Errata: Tenth Episode - Trouble at the Top

The lift doors separated like a split peach and a lanky pine puppet gangled into the room, all twine and gleaming ball-joints. Flocculent mist-chunks straggled from its fleshless angles as it rattlebagged down the First Carpet towards the Governor.

The windows on the top floor of City Hall were blacked-out and triple-glazed, psionic white noise piped into the gaps between panes to shut out snoopers. The puppet's head jerked starboard than rolled round to port, taking in décor elaborate as a bucket; the walls were slathered in thick, tough coats of cream emulsion, the floor and ceiling unadorned concrete. At the far end of the room, past tree trunk columns, the carpet petered out before a glugging glass tank set into the wall.

The Governor's Aide eyed the interloper with languorous disdain, a plump cheroot hanging from her slack dry lips.

'State your business,' she called, bare walls echoey as a squash court, and a brace of ceiling-mounted lasers centred on the puppet like bazooka mikes.

The puppet halted, trilled its articulated digits like riverweed. Its hollow skull crackled with static.

'Good morrow, Governor!' The fuzzed salutation came from a cheap speaker inside the dummy's head. 'I trust you are well, very well, or indeed glowing with unprecedented good health!'

Blaze motes tuliped round the nose of a laser. A beam lanced from the nexus, slicing the puppet's right arm from its shoulder. Whiffy smoke licked from the dark stump, curling into bright glyphs as it rose.

The Aide toked then respoke: 'State your business.'

'Ha!' The puppet writhed with delight. 'Well met, sirrah! I'm a Courtesy Golem, courtesy of the Kismet-Shaman W.' It dealt her a clumsy salute with its remaining arm, mouth carved in a square-toothed perma-grin.

'He couldn't come his self?'

'Him? Here?' The golem's head let out a joke shop chuckle. 'You jest, of course, m'lady. When the fish are called for conference with the gulls do they flop gasping onto land themselves or send a deputation of beakproof crabs? Mr W's current location remains spectacularly adequate for his purposes, thanking you kindly. Thus I arrive in his stead, dead as a signpost.'

The Aide scratched at the loose folds of skin around her neck. She had the drab, melted look of a serial crash-dieter.

'We led to understand he comes his self.'

'Mr W has an important message for you, certainly, I being its chosen format. You can listen or by all means blast me to pieces with those rather natty ceiling lasers. I've the mere illusion of sentience and really don't mind.'

'Why don't he come his self?'

'Mr W wishes to retain portions of his face in case he decides upon an open-casket funeral. He felt that arriving at a building so laden with anti-shamanic countermeasures and bureaucratic animosity might jeopardise that dream.'

The Aide sighed. 'We led to understand he comes his self.'

'Well.' The golem let its polished head loll. 'Shall I just give you the message? Hmm?'

'What he wants to tell the Governor?' Behind her, emerald sludge shifted underlit in the Governor's viewing tank, bubbles rising like jellied suns.

'Ahem.' The golem raised a fist to its faux-mouth and feigned clearing its non-existent throat. 'Noble people¦' It jinked its head to the side conspiratorially. 'Oh, by the by,' whispering through a happy wooden rictus, 'this is all in the standard kis-sham vernacular. Tad circumlocutionary in parts, but well, that's tradition for you. Nothing beats shackles when it comes to keeping one's ankles warm.' Its position reset. 'Noble people, Mr Governor,' the viewing tank gubbled in acknowledgement, 'prophecy is a crap shoot. Yet, as with a hedge maze, a casino's uncertainties exist only up close. Step back, and the formula is brow-slappingly basic ' the House always wins.' The puppet took a lurching bow, its single arm swept across its chest. 'My name is W, and I have range.

'We're all agreed on the long game, here ' the Planes will coalesce and collapse, Underspace geysering through fissures and quenching order until all existence winds up a sort of speckled morass. In Grand Plan speak, Errata is fucked. You need no sage to tell you this, yet heed my mouth ' though feasts transmute to faeces we don't dine direct from an open sewer. In the short and medium term there are many ways; the path has trapdoors, trick walls.

'There is a one and then a one, a man doubled. To himself, he is a stranger, but be warned ' there is a pebble in this pie slice which may yet snap the golden tooth from God's crooked grin. Mr Governor, by your dreams you have woven us a cosy hairshirt, a garment against bleak entropy, this I grant you, but I fear a loose strand still dangles, aching to be tugged. Install a self-destruct button next to your bed, greet each morning drinking in its delicious vertigo ' don't get me wrong, I relish the oblivion impulse as much as the next mystic, but you have to draw back from the brink to enjoy it.

'I have met this double-man, though at the time I did not ken his final purpose. Now I see he is the staggering drunk who, blind to his own apocalyptic agency, sits fat-arsed on the dynamite plunger. He seeks escape, but cannot espy the door directly behind his eyes. Clueless, this man tracks doom's spoor, fancying he smells fresh doughnuts. If fractals align he may unpick Errata within the week ' you'd be well-advised to focus your considerable resources on stopping him.'

The Governor's Aide blinked. 'You said your piece?'

The golem sagged out of character. 'Hah, humm¦ Oh. Yes, I think that's your lot. Mr W says you've his cell number if you n-' And it vaporised in a bright asterisk of converging beams.

The Aide puffed on her cheroot as golem ash settled in a fine, hot dust. 'What you thinking, Mr Governor?'

The slime vat potched and gurgled.

The Aide nodded. 'If we find W, we shake him down for specific name this guy. No more kis-sham mumbo jumbo. But he must expect we going try that. Maybe as well it's time we call up Waltz?'

The slime held static. A single bubble belched from the tank's gunked floor.

'Yessir. You got it sir. I roll out orders to Council right way sir.'

She marched to the elevator through the puppet's atomised remains, tracking black prints into the carpet.

* * *

Supping gravy from a novelty coconut, Brahmini Jones felt strangely equanimous as Underspace scalpeled and a satchel-toting delivery troll stepped from the incision. Heat wafted from the rapidly remelding gash as the creature towelled off glittery amniotic juices then glanced at its delivery roster.

'This is the moment I've been waiting for, don't you know?' Jones lilted dryly. He took a tug on a tortuous fuchsia straw, cool brown fluid fluming through its curlicues then bursting against the moist slab of his tongue. Around him the treehouse had returned to humid normality, all mosquito traces vanished save a vague hexagonal pattern tessellating through the air like a phantom jigsaw.

The troll blinked at him with eyes like puncture wounds, its nose a huge warted cudgel shaded aquamarine through to yellow.

'Harumph,' Jones enunciated. 'Well, yes ' predictable as tears before bedtime after a paraffin fight. My moment of triumph and no one here to see it but a member of the working class.'

The troll blinked again. 'Oh wow. Did you ever get that thing where you're looking at someone and they're talking and suddenly it's like you can remember it all happening before?'

'Déjà vu?'

'No, it's like¦' He pushed back his peaked blue cap and scratched the crop of cysts on his scalp. 'You know it's like a memory, only it's not a memory, it's happening right now?'

'Yes. You mean déjà vu. You're talking about déjà vu.'

The troll blinked again. 'No, it's like¦ that thing where you're looking at someone and they're talking and suddenly it's like you can remember it all happening before.'

'Déjà vu?'

The troll clasped a spindle-fingered hand to his brow, staggered on podgy legs. 'Jenkins on a billy bike. Something in the air ain't right.' He glanced around. 'What's with the honeycomb meshwork? You ain't got a membrane leak, have you? When's the last time you got this place checked?'

Jones frowned until his vision narrowed. He thumped the coconut back into its holder, a waxwork monkey paw fused with the corner of the escritoire.

'Are you a safety professional?'

'No sir, I ain't.'

'Then shut the piss up and hand over my parcel.' He eyed the creature's leather satchel. 'That is what you're here for, isn't it? Special delivery for Brahmini Jones? Tell me it is or I shall have to express my disappointment through the medium of fists.'

The troll glanced at the roster, a spiral-bound notepad wrinkled with travel damp. Jones tumblered his eyes from asphalt grey to an especially piercing pair of baby blues.

'Yeah, that's right ' courtesy of Columpton and Columpton Legal Solutions. If you'd just like to sign and date,' the creature whipped out a pastel pink release docket, 'here, here and print name here.'

Brahmini snatched the document with a taloned hand and slammed it down against his writing desk. 'When I am king all servile drudges will swing from the gallows on nooses of red tape.' Plucking a peacock quill from the inkwell he signed in shining black flourishes. 'There.' He thrust the docket back at the delivery troll. 'Searingly adequate, I trust?'

The troll accepted the docket, examined Jones' handiwork. 'Yeppers.' Nodding, he unhasped his satchel. Brahmini Jones felt his anticipation rise and turn time to a slow, treacled brilliance as the troll's grubby fingers delved into the bag and retrieved a small, brown paper parcel, perfectly cuboid, perfect. He did not reach, allowed the troll to place it on the polished teak surface of his desk.

'If this,' he said, 'turns out to be a block of Gorgonzola, so help me God I'll flay the hide from every kitten in the known universe.' He shot a glance at the delivery troll. 'You can bugger off now.'

'I want to see what's in it.'

'Of course you do,' Brahmini snapped. 'Hide a hen under a dishcloth and you'd doubtless be enthralled for weeks. Your attention's no more than an amorous mongrel looking for ankles to hump. Do you have the even slightest inkling of what this unassuming package portends?'

The delivery troll scratched one of his nasal boils. 'Is it a present?'

'A present? A present? What is this game we're playing now? Did I ask you to start guessing?'

'A new mug?'

'No it is not a new mug.'

'A snowglobe?'

'Attempt anything approximating language in the next five minutes and I shall rip out your spine.'

The troll blinked.

'Better,' said Jones. 'This parcel contains neither a new mug nor a snowglobe. This parcel,' he slid the talon of his right index finger behind a crease in the paper, 'is victory.' He made a single upward stroke and brown paper sloughed loose like onion skin.

On the escritoire, revealed, denuded, was a small grey box.

The troll slumped a little.

'Yes, yes,' Jones sneered, 'just because it's not a dancing kangaroo that dispenses cough sweets your shrivelled fig of a brain has lost interest. Do you really think they make the best stuff attractive to idiots?' He reached forward, cupped the cube in trembling palms. 'Heh heh. If the sloppy nincompoops at the Tatami Club could see me now. Not a thimbleful of class between the whole bloody shower of 'em. Chairman kicked off the annual club orgy crowing "Gentlemen, start your engines! then spent the whole evening making revving noises. It's enough to put a chap off his stroke. No surprise that its lowly patrons cocked a snook at m' half-breed incandescence. One night I roared I'd see the whole of Errata smashed to atoms, them included. Then up steps old Channeler Monro, jowls like custard and his laughs all throaty, says he's got a client who'd fancy taking me up on that proposition, a little wager, like.

'So naturally having smashed down a few glasses of firewater I said do tell, and the coot's skin peeled off at the mouth like a chrysalis while he dialled up the Outer Circles. A blast of freezing flame, dark chords and sinners' groans like background noise at a swanky restaurant ' you know the drill. Finally the metamorphosis was complete and I found myself snout to snout with a Painsmith called Parish. Skull flat as an axe blade and the plump, scaly body of a dragon pup ' not much to look at, all told, but the chap had a modicum of chutzpah so I heard him out.

'Transpired he'd been eavesdropping on my tirade and, being no fan of Errata for reasons I didn't care to explore he suggested that we, being sporting gents, make a game of the endeavour. It was his ardently held belief that he, a mere Painsmith with all the agency of a grocer's cat, could contrive to destroy Errata faster than I. Naturally I snorted booze out my nostrils. He countered: "Not up to the challenge, my good fellow? Whichever of us prevail, the net result is this dire bolthole erased. Surely worth a little gamble? And of course for all my scepticism I couldn't fault his logic. So I inquired as to his terms.

'He responded: "We both have that which the other wants. You, sir, are repulsed by your humanity ' it hangs from you like a grandmother's unwelcome beard. Contrariwise, I grow weary of Hell ' nice place to visit, but the Outer Circles have been ruined by tourism. I fancy being able to shift between Planes without paying through the nose to some dashed stupid Channeler who sticks me in, and he glanced down in disgust at his reptilian paunch, "this shitty approximation of a daemonic body every time I want to make an appearance. I should rather enjoy the corporeal accoutrements that come with being semi-human.

'"So you're proposing a swap? I said.

'Parish scrunched his eyes like fists. "One can't simply break paramortals in two like toasted loaves ' it's an inexact, highly perilous business, not to mention unpleasant. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by fission, split against the grain then shoddily reglued in fractured bunches, a thousand bastard offspring trudging near-zombified through Underspace bereft of various sundries. Swapsies can go sod a log. He took a heavy breath. "What I want is a donor. I want to slice the humanity out of you and leave your rotten remainder to perish on the slab. I'll have it grafted onto my essence, all fleshy and conjoined like a meat jetpack. Crossbred corporeality's an ultra-rare commodity, y'know ' unusual for the tendrils of paramortality to twine round a mundane soul without choking it lifeless. Yoked to a Pureblood such powers 'd grant me licence to pass through Underspace unhindered ' transphasic daytrips plus total control over my physical form.

'"And I would grant you this boon¦ why? I said.

'"You wouldn't, he replied. "What kind of altruistic plank wants to be left for dead with all his best bits half-inched? He stumbled, clutching his belly as the link glitched momentarily. "Ach! Damn this iffy line! Look, what I'm offering is me, my daemonic essence, whatever bits you care to plunder should you win the wager. What I want you to set against it is your humanity. The stakes are high, I grant you ' any recognisable trace of the loser will vanish like soup steam.

'"And the winner would be whoever of us brings down the city of Errata first?

'"My terms are Errata's absolute destruction. No smudge-faced survivors living savage in the smouldering ruins, thank you. I want the whole place nixed ' kablooey then black silence.

'"Why don't you just do it yourself? Why involve me?

'"Two birds, one stone, my dear Fleshbroker. Of course, if the stakes are too high¦
'Well, that narked me no end. "Do you take me for an artless bumpkin? I galed, rising like a tidal wave. "Are you genuinely trying to hustle Brahmini Jones?

'The Painsmith smirked. "I wouldn't have the temerity. Perhaps I misjudged you. No sense in forcing the issue if you've not the stomach. Apologies, friend¦ And he coruscated with psionic sparks, preparing to sever the connection.'

Brahmini Jones rocked back in his chair, its bowed legs groaning under his buffalo weight. 'Of course I took the bait. Three weeks and a respectable dollop of legal armwrestling later we'd drawn up a contract ' standard guff preventing either party bumping off the other prior to completion, automatic default upon death plus a whole raft of penalty clauses to ensure fair play.' Jones' snout ganglia writhed to the rhythm of his chuckles. 'Not long after completion the bugger made a schoolboy ' snagged him on an absolute classic. One of his minions tried and failed to interfere with my mail.'

At this, the delivery troll, who had slipped into a round-shouldered doze, snapped upright. 'Eh? Wha? Postal meddling?'

Jones shook his head. 'Not now, you sap. Anyhow, some witless lackey in hock to Parish got caught trying to pinch a letter en route to chez Brahmini. Clear-cut breach of terms ' a court consigned the pair of 'em to the Ire Marshes till the wager's resolution.'

The troll raised his eyebrows. 'What was in the letter?'

'A shockingly apposite question!' Jones held up the box like a pumpkin lantern. 'It was an anonymous tip-off. Spoke of a hallowed object known as "The Key To The City ' Errata's lynchpin, as it were.'

'Well that's no great revelation,' the troll sniffed. 'Even a dunce like me's heard of the Key. S'like the city's doomsday button, right?'

'Precisely. Of course mere notification of its existence would've been no greater boon than a bowler hatful of gazpacho. What Parish and his bumbling cohort had been so keen to keep from me were the Key's form and location.'

The troll's sausagey lips hooped in a silent ooooh.

'The place,' said Brahmini, 'was the Governor's Phase Vault, a top-secret trove reachable only through a combination-locked transphasic gate that changes position every forty-eight hours.' His eyeballs barrelled, settling on the conker-sized pupils of a cartoon puppy. 'And the Key's form¦' He gazed at the box with something approaching love. '¦ is naught but this.' He set the cube down on his writing desk, placed a weathered palm upon its lid. 'All I need do is open it, and Errata shall be no more.' With his other hand, he took the coconut from its holder and took a long cool schloo from the plastic straw.

The troll clutched his satchel and smiled queasily. 'But you're not going to, are you?'

Brahmini Jones sprayed gravy. 'Not going to?' He hooted with mirth, brown droplets shivering from his jowl foliage. 'No going to? I take it all back! Look! Look!' And he made a show of grabbing invisible insults from the pulsing air. 'You're quite the bloated jester! Not going to¦ Oh, my giddy ant! For entertainment purposes only, eh?' His fingertips brailled the box's smooth surface, skim-reading for a latch. 'I'm going to do it this very second, if not sooner. Stay and watch if you fancy.'

As the troll balked, an oval button clicked beneath the Fleshbroker's thumb.