“Let’s get moving,” said Samzing. “We’ve spent far too much time here.”
“Yes,” Sir Tombin hastily agreed. “There might be more of these infernal nuisances coming along at any moment.”
He tapped Snowmane’s rump lightly. “Sorry about that, old chap, but I had to be sure,” and the horse led the way down the invisible pathway.
Either the ground beneath his feet was rocking to and fro like the deck of a ship in stormy seas, or it was Sagandran himself who was doing the rocking. To judge by the soreness of his head, it was the latter.
Perima confirmed it. “Are you sure you’re safe standing up?”
“No.”
“Do you want to sit down again?”
“Yes, but I’d better not.”
“Put your arm around my shoulder.”
“A silver lining.”
“What?”
“I just meant that, oh, never mind. I’m not feeling great, Perima. Set it down to that.”
They made an ungainly hobble toward the crest of the ridge.
All that was left where the three Shadow Knights had been were three long piles of gray ash. There was no indication that these had been three living creatures a short while ago, however vile and compromised their souls. Of course, there was no sign at all of the evil wizard who had brought Sagandran and Perima into the Shadow World. His dust must have drifted on the wind to a million places by now.
Sagandran gulped loudly. “I killed him, didn’t I?”
Perima grinned. “Admirably.”
“I wish I could feel admirable about it.”
Her smile melted away. “Deicher had given so much of his essence to the Shadow Master that he wasn’t really alive any longer, Sagandran. He’d already destroyed himself. All you did was send his body down the same road that his soul had already gone. You were destroying the shell; the shell was all that was left.”
“I know that’s true, but—”
She squeezed his arm. “You’re all right, you know, Sagandran? You’re a good person. If you’d left the ‘but’ out of that sentence I’d be worried about you. As long as it’s still there, you’re okay.”
Sagandran found that the blue aluminum bracelet was in his hand. He wondered numbly how it had got there.
“I suppose this thing’s useless now,” he said. “Fariam told me it could defend us once and once only. I guess I should just chuck it away.”
“Keep it, Sagandran,” said Perima. “Its magic may have been all used up, but the meaning of the gift still remains. That’s got magic too – its own magic.”
“You’re right. Again.” He slipped it back onto his wrist. The metal felt dead now, against his skin. There was too much death around here.
They came to the top of the crest and were looking down into the blackness where the valley should be.
“Do you see? Over there?”
If it hadn’t been for a glint of pallid moonlight reflecting off Perima’s fingernail, Sagandran wouldn’t have known she was pointing.
“See what?”
“Lights. They look like lit-up windows.”
A long while later, the road stopped. Since the road was invisible in the ebony night, none of them knew how they knew this, but they all did. Ahead of them the blackness was just empty, nothing more.
“Hm. Perhaps we managed to come the wrong way after all, but I didn’t see any other path we could have taken.” For the first time since they’d arrived in the Shadow World, Samzing sounded completely at a loss. Flip didn’t like that at all. It made him even more nervous than the wobbly-shaped ideas had.
Oddly, it ended up being Memo who reassured them. The little memorizer had been silent ever since the Lime Flavor Jello Pudding Thought had disappeared, and Flip had assumed he’d been wallowing in some personal terror at the bottom of the wizard’s other pocket, but Memo seemed almost annoyingly chirpy.
“I’ve read a little about the Shadow World in the grimoires back in the library at Qarnapheeran. Only a little, you understand, because not a great deal is known about this, the third and least desirable of the realms—”
“Oh, get on with it,” prompted Samzing sharply.
“Yes, well, all in good time. I’m trying to tell you this in my own way, you see, and—”
“Memo.”
“Yes, Flip?”
“Spectacles can get broken. Irreparably. Remember that. Just tell us what you know.”
“Oh. I see. There’s no need to be like—”
“Memo!”
The memorizer plunged on swiftly. “Well, what all the grimoires are in agreement on is that just about nothing here is necessarily as it seems. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s the exact opposite.”
“So a great big ocean of complete vacuum could, in fact, be packed with mountains, trees, palaces, hay wagons and dancing girls, you mean?”
“I’m not so sure about the dancing girls but, well, yes. That’s what I mean.”
“But,” said Samzing, “how are we to know if this is true?”
“By testing it,” replied Sir Tombin with an air of resignation.
“Now, look, my dear old pal, don’t you go risking—”
The wizard’s protests were too late. The Frogly Knight had already taken a stride forward into the void.
Flip expected that to be the end of Sir Tombin, and he shut his eyes so as not to see his friend’s doom. He was persuaded to open them again by the start of surprise that Samzing made.
Sir Tombin was standing, seemingly unconcerned, in the middle of the emptiness.
“Why, there’s no road,” said the Frogly Knight in wonderment. “There’s nothing at all under me. I can sense that, and yet I don’t fall. I think Memo must be right.”
Memo emitted a squeak of such smugness that Flip almost bit through his own tongue.
“I’m sure that’s the case, dear boy,” said Samzing, “but don’t you think you’d be wiser to come back to safety until we’ve had a chance to think this through?”
“Oh, I’m perfectly safe,” replied Sir Tombin. He gave a little laugh. “I don’t know why I was so frightened, really.”
Flip was impressed. He hadn’t been able to tell Sir Tombin was frightened at all. Not for the first time it was brought home to him that the Frogly Knight had courage beyond anyone else he’d ever encountered in his short life. Just because Sir Tombin’s face was green, his hands were webbed and the expression on his face really was, as the Lime Jello Pudding had so rudely pointed out, a little bit dimwitted, it was all too easy to underestimate Sir Tombin.
“In fact,” the Frogly Knight was saying, “I think I’ll just take a few more paces and see where they take me.”
With that he turned away from them once more and walked further into the seeming vacuum.
He took one step.
He took two steps.
He took three steps.
And this time, he did vanish.
CHAPTER 3
TERNSGIVERTY
agandran and Perima walked through the streets of the town they’d glimpsed from the ridge. Climbing down the hillside in the sallow moonlight had been less difficult than they’d expected, though both of them had picked up new scratches and bruises. Sagandran’s head still throbbed from the blow he’d suffered when he’d been thrown off his feet by the blast of Deicher’s demise, but he’d learned to keep the pain at bay by keeping his mind occupied with other things. That hadn’t been too hard; both he and Perima were aware that every step they took in the darkness was a further step into the unknown, into the jaws of danger. The chilly wind had picked up while they’d been descending the hillside, and now it seemed intent on making them as miserable as possible, whipping their hair into their eyes and tearing at their clothing. The effects of the potion the dead wizard had given them were beginning to wear off, so they were also taunted by the pangs of incipient hunger. Cold, miserable, hungry, lost – they were hardly, Sagandran thought bitterly, in much of a way to defeat th
e might of Arkanamon. Beside him, Perima was always ready with a waspish joke, and somehow managed to keep his spirits up as well as her own. Without her, he knew he’d have found the temptation irresistible to find some secluded corner in which to curl up and fall asleep irresistible, in the vain hope that when he woke up everything would have sorted itself out and he’d be back in his soft, warm bed in Grandpa Melwin’s shack.
There was no one to be seen in the streets, yet he had the unsettling sense that the town wasn’t deserted, as if there were people there in plenty, but they were always where he wasn’t looking. And those people, he was sure, were watching them. He shivered, and not from the cold of the wind.
What made these streets more forbidding was that all he could see of the various abandoned buildings were shadows. Most of the shadows were deepest black; even the least dim ones – in the places where the fragile moonlight played – were the gray of dirty parchment. Yet there was always that pervasive feeling that, if he only knew what to do, he could summon the town’s inhabitants back into visibility and vibrant life, and the colors back into the roadway and facades.
“We’ve got to find somewhere out of the cold to rest,” said Perima. “We can’t go on wandering like this. We’re both on the verge of collapse.”
Sagandran attempted a light-hearted response. “You don’t need to tell me that. I’m right here, remember?”
Perima gave him a token smile. She looked worried about him. He was beginning to worry about himself. It wasn’t just exhaustion that had been making him clumsy over the last hour or more. He suspected his body was reacting to the crack he’d taken on the head and was in a state of shock. The same had happened the time he’d sprained his ankle playing football. His mother had put him to bed, kept him cozy, and made him drink lots of warm liquid. No chances of warmth or hot, sweet tea here, but the least he could do was find somewhere he could lie down for a while and perhaps get some sleep. Not so different from what his instincts had been telling him to do.
“I don’t fancy going into any of those places we’ve seen though, do you?” Perima continued breezily. “I wonder if they’re haunted. It’s like they’ve got invisible keep out signs, telling us to stay well clear of them.”
“I reckon they’re still occupied,” muttered Sagandran.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Like I said, haunted.”
They kept stumping on. There was nothing else they could think of to do. Just moving was somehow an expression of hope.
Finally, the houses thinned out and soon they’d left the town behind them as if they were shedding heavy, wet clothing. Perima’s pace became livelier, and there was a little spring in her step that hadn’t been there before. After a little while, Sagandran’s mood likewise cheered.
A few hundred yards beyond the town and not far off the road, there stood a big dark building in a field.
“Looks like a barn,” said Sagandran.
“Just what we’re after. Assuming it doesn’t have any rats.”
“Right now,” Sagandran commented, “I could probably eat a rat.”
“Yuck.” She walked on a little further. “You would, um, cook it first, wouldn’t you?”
“If I had anything to light a fire with, yes.”
“Maybe there’ll be some dry sticks we could rub together. Here, help me over the wall.”
Sagandran half-crouched and linked his hands together to make a step for Perima. She hoisted herself up onto the top of the shoulder-high field wall,then offered him her hand.
Astride the wall, they gazed at the barn.
“Not exactly a palace, is it?” said Sagandran.
“Believe it or not, Sagandran, that dump looks better to me now than my father’s palace ever has.”
“If you say so.”
He supposed they’d find heaps of straw inside the barn, but there was nothing but bare floor. It was probably as well, Perima pointed out in a determined display of forced cheerfulness, because in their blindness they’d certainly have tripped over anything there might have been to trip over. The wooden walls of the barn were broken and gaping in many places, but they still blocked most of the wind’s onslaught. There was not a trace of rats.
“Someone’s obviously eaten them all already,” Perima joked, then gulped. “That may be exactly what’s happened. Those farmers we saw, the ones Deicher was so beastly to, I’ll bet they’d have seized on a rat if they’d seen it.”
“I still feel rotten every time I think of those guys,” Sagandran admitted.
“Them and their families.” “There’s nothing we can do for them,” she said in a businesslike way, looking around to see if, by any chance, one bit of floor might be more comfortable to lie down on than the rest.
“Yes, there is.”
“What?”
“Defeat Arkanamon,” said Sagandran defiantly. “That way, with luck, we can banish the blight that’s laid hold of this world.”
Perima made an inscrutable decision about the most appealing patch of floor, and sat down on it.
“Well,” she said, “that’s why we came here, isn’t it?”
“I assure you wallahs, it’s perfectly safe,” said the void. “Well, as safe as where you are, at least. Harrumph.”
“That’s Sir Tombin speaking,” said Flip. “Sounds like him, anyhow, but where could he possibly be?”
“I should think,” said Samzing, “that he’s in the Shadow World.”
Flip was muddled for a moment. “I thought that’s where we were.”
This time it was Memo who replied. “No. We’re still in the limbo between the worlds. There must be a second portal there, floating in the emptiness, only that we can’t see it.”
“Your little friend is right,” Samzing said in a tone that made Flip wish he’d left the memorizer to rot back in Qarnapheeran.
“Well, I’m not going to risk it,” Flip said.
Samzing chuckled. “You don’t have much choice, seeing as you’re in my pocket and I’m going there.”
The wizard took a step forward onto nothing. Flip took what satisfaction he could from the fact that Samzing’s step was a lot less confident than his words.
“How’re you going to persuade Snowmane to come with us?”
Samzing paused. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
The horse gave a little whinny, put its head down and shook it from side to side, then trotted forward happily enough past the wizard. With a swish of his tail, Snowmane vanished before their eyes.
“I think Snowmane has just answered your question,” remarked Memo, unctuously smug. “Let’s go after him, shall we, Samzing?”
“All in my own good time.”
Probing ahead of him with his staff, the wizard took a couple more strides, and all of a sudden they found that they were looking not at complete nothingness but at a landscape of such gloomy bleakness that Flip wished they’d stayed where they were.
Sir Tombin was waiting for them, tapping one large foot.
“Fariam was right to warn us that this place was a little, ahem, dreary. Still, one mustn’t complain, must one? So glad you could join me, my friends.”
“It’s cold too,” said Flip. “This wind is trying to turn my nose into an icicle.”
“I wouldn’t complain too loudly if I were you,” responded Samzing. “You’d be even colder if I turfed you out of my pocket and told you to walk.”
“We could do with some of those fire imps you conjured up when the worgs were going to sacrifice us.”
“No,” said Sir Tombin promptly. “No fire imps, there’s a good fellow.” The Frogly Knight shuddered theatrically. “I can still remember what happened the last time.”
“No need to bear a grudge, old fruit,” said Samzing huffily. “Accidents can happen to even the best-regulated of wizards, and we were glad enough to see them when we did.”
“Even so.” Sir Tombin shuddered again. “But I don’t think we should hang around here anyway. Shall we see if we can find any
trace of our youthful friends and that blaggard of a sorcerer, hm?”
“Very true,” agreed Samzing. “Would you like to ride Snowmane?” He patted the horse’s shoulder.
Sir Tombin indicated that he was happier on foot, and gave the wizard a boost up onto Snowmane’s back. Soon they were making good speed along a featureless road. Flip settled down into the wizard’s pocket and tried to grab a little sleep, but found that he couldn’t. Back in Mishmash, it had been quite exciting any time he got far enough from the village that he could no longer see or hear it. Then, just a few weeks ago, it had been exciting to be carried by Old Cobb’s hawk to another part of Sagaria. Was he becoming so blasé about adventure that he could no longer find excitement, even in being transported into an entirely different world? It was his duty to be excited, wasn’t it? On the other hand, it was so very warm and comfortable down here in the darkness at the bottom of the pocket in among the junk the old wizard carried around with him: pipe cleaners, crumpled candy wrappers—oh yuck. What was this? It was soft but sort of sticky and … Flip put as much distance between himself and Samzing’s handkerchief as he could.
“You don’t think I could join Memo in your other pocket, do you?” he said, thrusting his face back into the bone-chilling wind.
“No,” said Memo before Samzing could reply. “This pocket’s big enough only for the one of me.”
Flip decided to make the best of a bad lot. To take his mind off the handkerchief pulsating evilly somewhere beneath where he was perched, he tried to find something interesting to look at amid the barren, nearly lightless countryside through which they were passing. But all he could see were the roadway, the crumbling stone fences to either side of it, and the blasted heath beyond the walls. Everything in this world seemed to be the same oily black, as if someone had deliberately made it dirty because they didn’t like the way it looked clean.
“I spy with my little eye,” he ventured after a while, desperate to find a way of passing the time.
“Something beginning with ‘t,’” said Memo at once. “I was thinking the same. What we need is a game, I was thinking. What better game could there be than I Spy? I was thinking. I was thinking other things too, of course, but I can’t remember exactly what they were. Anyway, that was the best one.”
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