The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,11

knilch?’ He answered his own question. ‘The thrill of overcoming an aversion, that’s what appeals to them, just as transcending the norm is the alchemist’s supreme motivation. Not only cooking is related to alchemy; eating is too. Eat this Sewer Dragon’s knilch, analyse its constituent flavours with your tongue and taste buds, and you’ll be halfway to becoming an apprentice alchemist! Shut your eyes!’

Echo complied. He sank his teeth in the peculiar organ and chewed with deliberation. There was no taste he could identify, nothing that reminded him of any particular food. It was like eating something cooked on another planet.

‘I can’t taste anything familiar. It smells strange. It tastes strange too - unusual but interesting.’

Echo swallowed the last morsel.

Ghoolion levelled a triumphant finger at the little Crat. ‘Then you’re a gourmet! A born gourmet and a budding alchemist!’

‘Am I?’

‘Beyond a doubt! A culinary ignoramus would have spat out a Sewer Dragon’s knilch at once. It tastes extraordinary - like nothing else. Ordinary folk prefer familiar tastes - they’d sooner eat the same things all the time - but a gourmet would sample a fried park bench just to know how it tastes. It’s the same with the alchemist: nothing strange, novel or surprising can deter him. On the contrary, he goes looking for such things. Are you ready for the next course?’

And so it went on, hour after hour: noodles baked in gold leaf, catfish and buttered shrimps, gurnard with twelve sauces, spider crab in paprika and brown sugar, brill encased in zucchini scales, sautéed lobster in aubergine boats, grouse livers with essence of morel, pigeons in aspic, Midgard rabbits’ tongues in lavender sauce, stuffed marsh-hogs’ tails on a bed of blue cabbage, wishbone meat in lemon-balm jelly, chilled sea-slug soup with shaved crayfish tails. The portions were minute, often no more than a mouthful, to ensure that every course left Echo wanting more. And as for the puddings!

Ghoolion produced a whole succession of sensational delicacies, accompanying each of them with some enlightening piece of information, exciting story or amusing anecdote. Echo had never felt so well entertained or so superlatively well fed. While devouring each course, he watched the Alchemaster busy himself at the stove and listened to his dissertations with rapt attention. The tyrant of Malaisea was showing him some entirely new sides of his personality: those of a perfect host and charming, omniscient raconteur who not only produced one gastronomic sensation after another but served them with the perfect manners of a head waiter in a five-star restaurant. Everything was cooked to a turn, perfectly seasoned, just the right temperature, and as decoratively arranged on the plate as a Florinthian florist’s market stall in springtime. Echo was so enchanted, he forgot all about the next full moon and his impending demise. And Ghoolion continued to produce course after course until, late that night, Echo pronounced himself defeated.

In the end, the Alchemaster picked up the half-unconscious little Crat, who now weighed twice as much as he had a few hours ago, and carried him into another room, which was kept at a cosy temperature by a big tiled stove. There he deposited him in a wonderful sleeping basket lined with plump cushions, and Echo, purring softly, drifted off into the land of dreams.

The Leathermousoleum

When Echo woke up the next morning, it all came back to him in a rush: his contract, the next full moon, being stripped of his fat and stuffed … A prey to gloomy thoughts, he climbed out of his little basket and went slinking through Ghoolion’s sinister domain.

Although there were no stuffed Cyclopean Mummies or Hazelwitches on the top floor of the castle, the atmosphere was quite intimidating enough for Echo’s taste. The sunlight seemed to be robbed of its luminosity as soon as it streamed in through the tall windows, only to dissipate and disappear down the interminable passages. For the first time, Echo was unpleasantly struck by the absence of the hum of voices to which he’d been accustomed down in the town. Here, all that came to his ears was the melancholy music of the wind, to which motes of dust were dancing in the gloom.

Shivering, he made his way into the great hall, that prison for prisons filled with long, thin shadows cast by the bars of the cages it contained. He hurried past them with his head down. The cages were empty, but each told the story of one of Ghoolion’s victims and none had ended happily. The