FIRSTPIECE.

Turvius Sullius, apprentice sorcerer, twisted dwarf and self-styled ladies' man, knew he was caught red handed; above him the blue Pirakteshi sky, in his hand a carving knife.  He had been carving the words 'Axtos is a Puff' on the wall in the Torture Garden of the Imperial Palace when he heard the fat lad Axtos, heir to the Diamond Throne, come wheezing round the corner. "You hideous dwarf!" yelled fat Axtos, his face beetroot with exercise and anger. "I'll tan your arse for you!"

Suddenly panicked, and not wishing any of this arse tanning, Turvius tried a disappearing spell, but he was yet young in his studies and with a wet fizzle, he remained unvanished and standing in the path of Axtos who was raging like a bull and sweating like a pig. And then, perspicacious as he was young, he noticed Axtos carried a half-brick in his hand and wielded it as if he meant business. Axtos snarled, "You've been writing comments about me in the men's toilets again," and he swung the brick.

But Turvius was quicker; he sidestepped, with surprising grace for a lad with a hunch, and Axtos sailed by, as if the bull had met his matador. "Olé!" shouted Turvius, and then activated the rocket boots, which his father Srakosi had given him. With a whoosh, off he shot into the sky in a sparkle of gold and red fire. When the power died, he landed heavily on one of the high roofs of the Imperial Palace and looked down. Far below Axtos was still searching among the gibbets, brick in hand.

Turvius's brow furrowed: he had got away. But for how long?

It all happened long ago, when the world was younger and while you were yet a twinkle in your great-grandfather's eye, or as the common folk have it - still in his knacker bag. These two boys were set by fate to be at each other's throats; the underdog Turvius versus the over-privileged Axtos. And this is what this book is about: truth, honour and justice. It tells how a man can snatch at goodness, and find it run through his fingers like the Pirakteshi desert sand. It speaks of how a man can bend to evil, and find the price was more than he could afford. Is it more than you will pay reader? Is this a journey you will take with us? To travel from the fabled city of Piraktesh across the burning desert, to cross the steaming jungles of Wamawama and hear the rabbity-blurger's song? To climb the Mountains of Doom and find redemption in the ice gripped lands of Wormoria? To watch the dead rise? To lead an army of hamsters? To finally face your soul?

But perhaps I have already told  too much. So turning again to my story I will merely say: it all happened like this:

Turvius's father - the aforementioned Srakosi, was a man of great authority at the Court, but he died one night in puzzling circumstances whilst tinkering in his alchemical laboratory. Tiny Turvius had been left an orphan. He had no mother because was brought forth from a spotted toadstool in one of his father's bizarre experiments. Even so, Srakosi had loved the wee lad, despite him being a by-product, and had given him ether and jungleweed from an early age: too early some warned, but Srakosi would hear nothing against any of his disputed practices - taking drugs and free love was how he rolled. After all he was the inventor of the game of hog-riding, whereby he injected pigs with steroids and watched them work out in the Alchemical Gym.

The official story of his death was that Srakosi had died of an ether overdose - a substance to which he was unfortunately addicted. But others said he had been murdered by agents of the Autocrat - his liege lord - Shabbler the Hideous.

But why? Turvius had to know. He cast cards; he gazed into scrying stones; he called beings of the wind and dark to aid him - to help him find the truth. And slowly he pieced together the true narrative of his father's death. What he uncovered shook him. The chattering demons told him that Axtos had poisoned the Autocrat's mind against Srakosi by intimating unspeakable things. And all this because Srakosi caught Axtos at it - whatever 'it' was (the demons were too prudish to say; they just giggled and put their hands over their mouths) - at it with an artifact of ancient power that shook and vibrated with its own arcane energy. Srakosi had used this knowledge to blackmail Axtos, and Axtos hated him for it.

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As Turvius grew, fatherless and neglected, he mourned the tragically premature death of Srakosi. If he had lived what mysteries would arch sorcerer have uncovered for him? What fun games might they have invented together? This loss - these things - that should have come forth from his father's fecund brain were denied him and Turvius became bitter. He grew more and more strange - totally convinced of the conspiracy theory of history - rejecting all evidence, rejecting common sense and believing any crazy nonsense a crystal carrying Kriptashi hippy told him in return for a Pirakteshi Jell and a bag of salted nuts.  

He became obsessed with his father's murder. It was true that their relationship had been twisted, but Turvius loved Srakosi and forgave him his many excesses. He forgave him his plentiful lies, even the ones that cut deepest, such as when Srakosi refused him peanuts on the grounds that they were magic ones (which they were not). But Turvius knew there was no court in the land that would convict Axtos, the Heir to the Diamond Throne. And so he bided his time and he held his wheesht.

Then one day, down in the lower Palace, he opened a broom cupboard to find Axtos's hunched figure engaged in some foul practice with a lady's glove. Of course Turvius roared with laughter. Who wouldn't? Axtos protested his innocence of whatever foul habit Turvius supposed him to have been indulging in. But, in truth, he had stolen the glove from the palace cook, the only woman not afraid of thrashing him because she had something on his father. Axtos yelled that things were not as they seemed, but Turvius listened not to his protestations. In a flash, he saw that this was his opportunity for revenge on Axtos for killing his father and so he took to writing inappropriate things about Axtos and gloves on the Palace walls and in the deep cisterns and in the foulest garderobes.

And Axtos fumed. He saw the writings, and he guessed who wrote. If there was a thing that Axtos could not stand, that thing was graffiti. And if there was another thing Axtos couldn't stand, it was ridicule and so the ridiculing graffiti tore at his mind and he gnashed his teeth and rent his garments. In those days his power was smaller and Turvius was held in high regard by the Court so he had to find a pretext to wreak his revenge on the dwarf sorcerer.

And so we return to the scene where Axtos stood in the Torture Garden with Turvius on that hot summer day in Piraktesh. This was a long time ago - when you, dear reader, were yet a delight of your mother's mind as she lingered in the bath, imagining your father's strong arms and burning glances; thinking of how she would come upon him by chance as it were (though long planned) as he sweated at his labours with the horses and how her musical giggle would turn his simple male mind. Though you - unaware of these bathtime fantasies of hers - were yet an innocent, slippery egg in her tubes and are not to blame for her wily feminine machinations. But I digress.

And that day, in the garden, Axtos was rehearsing for a part in a play he had written about himself whose main theme was the murder of a man suspected of peanut theft. He was declaiming loud and long to the corpses in the gibbets, who were way past caring, and to the carrion crows on the gibbets who found it all quite interesting. There, unexpectedly he saw Turvius carving rude things about him on a gibbet. He exploded in rage and picked up his brick. But as we have seen, Turvius lifted off in front of his eyes and escaped to safety.

But this was not the end of it. Axtos got his daddy the Autocrat to order that Turvius leave the palace and all the realms of Piraktesh. The Great God Hector, Lord of the Apes, knows that all things were written and so it was that Axtos knew his father, Shabbler, would indulge him in this as he was an extremely spoiled prince.

And so, mere hours after his escape with the boots, with tears in his eyes, Turvius left the Palace, walking out of the garden, through the dining hall and then out of the gates into the teeming city. When he was almost out of the gloating Axtos's sight he turned and shook his fist at the grinning princeling perched on the high palace balconies watching him go. Turvius wiped his mouth and spoke a mighty curse, "I'll get you Axtos!" Then he was lost in a crowd of passing camel dealers.

The years tell that Axtos became the most feared and hated of all the Autocrats - the terrible Axtos III. Little Turvius Sullius, however, after a failed career as a camel dealer, went to study sorcery in the glittering city of the wizards - fabled Kharkesh. Occasionally, he would return to Piraktesh in disguise and have affairs with women from the lower classes of society. It is from this came the root of the downfall of the noble house of Berok, and incidentally the ruin of his own house of Sullius. It is this story which this narrative will attempt to trace.

In all those long years there were good times and there were bad times, but never in the good times, and certainly not in the bad times, did Turvius ever put from himself thoughts of revenge upon the most hated Axtos III, in his mind forever branded  That Fat Bastard.