The Wizard of Rondo

by Emily Rodda

  ‘In my opinion,’ Bertha said, her voice trembling with indignation, ‘this quest has got off to a very bad start. Mimi and I have been forced to walk a long way, carrying a lot of heavy bags. We’ve been insulted and exposed to gruesome diseases – and fleas. And I have narrowly escaped death. Plus my disguise is ruined.’ She tossed a strip of ruffle out of her eyes.

  ‘Yes, well, sorry about that,’ Conker mumbled. ‘But every quest has its ups and downs, you know. There have certainly been a few unfortunate events –’

  ‘Unfortunate!’ squealed Bertha.

  ‘Conker, just tell her,’ Leo said quickly.

  ‘You tell her,’ grunted Conker, who seemed to have decided to sulk.

  So while the rug flew steadily on through the cool, starry night, Leo told the story. Conker preserved an insulted silence for a while, but Bertha’s exclamations and questions soon drew him out of his bad mood. In no time he was chiming in, adding details and explanations to everything Leo said.

  ‘So,’ he said rather pompously, when Leo had finished. ‘Now, I hope, you see why we had to get to Hobnob without delay.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Bertha said, in a crisp voice that showed she hadn’t yet quite forgiven him. ‘Imagine Simon being a mushroom! No wonder his auntie said he wasn’t himself. The question is, how did he get to be a mushroom? Who changed him?’

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ Conker said, shaking his head. ‘I’ve racked my brains but I can’t think of anyone who’s got that sort of transforming power these days.’

  ‘Spoiler certainly doesn’t,’ Leo said ruefully.

  ‘I never heard that Bing had it either,’ Freda put in.

  ‘Well, no one who had the power would advertise it, would they?’ Bertha retorted, still sounding rather distant. ‘Transforming spells are illegal.’

  Conker shrugged. ‘That was always a pointless law,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to arrest someone who can turn you into a toad at fifty paces? A few of the registered heroes tried, and where did they end up? Croaking and catching flies for a living, that’s where.’

  ‘Yes.’ Bertha sighed. ‘Isn’t it tragic? Though Scribble – my special reporter, you know – says they seem to quite enjoy it. The healthy outdoor life, freedom from stress and so on. Scribble once did a series of interviews …’

  Leo caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked around and saw that Mimi’s hand had crept up to cover the pendant hidden beneath her jacket. Leo’s skin prickled.

  ‘Mimi,’ he whispered sharply. ‘Don’t –’

  Mimi’s head jerked up and with a quick, guilty movement she snatched her hand away from the pendant. ‘Shut up, Leo!’ she hissed, glancing furtively at their companions, who were still talking about toads. ‘If the others guess I’ve got it they’ll just start fussing.’

  Leo stared at her, seething. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  ‘Stop looking at me as if I’m some loony with a loaded gun,’ Mimi muttered. ‘I wasn’t going to do anything just now. I was just thinking that if only I’d been with you at the gaol I could have turned Simon back into himself. Then he’d have been able to tell us who –’

  ‘Mimi, you’re incredible, do you know that?’ Leo’s voice was shaking with anger. ‘How many times do you have to be told? The Key is dangerous! Using it is dangerous! Even thinking about using it is dangerous! But you know better, don’t you? No one’s going to tell you what to do, are they? So you sneak, and lie –’

  ‘I didn’t lie,’ Mimi snapped back. ‘I agreed to put the Key in the Safe Place, but I didn’t promise to leave it there. Hiding the Key was a stupid idea. Who knows when we might need it?’

  ‘We needed it just now!’ Leo hissed. ‘And you couldn’t use it, could you? Not to help, anyway.’

  Mimi’s face froze into a stiff, expressionless mask. Leo knew by now that this meant she was very upset, but he was far too angry to care.

  ‘You were in such a panic you couldn’t think!’ he went on remorselessly. ‘Then Bertha said she was afraid the ruffles would tear, and lo and behold, they did! Because the moment she said it, you couldn’t stop yourself imagining it! You nearly made Bertha fall! And what about Misery Merk’s nose? That’s exactly the sort of thing Hal’s afraid of. If the Blue Queen hears rumours –’

  ‘She won’t,’ said Mimi, her lips barely moving. ‘Misery Merk won’t think anything of that pimple. She probably gets them all the time. Anyway, it was an accident and I won’t make the same mistake again. Just leave me alone.’

  She turned away from him and stared out into the night. Her hair flew wildly in the wind. She could do anything, Leo thought suddenly. She could turn this rug into a dragon. She could change us all into messenger mice.

  You don’t realise how dangerous the Key is …

  Only now did Leo fully understand how true those words of Freda’s were. So much depended on Mimi’s being calm and sensible. And Mimi Langlander just wasn’t a sensible sort of person.

  Not like me, Leo thought, and for some reason felt angrier than ever.

  At that moment, the rug passed over a mass of twinkling lights so bright that it lit up the sky. Everyone looked over the side at a fairytale vision of gleaming glass spires.

  ‘The Crystal Palace,’ Conker said, straightening up and smoothing his ruffled beard. ‘Hobnob’s not far now.’

  I’ll have to tell them about the Key, Leo thought. If I don’t, I’ll be as responsible as Mimi if anything bad happens. He winced at the thought of the scene that would follow his announcement. What was more, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he would be betraying Mimi, telling tales on her. Mimi would certainly see it that way.

  Oh, if only I’d never seen that pimple pop out on Misery Merk’s nose, he thought dismally. If only I’d been looking the other way like everyone else! Then I wouldn’t have this problem.

  He looked out at the sky, struggling with his conscience. I’ll have to tell, he thought, but I’ll wait till after we’ve landed. It would be safer.

  Immediately, everything looked brighter. The problem still had to be faced, but at least it didn’t have to be faced right at this moment. He pushed it out of his mind and tuned into the conversation going on around him.

  ‘Still, law or no law, transforming spells have gone out of fashion since the Dark Time, haven’t they?’ Conker was saying. ‘I think the old wicked witch of the west was the last real expert, and she exploded ages ago.’

  ‘Wanda specialised in frogs, anyway,’ said Freda. ‘She did the occasional newt towards the end, but I never heard of her going in for vegetables.’

  ‘Mushrooms aren’t vegetables,’ Leo put in automatically. ‘They’re a kind of fungus.’

  ‘Really?’ exclaimed Bertha. ‘Oh, I can’t wait to tell my know-all brother! He always puts mushrooms in that vegetable soup he’s so proud of. Just wait till I tell him he’s been wrong all along.’

  ‘He hasn’t been wrong!’ Mimi snapped. ‘You use mushrooms like vegetables, and they’re sold with vegetables, so you might as well call them vegetables. It’s just boring to go on about them being fungus.’

  I’d rather be Mister Boring than Little Miss Weird, Leo thought savagely. He turned away from Mimi, looked ahead, and jumped in shock. ‘What’s that?’ he yelled.

  A strange cloud formation had suddenly become visible as the rug lost height. Spearing up through the inky blackness of the sky was a cluster of tall, weirdly luminous grey-green shapes, narrow and pointed like towers. As the rug dipped again, everyone could see that the towers rose from a bulky, billowing mass that reared up from the ground like palace walls.

  ‘The Strix’s palace!’ Bertha quavered. ‘It’s here! Misery was telling the truth! And we’re heading straight for it! Oh, lawks! Oh, help!’

  ‘Oh, my blood and bones!’ muttered Conker, his eyes bulging.

  ‘No worries,’ drawled Freda, whose feathers were standing up like spines. ‘It’s just a myth, remember?’

  ‘I don’t b
elieve it,’ moaned Conker. ‘I just – don’t – believe it!’

  ‘Conker, turn the rug around!’ Leo shouted.

  But before Conker could say a word, the rug stopped dead in the air then dropped straight down with stomach-churning speed.

  Bertha, Conker, Freda, Leo and Mimi screwed up their eyes as the wind roared past their ears, smothering all other sound. They gasped for breath, flattening themselves against the rug, clinging to it for dear life, bracing themselves for the crash they knew must come …

  Then there was an abrupt jolt, and silence.

  Chapter 11

  Hobnob

  Cautiously, Leo opened his eyes. He found himself staring up at a string of lights that spelled out the words OGG’S HOE EMPORIUM. It took him a moment to see that the lights were fixed to the front of a large shop which seemed to be made up of several smaller shops joined together. Shortly afterwards, he realised that the rug was hovering a hair’s breadth above the cobbles of the Hobnob village square.

  Slowly he sat up. Around him, Conker, Freda, Mimi and Bertha were doing the same. They all looked very shaken and wind-blown.

  ‘I think my stomach got left behind up there,’ groaned Bertha.

  ‘If I’d known this thing was so skittish I’d have thought twice about borrowing it,’ grumbled Conker. He clambered off the rug, and the others gingerly followed.

  A muffled rattling sound, like the pattering of rain on a metal roof, was coming from behind the closely shuttered windows of the hoe emporium.

  ‘Ogg has obviously got a big dot problem,’ said Conker, fingering the handles of his dot-swatters. ‘My blood and bones, listen to those pests – there must be hundreds of them!’

  They looked around the deserted square. A spindly little tree bearing a few limp white flowers drooped in a pot in the centre, and lamps, only one of which was alight, hung from poles at each corner. All the quaint two-storeyed buildings were as tightly shuttered as the hoe emporium. Leo noticed an antique shop, a sweet shop, a bakery and a small shop called STITCH THE TAILOR. On every door there was a notice reading CLOSED, and the windows above the shops were dark.

  ‘Lawks-a-daisy,’ Bertha whispered nervously. ‘Folk go to bed very early in Hobnob.’

  ‘I’d say they’re just being cautious,’ Freda said. ‘Who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances?’ She jerked her head at the cloud mass that brooded over the outskirts of the village.

  Leo stared, and his stomach turned over. From the air, the cloud had looked very like a palace. On the ground, it looked exactly like one. Menacing and faintly luminous, it rose high behind the rooftops, its turrets and towers glimmering palely green against the blackness of the sky.

  ‘It’s so strange,’ Mimi breathed. ‘I wonder what it’s like inside?’

  ‘Don’t, Mimi!’ squealed Bertha. ‘That’s how it catches you!’

  ‘Stop it, all of you!’ Conker snapped. ‘Whatever that – that thing is, it’s not going to distract us from our mission. We’re safe as long as we don’t go near it, and there’s no reason why we should go near it. It’s got nothing to do with us.’

  ‘But Conker, it might have everything to do with us,’ Leo said reluctantly. ‘Maybe it’s – the answer.’

  Conker’s jaw dropped. ‘Of course!’ he gasped. ‘Oh, my blood and bones, no wonder Begood arrested the mushroom and rushed home saying the case was closed. He didn’t want to face the thing in that cloud!’

  ‘Ooh!’ Bertha squeaked. ‘You mean – Wizard Bing might have been …’ She swallowed.

  ‘Collected,’ Freda said flatly. ‘Well, if he has, no one will ever see him again. We might as well say goodbye to our fee and go straight home.’

  ‘How can you say that, Freda?’ Leo exclaimed impulsively. ‘If Wizard Bing’s been taken prisoner, we can’t just let him rot! We’ve got to try to save him!’

  The moment the words left his lips, he longed to snatch them back. But it was too late. Freda was frowning in disgust, but Mimi was nodding vigorously, Bertha’s eyes were shining, and Conker was looking deeply moved.

  ‘You’re right, Leo,’ Conker said in a choked voice. ‘What better way to die than to lay down our lives in such a noble cause? What hero could ask for anything more?’

  ‘This hero could,’ Freda said tartly. ‘This hero would prefer not to die at all, for example.’

  ‘Oh, we’d all prefer that, I daresay,’ cried Conker, flapping his hands. ‘Still, you can’t have everything. All right! We storm the palace at dawn.’

  ‘There you go with that dawn business again!’ Bertha complained. ‘After breakfast is surely quite early enough to –’

  ‘We shouldn’t wait till the morning,’ interrupted Mimi, gazing at the palace in fascination. ‘The cloud might drift away in the night.’

  ‘Taking Bing with it!’ Conker shouted, electrified. ‘Oh, my lungs and liver! Right! We storm the palace at once.’

  ‘We haven’t even had dinner yet,’ Freda grumbled.

  ‘It’s a wicked waste of good food to eat it just before you’re going to die,’ Conker said sternly. ‘I’m surprised at you, Freda!’

  ‘Wait!’ Leo said desperately. ‘We mustn’t – we can’t attack the cloud palace!’ He felt his face grow hot as everyone turned to look at him in surprise. Just say you didn’t mean what you said, he told himself. Just say you’ve changed your mind.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It’s the Rondo effect, the rational part of his brain told him. It’s what made you suggest a rescue mission in the first place. Ignore it! Say what you have to say. You’re the only responsible one here. It’s up to you to save them all.

  They were all staring at him, waiting. He had to say something. He had to!

  Delay. The little word floated into his mind, as welcome as a life preserver in a stormy sea. ‘I mean – we can’t attack the palace just yet,’ he said in a rush.

  ‘Why in Rondo not?’ Conker demanded.

  Leo thought furiously and was suddenly inspired. ‘We have to report to Muffy Clogg first,’ he said. ‘She’s expecting us. If we go off to the cloud palace without telling her and then disappear, she’ll never know we were here at all. She’ll think we let her down.’

  Conker deflated a little. ‘That’s true,’ he muttered. ‘It would be very bad for our reputation.’

  ‘It would be dreadful!’ Bertha cried. ‘I mean, it will be bad enough to die on only my second quest, without dying a heroine and no one even knowing about it!’

  ‘True quest heroes aren’t in it for the glory, Bertha,’ Conker said loftily. ‘Still … it does seem a pity.’

  ‘I wonder where Clogg’s shoe shop is?’ murmured Leo, fervently hoping it would be so hard to find that the Strix’s palace would drift away while they were still looking.

  ‘Fan out!’ Conker ordered. ‘We’ll find the woman before midnight if we have to knock on every door in Hobnob to do it!’

  As if to set an example he pounded on the main door of the hoe emporium. The pattering noise behind the shop windows stopped abruptly and an instant later a pair of shutters flew open above the friends’ heads.

  A round-faced woman with a frilly lace cap perched on her very curly, very golden hair leaned through the window, one plump hand pressed to her heart. ‘Mercy, what is it?’ she gasped. ‘Oh, you gave me such a fright!’

  ‘My apologies, madam,’ Conker said, baring his teeth in what he no doubt thought was a winning smile.

  The woman gave a little scream and shrank back.

  Conker frowned. ‘This is urgent quest business, madam,’ he said. ‘Please pay attention. We need to see Mistress Muffy Clogg. Do you know where she lives, by any chance?’

  ‘Oh!’ said the woman, her china blue eyes widening. ‘Why, yes! She lives here. I mean, I am her … she is me … I mean – I am Muffy Clogg!’

  Bertha exclaimed in amazement. Leo glanced up at the lighted sign and shook his head, unable to believe his bad luck.

  Conker narrowed his
eyes suspiciously. ‘If you are who you claim, madam,’ he said coldly, ‘why are you living here?’

  The woman looked at him blankly. ‘We’ve always lived here,’ she said. ‘Of course, the shop was much smaller before … before our fortunes changed for the better.’

  ‘They must have the glow-worm plague here too, Conker,’ Leo whispered. ‘See? There are letters missing from the sign.’

  Conker blinked up at the glowing letters spelling out OGG’S HOE EMPORIUM. His lips moved silently for a moment. Then he cleared his throat and looked back at the woman at the window.

  ‘So!’ he said heartily. ‘You are Mistress Clogg of Clogg’s Shoe Emporium?’

  ‘Indeed I am!’ the woman said breathlessly. ‘And would I be right in thinking that you are the quest team, come to save my poor young nephew from wrongful arrest?’

  ‘Indeed we are!’ Conker said, gesturing grandly behind him at Freda, Leo, Mimi and Bertha.

  Muffy Clogg blinked into the shadows, clearly unable to see anyone but Conker himself. ‘How do you do?’ she said faintly. ‘So good of you to come. I must say, I didn’t expect you so soon.’

  ‘Let it never be said that our team drags its feet when duty calls,’ said Conker. ‘Now – may we come in?’

  Muffy Clogg glanced nervously behind her and lowered her voice. ‘Actually, it’s not quite convenient just now,’ she whispered. ‘Could you come back tomorrow? After breakfast? When my husband has gone down to the shop?’

  ‘After breakfast?’ Conker bawled, swelling with indignation. ‘Madam, this is a matter of life and death!’

  Muffy Clogg’s hands flew to her cheeks. ‘Mercy!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t tell me that poor Simon is going to be – executed?’

  ‘No, no, Mistress Clogg!’ Bertha cried as Conker scowled ferociously. ‘Simon’s fine – other than being a mushroom, of course. What Conker means is that we have to invade the – um – the thingy’s cloud palace before it leaves. Otherwise we’ll have no chance of saving Wizard Bing, will we?’

  ‘We’ve got no chance anyway,’ Freda muttered to Conker. ‘Listen, if the Clogg woman won’t let us in, get her to throw down a bread roll or something, will you? I’m starving.’