Jinx On The Divide (13 page)

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streak of pale turquoise-blue, shaped like a gigantic hot dog bun that tapered away to nothing. "Glacier," said Catchfly.

The fire-breather started to lose height, going into a long glide. The sun was low in the sky now, but the sunset was taking just as long as the sunrise. Eventually, they landed beside a group of three little wooden huts.

Pepperwort went over to the biggest one, opened the door, and beckoned to the fire-breather. He pointed at something inside, and the fire-breather shot a jet of flame through the open door. "Put the kettle on, now you've got the fire going!" called Catchfly, unpacking a leather satchel and laying some parcels on the snow.

Rhino went into the hut. A log fire was roaring away in the fireplace, as though it had been going for hours. There were some rough wooden cots, a table and some stools, and piles and piles of thick woolen blankets.

Pepperwort filled the kettle with snow and hung it over the fire on a metal hook. Then he pulled the cork out of a gourd, and it popped the way a bottle of wine does when it's uncorked.

Rhino had a sudden flashback to life at home. His mother eating fries, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of gin in the other -- not an easy feat. His brothers, swigging beer straight from the can and watching football on TV. The cat, peeing behind the sofa. He missed the cat.

He looked out the window. The mountains towered above

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them, the sheer rock faces black against the florid evening sky, the slopes of snow between them a deep cobalt-blue. It beat the London suburbs hands down. He looked around the hut. The fire danced and crackled, and central heating suddenly seemed dull and pedestrian. What really hit him, though, was the silence that underpinned it all. He could hear Catchfly and the fire-breather outside, barbecuing something, but other than that ... nothing. No traffic, no sirens, no airplanes, no television. To his astonishment, he actually liked it. He, Rhino, the streetwise city kid. He lived in the poorer part of Wimbledon, the part that wasn't on the hill. He'd grown up in a concrete landscape that smelled of discarded takeout food and exhaust fumes, and he suddenly realized that he hated it.

"Barbecued cuddyak steaks and piffleweed salad," said Catchfly, appearing in the doorway with three plates balanced on his arm, like a waiter from a fancy restaurant. "Just as good as any lickit could produce. Not that I've ever discussed recipes with one. They tend to avoid japegrins. Frightened of us, for some unfathomable reason." He laughed.

Everyone was frightened of me, too,
thought Rhino.
The whole school was scared of me. And it felt great. Except when you needed someone to talk to, because they'd only say what they thought you wanted to hear. Best never to
need
to talk to anyone.

Eventually the night closed in around them, but when the moon came out, it was as full and fat as a Gouda cheese. Catchfly had found some sort of stringed instrument, and

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he was trying to tune it. Pepperwort was humming something -- then, suddenly, he was no longer singing by himself. The most eerie sound imaginable was all around them, rising and falling. Then it stopped, as abruptly as it had begun.

"What was that?" asked Rhino.

"Snagglefangs," said Catchfly. "But
we're
all right; we've got a fire-breather on guard."

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***

8

***

"Fuzzy?" Betony kneeled down in the snow beside the brazzle's motionless body and stroked her head. She noticed that a few of the golden feathers there had turned black and spiky. "Oh, Fuzzy," she sobbed. "I'm so sorry I took all the interesting jobs in the library and left you the indexing. And I'm sorry I laughed at that squawk song. And I'm sorry I told Thornbeak you weren't serious about history."

Fuzzy opened a bright yellow eye. "So it was
you?"

Betony's mouth dropped open.

"It doesn't matter," said Fuzzy. "And it explains why she didn't get her feathers in a twist when
I
told her."

"She's alive," said Felix, rather unnecessarily.

"Of course I'm alive," said Fuzzy, standing up and shaking the snow from her plumage. "But it's much safer playing dead when there's a mad japegrin with a harpoon close by. Is he likely to fire at me again?" She wriggled the wing where the missile had caught her a glancing blow.

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Felix glanced behind him. The japegrin had reeled in his harpoon and was standing there, talking to the driver.

"She's a friend!" Betony called out. "She's not going to hurt you!"

"Don't bank on it," said Fuzzy, under her breath. "That's the second time I've been attacked for no reason."

"I thought you were dead," sniffed Betony, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "I thought that was why your feathers had started to turn black."

"Had them done at a screech salon," said Fuzzy. "They look pretty smooth, don't they? Anyone who's anyone has black spikes this season. And check out the talons."

"Nice," said Betony, wondering whether pink and orange really did go together.

Felix overheard the driver say, "You were protecting the sleigh, pal. I'll stick up for you if she decides to press charges."

"What are you
doing
here?" asked Betony.

"Rescuing you," said the brazzle. "And some boy called Rhino. I think Nimby must have gotten the name wrong, though, because ..."

"Nimby?" squealed Betony, her face going pink with excitement. "You've seen Nimby? Where is he?"

"How do you think I found out about you two -- and your friend?"

"He's not my friend," muttered Felix.

"Nimby's been hexed by a brandee," Fuzzy continued. "It should wear off soon. Then he'll come and find you."

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"Are you two getting back in the sleigh or what?" demanded the driver.

"They don't need
you
anymore, squinty-eyes," said Fuzzy. "They've got
me
to take them to Yergud now."

The japegrins looked at one another. Riding on a brazzle was unheard of. The driver shrugged and shook the reins, and the sleigh creaked and squeaked its way into the distance.

Felix and Betony climbed onto Fuzzy's back, where the sleek bronze feathers changed to tawny fur. Fuzzy twisted her head around to look at them -- her neck was far more flexible than theirs. "There's supposed to be a group of rescue huts around here somewhere," she said. "A carrionwing told me about them. Drew me a map, even."

"What was a carrionwing doing in Yergud?"

"Going to a shrieking convention," said Fuzzy. "She was guesting with a squawk band as well. How smooth is that?"

Felix just listened as the conversation moved on to music. He was still having trouble accepting that this fashion-conscious brazzle was the scrawny little chick he had tucked under his arm the previous summer.

"I can't fly any farther," said Nimby to the brandee. "It's getting dark. I'm going down. I have sensors that detect comfort facilities and there's some rescue huts up ahead. We can shelter in one of them. Rhino's execution will have to wait."

It was clear that the biggest hut was occupied, because a fire-breather was curled up asleep beside it, snoring. Inside,

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someone was wailing a tuneless song about carousing on icebound ships, and someone else was accompanying him on a bangithard. There was a sleigh parked outside the middle hut, but it was covered with snow, so it couldn't have been used for a while.

The brandee opened the door of the smallest hut and dragged the carpet inside. He lit the fire with a wave of his hand, but it was a while before it burned up enough to provide much warmth. Nimby settled himself by the hearth, and the brandee made himself comfortable on one of the cots.

"It's not very nice being at someone's beck and call, is it?" said Nimby conversationally. "Now that Squill's got your lamp, he's got you sewn up like a stuffed pillow."

The brandee poked the fire and said nothing.

Nimby could feel the hex beginning to wear off, and he wanted a piece of the action. No carpet had ever won the Magical Objects Bravery Award. It had long been a dream of his to beat the crystal ball that had won first place for the past three years for rolling into extreme danger to predict catastrophes. "Funny thing, free will," he said. "I know a sinistrom who developed it when he became separated from his pebble. His name's Grimspite."

The brandee looked around. "The one who wrote the cookbook?"

"Yes, him. He said that the trouble with free will is that once you get it, you don't always know what to do with it." The brandee snorted.

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"Me," said Nimby, "I don't want it. Give me a nice understanding mistress who goes to interesting places, and I'm as silky as a carpet can be."

The brandee scowled. "You don't want free will because you've never had it. I keep getting it for a while and then losing it again. If I were a human being, I wouldn't be beholden to anyone ever again. And the only way to achieve
that
is with a scientist ..."

"Or possibly the right powerword," said Nimby. "If they really exist."

"They exist, all right," said the brandee. "They're stored inside my lamp, in a jinx box. It's forgotten what they are, though. A jinx box always forgets a powerword once it's got someone to use it."

There was a moment of complete silence. Then Nimby said, "Are we talking about the jinx box that was used to collect the Common Language, by any chance?"

"You know the story, then."

"Of course. There was once a sorcerer who convinced our world he'd discovered time travel," said Nimby. He was very well-educated, for a carpet. "The guilds sent him off to find a language that was either extinct or hadn't yet been discovered, so that
everyone
had to learn the new language from scratch. Except he wasn't time traveling, because it's impossible. In fact,-he'd discovered the Divide spell."

"Not exactly," said the brandee. "It was
the jinx box
that created the Divide spell, by accident. The sorcerer had stored

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his useless time-travel number-string in there, and the box fiddled with the figures."

"Well, anyway, the sorcerer went to Felix's world, using the spell," said Nimby, "and he brought back English."

The brandee nodded. "When he came back, he kept the jinx box in my lamp. Nice quiet place to work while he compiled his dictionary and got it ready for Quillfinger the scribe to copy out. He didn't realize that the box kept changing things. Hippopotamus to river-fatty, djinn to brandee, that kind of thing."

"Is it still there? Inside your lamp?"

"In the greenhouse. It looks very nice next to the evening flumpett -- it's pretending to be a marble pedestal at the moment. It doesn't take a lot to amuse it."

"What would happen if it remembered the powerwords?"

The brandee didn't answer for a moment or two. Then he said, "It's a nasty piece of work, that box. Malicious. Fortunately, the powerwords are only effective if they're spoken by a mythical being. Rhino said one of them by accident --
abracadabra.
That gave me partial free will, which is a good thing for me; but unfortunately, you get both good
and
bad effects."

"What might make the box remember them?" queried Nimby.

"The book I read wasn't too clear about that," said the brandee, looking slightly worried. "I'm hoping it's nothing to do with explosives. Rhino set off a firecracker inside my

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lamp." He poked the fire again. "The sooner I execute Rhino, the better, I think."

The air outside was suddenly filled with an eerie sound that rose and fell in a cadence of howls, composed of many voices -- although, even with Nimby's sophisticated sound sensors, it was impossible to say how many.

The brandee got up, went over to the window, and peered out. Then he hurried over to the door and barred it shut. After that he drew his dagger and tested the edge, then threw more logs on the fire.

"What are they?" asked Nimby, as the chorus intensified.

"I don't know," said the brandee. "But it is quite possible they are hungry enough to gnaw on a carpet."

"They won't come any closer with a fire-breather out there," said Nimby.

"As long as it stays there. Male fire-breathers are all cowards, despite their size."

Suddenly, there was silence.

The brandee looked through the window once more. "Whatever they are, they're camouflaged even better than a riddle-paw on a rock," he said. He sat down on the cot and studied his dagger. "I happen to know that the fire-breather outside is Squill's," he said eventually. "So Rhino must be in the hut next to us, with two japegrins. If I had free will, I could let the boy go. As it is ..."

"Why don't you wait a while?" said Nimby. "You never know, after all."