Jinx On The Divide (8 page)

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Eventually, he managed to hitch a ride on a sleigh pulled by what he assumed were cattle (although the horns on their noses were a little confusing), in the hope of reaching somewhere with reception for his cell phone. He didn't have to ask what the sleigh was carrying. The smell of fish that wafted over his shoulder spoke for itself.

The driver was bundled up in a greasy sheepskin jacket and leggings, and he was wearing the most extraordinary pair of feathered earmuffs. He didn't look quite human -- if the earmuffs were anything to go by, his ears would have looked better on a garden gnome. He seemed to think that Rhino was something called a japegrin, and, as a diggeluck (whatever that was), he had a lot of bones to pick with japegrins.

"Your kind think they're the only ones with any idea of how to run things," he grumbled, "but diggelucks know more about mining than anyone else. Used to be a miner myself, before I took some of Snakeweed's cough potion. Can't work underground anymore, so I takes fish to the airstrip instead...."

Rhino sat bolt upright. "Airstrip?"

"You didn't think I was going to
drive
all the way to Tiratattle? Can't take chances with fish, you know; fish has to be fresh. No, I drops them off and they gets air-freighted the rest of the way."

"Er ... right," said Rhino, his mind working overtime. Perhaps there would be a radio tower in Tiratattle? But how

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much would the flight cost, and how would he pay for it? He felt in his pockets: a handkerchief, his remaining firecrackers, a knife, the cigarette lighter, a candy bar, a few coins ... He pulled out the coins.

The diggeluck glanced across. "Never seen any like those," he said. "A collector would pay a fortune for them, I reckon."

"I'll give you a special price," said Rhino, scarcely believing his luck, "seeing as you've done me a favor."

So Rhino got the money for his ticket. After a while the movement of the sleigh had a hypnotic effect, and he dozed off. When he woke up, dawn was breaking and they were at the airstrip.

It wasn't like any airstrip he'd seen in a movie. There was a runway, certainly, the snow packed down hard. But it wasn't very long, and instead of wheel marks, there were huge three-toed footprints, like dinosaur tracks. It looked as though there hadn't been a flight for a while. Rhino went inside the shack, which was the so-called terminal, to buy a ticket and, hopefully, a cup of coffee. He purchased his ticket without any trouble, but he would have to wait for the next flight to arrive so that it could be turned around. It was a tiny airport -- there were no planes on the ground at all.

No one seemed to know what coffee was, so he sat there and studied his fellow passengers-to-be. They were an odd group. This clearly was not Scotland. There were a few diggelucks, a one-eyed mutant in a pink frock, a goaty-legged

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thing with horns -- a costume, surely -- and one lone human being. He had a mass of curly red hair, not unlike Rhino's own, and squinty green eyes. Just as Rhino was gearing himself up to go over and say hello, the man ran a hand through his hair, revealing a pointed elfin ear.
Oh, well,
thought Rhino. /
may be dreaming, round the twist, or dead, but it could be worse. It could be history class.

A few minutes later, it did get worse, a lot worse. First of all, he noticed a light in the sky. Then he realized it was winking on and off -- some sort of identification signal, probably. By the time the light reached the end of the runway, he'd figured out that its source was a jet of name, not a lightbulb, and it was coming from the mouth of -- well, a dragon. He watched the creature touch down at a gallop and slow to a waddle. easy-flap had been painted on its flank, and it wore a long, many-seated saddle. Rhino watched the passengers disembark. None of them looked normal. A radio tower in Tiratattle was seeming less and less likely by the minute. He walked out of the airport and took the next passenger sleigh out of town. It was going to a place called Yergud.

He eavesdropped on the conversations in the sleigh as it jolted along, and he learned a lot. It became clear that, somehow, he had crossed over into another world. Whether it was a real world, or a world inside his head, remained to be seen. He couldn't do anything about it, so there was no point in agonizing over it -- but based on his experiences so far, he would be able to live like a king if he played his cards right.

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[Image: A dragon.]

He was feeling pleased with his curly red hair for the first time ever -- and it was long enough to hide his ears.

The landscape was changing, for they were going uphill all the time. They passed gigantic frozen waterfalls, and lakes waxed with ice. There didn't seem to be any trees anymore, just great expanses of shoulder-high bushes with silvery trunks and snow-laden branches. Although Rhino had seen tundra on television, actually
being
in such a bleak environment was a very new experience. The sunrise was far more protracted than it was in England, and the light was strange -- a pearly lilac-gray.

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Gradually, the grayness seeped away until the sky was streaked with turquoise and pink, and the sun appeared, red and raw. They stopped at a roadside cafe for breakfast. When they came out, a blizzard was in progress. Five minutes later, it was bright sunshine again. A little later, the sky darkened to a bruise, and then the mountains disappeared behind a veil of white. Rhino pulled up his hood, but once again, the snowstorm didn't last long.

Yergud itself looked like a toy town. There weren't any buildings over two stories high, and they were all painted in pastel colors. He made his way to the market and looked at the produce, considering lunch. Some things were familiar -- loaves of bread, crocks of honey, dried mushrooms, cheeses.

The livestock section was completely
un
familiar. There were several pens full of goaty things that quacked and waggled their ears every so often. Beneath the bleating of bright-blue domestic fowls and the bellows of cuddyaks, there was a nonstop background track of haggling voices and clinking coins.

Rhino took out his cell phone and turned it on. He was being very careful about saving power since he didn't have his charger with him. Once again, there was no signal whatsoever.

"I'll take that," said a voice over his shoulder, and before he had time to react, a hand had relieved him of his phone.

Rhino spun around in a fury. It didn't matter that the cell wasn't his in the first place -- having the tables turned on him didn't please him one bit. The japegrin responsible for

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the snatch pressed a few buttons and accidentally called up Rhino's ring tone, which was a bloodcurdling scream he had downloaded from the Internet. The japegrin went very pale and nearly dropped the phone. "What lives inside it?" he asked.

"Give it back and I'll tell you," said Rhino.

The japegrin shook his head. "Squill needs to hear about this."

"Yeah, right," said Rhino, and he lashed out with his foot, catching the japegrin on the shin, and followed up with a swift right to the stomach.

Despite the fact that the japegrin was taller than Rhino, he doubled over, making a satisfying
oomph
sound -- but much to Rhino's surprise, he didn't give up the phone. What he did was to pull out a sort of dull black stick and wave it in a figure eight. Rhino felt the coldness arrive like a sudden and violent dose of flu. It was as though his body were changing seasons, from summer to autumn to winter. The frost seeped through his veins, settling around his bones and chilling his flesh from the inside. His eyes fixed in one position so that he no longer had any peripheral vision, and everything grew blurred and foggy. He couldn't swallow anymore, and the moment he stopped breathing was the scariest of all.

When Rhino regained consciousness, he found himself lying on a couch. The japegrin who'd taken his phone was nowhere to be seen, but there were several others sitting at little tables and going through paperwork.

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"Hey," said one of them, glancing in Rhino's direction. "The human's awake."

Rhino sat up, trying to remember what had happened just before he passed out. Everything was a bit confused. He could remember someone waving a stick at him, but that was about it.

"So," said a different voice, "we have another human being in our midst. You look far more like a japegrin than the last one."

Something clicked in Rhino's mind. "What do you mean, the last one?"

"Felix Sanders. Felix had brown hair and blue eyes. You, on the other hand, have hair the color of congealing blood, and eyes of the finest mud. Allow me to introduce myself. My name's Squill, and I'm the Thane of Yergud."

"Stephen Rheinhart," said Rhino, trying to take in the fact that Felix had been to this place before and undoubtedly knew a lot more about it. Why hadn't he made his fortune, then? He was good enough at science to be able to explain the internal-combustion engine and probably quite a few other things. Felix wasn't streetwise, though -- perhaps that was it. He simply had no business sense.

"Now, then," said Squill. "The Divide spell. You have it?"

Rhino looked blank.

"How did you get here?"

"In a magic lamp," said Rhino faintly.

"So someone else recited the spell. Pity." Squill took

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Rhino's cell phone out of his pocket. "You have imprisoned some creature in here. Is it dangerous?"

"It's a machine for talking to people," said Rhino. "The other person has to have one as well. There's nothing actually
in
there."

"So someone was screaming at you through it?"

"No, it was a recording -- a copy -- of someone pretending to scream."

"Why?"

Rhino couldn't think of any reply that would be worth making.

"It's scientific?"

"Yeah."

"And you are a scientist?"

Pretending to be a scientist might be a good move. "What if I am?" he said, although he realized that he might be required to prove it before too long. Mind you, these pixie folk would be seriously impressed by even the most mundane of inventions. A flashlight, for instance. Which needed a lightbulb. And to make a lightbulb, you'd need to make glass. And to make glass you needed ... what?

"If you are a scientist, then you are more than welcome," said Squill. "There are various things we're working on. Gold mining, cake design, world domination. Take your pick. Top salary, naturally."

"What exactly are you after?"

"A scientific icing that doesn't go granite-hard. A way

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of blowing up rock -- drilling spells take forever. We're rebuilding our capital, Tiratattle, way to the south, and we need a lot of stone. We're somewhat behind on production because we had to shut down one of the quarries."

"Why?"

Squill looked evasive. Then he said, "Safety issues," but it didn't ring true somehow.

Rhino put his hand in his pocket. The firecrackers were still there, and so was the cigarette lighter. He suddenly felt that his luck had turned; he could bluff his way through this. "I know a bit about blowing things up," he said. The only time he had ever paid any attention in chemistry was when there were loud bangs involved, and he still had enough firecrackers to make something fairly destructive. Once those were gone, he'd have to think again.

They dressed him in japegrin purple. Although he felt silly at first, he could pass unnoticed when he wanted to. But he didn't want to -- he kept his head bare so that everyone could see his ears. He was famous just for being human, and it felt good when people turned to stare. The only times he'd made an impression in the past were when he'd smashed a window, or spray-painted his name on a wall, or beaten someone up. He decided to hang on to the brandee's cloak. Although it was black -- and consequently unfashionable -- it was very lightweight and astonishingly warm.

Squill wanted a scientific demonstration right away, so Rhino packed three of his remaining firecrackers into something

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that looked a bit like an oversized walnut shell. Squill selected a target -- a little ragamucky shack by a rocky outcrop just outside Yergud -- and hid behind a tree. Rhino lit the fuse, and then ran like crazy.

The bang was much bigger than Rhino had been expecting, and he narrowly avoided being hit by flying debris.

[Image: Rhino.]

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Dust rose into the air like a mushroom cloud, and a flock of birds lifted out of the trees and wheeled around, dazed and confused. How the heck had three cheap firecrackers managed to produce a result like this? Then one of the birds tumbled out of the sky and landed dead at his feet. Then another, and another. The dust cleared, and he could see that nothing remained of the shack except a few pieces of charred and splintered wood -- and two halves of something that looked remarkably like a crystal ball.

Squill turned to Rhino, his emerald eyes bright and intense in his soot-blackened face. "You are a gifted scientist, Professor Rheinhart, that is quite clear. Perhaps you can also show me how to make those talking-together machines. What did you call them? Cell groans?"

The ragamucky suddenly appeared from behind them, carrying a bag of groceries, her face twisted with fury. "That was my home you just razed!" she yelled. "How am I supposed to rent out perching rocks if I don't live on the premises?"

"Slum clearance," said Squill.

The ragamucky's expression darkened. "I demand compensation."

"Only japegrins get compensation," said Squill. "So I suggest you pick up the two halves of your crystal ball -- which, clearly, failed to warn you that your house was about to be demolished -- and go back to wherever you came from."

***