Un Lun Dun (44 page)

86

The Unintended Attacker

The fruit-thing rose, and unfolded.

It was taller than Jones. Deeba saw pears and peaches, apples and grapefruit all moving together like muscles. It stretched out arms at the end of which were bunches of bananas splayed into open hands. Its head was a watermelon, with bulging kiwi-fruit eyes.

The thing looked ridiculous.

“We’re being menaced by
fruit
?” said Obaday sarcastically. “Oh
scary.
”

“Wait!” said the book, and “No!” said Jones, but Obaday had picked up a knife from the table and swung it casually at the thing.

The fruit-figure caught Obaday’s wrist with one of its bunch-of-banana hands, and it began to squeeze. Obaday stared at it in astonishment, and then cried out in pain. The melon-head was mouthlessly snarling.

“Not what we had in mind,” said one of the Hex.

“We were thinking of a tin-man sort of thing,” said another.

“But a fructbot will do,” finished a third.

There was a crack from Obaday’s wrist, and he screamed.

The fruit-monster swung cherries and strawberries and black currants sausaged into a tail, ending in a pineapple like a spiked club. It sent Obaday sailing through the air to land with a horrible thud.

The fruit-devil raised its banana claws, and ran at Deeba.

The Hex laughed and watched their inadvertent creation on the rampage.

Deeba leapt away from it. Jones grabbed it and tried to electrocute it, but the charge seemed only to annoy the fruit. It flicked him away. The little half-transparent utterlings could only scamper out of its path and occasionally slap it, completely without effect. Lectern cowered.

The towering fruity menace slammed its bananas and its pineapple into the wood of the table, sending food flying. Each blow bruised and smashed the fruit that made it, but the fragrant stuff still held together. Deeba dodged its sweet-smelling blows.

It stamped, and snarled, its fruit-face terrifying and malevolent, crouching like a murderer.

“Deeba!” Jones shouted. “Get out of here! Finish the job! I’ll hold it off!”

She grabbed Curdle and tensed. But she hesitated.

One of the Hex was watching her. Before she got three paces, she realized, they’d cast another spell, and this time it would hit her full-on. Obaday was unconscious, the utterlings and Lectern were useless, and Conductor Jones was being pounded by the fruit. It smacked him with blow after terrible blow.

“Right,” she said, and pulled the UnGun from her belt.

“No, Deeba!” said Jones. “You need the ammo!” He ducked, but got hit anyway by a pineapple smash. “You’ll only have one bullet left,” he groaned.

“You’ve seen what the bullets do,” said Deeba. “Whatever they have to. One’s all I’ll need.”

She pulled the trigger.

There was a reverberating UnGun roar.

The report stung Deeba’s hands, but she kept her stance, lowered the UnGun a little, to aim at the astonished Hex.

From the tiny spaces between the fruit of the attacker’s body rushed rapacious black specks. A tide of hungry ants.

The fructbot turned and spun on its heel, raised its hands, and beat itself with its tail. But though it must have mashed thousands of the insects, millions remained, racing over it and its crevices and chomping with their little scissor-jaws. Deeba could actually hear a whisper of munching.

“It’s not enough to hit it,” she said to Jones. “You have to actually take bits away.”

The fruit figure was shrinking fast, its struggles weaker and weaker.

A trail of ants was crossing the floor in a line, disappearing into a crack in the floor, each bearing a nugget of fruit-flesh.

“To be honest,” Deeba said, “I was sort of hoping it might be one giant one.”

“Stop staring at that thing and look at the Hex!” the book shouted. Deeba spun.

The Hex stood grim and angry, their hands clenched in a complicated six-way clasp. Jones tried to vault the remains of the table to get to them, but he was way too battered. They glanced at him and spoke simultaneously.

“Where!”

“Now!”

“Are!”

“Stay!”

“You!”

“Right!”

Jones froze. His eyes shifted from side to side, but he couldn’t move.

The Hex stared at Deeba.

“Forget taking her for questioning,” spat the one called
ivv.
They shouted words again.

“Time!”

“It’s!”

“Heart!”

“Your!”

“Beating!”

“Stopped!”

In the split second they spoke, Deeba rearranged the words in her mind, and a dreadful fear gripped her. She wanted to pull the trigger, but—absurdly, even at that moment when everything was about to end—she remembered that she would need one bullet at least to face the Smog and she hesitated.

She could almost sense the Hex’s words flying across the air between them and her.
Oh no,
she thought. Her chest constricted, and she went numb.

87

Words of Persuasion

But even as a chill began to creep through Deeba’s limbs, the utterlings leapt in front of her.

Bling and Cauldron were getting fainter and fainter. She could see right through them. But it didn’t seem to affect their energy. They were jumping up and down frantically, waving their limbs.

Deeba couldn’t quite make anything out, but she had a strong sense that something was decelerating. A point of focus. A particular vibration in the air. The utterlings leapt on the spot and gesticulated. No one but the utterlings moved.

“I can’t help noticing,” Deeba said eventually, “my heart’s still beating. What exactly’s going on?”

The utterlings signed quickly at the strange patch of air. The Hex stared at them in rage and shouted again.

“Banished!”

“Words!”

“You!”

“Renegade!”

“Are!”

“Spoken!”

The utterlings redoubled their motions, and another invisible-but-detectable oddity racing towards them slowed, and stalled.

Renegade spoken words, you are banished,
thought Deeba.

“Oh my,” said the book. “I think I know what’s happening. The Hex are spellspeakers—”

“But the utterlings are making their words disobey,” said Deeba.

“They’re words, and they rebelled themselves,” the book said. “They know what to say to persuade other words to follow suit.”

“Somebody bleeding well gag the Hex!” the book shouted. The six magicians were opening their mouths to try a third time, but Deeba swung the UnGun at them and they froze.

Jones shoved cloth torn from their own clothes into each of the Hex’s mouths. He picked up lengths of chain from the cluttered room and connected all six of them. He sat wearily on the stairs holding one end of the metal.

“If I hear a word out of any of you,” he said, “I’m conducting the juice, and you won’t like that. So
shhhhh.
”

The Hex looked wide-eyed, and nodded to show how carefully they would obey.

Deeba circled the utterlings, which were talking silently and animatedly with their hands, pausing sometimes, presumably as the Hex’s words answered them.

“So,” Deeba said. “Somewhere in there—” She pointed at the air in front of them. “—are the words to banish them and kill me?”

“Yes,” said the book. “But the utterlings are doing a good job of persuading them to do their own thing.”

“What if they decide to do what they were supposed to, later on?”

“I don’t think they’re very interested in that,” the book said. Bling had begun walking around the room, pointing things out to the rebellious words. “See? It’s showing them around. They want to be tourists. They only just got born.”

“If they do what they were supposed to, then they’re finished,” Deeba said. “I suppose the last thing they want to do now is what they were told. Then they’d be done.”

The last of the ants was carrying off the last shreds of the fruit. There was nothing left but pips, stones, and stalks, lying on the floor very vaguely in the shape of a man.

“Isn’t there something we can do for the utterlings?” Deeba said quietly to the book. “They’re nearly gone.”

“I don’t think so. They’ve already lasted longer than most of their kind.”

“But…we can’t just let them disappear!”

“I don’t want them to, either,” the book said. “But it’s not under our control.” Deeba watched the dwindling figures.

“Can’t I just speak them again? Cauldron. Bling.”

“It doesn’t work that way. You didn’t speak them in the first place.”

“Well, Mr. Speaker’s certainly not going to speak them again,” said Deeba. “Even if he could…” She stopped suddenly. “But they’re not his things anyway, anymore. They rebelled. Why can’t they speak themselves?”

“Don’t be silly,” the book said. “They haven’t got any mouths.”

“There are people who can’t make sounds but they still talk,” Deeba said. “They use their hands. Or they
write things down.
Why can’t the utterlings do that? They
are
doing it, look. They could talk themselves back.”

Cauldron and Bling were gesturing energetically to the Hex’s invisible words.

“Tell them to say themselves,” Deeba said. “That could work. Couldn’t it?”

“It…might,” the book said hesitantly.

“Of course it will,” said Deeba. “Promise me you’ll tell them to try, as soon as they’re done talking to the spell-words. Promise?”

“What do you mean?” said the book. “Why can’t you tell them?”

“Because I have to go,” Deeba said. “Time’s running out.” She sat next to Jones.

Obaday was moaning and clutching his broken wrist, while Lectern tended him. The utterlings were escorting the newly independent words around the world that most words never had the time to notice.

“Come on then,” said Jones. Deeba could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The Smog’s somewhere upstairs. Time to track it down.”

“Jones,” she said. She sighed. “Look at yourself.”

“Come on now,” he groaned.

“Seriously. That fruit-thing knocked you around. You can’t even walk. And anyway…” She lowered her voice. “Do you really trust Obaday to keep watch over the Hex?” Jones laughed morosely. “
You
have to watch them, be ready to shock them if they get uppity. They can’t come after me.”

“Deeba, you can’t go on your own.”

“Do you think I want you not to come?” For a moment she could hardly speak. “I don’t even want to go myself. But I got no choice. Look at you, man!” She prodded him gently, and he had to fight to stifle a moan. “You’re a liability. Besides,” she added. “I won’t be on my own. I’ll have Lectern.” They watched the Propheseer.

She was dabbing at Obaday. Curdle butted gently against her, and Lectern gave a little squeak and twitched her hands and dropped her scrap of cloth. It fluttered down and snagged on Obaday’s pins-and-needles hair. Lectern frowned and tried, and failed, to pluck it off.

“A milk carton, a bad-tempered book, and her?” said Jones.

Deeba and Jones began to giggle, a little hysterically. But there wasn’t much time, and even as she laughed, Deeba knew she had to go.