Un Lun Dun (32 page)

65

The Smoky Dead

Deeba stumbled. She heard Curdle squeak in her bag. Cauldron leapt at the attacker, but the dead man backhanded him away.

An awful stink of old meat and burning sulfur filled the air. Deeba tried to crawl away, but the man bore down on her with his fast shambling step and raised his blade.

Deeba screamed as it swung down.

But the blow stopped descending. The man looked up with smoke eyes. His weapon had caught on a vine. He struggled clumsily to free it.

“Come on, come on!” Hemi hauled Deeba up.

“What is it?” she shouted.

“A smombie,” Hemi said.

The aggressive corpse lurched at Hemi, who ducked wildly.

The travelers backed onto the banks of a pool where the river’s waters had collected. The horrible smelly attacker blocked their path and came at them. With each blow it devastated a huge swath of forest: it was terrifyingly strong.

Bling flew at it, scratching with hard insect claws. Where it tore skin, wisps of smoke rose. The dead man ignored the injuries and headbutted a tree trunk, stunning and dislodging the utterling on his face.

Mr. Cavea sang and stepped in front of him. He threw the book to Deeba, put up his hands, and dropped into an odd crouch, like an antique photograph of those old boxers wearing what looked like women’s swimming costumes. He waggled his fists.

“He says, ‘I must warn you, sir…’” the book translated, but got no further, as the dead man swung the machete and Cavea had to dance away.

“Don’t try it!” Hemi shouted. “Smombies are strong!”

Mr. Cavea skipped nimbly over the roots, jabbing swiftly and punching. His blows didn’t seem to do any real damage, but they were obviously annoyances. The smombie shambled, following Mr. Cavea at the water’s edge.

He’s turning him round!
Deeba realized.
He’s giving us a way out!
She gestured at Hemi and the utterlings, and they began to creep behind the smombie’s back.

But while the man was dead, he wasn’t stupid. He saw them moving and turned. Mr. Cavea punched and shoved him, tried and failed to knock him down. The man ignored him, and raised his machete again.

The bird in the cage whistled once.

“He says, ‘Oh, dammit!’” the book said.

With that, Cavea grabbed the dead figure and twisted in a kind of judo throw, hauling the corpse over his shoulder. Their attacker arched towards the water and the avidly waiting fish. As he sailed over, the smombie gripped Cavea himself, and pulled him with him into the pool.

The two bodies vanished into the deep water.

“No!” Hemi and Deeba shouted.

The smombie’s head and Mr. Cavea’s birdcage both broke the surface. The water rippled as excited piranhas came to investigate. The smombie hauled clumsily at roots, to get out, but Mr. Cavea kept batting his hands away. The bird shook water from itself and trilled and hopped around its cage.

“He says go!” the book shouted. “Now! Before the Smog gives up on this body.”

“We can’t leave him,” Deeba said.

“No way!” said Hemi.

Cavea chirruped at them furiously.

“Go. He says he won’t be able to hold him much longer.”

Deeba could see hundreds of fish nibbling at the men in the water. The piranhas around the smombie swam away, to join those attacking Yorick Cavea.

They don’t like old meat,
she realized.

“He says thanks for inviting him,” said the book.

Hemi dragged Deeba. “We got to go,” he said urgently. He pulled her through the passageway the smombie had cut, under the sliced ends of vines dripping sap.

Deeba looked back. Mr. Cavea was sinking. He gripped the smombie with one hand, and with the other, he threw open the door to his cage. As his body slipped into the piranha-infested water, the little bird flew out.

Immediately, the human body stiffened, its hand still tight around the smombie’s neck. The two figures sank below the surface, the smombie still moving, the little bird circling above the pool.

There was a rumbling, bubbling noise.

The water of the pool was thick and foul with the juices of the fight and the dead body. It was unsettled like a stomach. Big bubbles rolled up in it.

There was a farting sound, and a mass of gas erupted out of the deeps. Bubbles of black smoke gathered, and sent out tendrils.

The bird-part of Cavea, still soaking, launched itself from a branch and circled the bolus of Smog.

“Move,” whispered the book.

“No, everyone stay still,” whispered Deeba.

The bird whirled around the Smog so fast it tore off strips of cloud-matter. After several such provocations, it raced off up the stairs. The Smog billowed in a dirty mass after it.

“He led it away,” Hemi whispered.

“Good man,” the book said.

“
Brave
man,” Deeba said.

“Now can we
please
get out of here?” Hemi said.

They opened the front door, and stumbled out of the forest in the house, bedraggled, sticky with resin and plant juice, scratched, bruised, hungry, and exhausted, into the afternoon of UnLondon.

66

Skipping Historical Stages

People stared at them curiously. Sitting on his step opposite was the old man they had spoken to before entering.

“So in my opinion,” he said, “you should avoid going in.”

Deeba gave him a scorching look. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Hemi, can you find somewhere?” They stumbled off to a less crowded street, and Hemi read the signs until he found them an emptish house, where they washed as best as they could under the taps, went to the living room, and collapsed.

“What exactly was that…smombie?” Deeba said.

“They used to be really rare, but these days there are more of them,” Hemi said. “Smog gets everywhere. Into cemeteries, and through the earth into the graves.”

“How do you know so much about this?” said the book.

“Do you remember where I’m from?” Hemi snapped. “There’s not much gets people in Wraithtown more riled than mistreating the dead. We’ve been complaining about this for ages. Not that anyone listened.

“Smog gets inside bodies and pulls them around like puppets. Some are nothing more than skeletons with clots of Smog around their joints. Some are like the one we saw in there.”

“Aha,” said Deeba. “And sometimes they might look even more as if they’re still alive.”

“Yeah…Of
course,
” Hemi said, his eyes widening as he remembered the Unstible-thing.

“And how’d it find us?”

“The Smog must’ve sent them all over the place.”

“It probably didn’t expect to find you,” the book said. “There’d have been more than one. But the forest is well known enough that it was worth staking out. Which means that there may well be others, waiting for us elsewhere.”

Deeba held up the feather and turned it in her fingers. Its key-shape was made of intricate whorls and beautifully plaited threads of matter. Its reds and blues glinted like colored glass.

“So what now?” Hemi said.

“Well,” the book said. “That was the first task. There are six more. The next thing we have to fetch is the squidbeak clipper. That’ll mean going to the docks. After that we need the bone tea. After that…”

“We can’t,” Deeba said, twirling the feather.

“What?” said the book.

“What?” said Hemi.

“Look…what are we supposed to do with all these things once we’ve got them?”

“It depends,” the book said. “The clippers are supposed to, well, to snip something open. The bone tea’s there to send something to sleep. The snail…it’s not exactly clear what the snail’s for, but there are two distinct schools of thought—”

“What do you mean ‘it’s not clear’?”

“Don’t take a tone with me! I told you, prophecies can be vague.”

“Yeah, and wrong,” muttered Hemi.

“A lot of these things,” the book went on, “the idea is that as situations arise you’ll…sort of know what to do. Some stuff is explained in detail, some isn’t. Or it’s…well…contradictory.”

“This is
ridiculous,
” Deeba said. “Trying to follow prophecies is obviously way too hard.”

“But this was your idea,” the book said. “And look, we got what we needed, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, and it took us
two days,
and we lost
two people
!” Deeba yelled. There was silence.

“Diss is dead, and Cavea probably is,” she said. “Do the maths. We still have
six more
things to get. At this rate that’s going to cost us
twelve people,
and there are only six of us left, and that’s if we count you, book, and Curdle! And, it’s going to take
twelve days.
And I haven’t
got
twelve days! You
know
that. I’ve got seven at the
most.
”

“That started again, though,” the book said tentatively. “After the phone call. And the number may not be accurate…”

“It’s
too long.
And too risky. You saw what happened to Diss! We can’t do it this way. Like you said, we don’t even know what we’re supposed to do with this stuff.” She held up the featherkey. “Like, what do I do with this?”

“Well, you open a door, obviously,” the book said.

“
What
door?”

“A
very important
door. A door without the opening of which the Smog cannot be stopped!”

“You don’t know, do you?” Deeba said.

“No,” said the book.

“No idea?”

“Not really.” It sounded quite defeated. “I think it’s the doorway to the room where the squid beak is, but…no. Not really.”

Deeba stamped around the room in rage.

“We spent two days crashing around in a forest, and people
died,
and we aren’t even sure what for! I’m supposed to use it to get something to get something else! Why don’t I just get the last thing in the
first
place?”

“As I say, the occasions tend to present themselves, and then it’s clear…” the book said.

“I’d shut up now, if I were you,” Hemi muttered to it. The book took his advice.

“If Diss hadn’t died getting us this,” she said, staring at the key, “I’d tear the bloody useless thing up. I know it’s not your fault,” she said to the book. “It was my idea. And I know it would be nice for you if what’s written in you turned out to be sort of true. But
we don’t have time.
And it’s too risky. So go through the tasks, and tell me what each one’s supposed to do.”

“Well, as I say, the squidbeak clipper’s supposed to hold on to something in the tearoom—”

“Forget it,” Deeba said. The book hesitated, then continued.

“The bone tea’s refreshing—”

“No.”

“But…we need it to give to the aleactor, to send him to sleep when we play ludo, so we can take the teeth-dice—”

“I said
no.
”

“The teeth-dice we need to chew up a—”

“No.”

“The snail, I
think,
can prove to us that slow and steady wins out—”

“Are you joking? No.”

“The black-or-white king’s crown explains an outcome—”

“Whatever. Don’t even know what that means.”

“—and the UnGun’s a weapon.”

There was a pause.

“Is it? A weapon? For real?”

“For very real,” Hemi said. “I didn’t know it was in the prophecy, but everyone’s heard of the UnGun.”

“It’s the most famous weapon in UnLondon’s history,” the book said.

Hemi nodded—surreptitiously, so the book wouldn’t see that Deeba wanted independent verification of everything it was saying.

“Why?” she said. “What did it do?”

Hemi looked at the book, and Deeba was sure the book was looking back at him.

“I dunno,” said Hemi. “Heroic stuff.”

Deeba rolled her eyes. “What is it?”

“A gun,” the book said, “only an un one. It says in me, ‘The Smog’s afraid of nothing but the UnGun.’ That’s what all this, all the seven tasks, leads up to. The fetching of the UnGun. It was put in a very safe place, where no one would mess with it, years ago.”

“Smog’s afraid of nothing but the UnGun, eh?”

“Yes,” the book said, then added nervously, “Well to be honest it actually says ‘nothing
and
the UnGun,’ but we realized that must be a misprint.”

“You’re kidding me,” Deeba snapped. “So you
did
know you there could be mistakes in you?”

“It was three letters,” the book said forlornly. “We didn’t think anything of it…”

“Alright. Whatever.” Deeba thought. “A weapon. Alright. Right now we haven’t got much to fight the Smog with. We need a weapon, and the Smog’s obviously scared of this one.

“So that’s what we’re going to do,” Deeba said. “We’ll skip the rest of the stuff. Save us some time. We’ll go straight to the last stage of the quest. Let’s go get the UnGun. Then we can deal with the Smog, and I can go home.”