Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  Frowning, Paul opened the front cover. It was a book of carpet samples; maybe two dozen of them, with fibre backings and little sticky labels on the undersides telling you what they were.

  ‘But not the whole truth,’ Mr Laertides said. ‘Bit more to it than that. Three guesses? All right, they’re carpet samples, yes, but carpet samples with a difference. A bloke in Muscat makes them for me. You just use them once and throw them away.’

  ‘Muscat,’ Paul repeated. ‘That’s in France, isn’t it?’

  Mr Laertides smiled. ‘Oman,’ he said, ‘on what used to be called the Persian Gulf. Still haven’t figured it out? Fine. They’re flying carpet samples. You just unclip these two rings up the middle, see, and take out one of the carpet squares, and tap it very gently with the side of your left index finger—’

  Abruptly, the carpet sample lifted into the air, levelled off, straightened out its creases, and hung motionless in front of him, about four feet off the ground. ‘That’s a flying carpet?’ Paul asked breathlessly.

  ‘Well, it’s carpet,’ Mr Laertides replied, ‘and there it is, flying. Just for once, a great leap of faith isn’t absolutely essential. And before you ask, it’s dead easy. You just stand in the middle of it and say where you want to go; and next thing, there you are. A nice little added bonus is, the carpet zips along so fast, it can’t be seen by the naked eye. Pretty neat bit of kit, though I do say so myself. You’ve just got to be a bit careful about low doorways and unusually tall coffee tables, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ Paul said doubtfully. ‘But I still don’t see—’

  ‘Oh.’ Mr Laertides’s left eyebrow shot up. ‘You surprise me. I’d have thought the guy who outsmarted Countess Judy’d have figured it out for himself a while back. Hop aboard, and it’ll whiz you past Rosie’s desk without being seen. It won’t take you all the way to Jowett Street, unfortunately; even the best of them - that’s the beige deep-pile Wilton knock-off with the faint herringbone pattern - its maximum range is only about four hundred yards. That one you’ve got there, the light blue imitation Axminster, ought to get you out the door and fifty yards down the street. Well, don’t just stand there gawping like that, give it a go.’

  ‘But—’ Paul was going to ask some pertinent question or other. Unfortunately, his subconscious had been trying to work out how far down St Mary Axe from the front door fifty yards was, and a mental image of the bus stop flitted across his mind.

  Immediately, he felt something jerk viciously at his right wrist, and a shield-wall of air hit him hard in the face as he shot upwards and forward. Fuck, I’m flying, he thought, just like bloody Superman—Then something very hard and chunky slammed into his shoulder, and he dropped to the ground. When he came round after a brief holiday from consciousness, he realised that he was sitting on the pavement next to the lamp-post from which the bus-stop sign hung, and he was holding a small square of light blue carpet in his right hand.

  ‘That,’ continued Mr Laertides, who was leaning on the lamp-post like an absurdly elongated George Formby (and he looked as though he’d been there all along, waiting for Paul to show up), ‘is why it’s better to start off kneeling or sitting on the carpet, like I told you, only you had to know best. Maybe next time you’ll try it my way. Also, don’t forget the light tap with the left forefinger, it helps slow the bugger down so you don’t get your neck sprained by the slipstream.’

  Paul looked up to reply, but Mr Laertides wasn’t there any more. Several passers-by looked at him, and one woman made a point of crossing the street to avoid him. He couldn’t blame her in the least.

  As he stood up (Mr Laertides had forgotten to include unexpected high-velocity flight followed by a sharp blow in his list of things that made the world go round; odd, since it was a doozy), Paul felt something heavy in his offside jacket pocket, and instinctively reached in and drew it out. It was the carpet-sample book, still far too big to fit in any jacket pocket ever made; but when he tried to put it back, it dropped in quite happily as though it was no larger than a matchbox.

  Gift-horses’ teeth, Paul told himself. Of course, he knew that it couldn’t possibly be real, but on the other hand it didn’t take much imagination to realise that if it did actually work, under certain circumstances it could be amazingly useful. He shrugged. Mr Laertides was, after all, a specialist in what Countess Judy had called effective magic; the point about which was that if you believed something was true, quite often it would be, assuming you’d first made out a sufficiently large cheque in favour of J. W. Wells & Co. He’d sort of got the impression from Countess Judy that he was one of the very few non-Fey who had the innate knack of doing effective magic, which perhaps explained why the carpet had responded so readily to him. The pain in his arm reminded him that sometimes a very strong but completely untrained latent ability could be more of a liability than an asset.

  What the hell; in any event, he’d got past Mr Tanner’s mum without rupturing any blood vessels through excessive blushing, so that was all right. Paul found a rubbish bin and dumped the used-up carpet square (if only she could have seen him, his mother would’ve been so proud). Now all he had to do was find Jowett Street and pick up the professor’s parcel.

  When he’d read the memo that morning and seen the words just off the Charing Cross Road and collect a parcel for me, he’d known immediately what to expect. Charing Cross Road was where all the funny little second-hand bookshops were; it was the sort of neighbourhood where eccentricity was the rule rather than the exception, and even a specialist in magical texts and spell books would count as boringly normal. Obviously, therefore, the professor was sending him to collect a book. 16 Jowett Street, however, wasn’t a bookshop at all; in fact, it was a small Italian café. Sensibly he’d brought the memo with him, and he took it out and checked it again, just to be sure. But there it was, unambiguous as a kick in the face: 16, Jowett Street. A little bell tinged as he walked in, and a short, stocky man with a perfectly spherical head, thick glasses and a grin that looked as though it was larger than his face asked him what he wanted.

  ‘Um,’ he said.

  The short man laughed. ‘What you want to eat?’ he repeated.

  ‘Nothing,’ Paul replied; then, quickly, he added: ‘Look, I’ve probably come to the wrong place, but have you got anything for a Professor Van Spee?’

  The short man’s grin widened so alarmingly that Paul had visions of his face coming unzipped and falling off. ‘Theo,’ he said. Uno momento, per favore.’ He vanished, then popped up again at the other end of the counter holding a white cardboard box, the sort cakes are packed in. ‘Ecco,’ he said. ‘Zabaglione alla Romana.’ He thrust the box at Paul like a fly-half passing the ball. ‘For my good friend il professore. Buon’ appetito.’

  Zabaglione? That was some sort of Italian bandit, wasn’t it? No, it wasn’t, it was a cake, or trifle or something. ‘Um, thanks,’ Paul said. ‘How much do I—?’

  The man roared with laughter, as if the idea of paying for something was the funniest thing he’d come across in years. ‘Is on the ’ouse,’ he chuckled. ‘And something for you,’ he added. ‘Any friend of Theo’s is friend of mine.’ He lunged at Paul with some species of choux pastry, chocolate-swathed and gushing cream at every splitting seam. ‘You sit, eat, have a cup of coffee. Plenty of time,’ he said; and Paul, catching sight of the clock on the wall, realised it was only just gone ten, and he wasn’t due to meet the professor till 11.15. Also, he hadn’t had any breakfast, and there are no grey areas or complex moral issues where chocolate-covered cream cakes are concerned. If one presents itself, you eat it. Simple as that.

  So he sat down with his cake, and the short man brought him a large frothy coffee with cocoa powder on the top, and while he was busy guzzling the choux thing a slice of exquisite-looking cheesecake somehow found its way onto the table just by his elbow, so he ate that too, and time passed swiftly and agreeably, the way it usually doesn’t during the course of the average working day. A smal
l part of him was trying to brew up a degree of indignation at being sent out like some kind of serf to fetch yummy puddings (and him a fully fledged assistant magician), but it was fighting a losing battle, and it knew it. So far, working for Theo Van Spee had been a tense business. Mostly he’d been summoned to the presence, given books to read and been politely dismissed; and each time the process was repeated, the professor would look at him thoughtfully for ten seconds or so and tell him that he wasn’t ready yet. That was fine, in a way; no filing or photocopying or prodding 8 x 4s of assorted bits of Outback or filling in bewildering forms, nothing scary or disgusting or even particularly bizarre. Theo Van Spee was odd, of course, because everyone at JWW was odd; he was tall and thin and elderly and grave, so you hardly dared breathe in his presence, and his room was as dark as a bag (he had a great many ancient manuscripts, he’d explained, which would suffer horribly if exposed to the harsh glare of electric light; so the blinds were drawn, and the only illumination was a single oil lamp and a handful of chubby white candles), and of course he did have that unnerving habit of telling you things about yourself and other people that he couldn’t possibly have known, not to mention his even creepier knack of seeming to know exactly what you’d been doing and what you were about to do, and always getting it absolutely right . . . But when Paul had been assigned to Mr Wells junior, he’d tried to maroon him for ever in a small room with no doors or windows; and Countess Judy had tried to kill him in his sleep; and Benny Shumway had made him fight a dragon (albeit a very small one, and he’d killed it quite accidentally, by tripping over it and sitting on it) and had sent him into the kingdom of the dead to do the daily banking; and Ricky Wurmtoter had used him as live bait in his feud with Countess Judy, and shot him at point-blank range with a crossbow, killing him stone dead . . . Fetching cakes, by comparison, wasn’t so bad after all, and neither, if he was going to be perfectly honest, was being sent to his office to read books, even if he couldn’t make head nor tail of them.

  ‘Scusi.’ The short man’s voice snapped Paul out of his contemplative daze. ‘Is ten forty-five. Thank you so much. Goodbye.’

  No point even being faintly surprised that the short, round-headed man knew when Paul had to be back at the office. He got up, said thank you politely for the nice cakes, and left, taking care not to squash the white box with the professor’s zabaglione in it. Mr Tanner’s mum was still on reception when he got back - for some reason she’d turned into a willowy Swedish blonde; but she changed shapes the way a daytime soap star changes outfits, so he wasn’t at all fazed thereby - but she let him past with nothing more intrusive than a further reminder about the rehearsal tomorrow evening. He started to climb the stairs, and on the second-floor landing he collided with Sophie, who was coming out of the room where the big laser printer lurked. She was holding a huge wodge of papers, and of course he knocked them out of her hands all over the floor.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she snarled, as she knelt down to pick them up (small, dark, painfully thin; enormous eyes, like one of those fish that live right down at the bottom of the sea). ‘I can manage. What are you doing with a cake box?’

  ‘Something I had to fetch for the professor,’ Paul mumbled. He tried to gather a stray sheet of paper, but she blocked him with her shoulder and grabbed it. ‘My fault,’ he said, ‘wasn’t looking where I was—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘And I just spent half an hour getting them in order, but don’t let it bother you, I’m sure you had really important stuff on your mind at the time.’

  He wasn’t sure he followed that. ‘What?’

  ‘Now you’ve been promoted.’ The word came out like the first hiss of steam from a volcano on the point of eruption, and Paul took a step back, felt the edge of the stair under his heel, and grabbed the banister to keep himself from toppling over. ‘So please don’t let me hold you up,’ she went on. ‘I’m sure you’ve got an important executive meeting to go to, or clients to see, or you’re expecting a really important call from Minneapolis or Dar-es-bloody-Salaam.’ She grabbed his ankle, lifted it like a farrier shoeing a horse, and retrieved a stray page from under his foot. ‘I just hope I haven’t held you up too terribly much, that’s all.’

  It simply hadn’t occurred to Paul that Sophie hadn’t been promoted too, and his mind emptied of helpful things to say as though someone had just phoned in a bomb threat. ‘Look,’ he muttered, ‘it wasn’t my idea, and you know what they’re like, it’s probably some horrible devious plan—’

  ‘Yes, right,’ Sophie snapped. ‘They’ve doubled your wages and given you holidays and everything because they’re toying with you, trying to lull you into a true sense of security. The bastards, ’ she added, with a ferocious scowl.

  That was just a millitad more than Paul could stand. ‘Oh come on, Sophe,’ he wailed. ‘Be reasonable. What do you think I ought to’ve done?’

  ‘Refused,’ she snapped. ‘Of course. Otherwise, it’s - it’s collaborating. But I don’t expect you to see that.’

  The same tiny cell of his mind that had got all stroppy about fetching cakes now speculated about whether she’d have turned down a pay rise if she’d been offered it, but Paul knew better than to pay any heed to subconscious troublemakers. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I just assumed they’d promoted you as well, because—’

  ‘Balls,’ she interrupted crisply. ‘You knew perfectly well. It’s because you’re a man, so obviously you get the promotion and the extra money and the BMW and the key to the executive toilet, and I’m stuck in the photocopier room copying bloody leases all morning. Honestly, Paul, I really thought you weren’t like that, I really thought you had a shred of decency—Do you mind,’ she added, ‘you’re standing on my hand.’

  Which was true, unfortunately. He hopped like a sparrow, and she made rather a show of rubbing her knuckles and biting her lip stoically. ‘Sophe—’

  ‘Please don’t call me that,’ she said, in a voice you could’ve smashed into chunks and put in gin and tonic. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go and sort this lot into order. Again.’

  Paul opened his mouth for a bit more abject pleading, but it occurred to him that anything he said would only make things worse, and by now he must be late for Theo Van Spee. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, and charged up the stairs as fast as he could go, tripping over his feet once or twice because the light on the stairs had blown, until he was standing outside the professor’s room. Just before knocking, he glanced down at his watch. 11.15 precisely. Then, just as his knuckles were about to impact on the door, it swung open, with the result that he tapped Professor Van Spee lightly on the chest, as though examining his tie for signs of dry rot.

  (Didn’t predict that, though, you bastard, he said to himself by way of consolation; otherwise you’d have stood a step to the right.)

  ‘Please sit down,’ the professor said. ‘You have collected my parcel. Please put it carefully on the sheet of newspaper I have laid out on the desk.’

  He did so, observing without being even slightly interested that it was the Court Circular page of the Montreal Herald. ‘You wanted to see me,’ he said.

  The professor nodded very slightly, and sat down on his side of the desk. He was backlit by one of the chubby candles, which cast a pale honey-coloured halo round his shoulders while effectively silhouetting his profile. Poseur, Paul decided. ‘Since you have at last tackled the first section of the book I asked you to read, you are now ready to help me with my current project. I have to recalibrate a number of rather delicate thaumaturgical instruments, and I need you to work out for me the mean differences and standard variations. You have not brought a calculator with you; I keep one in the second drawer down on your left.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Paul interrupted, ‘but there wasn’t anything in the book about what you just said. It was all about the world being a biscuit and stuff.’

  The professor sighed. ‘You opened the book and started to read. You glanced at a couple of paragraphs, and then fell
asleep. You had a strange dream, which you cannot now remember. Correct?’

  Paul nodded.

  ‘Excellent. We will begin with the differential field-polarity gauges.’ Van Spee reached across the desk, picked up a flat rose-wood box slightly larger than a paperback book, and flipped the dainty little catches to open it. Inside, snuggled in frayed green baize, lay a pair of tiny little brass gadgets, with jaws and thumb-wheels and bits that slid in and out, and scales of numbers lightly engraved in teeny-tiny lettering, so faint and elegant and fine he couldn’t actually read them. The professor picked one up, wound the jaws open and blew on it very lightly; then he picked a pin out of the lapel of his coat, whistled the opening bars of the ‘Blue Danube’, and held the sharp end of the pin between the jaws.

  ‘Eight hundred and thirty-six,’ he said. ‘Do you concur?’ Paul was about to object that he hadn’t got the faintest idea what the professor was talking about when his eyes blurred over, the way they do when you’ve just been crying or peeling onions. But it wasn’t anything like that, he realised; they were just out of focus, like binoculars someone else has adjusted. Parallax; they’d done it at school but he’d been daydreaming, as usual. He lifted his head a little and tried to concentrate on something a bit further away. When he reached the professor’s brass gadget, he found it was perfectly clear, amazingly so - in fact, the minute little numbers on the thing’s sides were as deep and broad as ditches, and the figures themselves were almost too big to recognise. He blinked, then noticed the point of the pin; it was crawling with tiny moving things, small and busy as ants but darting about in a markedly orderly fashion, and in time to the professor’s rather tuneless whistling.

  ‘The ants,’ he said. ‘Are they dancing?’