Страница 25 из 70
‘For Help topics,’ the accountant said in a flat, droning voice, ‘select the appropriate mirror or press F1.’
‘Oh right,’ wailed the little wooden face, expressing exasperation and despair by waggling its head from side to side in the other direction. ‘You tell me how, with no mouse and no keyboard.’
‘For Help topics, select the appropriate mirror or press F1.’
‘Oh no, I haven’t got time for this,’ the little wooden face snarled. ‘No, wait, all right, let’s try something. Execute voice prompt.’
The accountant didn’t move. ‘To execute voice prompt, select the appropriate mirror or press F9.’
The face waggled so furiously that its feather nearly came loose. ‘Yes, but how?’ it demanded. ‘Oh go on, give me a break.’
‘Bad command or file name.’
‘All right, all right.’ The face leaned over sharply to the right to convey Concentration.
‘Let’s start with the obvious. Select appropriate mirror for voice prompt.’
The accountant’s lip curled half a millimetre before it replied. ‘Error,’ it intoned. ‘Path not found.’
‘You lousy—’ The face twisted round through 180 degrees, a manoeuvre that would have snapped a human spine; then it swivelled back. ‘They’re coming,’ it hissed. ‘The Baron and his creepy friend. Come on, you’ve got to… Oh, exit Mirrors.’
The face disappeared with a plop! and the surface of the water slowly filled with more ripples; first one way, then the other, like the tides of the oceans of a tiny flat planet. The expression on the accountant’s face softened into something approximating to a smile, while a tiny spider, dangling from the end of a long gossamer thread, dropped into his ear.
More so than the frog, the human itched.
Also, Fang muttered to himself as he stared balefully at his reflection in a puddle, it looked silly. There were of course times, he admitted to himself, when any self-respecting animal found it useful to stand on his hind legs; pushing open a door, or reaching things dangling from the lower branches of trees. But a species that spent its entire life reared up on its back paws was a gimmick, pure and simple, as contemptible as the circular teabag — some marketing executive somewhere deciding that since it hadn’t been done yet, it was probably worth a try. It’d be bad enough if he were some naturally dim-witted, demoralised kind of creature, such as a bird or a fish; but for a wolf of all creatures to be violently and unexpectedly sewn up in a monkey suit and condemned to waddle about on half the proper number of feet was nearly unbearable. Although he knew it wouldn’t work, he had a terrible desire to jump in the puddle and roll around just to see if the Human would wash off.
So: priority number one, get rid of it. And to do that, all he had to do was find a witch.
Hah!
It was typical, Fang reflected as he trudged sullenly and bipedally along the dusty road. Under normal circumstances, you could hardly move for witches in this neck of the woods. Shake any tree, and a witch’d fall out. Spit, and a witch’d get wet. It was that easy. Now, when he was actively looking for one, were there any? Were there hell as like.
Then, as he turned a bend in the road and found himself facing a spindly, rather run-down-looking tower that slouched among the trees like a spaceship playing at being an ostrich, the vestiges of his lupine sense of smell detected a faint but unmistakable flavour on the breeze. A rich, musty, unpleasant smell; stale cooking fat, unwashed human, iodine, cat-pee, onions and something from the cheaper end of the Giorgio Armani range of fragrances, all mixed together to produce something that, in concentrated form, was eminently suitable for use in trench warfare. Witch.
Fang breathed in deeply, then sneezed. Another definite black mark against human bodies was their truly awful sense of smell; to get any useful data at all, you had to breathe in enough air to float a large balloon.
The witch was up in the tower; and the tower, needless to say, was locked. Craning his neck, Fang looked up to see if there were any accessible windows, conveniently placed drainpipes, fire escapes, even (let’s not forget the blindingly obvious) an open door, anything he could use to effect an entrance. Nothing doing; the lowest window was five storeys up and the heavy oak shutters were resolutely shut. Ah well, Fang told himself, there’s plenty of witches but I’ve only got one neck. He shook his head sadly and was about to trudge on when something fell down the side of his tower and hung level with his armpits. A rope.
Now that was more like it; except, why would any sane witch throw down a rope when she could quite easily come down and unlock the front door? Laziness? A macabre sense of humour? He glanced up and saw that the rope was hanging from the very topmost window; it would be a dreadfully vertiginous ascent, and he wasn’t absolutely sure that as a human he knew how to climb ropes. Also, there was something peculiar about the rope itself. Instead of the customary coarse hemp fibres it appeared to be made out of some kind of very fine sandy-yellow thread. Or hair, even.
A rope made out of hair; well, witches are a fu
Prudence dictated that until he saw evidence to the contrary he should assume that any non-wolf he met was more likely to be an enemy than a friend. Just out of curiosity, however, he reached out a paw and gave the rope a sedate little tug.
‘Ouch!’
The voice came from far up above, and it didn’t sound in the least like any witch that Fang had encountered before. It was young and girlish and silvery, so presumably its owner was likely to be about as much use to him as a cardboard car-jack. What he wanted was something ancient and wrinkled and extra crone, not some long-haired kid.
‘Sorry,’ he yelled back.
The rope started to climb the wall; obviously its owner didn’t trust him not to yank it again. He looked up to watch it go, and was thus in an ideal position to observe the contents of the porcelain vessel that a pair of unseen hands tipped out of the window as they sailed down and landed on his head. Wet, and didn’t smell very nice. Eau de toilette, in a sense. He closed his eyes, swore, and started to walk away. An apple missed him by inches as he turned, closely followed by an old shoe and a coffee-mug. Taken together, they appeared to constitute hint.
‘All right, already,’ he shouted, as the hint was reinforced by a half-brick and a week-old portion of macaroni cheese, ‘I’m going…’
‘Help!’
The second voice froze him in his tracks; fortunately, as it turned out, because whoever it was who threw the old saucepan that narrowly missed him in front had obviously included a nicely calculated degree of forward allowance in the throw, and if he’d still been moving he’d have been clobbered silly.
‘Help! Help!’
Now that, Fang gri