"Luka and the Fire of Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushdie Salman)

2 Nobodaddy

As he ran out of the front door with Dog and Bear, Luka had the strangest feeling: as if they had crossed an invisible boundary; as if a secret level had been unlocked and they had passed through the gateway that allowed them to explore it. He shivered a little, and the bear and the dog shivered, too, although it was not a cold dawn. The colours of the world were strange, the sky too blue, the dirt too brown, the house pinker and greener than normal… and his father was not his father, not unless Rashid Khalifa had somehow become partly transparent. This Rashid Khalifa looked exactly like the famous Shah of Blah; he was wearing his panama hat and his vermilion bush shirt, and when he walked and talked it became obvious that his voice was Rashid’s voice, and the way he moved was an exact copy of the original, too; but this Rashid Khalifa could be seen through, not clearly but murkily, as if he were half real and half a trick of the light. As the first whispers of dawn murmured in the sky above, the figure’s transparency became even more obvious. Luka’s head began to spin. Had something happened to his father? Was this see-through father some sort of… some sort of…

‘Are you some sort of ghost?’ he asked in a weak voice. ‘You are certainly something peculiar and surprising, to say the very least.’

‘Am I wearing a white sheet? Am I clanking chains? Do I look ghoulish to you?’ demanded the phantom dismissively. ‘Am I scary? Okay, don’t answer that. The truth is that there are no such things as ghosts or spectres and therefore I am not one. And may I point out that right now I am just as surprised as you?’

Bear’s hair was standing on end, and Dog was shaking his head in a puzzled way, as if he had just begun to remember something.

‘Why are you so surprised?’ Luka asked, trying to sound confident. ‘You’re not the one who can see through me, after all.’ The see-through Rashid Khalifa came closer and Luka had to force himself not to run away. ‘I’m not here for you,’ he said. ‘So it is, hmm, unusual for you to have crossed over when you’re in perfect health. And your dog and bear, too, by the by. The whole thing is exceedingly irregular. The Frontier is not supposed to be this easily ignored.’

‘What do you mean?’ Luka demanded. ‘What Frontier? Who are you here for?’ The moment he asked the second question, he knew the answer, and it drove the first question out of his mind. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. Then is my father…?’

‘Not yet,’ said the see-through Rashid. ‘But I’m the patient type.’

‘Go away,’ Luka said. ‘You’re not wanted around here, Mr… what is your name, anyway?’

The see-through Rashid smiled a friendly smile that somehow wasn’t entirely friendly. ‘I,’ he began to explain, in a kindly voice that somehow didn’t feel completely kind, ‘I am your father’s dea-’

‘Don’t say that word!’ Luka shouted.

‘The point I’m trying to make, if I may be allowed to continue,’ the phantom insisted, ‘is that everyone’s dea-’

‘Don’t say it!’ Luka yelled.

‘-is different,’ the phantom said. ‘No two are alike. Each living being is an individual unlike all others; their lives have unique and personal beginnings, personal and unique middles, and consequently, at the end, it follows that everyone has their own unique and personal dea-’

‘Don’t!’ Luka screamed.

‘-and I am your father’s, or I will be soon enough, and at that time you will no longer be able to see through me, because then I will be the real thing and he, I’m sorry to say, will no longer be at all.’

‘Nobody is going to take my father away,’ Luka cried. ‘Not even you, Mr – whatever your name is – with your scary tales.’

‘Nobody,’ said the see-through Rashid. ‘Yes, you can call me that. That’s who I am. Nobody is going to take your father away: that is exactly right, and I am the Nobody in question. I am your, you might say, Nobodaddy.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Luka.

‘No, no,’ the see-through Rashid corrected him. ‘I’m afraid that Nonsense is not involved. You will discover that I am a no-Nonsense kind of guy.’

Luka sat down on the front step of the house and put his head in his hands. Nobodaddy. He understood what the see-through Rashid was telling him. As his father faded away, the phantom Rashid would grow stronger, and in the end there would be only this Nobodaddy and no father at all. But he was very sure of one thing: he was not ready to do without a father. He would never be ready for that. The certainty of this knowledge grew in him and gave him strength. There was only one thing for it, he told himself. This, this Nobodaddy had to be stopped, and he had to think of a way to stop him.

‘To be fair,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘and in a spirit of full disclosure, I should repeat that you have already achieved something extraordinary – by crossing the line, I mean – so perhaps you are capable of further extraordinary things. Maybe you are even capable of bringing about the thing you are even now dreaming up; maybe – ha ha! – you will succeed in bringing about my destruction. An adversary! How enjoyable! How positively… darling. I’m so excited.’

Luka looked up. ‘What do you mean exactly, “crossing the line”?’ he asked.

‘Here, where you are, is not there, where you were,’ explained Nobodaddy, helpfully. ‘This, all of this that you see, is not that which you saw before. This lane is not that lane, this house is not that house, and this daddy, as I have explained, is not that one. If the whole of your world took half a step to the right, then it would bump into this world. If it took half a step to the left… well, let’s not go into that just now. Don’t you see how much more brightly coloured everything is here than it is back home? This, you see… I shouldn’t even tell you, really… this is the World of Magic.’

Luka remembered his stumble in the doorway, and his brief but intense feeling of giddiness. Was that when he crossed the line? And had he stumbled to the right or the left? It must have been the right, mustn’t it? So this must be the Right-Hand Path, must it not? But was that the best Path for him? Shouldn’t he, as a left-handed person, have stumbled to the left?… He realised that he had no idea what he meant. Why was he on any sort of Path at all, and not just in the lane outside his house? Where might such a Path lead, and should he even think of going down it? Should he be thinking about just getting away from this alarming Nobodaddy and finding his way back to the safety of his bedroom? All this talk of Magic was much too much for him.

Of course Luka knew all about the World of Magic. He had grown up hearing about it from his father every day, and he had believed in it, he had even drawn maps and painted pictures of it – the Torrent of Words flowing into the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge and the Fire of Life, all that stuff; but he hadn’t believed in it in the way that he believed in dining tables, or streets, or stomach upsets. It hadn’t been real in the way that love was real, or unhappiness, or fear. It was only real in the way that stories were real while you were reading them, or heat mirages before you got too close to them, or dreams while you were dreaming.

‘Is this a dream, then?’ he wondered, and the see-through Rashid who called himself Nobodaddy nodded slowly in a thoughtful way. ‘That would certainly explain the situation,’ he replied agreeably. ‘Why not put it to the test? If this is indeed a dream, then maybe your dog and your bear would no longer be dumb animals. I know your secret fantasy, you see. You’d like them to be able to talk, wouldn’t you? – to speak to you in your own language and tell you their stories. I’m sure they have extremely interesting stories to tell.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Luka, shocked, and again the answer arrived in his head as soon as the question was out. ‘Oh. You know because my father knows. I talked to my father about it once, and he said he would make up a story about a talking dog and bear.’

‘Quite so,’ said Nobodaddy calmly. ‘Everything that your father has been, and known, and said and done, is slowly crossing over into me. But I mustn’t hog the conversation,’ he went on. ‘I do believe your friends are trying to get your attention.‘

Luka looked round and saw to his astonishment that Bear the dog had risen up on his hind legs and was clearing his throat like a tenor at the opera. Then he began to sing – not in barks, howls or dog-yaps this time, but in plain, understandable words. He sang with a slight foreign accent, Luka noticed, as if he were a visitor from another country, but the words were clear enough, although the tale they told was bewildering.

Then it was the turn of Dog the bear, who also rose up on his hind legs, and folded his paws in front of him like a schoolboy at a public-speaking contest. Then he spoke in clear, human language, and his voice sounded remarkably like Luka’s brother Haroun’s, and Luka almost fell over when he heard it. Nobodaddy saved him by stretching out a protective arm, exactly as if he were the real Rashid Khalifa. ‘O mighty pintsized liberator,’ the bear began grandly, but also, it seemed to Luka, a little uncertainly, ‘O incomparably cursing child, know that I was not always as you see me now, but the monarch of, um, a northern land of deep woods and shining snow, hidden behind a circular mountain range. My name was not “Dog” then, but, er… Artha-Shastra, Prince of Qâf. In that cold, lovely place we danced to keep ourselves warm, and our dances became the stuff of legend, for as we stamped and leapt the brilliance of our spinning wove the air around us into strands of silver and gold, and this became both our treasure and our glory. Yes! To twirl and to whirl was all our delight, and by whirling and twirling we came round right, and our golden land was a place of wonder and our clothes shone like the sun.’

His voice strengthened, as if he had become more certain of the tale he was telling. ‘So we prospered,’ he went on, ‘but we also aroused the envy of our neighbours, and one of them, the giant, bird-headed fairy prince called -’ and here Dog the bear stumbled again – ‘um… ah… oh yes, Bulbul Dev, the Ogre King of the East, who sang like a nightingale but danced like an oaf, was the most envious of all. He attacked us with his legion of giants, the… the… Thirty Birds, beaked monsters with spotted bodies, and we, a dancing, golden people, were too innocent and kindly to resist. But we were stubborn folk, too, and we did not give up the secrets of the dance. Yes, yes!’ he exclaimed excitedly, and rushed on to the story’s end. ‘When the Bird Ogres realised that we would not teach them how to spin air into gold, that we would defend that great mystery with our lives, they set up a fluttering and a flapping and a screeching and a cawing so dreadfully terrifying that it was plain that Black Magic was afoot. Within moments the people of Qâf, shattered by the Ogres’ shrieks, began to crumble, to lose human form and become dumb animals – donkeys, marmosets, anteaters and, yes, bears – while Bulbul Dev cried, “Try to dance your golden dance now, fools! Try to jig your silver jigs! What you would not share, you have lost for ever, along with your humanity. Low, grubbing animals you will remain, unless – ha ha! – you steal the Fire of Life itself to set you free!” By which he meant, of course, that we would be trapped for ever, for the Fire of Life is no more than a story, and even in stories it is impossible to steal. So I became a bear – a dancing bear, yes, but a golden dancer no more! – and as a bear I wandered the world until Captain Aag caught me for his circus, and so, young master, I found you.’

It was just the sort of story Haroun would have told, thought Luka, a tall tale straight from the great Story Sea. But, when at last it was over, Luka was overcome by a strong feeling of disappointment. ‘So you’re both people?’ he asked regretfully. ‘You’re not really my bear and my dog, but enchanted princes in dog and bear suits? Am I supposed not to call you “Dog” and “Bear” but “Artha-whatever” and “Barak”? And here I am, worried sick about my dad, and now I’m supposed to worry about how to get you guys turned back into your real selves as well? You do know, I hope, that I’m only twelve years old.’

The bear came back down onto four legs. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘While I’m in bear form you can go on calling me “Dog”.’

‘And while I’m a dog,’ said the dog, ‘you can still call me “Bear”. But it’s true that, as long as we are here in the World of Magic, we would like to search for a way of breaking the spells that bind us.’

Nobodaddy clapped his hands. ‘Oh, good,’ he cried. ‘A quest! I do like a quest. And here we have a three-in-one! Because you’re on a quest, too, aren’t you, young fellow? Of course you are,’ he went on before Luka could say a word. ‘You want to save your father, of course you do. You want me, your detested Nobodaddy, to fade away, while your father becomes himself again. You want to destroy me, don’t you, young fellow? You want to kill me and you don’t know how. Except, as a matter of fact, you do know how. You know the name of the only thing in any world, Real or Magical, that can do what you desire. And even if you had forgotten what it was, you have just been reminded by your friend, the talking bear.’

‘You mean the Fire of Life,’ said Luka. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it? The Fire of Life that burns at the top of the Mountain of Knowledge.’

‘Bingo! Bullseye! Spot on!’ cried Nobodaddy. ‘The Towering Inferno, the Third-Degree Burn, the Spontaneous Combustion, the Flame of Flames. Oh, yes.’ He actually capered in delight, doing a soft-shoe shuffle with his feet, and juggling with his panama hat. Luka had to admit that this little dance was exactly the sort of thing Rashid Khalifa did when he was a bit too pleased with himself. But it was odder when you could see through the dancer.

‘But that’s just a story,’ said Luka faintly.

‘Just a story?’ echoed Nobodaddy in what sounded like genuine horror. ‘Only a tale? My ears must be deceiving me. Surely, young whippersnapper, you can’t have made so foolish a remark. After all, you yourself are a little Drip from the Ocean of Notions, a short Blurt from the Shah of Blah. You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasise? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.’

‘But still, the Fire of Life… it is just a fairy tale,’ insisted Dog the bear and Bear the dog, together.

Nobodaddy drew himself up indignantly. ‘Do I look,’ he demanded, ‘like a fairy to you? Do I resemble, perhaps, an elf? Do gossamer wings sprout from my shoulders? Do you see even a trace of pixie dust? I tell you now that the Fire of Life is as real as I am, and that only that Unquenchable Blaze will do what you all wish done. It will turn bear into Man and dog into Dog-Man, and it will also be the End of Me. Luka! You little murderer! Your eyes light up at the very thought! How thrilling! I am amongst assassins! What are we waiting for, then? Are we starting now? Let’s be off! Tick, tock! There is no time to lose!’

At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody was gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighbourhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly coloured, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly coloured, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly coloured, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads?

He needed to think. He remembered the golden rule that one of his schoolteachers, the science master Mr Sherlock, a man with a pipe and a magnifying glass who always dressed too warmly for the climate, had taught him: eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however improbable, is the truth. ‘But,’ thought Luka, ‘what do I do when it’s the impossible that remains, when the impossible is the only explanation?’ He answered his own question according to Mr Sherlock’s golden rule. ‘Then the impossible must be the truth.’ And the impossible explanation, in this case, was that if he wasn’t moving through the world then the world must be moving past him. He looked down at his ticklish feet. It was true! The ground was slipping along beneath his bare feet, tickling him gently as it went by. Already he had left the street vendor far behind.

He looked at Dog and Bear, who had started behaving as if they were on an ice rink without skates on, slipping and sliding on the moving roadway and making loud, surprised protesting noises. Luka turned to Nobodaddy. ‘You’re doing this, aren’t you?’ he accused him, and Nobodaddy widened his eyes, spread his arms, and replied innocently, ‘What? Excuse me? Is there a difficulty? I thought we were in a hurry.’

The worst, or maybe the best, thing about Nobodaddy was that he always behaved exactly like Rashid Khalifa. He had Rashid’s facial movements and hand gestures and laugh, and he even acted innocent when he knew perfectly well he wasn’t, just the way Rashid did when he was clumsy or wrong or planning a special surprise. His voice was Rashid’s voice and his wobbly tummy was Rashid’s stomach and he was even beginning to treat Luka with a spoiling affection that was totally Rashid-like. All his life Luka had known that his mother was the one who laid down the law and had to be handled with care, while Rashid was, quite frankly, a bit soft. Was it possible that Rashid’s character had crept into his would-be nemesis, Nobodaddy? Was that why this scary anti-Rashid seemed actually to be trying to help Luka out?

‘Okay, stop the world,’ Luka commanded Nobodaddy. ‘There are some things we need to get absolutely clear before anyone goes anywhere with you.’

He thought he heard, high up and far away, the noise of machinery grinding to a halt with a distant screeching noise, and his feet stopped being tickled, and Dog and Bear stopped sliding about. They had gone quite some distance from home already, and were standing, by chance (or not by chance), on more or less the exact spot where Luka had been on the day he shouted at Captain Aag while he and Rashid were watching the sad parade of the circus animals in their cages. The city was waking up. Smoke rose from roadside canteens where strong, sweet milky tea was being brewed. A few early-rising shopkeepers were taking down their shutters and revealing long narrow caverns filled with fabrics, foodstuffs and pills. A policeman with a long stick yawned as he walked by in dark blue shorts. Cows were still sleeping on the pavement, and so were people, but bicycles and motor scooters were already busying the street. A jam-packed bus went past taking people to the industrial zone, where the sadness factories used to stand. Things had changed in Kahani, and sadness was no longer the city’s principal export, as it had been when Luka’s brother Haroun was young. The demand for glumfish had fallen away, and people preferred to eat better-tasting produce from further away, the grinning eels of the south, the meat of the northern hope-deer, and, more and more, the vegetarian and non-vegetarian foods available from the Cheery Orchard stores that were opening everywhere you looked. People wanted to feel good even when there wasn’t that much to feel good about, and so the sadness factories had been shut down and turned into Obliviums, giant malls where everyone went to dance, shop, pretend and forget. Luka, however, was not in the mood for self-deception. He wanted answers.

‘No more mystification,’ he said firmly. ‘Straight answers to straight questions, please.’ Now he had to fight to control his voice, but he succeeded, and fought down the dreadful feelings that were filling his whole body. ‘Number one,’ he cried, ‘who sent you? Where do you come from? Where -’ and here Luka paused, because the question was a terrifying one – ‘… when your… work… is done… if it’s done, that is… which it won’t be… but if it was done… where do you plan to go?’

‘That is numbers one, two and three, to be exact,’ said Nobodaddy, as, to the watching Luka’s horrified astonishment, a strolling cow walked right through him and went on about its business, ‘but let’s not quibble.’ Then he thought deeply for a long, silent moment. ‘Are you familiar,’ he said finally, ‘with the Bang?’

‘The Big Bang?’ Luka asked. ‘Or some other Bang I don’t know about?’

‘There was only one Bang,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘so the adjective Big is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from.’

Luka didn’t want to waste time arguing. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ he said.

‘Then tell me,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘what was there before the Bang?’

Now this was one of those Enormous Questions that Luka had often tried to answer, without having any real success. ‘What was it that had gone Bang anyway?’ he asked himself. ‘And how could everything go off with a Bang if there was nothing there to begin with?’ It made his head hurt to think about the Bang and so, of course, he didn’t think about it very much.

‘I know what the answer is supposed to be,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be “Nothing”, but I don’t really get that, to be honest with you. And anyway,’ he added as sternly as he could manage, ‘that has nothing to do with the subject under discussion.’

Nobodaddy wagged a finger under his nose. ‘On the contrary, young would-be assassin,’ he said, ‘it has everything to do with it. Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don’t you see that the opposite could also be true? That it’s possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the Emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie, or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they’re… done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?’

‘Un-Bang?’ Luka repeated, in some confusion.

‘Exactly,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘Not a spreading out but a closing in.’

‘Are you telling me,’ Luka said, feeling an anger rise in him, ‘that my father is about to implode into Nothing? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Nobodaddy did not answer.

‘Then what about life after dea-’ Luka began, then stopped himself, slapped himself on the head and rephrased the question. ‘What about Paradise?’

Nobodaddy said nothing.

‘Are you trying to say that it doesn’t exist?’ Luka demanded. ‘Because if that’s what you are trying to say, I know a lot of people in this town who will give you a pretty heated argument.’

Not a word from Nobodaddy.

‘You’re suddenly very silent,’ Luka said crossly. ‘Maybe you don’t know as many answers as you pretend you do either. Maybe you’re not as big a deal as you think.’

‘Ignore him,’ said Dog the bear in an oddly big-brotherly way. ‘You really should go home now.’

‘Your mother will be worrying,’ said Bear the dog.

Luka was still not used to the animals’ new powers of speech. ‘I want an answer before I go,’ he said stubbornly.

Nobodaddy nodded, slowly, as if a conversation he had been having with someone invisible had just come to an end. ‘I can tell you this,’ he said. ‘That when my work is done, when I have absorbed your father’s… well, never mind what I will have absorbed,’ he added hastily, seeing the look on Luka’s face, ‘then I – yes, I, myself! – will implode. I will collapse into myself, and simply cease to Be.’

Luka was astounded. ‘You? You’re the one who’s going to die?’

‘Un-Be,’ Nobodaddy corrected him. ‘That’s the technical term. And as I have answered your third question first, I should add that, one, nobody sent me, but somebody did send for me, and, two, I don’t exactly come from somewhere, but I do come from someone. And if you think about it for a moment, you will know who that somebody and that someone are, especially as they are one and the same, and I am the spitting image of them Both, who are only One.’

The silver sun brightened in the east. Dog and Bear looked agitated. It was definitely time for Luka to be at home getting ready for the school day. Soraya would be beside herself with worry. Maybe she had sent Haroun out to search the neighbourhood streets. When Luka got home for breakfast he was going to be in nineteen different kinds of trouble. But Luka wasn’t thinking about breakfast, or about school. This was not the time for cereal, Ratshit or geography. He was thinking about things he had hardly ever thought about in his life. He was thinking about Life and Dea- well, Un-Life. He still couldn’t bear that other, incomplete word.

‘And the Fire of Life can save my father,’ he said.

‘If you can steal it for him,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘then, yes, without a doubt.’

‘And it will give Dog and Bear back their real lives as well.’

‘It will.’

‘And what will happen to you then? If we succeed?’

Nobodaddy did not reply.

‘You won’t have to implode, will you? You won’t Un-Be.’

‘That is so,’ Nobodaddy said. ‘It won’t be my time.’

‘So you’ll go away.’

‘Yes,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘You’ll go away and never come back.’

‘“Never” is a long word,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘Okay… but you won’t come back for a long time.’

Nobodaddy inclined his head in agreement.

‘A long, long time,’ Luka insisted.

Nobodaddy pursed his lips and spread out his arms in a kind of surrender.

‘A long, long, long -’

‘Don’t push your luck,’ Nobodaddy said sharply.

‘And that’s why you’re trying to help us, isn’t it?’ Luka concluded. ‘You don’t want to implode. You’re trying to save your own skin.’

‘I don’t have skin,’ said Nobodaddy.

‘I don’t trust him,’ said Bear the dog.

‘I don’t like him,’ said Dog the bear.

‘I don’t believe a word he says,’ said Bear the dog.

‘I don’t think for one moment that he’ll just go away,’ said Dog the bear.

‘It’s a trick,’ said Bear the dog.

‘It’s a trap,’ said Dog the bear.

‘There’s a catch,’ said Bear the dog.

‘There must be a catch,’ said Dog the bear.

‘Ask him,’ said Bear the dog.

Nobodaddy took off his panama hat, scratched his bald head, lowered his eyes and sighed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s a catch.’

Actually, there were two catches. The first, according to Nobodaddy, was that nobody in the entire recorded history of the World of Magic had ever successfully stolen the Fire of Life, which was protected in so many ways that, according to Nobodaddy, there wasn’t enough time to list one-tenth of them. The dangers were almost infinite, the risks dizzying, and only the most fool-hardy adventurer would even think of attempting such a feat.

‘It’s never been done?’ Luka asked.

‘Never successfully,’ Nobodaddy replied.

‘What happened to the people who tried?’ Luka demanded.

Nobodaddy looked grim. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Luka, ‘so what’s the second catch?’

Darkness fell – not everywhere, but just around Luka, Dog, Bear and their strange companion. It was as if a cloud had covered the sun, except that the sun could still be seen shining in the eastern sky. Nobodaddy seemed to darken, too. The temperature dropped. The noises of the day faded away. Finally Nobodaddy spoke in a low, heavy voice.

‘Somebody has to die,’ he said.

Luka was angry, confused and frightened all at the same time. ‘What do you mean?’ he shouted. ‘What sort of a catch is that?’

‘Once someone like me has been summoned,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘someone alive must pay for that summons with a life. I’m sorry, but that’s the rule.’

‘That’s a stupid rule, to be honest with you,’ said Luka, as powerfully as he could, even though his stomach was churning. ‘Who made a stupid rule like that?’

‘Who made the Laws of Gravity, or Motion, or Thermodynamics?’ Nobodaddy asked. ‘Maybe you know who discovered them, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Who invented Time or Love or Music? Some things just Are, according to their own Principles, and you can’t do a thing about it, and neither can I.’

Slowly, slowly, the darkness that had encircled the four of them faded away and the silver sunlight touched their faces.

Luka realised with horror that Nobodaddy wasn’t as see-through as he had been before: which could only mean that Rashid Khalifa had grown weaker in his Sleep. That settled it. They didn’t have time to waste on chit-chat. ‘Will you show me the way to the Mountain?’ Luka asked Nobodaddy, who grinned a grin that wasn’t at all humorous, and then nodded his head. ‘Okay,’ said Luka. ‘Then let’s go.’