Sagaria (43 page)

“It could be yours,” Sir Tombin continued, staring intently at the Great Inventor, “yours to keep forever, if only you would permit us sorry wayfarers a ride in your airship.”

The Great Inventor scowled. “You have to ask me nicer than that,” he spat.

“Let me,” said Samzing, putting a hand on Sir Tombin’s shoulder. “It’ll be my pleasure.”

“If you think that’s wise, my old potato,” said the Frogly Knight, looking at him worriedly.

“Now look,” said Samzing in a loud voice to the Great Inventor, “I’m going to tell you just once, and if you’re too halfwitted to listen properly, I’m not going to waste my time telling you again. You may be so despicable a donkey would cut its own throat rather than excrete on you, and you may look even worse than you are, that it’s no wonder your mother threw you out at birth and pretended you were just something the butcher didn’t dare put in his sausages, but my esteemed companion here is making you an offer the like of which an armpit-dweller like you will never have again, d’you hear?

“You can have the Thing That Throws Bright Illumination Everywhere to impress all the opposomes who’re even stupider than you are, hard though that is to conceive; and you can have it in exchange for giving us a ride on your abject apology for an airship. See? Got that? Has the message sunk into your spinal cord yet?”

“See?” said the Great Inventor to Willfram. “All they had to do was ask me nice.”

Sir Tombin tossed the flashlight to him. The Great Inventor plucked it out of the air with incongruous ease and began to examine it, his little hands moving feverishly all over it as he tried to work out how to reduce it to its component parts.

“Oh Mighty Inventor Fool,” said Willfram, bowing, “should I take the futtocks to the airship?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” wheezed the Great Inventor. “Can’t you see I’m busy? I have a few finishing touches to put to my masterpiece today, so you’ll have to wait until I’m done. Willfram will show you the ropes tomorrow morning. You know how to pull a lever as well as I do, don’t you, Willfram? Well, get them out of my sight, then.”

Then he was once more absorbed in his task.

Outside Reversa on the side of the village away from the river, stood a barn that, from the outside, seemed every bit as chaotic as the Great Inventor’s house. The inside, the three companions discovered as they followed Willfram into it the next morning, was surprisingly neat. It was as if the opposome engineers who worked under the Great Inventor’s guidance were more fastidious than he in their practices, whatever the genius might dictate.

Sir Tombin decided that he rather liked those engineers, even though there were none to be seen anywhere on the wide and slightly dusty but well-tidied floor. He stretched. He and Samzing had been given no choice but to sleep on Willfram’s floor, and it had been unyielding. Flip had been more comfortable: he’d bedded down for the night on Samzing’s stomach.

Standing in the middle of the floor was a rudimentary hot-air balloon. The basket was made of what looked like scavenged lengths of electrical cable, woven together in whatever order they came, so that the basketwork was a jumble of colors. There was a thick blue cable entwined with a thin red one, and these were further tangled with cords of intermediate sizes in green, white, black, bicolor stripes and brown. Wooden supports held up a bag made
from old sacks stitched together. It was sagging at the moment, but could obviously be inflated by the furnace, whose chimney rose just below the bag’s center. Whether the furnace could be lit without setting the bag on fire was another matter altogether, but Sir Tombin assumed the opposome engineers had sorted this problem out.

At least, he hoped so. He tried to push his misgivings to the back of his mind.

“We’re going to fly in that?” piped Flip disbelievingly from somewhere behind Sir Tombin’s ear.

“And why not, small fry?” sneered Willfram, though he too looked uneasy. “It does work, you know, even though it’s still just a prototype.”

Samzing cleared his throat. Glancing at his old friend, Sir Tombin could see the wizard’s eyes rolling in what looked like terror. Surely not.

“I’ll just get the fire going,” Willfram was saying. He clapped then wrapped his arms around his waist, looking dubiously at the basket. “Just wait ’til I’m ready, can’t you?”

It seemed an odd remark. None of them had been trying to hurry the opposome.

“Oh well, here I go,” said Willfram with the shrug of one about to go over a waterfall in a barrel. He climbed up over the side of the basket, and soon they could hear the sounds of cursing and hauling. Not long afterward a tendril of smoke rose out of the chimney.

As the bag slowly inflated, Sir Tombin began to appreciate the cleverness of the Great Inventor’s design. Although the wooden struts supporting the balloon appeared to have been built haphazardly (like the cables of the basket-weave) and thrown together in whatever order they happened to be in at hand, in fact they held the sacking perfectly clear of the hot sides of the chimney and of any flames and sparks that might puff up out of it.

He was still musing on the fact that one shouldn’t always judge things by their appearances when Willfram emerged from the basket, looking a little more confident now.

“Soon be done, though why I bother for the sake of dog-dropping outsiders like you, I’ve no idea.” He stared at the bulging balloon with undisguised admiration. “Another couple of minutes and she’ll be full enough for you to get on her.”

Now that the moment was imminent, Sir Tombin felt his own confidence ebbing. Samzing still seemed to be lost on some plane of existence other than this one, and obviously hadn’t heard a word the opposome had said.

It was Flip who stopped Sir Tombin from deciding that discretion was the
better part of valor – preferably discretion exercised some considerable distance away from Reversa.

“Golly, this looks exciting. I can hardly wait.”

His enthusiasm was infectious, at least so far as Sir Tombin was concerned. Well, not enthusiasm, exactly. It was more a matter that if Flip, the smallest and weakest of them all, could be anticipating the adventure with eagerness rather than trepidation, surely the bigger companions should be able to enter into it with at least a show of equanimity.

“Shouldn’t be long now,” said Sir Tombin, as if he, too, were impatient to get going.

Samzing said nothing, he just let his walking staff fall in a meaningful way.

Willfram was busy with a system of ropes and pulleys that hung around the barn’s walls. “Give me a hand, can’t you, greenface,” he said crossly.

“Why, certainly,” responded Sir Tombin with instinctive courtesy, remembering only after half a breath to add “wimp.”

Working under Willfram’s amicably abusive instructions, he found that the ropes and pulleys were arranged so that the two halves of the barn’s roof, which proved to be made of some stretched parchment-like material, could be hauled back out of the way. It wasn’t long before there was an irregular rectangle of blue sky above them, comfortably larger than the balloon’s largest dimension.

Willfram indicated it was time for the trio of travelers to climb aboard. Sir Tombin did so, then at Flip’s insistence, he let the little creature down onto the floor of the basket so he could rush around excitedly exploring. Samzing seemed more reluctant about the whole enterprise and had to be nudged fairly forcefully by Willfram in the direction of the basket. Sir Tombin handed the old wizard aboard, and Samzing collapsed in a slump in the basket’s corner.

“It’s time to cut you loose, fatheads,” said Willfram. “Be glad to see the back of you lot; it can’t look any worse than the front.”

He picked a long knife up from somewhere and began to saw at the first of a group of ropes which, Sir Tombin realized, were all that held the ramshackle little craft to the barn floor.

“Wait a moment,” the Frogly Knight called. “Wouldn’t it be advisable, ah, pants-on-fire, to tell us how we should steer this thing?”

“Oh,” said Willfram in a carefree fashion, severing the first rope with a grunt of satisfaction, “there isn’t any. You think we’re as daft as you? You just have to go wherever the winds take you.”

As Sir Tombin stared at the opposome in horror, Samzing suddenly rose to his feet. “My staff,” the wizard cried. “I’ve left it behind.”

Sure enough, the staff he’d fashioned in the forest lay where he’d dropped it in the middle of the barn floor.

“Excuse me, dear chap,” Sir Tombin was just beginning to say to a contemptuous-looking Willfram when Samzing scrambled back over the side of the basket, eyes fixed on the fallen stick.

“Hard to believe his mother loves him, innit?” said Willfram, resuming his work cutting the ties.

The balloon gave a sideways lurch that left Sir Tombin’s stomach behind.

“Hurry up, there’s a good fellow,” the Frogly Knight called to Samzing who, having picked up his staff, showed little inclination to return to the vessel.

“Ah, just checking,” said the wizard. “Just, you know, making sure it’s not broken or anything.”

“Hurry up!”

“You don’t want to stay in Reversa,” Willfram assured Samzing heavily.

Sir Tombin reflected that the opposome had probably never spoken a truer word.

Irresolutely, the wizard returned toward the balloon, which was now straining at its sole remaining tether.

Sir Tombin felt another jolt. The balloon was like a bird being released from a cage: eager to be back among the clouds.

“Get a move on!” Sir Tombin shouted, beginning to panic.

“All in good time, dear friend,” said Samzing, his eyes glassy. His feet seemed to be refusing to obey the somewhat half-hearted orders from his brain. They weren’t precisely rooted to the floor, but the most they could manage was a slow, uncertain forward shuffle. The wizard had almost reached the side of the basket when, with a
pyoing
, the final rope sundered.

As the balloon began its inexorable ascent, Sir Tombin made a grab for the old sorcerer’s robe. There was a confusing flurry of limbs and garments that didn’t stop until the balloon was rising cheerfully above the barn’s roof. When his vision had cleared sufficiently for him to see what had been going on, Sir Tombin discovered that he had indeed been able to secure his old friend. The wizard waswith them.

Sort of.

The bit of Samzing that Sir Tombin had finally been able to get a secure grip on was a bony ankle. Glancing downward over the rim of the basket, the Frogly Knight was treated to a most unusual perspective on a pair of underpants.

He coughed discreetly. “Are you all right, old chap?”

“I suppose so,” said a quavering voice from somewhere beneath the basket. “Did I ever mention to you that I have acrophobia?”

“I’m sorry, old chap, but I can’t hear you over the wind,” Sir Tombin answered.

“Acrophobia!” the wizard shouted.

“Still can’t hear you.” The Frogly Knight winked at Flip.

“Well, lean over the basket then, you dimwit.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I have the stomach for that. You see, I’m a little scared of heights.”

“Very funny,” the wizard mumbled.

CHAPTER 7

S
HADOW
K
NIGHTS

s he slowly groped his way toward wakefulness, Sagandran couldn’t think what the smell was, at first. Boiling tar? No. Overheated dirty laundry? No, but closer to the mark. Ah, yes. It was burning sugar.

He couldn’t think why someone would be setting sugar on fire at this time of the morning, but it didn’t seem terribly important as he turned over in his comfortable bed, pulling the bedclothes over his head to blot out the irritating glow of bright sunlight through his eyelids, kneading his pillow with his face as he sank back toward …

Where was he? The question obtruded itself just ahead of an onrushing wall of dreams.

Wonderville, that was right. The Hotel Chortle, to be precise.

Safe and secure in his bed. Surrounded by the stout walls of Mayor Lamarod’s prize hotel. Stout walls made of …

He was hammering on the door of Perima’s bedroom before he realized he’d got out of bed.

“Something’s terribly wrong,” he yelled as he stumbled in.

“You’re not properly dressed,” she said primly, sitting up in bed with the blankets tucked around her chin.

“Look out the window.”

“No need to bother about modest—”

“No, really, look out the window.”

“What’s that frightful stink?”

“Wonderville. It’s on fire!”

Through the window, they could see pillars of smoke rising into the morning sky. They’d slept later than they thought. The sun was well above the horizon, peering at them through the swirling smoke. For a split second, Sagandran had the illusion that it was wrinkling up its face and coughing.

“We better get out of here,” snapped Perima, leaping from her bed and
grabbing the garments she’d left folded neatly on the bedside chair. The tiny part of Sagandran’s mind that was not filled with panic thought of the way his own garments were strewn all over his bedroom floor.

“Hurry,” she cried. “We’ll be safer out in the open.”

As if in acknowledgement of her words, a lick of eager flame flickered up from beneath the window ledge.

Sagandran dressed in a blur. By the time he staggered back into the sitting room, Perima was already there, impatient to go.

They scampered into the corridor. There was no question of using the elevator. There was no question of even getting anywhere near it. A scrum of other hotel guests, all shouting and shrieking, was thick around its doors. Besides, who wanted to be trapped in an elevator if the whole place went up in flames?

“This way,” Perima shrieked above the hubbub, addressing the other guests. She pointed to the far end of the corridor where a big red sign said:

in between schematized pictures of an elephant’s rear end and an exploding ice cream. The pictures didn’t seem at all comical just then.

Perima and Sagandran thundered along the corridor’s candyfloss carpeting at the head of a crowd of terrified people. Throwing open the fire door, they looked down into the stairwell. Below, there was pandemonium. Obviously, they weren’t the only ones who preferred the fire stairs to the elevators. A seething mass of bodies were all pushing at each other as a sluggish tide of humanity pressed on downward. Other people were joining it from above. But at least they were moving downward.

The next ten or fifteen minutes seemed like the longest minutes of Sagandran’s life. He lost Perima a couple of times when her hand was wrenched out of his, but eventually they rejoined each other. He tried shouting encouragement to her, but in the narrow confines of the stairwell the din of everyone else’s consternation was too loud for her to hear him.

They were finally in the lobby. It was also crammed with struggling people. Someone had trampled the Hotel Chortle’s main doors flat, and the mob was pouring out through the gap. Chimps were rushing around the fringes of the crowd trying to bring a semblance of order to events, but without success. Sagandran put his shoulders down and pushed himself and Perima forward as best he could.

The air was thick and choking with smoke in the street outside. Perima doubled over coughing. Sagandran rummaged through his pockets for a
handkerchief to give her. Yesterday’s merrymakers were running in all directions at once, filling the air with shrieks. Most were dressed in festive garments they must have gotten in the stores here in Wonderville. There were clowns, pierrots, pink dinosaurs, vampires and other costumes that Sagandran couldn’t identify. The fancy dress made the whole scene seem even more pathetic, somehow.

Fire engines manned by stern-faced chimps were trying to push their way through the bustle. As Sagandran watched, one of the crowd threw up his arms with a scream of horror and vanished beneath a vehicle’s wheels.

“We’ve got to get off the main thoroughfare,” he bellowed at Perima.

Eyes streaming above the handkerchief pressed to her face, she nodded and followed him as he groped his way along the stickily-hot front wall of the Hotel Chortle. The fire seemed to be burning somewhere above them. There were no signs of burning at ground level, though that couldn’t last forever Sagandran thought grimly. Sooner or later, once the upper stories had been devoured, the flames would creep downward.

He dived into the mouth of an alleyway, tugging Perima after him. The way ahead of them was empty except for tumbled dustbins and heaps of discarded junk. Even somewhere as organized as Wonderville had garbage. They jogged as quickly as they could along the alley, trying not to trip over broken furniture and mysteriously bulging sacks containing who knew what.

The street at the end was a lot less populated than the one they had left. Running between the back of the Hotel Chortle and another similarly huge building, the street looked as if it were normally used only by tradesmen and maintenance crews. A few people were fleeing along it, but they were outnumbered by chimpanzee stewards, most of whom appeared to be holding panic at bay.

Sagandran grabbed one of the chimps by the arm as she ran by him. “What’ happening?”

The chimp paused and put her hands on her knees, giving vent to a storm of coughing. “Fire,” she explained, once she had her voice under control. She made to run onward.

“We can see that!” exclaimed Sagandran. “But how? Why?”

“Bad men. Evil men.” There was another smaller burst of coughs. “Men in shining suits of silver armor. They took Lamarod away to question him, they said.” The chimp leaned against the wall and shook her head sadly. “Then they lit brands and started putting everything to the torch. Some of the stewards tried to stop them.” She rubbed tears away from her eyes with the inside of her wrist. “They were chopped down where they stood. Evil men. Murderers.”

“Shadow Knights,” hissed Perima.

Sagandran nodded as the chimp again tried to flee off on whatever task they’d interrupted.

“Just one more thing.”

The steward tried to pull herself free. “Gotta go. Fires to fight. Lives to save.”

“Where did they take the mayor?”

“The Tunnel of Love.” The chimp’s mouth twisted. “A sick joke. They thought it was hilarious.”

This time, she succeeded in getting away.

“We’ve got to try to help him,” said Sagandran as they watched the chimp’s receding back.

“Yes,” said Perima.

No other discussion was needed.

Finding their way from here to the Tunnel of Love was both easier and more difficult than it had been the day before, when the streets had been filled with slow-moving pleasure-seekers. Some of the roads they dashed along were nearly empty save for the ubiquitous chimps. The larger thoroughfares, however, tended to be jammed with mindlessly milling tourists. Perima and Sagandran soon became adept at finding smaller roadways parallel to these.

At last, they were at the corner where a side street joined the little square where the entrance to the Tunnel of Love stood. The great sign over the opening of the tunnel was smoke-blackened, and a couple of Shadow Knights were standing guard. They were smiling like genial elder brothers, as if all they really wanted to do was find an old lady they could help across the street, but they held tightly onto the pommels of the swords at their belts and bespoke their readiness to move into instant, lethal action.

“How the heck are we going to get past them two?” muttered Sagandran. Those smiles seemed to be freezing the blood in his heart.

“With difficulty,” said Perima. The obvious reply. For once, it wasn’t a joke. “Look, Sagandran, let’s get one thing clear between us.”

“Yeah?”

“We want to get the mayor out of their clutches, no argument, but that isn’t the most important thing we have to do.”

“Can you imagine what they’re putting him through right now, while we’re standing here chatting on a street corner?”

“I’m trying not to imagine that. He may be a pain in the rear, but he certainly doesn’t deserve to be suffering the ‘questioning’ of the Shadow Knights. Even so—”

Then Sagandran realized what she was trying to say.

“Even so,” he continued for her, speaking the words she didn’t want to, “the most important thing is to keep ourselves out of their clutches.”

“Not even that,” she said, drawing herself up to full height. “It’s you they mustn’t get their hands on. You and the crystal. We can’t throw away the future of Sagaria and the Earthworld for the sake of just one man.”

And just one girl
, she might have added. The thought hung in the air between them. Whether she’s the princess she was born to be or the peasant she wants to be.

“You’re right,” said Sagandran slowly. He felt the huge weight of responsibility bearing down on his shoulders. He tried a smile. “But it shouldn’t come to that.”

“It might,” she said, avoiding his gaze and pretending to study the two Shadow Knights in front of the tunnel entrance, “and, if it does, I want you to promise me something, Sagandran.”

He knew what she was going to say, but he asked anyway. “What?”

“That if it comes to a toss-up between me and the crystal, it’s the crystal you choose to save.”

There. She’d said it. Of course, she was right. Millions – billions – of lives depended on the crystal being kept from Arkanamon, the Shadow Master. If it came to it, Sagandran’s choice would be obvious.

Easy enough in theory. In practice? He didn’t think he could sacrifice Perima to the Shadow Master or anyone else. He’d die to save her.

“I promise,” he lied.

There was a scream from inside the Tunnel of Love – not a scream of panic but of agony.

“Watch,” said Perima. She stooped down and rubbed her hands in the dirt of the alley. As she stood up again she smeared her face with the grime, scuffing up her hair and dirtying it as well. Shrugging off her backpack, she tore her dress at the shoulder. By the time she was done, she looked about five years older and more like a streetwalker than an aristocrat.

Perima put her finger to her lips, cautioning Sagandran to stay silent and hidden, and then sauntered out into the square. She caught the attention of the Shadow Knights instantly. With a clatter of the gruesome metal ornaments hanging off their armor they stood alert, facing her. They maintained their smiles, but it wasn’t hard to see the steel beneath.