Ratastrophe Catastrophe by David Lee Stone Page A

help him to the palace?”
    Gordo nodded. “I don’t know about that,” he muttered. “But, if you can get us in, we might be persuaded to dump him inside the door. That way, we get to pitch to the duke, first. Agreed?”
    Tambor smiled awkwardly, but the look on Groan’s face advised him against argument.

NINE
    S LOWLY, DIEK RETURNED TO consciousness. It was strange waking up in a palace and not remembering how you’d arrived there. It was even stranger waking up dazed and confused in a palace that looked as though it had been designed by a confirmed lunatic. The place was an absolute mess.
    Cobwebs parted before Diek as he entered the kitchen. The staff consisted entirely of ghouls, hollow-eyed grave walkers who lurched around without purpose, stopping every few seconds to turn their empty eye sockets toward vats filled with bubbling soup.
    Chickens squawked in cages suspended on ropes from the kitchen ceiling. A dark-skinned wench with a flaking scalp brought down a chopper and severed one of her own fingers, which fell into a bowl of flour. She didn’t look too surprised, though; perhaps it was part of the dish. Diek shook his head, wondering if the palace officials ever came down here. He hadn’t seen so many dead people walking around since his grandmother’s eightieth birthday.
    Diek chose the section occupied by the fewest zombies and sidled into it unobtrusively, careful not to draw attention to himself. On reflection, he decided that these people probably wouldn’t notice an invasion, and moved on at greater speed.
    The central passage wasn’t much better. True, it wasn’t full of the living dead, but it was full of Modeset family portraits which, though marginally more welcoming, were just as ugly. He fancied that he heard voices echoing far above; so, stepping over a toppled bench, he cautiously ascended the stairs.
    A little farther up, he huffed on a pane in an arched landing window, wiped a circle, and peered out. Dullitch sprawled beneath the palace, a cityscape of rooftops and towers. So many people and—he paused to remember the words of the herald—three rats to every man. He had to be confident. A confident demeanor is second only to a crystal-clear mind, the perfect instrument for attracting faith in others. The Voice was getting stronger.
    Diek shook himself from his reverie; he was beginning to feel unusually disoriented.
    “Twice in one day,” said Tambor, puffing and panting as he conquered yet another flight of steps. “I’ll tell you fellows something for nothing; if I had my time again, I’d choose magic over politics and that’s a fact. In my early days, I could’ve shot up here on a magic carpet.”
    “You can’t go up stairs on a magic carpet,” said Pegrand, still straining under his personal burden. “It’d go on a diagonal and you’d fall off.”
    “Well, I never fell off a magic carpet in ten years as a sorcerer and I’ll be damned if I’d have fallen off one going up here.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Gordo, who’d seen an opening in the conversation. “If you fall off a magic carpet anywhere, you’re stuffed. It’s always a long way down unless you’ve just taken off.”
    “Yeah,” said Groan.
    Tambor scowled. “Not if you were flying with old Wally Sprinkle. His takeoffs were legendary. Birds used to migrate in accordance with his flight schedules.”
    “Anyway, we haven’t got one now,” said Gordo, trying to change the subject.
    “Sometimes he didn’t even need the carpet,” Tambor continued, mumbling to himself. “Just used to take off on his own.”
    To take his mind off the rat crisis, Duke Modeset had spent the afternoon searching for his current canine companion. He had only seen the dog once since his manservant, Pegrand, had purchased it, and he felt a distant pang of guilt for the neglect.
    He was down on his hands and knees, peering into the darkness underneath the ducal throne. From what little he could see, it wasn’t a