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

7 The Fire of Life

The whole World of Magic was on Red Alert. Jackal-headed Egyptian deities, fierce scorpion- and jaguar-men, giant one-eyed, man-eating Cyclopes, flute-playing centaurs, whose pipes could entice strangers into cracks in rocks where they would be imprisoned for all time, Assyrian treasure-nymphs made of gold and jewels, whose precious bodies could tempt thieves into their poisoned whipcord nets, flying griffins with lethal claws, flightless basilisks glaring in all directions with their deadly eyes, Valkyries on cloud-horses in the sky, bull-headed minotaurs, slithering snake-women; and huge rocs – larger than the one that bore Sinbad the Sailor to its nest – charged wildly across the land and through the air, answering the Fire Alarm, hunting, hunting. In the Circular Sea, after the Alarm sounded, mermaids rose from the waters singing siren songs to lure the foul intruders to their doom. Enormous island-sized creatures – krakens, zaratans and monstrous rays – hung motionless on the Sea’s surface; if an intruder were to pause on the back of one of the beasts for a rest, it would dive and drown him, or flip over to reveal its giant mouth and its sharp triangular teeth, and swallow the trespasser down in bite-sized chunks. And most terrible of all was the gigantic Worm Bottomfeeder, who rose blind and roaring from the Sea’s usually silent depths, in a rage to consume the scoundrels who had triggered the Fire Alarm and disturbed its two-thousand-year sleep.

Amid the chaos of that World the Fire Gods rose in all their majesty to defend Vibgyor, the One Bridge to the Heart of the Heart, the rainbow arch that crossed the sundering Sea and enabled the favoured few to enter the Aalim’s lands. Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, emerged from the cave where she had sulked for two millennia after quarrelling with her brother, the storm god, with the magic sword Kusanagi in her hand, and rays of sunlight flying outwards from her head like spears. Beside her was the flaming child Kagutsuchi, whose burning birth had killed his mother, Izanami the Divine. And Surtr with his fiery sword and at his elbow his female companion, Sinmara, also bearing a lethal sword of fire. And Irish Bel. And Polynesian Mahuika with her fingernails of flame. And lame Hephaestus, the smith of Olympus, with his pale Roman echo Vulcan at his side. And Inti of the Incas, the Sun with the Human Face, and the Aztec Tonatiuh, thirsty for blood, Tonatiuh the former Lord of the Fifth World, to please whom twenty thousand people used to be sacrificed each year. And towering above them all like a giant pillar in the sky was falcon-headed Ra of Egypt, his piercingly sharp bird-eyes searching for the would-be thieves, with the Bennu bird sitting on his shoulder, the grey heron that was the Egyptian phoenix, and his mighty weapons, the wadjets, the disks of the sun, held urgently in his hands. These great colossi guarded the Bridge and waited with clouds at their foreheads and murder in their eyes.

Inhabitants of the Heart of Magic rushed freely across the Bridge in both directions, hunting, hunting; but for the hunted intruders, Luka thought, there appeared to be no way past the falcon eyes of Ra. Luka, hiding with his companions behind the rhododendron bushes, had the feeling that the thicket was shrinking, dwindling away and becoming a less and less adequate shelter. His heart was beating too rapidly. Things were definitely getting scary.

‘The good thing about all these ex-gods,’ said Soraya comfortingly, ‘is that they’re all stuck in their old stories. I’m sure the Fire Bug will have reported accurately to the Aalim – a boy, a dog, a bear, he will have said – but when the Fire Alarm goes off, everyone here inevitably starts hunting for the Usual Suspects.’

‘Who are the Usual Suspects?’ Luka wanted to know. He realised he was whispering, and that he wished Soraya would lower her voice as well.

‘Oh, the ones who were Fire Thieves in the times and places in which these gods were the gods,’ Soraya said, waving an arm airily. ‘You know. Or,’ she added, reverting to her old Insultana habits, ‘maybe you’re too ignorant. Maybe your father didn’t teach you as much as he should have. Maybe he didn’t know himself.’ Then, seeing the expression on Luka’s face, she softened her voice and relented. ‘The Algonquin Indians got Rabbit to steal Fire for them,’ she said, ‘and you know about Coyote already. Beaver and Nanabozho the Shape-Shifter did the same for other tribes. Possum tried and failed, but then Grandmother Spider stole Fire for the Cherokee in a clay urn, which reminds me’ – Soraya paused for a moment – ‘that you will need this.’

She was holding a little clay pot in her hands. Luka looked inside it. A small group of what looked like half a dozen black potatoes nestled on a bed of twigs. ‘This,’ said Soraya, ‘is one of the famous Ott Pots, and there inside it are a few of the famous Ott Potatoes. Once the Fire of Life touches them, they’ll burn brightly, and they won’t easily be put out.’ She hung the pot around his neck by its leather strap. ‘Where was I?’ She thought for a minute, then resumed. ‘Oh yes. Maui – that’s Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga to you – stole Fire from the fingernails of the fire goddess Mahuika and gave it to the Polynesians. She’ll definitely be on the lookout for him. And so on.’

You neglected to include the First Thief, Coyote said. Oldest and greatest. King of the Hill. Inspiration to us all. Stole it for all mankind.

‘The Titan Prometheus,’ Soraya said, ‘was the brother, oddly enough, of your friend, the late, unlamented Captain Aag. Not that they ever got on. Couldn’t stand each other, in fact. Anyhow: three million four hundred thousand years ago the Old Boy was indeed the first of the Fire Thieves. But after what happened to him back then, the searchers will probably not be on the lookout for another Fire Run by the old fellow.’

‘He lost his nerve,’ Luka remembered.

That warnt right of me to mention, Coyote said. Taint proper to dishonour the great. But since Hercules shot the eagle the Old Boy lives pretty quiet.

‘Or the vulture,’ Luka said.

Or the vulture. Warnt none of us there at the time to verify, and the Old Boy, he dont talk so much no more.

‘And another good thing about all this rushing about,’ Soraya murmured in Luka’s ear, ‘is that it will allow you to get close to the Bridge, if you rush about too and look like you’re searching for yourselves.’

Theyll be looking for me an my associates, Coyote said. Best we part ways. It’s fixin to get kindly heated in my vicinity. But look for me to make my run and then you put your best foot forward an make yours. He loped away without another word.

All at once Luka realised that Nobodaddy had disappeared. One minute he had been there, listening, fidgeting with his panama hat, and then without so much as a poof, he was nowhere to be seen. ‘What’s he up to, I’d very much like to know?’ Luka thought. ‘I don’t feel good about him vanishing like this.’ Soraya put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re better off without him,’ she said. Then Nuthog the red dragon had her idea, and Luka put Nobodaddy out of his mind.

‘Once upon a time our sister Gyara-Jinn helped the King of the Horses escape from Sniffelheim,’ said the red dragon, nodding at her golden sibling. ‘Yes! The mighty Slippy, that gigantic, white, eight-legged steed – with two legs at each corner, so to speak – had been arbitrarily, unfairly imprisoned there by the Aalim, just as my sisters were until Queen Soraya here set them free by her own powerful magic. The Three Jos had decided there was no place in all of Time for an eight-legged wonder-horse. Just like that – decided it, without any discussion, like tyrants; with no consideration for anyone’s feelings, Slippy’s feelings included. They can be cruel and wanton and wilful when they want to be, even though they pridefully call themselves the Three Inevitable Truths! Anyhow, it was Jinn here who freed Slippy with her dragon-fire – her breath is hotter than mine or Badlo’s or Sara’s, and proved hot enough to melt the Eternal Ice, which ours did not. In return, the King of the Horses gave her a magnificent gift: the power to Change, just once, whenever the need might be very great, into an exact replica of Slippy himself. No god will dare to search Slippy the King of the Horses as he passes over Vibgyor. We’ll strap in each of you – you, Luka, and your dog and bear – between one of the pairs of legs, which leaves one pair of legs for you, Queen Soraya, if you would like…’

‘No,’ Soraya said sadly. ‘Even with the Flying Carpet of King Solomon folded away, I’m afraid the presence of the Insultana of Ott will not help you, Luka. I have been too offensive about those cold, stuffy, punishing, implacable, destructive old Jos for too long, and they have no Time for me. It will go worse for you if I’m at your side. I will not enter the Heart of the Heart ever again, that’s the truth. I have no wish to end up in Sniffelheim, imprisoned in an Ice Sheet. But I will wait for you and speed you to safety if, that is to say when, you return with blazing Ott Potatoes in that little Ott Pot.’

‘You’d do this for me?’ Luka said to the golden dragon. ‘You’d use up this one-time Change just to help me win through? I don’t know how to thank you enough.’

‘We owe everything to Queen Soraya,’ said Gyara-Jinn. ‘That is the person whom you need to thank.’

‘Who could have imagined,’ Luka told himself ruefully, ‘that I, Luka Khalifa, aged only twelve, would be crossing the great bridge Vibgyor, the most beautiful bridge in the entire Magical World, a bridge built entirely of rainbows and brushed by the west wind, gentlest of all the winds, blown softly from the lips of the god Zephyr himself; and yet the only thing I can see and feel is the bristly hair on a giant horse’s inner thighs. Who would have thought that out there are some of the greatest names in the history of the Unseen World, the names of the once-worshipped, once-omnipotent Divinities with whom I grew up, about whom I heard each night in my father’s endless supply of bedtime stories, the sword Kusanagi, the ex-gods Tonatiuh, Vulcan, Surtr and Bel; and the Bennu bird, and Ra the Supreme; and yet I can’t catch even a glimpse of them, or allow them to get the tiniest glimpse of me. Who would have believed that I, Luka, would be entering the Garden of Perfect Perfumes which circles the Lake of Wisdom and is the sweetest-smelling place in all of Existence, and yet the only thing I can smell is horse.’

He could hear noises such as he had never heard in his life: the shriek of a falcon, the hiss of a snake, the roar of a lion, the burning of the sun, all magnified beyond imagining and almost beyond endurance, the war cries of the gods. The Changer Gyara-Jinn in the form of the King of Horses whinnied, neighed, stamped her (or, for the moment, his) eight feet in response, and the intruders concealed between her (or, for the moment, his) legs shook and cringed. Luka didn’t like to imagine how Bear and Dog were feeling. Underneath a horse, wedged in between its legs, was no place for a dog, or a bear. There must be a certain loss of pride involved, and he was upset to be the reason for their feelings of shame. He was leading them into great danger, too, he knew that, but he had to close his mind to that thought if he was to stand any chance of doing what needed to be done. ‘I am exploiting their love and loyalty,’ he thought. ‘It seems there is no such thing as a purely good deed, a completely right action. Even this task, which I took on for the very best of reasons, involves making choices that are not that “good”, choices that might even be “wrong”.’

In his mind’s eye he saw again the faces of Queen Soraya and the Memory Birds, as they had looked when he said his farewells. Their eyes were moist with tears, and he knew it was because they feared they would never see him again. To this thought, too, he needed to close his mind. He was going to prove them all wrong. If a thing had never been done before, that only meant it was still waiting for the one who could pull it off. ‘See how narrow I have become,’ he thought. ‘I have turned myself into a single, inevitable thing. I am an arrow speeding towards a target. Nothing must deflect me from my chosen course.’

Somewhere in the sky up above him were Nuthog, Badlo and Sara, flying in formation in their dragon incarnations. There was no turning back now. The seven of them had entered the inner sanctum of the Aalim with crime in their hearts. The country below them was filled with wonders, but there was no time for sightseeing. All his life, ever since Rashid Khalifa started telling him stories, Luka had wondered about the Torrent of Words that fell to Earth from the Sea of Stories, which was up above the world on its invisible second moon. What would that look like, that waterfall tumbling from space? It must be wonderful to behold. Surely it would splash like an explosion into the Lake of Wisdom? Yet Rashid had always said that the Lake of Wisdom was calm and still, because Wisdom could absorb even the largest Rush of Words without being disturbed. There at the Lake it was always dawn. The long, pale fingers of the First Light rested quietly on the surface of the waters, and the silver sun peeped over the horizon but did not rise. The Aalim who controlled Time had chosen to live at the Beginning of it for ever. Luka could close his eyes and see it all, he could listen and hear his father’s voice describing the scene, but now that he was actually there it was very frustrating not to be able to take a look.

And where was Nobodaddy? ‘Still Noplace to be seen,’ thought Luka, who was surer with every passing minute that the missing phantom was up to no good, wherever he was. ‘I will have to face him before the end, I’m sure of that,’ he thought, ‘and it isn’t going to be easy, but if he thinks I’ll give up my dad to him without a fight, he’s going to be very much surprised.’ Then he was struck, as if by a powerful fist, by the worst thought in the world. ‘Had Nobodaddy gone because Rashid Khalifa had already… already… had finally… before Luka could save him… gone, too? Had the phantom who was absorbing his father vanished because its purpose had been achieved? Was all of this in vain?’ Luka began to tremble at the thought and his eyes grew wet and prickly and grief began to flood over him in great shuddering waves.

But then something happened. Luka became aware of a change within himself. He felt as if something more powerful than his own nature had taken control of him, some will stronger than his own that was refusing to accept the worst. No, Rashid’s life was not over. It could not be, therefore it was not. The will-stronger-than-Luka’s-own rejected that possibility. Nor would it allow Luka to give up, to flinch in the face of danger or cower in the face of terror. This new force that had gripped him was giving him the strength and courage he would need if he was going to do what needed to be done. It felt like something not-himself, something from outside, and yet he also knew that it was coming from within him, that it was his own strength, his own determination, his own refusal of defeat, his own strong will. For this, too, Rashid Khalifa’s storytelling, the Shah of Blah’s many tales of young heroes finding extra resources within themselves in the face of horrible adversity, had prepared him. ‘We don’t know the answers to the great questions of who we are and what we are capable of,’ Rashid liked to say, ‘until the questions are asked. Then and only then do we know if we can answer them, or not.’

And above and beyond Rashid’s stories lay the example of Luka’s brother Haroun, who had found such an answer in himself, afloat on the Sea of Stories, once upon a time. ‘I wish my brother was here to help me,’ Luka thought, ‘but he isn’t, not really, even though Dog the bear is speaking in his voice and trying to take care of me. So I’m going to do what he would have done. I’m not going to lose.’

‘The Aalim are set in their ways and dislike people who try to rock the boat,’ Rashid Khalifa had told the sleepy Luka one night. ‘Their view of Time is strict and inflexible: yesterday, then today, then tomorrow, tick, tock, tick. They are like robots marching along to the beat of the disappearing seconds. What Was, Jo-Hua, lives in the Past; What Is, Jo-Hai, simply is right now; and What Will Come, Jo-Aiga, belongs to a place we cannot go. Their Time is a prison, they are the jailers, and the seconds and minutes are its walls.

‘Dreams are the Aalim’s enemies, because in dreams the Laws of Time disappear. We know – don’t we know, Luka? – that the Aalim’s Laws do not tell the truth about Time. The time of our feelings is not the same as the time of the clocks. We know that when we are excited by what we are doing, Time speeds up, and when we are bored, it slows down. We know that at moments of great excitement or anticipation, at wonderful moments, Time can stand still.

‘Our dreams are the real truths – our fancies, the knowledge of our hearts. We know that Time is a River, not a clock, and that it can flow the wrong way, so that the world becomes more backward instead of less, and that it can jump sideways, so that everything changes in an instant. We know that the River of Time can loop and twist and carry us back to yesterday or forwards to the day after tomorrow.

‘There are places in the world where nothing ever happens, and Time stops moving altogether. There are those of us who go on being seventeen years old all our life, and never grow up. There are others who are miserable old wretches, maybe sixty or seventy years old, from the day they are born.

‘We know that when we fall in love, Time ceases to exist, and we also know that Time can repeat itself, so that you can be stuck in one day for the whole of your life.

‘We know that Time is not only Itself, but is an aspect of Movement and Space. Imagine two boys, let’s say you and young Ratshit, who both wear wristwatches that are perfectly synchronised, and that both keep perfect Time. Now imagine that that lazy rascal Ratshit sits in the same place, let’s say right here, for one hundred years, while you run, never resting, all the way to school and back here again, over and over, also for one hundred years. At the end of that century, both your watches would have kept perfect Time, but your watch would be six or seven seconds slower than his.

‘There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the Future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the Past ceases to exist.

‘I’ve spent my life telling people that this is the truth about Time, and that the Aalim’s clocks tell lies. So naturally the Aalim are my mortal enemies, which is just fine, because as a matter of fact I am their deadly foe.’

The Changer Gyara-Jinn stopped galloping, slowed down to a walk, then stopped completely and began to change. The giant eight-legged horse started becoming smaller; its hairy skin vanished and was replaced by a smooth shiny surface; the smell of horse faded away and Luka’s nostrils were filled, instead, by the far less palatable odour of the pigpen. Finally the eight legs became four, so that Luka, Bear and Dog slipped out of their bindings and tumbled what was now only a short distance to the admittedly stony ground. Gyara-Jinn’s once-in-a-lifetime transformation into the King of Horses had come to an end, and she was a tin sow once again. But Luka wasn’t paying any attention to that dramatic Change, because he was staring open-mouthed at the heart-stopping sight he had come so far to see. He was standing at the foot of the vast massif of the Mountain of Knowledge, and just a few feet away, lapping at the Mountain’s feet, was the Lake of Wisdom itself, its water clear, pure and transparent in the pale, silvery light of the Dawn of Days, which never brightened into morning. Cool shadows stretched across the water, as always, caressing and smoothing it. It was a ghostly scene, at once haunted and haunting, and it was easy to imagine music in the air, a tinkling crystal melody: the legendary Music of the Spheres that had played when the World was born.

The Shah of Blah’s description of the Lake and its inhabitants, which Luka had heard so often that he knew it by heart, proved to be startlingly accurate. Shining schools of little canny-fish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly coloured smartipans, and the duller, deep-water shrewds. Flying low over the water’s surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths, and Luka recognised the Lake ’s little groups of islands, too, the Theories with their wild, improbable growths, the tangled forests and ivory towers of the Philosophisles, and the bare Facts. In the distance was what Luka had longed to behold, the Torrent of Words, the miracle of miracles, the grand waterfall that tumbled down from the clouds and linked the World of Magic to the Moon of the Great Story Sea up above.

They had given the hunters the slip and arrived at the notorious South Face of Knowledge without being caught, but looming above Luka was an obstacle far more forbidding than he had imagined, the sheer cliff of the Mountain, a rugged wall of black stone upon which no plant had managed to find a foothold. ‘If a plant can’t do it, how can I?’ Luka wondered in dismay. ‘What sort of mountain is this, anyway?’

He knew the answer. It was the Magic Mountain, and it knew how to protect itself. ‘Knowledge is both a delight and an explosive minefield; both a liberation and a trap,’ Rashid used to say. ‘The way to Knowledge shifts and changes as the world changes and shifts. One day it is open and available to all, the next it is closed and guarded. Some people skip up that Mountain as if it were a grassy slope in a park. For others it is an impassable Wall.’ Luka scratched the top of his head, just the way his father liked to do. ‘I guess I’m one of the others,’ he thought, ‘because that doesn’t look like any grassy slope I’ve ever seen.’ To be blunt, the Mountain looked impossible to climb without serious mountaineering equipment, to say nothing of the proper training, and Luka lacked both. Somewhere above him, at the top of that world of stone, the Fire of Life burned in a temple, and there was no way of knowing where that cave might be, or how to go about finding it. Luka’s principal advisers were no longer at his side. Queen Soraya of Ott had not crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and the much less trustworthy (but formidably well informed) Nobodaddy had evidently decided – for whatever reason, and no not that one! – to withdraw his support.

‘Might I remind you,’ said the voice of Nuthog, in gentle tones, ‘that you do still have help available, and that that help possesses – may I point out? – wings.’

Nuthog, Badlo and Sara were still in dragon-mode, and Jinn quickly dragonised herself as well. ‘With four fast dragons at your service you should be able to reach the Fire Temple quickly enough,’ Nuthog said. ‘Particularly if those four fast dragons happen to know where on the summit the Temple actually is.’

‘To know approximately,’ said Badlo, rather more modestly.

‘We think, anyway,’ said Sara, and that didn’t sound convincing at all.

‘At any rate,’ added Jinn, more helpfully, ‘before we get going, it would probably be a good idea if you punched… that.’

That was a silver knob embedded in the stone wall of the South Face. ‘It looks like a saving point,’ Luka said, ‘but why is it silver, not gold?’

‘The gold button is in the Temple,’ said Nuthog. ‘But at least you can save the progress you’ve made so far. And be careful. From now on, every mistake you make could cost you a hundred lives.’

That was alarming, Luka thought as he punched the silver button. It left almost no room for mistakes. Four hundred and sixty-five lives allowed him four slip-ups, maximum. Besides, while Nuthog’s offer of flying him up to his goal was certainly generous, and practical, too, Luka clearly remembered his father’s words about the Mountain of Knowledge: ‘If you want to reach the summit of the Mountain and discover the Fire of Life, you must make the final ascent alone. The Heights of Knowledge are reached only if you earn the right to do so. You have to put in the hard work. You can’t cheat your way to the Top.’ He had said something else after that, and Luka remembered thinking that that last bit was the really important part, but he couldn’t call it to mind. ‘That’s the trouble,’ he thought, ‘with being told all this stuff at night, when you’re always dead tired and falling asleep.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Luka to Nuthog, ‘but I think I’m supposed to solve this riddle and get there by myself. To fly up on your back… well, it just wouldn’t be right.’

For some reason that idea, not right, stuck in his head. The words kept replaying, again and again, as if his thoughts had become stuck like a scratched record, or caught in some sort of loop. Not right. Not right. What was a thing if it was not right? Well, yes, wrong, that was what most people would say, but it could also be -

‘Left,’ he said aloud. ‘That’s the answer. I went right, and fell into the World of Magic. Now maybe if I somehow go left, I’ll find my way through it.’

Luka remembered his big brother Haroun’s many teasing warnings, back home in Kahani, which felt, just at that moment, very far away indeed. Just be careful not to go down the Left-hand Path. That’s what Haroun had said. ‘But I don’t like to be teased,’ Luka reminded himself, ‘and so maybe I should do the opposite of what he said. Yes! Just this once, I’m not going to listen to my brother’s advice, because Right-thinking people can never really understand what it is to be on the Left, and that hidden Path is exactly the Path that will get me where I need to go.’

After all, his mother Soraya would be on his side. Maybe you are correct to believe that the left way round is the right way, and that the rest of us are not right, but wrong. That’s what she had said, and that was more than enough for him.

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Bear the dog loyally.

‘I’ll go too,’ said Dog the bear, not quite as enthusiastically.

And then Luka recalled the really important part of what Rashid Khalifa had told him about the Mountain: ‘To climb Mount Knowledge, you have to know who you are.’ Luka, sleepy, bedtime Luka at home far away and long ago, hadn’t really understood. ‘Doesn’t everyone know that?’ he had asked. ‘I mean, I’m just me, right? And you’re you?’ Rashid had caressed his hair, which always soothed Luka and made him drowsy. ‘People think they’re all sorts of things they aren’t,’ he had said. ‘They think they’re talented when they’re not; they think they’re powerful when they’re actually just bullies; they think they’re good when they’re bad. People fool themselves all the time, and they don’t know that they’re fools.’

‘Well, I’m me, anyway; that’s all there is to it,’ Luka had said, just as he had fallen asleep.

‘There he is! There’s the Fire Thief! There he goes!’

‘It’s Coyote! He has a burning brand between his teeth!’

‘Look at him go! See him dodge and swerve!’

‘Stop him! – Oh, they’ll never catch him! – Stop that Coyote! – Oh, he’s like hairy lightning! – Stop, thief! Stop the Fire Thief!’

Luka snapped out of his reverie and saw Coyote emerging from the shadows at the foot of Mount Knowledge with fire blazing from his mouth, and streaking round the Mountain towards its far side, running faster than Luka would have believed it was possible for a coyote to run. He was heading across stony ground in the opposite direction from the Rainbow Bridge, leading his pursuers deliberately away from Luka’s probable escape route and into the Wild Waste that lay beyond the Lake. This was an area of semi-desert, more properly known as the Waste of Time, a large expanse of arid land which had been overrun, long ago, by a virulent outbreak of Slackerweed. This rapidly spreading weed, previously unknown in the Magic World, had first choked and destroyed all other plant life – except for a few of the hardiest cacti – and then bizarrely self-destructed, as if it had no idea what to do with itself, and no real desire to find out. It just lay apathetically on the ground until it withered away, leaving behind this yellow wilderness dotted with the skulls of long-dead creatures. Snakes slithered out from under rocks and buzzards wheeled overhead, and it was well known that the gods, accustomed as they were to luxury and opulence, were not fond of entering this zone, where, Rashid Khalifa had told Luka, the air moved slowly, the breeze blew without any real sense of direction, and there was something in that wind that induced carelessness, laziness and sleep. Only a few of the guardian deities who had answered the Fire Alarm had been willing to follow Coyote into the Waste, and their pursuit of the fleeing animal seemed slower, groggier and less purposeful than it should have been. Coyote, however, seemed immune to the infectious lethargy in the air. ‘The Wild Waste is his natural habitat,’ Luka thought. ‘He’ll give those gods a good run for their money there.’ And positioned at intervals along the route Coyote had chosen were the Lion, the Big Bear, the Little Bear, the Wolf, the Squirrel and the Frog. Would the Waste of Time affect them, Luka wondered, or had Coyote discovered an antidote? It wasn’t important. The decoy relay had begun.

He heard Coyote’s voice in his head, saying, Put your best foot forward an make your glory run. And all around him were excited dragons and a barking dog and a roaring bear, and Nuthog was saying, ‘It’s now or never, young Luka, and if you can’t find the way Left, as you say, then you’d best let us fly you up there and take your chances. Move! This is the moment of Truth!’

‘Who are those monsters chasing Coyote?’ Luka needed to know. ‘If you don’t act fast,’ Nuthog harrumphed, panicked, ‘they’ll be chasing you instead, soon enough. Saturn’s out there, as savage and violent as any immortal. He eats children, by the way. He’s done it before, with his own. And the bearded fellow with the snake wound around him is Zurvan, the Persian time god – you don’t want that snake to get within snapping distance, let me tell you! There goes the Dagda, look, that wild Irish fellow with the enormous club! And Xiuhtecuhtli too, though he usually only roams about at night. And even Ling-pao T’ien-tsun – they got him out of the Gossamer Library for once! Looks like they really want to stop the Fire Thief, and when they find out that the fire in Coyote’s mouth is a fake – that it’s just fire, and not the Fire of Life – then they’ll know he was only a decoy, and they’ll come after the real Fire Thief in all their fury. So if you know how to climb up this Mountain under your own steam, it would be a good idea to get on with it.’

To decide to do a thing was decidedly not the same thing as actually doing the thing, Luka quickly understood. He really had no idea of exactly how he was supposed to take the little tumble to the left that would shift him into the Widdershins Dimension in which the whole world, including the World of Magic, would morph into Planet Wrongway, the left-handers’ home, the southpaw variation of Planet Earth. He tried falling, jumping and rolling to the left; he attempted to trip over his own feet; he asked Bear and Dog to knock him over; and finally, closing his eyes, he tried to feel the Left World pushing at his left shoulder, so that, by pushing back, he could fall through the invisible frontier and get to where he needed to be. None of it worked. His many falls left him considerably the worse for wear, bruised of shoulder and of hip, and with a battered and scratched left leg.

‘It beats me,’ he admitted, almost in despair.

‘The thing about the Left-Hand Path,’ said Nuthog gently, ‘is that you have to believe it’s going to be there.’

Just then a triumphant blast of the Fire Alarm announced the capture of the Fire Thief, followed by two blasts of renewed anguish that announced the hunt was still on. Nuthog whizzed off to investigate as soon as she heard the first blast, and returned to report that after the decoy fire had been passed from Coyote to Lion, and then all the way down the old relay team until it reached Frog, that doughty amphibian had swallowed it and dived into the Circular Sea; whereupon the enraged Worm Bottomfeeder had ended the carrera de distracción by swallowing Frog in a single greedy gulp. Four seconds later, Bottomfeeder spat the saliva-covered Frog out again, and roared with all its might to announce to the entire Magical World that this particular Fire Thief was a Common Fraud.

‘They’re all coming this way now,’ Nuthog panted, ‘and, to be frank, they’re mad as hell, so if you won’t let us fly you away from here, then at least run. Run for your life.’

‘Yes, I probably should start running,’ Luka thought. ‘After all, I was running before, when I stumbled the first time and took that magical step to the right.’ It was hard to be certain of the laws of Magical Physics; ordinary physics was difficult enough. But what was it Rashid had said? ‘Time is not only Itself, but is an aspect of Movement and Space.’ That was the point, wasn’t it? ‘So, umm, errr,’ Luka thought, ‘if T is affected by M and S, then, ahhh, therefore, it follows – doesn’t it? – that S, which is to say Space, including the Space between the Right-Handed and the Left-Handed Dimensions, must – probably, right? – be an aspect of T and M, i.e. Time and Movement. Or, urrgghh, to put it in English, it makes a difference how long it takes you to make your move, or, in other words, how fast you run.’

The ground began to tremble. ‘Is it an earthquake?’ Luka cried. ‘No,’ said Nuthog sadly. ‘It’s much worse than that. It’s the sound of several hundred angry gods moving at speed. It will take a lot more than four dragons to stop that crowd.’

Dog the bear stepped forward with sudden resolution. ‘You go,’ he said to Luka. ‘Go this minute. Take off, bhag jao, amscray, vamoose. Go and do the deed. Bear and I can hold them up for quite a while.’

‘How?’ asked Nuthog sceptically.

‘By doing what we do best,’ said Dog the bear. ‘Are you ready, Bear?’

‘Ready,’ said Bear the dog.

Luka knew there was no time to discuss the matter. He turned to his left, tilted his left shoulder down a bit, put his left foot forward, and set off at a gallop, as if his life depended upon it. Which, in point of fact, it did.

He ran without looking back. He heard the noise behind him, already loud, getting closer, growing much louder and becoming deafening, like the sound of a thousand jet engines roaring next to his eardrums; he felt the ground beneath his feet, which had already been trembling, begin to shake as if it had been seized by an uncontrollable terror; he saw the sky above him darken, and white lightning begin to stab through the black clouds. ‘Okay, so they can put on a show, these gods,’ he told himself, to keep his courage up, ‘but remember, they aren’t gods of anywhere or anyone any more. They’re just circus animals, or caged creatures in a zoo.’ But a less confident voice whispered into his right ear, ‘That may be so, but even in a zoo you shouldn’t jump into the middle of the lions’ den.’ He shook this thought off, put his head down and sprinted harder. Nuthog’s advice was the only thing in his head. The thing about the Left-Hand Path is that you have to believe it’s going to be there. Then all at once the noise seemed to stop, the earth no longer shook, he felt as if he were floating at high speed rather than running, and that was when he saw the abyss.

‘Behind the Mountain of Knowledge,’ Rashid Khalifa used to say, ‘if you are very unlucky, you will find the Bottomless Pit known as the Abysm of Time. And that, by the by, is a rhyme. You pronounce it abime and it rhymes with rhyme, which also rhymes with time. But if you fall into that rhyming Abysm it isn’t rhyme that you’ll have on your mind.’

Meanwhile, the thundering herd of ex-gods arrived at Mount Knowledge, and found two of the brightest stars of the Great Rings of Fire, the defunct circus of Captain Aag, waiting for them as calmly as the experienced artistes they were, and gesturing courteously to their outside audience to settle down. Bear the singing dog and Dog the dancing bear had taken up their starting positions, along with their backing singers, the Changers, a quartet of giant metallic sows. The sight was unusual enough to stop the discarded deities in their tracks. Ra the Supreme held up his hand and all the ranks of all the former gods, Egyptian, Assyrian, Norse, Greek, Roman, Aztec, Inca and the rest, came clattering to a clumsy halt, full of screeches, collisions and oaths. The Cyclopes accidentally elbowed one another in the eye, the fire gods’ burning swords singed the hair of the treasure-nymphs, a basilisk glared at a griffin and accidentally turned it to stone. The beauty goddesses – Aphrodite, cow-eared Hathor and the rest – complained loudest. It appeared that the lower-ranked supernatural entities were taking advantage of the crowd of immortals to squeeze the Beauties’ bottoms, accidentally-on-purpose. Also, why exactly were minotaurs stepping on the Lovely Ladies’ feet? And, no, the Beauties absolutely did not appreciate snake-headed deities from rival mythological traditions looking up their togas. A little space, please, they demanded, a little respect. And shh, by the way, they hissed. There were performers here, and they were ready to begin.

‘,’ said Ra, ‘.’

‘What on earth was that?’ asked Bear the dog.

‘He’s speaking Hieroglyph,’ said Nuthog, ‘and what he says is, “Okay, this had better be good.”’

‘Start dancing,’ murmured Bear the dog to Dog the bear. ‘And dance as you’ve never danced before.’

‘And you start singing,’ growled Dog the bear to Bear the dog. ‘Sing as if your life depended upon it.’

‘Which, in point of fact, it does,’ chorused Nuthog, Sara, Badlo and Jinn. ‘And ours too, by the way,’ Nuthog added. ‘No pressure, though. Break a leg.’

So Dog the bear began to dance, first a soft-shoe shuffle, then a rhythm tap, and then the African Gumboot Dance. Once he had warmed up, he went into the Broadway Style and at last his show-stopping speciality, the Caribbean Juba, the most energetic tap dance of them all. The audience went crazy. He had them right where he wanted them; as his feet tapped, so did the feet of the ex-gods; as his hands clapped, so the junked deities clapped along; and when he twirled the Juba Twirl, well, those ancient relics discovered they could still get down and boogie! Ra the Supreme clapped right along with everyone else. ‘,’ he roared, and Gyara-Jinn translated, ‘He says, “You make my pants want to get up and dance.”’ Dog the bear shook his head in wonder. ‘But he isn’t wearing any pants,’ he pointed out. ‘Just that little loincloth sort of thing which doesn’t exactly hide very much,’ agreed Bear the dog, ‘but let’s not argue.’

‘Your turn now,’ said Dog the bear to Bear the dog, and the dog murmured back, ‘Let’s try a little flat-out flattery. After all, it’s been a while since anyone worshipped these folks properly.’ Then he cleared his throat and burst into howlful melody, singing a series of honeyed odes to the gods of Babylon, Egypt, Asgard, Greece and Rome, improvised from less specifically reverential tunes: ‘When I Wish upon Ishtar’, ‘It’s a Beautiful Frey’, ‘Long-winded Adulation Goes to Memphis on the Nile’, and so on. The show seemed to go well, and as he launched into his big finish, the metal sows oohed and clanged behind him.

‘You’re dee-vine,’ sang Bear the dog, and the Clangers chorused, ‘Ooh (clang), ooh (clang), ooh (clang).’

‘You’re Level Nine,’ sang Bear the dog. ‘Ooh (clang), ooh (clang).’

‘You gorgeous gods of mine,

I really wanna praise you!

Really am amazed by you!

Really wanna praise you now

Cause you look so fine, my gods…’

‘Ooh (clang), ooh (clang), ooh (clang),’

‘My sweet gods…’

‘Ooh (clang), ooh (clang), ooh (clang).’

‘O, my gods -’

Bear was interrupted by an angry roar and a golden blaze of light. Ra the Supreme broke the spell of the music, rose into the sky, glowing furiously, and shot like a bullet towards the summit of Mount Knowledge. All the other ex-gods soared after him, looking like the grandest fireworks display in world history. Bear the dog looked disconsolate. ‘I lost my audience,’ he said sadly. Dog the bear comforted him. ‘It wasn’t you. Something just happened up there,’ he said. ‘Maybe it was something good. Let’s hope we bought young Luka enough time.’

An enormous white horse with eight legs galloped towards them, snorting angrily. ‘Let’s go and see if you did, shall we?’ he said. ‘By which I mean, you’re both under arrest.’ This was the real Slippy, King of the Horses, and he didn’t look at all pleased to see them. ‘As for you and your sisters,’ he said to Gyara-Jinn and the other Changers, ‘you should consider yourselves seized as well. We’ll decide what to do about you later, but treason, may I remind you, is not a minor offence.’

When Luka saw the rhyming Abysm of Time ahead of him he didn’t slow down, because now, at last, he could feel the ghostly pressure on his left shoulder that told him the Left- Hand Dimension was right there, right beside him, so he ran even faster, and then, at the very edge of the Abysm, he hurled himself to the left…

… and fell into the Bottomless Pit, and, as he plummeted through the blackness, flew apart into a million shiny fragments. When he came to his senses, his life-counter had subtracted one hundred lives, and he was running at the Abysm again; and again throwing himself left at that area of soft pressure; and again toppling into blackness and disintegrating.

And the third time, the same thing happened again. This time, when the shiny fragments of himself re-formed, and he saw that a total of three hundred lives had evaporated in just these few instants, leaving him with only 165, he lost his temper. ‘That’s pathetic, Luka Khalifa, to be honest with you,’ he scolded himself. ‘If you can’t be serious now, after coming so far, then you deserve the Final Permination you are about to receive.’

Just then a red squirrel ran across his path from right to left, at the very edge of the Abysm, and simply disappeared into thin air. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Luka thought, ‘I don’t even know if there are such things as left-handed – left-footed? – squirrels, – but if there are, then this was surely one of them, and it’s amazing how easily it hopped across onto the Left-Hand path, without even trying. Obviously when you really and truly believe it’s there you can scurry across onto it without the slightest difficulty, whenever you feel the urge.’ Whereupon, following the squirrel’s example, Luka Khalifa simply turned to the left and took a step, and, without even needing to stumble, stepped into the left-handed version of the Magic World…

… in which the Mountain was completely different! As a matter of fact, it was no longer a Mountain at all, but a low green hill dotted with oaks and elms and chinar trees and stands of poplars, and flower bushes around which honeybees buzzed, hummingbirds hummed and larks warbled melodiously, while crested orange hoopoes strutted like princes on the grass; and there was a pretty path curling around it to the left, a path which looked like it might take Luka all the way to the top.

‘I always knew the Left-Hand World would be much easier for me to handle than the Right-Hand one, if I could just find my way there,’ Luka thought happily. ‘I bet you that if there was a doorknob anywhere around here, it would turn to the left. It seems that even Knowledge itself is not such a huge, frightening Mountain when the world is arranged to suit us lefties for a change.’

The red squirrel was waiting for him on a low tree stump, nibbling at an acorn. ‘Greetings from Queen Soraya,’ she said, bowing formally. ‘Ratatat’s the name. Oh yes. Her Majesty the Insultana thought you might appreciate a little guidance.’

‘She certainly has friends everywhere,’ Luka marvelled.

‘We redheads like to stick together,’ said Ratatat, bristling with pleasure. ‘And some of us (I don’t want to boast, but there it is) are Honorary Otters of long standing – oh yes! – members of the highly confidential Ott List, the Insultana’s emergency undercover squadron – sleeper agents, if you will, lurking in our secret Ott Beds and available to the lady twenty-four/seven on her personal Ott Line, just in case she needs to activate us. But, much as I’d like to stop and chat about these Ott Topics, I do believe you might be in something of a hurry. So,’ she went on quickly, noticing that Luka had opened his mouth to reply, and obliging him to shut it again, ‘let’s Ott-foot it up this so-called Mountain while we can.’

Luka almost skipped up that hill, so great was his determination and joy. He had Jumped to the Left, from a Mountain of Difficulty to a Hill of Ease, and the Fire of Life lay within his grasp. Soon he would be rushing home as fast as he could go, to pour the Fire into his father’s mouth, and then Rashid Khalifa would surely Awake, and there would be new stories told, and Soraya his mother would sing – ‘You do know,’ said Ratatat the squirrel, ‘that there will be guards?’

‘Guards?’ Luka stopped dead in his tracks and almost shrieked the word, because somehow he hadn’t been expecting to encounter any further obstacles – not here in the Left-Hand Dimension, surely not! Happiness drained from him like blood from a wound.

‘You wouldn’t expect the Fire of Life to be left unguarded, would you?’ said Ratatat sternly, as if lecturing a slightly dim-witted student.

‘Are there Fire Gods in this Magic World, too?’ asked Luka, and then felt so foolish he actually blushed. ‘Well, yes, I suppose there must be – but aren’t they all somewhere else right now, guarding the Rainbow Bridge or searching for… well, for me, I suppose?’

‘As well as Fire Gods,’ said Ratatat, ‘there are Fire Guards. Oh yes.’

Nowadays, the squirrel explained, the job of guarding the Fire of Life had been given to the most powerful Guard Spirits from all the world’s dead religions, aka mythologies. Spotted Kerberos, the fifty-headed dog of Greece and the former gatekeeper of the Underworld; Anzu, the Sumerian demon with the face and paws of a lion and an eagle’s claws and wings; the decapitated but still living head of the Nordic giant Mimir, which had been guarding the Fire for so long that it had grown into, and become part of, Mount Knowledge itself; Fafnir the superdragon, as big as the four Changers combined and a hundred times as powerful; and Argus Panoptes, the cowherd with the hundred eyes, who saw everything and missed nothing, were the five appointed guardians, each of them more ferocious than the last.

‘Ah,’ said Luka, feeling cross with himself. ‘Yes, I should have expected that. So, as you know everything, can you tell me how am I supposed to get around that little lot?’

‘Cunning,’ said Ratatat. ‘Do you have that? Because a good supply of that is what is recommended. Hermes, for example, tricked Argus once by cunningly singing him lullabies until all his hundred eyes closed and he fell asleep. Oh yes. To steal the Fire of Life, you’ll need to be the cunning, devious, sneaky, tricky, weirdly twisted type. Is that, by any chance, the type of type you are?’

‘No,’ said Luka disconsolately, and sat down on the grassy slope. ‘I’m sorry to say that I’m not.’

As he spoke the sky darkened; storm clouds, black and lightning-lit, thickened overhead. ‘,’ said a terrifying voice emanating from the heart of the clouds, ‘.’

‘“In that case,”’ little Ratatat translated through teeth that were chattering with fear, ‘“you might find this last step a trifle tough.”’

As the gods rose like a swarm of hornets towards the summit of Mount Knowledge, the Fire Alarm sounded the all-clear, announcing the capture of the Fire Thief to the whole Heart of Magic. Bear the dog and Dog the bear, who were being carried up to the top on the Horse King’s back, heard the triumphant notes of the siren and were plunged into gloom. Nuthog and her sisters were flying alongside them with their tails very much between their legs. ‘The jig is up, I’m sorry to say,’ Nuthog told Bear and Dog, confirming their fears. ‘It’s time to pay the piper.’

At that instant the entire swarm of gods swerved sharply to the left – and, to Bear and Dog’s amazement, actually tore through the blue sky itself, as if it were made of paper, and charged through into another sky, which was full of storm clouds. The Horse King and his prisoners followed the swarm through the gigantic rip into the Left-Hand World, and Bear and Dog saw for the first time the transformed version of Mount Knowledge, which they both immediately thought to be the loveliest of green hills, even though the sky was dark and menacing, and the moment so forlorn. At the summit of Knowledge was a flower-strewn meadow crowned by a fine, spreading ash tree. In spite of the tree’s beauty, however, its name was the Tree of Terror, and under its boughs stood Luka Khalifa with a red squirrel on his shoulder and the Ott Pot hanging from his neck, guarded by his captor, Anzu the Sumerian thunder demon with his lion’s head and eagle’s body, who looked as if he was only just managing to restrain himself from ripping the boy to bits with his enormous claws. The rest of the Fire Guards – many-headed Kerberos, Mimir the head without a body, Fafnir the superdragon and Argus Panoptes of the hundred eyes – were also angrily at hand. And beside the great tree was a small, slender-columned marble temple, scarcely larger than a humble garden shed. Inside the Temple was a light that glowed with an almost shocking intensity, filling the air around the Temple with warmth, radiance and a crackle of energy, even in the thunderous mood of that time of failure, captivity and imminent judgement; and above the pillared entrance to the Temple stood a golden ball, the Saving Point at this impossible Level’s End. ‘That’s the glow of Fire of Life,’ Dog the bear growled quietly to Bear the dog. ‘What a simple home it has, at the end of such a grand journey; and how close we came, and how sad that we didn’t -’ Bear the dog interrupted sharply: ‘Don’t say that,’ he barked. ‘This isn’t over.’ But in his heart he believed it was.

The trial began. ‘ ’ roared Ra the Supreme, who seemed to have taken charge of events.

‘Maat!’ the crowd of gods roared back – which is to say roared, or shouted, or chirped, or hissed, depending on the god in question.

‘ ’ shouted Ra.

‘Maat has been disrupted and must be restored,’ echoed the divine mob.

‘ ’ Ra bellowed.

‘Therefore let Maat be done.’

‘What’s Maat?’ Luka asked Ratatat the squirrel.

‘Ahem,’ said Ratatat, raising her eyebrows and twitching her whiskers professorially. ‘It is a reference to the divine music of the Universe – oh yes! – and the structure of the World, and the nature of Time, the most basic of all Forces, which to interfere with is a crime -’

‘In short?’ Luka requested.

‘Oh,’ said Ratatat, looking a little disappointed. ‘Well, then, in brief, Ra means that order has been disturbed, and justice must be done.’

Luka discovered all at once that he was feeling extremely annoyed. How dare this posse of has-beens judge him? Who were they to tell him he should not try to save his father’s life? This was the moment at which he saw his companions arriving on the scene, and the sight of his beloved dog and bear and the four loyal Changers under arrest increased his irritation. These supernatural pensioners had some nerve, he thought. He would have to show them what was what.

‘ ’ cried Ra the Supreme,

‘

’

‘Do I have to translate all that?’ said Ratatat reluctantly.

‘Yes,’ Luka insisted.

‘Fortunately for you,’ said Ratatat, sighing a little, ‘I have an excellent memory, and an obliging nature as well. You won’t like it, though. “Once and for all,”’ she began, ‘“members of the Real World must be shown that they are not permitted the use of the Fire of Life. It cannot revive the Dead, for they have entered the Book of the Dead and are no longer Beings, but only Words. But to the Dying it gives new life, and in the healthy it can induce great longevity, even immortality, which belongs to the gods alone. The Fire of Life must not cross the boundary and enter the Real World, and yet here is a Fire Thief who plans precisely to take it across that forbidden frontier. An example must be made.”’

‘Oh, is that so?’ said Luka. A fire of his own making had risen in his breast, and blazed through his eyes. The strange inner force that had gripped him after Nobodaddy’s disappearance rose up again and gave him the strength he needed. ‘As it happens,’ he realised, ‘I know exactly what to say.’ Then he called out so loudly to the assembled ex-gods that they stopped roaring and hissing and chirping and whinnying and making all the other weird noises they habitually made, and fell silent, and listened.

‘It’s my turn to speak now,’ Luka hollered at the assembled Supernatural Beings, ‘and, believe you me, I have a lot to say about all this poppycock, and you had better listen closely, and listen well, because your future depends upon it as much as mine does. You see, I know something you don’t know about this World of Magic… it isn’t your World! It doesn’t even belong to the Aalim, whoever they are, wherever they are lurking right now. This is my father’s World. I’m sure there are other Magic Worlds dreamed up by other people, Wonderlands and Narnias and Middle-earths and whatnot – and I don’t know, maybe there are some such Worlds that dreamed themselves up, I suppose that’s possible, and I won’t argue with you if you say it is – but this one, gods and goddesses, ogres and bats, monsters and slimy things, is the World of Rashid Khalifa, the well-known Ocean of Notions, the fabulous Shah of Blah. From start to finish; Level One to Level Nine and back again; lock, stock and barrel; from soup to nuts, it’s his.

‘He put it together this way, he gave it shape and laws, and he brought all of you here to populate it, because he has learned about you, thought about you, and even dreamed about you all his life. The reason this World is the way it is, is because, Right-Handed or Left-Handed, Nobody’s World or the World of Nonsense, this is the World inside his head! And I know about it – probably that’s why I was able to stumble to the right and step to the left and get here – because I’ve been hearing about it every day of my life, as bedtime stories and breakfast sagas and dinner-table yarns, and as tall tales told to audiences all over the city of Kahani and the country of Alifbay, and also as little secrets he whispered into my ears, just for me. So in a way it’s now my World, too. And the plain truth is that if I don’t get the Fire of Life to him before it’s too late, he isn’t the only one who will come to an end. Everything here will vanish, too; I don’t know what will become of you all exactly but, at the very least, you won’t have this comfortable World to live in any more, this place where you can go on pretending you matter when actually nobody gives a hoot. And in the worst-case scenario you will disappear completely – poof – as if you had never been, because let’s be frank, how many people other than Rashid Khalifa are really bothering to keep your story going nowadays? How many people know any more about the Salamander that lives in Fire, or the Squonk that is so sad about being ugly that it actually dissolves into tears?

‘Wake up and smell the coffee, old-timers! You’re extinct! You’re deceased! As gods and wonderful creatures, you have ceased to be! You say the Fire of Life mustn’t cross into the Real World? I’m telling you that if it doesn’t reach one particular member of the Real World double-quick, you’re done for. Your golden eggs have been fried, and your magic goose is cooked.’

‘Wow,’ Ratatat the squirrel whispered into his ear. ‘You’ve certainly got their attention now.’

The entire army of discarded divinities had been shocked into amazed silence. Luka under the Tree of Terror knew that he mustn’t let anything break the spell. And besides, he had plenty more to say.

‘Shall I tell you who you are now?’ he shouted. ‘Well, first I’ll go on reminding you who you aren’t. You aren’t really the gods of anywhere or anyone any more. You no longer have the power of life and death and salvation and damnation. You can’t turn into bulls and capture Earth girls, or interfere in wars, or play any of those other games you used to play. Look at you! Instead of real Powers, you have Beauty Contests. It’s a bit on the feeble side, to be honest with you. Listen to me: it’s only through Stories that you can get out into the Real World and have some sort of power again. When your story is well told, people believe in you; not in the way they used to believe, not in a worshipping way, but in the way people believe in stories – happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn’t end. You want Immortality? It’s only my father, and people like him, who can give it to you now. My father can make people forget that they forgot all about you, and start adoring you all over again and being interested in what you’ve been getting up to and wishing that you wouldn’t end. And you’re trying to stop me? You should be begging me to finish the work I came here to do. You should be helping me. You should be putting the Fire into my Ott Pot, making sure it lights up my Ott Potatoes, and then escorting me all the way home. Who am I? I’m Luka Khalifa. I’m the only chance you’ve got.’

It was the greatest speech of his life as a performer, delivered on the most important stage on which he had ever set foot; and he had used every ounce of skill and passion in his body, that was true – but had he carried his audience with him? ‘Maybe so,’ he thought worriedly, ‘and maybe no.’

Bear the dog and Dog the bear, still on the Horse King’s back, were shouting out supportively, yelling, ‘That’s telling them!’ and so on, but the silence of the gods grew so dense, so oppressive, that in the end even Bear held his tongue. That awful silence went on thickening, like a fog, and the dark skies grew darker until the only light Luka could see was the glow from the Fire Temple, and in that flickering radiance he saw the slow movements of giant shadows all around him, shadows that looked like they were closing in on the Tree of Terror and the boy who stood captive beneath it with a Sumerian thunder demon as his guard. Closer and closer the shadows came, forming themselves into a single giant fist that was closing around Luka, and would, any minute now, squeeze the life out of him like water from a sponge. ‘This is it, then,’ he thought. ‘My speech didn’t work, they didn’t buy it, and so here’s an end to it all.’ He wished he could hug his dog and his bear once more. He wished the people he loved were there to hold his hand. He wished he could wish himself out of this jam. He wished…

The Mountain of Knowledge began to shake violently, as if some invisible colossus were jumping up and down on its slopes. The trunk of the Tree of Terror cracked from top to bottom, and the Tree fell in ruins to the ground, its crashing branches narrowly missing Luka and the thunder demon. One falling branch struck Mimir the Head, and he unleashed an injured yelp. From among the ranks of the gods and monsters there were many more cries, of anguish, bewilderment and fear. Then came the most terrifying events of all. There were instants, very brief, fractions of seconds, when everything completely disappeared, and Luka, Bear and Dog – the three visitors from the Real World – remained suspended in an appalling, colourless, soundless, motionless, lawless, everything-less absence. Then the Magic World came back again, but a horrible realisation began to dawn on everyone and everything there: the World of Magic was in trouble. Its deepest foundations were shaking, its geography was becoming uncertain, its very existence had begun to be an intermittent, on-off affair. What if the ‘off’ moments started getting longer? What if they began to last longer than the ‘on’ ones? What if the ‘on’ moments, the periods of the World’s existence, diminished to split seconds, or even vanished entirely? What if everything the Fire Thief had just told them was the naked truth, in which they had until now refused to believe, clothed as they all were in the tatters of their old divine glory and the remnants of their pride? Was this the bare, unvarnished reality: that their survival was tied to the ebbing life of a sick and dying man? These were the questions plaguing all the inhabitants of the Magic World, but in Luka’s panicked, racing mind there was a simpler, more horrifying query.

Was Rashid Khalifa about to die?

Anzu the thunder demon fell to its knees and began to plead with Luka in a soft, sad, piteous voice, ‘

.’

Ratatat was so scared that her voice shook as she translated the Sumerian. ‘“Save us, sir! Only, please, sir, we don’t want to be just fairy tales. We want to be revered again! We want to be… divine.”’

‘Sir, huh?’ Luka thought. ‘That’s a change of tone if ever I heard one.’ Hope surged through his body, fighting against his despair; he rallied all his strength to make one last effort, and said with all the force he could command, ‘Take it or leave it, all of you. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.’

The darkness stopped closing in around him; the wrath of the gods wavered; overcome by their fear, it broke into pieces and dissipated completely, to be replaced by abject terror. The clouds of anger parted, the daylight returned, and everyone could see that the rip in the sky through which the god-swarm had poured had grown ten times as large as before; that there were actually cracks running across the heavens from horizon to horizon; and that the army of mythological figures was itself deteriorating – ageing, cracking, fading, weakening, diminishing and losing the ability to be. Aphrodite, Hathor, Venus and the other Beauty goddesses looked at the wrinkled skin on their hands and arms and shrieked, ‘Smash all the mirrors!’ And the immense figure of the falcon-headed Egyptian Supreme Deity fell to its knees just like Anzu had, its body beginning to crumble like an ancient monument; and all the other gods followed Ra’s lead – or at least those of them who had knees. In a low, respectful, frightened voice, Ra the Supreme said, ‘

’

‘What did he say?’ Luka asked Ratatat, who had started jumping up and down on his shoulder, squeaking loudly.

‘He says they’ll take it – your offer, that is,’ squeaked Ratatat, in a voice that was simultaneously relieved and terrified. ‘You can take the Fire now. Hurry! What are you waiting for? Save your father! Save us all! Don’t just stand there! Move!’

Shadows rushed across the sky above their heads. ‘Well, will you look at that!’ said the welcome voice of the Insultana of Ott. ‘I thought I was leading my loyal Otter Air Force on a doomed-but-gallant rescue attempt of an incompetent but oddly likeable young fellow, because, in spite of your foolhardiness, in the final analysis I couldn’t stand by and leave you to your fate with only my Honorary Otter Ratatat to represent me; but I see – to my considerable surprise, considering what a foolish boy you are – that you have managed pretty well on your own.’ There in the newly cloud-free, but also decaying, sky above the Mountain of Knowledge was the entire OAF on its flying carpets, with quantities of rotten vegetables and itching-powder paper planes at the ready, and Queen Soraya at their head aboard Resham, the Flying Carpet of King Solomon the Wise, along with Coyote the decoy runner, the Elephant Birds – ‘We came too!’ they shouted down. ‘We don’t just want to remember stuff! We want to do stuff too!’ – and a male stranger of great age and improbable size, who was also completely naked, with a heavily scarred midriff.

Luka didn’t have time to reply to anyone, or to ask who the naked stranger was, or even to embrace Bear and Dog, who had jumped off the Horse King’s back and rushed to his side. ‘I have to get to the Fire,’ he cried. ‘Every second counts.’ Bear the dog reacted at once, and charged at breakneck speed into the Fire Temple, to return a few seconds later with a burning wooden brand between his teeth, ablaze with the brightest, most cheerful, most attractive, most hopeful fire Luka had ever seen; and Dog the bear climbed the columns of the Fire Temple and, with one great paw, hammered the golden ball over the entrance as hard as he could. Luka heard the telltale little ding, saw the number in the top right-hand corner of his field of vision click up to 8, grabbed the burning wood from Bear’s jaws and plunged it into the Ott Pot, whereupon the little Ott Potatoes began to burn with the same heart-warming, optimistic cheeriness as the stick.

‘Let’s go!’ yelled Luka, hanging the Pot around his neck again. Its warmth felt comforting; and Soraya swooped down to allow Luka, Bear and Dog to leap up onto King Solomon’s Carpet. ‘No faster mode of transport in the whole Magic World,’ she cried. ‘Say your farewells and let’s be on our way.’ Then Nuthog and her sisters and the squirrel Ratatat shouted, ‘No time for that! Goodbye! Good luck! Go!’ And so they did. Soraya’s carpet hurtled back through the rip in the sky. ‘You came in from the Right-Hand World, so that’s the way you’ll have to go back out,’ she told him. The rest of the Otter Air Force followed, but the Carpet of King Solomon was flying at its very fastest, and the others were soon left behind.

‘Don’t you worry,’ said Soraya in her most determinedly cheerful voice. ‘I’ll get you back in time. After all, it turns out that you have our whole World to save as well as your dad.’