Read Back To The Divide Online
Authors: Elizabeth Kay
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Action & Adventure - General, #Children's Books, #Magic, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Ages 9-12 Fiction, #Children: Grades 4-6, #Humorous Stories, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Pixies
Back To The Divide (10 page)
94
He'd been a slave, at the beck and call of whoever owned his stone at the time. When he'd crossed the Divide the first time his pebble had been lost, so he no longer had a master. And what had he done? Attached himself to Snakeweed, who was still convinced he was Architrex.
Snakeweed would have made a lousy master whatever world he was in. He had no idea how to treat a sinistrom -- he had ordered Grimspite around as though he had employed a second-rate hired killer instead of a highly sophisticated shadow-beast with a real flair for rearranging intestines. As the year had progressed, Grimspite had hated Snakeweed more and more. He kept his identity secret, looking forward to the moment when he would reveal himself to Snakeweed, and Snakeweed would realize that there was nothing to stop
this
sinistrom from tearing him to pieces. He kept putting it off, however. On the one hand, anyone who spoke to him the way Snakeweed did deserved all he got. On the other hand, sinistroms didn't do that sort of thing to a master. On the third hand -- or paw, possibly, Snakeweed wasn't his real master. And on the fourth paw, he was losing interest in extreme violence. It was all very confusing!
When they'd crossed the Divide the second time, Grimspite had come around before Snakeweed, so he'd rifled through Snakeweed's pockets for Architrex's sinistrom pebble and thrown it as hard as he could into the undergrowth. His cover would have been blown if Snakeweed had tried to imprison him in it since the spell wouldn't have worked.
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Snakeweed had noticed the stone's absence before long and had sworn loudly. "There are some places I can only take you in a pebble, Architrex," he had fumed. "I couldn't smuggle a fully functional sinistrom into the palace, for instance, should I want to get rid of the king and queen."
Grimspite had looked seriously alarmed.
"A sinistrom with a conscience?" Snakeweed laughed. "What's next?"
Is that what I've acquired? Grimspite wondered. A conscience? How can I tell whether I've got one or not? He sniffed himself, but he still smelled the same. He licked his backside, but it still tasted the same.
"You'll be telling me it's unethical to rip things apart next," chuckled Snakeweed.
That had been a bit of a puzzle. Ripping things apart had always been Grimspite's goal in life, although he hadn't done much of it recently. How did he feel about that? He didn't know.
"And I don't want you getting any big ideas, now that I've mislaid your pebble," Snakeweed had said. "In fact," he added, drawing his wand, "I'm going to make sure you don't." And before Grimspite could react, he threw a blocking spell over him that could only be lifted by a brittlehorn. There was now no way at all that Grimspite could physically hurt him.
Grimspite had been absolutely furious. You just didn't
do
that sort of thing to a sinistrom. It was the worst insult
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imaginable. He had to get the spell lifted urgently. Then he would make one exception to his new policy of nonviolence.
Grimspite carried on along the mountain track, wondering what to do next. After he'd run out on Snakeweed outside the palace, he'd spent a few days searching for the brittlehorn hermit he'd heard about, in the hopes that he could lift the blocking spell, but he hadn't found him. Then he'd gone back for the trial -- which he'd witnessed in two-legged lickit form, from the back row -- and he'd seen the Land Rover confiscated. This was bad news. The manuscript of the book he'd been writing while he was in the other world was still inside it. He wished he'd had the sense to grab it while he could. This needed some thought.
A thin trickle of smoke in the distance seemed to be worth investigating, so he made his way to a little valley with a river and trotted over to the cave at the far end. Someone was singing a song about fish, and there was a pile of fish bones and vegetable peelings near the entrance.
Grimspite tapped politely with his paw on the sign that said TURPSIK.
The singing stopped and a voice yelled, "Go away! I'm working!"
Grimspite sighed and went away. Then he had an idea. He loped over to the river, caught a very fine gobblerfish, and carried it back proudly in his jaws. He placed it on the ground outside the cave and tapped on the sign again.
"Go away!" repeated the voice.
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"I've brought you a present," called Grimspite. "A gobblerfish."
There was silence for a moment, and then a large figure in a pink dress emerged from the cave. When she saw the sinistrom, she stopped dead.
Grimspite decided to try and look friendly, but it wasn't something that came naturally. How did you do it? He put his head on one side in what he felt was an engaging fashion and experimented with a little whine. Nope. It sounded like a vamprey's attack squeak. Perhaps the direct approach was best. "Look," he said, "I don't
like
being a shadow-beast any more than you like seeing one. I don't even like disemboweling things these days. I prefer talking to people."
Turpsik glared at him with her one eye. "You don't expect me to believe that drivel, do you?"
"I suppose not," said Grimspite. "I'll leave you the fish, anyway." He turned and walked off back down the valley.
Turpsik eyed the fish. Then she picked it up and sniffed it. It was fresh, all right, and she couldn't smell any unorthodox additions such as poison. She glanced down the valley. The sinistrom wasn't even trotting -- he was walking quite slowly with his head bowed. "Thanks!" she called after him. He stopped and turned around. There was such a hopeful expression on his ugly face that Turpsik didn't have the heart to tell him to go away again. "All right!" she shouted. "You can stay for dinner!" You're going to regret this, she thought. Sinistroms have hearts of granite.
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But the only thing she regretted was not being able to get a word in edgeways. Grimspite talked and talked and talked about what had happened to him over the last year. He told her how much he despised Snakeweed and the way Snakeweed still thought he was Architrex. "And what's more," he finished, "I've been writing a cookbook."
"Who ordered you to do that?"
"No one," said Grimspite, perplexed.
"You,
a sinistrom, made a decision to do something
you
wanted to do?"
"Yes."
"Extraordinary," said Turpsik.
"And I'll tell you something else," said Grimspite. "I think it's just possible I'm developing a conscience." Turpsik's mouth dropped open.
"My pebble got lost, you see, when I crossed the Divide," said Grimspite.
"So you're a free agent. How interesting. I was always led to believe that sinistroms just wasted away without a master to instruct them."
"I think it was something to do with crossing the Divide," said Grimspite. "It kind of cut all the ties between me and my stone." His brows drew together. "It's an uncomfortable sort of business, a conscience. Ripping things apart is what sinistroms do best. But I haven't done much of that over the last year -- I've been kind of happier messing around with recipes. But ... well, I do miss having a proper mission."
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"I can see that," said Turpsik. "You could make getting your manuscript back a sort of mission. Let's discuss it after dinner."
"OK," said Grimspite. "I'll wash up."
"Splendid fish," said Turpsik, wiping her plate with a hunk of bread and handing the utensil to him. "But tricky things to catch."
"I'll get some more for you if you like," said Grimspite, licking the plate clean.
"That'd be nice," replied Turpsik, wondering whether to explain about hygiene. Grimspite started on the cutlery, and she decided against it. Helping with housework was obviously uncharted territory, and she didn't want to put him off.
When he'd stacked everything away, Grimspite studied his paws for a moment. Then he looked up and said, "Are we friends?"
Turpsik smiled. There was something rather endearing about him if you ignored the knifelike canines. "Reckon so," she said.
Grimspite had a really good scratch to celebrate.
"Need to decide on a plan of action regarding your manuscript," said Turpsik, wondering if Grimspite had fleas. "Be retching with rage if I lost any of
my
work."
"It's called
Dining Out on Mythical Beasts,"
said Grimspite.
"Good title."
Grimspite had never been congratulated for anything
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except extreme violence before. It felt good. He started to tell Turpsik about triangle-fins and sword-noses. Not that he'd caught either of those last two himself, but he'd been to a couple of classy restaurants with Snakeweed and he remembered the menu with affection.
Turpsik made a few suggestions about the names he'd chosen for various dishes.
Berk buk-a-buk
didn't have the right ring to it, and the otherworld name --
chicken
-- had nothing going for it.
Cluck-bird
sounded better.
The next morning he slipped out early and caught another gobblerfish for breakfast. As they ate, they talked. Talking was such fun. He told her all about Snakeweed's trial and how he'd witnessed it from the back row.
"Sounds like a complete fiasco," said Turpsik. "Fleabane isn't nearly as clever as Snakeweed."
"And you should have heard the anthem," said Grimspite. "It was a hoot."
Turpsik stiffened.
"Honestly," said Grimspite, warming to his theme, "the tune was totally unsuitable, and the words were just plain stupid...." He trailed off "What's the matter?"
"Nothing," snapped Turpsik. "I've just got a lot of work to do today. Now shove off and leave me in peace."
Grimspite felt devastated. What had he done? This friendship business was so complicated; there seemed to be rules all over the place that he just didn't understand.
"It
was
funny," he said lamely, trying to make her laugh.
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"When Pignut got to the
fear each wand and fear each boot
bit, he pointed to them just like a children's entertainer. Fleabane looked absolutely furious. I think the anthem was meant to be all sort of solemn and --"
"Can't stand around gossiping all day," said Turpsik sharply. "Good-bye."
The journey to Geddon was a two-day flight, and when the brazzles stopped for the night Felix raised the matter of his parents again. "I thought maybe
you'd
be able to calculate a spell," he said to Ironclaw.
Ironclaw shook his head. "You need a proper sorcerer to sort that one out, Felix. I don't think even a brittlehorn could do it. We could do with a proper sorcerer to locate the king and queen, as well."
"If there'd been a solution to petrification spells," snapped Betony, "don't you think we'd have found it by now? My brother and sister did try, you know. They wanted to bring me up even less than I wanted to be brought up by them."
"This isn't the same thing at all, Betony," said Thornbeak. "Your parents were turned to stone by a spell that went wrong. Snakeweed must have quite cold-bloodedly used a specific chain-reaction hex, and the implications are very serious."
Betony scowled.
"He may not have known it was a chain-reaction hex," said Ironclaw. "Magical theory was never his strong point."
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"Consider this, Betony," said Thornbeak. "Eventually the infection will spread outside Felix's garden, and people will start to notice. There is no magic in Felix's world; from everything he's told me, its arrival would be a disaster. What's a good thing in one place may be a bad one in another."
"They'll want to find out how it works," said Felix. "Scientists will be desperate to analyze what's going on, and if they succeed they'll use magic for all sorts of dreadful things. Snakeweed was a total amateur compared to the businessmen in
my
world."
"Hardly anyone understands the principles behind magic," scoffed Betony. "It's too difficult."
"I understand the basics," said Ironclaw, and he started to explain, emphasizing the importance of something he called a twisty-strip. It wasn't until he said that it had only one side and one edge that Felix realized he was talking about the Möbius strip, a curious mathematical figure with all sorts of intriguing properties he'd once seen demonstrated at school. He'd been presented with it as a thin ribbon of paper, joined together at the ends, but with one half-twist in it.
Perhaps, thought Felix, that's what magic is -- physics with a different twist to it. My world just hasn't discovered the twist.
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***
6
***
Nearly four thousand tangle-folk lived in Geddon, the closest town to the rocky peak of Tromm Fell and Betony's home. Most of the dwellings were tree houses with small plots of land to one side, and only in the center did the wooden buildings crowd together at ground level along narrow streets, Elizabethan-style. There was a square right in the middle, which was used for storytelling sessions and wailing concerts. There was also a market, a school, several lodging houses, and a livery stable, but no landing strip for the fire-breathers. They had to use the main road to take off and land, and there was a bell that someone rang to clear the way whenever necessary. Each tree house had a yard beneath it, and some of them had been turned into gardens. At dusk, dozens of varieties of evening flumpett saturated the air with their fragrance.
The brazzles landed as the shadows were lengthening and the stabber-birds were screeching lullabies at their chicks.