The Murdstone Trilogy (14 page)

There was no sign, sound or smell of the Greme. Philip settled himself in front of his screen and plunged eagerly into
Part the Second.

The switch of narrator, the change of voice which, during transcription, had briefly startled him out of his enchantment, now astonished him utterly.

Who in God’s name was this omniscient narrator out of nowhere? Why this totally unheralded side-step into the Third Person? What the hell was Pocket up to? His eyes jittered down a page of text. Then he stopped himself, scrolled back up and began again.

Bemused though he was, he had to concede that this new voice was extremely beguiling. Magisterial, yet without the slightest taint of pomposity. Literary but also intimate, conversational. Mellow with dark undertones. Complex yet unstrained, like Henry James cured of costiveness. Avuncular. Strangely familiar. Very, very good.

Better, Philip acknowledged bitterly, than anything he had ever written. Better than anything he would or could ever write. A first-time novelist – and a bloody gnome,
into the bargain – had achieved a feat of literary ventriloquism way beyond the reach of his own striving.

The little shit.

He read on. After a slowish start
Part the Second
of
Warlocks Pale
swelled into a major set piece. The Battle of the Bay of Quarternity, for which the scene had been set elaborately in
Part the First
, was in full ding-dong. Cadrel’s untrustworthy allies, the piratical Long Bankers under the command of Mock-Admiral Bocksteen (he of the worm-infested beard), came under mort-fire almost as soon as their triremes came within range of the coast of the Realm. This brimstone barrage was the work of the Quernows. Once a fiercely independent clan, these blood-red alchemical miners were now minions of Morl. Despite the best efforts of these bombardiers, Bocksteen drove his burning ships (which were filled with the howling of smouldering oarsmen) through the cordon of Sea-Swelts onto the shore. The chaotic hand-to-hand fighting amidst surging black smoke, the undisciplined savagery of the Bankers, the blood and innards sloshed onto the pale and thirsty sand were all described with a velvety, ironic restraint.

All excellent, Philip gladly admitted. Minerva will wet herself when she reads this, he reckoned. It hits all the criteria of her purple fucking blueprint and then some.

With the battle in the balance, with Cadrel and Bocksteen back-to-back, their swords dripping gore, Swelts swarming towards them over dunes of their own dead, the action shifted away.

To Mesmira.

He had completely forgotten about her. Where was she, again?

Ah yes, in the moated grange belonging to good old Gyle Tether, into whose safekeeping GarBellon had delivered her. There she was, mooching about in her chamber, looking sexy in white silk, thinking about stuff. Back story. Well enough done. Presumably necessary. Suppose there will be readers who for whatever half-cocked reason read
Warlocks Pale
before
Dark Entropy.

But then she takes up the Verotropic Mirror and looks into it.

And we’re back to the battle again. Nice idea. Seeing it in the Mirror. Mesmira gazing at Cadrel’s smoke-blackened and blood-stained face. Her love will power his sword. That’s what we think. It’s like a Mel Gibson film, but good.

Morl in the mirror! What’s
he
doing there? Sort of phasing out of, emerging out of Cadrel, then back again. They look a bit alike. Not noticed that before.

Mesmira recoils from the Mirror, drops it. It shatters on the flagstoned floor, dissolves into a trillion motes of prismatic dust that skirl and disappear through the mullioned window.

Bad luck, that, breaking a mirror. Seven years’ worth. A plot device? Hmmm …

Mesmira stands wide-eyed and aghast, or thrilled, clutching herself. Hands clasped on her bosom. Erotic. Arora doing it. Lovely titsquash. Can see it all.

New chapter. Morl paces within the Observatory atop his Thule. His bitter monologue, his agonized rant to his uncomprehending Praetorian Swelts. How he has been so terribly misunderstood; how the stupid, nostalgic, magic-sozzled inhabitants of the Realm have failed to see the necessity for modernization, modernization, modernization. How he had been hailed as a hero, a deliverer, then been villainized when he put his reforms into action.

Philip was surprised to find himself feeling almost sorry for the evil bastard. Having to admit that much of what he said made sense, all things considered. Clever stuff, Pocket. Subverting the reader’s allegiance. Bloody good.

Ah, now here’s the author himself. That’s a relief. Change of voice is one thing, completely vanishing another thing entirely. Wouldn’t do at all. Enormously popular character. There were websites devoted to him on which Pocket fanatics wittered to each other in Gremespeak. In the nobbles his self-portrait was a somewhat flattering one, of course. If his admirers knew what the real Pocket was like, what he was capable of, they might revise their opinions.

Anyway, here he comes, disguised as a Morven pedlar, the lead-sealed Fourth Device concealed in the false bottom of his cart.

Philip cannot remember the significance of the Fourth Device. Never mind. It’ll make sense, sooner or later.

Lyrical account of Pocket’s travels across the Plain of Wraith and into the Forest of Mort A’Dor. A sort of
pastoral idyll after all that violence: golden light filtered through leaf-canopy, shadow deer startled away, glow-vines at dusk. He arrives at a glade and chuckles the cart-pony to a halt. He’s weary and so is the pony. He clambers down and gathers the materials for a fire. While it crackles into life he feeds the pony clump-nuts from his satchel and turns her loose to graze. The moon, in its green phase, rises above the trees. The stars choose their constellations and settle for the night. Pocket roasts coney meat on a skewer and washes it down with two measures of barleybrew from his flask. Yawning, he creeps beneath the cart and wraps himself in his blanket. He hums himself asleep to the sweet refrain of an ancient Greme lullaby.

And never wakes up again because his throat has been slit.

Philip jerked back.

Whatwhatfucking
what
?

Read that again.

Christ, yes. Pocket had killed himself off. His pale little body touched by the first light of morning. Blood pumped onto the leaf-litter. A blue-breasted death-warbler perched on his stiffened left thumb. The cart smashed to kindling. The Fourth Device stolen.

Who killed him? No idea. Just happened like that out of nowhere.

End of chapter.

Jesus wept. Philip stared at the screen as if hoping that his dead inkage might find life and change its mind.

But no.

He sat fumbling anxiously at the remnants of his facial hair. This was just about the last thing he’d expected. Pocket was indispensable, surely.
Dark Entropy
owed much of its enormous success to his voice. That he should hand over the narrative to this other bloke was pretty rum; that he should gratuitously top himself and rule himself out of any further part in the action … well, that was plain perverse. Shocking. Mind you, what a bloody stroke to pull! Philip imagined millions of readers doing just what he had done: come to a shocked halt, mewling expletives. It was a wibbler that would make ’em sit up straight, and no mistake.

(Which it did. Several months later, Adelaide Pinker, writing in the
Guardian
, will admit that ‘like all admirers of
Dark Entropy
, I mourn the demise of the garrulous Greme. I confess to having felt angry, almost betrayed, by his dispassionately described demise. But what a stroke for Murdstone to have pulled! To have killed off his narrator halfway through what we must now confidently expect to be a trilogy. It’s as if Dickens had murdered David Copperfield three hundred pages in. Or as if, halfway through
The Catcher in the Rye
, Holden Caulfield is wiped out by a hit-and-run driver while crossing Park Avenue. There is something almost self-destructive in taking such a risk. But it may be that like all great writers Murdstone needed to slough off one persona to explore another. And the narrative voice he develops in the second part of
Warlocks Pale
is an extraordinary achievement. Whether
this voice is that of the author himself or a character in his continuously surprising history of the Realm is one of the brilliantly teasing questions that make us wait thirstily for the final part of the Murdstone Trilogy.’

That same weekend, the
Mail on Sunday
will embark on a series of stories about the drink- and drug-fuelled misadventures of Marcus Dalloway, the pint-sized actor who played Pocket in the movie version of
Dark Entropy
.)

Philip read on. It continued to astonish him that he had transcribed this tale through the long watches of the night without remembering any of it. So he was surprised when, eighty or so pages from the end, the narrative set off in a completely unexpected direction. Well, not completely; Philip had read Pocket’s earlier hints correctly.
Warlocks Pale
finds its final focus within the grubby, addled Shire of Vedno.

Keepskite is indeed in possession of the Amulet. Morl has learned this. He has discovered that not only is Trover Mellwax, stealer of the Amulet, alive, but has thirty-two, not thirty-one, manifestations.

His thirty-second is a small pink island in The Middle Sea. Morl’s Sea-Swelts sever its anchor chains and tow it back to the Thule where it is tethered on the Dimensionless Table of Morl’s hastily reassembled necromantic laboratory. For two days it defies form. On the third day Morl manages to clone cells from a finger posing as a sandbar and phases them through the Morph Scrambler until he gets something he can work on.

It’s Mellwax’s nineteenth manifestation: a young Morven female with the luminous innocence typical of her species. The calm and graphic description of her torture at the hands of Morl and his Swelts – worthy, Philip thought, faint and dry-mouthed, of Louis de Bernières – goes on for several pages. Eventually her agonies yield an imago: of herself being brutally rear-swived by Keepskite, of his dirty fingers relieving her of the thong-hung Amulet while, eyes clamped shut and senses closed down, she simulates gratitude.

All of which left Philip most uneasy. Despite the cool restraint of the prose, this was hardly suitable material for younger readers. Then he laughed at himself. What was he thinking? He had a new readership now, one that was – anatomically, at least – adult. He no longer had to concern himself with what children felt. It was ridiculous that he hadn’t fully understood this before, hadn’t allowed himself that glorious sense of release. He did so now. Then returned to the text.

The last section of
Warlocks Pale
took the form of a classic chase. Or race, rather. GarBellon the Sage has also discovered the whereabouts of the Amulet, and he, along with Cadrel and Mesmira and a brave (if quarrelsome) band of Gremes and Porlocs, set out on a hazardous expedition to the wilds of Vedno. At GarBellon’s insistence, their route takes them across Turbid Hoag, the frightful lake haunted by mirages and patrolled by poison-finned Slankers, and thence into the unmapped harshness of the Vednodian foothills.

Absorbed as he was in Pocket’s action-packed miniepic, Philip couldn’t help noting that Cadrel’s character had undergone a subtle change during this second part of the story. He had become harder; even, occasionally, arrogant. Less sympathetic. It was rather puzzling. But perhaps this was understandable, after all he’d been through. Or perhaps, like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, he’s had to turn his back on youthful lightness of heart to harden himself for kingship. Regrettable, yes, but maybe necessary.

Hmm. Fits the blueprint in a slightly more interesting way. Let the editors sort that one out.

Meanwhile Morl, at the head of a cohort of Battle-Swelts, approaches Vedno from the opposite direction, across the wasteland of Shand’r Ga and through the mazy vales of lexical rocks known as Wylselph.

And it is Morl who wins the race. His army penetrates the wormy labyrinth of the Vednodians while Cadrel’s oarsmen yet labour to propel their boats through the deliquescent off-shore sands of the Hoag.

Then, just as it seems inevitable that the Evil One has the Amulet within his grasp, Pocket pulls off a bravura set piece.

The Swelts, thirsty after their arduous trek in heavy armour, and before Morl can stop them, guzzle their fill from the Font of Zydor. The resulting party is an orgy of maudlin camaraderie punctuated by random acts of violence and primitive song. (Philip is reminded of a long-ago occasion in Worthing, when he’d stumbled upon
– and quickly fled – a host of bikers who’d descended on the Sussex coast to get off their faces on beer and magic mushrooms.)

The sound of the Swelt bacchanal awakens Keepskite, who has been sleeping off the previous day’s binge in his squalid grotto overlooking the Font. After a horrified survey of the nightmare below, he takes flight; but not before Morl has spotted him.

Pursued by the magnificent necromancer, Keepskite flees through the narrow convoluted rock tunnels known only to Vednods. As he runs, the Amulet grows heavier against his greasy chest, slowing him, seeming to yearn for his pursuer. Twice, thrice, Morl hurls lethal bolts of Transformational Hex at his shadowy quarry, but misses; they strike rock fragments from the walls which turn into metallic earwigs that clatter and squeal away into the darkness.

Slick with sweat and electrical with panic, Keepskite emerges onto a broad ledge that overhangs a dizzying precipice. The brooding day is full of roaring because, to the left, the ledge disappears in the seething waters of a cataract that hurtles from the plateau above and plunges to the Tarn of Gorn, far, far below.

Moaning fear, Keepskite staggers towards the waterfall. He knows what he hopes Morl does not know: that the ledge continues behind the curtain of water and gives unto a perilous flight of rough-hewn steps which, in turn, lead to a lower complex of caverns and passages.

However, the desperate Vednod takes only a few paces then stops, letting out a whinny of terror.