Jinx On The Divide (32 page)

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hysterics or something. He didn't think it would go quietly, anyway. It would be like killing something -- in cold blood, too. He might not feel like eating afterward, and this was his last meal in Betony's world. The last meal of the condemned man. He tried to stop thinking about it, and concentrated on his lunch.

"If I didn't go back," said Rhino, thinking aloud, "I'd have to find somewhere to live, and I'd have to get a job."

"Easy," said Betony. "What could I do?"

"Loads of things. You're a mythical being -- they'd have a job for you at the Castle of Myths and Legends, no problem. You'd get a room and all your food, too. People
dress up
as human beings there. You're the real thing. You wouldn't even have to have a molding spell done on your ears."

"I didn't know about those," said Felix, managing a smile.

"Actually," said Betony,
"I'd
forgotten about them until now. Maybe I should do one on myself, so that I fit into your world a little better. I can recite the
undo
when I get back."

"Good idea," said Felix.

Betony thought for a moment. Then she rubbed her ears with snow, stood on her head, and recited a little rhyme. When she turned herself the right way up again, she looked almost human.

"How would I get to this castle place?" asked Rhino.

"I'll take you," said Fuzzy.

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"That's settled, then," said Rhino. "I'm staying. No more double physics. Smooth!"

"Hey!" said Fuzzy, doing a high five with her wing. "Smooth!"

Felix felt annoyed all over again. When Betony had finished her vacation in his world, she'd come back here. She and Rhino would meet up from time to time, have picnics on the beach, talk about old times, visit Ironclaw, go to dance festivals. He stood up, in exactly the right frame of mind to commit murder, and took out the eyeglass case. The opening edge had suddenly and inexplicably become razor-sharp, and he cut himself. It hurt. He dropped the box, and the lid sprang open. A drop of blood landed in the snow.

"Hello there," said the box. "What can I do for you today? A little entertainment? How about a natural disaster? No? An execution, maybe? A massacre, perhaps?"

Felix didn't reply.

"I know," said the box. "Why don't you say
open sesame
and see what happens?
Open sesame
would benefit the whole world, Felix. Bring people together. Get rid of divisions. How can you say no to that?"

"Quite easily, when I know there's a downside." His finger was bleeding heavily now. He found a tissue and bound it tightly around the cut.

"Not much of a downside. Oh, it'll bring some people together who I'm sure you'd rather
didn't
get together ...

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But that's nothing compared to a whole community in harmony -- japegrins, ragamuckies ..."

"Which people will it
bring together?"

The box just laughed.

"Betony and Rhino," said Felix.

"You said it, not me," said the box.

"Did someone mention my name?" said Rhino. He glanced over Felix's shoulder at the jinx box. "Oh, stop worrying, Felix. All you need to do is
not
say the powerword." He grinned. "It's a bit like not thinking about pink elephants, isn't it?"

The box waited until Rhino was out of earshot again.
"Open sesame
is a level thirteen spell," it said. "Very, very powerful. Oh, well. If you're not going to say it, let's hope for the sake of this world's future that Rhino has a pink-elephant moment."

"I think we ought to let this world decide its own destiny," said Felix. "If Rhino and Betony getting together were
really
the only bad side to saying that word, what would be in it for you? I thought your speciality was chaos?" And with that he stooped down, scooped up the box, snapped it shut, and stepped over to the fissure.

A blast of hot air hit his face. Whether it was that, or the fact that the eyeglass case suddenly developed a shiny satin exterior, he didn't know. He felt it slip through his fingers and drop down onto the rock, neatly avoiding the crack itself. He thought he saw it do a half-twist in the air, which

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surely couldn't be possible -- but it did land on its edge, and the case opened again. He made a grab for it, but, as before, it slid away from him.

"I know what you've got planned for me," hissed the jinx box in its oily little voice, all pretense at joviality gone. "You're going to kill me, roast me alive, burn me to a crisp ..."

Felix lunged at it again, but once more it evaded him, sliding a little farther down the slope. In a moment, it would reach the steep bit and start to ski all the way back to Vattan.

"... cremate me, carbonize me, turn me to ash ..."

"Stop it," said Felix, spooked by the unbroken stream of synonyms.

"Stop what?" said Fuzzy, turning around to look at him, perplexed. "Why are you talking to an icicle?"

"... toast me, incinerate me, bake me ..."

It was changing its appearance as it spewed out its vocabulary. It had become a laptop again, and there were flames on the screen. It slid farther away from him, and he scrambled after it.

"... pyromaniac, arsonist, fire raiser ..."

"Where are you going, Felix?" asked Betony, her voice growing fainter.

"Where do you think?" said Rhino. "He's just drunk half a gourd of fertle juice. Nature calls ..." His voice faded away.

It was like following a dog that didn't want its leash put back on. A few steps closer, almost there -- and then it

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would slide a little farther and be just as out of reach as ever. Felix knew he was getting angry and when he got angry, he got reckless. He needed to keep a cool head. He sped up, rounded a promontory -- and found himself teetering on the edge of a crevasse. It wasn't very wide (too far to jump across, though), but it was deep. The jinx box was trying to kill
him
before he exterminated
it.
He backed away carefully, his heart in his mouth. A section of ice broke off and tumbled downward, turning in the air like a diver.

"Oh, well," said the jinx box. "Better luck next time."

"There won't be a next time," said Felix, trying to catch it off guard and kick it over the edge. He just missed.

"I think you ought to stop acting like a child, and watch my screen for a moment," said the jinx box, slipping a little farther along the edge of the precipice. It obviously wasn't going to move too far away and lose the chance of tipping Felix over. "I'm going to show you what will happen to you when you try to destroy me."

A picture of Felix appeared on its screen. Felix knew he shouldn't watch, but he couldn't help himself. He saw his body turn completely transparent, so that he looked like an ice sculpture, shiny, with a very faint blue tinge. Then he shattered into thousands of pieces, like a broken windshield.

"I like that way of bumping someone off," said the box cheerfully. "It's got a really arty feel to it. Fire and ice. Love them both."

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The screen tilted toward him, and he saw a raging inferno -- the library, in flames. He could see thick wads of pages turning to stacks of white ash. Touch one of them with a fingertip and it would disintegrate. The picture switched to the Ziggurat Gardens of Kaflabad. Every single plant was dying, as though someone had sprayed the fruit trees and the flowers with Agent Orange.

"That was the Andrian library burning, wasn't it?" said Felix. "And after that it was the King's Gardens at Kaflabad."

"No. It was the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
Felix. And it wasn't the Andrian library, it was the
Alexandrian
library. Where all the books in your known world were stored, including all the spell books. I invented the Divide spell a long time ago, you see, and I've been owned by many different sorcerers. And what fun we've had. Where do you think Andria got its name? From me, that's where. A corruption of Alexandria. I corrupt everything; it's in my nature. Even powerwords. Speaking of which, I've got some more for you. I'd love you to try
open sesame."

"Not interested."

"I'm astonished that you've never asked me about the words from
this
world that became powerwords in
yours.
Harmless little words over here, just for fun.
Zizzipadoo. Boggaliood.
But over there they can get you anything you want."

The laptop screen flicked to a picture of Felix, older, but still recognizably Felix, in a mortarboard and gown. He was

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standing outside what could have been an Oxford college. "Don't you want to make your parents proud of you, Felix?" cajoled the box. "Don't you want to know what the words are?"

"No, thanks," said Felix. "And I'll get to college on my own merit, thank you, not by magic."

"Really? How scrupulous of you. Oh, well. How about your own laboratory? The Nobel Prize for physics? A knighthood? Sir Felix Sanders ..."

Felix inched closer.

The box didn't seem to have noticed; it was in lecture mode. "You could have power beyond your wildest dreams. You could do so much good, Felix. Anyway, I've shown you the past. Now I'll show you the future." This time it
was
the Andrian library. "Such a shame," chortled the box. "All that learning. And once it's lost, this world will be no different from yours, Felix. The magic will go, and the steam engine will arrive -- followed by the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, telephones, televisions, computers, pollution.... You could stop all that, of course. Just by saying
open sesame.
Say
open sesame,
just once, and you save both the King's Gardens and the library. And after
open sesame
there's
mumbo jumbo
and
shazam
and
ali kazam,
and all the wonderful things they will achieve."

"I don't believe you," interrupted Felix, finally getting close enough to kick and connect.

The box flew up in the air -- and as it did so, it turned end over end and mutated from a laptop to an eyeglass case,

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a jewelry box, an urn, a tea caddy, a sea chest, a wickerwork basket, an amphora ...

Felix took a couple of steps closer to the crevasse, so that he could continue to watch it fall ... a barrel, a satchel, a sarcophagus, a handbag, a coffin.... He watched for as long as he could, until his angle of vision made the box disappear from view. He thought he heard a plop, like something landing in red-hot lava, but he couldn't be sure. It was a long way down.

Nothing else happened. He didn't turn to ice and shatter into a thousand pieces. He didn't burst into flames. He heaved a huge sigh of relief, and some of the weight seemed to lift from his shoulders. The box had been the mother and father of all liars. He went back to the others.

"You must have been desperate." Rhino smirked. "You've been gone ages."

"I kicked the jinx box over a precipice into some molten lava," said Felix.

"Oh, well done," said Betony.

"It tried to kill me first," said Felix. "That made my job a lot easier."

"Time to go, then," said Nimby. "Emptied your pockets? Nothing scientific anywhere?"

"No." Suddenly, he knew what it was that he had wanted so much. He closed his eyes.
Betony.
He wanted a way of staying with Betony. Forever. And it just wasn't possible. Or was there a way? What if he spoke
those words?
A leap of faith -- or a surrender to temptation?
What should he do?

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"What's the matter, Felix?" asked Betony.

He opened his eyes. Everyone was staring at him. But when he tried to speak, he found that he couldn't. He shook his head.

"Are you still thinking about the
open sesame
thing?" asked Rhino. Then he went chalk-white, swore, and said, "Pink elephants."

There was a sound like a thunderclap, although it wasn't a thunderclap. The sound reverberated for far too long.

A split appeared in the fabric of the mountain itself, although no molten rock or ash spewed out. Rhino gave out a piercing scream. Then he lay down in the snow and started to roll around in it. Before Felix could really take in this odd behavior a wind sprang up, and within seconds it was whistling around them, slapping their hair against their cheeks and shrieking in their ears. A moment later they were all struggling to stay upright -- Fuzzy most of all, for she was the biggest. Nimby had rolled himself up so that he wouldn't get swept away. The sky darkened with ludicrous speed, and flurries of snow started to whirl around them.

"What's happening?" yelled Betony, her blond hair whipping out around her head in a halo. "Is it another eruption? What's wrong with Rhino?"

"The crack in the mountain!" shouted Felix. "It's right over the Divide!"

"What?" yelled Betony.

"The crack's right over the Divide!"