The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,7

Advanced Students

The Heptagram of Sublimation

Furnaces of the Soul

Sulphur, Saltpetre and Sulphate of Ammonia,

the Alchemist’s Three Great Sibilants

Golem Gâteau and Mandrake Soufflé,

Choice Recipes for the Alchemical Cuisine

Antimony: Lethal Poison and Sovereign Remedy

The Myth of ‘Prima Zateria’

Metals Susceptible to Pain

and How to Avoid Hurting Them

Zamonium, a Curse or a Blessing?

Echo came to a sudden halt. A title had caught his eye:

Alchemical Taboos

by

Succubius Ghoolion

A book by Ghoolion himself? There! There was another:

The Confessionator,

A Device for the Interrogation

of Uncooperative Subjects

by

Succubius Ghoolion

It hadn’t occurred to Echo that the Alchemaster possessed a forename because everyone referred to him as Ghoolion. He knew very little about his host, and even less about exactly what lay in store for him.

The Alchemaster and the Ugglies

Every sizeable town in Zamonia has a municipal alchemist responsible for dealing with Ugglian affairs. He issues Ugglies in transit with fortune-telling permits (or withholds them, whichever), checks the account books of resident Ugglies, inoculates them against Ugglyitis (a disease exclusive to Ugglies that sends them into a weeks-long prophetic trance in which they foretell disasters nobody wants to hear about), delouses them annually and collects their soothsaying taxes. In Malaisea, Ghoolion performed all these tasks with the utmost zeal. He would regularly lock up a few Ugglies in the municipal jail, just for the hell of it, and torment them for days on end with musical renditions on the migrainophone and screamatina.

Ghoolion was also a fanatical advocate of Ugglian incineration, the barbaric but long-eradicated medieval custom that had cost the lives of many innocent Ugglies. Although Zamonian legislation precluded Ghoolion from practising it, much to his indignation, he addressed an incessant stream of requests for its reintroduction to the Zamonian Ministry of Justice in Atlantis, organised petitions signed by Uggliophobes and had even founded a political party whose only member was himself. One of its main objectives was the installation in every town of a cast-iron grill especially designed to reduce Ugglies to ashes. This he proudly christened the Ghoolio-Ugglian Barbecue.

Succubius Ghoolion had written one book on the correct construction of such a grill and its incineration techniques (he was particularly proud of the riddling device that enabled the Ugglies’ charred remains to be sieved into an ashpan) and another on methods of interrogating Ugglies, which far surpassed medieval inquisitors’ techniques in cruelty and ingenuity. This contained exhaustive descriptions of Ghoolion’s numerous instruments of torture, which ranged from the Uggliopress and the Electric Interrogator (powered by an alchemical battery) to the aforementioned Ghoolionic Confessionator, an airtight sack of otterskin filled with thistles and nettles in which Ugglies were sewn up together with a pregnant viper, a rabid fox and a gamecock, and left there until they pleaded guilty. Quite a few of Malaisea’s more enlightened citizens found it outrageous that an avowed Uggliophobe like Ghoolion should hold the post of municipal alchemist in charge of Ugglian affairs, but they were outnumbered by those who advocated that the itinerant fortune tellers be ruled with a rod of iron.

And Ghoolion made sure they were. In no other Zamonian town was it so difficult for Ugglies to live and practise their profession. Only in Malaisea were they subject to the Ugglian Code, a list of eight hundred regulations bristling with insidious bureaucratic and juridical pitfalls devised by Ghoolion himself. Among other things, they specified the hours of the day during which Ugglies could ply their trade and the penalties they could expect to incur in the event of an infringement. They could not, for example, prophesy at night, nor at midday, nor late in the afternoon, nor in fog, nor when the moon was full, nor on public holidays, nor in sub-zero temperatures, nor in buildings other than the houses in Uggly Lane, which possessed no cellars. They were further required to submit a quarterly tax return of such intricacy and complexity that it would have driven a qualified Zamonian tax consultant to distraction. Finally, they were not only forbidden to go shopping except at certain times, all of which fell within their prescribed working hours, but prohibited from entering a shop at those same times.

Penalties ranged from drastic fines to months of solitary confinement in the dark, exile to the Graveyard Marshes, or forced labour in the sulphur mines at Demon’s Gulch. All the Ugglies in Malaisea were skating on the thin ice of illegality, for Ghoolion’s regulations were so sophisticated that he could prove them to have been broken by any one of the female soothsayers at any hour of the day or night, even