The City of Dreaming Books (69 page)

‘This is fantastic!’ I cried, when Homuncolossus had finished reading. ‘We can destroy Smyke with this - quite legally! If we make it public he’s finished! He’ll be branded a murderer, a liar, an embezzler. This is a document whose veracity no one can doubt. No one could have forged it. Hagob was the only person who had mastered this art.’

Homuncolossus was still staring at the eyelash.

‘
You
can inherit the library, being the first to read Hagob’s will!’ I went on. ‘I’m your witness! They’ll strip Smyke of all his official positions. Everyone will turn against him. He can count himself lucky if they banish him to the crystal mines or Demon’s Gulch or the labour camps of Ironville.’

‘You think that’s an adequate punishment for what he has done?’ asked Homuncolossus. ‘And for what he’s planning to do?’

‘No punishment could be adequate,’ I said, ‘but that would do for a start.’

‘Whom do you propose to show the will to? Whom can you trust in Bookholm? Whom do you know that isn’t on Smyke’s payroll?’

That pricked my bubble of enthusiasm. We gave each other a long look.

‘Perhaps you could try us?’ said a piping, quavering voice. ‘Even though your previous experience of us hasn’t been of the best.’

We spun round and stared.

Standing in the mouth of the cave were Ahmed ben Kibitzer the Nocturnomath and Inazia Anazazi the Uggly, the Bookholm antiquarians who had told me to get lost.

They stood there at a respectful distance, trembling like deer poised to flee. I could almost smell the fear that gripped them at the sight of the Shadow King.

‘You lose, Kibitzer,’ the Uggly said in a tremulous voice.

‘You’re right,’ said Kibitzer, his voice sounding even feebler than hers. ‘I would never have believed that an Ugglian prophecy could prove so accurate.’

Then they clung to one another and fainted.

I
told Homuncolossus to remain in the cave with Hagob’s mummy, or the pair of them might fall into another swoon as soon as they recovered consciousness. They quickly came round after I’d propped them up against the wall and fanned them for a while.

‘Good heavens,’ Kibitzer gasped, ‘that’s never happened to me before. I pictured him quite differently.’

‘Me too,’ croaked Inazia. ‘I’ve never seen anything more frightful.’

I secretly wondered when the Uggly had last looked at herself in a mirror.

‘He doesn’t seem half as frightful once you’ve become accustomed to his unusual appearance,’ I whispered, although I knew perfectly well that Homuncolossus was listening, and that his phenomenal hearing would enable him to pick up every word we uttered, however softly. ‘Looked at in the right way, he’s really quite handsome.’

‘We didn’t mean to offend him,’ said Kibitzer.

‘No,’ the Uggly put in, ‘far from it. As a matter of fact, we came to do the exact opposite.’

‘So why
are
you here?’ I asked.

‘I’d like to recapitulate a little,’ Kibitzer replied, ‘if I may.’

‘The thing is,’ said the Uggly, ‘we’re sure we can shed light on certain matters you still find inexplicable.’

‘That would certainly be of interest to me,’ I said.

‘To enable you to understand what an awkward position we’re in,’ said Kibitzer, ‘I must go back to a time before you arrived in—’

‘Will this take long?’ the Shadow King demanded darkly from the cave next door.

‘I’m afraid so,’ I called back and he heaved a sigh.

‘I’ll be as brief as I can,’ said the Nocturnomath. ‘It all really started when Pfistomel Smyke attained a certain popularity in Bookholm. The city had previously been dominated by a form of - well, creative chaos, let’s say. Nothing worked properly, but it did work after a fashion and no one was particularly dissatisfied with that state of affairs. Bookholm attracted the kind of people who didn’t hanker after strong leadership, if I may put it that way. A touch of anarchy had always been more to their taste than a well-swept pavement. Then, in recent times, an alarming change occurred.

‘When he first turned up in Bookholm, Pfistomel Smyke made an extremely favourable impression on us all. By “us” I mean the literary fraternity, the inner circle, the handful of antiquaries and publishers, booksellers and artists who provided the city with its intellectual cohesion. From the first, Smyke cut a good figure at our various social functions in spite of his incredible obesity. He could waddle into a room - a literary salon, for instance - and ten minutes later all present would have formed a circle round him. He was witty, humorous, a gifted literary scholar and an antiquarian bookseller with a highly specialised stock of choice volumes, yet he behaved modestly. He lived in a tiny listed building, maintained it with loving care and presented Bookholm’s leading citizens with honey from his own beehive. He seemed to have no ambitions outside our circle. In short, he was a person of private means whom anyone in Bookholm with any self-respect would gladly have numbered among his circle of friends.’

‘Anyone!’ croaked Inazia. ‘Even us Ugglian booksellers, who don’t have any circle of friends.’

‘He was a public benefactor, too,’ said Kibitzer. ‘In every respect. He was always donating valuable books from his stock to help finance some project or other; for instance, the renovation of the municipal library or the restoration of the oldest houses in Darkman Street. Even a single one of those books was sufficient to preserve an urban district from dilapidation. Above all, though, he was a patron of the arts.’

The Uggly gave a venomous laugh.

‘One day,’ Kibitzer went on, ‘he founded the
Friends of Murkholmian Trombophone Music.
That, I think, was when conditions in Bookholm started to undergo a gradual change - not that anyone noticed it at first. The trombophone concerts became an absolute must where Bookholm’s intellectual and literary élite were concerned. Everyone wanted to attend them, but only the most important citizens were invited.’

‘You went to one of those concerts yourself,’ the Uggly reminded me, ‘so you know what they can do to a person. Please bear that in mind before you condemn us for what follows!’

I nodded. I still had a vivid recollection of that trombophone music.

‘We didn’t notice what was happening to us,’ said Kibitzer. ‘I was a little more resistant because of my three brains, but they too went soft in the end. Smyke’s psychological hold over us grew stronger with each successive concert. The music’s hypnotic power wore off after a certain length of time, but for several days we went around like remote-controlled machines and carried out the posthypnotic commands Smyke had instilled in the music. We did the most idiotic things without questioning them subsequently. I was there when we desecrated the Ugglies’ cemetery.’

‘Even I was there too,’ said the Uggly, hanging her head in shame.

‘And so was the mayor!’ Kibitzer added. ‘But those were just test runs on Smyke’s part. Before long he induced us to do some really important things for him. Successful booksellers sold him their businesses for a song. Many bequeathed him their stock and then committed suicide. Others, like us two, joined the Triadic Booksellers’ Association, whose members have to pay him fifty per cent of their takings. The city council passed nonsensical laws whose sole beneficiary was Smyke himself.’

The Uggly took up the thread. ‘The intervals between the concerts steadily diminished until we never came to our senses at all. Smyke directed the destinies of Bookholm like a conductor directing an orchestra. And then your, er . . . your friend here arrived in the city.’

She glanced towards the cave in which Homuncolossus was lurking. The groan of impatience that issued from it made her and the Nocturnomath flinch.

‘We first heard of him when he was already in Smyke’s clutches,’ Inazia went on. ‘Smyke showed us and one or two others what this young genius had written. He also initiated us into his disgraceful plan to transform him into a monster and banish him to the catacombs, so that he could rid them of Bookhunters.’

‘You knew of his plan?’ I asked in horror.

‘Not only that,’ Kibitzer replied quietly. ‘We made an important contribution to it. Listen carefully, because now comes the really shameful part of our story and we’re here to make amends. The fact is, Smyke could never have fulfilled his plan without our active assistance.’

‘You ought to add that we cooperated with pleasure,’ the Uggly put in, ‘- indeed, with fanatical enthusiasm. Our brains were so addled, so manipulated, that we considered Smyke and his paranoid ideas to be infallible. We gave him all the help he requested. Take the paper your poor friend consists of. Do you know who supplied it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘How should I?’

‘I did!’ she gasped. ‘It comes from some ancient Bookemistic tomes of which only my bookshop possesses a stock.’

The Uggly’s eyelids flickered at the sound of a faint rustle from the cave next door. She was too scared to continue, so the Nocturnomath took over.

‘And I constructed his eye mechanism,’ he said, ‘using a book on the optics of nightingaloscopes by Professor Abdul Nightingale. His eyes have diamond lenses ground by me personally. I also made a few other contributions to his body. His liver is good for a thousand years.’

‘You mean you helped to put him together?’ I asked in disgust.

‘No,’ said the Uggly, ‘we only supplied the components. We never set foot in Smyke’s secret laboratory, nor did we ever see the Shadow King completed. Until today.’

An angry growl issued from the adjacent cave. The pair of them exchanged anxious glances.

‘We’re almost done - I’ll make it quick,’ Kibitzer said apologetically. ‘Well, that was that for the moment. The Shadow King became a legend and Smyke became more and more powerful.’

‘And then you arrived in the city and jolted us out of our stupor,’ said the Uggly. She uttered the words like a curse.

‘We both recognised the handwriting of the person we’d helped to transform into a monster,’ said Kibitzer. ‘It was like awaking from a nightmare. We were in shock at first and it was a while before we could really rouse ourselves to help you. But by then it was too late.’

‘You’d already disappeared,’ the Uggly went on. ‘Smyke made no secret of what he’d done with you - he blithely told his inner circle about the Lindworm he’d consigned to the catacombs. He cherishes a special hatred for Lindworm Castle. Once he has extended his power beyond the confines of Bookholm, it will be right at the top of his list for destruction.’

‘So we took to plugging our ears with wax whenever we went to a trombophone concert,’ said Kibitzer. ‘We still belong to the Triadic Circle, but Smyke has lost his power over us. We’ve become spies and renegades.’

‘We used to be Smyke’s accomplices,’ Inazia said. ‘Now we’re traitors. That’s our story in a nutshell.’

I needed time to digest all this, but there was one thing I still failed to understand.

‘How did you know exactly when we would turn up here?’

The Uggly cleared her throat with a horrible retching sound. ‘I foretold your future the first time we met,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘I vaguely recall some fanciful remarks that might have meant anything,’ I replied truthfully.

‘
He will descend into the depths
!’ Inazia snarled. ‘
He will be banished to the realm of the Animatomes, the Living Books! He will consort with Him whom everyone knows but knows not who He is
!’

Yes, I thought, those really were the words she had uttered - a rather puzzling prophecy at the time. But that still didn’t answer my question.

‘It isn’t a gift,’ she went on, ‘it’s a curse. That prophecy was just a typical Ugglian reflex - nothing special, utterly imprecise - so I performed an oneiromantic analysis on myself. That’s one of the most accurate prognostic methods in existence, but it’s also an exceptionally painful procedure. It makes you weep blood and can drive you insane. Kibitzer had to hypnotise me, strap me to a bed of nails and sprinkle me with ox gall all night long.’

‘It was awful,’ Kibitzer said with a shudder.

‘But that combination of nightmare visions and confession under torture represents the most accurate and honest forecast of the future any Uggly can make. I foresaw your fate in every detail, down to the present moment. Kibitzer didn’t believe me either, not at first, but here we are: in the right place at the right time. Now he’s lost his bet. He owes me a signed first edition of Nightingale’s treatise on constructing submarines out of nautilus shells.’

‘It’s worth a fortune!’ sighed Kibitzer.

‘How much longer are you going to be?’ Homuncolossus bellowed.

‘Well,’ Kibitzer whispered, ‘here we are. We’ve admitted our guilt. It would be only right if the Shadow King killed us for our misdeeds, but perhaps we can atone for them by doing him a favour.’

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘He sounds pretty peeved. What have you got to offer?’