The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,64

die just like other creatures. They fall from the rafters occasionally and I collect them.’

Echo was feeling sick.

‘How disgusting,’ he said.

‘Not at all. Be honest, you quite enjoyed that black pudding.’

Echo could hardly deny this, having wolfed it with such gusto.

‘Anything seasoned with curry powder tastes good,’ said Ghoolion. ‘That’s why I don’t use the stuff too often - it makes things too easy. I could curry glazier’s putty and you’d enjoy that too. Before bleeding the Leathermouse I marinated its corpse for a week in an infusion of Blue Tea, Hypnium and Crazyroot, so the metamorphotic effect should be quite something - far more potent than that of salmon fishcakes. Give my regards to the Leathermice! You’ll now get all the exercise you wanted.’

‘Eh?’ said Echo. ‘W-what’s happening to me?’

Ghoolion’s face was expanding and contorting, turning into a whirling spiral, a rotating vortex that sucked in everything around it: the stove, the whole kitchen and, last of all, Echo himself.

There followed a moment or two of absolute darkness with a chill wind whistling in his ears. At last he plucked up the courage to open his eyes.

He was high, high in the sky. Malaisea lay spread out far below, many of its windows illuminated. All around him, silhouetted against the moon and the racing clouds, were hundreds of shafts of black lightning: his companions the Leathermice.

‘I’m a Leathermouse,’ he thought. ‘I can fly.’

An aerial armada of vampires was streaming into the night sky from a hole in the castle’s roof.

‘Night-time!’ they cried.

‘Time to go hunting!’

‘Time for blood!’

‘Watch out for curtains!’ cried another.

Then, as if in response to an unspoken word of command, the whole squadron swooped down on the town.

Echo had never felt so liberated in his life - released from the constraints of gravity and denuded of all his fat. He was now a wiry Leathermouse equipped with powerful wings. Wings, he possessed wings! That thought alone filled him with a feeling of profound contentment. Flapping steadily up and down, his wings seemed to function by themselves. ‘Of course!’ he thought. ‘After all, I don’t have to keep telling my legs what to do. I don’t have to learn to fly, I already can.’

Malaisea resembled a roof tile shattered into hundreds of little fragments. The cracks between them were its thoroughfares, which were waiting for him to explore them. Echo experienced a fierce desire to dive down and test his new-found ability to fly by soaring around every twist and turn in Malaisea’s labyrinth of streets.

On the other hand, wasn’t this an ideal opportunity to escape? The mountains lay over there. These wings of his could easily enable him to reach them in a matter of minutes and fly far beyond them. But Echo was already too much of a Leathermouse - a vampire - to think like a Crat. He was here for a very specific reason: to drink blood. Being a vampire, he knew the natural reason for his thirst for blood. Unless he maintained the everlasting cycle of drinking and digesting the red fluid, his cells would decay and he would die a painful death - reason enough to accompany the other members of his new species.

He dropped like a stone by simply folding his wings. Descending in free fall, an absolutely terrifying sensation for creatures incapable of flying, left a Leathermouse entirely unperturbed. It was merely the quickest way of covering the distance between two points with no fear of injury or death. Indeed, Echo was even able to intensify the free-fall sensation and accelerate his descent by flapping his wings a couple of times. He was intoxicated by his own temerity. Creatures with wings, he thought, must all be exceedingly happy.

A few feet above the roofs he unfolded his wings, checked his descent, and glided between chimneys and weathercocks, flagpoles and plumes of smoke. The whole town was his oyster! He could look down on backyards and secluded gardens, peer into lighted rooms through dormer windows. He could land anywhere he chose on Malaisea’s expanse of roofs. Every tower, chimney and treetop was accessible to him. He no longer had to climb them with difficulty, he had only to alight on them. But he had no intention of doing that now. Who wanted to roost when he could fly?

Echo banked gracefully down into Apothecary Avenue. At this hour, long after closing time, it was shrouded in darkness. From high above the moonlight and his eyesight had been guides enough, but down here in