The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,38

cupboard and brought out an odd-looking implement.

‘What cook’, he cried, ‘does not possess such a gadget, which can sculpt a radish into a miniature rose? I acquired it at a fair in one of those moments of mental derangement when life without a miniature-rose-cutting gadget seems unimaginable.’

He hurled the thing back into the darkness and brought out another.

‘Or this here, which enables one to cut potatoes into spirals five yards long! Or this, a press for juicing turnips! Or this, a frying pan for producing rectangular omelettes!’

Ghoolion took gadget after gadget from the cupboard and held them under Echo’s nose, glaring at them angrily.

‘What induced me to buy all these? What can one do with potato spirals long enough to decorate a banqueting hall? What demented voice convinced me in a whisper that I might some day be visited by guests with an insatiable hankering for turnip juice, rectangular omelettes and potatoes five yards long?’

He hurled the gadgets back into their dungeon with a look of disgust. Dust went billowing into the air and Echo sneezed involuntarily.

‘Why, I ask myself, don’t I simply chuck them all on to the rubbish dump? I’ll tell you that too. I keep them for one reason alone: revenge! I keep them just as medieval princes kept their enemies on starvation rations. A quick death on a rubbish dump would be too merciful. No, let them languish in a gloomy dungeon, condemned to everlasting inactivity. That’s the only condign punishment for a rectangular omelette pan!’

So saying, Ghoolion slammed the cupboard door and turned the key three times in the lock. Then he went on cooking as if nothing had happened.

From that day on, Echo regarded the kitchen cupboard - and the bottommost compartment in particular - with new eyes. No longer a cupboard, it was a medieval fortress whose dungeon harboured a terrible secret. He often slunk past it, and when all was quiet he would put his ear to the door and listen. And he sometimes fancied he could actually hear Ghoolion’s pitiful captives whimpering for mercy - pleading to be allowed to rust away on a rubbish dump.

A Legal Consultation

Having now been Ghoolion’s guest for quite some time, Echo felt so at home in the Alchemaster’s castle that it never even occurred to him to leave it. Either he was far too busy eating, drinking and indulging in long, digestive siestas, or he was watching Ghoolion’s alchemical and culinary experiments. He didn’t even have time for a stroll in the town, for the ancient castle itself afforded plenty of scope for long and interesting excursions.

It was only when he was sitting up on the roof with Theodore, surveying the wide expanse of countryside below, that he sometimes yearned to explore the mysterious regions beyond the mountains, where lived the other kind of Crat to which the Tuwituwu had alluded in such a cryptic undertone.

‘You recently said that contracts were made to be broken,’ Echo reminded him during one of their conspiratorial get-togethers. ‘What exactly did you mean?’

Theodore lethargically raised his single eyelid. ‘What I said,’ he replied.

‘But breaking a contract would be illegal, wouldn’t it?’

‘Of course, but you have to make up your mind which is worse: the fate that awaits you if you abide by it or the penalty you’ll incur if you break it.’

‘That’s just what’s on my mind,’ said Echo. ‘The fate that awaits me if I abide by the contract is to have my throat cut.’

‘That strikes me as an inapprapriote reward for peeking an agreement,’ the Tuwituwu growled. ‘It’s tosipively unjust. Too unjust for almost any crime I can think of.’

‘Still, I wonder what legal penalty I’d incur if I broke my contract with Ghoolion. Might it be equally harsh?’

‘Hm,’ said Theodore, ‘I can give you a pretty precise answer to that. I’m something of an expert on prurisjudence, as you know. There’s a precedent where Alchemasters and Crats are concerned - a case that was tried in Baysville two hundred and fifty years ago. A Crat had cantrocted with an Alchemaster to keep his house free from mice for the rest of his life, but the said Crat vedeloped an allergy to mice and was unable to filful his oglibations. The Alchemaster hauled him before the court. Alchemasters tend to be rather tiligious, I’m afraid.’

‘Was this a comparable case?’ Echo asked.

‘You could say that. Similar charge: breach of cantroct. The fact that your life is at stake would be a timigating factor, I’m sure, and the laws