Flight of the Gazebo

Chapter 9 - Spies

Pip trotted amongst the remains of the gazebo. His random wanderings around the village had finally taken him to the garden of Montgomery-Jones' manor house and the moment he'd seen the pile of crooked beams, still roughly arranged in a many-sided pyramidal shape, the sub-personality in his head had squirmed with excitement.

He was compelled to look at each twisted beam and each loose blackened piece with an intensity not normal for a dog. But a dog's sense of sight is flat and colourless. It's the rich world of smell that makes a dog a dog and even Pip's inbred nostrils made a human's olfactory sense look distinctly short-changed. His nose could detect subtle differences of odour in a way that can only be compared to how a human eye can distinguish between shades of colour. In his doggy mind a picture of smells was built up, equivalent to a human's visual picture.

The damaged structure was a veritable feast of smells from the acid tang of melted metal; the pungent whiff of burned wood to the sharp smell of ozone. And underlying it all was the scent of humans.

******

"Haven't you, ah, connected with our spy yet?" asked Lungwil.

"Will you shut up!" said Ranthar. "You can see exactly what I can see. Stop distracting me." Ranthar shut its three eyes again and adjusted one of the many knobs attached to the lacework of rods, struts and straps that encased its head. Lungwil, closed its eyes and placed its four hands over a similar headpiece bedecking its long head. It didn't actually make any difference, covering the headpiece with its hands, but it made the gangly creature feel more at ease. Its headpiece was slaved to Ranthar's through which it could see and hear everything that the other courtier was tuned into. Any feedback from their own thoughts was prevented from being relayed to the subject they were dealing with - or so they believed. Unbeknownst to either of them, the block was compromised by a toothpick which had been carefully placed inside the equipment to connect two of the twenty-one geometrical shapes that made up the framework into which both headpieces were plugged.

"Bring up the power slowly," said Lungwil. "We, ah, don't want our, um, usage noticed." It opened its eyes and looked around guiltily.

"For the hundredth time, Lungwil, shut up and let me get on with it. I know what I'm doing."

"Yes, like when you lost the human in mid-air," muttered Lungwil, shutting its eyes again.

"I salvaged that!" snapped back Ranthar. "You know very well I managed to use the last of the energy to position the human right over one of the kynbar's bloated vegetables. I saved its life."

Lungwil sniffed and turned its head away, a gesture that was entirely lost since they both had their eyes closed.

Ranthar continued to adjust the knobs. After a few minutes, his frown of annoyance gave way to elation. "Got it! I've made contact. Time to report in, my spy."

Through the headpieces the two courtiers experienced Pip's every sight, sound, taste, smell and touch.

"It's a bit, ah, shorter than the one we've got locked up in the storeroom," said Lungwil.

"Perhaps it's lying down," said Ranthar.

******

Pip was no stranger to oddness. Having the genetic memory of a wolf crammed into the stunted body of a Chihuahua tends to lead to bizarre behaviour. Like the uncounted number of times he had taken on Mr Nelson's Alsatian in disagreements about being in the same immediate vicinity as one another. He had scars from some of those encounters. On more than one occasion, if it hadn't been for Mrs Dillinger leaping to his aid, handbag flying, he would have had the unfortunate experience of viewing an Alsatian's throat from the inside. But despite this, his irrational faith in his strength remained unshaken, a faith which sprang from his belief that he was human. He believed this with every ounce of his being, which, it could be argued, was not very much given his small size, but what he lacked in size he made up for in conviction.