Back To The Divide (22 page)

"Hmph,"
said Leona, her tail flicking back and forth with annoyance.

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"Why isn't it working?" asked Betony.

"I think the king and queen are asleep at the moment," replied the riddle-paw. "The feather
will
point to where they are, as soon as they wake up. You'll just have to keep trying."

"Supposing they're not asleep? Supposing they're dead?"

"They're not dead. The feather would have vanished if they were. Just keep trying, and sooner or later you'll get a reading."

"We ought to be on our way," said Thornbeak. Leona looked disappointed.

"We can't fly back now," said Ironclaw. "Sunset's only an hour away, and Nimby can't travel far in the dark. I think we should camp here and leave first thing tomorrow morning."

"Excellent idea," said Leona, and they all busied themselves collecting brushwood. Leona lit a fire with a wave of her paw, and they settled themselves around it and had supper.

Ironclaw and Leona threw a few brainteasers at one another and were mightily impressed with each other's performance. Betony yawned, so Thornbeak asked Jahim about the history of Kaflabad, which interested Betony far more than logic. Nimby rolled himself up and went to sleep.

"I'd like to hear a bit about magical theory," said Felix to Leona, when he could get a word in edgewise.

"Know anything about ittybitties?" asked Leona.

"I think we call them atoms," said Felix. "They join together to make molecules."

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"Oh, well, when ittybitties join together, we call those ittybitty-twists. They can be either left-handed, or right-handed, or neither. And they can be huge."

"That's like DNA," said Felix. "Twisted into a double helix and the basis of life itself."

"You know quite a bit about it, then. Twist something one way, and it's one thing. Twist it the other way, and it's something else entirely, although it may look exactly the same. But give it a half-twist, and the unexpected
really
starts to happen. The twisty-strip effect."

"We have things we call mutations -- when DNA reproduces itself and doesn't get it quite right."

"Magic does something similar, except we control the not-quite-right part of it."

"How?"

"With force fields. Wands give off force fields."

"I once used magnetism to open a magic lock."

"What's magnetism?" Felix explained.

"Hmm,"
said Leona. "That's one I haven't heard of. We have others."

Ironclaw started to explain. Twirl-force was obviously centrifugal force, and sticky-force was probably van der Waals force, the one that enabled geckos to run across ceilings -- but there were others that were far stranger, and Ironclaw lost Felix very quickly with the mathematics involved.

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"The thing I don't understand," said Felix, "is how spells work when they're just spoken -- when you don't exert another force. Like lighting a candle."

"The wave of the hand is the other force employed there," said Ironclaw. "But suggestion is very important with person-to-person spells. Suggestion's a force, too."

Hypnotism, thought Felix. No one really knows how it works. Hypnotism with a half-twist could be very powerful indeed. By the time they all settled down to sleep, his head was spinning. It was clear that magical theory
could
be understood, right down to the fine details. He wanted to get back to his own world as fast as possible now, before one of the marble creatures got into the hands of someone who was capable of analyzing it.

The next morning Betony tried the royalty location spell again, but the king and queen still seemed to be asleep, because the feather remained unresponsive. Leona and Ironclaw decided to stay in touch through the new triple-head postal service that had recently been established. Now that Leona had someone she could swap riddles with, she'd stopped feeling quite so resentful toward the Sebethians and had decided to go back to eating less controversial game. Jahim, Felix, and Betony climbed on board their carpet, which soared exuberantly into the air and cruised alongside Ironclaw and Thornbeak.

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"Felix," said Betony, "thanks for asking Leona about my parents."

"I'm sorry she couldn't do anything," said Felix. "It seems so unfair."

"It's weird," said Betony. "Half the time I want them back and half the time I'd rather things stayed the way they are."

"I don't think anything about parents is straightforward," said Felix, smiling.

They reached Kaflabad at sunset. Jahim reversed the change-of-ownership hex on Nimby, and they all said goodbye. Jahim was rather looking forward to reporting back to the king. His majesty's face would be a picture when Jahim told him that the riddles had all been solved, and Leona had promised not to eat any more of Sebeth's inhabitants.

Nimby was parked on the crystal rack again -- but he was a carpet of the world now, and his tales of high adventure earned him a lot of respect.

The brazzles found some suitable rocks outside the city walls.

Felix and Betony walked down one of the narrow streets, looking for an inn. As they passed a doorway, a dark figure jumped out and threw his arm around Felix's throat. "Don't try anything, tangle-girl," he growled at Betony, "or I'll break the human's neck."

Betony put a hand to her mouth and stood transfixed.

"You left me to die, didn't you?" hissed the figure.

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Felix couldn't speak; he could hardly
breathe.

"I'm sorry," said Betony in a small voice. "The sandstorm covered you completely. We wouldn't have been able to find you."

Felix twisted his head and got more air. What was Betony talking about? Then he felt something metal pressing against him, and he managed to glance down. It was a brass lamp.

"As you can see," said the voice, "the sand released me again. A triple-head saw me shining in the sunlight, praise its six eyes, and it brought me here."

It's the brandee, thought Felix. He's out for revenge. I've had it.

"What do you want?" asked Betony shakily.

"I want to go to the human's world," said the brandee. "There might be a scientific way of turning me into a proper being."

"What do you mean," queried Betony, a little more confidently, " 'a proper being'?"

"How would you like to spend your life as a gas until some idiot summons you? It's always the same: They either want wealth beyond their wildest dreams or the most beautiful female of their species. No imagination."

"What happens if you're summoned by a female?"

"No idea. It's never happened to me."

"So what would you do if you were human, and free?"

The brandee grinned. "I'd go for wealth beyond my

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wildest dreams, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Put my lamp in your backpack, boy, and take me with you."

"You'd better let him go then, hadn't you?" said Betony.

"Sorry," said the brandee, releasing Felix.

Felix coughed a couple of times, rubbed his neck, and opened his pack. The brandee streamed back into his lamp and Felix put it away, wrapped in some clothing. He gave Betony a look that said,
You know and I know I must never take that lamp across the Divide.

Betony nodded again.

"I'll throw it away," Felix mouthed at her, miming the action in case the brandee was listening.

Betony nodded for a third time and giggled.

They found an inn, asked for the a la carte lickit menu, and ordered the most expensive things on it -- they could pay for them now that they had pocketfuls of brazzle gold once more. And what with the fruity fizzings and frothings and flashbangs that followed, they forgot all about the lamp in the backpack.

The next morning they took off once again and headed back across the Skeleton Plain for Geddon. By late afternoon the desert was behind them; they were in the foothills, and they would reach Tromm Fell the following day.

"I can't wait to see Agrimony's face when I turn up with my very own magic carpet," said Betony. "Sulfur's the
family
fire-breather, not Agrimony's own personal one."

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"And whose gold paid for him?" muttered Ironclaw.

Betony bit her lip and glanced at Thornbeak.

"Oh, take no notice," said Thornbeak, angling her golden head and peering at the scrubland beneath them. Suddenly she banked sharply, broke away from the others, and went into a dive.

"Where's she going, Ironclaw?" asked Betony.

"No idea," said Ironclaw. "The workings of the female mind are way beyond even my considerable capabilities."

They watched the little gold dot that was Thornbeak land in a patch of scrub, and then they were over the next outcrop and she was out of sight.

"Shouldn't we wait for her?" asked Betony.

Ironclaw raised one of his feathery eyebrows. "Why?"

"It's polite."

"It's OK, I can see her now," said Felix. "She's not far behind -- but she's carrying something in her beak."

"Looks like a branch," said Betony. "A
branch?"

"Maybe she decided the perching rocks were too far gone."

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***

12

***

Rutherford Aubrey Tripp had forgotten all about the white marble wasp he'd passed on to his colleague Emily Parsons. When she called him, he had no idea what she was talking about.

"Rutherford!" she shouted. "You really are the limit! You ask me to do something in the spare time I don't have, and I assume it's something important. It now appears it was
so
important it's slipped your mind completely."

"Ah," said Rutherford, desperately trying to remember what it could possibly have been.

"You still don't know, do you?" fumed Emily. "I've a good mind to keep this to myself."

"Keep what to yourself?"

"This extraordinary petrification effect. You might have warned me. It's sheer chance I didn't turn to marble myself." A picture of the little white insect flashed into Rutherford's

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mind. "Has someone invented the insecticide to end all insecticides, then?" he asked.

There was a grim little laugh at the other end of the line. "You could say that, Rutherrord, you could say that. I think we ought to meet up. There's a lot here that I don't understand. I'd like to investigate it further, but I want to be certain I'm not treading on any important toes."

"You can tread on mine as much as you like," said Rutherford, wishing he had the nerve to ask her out.

"I didn't mean yours, you idiot," snapped Emily. "I'm talking about the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, or whatever combination of letters and numbers is appropriate these days. Do you get my drift?"

Rutherford gulped. "I think so," he said.

Not all the japegrins had been enthusiastic about Snakeweed becoming president, but as the only popular alternative had been Pewtermane, they hadn't argued. Better a japegrin than a brittlehorn. With a brittlehorn in charge they'd all be sent to philosophy classes and urged to take up meditation.

Snakeweed had known something flamboyant was needed that would win everyone over. He'd gotten Grimspite to sniff out Harshak's sinistrom pebble in the library, and the public juicing of it had gone remarkably well -- he'd made sure that the best reporters had been there, writing it up. The newspapers would be all over the known world by now, and he would be a hero. He hadn't really destroyed Harshak's

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pebble, however. He'd palmed it and substituted another. He kept the pebble in his safe and admired it from time to time.

Snakeweed finished one of his gloating sessions, shut his safe with a closing spell, and summoned his secretary. "What I need now," he said, "is a one-eye. I want an epic poem to commemorate Harshak's ... er ... demise. Apparently there's one in the Andrian mountains, an exile of some sort. She wrote that appalling anthem for Fleabane, but the style's exactly what I want. Nice undercurrent of violence. I've sent for her."

"Right you are, Mr. President, sir."

Snakeweed smiled. "I've got big plans. I've got some diggelucks dismantling the Land Rover to see how it works. Otherworld Vehicles -- I could set up a company and market them. I've learned a lot about big business in the last year. You move your production line from place to place, wherever the labor's cheapest. And you don't have to pay vehicles a salary, the way you do triple-heads or fire-breathers. I've got a spreadsheet in my personal organizer; I've worked it all out."

"Oh," said Snakeweed's secretary. "I forgot to tell you. We couldn't arrest Pewtermane because he's left the area. Gone back to the Geddon Forest apparently, to rejoin his herd."

"Oh, well," said Snakeweed, "that's even better. I won't have the tiresome job of thinking up a charge. And with Pewtermane gone, I have no serious opponents in the elections anymore."