Back To The Divide (17 page)

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"There are no maps west of here," said the bookseller. "Everyone knows that. And no, you can't have your money back."

They had a brief and spirited argument that got them nowhere, so they walked back to the main square. As they approached the carpet rack, they heard the occupants talking among themselves.
"Ssh,"
said Betony, grinning. "Let's eavesdrop."

"... and his name's Felix," Nimby was saying.

"You must think I was woven yesterday," scoffed a threadbare little rug.

"A human being? Don't talk such rag-rot."

"You think you're so upscale, don't you, with your three hundred knots per square inch? Well, it doesn't impress
us."

"You're spinning us a carpet worker's yarn."

"No I'm not," said Nimby indignantly. "I've got the most exciting owners ever -- we've been looking for brazzles already, and ..."

"Brazzles? Pull the other thread."

"I'm telling you the truth. We've got to find a riddle-paw and ask it something, as well."

"Riddle-paws just
love
brazzles," said the rug. "They regard them as a challenge. You'll be lucky if there's anything left of them apart from a few feathers by the time you get there."

"What do you mean,
by the time I get there?
I could outfly any of you any day."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah."

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"Come on then, show us."

"I can't, I have to wait for my owners."

There was a chorus of sarcastic laughter.

"All right then," said Nimby, and before Felix or Betony could do anything about it their carpet had rolled itself off the shelf and shot into the air.

The little threadbare rug did likewise, and the two of them zoomed off in the direction of the ziggurat, followed by yells of "You show him, Drugget!"

"He'll bring him down a warp or two," observed a striped mat. "If I know Drugget, he'll fly low over the railings by the king's garden and make that swanky floor mop snag himself on one of the spikes. He won't fly in a straight line again for a week!"

"I don't
believe
this," said Felix despairingly.

But Betony was thinking far more quickly, and she'd hailed a chariot, drawn by two of the gazellelike creatures. "Come on!" she yelled, leaping on board. Felix followed suit, his headscarf suddenly unraveling and revealing his face.

As he tried to wind it back around his head again he heard the mat exclaim, "Well,
brush my pile with a cactus!
His master really
was
a human being!"

Then Betony was shouting, "Follow that carpet!" and they were off, galloping through the streets and scattering pedestrians right and left.

It was hard to keep Nimby in sight; he and Drugget swooped and dived and swerved, neck and neck -- or whatever

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the carpet equivalent was. Passersby glanced up with horrified expressions and a quaddiump shied, throwing its rider into the gutter. "Take us to the main ziggurat!" yelled Betony, and the chariot took a left-hand bend on one wheel.

"Make up your mind!" bellowed the driver.

A few minutes later the chariot slid to a halt in a cloud of dust, and its passengers piled out and paid the fare.

"The garden's on the fifth level," said Felix, looking up. "We'd better hurry."

They ran up the ramp, pushing their way past people coming the other way. By the time they reached the fifth level all they could do was stand there panting, their hearts in their mouths. After a moment or two the carpets came into sight, flying low and fast. Drugget was slightly in the lead; at the last moment he zipped down behind the railings, skimming the rosebushes and scattering petals.

"Nimby!" screamed Betony and Felix as one.

The carpet obviously heard them because he braked sharply, his front end flipping upward. Drugget tried to loop the loop to find out what had happened to his rival; he misjudged it, thumped into the wall of the ziggurat, and fluttered to the ground.

Nimby landed none-too-gracefully beside the children. "I've been a bit of a dishcloth, haven't I?" he said. "I'm really sorry. That was a stupid thing to do. Do you want to beat me? They sell carpet beaters in the bazaar."

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"No," said Felix. "Just don't do anything like that again, will you?"

"He won't get the chance!" shouted an amberly from the level below. "You're both under arrest for dangerous driving!"

"But neither of us was aboard!"

"Immaterial! You are responsible for the behavior of your vehicle!"

Another amberly appeared, walking down the ramp from the level above. "Your carpet's impounded," he said, and he raised some sort of weapon, which he fired straight at Nimby. A jet of fermented fertle-juice hit the rug dead center, and a dark stain spread outward like blood. Nimby hiccupped and flapped his fringe a couple of times. Shortly after that he stopped moving and started to snore. Felix and Betony looked at each other. There was nowhere to run, and it was clear that their carpet had been disabled. Felix clenched his fist and hit himself on the thigh with annoyance. Andria -- and the Divide that would take him back home -- suddenly seemed a very long way away indeed.

Squill entered Fleabane's office in the Andrian palace. "Snakeweed's been put up as a candidate in the elections," he said. "He's made a lot of friends with his de-gluing work in the library."

"I know," replied Fleabane. "It's time for that little accident, I think."

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"I'll see to it," said Squill. "Oh, there's a lickit outside."

"Send him in."

"You've got three minutes," snapped the president when the lickit appeared. "I'm a very busy being."

Grimspite took a deep breath. He didn't particularly enjoy being in lickit form; he much preferred his four-legged guise. "Do you have any use for that manuscript in the Land Rover?" he inquired.

Fleabane gave him a sharp look. "How do
you
know it's a Land Rover?"

"It says so," said Grimspite. "On the back."

"It does, actually," said Fleabane's secretary.

"The manuscript seems to be a cookbook," said Grimspite. "And I'm a cook." He smoothed his white lickit robe to emphasize the point.

Fleabane told his secretary to fetch it, and then he leafed through it. He started to read some of the recipes out loud until he was laughing so much he could hardly carry on. "Listen to this bit," he spluttered. "First, disembowel your berk buk-a-buk ..."

Grimspite wanted to protest that the wording was clear and sensible, but he couldn't. He had to stand there while Fleabane carried on making fun of his recipes.

Fleabane's secretary was having hysterics; his reaction was way over the top, presumably to impress his president. "It's even funnier than Turpsik's anthem," he shrieked.

Grimspite stiffened.
Turpsik
had written the anthem?

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Liver and kidneys,
that explained everything. He'd insulted her in the worst way possible.

"There wasn't anything wrong with the anthem," snapped Fleabane. "It was just the way it was sung." He turned to Grimspite. "OK," he said. " You can have it. But there'll be a charge -- you can cook for the people restoring the library. You get the manuscript when the job's finished."

Grimspite went to the palace kitchen to pick up a brazier, feeling awful. He understood -- rather too well, now -- exactly how much his sarcastic comments about Turpsik's anthem must have stung. He had to find a way of apologizing to her.

In the entrance hall of the library, Snakeweed continued to work at the desk. A lickit arrived at some point, set up his cooking equipment just outside, and used the other desk as a kitchen table. Then two militia came in and ordered Snakeweed to show them where the books on sea monsters were. The ocean section was hardly ever used, and the rooms were deserted. When they reached their destination, Snakeweed looked at the muddle of books and grinned. Where the sea monsters were was anybody's guess.

One of the japegrins drew his wand. "We don't want a book," he said nastily.

"A power surge in a heavy-duty wand is rare, I grant you," said the other with an evil smile, "but accidents do happen and Fleabane's sent us to take care of you."

"You have a really good way of expressing yourself," said

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Snakeweed admiringly. "If I became president, you could make a lot more money as my press officer."

"How many vacation days would I get?"

The sinistrom attack came like a bolt from the blue, and, despite the faint whiff of rotten eggs, took them all completely by surprise. The elder japegrin was on the floor and out cold almost instantly. Before the other one could unfasten his wand he, too, was flat on his back and comatose. Snakeweed turned and ran, aiming for the entrance hall, but he knew he'd taken a wrong turn when he found himself in the Ancient History section. There was no other exit; he was cornered, and there was nowhere to hide. He grabbed the biggest and heaviest book he could from the shelves.

"Oh, for goodness's sake," said the sinistrom, appearing in the doorway. "It's me, Grimspite."

Snakeweed gripped the book a little more tightly.

"It's
me,"
the shadow-beast repeated. "I was the lickit in the entrance hall, cooking for the people in the library."

"And your name's Grimspite?"

Oh,
dunk my paws in custard,
thought Grimspite, I'm meant to be Architrex. Why is life such a bother these days? "I meant Architrex," he said. "Grimspite was what my mother used to call me."

"You didn't have a mother."

"No," said Grimspite, "and I'm beginning to wonder whether that isn't highly significant. I mean, the way we sinistroms

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have turned out, you know? Bloodthirsty, callous, psychopathic, cruel ..."

"This is veering off the point," said Snakeweed. "First of all you say you had a mother, then you say you didn't. If you didn't, who called you Grimspite?"

"My first master -- well, mistress," said Grimspite, feeling even more irritated with Snakeweed than usual and making it up as he went along. "I was just a cub, really ..."It went against the grain, it really did, having to rescue someone you fully intended to kill at a later date. If Snakeweed died before the blocking spell had been lifted, all sorts of unpleasant things could happen to Grimspite, a lot of them involving molasses.

Then suddenly there was the
tramp tramp tramp
of kicking boots and nowhere to go.

"Well, well," said Fleabane, standing in the doorway, flanked by two japegrins. He looked from Grimspite to Snakeweed and back again. "You weren't a lickit at all, were you? You were Snakeweed's sinistrom. And you've disabled two of my militia. Can't have that." He nodded genially to one of the two japegrins accompanying him -- but he had never encountered a sinistrom in the flesh, so he seriously underestimated Grimspite's speed.

Grimspite launched himself at the japegrin on Fleabane's left. Snakeweed threw the book at the one on Fleabane's right and caught him squarely on the head. Fleabane was

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fumbling for his own wand now, but he was far too slow. Grimspite glanced at Snakeweed.

"Kill him," said Snakeweed, so Grimspite did. Following a direct instruction was still second nature to him -- if he'd had time to think he might have chosen differently.

He felt a bit odd afterward. He'd now killed two japegrins in quick succession, and it hadn't given him the buzz he was used to feeling. It all seemed a bit tacky, somehow. He'd been rather proud of himself for the restraint he'd shown with the first two. They'd need some stitches, true -- but he'd done them a favor; scars were the height of sophisticated elegance. Well, they were for a sinistrom.

He looked at the bodies. The trouble with
dead was
that it was so irreversible. "What are we going to say now?" he asked.

"Get yourself back into lickit form and don't worry your pretty little head about it."

Grimspite knew that his head was neither little nor pretty. Snakeweed's remark was extremely offensive.

"We'll stagger outside," Snakeweed added, "looking dreadfully upset, and say that Harshak has had a bit of a killing spree."

"That's clever," said Grimspite.

"When I tell everyone how I tried to defend Fleabane, they'll ask me to become acting president -- I even hit Harshak with this very book, you see, and drew blood." He smeared it a little more obviously over the cover. Then he

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ripped his clothes a bit and the two of them limped to the entrance hall and went outside.

The triple-head squawked with alarm when it saw the state they were in, and a couple of the militia came running over.

Snakeweed did a distressed hero impression, and the japegrins practically fell over themselves to suggest that Snakeweed take Fleabane's place. As they left for the palace in a cuddyak cart, the triple-head called after Grimspite, "You will remember to give me a signed copy of your cookbook when it's published, won't you?"

"Of course!" Grimspite called back. The triple-head had been really helpful when he'd been grilling things on his brazier, and it had given him all sorts of ideas for new recipes.

It quickly became clear that Betony and Felix were going to have to climb to the very top of the ziggurat. Finding an antidote to the marble spell seemed to be slipping away from them again, and Felix felt thoroughly frustrated. The sheer misery at the loss of the brazzles ran along underneath, like an icy cold underground river. The soldier who'd arrested them was quite pleasant once he realized they weren't going to try and escape -- there was no point -- and he talked all the way up.

"The king has his palace at the summit," he explained. "The court's in session there every afternoon, so you'll be dealt with promptly."

"What's the penalty for dangerous driving?" asked Felix,