Free The Wordsmiths and the Warguild by Hugh Cook Page B

its
bulbous lips, which were seven in number.
            "Who are you?"
cried Brother Troop, who had been standing to one side watching Togura's
performance.
            The ilps wavered.
            "Where do you come
from? Who owns you?"
            Half of the ilps
collapsed with a brief stench like a twinge of silage; the rest escaped.
             And Togura, having recovered his
breath, began to attack the odex with his voice. Once started, he did not stop.
Seeking the words which would recover Day Suet, he poured out the language of
love, hate and obscenity, of eating and drinking, of battle and war, of farming
and forestry; he cried out the names of birds, trees, mountains, rivers, seas,
lakes, weapons, cities, people, pets, insects, stars and uncouth diseases; he
called upon gods known and unknown, upon the powers of earth and sky, air and
water, fire and stone.
            Anything that served his
purpose was pressed into use. He bawled out snatches of drinking songs and
musical bawdry; he sung half-remembered phrases of love songs and madrigals,
inventing his own words when memory failed him. And then, yielding to despair
and fury, he poured out meaningless word-strings, shouting, demanding,
pleading, screaming, commanding.
            As he excited it, the
odex threw forth random assemblages with multiple heads, voices, smells, legs,
arms, teeth, tentacles, manes, pseudopods, carapaces, eyes, ears, tongues and
tails. As each ilps escaped, it drifted away, giggling, chuckling, snoring,
roaring, swelling, pulsating, gleaming and shining, until the night sky above
the stronghold of the Wordsmiths was cluttered with a positive fantasia of
shapes and forms.
            Sometimes, as Togura's
words accidentally hit upon some transient code of retrieval, the odex sent
real things out from its storehouse. Once it spat fire. Once it ejected a tiny
corn-coloured disk which swelled in a couple of breaths to a huge wheel of hay
the height of a man and the girth of a bullock. Once a shower of coins blasted
their way into the air, stinging and burning where they hit, for they were
red-hot.
            As the night wore on, an
ever-changing audience watched Togura's frantic performance. Servitors,
scribes, translators, wordmasters and even the governor himself joined the
gathering crowd. Togura, scarcely aware of their presence, cursed, stormed,
raged and pleaded, as if immune to all embarrassment.
            Alerted by the plague of
ilpses above the Wordsmiths' stronghold, the citizens of Keep began to wake; it
would have been hard for them to sleep, as all the dogs were howling and
barking, for an ilps had the peculiar property of being very disturbing to
dogs. Muttering imprecations, many hauled themselves out of bed and went to
investigate. Picking their way through the night, wary of mineshafts and made
dogs, citizens began to gather outside the stronghold, a conclave of lanterns
and speculations. Some infiltrated the stronghold to become astonished
witnesses to an unprecedented scene.
            They saw Togura, harsh
and hoarse and sweating, berating the odex, threatening it and lashing it with
the iron-edged fury of his tongue. As his non-stop attack continued, the odex
no longer manifested one object or apparition for each of his assaults, but
spat them out in twos or threes, and then a dozen at a time. More and more of
its productions were real things rather than randomly-formed ilpses.
            A little red snaked,
folded like a concertina, jumped out of the odex and hopped around on the
ground, rupturing itself with a string of explosions. Then Togura was drenched
and almost swept away by an onslaught of water, foam and spray in which a horde
of fresh and saltwater fish kicked, thrashed and jumbled - pike, snapper,
bream, bluefin, dogfish, cod, carp, smelts, dabs, haddock, lampreys, flounder,
trout, salmon, catfish, whitebait, gurnet, mullet, groper, flying fish,