TOM Read online

  The third time, less lucky.

  He saw it fall… but only at the last moment. It had landed right next to the snaky tendrils of the broom and, before he could try to wrench it clear, been sucked away to whatever place the dust and spider-webs went to. The hoom-broom just went right on working… but Tom knew he had a problem, when it came to doing the job again. And right now it was not a bit of use to ask Old Grumptious about it. The magician was still deep in demonology books and wasn’t taking to being disturbed well. Tom had managed a few glimpses of the demonology tomes. They seemed to have a lot of pictures. Very confusingly some of the pictures looked rather like lady-cats… or humans who could be cat-girls. He’d mentioned that to the skull of Mrs Drellson. She’d laughed nastily about it, and said it would serve him and Master Hargarthius right if they got caught. Demons looked exactly like what they wanted you to see.

  Tom found that quite hard to get his head around right now, but what wasn’t hard to work out was that he’d be in trouble again if the hoom-broom wasn’t working and being used.

  There hadn’t been anything special or magical about attaching the eye. Just a bit of spit. Tom was sure cat-boy spit had to be as good — if not better— than old magician spit. So he climbed back up on the bench and got the jar down.

  The lid was tight, and took all his strength to get it to twist. How had the old magician managed that? Tom got it off loose… realized he’d forgotten to spit and turned to do so. The jar lid fell off with a clang onto the bench-top. Tom turned back hastily, to see some of the contents beginning to ooze out over the top. He grabbed them and shoved them back. They were hot and squirmed as he crammed them in. Why did newt’s eyes co-operate with an old magician, and not him?”

  He tightened down the lid and then cursed. He still needed one of the eyes… but there was one, out and damply trailing its way across the bench.

  Maybe if he hadn’t been so flustered Tom might have noticed it didn’t look like the newt’s eye that had been on the handle. He grabbed it and shoved it in the spit. And then, thinking he’d better test it, pressed it.

  The broom took off with a bristle-writhing howl of HOOOOOOOOM, and Tom found himself being dragged across the floor, and then… when the broom reached the wall, straight up it.

  It didn’t stop there, either. It was determined to clean the ceiling, even with Tom hanging there, unable to let go, as it high-power HOOOOOOMED along, turning abruptly and sending a swinging Tom whacking against the wall, before voraciously racing after a few shreds of cobweb in the corner.

  What had he done wrong? It could kill him at the speed it was working.

  Too late it occurred to him that really, he should have looked carefully. It must be that he’d made the same mistake as last time… only this time there was no Master Hargarthius to help him. He put out his feet hastily to stop himself from leaving an imprint of the side of his face in the stone of the wall. And they changed direction again, hurtling toward the floor…

  The over-powered HOOOOOOOM broom was not going to leave any spot un-cleaned, even if it splattered Tom and then sucked up his remains…

  It sucked up some tongs and narrowly missed some complex twisted glass apparatus before dragging him up to the roof again. Tom yelled for help, because being in trouble was still better than being in trouble for breaking glassware. That was Master Hargarthius’s exclusive privilege.

  It didn’t help. The magician’s tower was half cut out of the native rock, and even where it wasn’t, the walls were two feet thick. There was no reason to suspect the ceilings and floors were not much the same. The heavy, iron-bound door was closed. Anyway, it was so thick one couldn’t even hear explosions from outside.

  The raven hadn’t been in the lab when he’d got there, or followed him in, or Tom would never have tried the experiment in the first place. The demon was deep in its pot, burbling purple pickle dreams.

  He was on his own… only every ounce of his strength enabled Tom to stop the over-powered HOOOOOOOM broom from shattering an orrery that the Master fiddled with from time to time. It ripped him back to the roof, and this time it was on course for the shelf full of bottles and jars of exotic and magical supplies.

  Frantic, Tom scratched at the baleful neep’s eye.

  And was rewarded by a sudden silence. A sudden silence, punctured by Tom’s yowl of alarm as he realised that he and the now silent broom were falling off the ceiling and straight into a glass and crystal multiple retort. Only a desperate mid-air turn and flail saved the glass, and landed Tom, hard, on the flagged floor. He did at least land on his feet like a cat. He made up for it by falling onto his face like a human, because a cat has four feet to land on, and that’s more stable than two.

  Still… he was alive. The roof and walls were cleaner. And he’d found out just how to turn a neep’s eye off.

  It might even work with newt’s eyes.

  It did.

  Learning magic, even to use, thought Tom, was not for the faint-hearted. Still he was quite proud of himself. The laboratory was clean in far less time than usual, and he’d learned something. It made up a little for having to have a strange human body, and for having to work. Dogs worked. Cats did not… unless they were caught and turned into famuluses.

  Of course pride and a bit of extra free time didn’t last long with the Skull of Mrs Drellson around. He’d just settled down with his feet up on the bench for a little cat-nap, when he awoke to her dulcet screeching. How a disembodied skull could open doors was still a bit of a mystery to him. Maybe she did it by sheer force of will. She had enough of that. “You will do this, you will do that.” And right now it seemed Tom would take out the garbage, which was stinking up her kitchen.

  He set off with the pail of kitchen scraps, which were, he had to admit, quite smelly even by the standards of a magician’s residence. He’d done it often enough before. Only this time… well, the skull followed him. He was aware of it, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

  He soon realized that he should have tried harder. Distracted her, or something, because he got a stinging weal of pain across his back. “Fool boy! Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To get rid of the rubbish. Like I always do.”

  The dead orbs of a skull cannot narrow, and look at you as if you just crawled out of a piece of green cheese. The skull of Mrs Drellson did her best. The chilly tone of her sneer made up for the difficulty. “That passage leads to the second-best dungeon. Not the midden.”

  “Uh. This is where I always take the rubbish.”

  That was clearly the wrong thing to say, because he got two more of her bolts of pain. “You disgusting, boy. How dare you!”

  “But… there was lots of rubbish in there anyway.”

  “Of course there is. Don’t you know anything about the maintenance of a proper dungeon? Hmph. Probably not. Let me explain, fool. That rubbish is selectively put there to make it unpleasant and harder to escape. You do not improve the cells with any old rubbish! You’ll have to clean it all up and return it to its previous state of awfulness before old Grumptious finds out. Estethius would have had your skin peeled off over three weeks. Fancy putting it there, of all places.”

  Tom had actually thought he’d done well to find a place with other rubbish, rotting scraps and rags. “But… I didn’t know where else to put it.”

  “Hmph. You know perfectly well where the midden is. I caught you sneaking out there. Without the rubbish.”

  “You mean it’s… outside?” asked Tom

  “Where else is a midden?” asked the skull.

  Tom had no idea, but decided it was probably not clever to tell her that. “But I thought I wasn’t allowed to go there.”

  “You’re not allowed to run away. Or you’d be stupid to. But the garbage needs to go somewhere,” said the skull.

  So Tom went back to the door to outside. He was very careful to get the spell right. The skull did follow him… but not further than the doorway. “I’m bound to the
tower,” she said irritably. “But it’s just a few yards away. A big hole. Estethius blasted it.”

  Tom found it, amid the dead nettles and with a few drifts of snow still lying in the lee of the rocks. It might have been a big hole once. It wasn’t any more. But there was still room for a pail of smelly kitchen waste.

  It was strange to be outside. Strange and cold.

  And the raven was watching him from a perch on a lichen-covered broken pillar that leaned among a patch of briars. It hadn’t come out of the door with him. It could fit though the arrow-slits, Tom suspected.

  It actually didn’t say ‘Nevermore,’ which was strange enough to make Tom not waste any time out there. Besides, it was cold.

  It didn’t stop him coming out again. And again. And quite a few more times after that, hauling kitchen scraps and laboratory disasters up from the second-best dungeon, to the midden.

  It was on the last of his trips up from the second-best dungeon that Tom found heartbreak.

  Well, not so much ‘heartbreak’, as a little lower in his body. There was a smell out there he recognised, and it wasn’t the familiar smell of kitchen scraps. It was a smell that did very odd things to his head.

  Things the human side of him said were insane, but still made his tail quiver, and wave rather fast and sinuously.

  She wasn’t what anyone would have called a beautiful female cat.

  That is, not anyone but a Tom cat, and that fairly temporarily. The human side of Tom could see that. The cat side wasn’t interested in logic.

  Unfortunately… or maybe fortunately, she wasn’t in the least interested in Tom. The feral she-cat had been hungry enough to be interested in kitchen scraps, perhaps. But not in humans. Not even human boys with a cat’s tail. They scared her, and she ran a lot faster on four legs than he did on two.

  Tom had been becoming somewhat resigned to being trapped in this clumsy human body, a body that wouldn’t have considered those scraps as edible or worth looking at. Not that he hadn’t still been thinking about getting to be a cat again one day. But it had lost its urgency.

  This made it all fresh again.

  Which, inevitably, led him into all sorts of trouble.

  “A Princess,” said the Duchess, loftily, “Is expected to behave with a certain amount of decorum. And, Zoryanthus help us, with discretion!” she hissed out that last word. “And,” and this sounded as if it were wrung out of her, “With a common page-boy, Alamaya! It’s your grandmother’s blood. It didn’t come from our side of the family. I’m… I’m mortified.”

  I wish you were, thought Alamaya. He was cute. But she didn’t say it. “It wasn’t anything serious, just…”

  “It’s the rumors you will start, Princess. A future queen needs to behave like a Corvin!”

  Alamaya had to admit that she felt no particular pride in being the last heir of the ruling dynasty, Corvin. She knew the Corvins were cursed, and that she’d die, after they married her off, when she had given birth to the next doomed Corvin. It wasn’t much to look forward to, let alone be proud of. She braced herself for a long, long lecture. She’d have turned herself into a green frog to avoid it. And the page-boy too. Hmm. That had possibilities… The frog spell wouldn’t work on herself, but maybe…

  Inside the security of the magical cone of silence Melania did not bother to hide her disdain. “If anything the Borbungs seem a more foolish house than the Corvins. They do not seem aware just how many mages report to us.”

  “It’s only the latest two generations of Corvins that seem to have lost the ability to command. Remember, that as foretold, the Raven took down the greatest mage of the age, Estethius. And, cursed as they are, they are a useful foil.”

  “And in the process of destroying Estethius, King Uther was consumed, lost to his people and his kingdom,” said Melania, dourly. “And therewith their virtue, courage and strength.”

  “Naturally. Destroying Estethius was not without cost.”

  CHAPTER 8

  USE ONLY AS DIRECTED!

  It’s got a big evil long beak, and a glittering eye. That’s not going to stop me killing that Zoryanthys bedamned bird, as soon as I get out of this mess, thought the warty toad sitting in front of the mirror in a puddle of mildly toxic slime, amid the flasks, beakers and retorts on Master Hargarthius’s main work-bench.

  The now-toad’s name was… Tom.

  Tom the toxic-skinned toad was of the opinion, now, that being a human and a magician’s famulus wasn’t actually the worst thing that could happen to a cat.

  Quite recently, about an hour ago, he had not had that opinion. That, he had to admit had a lot to do with the mess he was in. Maybe more than that old tatty black feather-duster of a bird who was sitting and looking him with one unblinking eye from its perch on the top of the bust of Athena.

  As a cat Tom had known that rules were for people and other lesser creatures. This was of course still true, but, well perhaps this time as an ugly-clumsy human had changed that. It hadn’t changed his tail, which had done most of his thinking in this situation.

  It had been that feral she-cat at the midden…

  He’d wanted her so badly. Of course the cat had not been very impressed with an ugly clumping human. Even if he’d had fish, she would not have found him interesting in the way he wanted her to find him interesting.

  Which had led him here, to this puddle of toxic slime and into all sorts of trouble, most of which could only get much, much worse.

  “Cats have more fun than humans,” he’d said to the raven — because there was no-one else to talk to in the tedious work of cleaning up after the wizard’s latest messy venture into the arcane. It was either the arcane or possibly supper, or possibly both. He hoped that was egg spilled on the counter. He’d been banished from the laboratory for this session, something that happened occasionally. The wizard considered it punishment. Tom wasn’t sure it was. “There are at least girl-cats around. I haven’t even met an attractive human, and won’t, with Old Grumptious about.”

  The raven tilted its head at him, and lifted its tail over the face of Athena, and said “Nevermore.”

  “I wish,” scowled Tom. “You always say that. But you always produce more.” He had put several pages of the Weekly Illuminati Age and Advertiser under the bust that was the raven’s favorite perch, but the tokens tended to land on Athena’s d�colletage or, like this one, hang up on her nose. It was the little cleaning job Tom resented most. Still, the raven was inclined to vicious pecks and sneak attacks, so he said it quite quietly.

  “It’s all very well for you,” he said taking a rag from the bucket and wiping Athena’s nose. “You’ve got no interest in the fairer sex.”

  “Nevermore,” said the raven, and slashed his beak at Athena’s nose, and Tom’s hand, which was hastily withdrawn.

  It was always a bit of a limited two-way conversation with the raven. “She was gorgeous. Well, attractive. I wish I could be a cat again. But Old Grumptious has barely taught me any magic, let alone the transformational stuff.”

  At which point the raven fluffed up its feathers and spread its wings and hopped over to the shelf above the workbench Tom was wiping down, landed clumsily on a large jar which rocked enough for Tom to raise his hands to catch. “KaaaaaRK!” it said, which was a change from ‘Nevermore.’ So then it said: “Nevermore,” and pointed its long heavy black beak at the jar’s label.

  That was enough to make Tom read it. Reading was one of the few advantages Tom had found to not being a cat.

  The jar — brown glass with a big stopper — had a large, florid label, making it look just like most of the other exotic supplies in the place, so Tom had never bothered to read it, just dusted carefully around it. He saved his reading skills and efforts for the Weekly Illuminati Age and Advertiser, and for the grimoires, whenever he could find one that wasn’t locked.

  This jar label read, in ornate writing:

  Ye Wizard’s Favorite:

  Doctor Mirabellus’s Orig
inal Ontogenetic Reflux liquid.

  ‘Never be short of those essential ingredients again! Eye of newt or wing of bat, fresh to the cauldron and on hand, just at your fingertips.

  Suppliers to Royalty’

  And on the bottom, beneath the picture of cauldron bubbling with suitable ingredients:

  ‘Use only as directed by ye professional Thaumaturge. Do not exceed the recommended dosage. See reverse label for application instructions.’

  So Tom did, but not before going to one of the few books he’d stashed safely where old Grumptious would never find it, with the soap, scrubbing brush, and hand-towel. It was Wolbster’s Dictionary of Magical and other Terms, and of great value to an apprentice and one-time cat who was learning to read. He looked up ‘Ontogenetic’ and got led into ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, which meant looking those words up too. He didn’t see quite how regressing a human could take the person to the stage of being something more advanced like a cat, but he went back to read the label on the back of the jar.

  ‘Administer the requisite dose to ye organism to be refluxed. When ye correct stage of ontogenesis —according to ye count of seconds is reached, say ye words ‘Sator-Hathaway-Yawahtah-Rotas three times while rotating ye organism counter-clockwise, and apply a second dose of the liquid, externally. It will then develop from there along ye correct evolutionary branch with the astonishing rapidity only achieved by Doctor Mirabellus’s Original Thaumaturgials. Accept no substitutes!

  And beneath that was a list of typical transformative dosages and times.

  Spider to porriwiggle - ¼ drop, 19 seconds

  Toad to usable famulus - three drops, 7 seconds.*

  Mouse to newt - one drop, 9 seconds

  Cat to toad - nine drops, 22 seconds