Jinx On The Divide (12 page)

116

"He's quite funny really, isn't he?" said one japegrin to another. "Whoever would have thought it?"

The cuddyaks trotted along, impervious to the blizzard, and snorting now and then. The sleigh's runners made a faint whooshing sound, drowned out for a while by the rushing torrent of a river, which ran alongside the road before veering off in another direction. Everyone was huddled beneath the covers -- blankets, then skins and furs. These were nice and warm, but smelled rather rank. The cuddyaks smelled, too. It was the sort of oily smell you get on your fingers when you run them through your hair -- particularly if you haven't washed it for a while -- only stronger, and mixed with the scent of leather harnesses. After a while Felix got used to it, and it ceased to bother him.

[Image: Felix on the sleigh.]

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The diggeluck finally ran out of stories, and then the snow stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the sky cleared.

The sunset seemed to last forever, streaking the sky with delicate pinks and blues. Eventually, the sun sank below the horizon, and it got noticeably colder. The moonlight was almost as bright as daylight, and the landscape turned to the sort of silver that's almost white and the sort of black that's almost blue. The mountains stretched into the distance, smooth snowy slopes slashed through with dark crags, and the little dwarf trees made strange lumpy shapes, their boughs laden with snow.

[Image: The cuddyaks.]

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Felix must have dozed off, because he felt himself wake with a jerk. The most eerie sound imaginable was all around him, rising and falling. Then it stopped, presumably as suddenly as it had begun. He sat up. "What was that?" he asked.

"Snagglefangs," said the driver shortly. "Full moon."

A japegrin at the rear of the sleigh lifted his harpoon and rested it on the guardrail. The other passengers looked at one another, but none of them seemed inclined to comment.

Felix looked at Betony. "What's a snagglefang?"

"I don't know," said Betony. "We don't have them down south."

Felix scanned the surrounding countryside. Once or twice, he thought he caught a glimpse of something white moving against the white snow, but it was hard to be sure. It was only when one of the shapes turned a pinpoint pair of luminous green eyes on him that a chill ran down his spine. These creatures were hunting, and they were hunting
him.
It felt as though there'd been a mistake. The people on the sleigh were intelligent, thinking beings. They weren't simply
food.

"Hold on tight," said the driver. "We're going to see if we can lose them." He yelled at the cuddyaks, and shook the reins. Felix could see the whites of the animals' eyes as they rolled them in protest, but they broke into a lumbering gallop and the sleigh speeded up.

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"I don't like this," whispered Betony as they jolted along. "Cuddyaks can't outrun
anything.
Those snagglefang things are getting closer."

Felix glanced out of the rear of the sleigh. Six pairs of disembodied green eyes were following along some ways behind. His mouth went dry with fear; the disembodied smile of the Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland
had scared him half to death when he'd been small. Then he realized that the eyes only
looked
disembodied because the animals had snow-white coats, which were lost against the icy backdrop. They looked like the illustrations he'd seen of Pleistocene dire wolves, and they seemed to be about the same size. Big.

The eyes were getting closer. He could make out the shapes of their bodies now, ghostlike in their pallor, and he could see their paws landing on top of the tracks made by the sleigh, hear the faint
thubbidy-thub
as they sent up little puffs of snow.

The driver started to swear quietly to himself as the japegrin tried to take aim with his harpoon, but the sleigh was bouncing around too much.

The eyes were a
lot
closer now -- although it was hard to estimate their real distance since there were no landmarks, just snow. The snagglefangs looked completely at home in this frozen wasteland, and ran so effortlessly they seemed almost to float.

"Go right, go right!" shouted the japegrin suddenly, and the sleigh nearly tipped over as it did a sharp turn, spraying snow in a graceful arc.

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Felix felt his knuckles go into spasm as they gripped the guardrail too tightly. The sleigh was heading straight toward a crevasse, and the cuddyaks were galloping flat-out. As they drew closer, he saw that there was a bridge. It was very narrow. It looked as though someone had spun it from sugar, to decorate a wedding cake. Delicate strands of white twinkled in the moonlight, arching over a chasm so deep that Felix couldn't see the bottom until they were actually on the bridge itself. The river below foamed and frothed and battered its way past boulders that were so far away they looked like pebbles. All he could hear was a faint rumble, like white noise. Snow was blowing off the cambered surface like clouds of spray, and there was a grating and a grinding noise from the sleigh as the runners hit stone. Felix bumped his nose on the seat in front, and then felt a tiny trickle of blood reach his lip. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

When they were halfway across, the first snagglefang loped into sight. It was the creature's long black shadow that Felix noticed first, then the beast itself. For the first time, he got a really good look at it -- and so did everyone else. He could see the ears, pricked, fluffy, set at a slight angle on a heavy skull. Its coat was thick and furry, like a husky's, and its fangs were long and thin and pointed, with a slight curve to them. There was a wail of fear from someone, and a stifled sob from someone else.

"Just get us to the other side!" yelled the japegrin with the harpoon. "I'll do the rest!"

121

[Image: Snagglefangs.]

The sleigh skidded to the left, and one of its runners strayed perilously close to the edge. Felix heard the diggeluck catch his breath as the driver hauled on the right-hand rein to compensate. The sleigh managed to steer a central course from then on, and they reached the other side without mishap. All six snagglefangs were on the bridge now, their wraithlike bodies coiling and stretching as they ran. They were closing the gap.

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"Stop!" called the japegrin with the harpoon, and the cuddyaks slid to a halt, breathing hard.

Felix felt his nose begin to throb where he'd hit it on the seat in front. Was he going to have a full-scale nosebleed? Finding a handkerchief occupied him so thoroughly that the next time he looked up, the japegrin had jumped down onto the snow. But instead of aiming his harpoon, he had drawn his wand. He pointed it at the bridge, and shouted something with lots of Zs in it.

The bridge seemed to crumble to nothing. The snagglefangs fell with it into the chasm below -- looking, at that distance, like cuddly toys thrown from a window by a bad-tempered child.

The rest of the passengers burst into spontaneous applause, and the japegrin smiled and bowed.

"Lovely bit of sorcery," said the diggeluck.

"There's just one problem," said the driver.

The other passengers looked at him expectantly.

"Yergud's on the other side of the chasm. We went way off course trying to escape the snagglefangs, and the only route back involves making an even bigger detour to the north."

There was a moment of silence.

"Can't be helped," said someone.

"Are we going to travel all night, then?"

"You're not going to find an inn out here in the wilderness, are you?"

123

"Oh!" said Betony, pointing upward.
"Blazing feathers!
What's
that?"

There was an eerie strip of light in the sky, like a wisp of dry ice illuminated by a green spotlight. As they watched, it faded ... only to reappear somewhere else.

"It's the Sky-mold," said a japegrin. "You get it a lot up here at this time of year."

The light started to behave like a gauze veil, doubling over on itself and streaming away into nothingness, reappearing, fading, intensifying, flickering, fading again.

"It's the northern lights," said Felix, awestruck.

"Are they dangerous?" asked Betony.

"No."

"So what are they?"

"There's something called the solar wind, and charged particles from it collide with gas particles in the atmosphere and make the lights ..." He stopped, aware that he was losing her. "I need to give you a real science lesson. Several lessons, really."

The lights flickered and danced, and a shooting star went straight through the middle of them.

"For me," said Betony, "it's enough that they're beautiful. I don't particularly want to know how they work."

Felix grinned. "Typical girl."

"I am
not,"
said Betony. She bent down, made a snowball, and threw it at him. Felix retaliated, and for a while they

124

exchanged missiles. As usual, Betony scored more hits than Felix -- but when they called a halt, they realized that everyone else had climbed back on board and tucked in their covers. As they walked back to the sleigh, they noticed that the cuddyaks had become very nervous, and after shying a few times, they lowered their horns and stood shoulder to shoulder.

"What's that?" asked someone, pointing upward.

A four-legged shape was flying across the face of the moon. It turned its head in their direction and then veered toward them.

"It's a brazzle!" exclaimed the diggeluck.
"Picks and shovels,
they're really fierce, brazzles are."

The brazzle went into a long glide and landed on the snow in front of the sleigh. Felix had been hoping that it would turn out to be Ironclaw, but this one was a female, and it wasn't Thornbeak. The japegrin leveled his harpoon.

"No!" shouted Betony.

But it was too late. The japegrin had fired already, and the weapon streaked through the air, the rope snaking along behind like a party streamer. The brazzle looked astonished for a moment; then the harpoon hit her a glancing blow and she sank down into the snow.

"It's Fuzzy," said Betony, in a strange, expressionless sort of voice.

"It can't be Fuzzy," said Felix, horrified. "Fuzzy's just a chick."

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"Not anymore."

Felix felt sick.

"I meant she isn't just a little chick anymore."

They both ran over to her.

Rhino had never flown in an airplane, let alone on the back of a dragon. His family hadn't gone on vacations, because they never knew which one of them was going to be in prison at any given time. Rhino had five elder brothers, and all but one of them had a criminal record.

There had been no one to witness his cowardice at the airstrip, when he'd taken the sleigh to Yergud instead of the fire-breather to Tiratattle. This time, though, there was no way out. He had to travel to the Spitfire Mountains by dragon, or look like a total wimp. At least he wasn't on his own. Two japegrins, Catchfly and Pepperwort, were accompanying him, and they would do the donkey work of loading the animal's panniers with sulfur. All Rhino had to do was identify the stuff. He knew it was yellow, and that was about it. Maybe there was something else scientific he could turn his hand to? Drilling for oil, maybe? Lots of things came from oil: gasoline, polystyrene, asphalt, paraffin, adhesives ... He remembered the list only because he'd had to write it out for a detention once.

The takeoff had been horrible. Rhino had barely fastened his seat belt before the fire-breather heaved itself to its feet and galloped off down the runway like a demented goanna. It

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spread its huge leathery wings, lifted off the ground, climbed for a minute or two, and then banked steeply. The horizon turned nearly vertical, and Rhino felt sick. The japegrins were chatting away to one another as though traveling sideways was perfectly normal. He shut his eyes and willed the time to pass as quickly as possible.

After a while things settled down, and Rhino opened his eyes. They weren't as high up as he'd expected, and they were traveling toward some mountains. The landscape directly below seemed rather featureless because of the snow, although there were lots of rivers and some spectacular waterfalls. Every so often they passed what he assumed to be a factory, because of the steam, and he wondered what they manufactured. He turned his attention to his immediate surroundings and noticed a basket strapped to the seat in front of him with soda and snacks and an in-flight magazine. He read about the rebuilding program in Tiratattle, the stone quarrying in Yergud, and the library in Andria. He also read about the geothermal water that came from underground, bubbling and steaming and heating the glass domes that grew the vegetables in this cold northern land. A little later, he spotted a streak of red in the distance. There was either some smoke or some steam climbing upward from it in a snow-white column. "What's that?" he asked.

"Spitfire fissure," said Pepperwort. "The ground splits open and spews out flame."

"And what's that?" asked Rhino, pointing to a broader