Back To The Divide (29 page)

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number from directory assistance. There's an answering machine message saying they're away for a few days."

"OK," said Emily, "I'm impressed."

"I could give you a leg up."

"All right," said Emily. "It's a secluded area, and the street's completely deserted."

They walked to the corner where the wall was lowest, and she scrambled to the top of the wall with a surprising athleticism. Then she leaned down and gave Rutherford a hand. After that they both dropped down onto the grass and looked around.

It was a big garden, with shrubberies and winding paths, and it was apparent that the lawn hadn't been mown for at least a couple of weeks. The grass was dotted with daisies and dandelions, and it was going to seed and creeping into the flowerbeds. Hips and haws were swelling on the rosebushes, which badly needed deadheading, and there were even some mushrooms here and there. On closer inspection, not all of them were mushrooms. One of them was a white marble toad.

Emily tucked her pants into her boots to make sure that there were no exposed areas of skin and put on a pair of surgical gloves. Rutherford did likewise, and they started to explore.

It was like visiting the statue section of a garden center. To begin with, apart from the toad, there was just the occasional invertebrate. Then Emily spotted a squirrel, and

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Rutherford tripped over a hedgehog and narrowly avoided being spiked by it. He shivered when he realized how close he'd come to being turned to marble himself.

"There's a summerhouse over there," said Emily. "Let's take a peek."

The door wasn't locked, and they stepped inside.

"Looks like it belongs to a kid," said Rutherford, flicking through a pile of comics and running a gloved finger over a particularly fine example of rose quartz.

"Nothing much here," said Emily, leafing through some notebooks and papers. "Hang on, what's this?
Canis hystericus?"
She laughed, but nevertheless she slipped a few things into her pocket, just in case there was some useful information. Then she noticed a bright golden feather lying on the floor. She picked it up and looked at it. There was something odd about it, so she put it in one of her plastic envelopes, and they both went outside again.

"Oh, my," said Rutherford.

"What?"

He pointed at the statue of Felix's mother, standing beneath the plum tree in her chalk-white blouse and skirt, cricket bat poised to hit a six, an albino blackbird perched, motionless, on her head. The ground around her was frosted with insects.

"Looks like the primary source," said Emily, thoughtfully prodding some milky bees with the toe of her boot.

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They both studied Felix's mother, but there was nothing more remarkable about her than any of the other marble statues.

"I wonder why she decided to play cricket in those clothes," said Rutherford. "They're highly unsuitable."

Emily laughed. "You're priceless sometimes, Rutherford, do you know that? She wasn't playing cricket. She was defending herself -- look at the expression on her face."

Rutherford suspected that a lot of sportsmen looked murderous in the heat of the moment, but he kept his thoughts to himself. "Defending herself against what? A swarm of bees?"

"Ah," replied Emily, "two bees or not two bees, that is the question."

Rutherford laughed. It wasn't because the joke was funny, but because he'd never known Emily to make one before.

She scowled for a moment, as though she regretted doing it. Then she went over to Felix's mother and squinted down the garden with her close-set dark eyes, working out the trajectory of the statue's gaze. "Human-sized, whatever it was," she concluded.

"Let's try the house," said Rutherford.

Neither of them was really surprised to find that the back door was open -- everything here was weird. They found a stone cat in the kitchen and a mouse in the hall, but the living room was full of marble people.

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The man by the fireplace had his hand halfway out of his pocket, caught in the act of pulling out a cell phone. Next to him stood two teenage boys wearing baseball caps. Beside
them
stood a man wearing a balaclava helmet. He was carrying an empty gym bag in one hand and a vase in the other.

Emily started to laugh.

Rutherford stared at her. "What's the joke?"

"Oh, can't you see?" giggled Emily. "The man with the phone lived here. He didn't have a cricket bat at hand, so he was going for his cell phone. The woman in the garden was presumably his wife, and she ran for it and got cornered under the plum tree. But the two teenagers and the balaclava man came along later. They're burglars -- the back door was wide open. They probably came in separately and made the mistake of touching one another. It must have been the first intruder -- or set of intruders -- who actually broke in. There were chips of wood on the kitchen floor."

"None of this really helps us to get to the heart of the matter though, does it?"

"No. But there's one thing we do know -- this isn't the KGB, or the CIA, or the FBI. They wouldn't have left the evidence here like this."

"So?"

"Well, unless you can come up with anything better, I'm guessing it's aliens. This technology is going to be priceless, if only we can understand it. Our people would pay a lot of money for something like this."

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Rutherford glanced around nervously. "Aliens? They might come back."

"And you might get knocked down by a car, and I might have a heart attack, and the earth might get hit by a meteorite. I'm going to work flat out on this, Rutherford. Are you with me, or not?"

A house in the Seychelles, a yacht in the south of France, a racehorse or two ... "I'm with you," he said.

Grimspite was feeling rather put out that he hadn't been able to find the brazzles. He'd tracked them to a clearing, but then they'd obviously taken off because the scent had vanished. He'd had a proper mission, one that he'd chosen, and he'd failed. He was now nearing the top of the peak, and he'd drawn a complete blank.

He rounded a promontory and stopped dead in his tracks. Felix and Betony were standing there, completely immobile. It was obvious that someone had put the freezing spell on them, and who else could it have been but Snakeweed? These spells usually wore off fairly quickly, though, especially if you used music. It would be the friendly thing to do, and then he could ask Felix and Betony what, exactly, had happened.

Grimspite sat on his haunches, raised his nose into the air, and started to howl "Jaws, Paws, and Claws," which was the only song he knew by heart. When he got to the bit that went
Crunch that spine and make it mine, I won't decline, it looks divine,
he wondered whether it was quite the thing -- but

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shortly after that he saw Felix blink, then Betony yawned, and after that they both stretched themselves and flexed their fingers and started to laugh.

"I'm glad you're both OK now," said Grimspite, although he was wondering why they found melting back to normal so funny. "What's the joke?"

"Nothing," said Betony. She glanced at Felix and had another fit of the giggles.

Felix bit his lip; he knew he shouldn't be laughing at Grimspite's singing, but he just couldn't help himself.

Grimspite's brow furrowed; it looked as though he'd been wondering whether he'd been off the beat.

Betony creased up again, but suddenly the smile left Felix's face. A picture of Granitelegs sitting ...

A picture of Granitelegs sitting there shivering had just flooded back through his mind.

He told Grimspite how Ironclaw had flown off; how Pepperwort had appeared from nowhere, complete with wand; and what Snakeweed had done to Granitelegs. "What I don't understand," he finished, "is why Snakeweed only froze us. Why didn't he kill us?"

"His wand was probably running low on power," said Grimspite. "You have to use a recharging spell on heavy-duty ones every so often. Look, I know you've got other things on your mind. You need to get back to your world, and you need to cross over in the right place, too. You head back to the brittlehorn valley and pick up your carpet. I'll sort out

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Snakeweed." He put his nose to the ground and sniffed. "Looks like we're traveling the same way for a bit, though," he said.

"Suits us," said Betony, and the three of them headed off down the hill.

The mules negotiated the rocky path down from Tromm Fell with no difficulty. "How are we going to get the fire-breather out of the brittlehorn valley?" asked Pepperwort. "They're not going to let us just take it, are they?"

"Bribery," said Stonecrop. "We've got enough gold to buy Andria."

"You can't bribe a brittlehorn," said Snakeweed. "There's nothing much they want."

"Well, what are we going to do, then?"

"We'll take a hostage," said Snakeweed, "and swap it for the fire-breather."

"We should have brought that tangle-child with us."

"She'd be troublesome," said Snakeweed. "I have a much better idea."

Pepperwort and Stonecrop looked at each other, but neither of them could imagine what the better idea might be. They all carried on walking, and Snakeweed scanned the sky from time to time, his hand shading his eyes. After a while he spotted what he wanted and pointed.

"It's a brazzle," said Pepperwort nervously, taking cover.

"It's a brazzle going off to hunt," said Stonecrop, even more nervously, pulling the mules beneath an overhang.

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"Look at the way she's going up on a thermal, so that she can use her magnifying vision to pinpoint her prey."

"She's gone over the other side of the peak now," said Pepperwort eventually. "That's a relief."

"Certainly is," said Snakeweed, and they set off again. A few moments later they rounded a bend and saw a great mound of twigs and branches in front of them.

"It's a brazzle nest," said Stonecrop.

"Yup," said Snakeweed. "And where there's a nest there's going to be an egg. And an egg is far less trouble to kidnap than a tangle-child. Empty one of those panniers -- you can redistribute the gold among the other three."

Pepperwort and Stonecrop set to work, while Snakeweed ducked his head and entered the nest.

It was spotlessly clean. But where a large white egg should have been there was now a round fuzzy chick with a semi-bald pink head. There were pale gray quills stippled around just beneath the skin -- only a few of which sported straggly gray feathers -- and the eyes were an unpleasant acid yellow. The beak, however, was pure gold. A hen chick, then. She regarded Snakeweed for a moment, and then she said, "Fish."

"OK," said Snakeweed, "I'll take you to a river where we can find some fish." He picked her up, and she wiped her beak on his sleeve and burped. Snakeweed held her at arm's length, carried her outside, and dumped her unceremoniously in the empty pannier.

"Fish," said the chick.

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"That's not an egg," said Stonecrop. "It's a chick."

"Oh, thirteen out of thirteen," said Snakeweed sarcastically.

They started off down the track, which quickly led into the forest. "That's a relief," said Pepperwort, glancing up at the tree canopy above them. "We want as much overhead cover as we can get."

"Want a fish," said the chick. Brazzles learned to speak very quickly indeed, and Fuzzy was no exception.

"What's the magic word?" asked Pepperwort. "Want a fish
what?"

"Want a fish
now!"
screeched Fuzzy.

"Please
is the word I was looking for," said Pepperwort.

Fuzzy raised herself up on her hind legs, flapped her pink pointy wing stubs for all she was worth, and just squawked.

"Shut up," said Snakeweed.

"It's a good thing they don't fledge as quickly as they learn to speak," said Stonecrop dryly.

"They don't get their wing feathers for ages," said Snakeweed. "She can't escape."

Fuzzy regarded them with her savage yellow eyes, but it was impossible to figure out what she was thinking. The mule had a good idea, however, as the stench that started to come from the bottom of the pannier drifted nose-ward.

"What's a blocking spell?" asked Felix as he, Grimspite, and Betony followed the stony track down from the peak of Tromm Fell.

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"A spell that stops me from harming Snakeweed," said Grimspite, "and it can only be lifted by a brittlehorn. I was kind of hoping Pewtermane would do the honors. I haven't met him, but you say he's the father of Snowdrift. Snowdrift was poisoned by Architrex, on Snakeweed's orders, so Pewtermane might quite like to help. I was really looking forward to the expression on Snakeweed's face when he realized I'd fooled him into thinking I was Architrex for over a year. After that I was going to kill him. Turpsik said it would make me lots of new friends. And then I was going to renounce extreme violence forever."

"Won't Pewtermane want to kill him?" asked Betony.

"I'd have to give him the choice, of
course,"
said Grimspite. His brow furrowed. "Harshak will probably want to kill him as well."

"You can't
all
kill him," Betony pointed out.

"I know," said Grimspite. "It's a bit bothersome, really."

It became even more bothersome when they rounded the next bend and found Thornbeak outside her nest jumping up and down and shrieking, "I'll kill him! I'll peck his eyes out so hard they'll come out the back of his head! My baby! Snakeweed's taken my baby!"

"Another would-be executioner for the list, then," said Grimspite.

"Oh, Thornbeak," said Betony, "whatever's happened?"

"Kidnapped," said Thornbeak. "A harmless little chick. How
could
he?"