Grailblazers. Part 20

'You tried the kitchens?'

'Yes, and . . .'

'You stopped for a sandwich.'

Turquine blushed. 'I was starving, Bedders. It wasn't like this in the old days. There were always pages and squires and things you could send down to the baker's while you waited for the dragon to come out. I don't hold with progress, personally.'

'It's a bit overrated, certainly,' Bedevere replied. 'Now then, left here, and we should be...'

They stopped. The Queen was standing in the doorway, and behind her were about seventy heavily-armed clerks.

'h.e.l.lo, boys,' she said.

Bedevere blinked. 'How the h.e.l.l did you get here?' he said.

'Simple,' the Queen replied, 'I used the lift. Grab them, somebody.'

'Well,' said Turquine, 'this is extremely jolly, isn't it? Right, who's going to be first?'

There was something about his tone of voice which the clerks seemed to find quite remarkably eloquent. They just stood there, in fact, listening to him, as if he were Maria Callas.

The Queen made a little clicking noise with her teeth, rather like someone loading a rifle. 'Come on, boys,' she purred. 'Let's not be all tentative about this. Grab them.'

That was even more eloquent; as if Maria Callas had been elbowed out of the way by Elizabeth Schwartzkopf and Joan Sutherland. The clerks shuffled forward in an unhurried but determined phalanx, while Turquine reached behind him and, as if by magic,* wrapped his hand round thirty inches of scaffolding pipe. It made a soft, heavy sound as he patted it against the palm of his left hand.

'Excuse me,' said Bedevere.

n.o.body was paying the slightest attention. One does one's best to take the heat out of the situation, and one might as well have stayed in bed. He frowned, and then pulled something out of his pocket.

'Excuse me,' he repeated, and this time everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at him. It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. And, shortly afterwards, they did.

'It's all right,' Bedevere went on, displaying a grenade prominently in his left hand. A rather superior example, admittedly; if Faberge had ever made grenades, they would have looked like this one. 'So long as I don't let go of this lever thing,' he said, trying to sound extremely reasonable, 'it won't go off. Now...'

Turquine nudged him so hard that he nearly dropped the bomb, and whispered, 'Where in G.o.d's name did you get that from, Bedders?'

Bedevere turned to him and smiled gently. 'You gave it to me, Turkey. From that big chest you broke open, remember? Now then...'

Turquine's hand flew to his pockets, which clinked faintly. 'Mine aren't,' he said. 'Mine are all diamonds and sapphires and...'

'Really?' Bedevere clicked his tongue. 'You always did have rather a limited imagination, though.' He turned back to the clerks, just in time to stop them drifting away.

*As if? Who are we trying to fool?

By a quirk of magic and genetics, all the first-born mates in Turquine's family had the knack of being able to put their hands on heavy blunt objects suitable for use as weapons whenever they needed to. Which probably explains why so many of them became warriors, and so few of them went into catering, stockbroking or graphic design., 'Now then,' he said, 'playtime's over, so if you all pay attention we can get this all sorted out and then we can get on with what we're supposed to be doing instead of playing at cowboys and Indians. Happy?'

Happy probably wasn't the word Flaubert would have chosen, but at least he had the audience's attention. He held up his hand - his other hand - and cleared his throat.

'Gather round now, please,' he said. 'Thank you. Right, first things first. This is indeed a real hand grenade, which I made out of a diamond about ten minutes ago, with the help of . . .' he dipped his right hand in his inside pocket and pulled out the leather-bound book. 'This. The Personal Organiser of Wisdom. Note the tiny gold clasp; made, of course, from Gold 337; hence the transformation from a decorative but useless form of carbon to a highly practical firework. Neat, yes?'

The clerks shuffled their feet. Ifit's possible to be scared out of your wits and ever so slightly bored at the same time, they were.

'Second,' Bedevere went on, 'we mean you no harm, honestly. All we want is this little notebook thing. It's not for us, it's for a friend. I know it'll mean removing a minute quant.i.ty of Gold 337 from Atlantis, and yes, that'll mean a slight wobble in the earth's axis. So what? By my calculations, it'll mean a small contraction in the orbit pattern, and we won'thave to botherwith leap-year anymore, and that'll-'

'Hey,' Turquine interrupted, 'it so happens I was born in a leap-year.'

Bedevere turned to him irritably. 'So what?' he said.

'So I'm still four hundred and sixteen,' Turquine replied. 'Just thought you might be interested, that's all.'

Bedevere nodded, and turned round again. 'Be that,' he said, 'as it may. If we leave, it'll be no skin off your noses and you can get back to fleecing the greedy and making money, we can press on with our job, n.o.body gets hurt, big anticlimax but really the best solution in the circ.u.mstances. If you try and stop us leaving, we'll throw this bomb at you. Anybody here feeling lucky?'

n.o.body, apparently. Bedevere nodded, and pointed to the Queen. 'Right,' he said. 'To make things easy, you lead the way.'

The Queen gave him a look you could have put on dandelions and started to walk. She didn't get very far.

With a roar like the sound of a dinosaur having a filling done, the Graf von Weinacht appeared in the corridor behind them.

'Oh drat,' Bedevere sighed. He released the handle of the grenade, counted to three, shouted 'Catch!', and tossed the grenade at the Graf, who caught it one-handed and popped it in his sack. A moment later there was a soft, distant thump.

Followed, shortly afterwards, by a louder, nearer thump as Turquine wiped the smile off his face with the scaffolding pipe and bolted, followed closely by Bedevere, the Queen arid the clerks.

For the record, Klaus von Weinacht woke up about ten minutes later, looked at the footprints all over his cape and the scorched hole in the side of his sack, and decided to call it a day. He produced a fireplace, climbed up it and vanished. When, many hours later, the Queen went to bed, she found on her bedside chair a large stocking filled with scorpions and a card with 'Happy' crossed out and replaced with 'Really miserable'; both of which she placed in the waste-disposal system.

'I liked him,' Turquine said as they ran. 'No mucking about, straight to the point. If he had better reflexes he'd be quite handy.'

Bedevere had no breath with which to reply, which was probably just as well. They were in another corridor; but this one was carpeted and there were doors with frosted gla.s.s windows in them leading off it at regular intervals. In other words, they were back Topside again.

'Let's try this one,' Turquine suggested.

Bedevere, who could run no further in any case, nodded, and they leant heavily on the door and fell into a small office.

If they'd had time they would have seen the writing on the window, which said: COMPLAINTS.

The Atlantean financial services industry prides itself on the fact that it has never yet received a complaint from one of its clients. There are three reasons for this: 1. All Lyonesse Group financial packages are tailored to meet your exact requirements by a team of dedicated experts with more than two thousand years of experience in all forms of monetary planning behind them.

2. The Lyonesse Group investment management team continually monitors all investment and insurance portfolios on behalf of their clients and advise immediately when a change in investment strategy is desirable.

3. Under the doormat in the Complaints Department there's this trapdoor thing that leads to a soundproof dungeon.

'Turkey.'

'Yes?'

'It was you who said Let's try this one, wasn't it?'

'Yes., 'Fine. I was worried there for a moment that I was losing my grip.'

'No, it was me.'

'Fine.'

A rat hesitated in the doorway of its hole, lifted itself on to its back paws, and sniffed. Something didn't smell right.

With a flick of his tail he retreated, demonstrating that animals are far more sensitive to atmosphere than human beings. If he had been so foolish as to go much further, there can be little doubt that Turquine would have caught him and eaten him.

'I'm famished, Bedders,' he said for the seven hundredth time. 'I mean, prison's one thing, you can't really squeal when you land up in a dungeon, it's all part of the game. They capture you, Dad comes up with the ransom, you go home, finish. But they're supposed to feed you while you're here. It's in some convention or other.'

Bedevere stirred uneasily. He had tried to keep his friend off the subject of why they were there, for fear it might upset him.

'Turkey,' he said quietly, 'I don't think you quite realise what's going on. I don't think this is the sort of dungeon you're meant to get out of.'

Turquine laughed. 'Don't be an a.s.s, Bedders,' he replied. 'There's no such thing as a dungeon you're meant to get out of. That's the whole point about dungeons. They're containers for the thing contained, like shoe boxes.'

'Up to a point,' Bedevere replied, staring up at where the roof should be but seeing only darkness. 'Only, with your . . . your conventional dungeon, you're only kept there for a limited time - you know, till the ransom's paid or until you've served your time or whatever. Somehow I don't think this is one of those.'

'Why not?'

'No door,' Bedevere replied. 'The only way in is through that trapdoor thing we fell through. I think you more, sort of, stay here.'

Turquine shuffled about on the straw. 'Surely not,' he said. 'I mean, don't take any notice of there not being a dour. They don't seem to hold with doors in this place. Reminds me of an office I delivered a couple of pizzas to once, there was just this sort of part.i.tion thing and-'

'No, hold on a moment,' Bedevere interrupted. 'You see, I'm basing my theory on all the, er, skeletons.'

'Skeletons?'

By way of reply, Bedevere rattled together a couple of tibias. 'I don't think they were on diets, Turkey. I think n.o.body fed them. Not for ages and ages.'

'Oh.'

'In fact,' Bedevere went on (and as he spoke, he had the feeling that if he was trying not to alarm his friend unduly, he had probably gone about this the wrong way), 'not at all. Do you follow?'

'Sort of,' Turquine replied. 'Bit unsporting, that, don't you think?'

'Absolutely.'

'Not on, really.'

'Yes.'

Turquine found one of the skeletons, and amused himself by pretending to be a ventriloquist; something that Bedevere found somewhat irritating. Still, he said to himself, if it takes his mind off things it's all right by me. Turquine's mind, as he knew from long experience, was a bit like nuclear war; when he got an idea into it, things were often very noisy and unpleasant for a while, but it was soon over. He lay on his back and tried to think of something clever.

A human pyramid to reach the trapdoor? No, not enough manpower.

Magic, perhaps? He felt in his pocket for the Personal Organiser, but the gold clasp wasn't even warm. No magic down here that he could detect, or if there was, it wasn't compatible. Probably the place was insulated, like the registered office.

He was just weighing up the possibility of using some of the bones to build a makes.h.i.+ft ladder when Turquine's ventriloquist's dummy started to laugh hysterically. Better put a stop to that straight away, he thought, or else the poor chap'll be right off his trolley in no time, which won't help matters.

'All right, Turkey,' he said, as gently as he could, 'Pack that in, will you? It's starting to get on my-'

'Um.) 'Turkey?'

'Bedders.' There was a note in Turquine's voice that Bedevere had never heard before, in all the years they'd known each other. Fear. Say what you liked about old Turkey, he never seemed to get the wind up. If you asked him what the word fear meant, he'd probably think for a bit and say it was the German for four.

'Turkey?'

'Um, could you come over here and ask this, er, lady to stop talking? She won't listen to me, and...'

That's it, said Bedevere to himself, the poor idiot's finally flipped. My fault for letting him play with the thing in the first place.

'Now don't be silly, Turkey,' he said, edging over across the straw on his hands and knees. 'You know it's you doing the voice and not the skull at all, so just-'

There was another peal of laughter, and Bedevere winced. Laughter like that meant only one thing. And then something occurred to him.

Turquine was talking to the skull in his own voice, asking it - begging it, even - to shut up. And the skull was still laughing. Either Turkey was a d.a.m.n sight better at ventriloquism than he thought (and he wasn't; there's no 'g' in 'bottle') or else it actually was the skull talking . . .

'Turkey,' he shouted, 'pack it in, you hear me?'

'Leave him alone.'

Silence. The only sound in the echoing dungeon was that of the rat banging the rathole door and jamming a piece of coal against it.

'Sorry?'

'I said leave the poor boy alone, you big bully.'

'Go and pick on someone your own size.'

Great, thought Bedevere, absolutely spiffing. Now I've gone round the bend too. If ever I get out of here, I'm going to kick young Snotty's a.r.s.e all the way from here to Benwick.

'Excuse me,' he said.

'Yes?'

'Who am I talking to, please?'

There was more of the laughter, and Bedevere found that he was getting a bit tired of it. He coughed meaningfully.

'Don't you get on your high horse with me, young man. I'm old enough to be your grandmother.'

'Actually,' Bedevere couldn't resist saying, 'I doubt that, rather.'

'Don't you answer me back.'

'Sorry,' Bedevere said, 'but I do happen to be well over fifteen hundred years old.'

There was a click, like rolling dice or - but it didn't do to think too hard about it - a skull's jaw falling open.

'Don't you try being funny with me, young man, because-'