“Is something wrong?” the Queen asked him anxiously.
“I don’t know,” said Reed. “I hope not.” It couldn’t be. It was a blatant impossibility. Wasn’t it?
There was no more rain or snow, which seemed to cheer up the visitors. The multi-coloured sky held their attention for quite a while, and Reed couldn’t help wondering if it had been arranged by the Lady Emperor’s PR urchin to make the royal visit more exciting. The alternative possibility was too nasty to imagine. What were the chances of something like the Glimmer happening all over again? He didn’t want to think about it.
The magic was all around them now. Kassa’s hair whipped around wildly as she tried to see a clear passage out of the chaos. She could see Daggar bent double over his wheelbarrow of silver, clutching on to it for dear life. She had a suspicion that Tippett was rummaging around for a quill to note down whatever decision she made. Aragon was standing very still, and she could tell that he was thinking over his options.
“I know what you are thinking,” he said aloud.
“Tell me,” she said, resenting his superior attitude. This was the old Aragon, all right.
“You are considering a most dangerous path.”
“This is true,” she replied.
“You want to take the risk of getting into this ghost-ship, or figment of imagination, or whatever you want to call it, and taking our chances,” he said in a disgusted sort of voice.
“Do you have any better ideas?” she shouted above the wind, which was getting louder.
“Unfortunately not!” Aragon returned, although she could barely hear him above the roaring sound of condensed magic.
“Let’s go!” Kassa screamed, grabbing hold of Tippett and scrambling towards the translucent ship. Daggar and Aragon clambered on to the deck ahead of her. A sudden gust of sparkling wind knocked Kassa off her feet, but she grabbed hold of a rope and managed to pull herself and Tippett over the side.
A sheep, caught up by the maelstrom, suddenly flew in their direction, thudding against the deck like a deadweight. “Lunch?” suggested Aragon.
“Certainly not!” snapped Kassa. She leaned over and looked carefully at the sheep. Its fleece had a faint green glow. As she watched, small buds sprouted from its back and unfurled into gloriously white albatross wings.
“Bloody Underworld,” yelled Daggar, for the first time paying attention to something other than his treasure. “What is that?”
The sheep was now a lovely shade of emerald, and the wings were a bright, vibrant purple. “You know what the Glimmer did to the Skullcaps!” Kassa screamed. “Imagine that everywhere!”
“No, thank you!” he screamed in return.
They could see the sprites now. Firebrands in vibrant colours of orange, green and purple came flooding out of the Skullcaps, followed by the bright white icesprites. All were carrying glowing mops and buckets, or dustpans and brooms. The guardian sprites were there too, looking almost human apart from their abilities to fly and turn into puffs of air. The gnomes came also, carrying their buckets with a certain grim intensity despite their usual reluctance to be seen as part of the sprite family. The only ones not doing anything useful were the mermaids, who were just hanging around the shoreline to point and giggle at everyone else.
Down on the beach, the Hidden Army was no longer invisible. Many mercenaries were running around and panicking wildly. Others stood very still, watching the cataclysm in terror. There was little escape for any of them. Some were caught by entrails of the magic which either vanished them completely or changed them. If they were lucky, they escaped with only a minor alteration such as the colour of their hair, eyes or skin. Most were not that lucky.
Kassa stared in horror at the sheep in her lap. “Daggar, this is not a sheep,” she said in a stunned voice. “It has a face.”
“All sheep have faces,” said Daggar dismissively, his anxious eyes on the mercenaries below. They were too far away for him to spot the one in particular that he was worried about.
“This face?” demanded Kassa, turning the sheep towards him. Daggar gulped. Tippett went green. Even Aragon looked slightly sick.
It was Singespitter, once the youngest, hairiest and most enthusiastic of executive mercenaries. Only his human face remained, white against the green fleece and purple wings of a Glimmered sheep. But the face, too, was changing. A moment later, it was the ordinary, placid face of a rather startled sheep. He bleated pitifully. Kassa hugged him to her, eyes wide. “We did this,” she whispered. “We caused all this.”
“You don’t know that,” said Aragon sharply. “Nobody can prove anything.”
“Do you think this is a coincidence?” she screamed at him. “This came from the caves, Aragon, from Bigbeard’s trove! We must have disturbed something! It is our fault!” She buried her face in the fleece of the mutated sheep. “It’s my fault,” she sobbed quietly. “It’s happening again, and it’s all my fault.”
“Wild magic,” said Tippett in a very small voice, shivering. He knew the old ballads. And the old ballads remembered the consequences of waking up wild magic. Ballads were a nasty thing to remember at a time like this, because they hardly ever had happy endings.
“Are we leaving yet?” demanded Aragon between clenched teeth.
“Which way do we go?” asked Kassa desperately. “It’s all around us. Soon it will be everywhere.”
“That way,” said Daggar in a strangled voice, pointing straight ahead.
Everyone looked at him as if he were mad.
“What?” said Tippett in a very little voice.
“He is not serious,” said Aragon flatly, not even considering the possibility that Daggar might have just made the only brave suggestion in his entire life.
“Why?” said Kassa incredulously.
“I know Zelora can look after herself,” gabbled Daggar, the words coming too quickly. “But this is probably my fault, because I was the one who disturbed all the treasure, and I really don’t want her to be turned into a purple sheep!”
“What do you think?” Kassa asked the others.
Aragon sighed. “It’s inevitable, I suppose. It probably won’t make very much difference in the end. It is likely to be just as dangerous to go in the opposite direction.” But he didn’t look very happy about it.
“You said there wouldn’t be any heroics,” said Tippett accusingly.
“I said that you could not expect heroics,” said Kassa distantly. “But nothing is predictable where wild magic is concerned.”
“Well,” said the little jester-poet bravely, straightening his spectacles and looking around for his humorous hat. “I suppose every epic needs a dramatic climax.”
“Forwards,” agreed Kassa. And the ghost of the long-lost ship Splashdance went forth, sliding over the edge of the hill and gliding down gently towards the magic and the madness below.
18
Plague
The whirling maelstrom of wild, old magic blustered across the beach, flinging bits and pieces of deadly glint in every direction. As Zelora Footcrusher knelt over her unconscious husband, a shard of glimmering magic crashed dangerously near them, sending up a cloud of sputtering sparks.
When a Glimmer is in full swing, the sunrise goes on forever and the sun is never seen. Because of this unnatural sky, Braided Bones had not returned to being a small, portable stone gargoyle. As an unconscious man, he was significantly harder to shift. No one in the Hidden Army was in any state to help Zelora move him. They were all running around like headless wildebeests, trying to save themselves.
The cloud of wild magic hissed, and spat out a ball of something silvery and nasty-smelling. Zelora threw herself out of the way and the nasty-smelling silver ball leaped with gleeful abandon upon the body of her husband. The wild magic did its random, viciously creative work. Braided Bones was Changed.
Zelora was not the sort of woman who ever got hysterical, but she came close to it as she watched the creature stand up. Braided Bones had grown
to be eight feet tall, and was considerably more hideous than he had ever been as either gargoyle or man. He was halfway between the two now, and it was a very nasty combination. His face was grey and distorted, his talons were sharp and flexible. His skin stretched over a new, monstrous bone structure and his huge wings unfurled.
Just as Zelora was close to losing the plot entirely, the huge, hideous creature spoke in the voice of her husband. “Hit me now,” he suggested in that familiar, placid way. “See what happens.” And his gnarled grey face distorted into something very like the annoying grin she remembered so well.
The royal carriage trundled quickly along the winding road which circled neatly around the Midden Plains, an unpleasant place which would hold little interest for tourists. Queen Hwenhyfar sniffed suspiciously as the wind carried the scent of the Midden Plains into the carriage. It smelled like…well, like old porridge, although a queen should not be capable of recognising such an aroma.
Reed Cooper was worried. It was he who had encouraged the carriage to speed up as much as possible. The colours in the sky were ominous, and he knew better than anyone what dangers they might herald. To cover up his anxieties, he winked roguishly at the Anglorachnid queen.
Overcome by a sudden fit of blushing, Queen Hwenhyfar completely forgot about the unpleasant smell of the Midden Plains. She bent over the embroidered handkerchief she was working on and realised that she had spelt her name wrong in the stitches.
Unaware of his wife’s embarrassment, as he was unaware of most things about his wife (despite his constant vigilance), the King made loud comments about the scenery being the blandest he had ever seen. Even the Teatime Mountain, an incredible structure which exactly resembed a giant teacup upside down on a saucer, failed to impress.
However, as the road swung towards Dreadnought, the King’s mouth fell open. The grim priestess-in-waiting, who was taking her turn with the dartboard, dropped a dart and inadvertently trod on it, shattering it with her hob-nailed boots. The Foreign Minister looked up from his scroll of erotic pictograms, giggled once, and tried to hide under his seat.
The horizon was exploding with colour, bright light and sparkly objects. Reed stuck his head out of the carriage window. “As fast as you can,” he ordered the driver. “We’ll have to shelter at Cluft. Faster, man!”
He couldn’t help wondering if Kassa Daggersharp had anything to do with it. It was her style, after all. Not that he had any reason to know what her style was anymore. Those days were firmly in the past. And now that they were on different sides, the past was becoming steadily further away.
“We’re not really doing this, are we?” said Kassa, who had her eyes shut.
“Charge!” yelled Daggar, who was getting carried away.
The ghostly silver ship flew at a frightening speed towards the mess of magic and mercenaries. As it reached the beach, it bounced twice and lurched to one side. Singespitter the sheep made an alarming noise and tried to hide under Kassa’s skirts. This would not have been quite so inconvenient had Tippett not been trying to do exactly the same thing.
Aragon Silversword stood upright beside the mast, very calm and very still. He was resolving to get off this ship of lunatics and emigrate to the mainland as soon as possible.
A swarm of glints broke away from the centre of the wild magic, punching right through the translucent sail and missing Daggar by inches. He yelled as a dozen silver coins from his hoard were converted into a swarm of rather nice-looking pink swans who took to the sky in elegant formation.
Several nasty-looking flying things with teeth descended on Kassa, and she slashed at them with her ruby-hilted sword, which chose that moment to be transformed into a long cast-iron poker with a twisted handle.
“I really don’t think I’m going to forgive you for this, Daggar!” she screamed at the top of her voice, but her cousin was past caring. He had just seen Zelora Footcrusher in rapid flight from a hideous eight-foot gargoyle monster.
Daggar threw her what he thought was a long, coarse length of rope, but which was a rather sulky cobra by the time Zelora grasped hold of it. She hung on anyway, and allowed Daggar to pull her up into the boat.
A moment later, the monster hooked his talons over the edge of the ship. Kassa slammed her poker down over its knuckles, and the monster sucked them reproachfully. “Nice,” he said sardonically.
Kassa pressed a hand to her mouth. “Braided Bones!”
“If you’ve quite finished hitting my husband,” said Zelora snippishly, “Perhaps you would be kind enough to help him on board.”
“I thought you were running away from him,” said Daggar sheepishly.
“Yes, but then you’ve never been very perceptive, have you?” she replied, her eyes fixed determinedly on her eight-foot husband and his long grey talons.
Daggar went away to find a corner to sulk in, convinced that he had been hard done by.
Zelora only tore her eyes away from her husband once, and that was to remark that she thought Singespitter was much improved by being a green sheep with purple wings.
“I hate to be the bearer of unpleasant conversation topics,” said Aragon Silversword, “But how were we planning to escape this beach after the heroic rescue attempt?”
Kassa glared at him, not having an answer immediately to hand. They were surrounded by the madness. The glints spread outwards, a destructive plague of random enchantments. The sprites were out in force, but even they were being changed into things now—pieces of fruit, assorted vegetables and sets of cutlery in unexpected colours fell out of the sky like autumn leaves, and in some cases it was hours before they would manage to turn themselves back.
This was why sprites were in charge of such clean-up operations as this. Humans rarely, if ever, could have glint-enchantments reversed.
Of course, not all of the sprites on the beach were around for humanitarian reasons. Many were busy squirrelling away pieces of the Glimmer for their personal use. By the time the day was over, the place would be crawling with witches and warlocks, all trying to salvage a bit of cheap magic-matter to play with.
There were also a few gods around, channelling the spare magic into forms that they could use. Just as the firebrands burned away the excess magic and the icesprites tried to freeze it to bite-sized bits, the gods used their own influences to counter the glints. The deity known affectionately as ‘The Dark One’, a greyish, long-nosed individual, had commandeered a whole corner of the beach and was transforming glints into a wall of shadow which he planned to piece together into a cloak.
“Not that way,” said Kassa, dismissing possible escape routes.
The brunette goddess Amorata, patron of love elegies and negotiable affection, had headed off the maelstrom at the other end of the beach by encasing all the glints she could find in a rosy haze of spring fancies and lustful dreams. “Definitely not that way,” said Aragon Silversword. He had experienced enough love enchantments to last him a lifetime. Even if he coudn’t quite remember exactly what had happened in that cave, he was occasionally assaulted by embarrassing glimpses of memory.
Kassa sighed and looked upwards. A silvery green web arched across the multi-coloured sky like a fishing net, preventing all stray glints from venturing too high. It represented three deities far more dangerous than any down on the beach. “Aragon,” she said tiredly, “Did I ever tell you that I didn’t want to be a witch?”
“You may have mentioned it,” he replied.
“And did I also happen to mention that I’m not that keen on piracy either?”
“I believe the subject came up once or twice.”
“I think I may have to pick one over the other now. I don’t think I can leave the decision for much longer.”
“Explain,” he said firmly, determined to be informed about the next risk she was planning to fling them headfirst into.
“There is a lot of magic going on here, and most of it is destructive,” she replied, her eyes firmly fixed on the silvery-green web above th
em. “Our only escape route is to pick a sympathetic god, and they are the only ones with whom I have an appointment.”
Aragon began to realise what she was talking about. “They,” he said slowly, wondering if she could really be saying what she seemed to be saying.
“The Witches Web,” said Kassa Daggersharp. “Destiny, Fate and the Other One. Three old women who have been debating my future for far too long. Shall we go and encourage them to make up their minds?”
“If we must,” said Aragon Silversword. This was a better plan than he could have hoped from the daughter of a pirate king and a renegade witch. If it worked, of course. Any alternative was preferable to staying here, where people were being turned into farmyard animals.
“Oh, I think so,” said Kassa Daggersharp, deciding suddenly that if she was going to face the Witches Web, she was not going without her crew, no matter what their preferences in the matter might be. “Upwards!’ she called, and the ghost of the Splashdance began to rise, floating up in a lazy spiral towards the green web which was plastered across the multi-coloured sky.
It was quite a while before any of the others realised what was happening, and by that time it was almost completely too late.
Lady Talle, Emperor of Mocklore, slept late. She didn’t open her lovely-lashed eyes until well into the afternoon. She then glided into her personal wardrobe and selected a perfect ensemble of silks and pearls, which she tossed carelessly on to her naked body.
She drifted down into her throne room, and went from there to the sunken bathroom where she ordered a light, refreshing brunch of pale poached sparrow eggs and glistening watercress soup.
Lady Talle was not in the habit of looking out of windows, and so she did not notice the abundance of unusual colours in the sky. No one told her of the rumours, fears and wild reports which were emanating from the coast. It was Griffin’s day off, and no one else had the nerve to inform the Lady Emperor of such things.
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 18