The Wordsmiths and the Warguild by Hugh Cook

mau
mau, rays, eels, gudgeon and perch, all mixed in a slurry with sea slugs, sea
urchins, crayfish, lobsters, gaplax, whelks and seaweed. While he was still
thrashing round in the water, screaming and yelching and screeching and
yelping, he was hit by a blast of vegetable scrapings.
            Then a child fell
bawling at his feet.
            A newborn child,
swaddled in a kind of soft white sheet.
            A woman darted out of
Togura's audience, snatched up the child and carried it off. As if a spell had
been broken, people started to scrabble for the valuables ejected by the odex,
and soon the central courtyard was filled with a turmoil of bodies and voices
pushing, shoving, complaining, shouting, scratching, wrestling, pinching,
pulling. Fish were torn apart or trampled underfoot or eaten raw on the spot
before they could be snatched away. The courtyard, lit by the unearthly
phosphorescent glow of more than a thousand ilpses, became a seething,
pullulating mass of mud, bodies, greed, avarice, jealousy and outright violence.
            Oblivious to the anarchy
all around, Togura, sword in hand, continued to fight the odex. Now, excited
not just by his voice but by the raging, screaming, shrieking crowd, it spat,
pumped and ejected, spraying the crowd with parts of dead animals and mangled
bits of human bodies, with lumps of gold and chunks of silver, with mine
tailings by the bucket-load, with peaches, leeks and baby hedgehogs, and then -
            A monster!
            Lurching out of the odex
it came, a fearsome beast with scales of jacinth and claws like knives, with
three snake-like heads on long and weaving necks. Togura swung with his sword
and chopped off one of its heads. Fleeing from his death-bright blade, it ran
straight into the clutches of a rabble of housewives, who swamped it, strangled
it, tore it apart and crammed its separate pieces into their bargain bags.
            The ilpses were now
popping out from the odex in a never-ending stream. Togura, filthy,
bloodstained, stinking, reeking, was shaken by a fit of riotous madness, and
laughed. His laugh provoked an onslaught of birds which battered into the night
sky. Some struck out for the darkness while others went looning around in the
light of the ilpses, or fluttered here and there and everywhere, bewildered, shocked
and disoriented.
            The air was a daze of
feathers, a cacophony of screams, cries, chirrups and distress calls. Togura
was lost in the swirling maelstrom of sparrows, thrushes, fan tails, gulls,
gannets, petrels, budgerigars, huias, yodel birds, cockatoos and laughing owls,
moreporks and dancing fins, ravens, jackdaws, crows, keas, sparrow hawks,
skypes, mynahs, skylarks, starlings, strutting breckons, hens, wood pidgeons,
nymphet skarks, muttonbirds and dark lartles.
            The feather-storm cleared.
            An egg fell out of the
odex, bounced, and rolled to one side; it was hard-boiled. A penguin, very hard
from home, hobbled away as best it could. Togura cried in a hoarse, cracked
voice:
            "Give me Day
Suet!"
            A horde of ilpses
stormed out of the odex. As he ducked and covered his head, the noise of the
crowd of looters rose to a fresh peak. The odex responded with cheeses,
showering one and all with a stream of weird, bizarre and alien concoctions -
green mould and yellow stink, cheddar and kray, cantal, marolles, olivet,
port-salut, livarot, limbourg, skwayjeg, soo, parmesan, brie, gournay,
roquefort, troyes, romantours, brazlets and mont d'ors.
            The air filled with
screams of delight as the housewives packed into the cheese.
            Togura, hit, thumped,
battered, plastered and knocked almost senseless by cheese, fell to his knees
and crawled away through the sour, dank, fetid reek of cheese. Soon the odex
was buried in cheese, and Togura was adrift on a steadily-growing mound of
cheese, which pulsed, twitched and