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he'd raced for the exit could have had a numbing effect. "Are vampreys poisonous?" he asked, feeling weak all of a sudden.

Ironclaw started to say something, but Thornbeak stamped on his foot.

"Tell me,"
said Felix, turning to Betony.

Betony bit her lip and looked at Thornbeak.

"Wash it in the pool," said Thornbeak. "I need to see if there are any puncture marks."

Felix rinsed his hand in the cold dark water and held it up for her to inspect. The blood started to well out of the cut again immediately -- but it was a cut, not a couple of tiny holes.

"Blazing feathers,
that's a relief," said Thornbeak.

"The snail was lying under a dagger," said Felix, remembering. "I must have caught the edge of the blade as I pushed it aside. What would have happened to me if it
had
been a vamprey bite?"

"Vampreys thrive on blood, sweat, and tears," said Ironclaw cheerfully. "But they're only tiddly little things really. If they attack in a group, they can drain your blood fast enough to kill you right away. If it's one on its own, it has to wait for the bite to take effect. The wound won't heal, you run a fever, start sweating, feel as limp as a waterlogged feather, and burst into tears. Starters, main course, and pudding -- all in one."

"Thank you for that, Ironclaw," said Thornbeak dryly.

"Come here," said Betony to Felix with a relieved smile.

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"I can fix that." She wrapped a curious ribbed leaf around the afflicted finger and recited the standard healing incantation. Then she washed his shirt for him in the pool and wrung it out. Felix took another one out of his backpack -- the wet one he tied to a strap by one sleeve. It would billow out and dry off when they were in the air. Five minutes later the cut had healed and they were on their way west once more, in their hunt for news of a riddle-paw.

The forest gave way to foothills and scrub, and then to proper desert. It was starkly beautiful; dune after dune of red-gold sand curved into interlocking crescent moons, with corrugated plains of it between, the ripples splitting and converging and dividing into complicated patterns. Now and again they flew over bare rocky outcrops. These jagged formations rose out of the desert like sets of molars, the red stone striated with parallel streaks of purple. They stopped for lunch beneath one of them, taking advantage of the shade. It was still incredibly hot, however, despite the wind that raised little eddies of sand, and they got through rather more of their water than they'd have liked. No one was particularly hungry.

"Hotter than a fire-breather's backfire," observed Ironclaw, fanning himself with a wing.

"You do have a way with words, don't you, Ironclaw?" said Thornbeak acidly.

"Oh, thanks," said Ironclaw, the sarcasm totally lost on him.

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"Speaking of words," said Felix to Thornbeak, "there's been something I've been meaning to ask you. Turpsik said that before you settled on one language for everyone you used to have lots of languages, like we do."

"That's right," said Thornbeak. "There were dozens ... Tangle, Japegrin, Brazzle ... You, presumably, have humungally and bottle-nose and human being?"

"Elephants and dolphins may well have their own languages," said Felix, "but we haven't deciphered them yet. It's only human beings who use words in my world. What I want to know is how you decided on English."

"English?"

"That's what I speak."

"Do you know," said Thornbeak, "I take everyone speaking the same tongue so much for granted that it never occurred to me how odd it was that you spoke it, too." She laughed suddenly. "Oh,
I
see.
Blazing feathers.
Well, well, well."

"Well?" said Betony.

"Well?" said Felix.

"Well?" said Ironclaw.

"When different communities started trading with one another," said Thornbeak, with a dry chuckle, "the guilds all got together and decided that one language would be a sensible idea. But they couldn't agree which one it should be -- every single species argued the case for its own tongue. The most distinguished sorcerer at that time was a lickit by the

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name of Sugarcrust, who was said to have invented time travel. He offered to go shopping for a language that had fallen into disuse or hadn't yet been invented, so that
everyone
had to learn it from scratch. What he came back with was -- what did you call it? English?"

Felix nodded. Then he smiled. "He wasn't time-traveling at all, was he?" he said, following Thornbeak's train of thought. "He'd discovered the Divide spell, and he'd been to England."

Thornbeak nodded.
"Sugarcrust
thought he'd traveled into the future, though. He stored all the words he'd learned in a jinx-box, which was a bit silly, as jinxes are notoriously unreliable, and the storage was far from perfect."

"So that's why we call a hippopotamus a river-fatty, and a pixie a japegrin," said Betony, showing off.

"Fascinating as all this is," said Ironclaw, who obviously wasn't fascinated in the slightest, "I think we ought to get going."

They took off again, but it wasn't until the sun was nearing the horizon that they began to see vegetation again. The plants they saw were like the cacti of Felix's own world: the tall branching saguaro, familiar from westerns, and the paddle-shaped prickly pear. They weren't identical, though -- the flesh of the saguaros was a dusky violet color, and that of the prickly pears pale lemon. Some of them were in flower -- huge, extravagant blooms of bright scarlet and peacock blue.

The sand here was firmer, interspersed with gravelly bits

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and boulders. There was a range of mountains in the distance, but they weren't anywhere near as high as the Andrian mountains. The brazzles looked for somewhere to camp that would be sheltered, for the wind was blowing more strongly and no one wanted to be sandpapered all night long. Eventually Ironclaw spotted a dried-up riverbed, and they landed.

Felix wondered whether to say anything. He knew that a dried-up riverbed was called a wadi, and his geography teacher had told him that people who camped in wadis could get swept away in the middle of the night by a wall of water. The sky was clear, though, and it didn't look as though it had rained in this area for years. They settled themselves down and had supper. This time it was Ironclaw alone who did the hunting -- Thornbeak wasn't going to leave the youngsters on their own again, not after what had happened the last time. He returned with some gazelle-type creature, and he and Thornbeak retired to a polite distance to eat.

Felix looked up at the sky. The stars were coming out, with that extraordinary brilliance peculiar to deserts. They munched on their bread and cheese and squealed every time they spotted a shooting star. Felix suddenly remembered the things he'd brought in his backpack, so he got out the newspaper and gave it to Thornbeak, and then he passed the chocolate to Betony.

"Weird," she said as she rolled it around her mouth. "We don't have anything remotely like this. I suppose it's quite nice."

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It had never occurred to Felix that chocolate might be an acquired taste.

"Hey, look," said Betony, pointing.

Felix glanced over toward the mountains. Lightning was forking down from the sky, silhouetting the peaks in front of it. The storm was so far away that they couldn't hear any thunder at all. It was like a fireworks display just for them, and they watched it, enthralled.

"Fangs and talons,
" swore Thornbeak suddenly.

The others turned to look at her.

"What sort of a world do you live in, Felix?" said Thornbeak, glancing up from the newspaper. "I assume that these journals place things in order of importance?"

"Well, yes," said Felix nervously.

"The front page is all about the result of a game of something called football. The second page is about some singers in short skirts. It's only as we get further in that there's a report about an earthquake and a scientific breakthrough. Am I missing something? Is football a way of settling international disputes, perhaps?"

"No," said Felix miserably.

"Listen to this," said Thornbeak. "
'The center forward's amazing new hairstyle is already being adopted by teenagers up and down the country.' ...
That's page one. And then, on page seven:
'Doctor Emily Parsons has upset environmentalists again. Her company's latest discovery is likely to make the Greens turn red

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with anger....'
What discovery? They don't even tell us what she was working on."

"They probably think it's too difficult for their readers to understand."

"I see. So newspapers are just for people who aren't very bright. Television is more challenging, I imagine. Which programs are the most popular?"

Felix told her about soaps and reality shows, feeling desperately ashamed of his own species.

Thornbeak looked more and more horrified. "Is this what mass communications lead to, Felix? Worldwide brain death?"

"There are some good things," said Felix, and he explained about the Royal Institution Christmas lectures and documentaries. But he had to add that not that many people watched them.

"I can see why you're so worried about the principles of magic leaking into your world," said Thornbeak. "This is a very important quest, isn't it? I can just picture it -- magic as mass entertainment, making fools of people for a cheap laugh. Or magical weapons, to turn enemies to stone. And that'll lead to more experiments with magic, and effects no one's capable of really understanding because they haven't studied it for long enough. It's not just your parents we'll be saving, it's your whole civilization. If I can grace it with such a title."

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***

8

***

Rutherford Aubrey Tripp bumped into Emily Parsons in the cafeteria at work. It was an upscale sort of cafeteria, as it was an upscale sort of company. It served unpleasantly healthy food that didn't fill you up and garnished it with seaweed and samphire and salsify. Rutherford was poking miserably at his herb salad and wondering why it tasted of fish, when Emily sat down at the next table. She had brown hair and olive skin and dark eyes that were set a little too closely together. She was slightly built but very intense, and most of Rutherford's colleagues thought she was a bit scary. He watched her for a moment or two, admiring the way she sliced up her avocado. She wielded her knife like a scalpel, and dissected the flesh with confidence and precision. The last time he'd found an excuse to talk to her she'd demolished one of his latest theories in one sentence and then laughed at his tie. She was a difficult person to impress. Suddenly Rutherford remembered the marble wasp, so

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he fished it out of his briefcase. It would be far better to get
her
to approach
him,
so he unwrapped it and just sat there, looking at it.

After a while she glanced across, and her dark eyes widened in surprise. "Didn't know you were into sculpture, Rutherford," she said. "That looks like a really classy acquisition, which is mildly astonishing, considering your taste in ties."

"It's not a sculpture," said Rutherford. "It's what happens to a wasp when it's zapped by a new insecticide."

"Wow," said Emily. "Something that effective will be quite a little moneymaker. Not on the market yet, though, is it? How did you get hold of it?"

"By accident."

"Oh, yes?" She smiled. "Oh, I see. A bit of industrial espionage. If you can analyze it before it goes on sale, you might be able to make a cheaper competitor. How are you doing?"

"It's not really my field, is it?"

"True," said Emily. "But it is mine."

Rutherford smiled.

It was surprisingly cold once the sun had disappeared, so Felix and Betony curled up under Thornbeak's wing for the night as Ironclaw's snoring increased in volume. It was Felix who woke first. It took a moment or two to register what was happening, as he was still half-asleep and he was vaguely aware of a warm dampness. His first thought was that he'd

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had an embarrassing accident, which was something he hadn't done since he'd been cured of his illness. Then he realized that there was far too much water for that; it had reached blood temperature because it had picked up heat on its long journey from the mountains. The wadi was flooding, and the river was getting deeper with a frightening rapidity.

Thornbeak woke up and squawked with alarm. Then everything seemed to happen very quickly. It wasn't a sudden wall of water, like a tidal wave, but it was much faster than a tide coming in, and it was carrying twigs and branches that knocked against him as he stood up.

"What is it?" gasped Betony, now also on her feet.

"The river!" yelled Felix. "We've got to get out!"

The side of the wadi was quite steep. By the time they reached it the water was up to their waists and it was getting hard to make any progress, especially with the backpacks on their backs. Thornbeak seemed to be in trouble; her feathers had been soaked from beneath. Rain always ran off her with no trouble at all, but this was different. She flapped her wings and screeched for Ironclaw, but he was having the same problem himself. The deeper the water got, the faster it seemed to flow. Felix got a toehold on the bank, climbed up a little way, and stretched his hand down to Betony. Hauling her out was harder work than he'd have thought possible -- every muscle seemed stretched to breaking point, and both their hands were slick with mud. He could see her face in the moonlight, twisted with effort, and for a