floor with the countess. For that evening, she had applied a false beauty mark to her upper lip, and I found it remarkably alluring. At some point in her life, she had been beautiful, and on that evening, dressed in a cream-colored gown, her hair done up in two conical horns and decorated with mimosa blossoms, she approached her former radiance like a clock frozen at only a minute to midnight.

“Flam, your dancing leads me to believe I will have to guide you to your room later with a trail of bananas,” she said and whisper-giggled into my left ear. The sound of that laughter did not frighten me, but instead made my head spin as though it were Sirimon opening a new pathway to that portion of the brain that houses desire.

Chin Mokes walked on his hands. Pester spun like a dervish. The Illustrious Shepherd of Dust sang an aria about the unrequited love of a giant. The Majestic Seventh did impressions of farm animals until she passed out beneath the table which held the island of roasted hog. The ballroom was a swirling storm of good will and high spirits while at its center sat Ingess as though asleep with his eyes open. Not once did his smile disappear, not once did he miss a chance to shake hands or give a thank-you kiss, not once did he laugh.

Then, sometime well after the dessert of chocolate balloons, there was a shrill cry of distress and the room went absolutely silent. I looked up from my drink to see what had hushed the crowd and saw the Ministress of Sleep, Mrs. Kofnep, standing just inside the northern entrance to the ballroom, working madly to catch her breath.

“Come quickly,” she cried, “something is happening in the chapel.” She turned and left in great haste and we all followed.

The small chapel was just large enough to accommodate all of us as long as Pester sat atop Durst's shoulders. We crowded in, panting and perspiring from our dash through the Hall of Light and Shadow, across the rotunda of the Royal Museum, and then down the steps just past the observatory. Upon the altar, the white entity, which I now knew to be a cocoon, rippled wildly, rocking and emitting sharp cries high and thin enough to pass through the eye of a needle.

There was an awed silence among the members of the court, and only Ingess had the wherewithal to draw his long dagger in case the expectant birth came forth a terror. People clutched each other as the white fabric of the thing began to tear with a sound like a fat man splitting his trousers. Ingess audibly groaned and his dagger clanked to the floor as the thing began to unfurl itself. An explosion of fine white powder was released at the moment of birth and then immediately blown away by some phantom breeze. When that cleared, I saw it above the altar, hovering in the air, a huge, diaphanous moth with wings as big as bed sheets. It looked only a hair more substantial than a ghost, glimmering in the light from the flickering votives.

The crowd became a chorus and voiced a gasp and then a sigh as the thing flapped its huge wings and flew above our heads toward the entrance. Pester, his face a mask of wonder, reached up toward it from where he sat on Durst's shoulders. His index finger ran along its underside as it passed into the hallway, and then his finger, like a flame going out, disappeared from his hand. The boy's mask of wonder became one of horror and he screamed. We meant to help him but by then the powder that had fallen from the moth reached our eyes. It caused in me a feeling of sorrow more deep than the one I experienced upon my mother's death when I was five. The entire court was reduced to tears. Only Ingess had not been affected. I saw him retrieve his dagger from the floor with the same stoic look he had worn at the feast.

When the effects of the moth's powder had worn off, we gathered round Pester to inspect his hand.

“There was no pain,” he said. “Only inside, a sadness.”

Some touched the spot where the digit had been, still unable to believe it was gone. Ringlat, knowing that as the bishop he should do something profound at this point but having no clue as to what, took the boy's hand in his and kissed the nub. Mokes actually turned to Tendon Durst for an explanation, and the Philosopher General mumbled something about insect fear and the ringed planet. Chin nodded as if he understood. The strange powder that had fallen now covered Frouch's beauty mark and somewhat disintegrated her power of enchantment. All jabbered like magpies, and the one thing that was finally decided upon was that strong drink was required. Before we left the chapel, Ingess apologized to us, especially Pester, since it had been his royal mind that had been responsible for the moth.

The evening ended with everyone, including the king, drinking themselves into oblivion. We wondered where the creature had wafted off to, but no one wanted to go in search of it. Sometime near daybreak, I and the others trudged like the walking dead to our sleeping chambers to feast on bad dreams. My last thought as I dozed off was of Frouch and her fleeting beauty.

Three days passed without a sign of the moth, and the court began to breathe easier, thinking that it was now time to put aside the tragic saga of Josette's death. I know that Ingess was approached by Saint-Geedon and some of the others about perhaps starting a project that might recapture the old spirit of Reparata, but His Royal very kindly put them off with promises that he would consider the suggestions.

On the night of the third day, while sitting in the garden with my cage of bats, I spotted the moth. It lifted slowly up like a dispossessed thought of ingenious proportion from behind a row of hedges, causing me to drop my pipe into my lap. I considered running, but its fluid grace as it moved along the wall of green hypnotized me. When I finally adjusted to the shock of its arrival, I noticed that same sound Sirimon had made when cavorting in Ingess's head. In less than a minute it had left a good span of hedge completely devoid of vegetation. Only a mere skeleton of branches remained. I nervously lifted the latch on the bat cage, thinking that their presence might frighten it away. As always they swarmed frantically out and around the garden, but none of them would dare go near the moth. Before I moved from my seat, I saw it consume an entire rose bush, a veritable mile of trailing vine, all of Josette's tiger lilies, and the foliage of an immense weeping willow.

The next morning, the moth having disappeared again, the court gathered in the garden, or I should say where the garden had been. Its destruction was so complete that I could count on my hands the number of leaves still clinging to their branches. There was a certain sadness about the destruction of that special place, but for the time being it was blanketed by a stronger sense of amazement at the enormity of the thing's appetite and its efficiency in satisfying it.

“Do we have a large net?” asked the Chancellor of Waste.

“Why, do you want to be the one to wrestle with it?” asked Pester, holding up his hand for all to see.

“It must be destroyed,” said Ringlat, “it's far too dangerous.”

“But it is beautiful,” said the Illustrious Seventh.

“The garden was beautiful,” countered the bishop. “This thing is evil.”

Ingess stepped into the middle of the crowd and turned to look at each of us. “The moth is not to be harmed,” he said.

“But it is not righteous,” said Ringlat.

“The moth is not to be harmed on pain of death,” said Ingess without anger and then turned and strode away toward the palace.

The members of the court said nothing, but each looked at his or her shoes like scolded children. A death threat from Ingess was like an arrow through the heart of Reparata. In that moment, we felt its spirit dissolve.

“Death?” said Chin Mokes when His Royal was out of earshot. He shook his head sadly. The others did the same as they wandered aimlessly away from the missing garden.

I called to Frouch to wait up for me, but to my surprise she turned and continued on toward the palace.

As we soon learned, the garden was only the beginning. On the next evening the ethereal glutton invaded the closets of the southern wing and, moving from room to room, devoured all of the linens and finery of those who resided there. All that remained by way of clothing was the outfits those court members had arrived at Reparata in, which had long ago been stored away in trunks. The next day I met the Chancellor of Waste at breakfast, and he was wearing the clown outfit that, in his previous life, had been his uniform. The shoes were enormous, the tie too short, the jacket striped and the pants checkered. In a loud voice, he desperately tried to explain and his embarrassment was contagious. It was a disarming sight to see half the royalty of court traipsing about in threadbare attire.

Ingess assigned the royal accountant to bring gold so that new fashions could be sent for immediately, but when the doors of the counting house were opened, allowing the sunlight access, the moth was startled into flight and brushed past the accountant. When he was finally able to clear his eyes of the insect's powder and his mind of its resultant depression, he discovered that the creature had a taste for more than just leaves and clothing. A good half of that immense trove of gold was gone.

All were skeptical of the story the accountant told, suspecting him of theft, since he had actually been a pickpocket earlier in his life. A few nights later, though, when the moth returned, more than one witnessed its consumption of jewelry, and Saint-Geedon vouched that it had, in minutes, done away with every place setting of the royal silverware. Ingess had even lost his crown to it, but still, in the face of strident requests that it be exterminated, he refused to relent on his command that it not be harmed.

I went to visit Frouch in her rooms the morning after it dined in our quadrant of the palace. My own wardrobe had vanished through the night along with just about everything else I owned. When I knocked on the countess's door I was wearing my old jacket missing an arm and the trousers I had wandered a thousand miles in, whose gaping knee holes made the bottom half of each leg almost superfluous. Putting these things on again was very difficult, and for a moment I considered simply going about in my bathrobe as the healer had.

There was no answer from the countess, and I was about to leave when I heard something from beyond the door that I at first mistook for the sound of Sirimon. I listened more closely and it came to me that it was Frouch, weeping. In a moment of madness, I opened the door and entered anyway.

“Countess,” I called.

“Go away, Flam,” she said.

“What's wrong?” I asked, though I already had a good idea.

“Don't come in here,” she said, but I had to make sure she was all right.

She stood in the middle of her room, wearing the short, revealing dress she had worn ten years earlier when walking the streets of Gile. Her hair was down and unpowdered to show its true mousey brown and gray.