Sagaria (54 page)

At one point, Samzing announced that he’d brought a gift for his dear old pal, Chickenlegs, a magical gift that was not to be opened until the annual
ceremony, just before Fariam announced the most outstanding student of the year. The auditorium should be completely silent.

Fariam nodded earnestly. Such conditions were apparently quite usual when gifts were exchanged between wizards.

Staring his companions into silence, Samzing produced with a flourish the green bottle into which he’d coaxed the amateur djinn and ceremoniously presented it to Grand Master Fariam, who was effusive in his thanks.

“Are you sure I can’t open it now?”

“Quite sure, Chickenlegs. It’s important that I should be at a considerable distance from Qarnapheeran when you discover the nature of my gift.”

“Seems reasonable,” said Fariam reluctantly, “magic being what it is.”

At last the room quietened.

“Excuse me, Chick—that is, Grand Master,” said Perima. “You said Samzing would be forever broken as a wizard because of what the scoundrel Arkanamon did to him, but is that really true? Is there no possible cure for him at all?”

Fariam’s face hardened with sorrow. “There’s a cure in theory,” he said, emphasising the last word, “but in practice, no, there isn’t.”

“What do you mean by that?” she persisted, twining a coil of her hair.

Renada, who had become considerably more friendly (especially once Flip had admitted he’d been lying about the zit on her nose) was the one who answered. “The only cure would be for Samzing to be subjected to the same spell again.”

“You mean, be smitten by another thunderbolt?” said Perima, looking horrified.

“Yes.” Renada spread her hands mournfully. “If he could survive the blast, then he’d be cured but, of course, he couldn’t survive the blast.”

Fariam sighed and shook his head in agreement. “If it’s of any consolation,” he said, “all your friendship has given him more strength than he imagined possible.”

Sagandran’s head tilted to one side and he regarded Samzing. If Fariam hadn’t made the remark, Sagandran might not have realized but Samzing had changed since Sir Tombin had first taken them to the wizard’s home in the middle of nowhere. He’d been a bumbling old man when they’d first met him. He’d kept getting his spells wrong. Sagandran still wouldn’t trust him to get every spell right, but in the game of magical hit and miss, Samzing could now be relied upon for more hits than misses.

Yet again, he remembered his talk with Samzing in the carriage about the magic borne of everyday things. The bond of friendship and trust among the companions had worked a very powerful magic on the wizard.

Deicher had, alas, regained his confidence.

“Look here,” he was saying assertively, hectoring the Grand Master, “even if what you say is correct, that Queen Mirabella was rely on this crew and to tell you we should do the same, and even if they did show remarkable resourcefulness in managing to reach here despite the hazards they faced, what guarantee is there that they’ll be able to cope once they get to the Shadow World? It’s a different world there, of course it’s a different world. What I meant to say was that—”

“Yes, yes, Deicher,” said Fariam impatiently. “Your point has been taken even before you made it. Sheer bravery and steadfastness may not be enough to counter the sorceries that Arkanamon is bound to hurl at them once they’ve passed through the portal into the world of shadows, but what would you propose to do about it?”

Glancing down, Fariam saw that he was still holding the Rainbow Crystal. He beckoned Sagandran to approach him and, with great gravity to indicate that he fully recognized the symbolic nature of the act, he put the golden chain back over Sagandran’s bent head.

“You, my boy,” he said, “are the jewel’s rightful owner. It is yours. Let no one seize it from you. Likewise,” he said with a sidelong glance at Deicher, “let no one cajole it from you.”

Deicher was breathing heavily through his nose as he watched this performance, his features becoming more and more irate.

“There is a solution, Grand Master,” he burst out as soon as Sagandran had stood upright again and stowed the crystal back inside his T-shirt.

“And what is that?” said Fariam, his voice bored.

“That I go with them, to help protect them.”

“You?”

“Yes.” The smugness was returning to Deicher. “I am skilled in my art. My magic would be at the boy’s service. I doubt there are any wizards in the Shadow World who could think to overcome me.”

“No,” said the Grand Master.

There was an instant hubbub among his councilors. Few of them had much sympathy for Deicher and a couple had started to regard him with open distaste, but nevertheless, they emphatically told their Grand Master that in this matter, Deicher was right. If the companions were to venture through the gateway into the Shadow World, they should have with them one of the most powerful wizards of Qarnapheeran, even if it were not Deicher himself. Fariam should remember that it wasn’t just the lives of the companions that were at stake but also the fate of the Rainbow Crystal, and hence that of the three worlds.

Fariam finally clapped his hands to indicate that everyone should be silent. He sat deep in thought for many minutes before he looked up. When he spoke, he addressed not his councilors, but Sagandran.

“Yes,” he said. “With your permission, the permission of you and your friends, one of the wizards from Qarnapheeran will go with you. It’s a precaution that we would be fools not to take.”

“Who?” said Sagandran dully. He had a horrible crawling sensation that he knew what the answer would be.

Deicher preened.

“I have not yet decided,” said the Grand Master. “I will tell you when I do.”

He lifted his forefinger, traced a perfect circle, and blew into its center.

Facing the companions were a number of empty chairs, with one in the middle of the semicircle that was barely more than a milking stool.

CHAPTER 10

U
NVEILINGS

he companions were given a dormitory to share, then left to their own devices. The big window looked out over Qarnapheeran, and they spent a little while asking Samzing to identify the various sights for them. Just as they were beginning to get bored of this, Shano, who’d shown them to the room, returned wheeling a trolley covered in dishes of hot and cold food. With a flourish, he produced a bowl of mixed nuts from the lower shelf of the trolley, which he handed to Flip with a grin. After seeing that they had settled down to eat, the young wizard left them once more, bidding them goodnight and drawing their attention to a bell on the floor by the door, telling them to ring it if they needed him.

Later, the companions decided to call it a day.

“I’m not sure,” said Flip, settling down on the pillow beside Perima’s head, “that I entirely trust that guy, Deicher.”

“Me neither,” she responded sleepily. “There’s something really creepy about him, you know?”

She turned over and he had to dodge out of the way to avoid being flattened. There was a long pause.

“But,” she continued softly, and this time Flip was fairly certain that she was talking in her sleep, “if Grand Master Fariam says we have to travel with him, I guess we have no choice.”

“Yes, but—” began Flip, then a very gentle snore blowing past his head told him that there was no point in continuing.

A few minutes ago, he’d been as sleepy as Perima. Food always did that to him, but now, paradoxically, he found himself wide awake. He tried lying there in the half-darkness with his eyes firmly closed, on the basis that if he pretended hard enough to be asleep he might trick himself into actually being so. It didn’t work; his mind was racing faster than ever. Sagandran had once told him that a good way to doze off was to imagine sheep jumping over a fence, and to count
them as they did so. Flip hadn’t tried this at the time and now he wished he had. He could have asked Sagandran for help with the problem he’d just discovered, which was that he’d never seen a sheep in his life. After a few moments spent deciding that it was probably an extremely bad idea to wake Perima and ask her, he compromised by trying to imagine what a sheep might look like.

The image that popped into his mind – all claws and tentacles and blood-stained fangs – was so terrifying that it made him sit bolt upright on the pillow, gasping with fear.

The assorted snores of his friends did nothing to drive the horrific picture away. Now he really was awake. He resolved to never fall asleep again.

Shano had left the door open a crack, and the vertical strip of yellow light from the corridor outside comforted Flip. As far as he could hear, the corridor was deserted. There were no footsteps and no rustling of wizardly robes, but at least the light promised the possibility of there being someone around to whom he could talk until his heart stopped trying to beat a passage out through his rib cage.

Taking care not to wake Perima –
as if I need to take much care, the way she sleeps!
– he crept across the pillow until he could eventually slither down the hanging side of the sheet to the floor. The door seemed a lot farther away from here than it had from the bed, for some reason, and the intervening distance was dark with the threat of unseen sheep waiting to pounce on him, but he squared his shoulders and set out across the boards.
All I’ve got to do is get to the door. After that I’ll be okay.

To his surprise, he found that he was. Peering through the gap between the door and the jamb, he saw the long, many-doored corridor down which Shano had led them to the dormitory. As his ears had told him, there seemed to be no one else around. His fears swiftly ebbed.

Well
, he thought as he squeezed himself through the space, which might have been too small if he’d had just one more hazelnut for his supper,
even if there’s no one around to gossip with, maybe I’ll be able to find some magical souvenir or other I can take back to impress the folks in Mishmash, to impress Jinnia!

Keeping to the wall, his claws clicking on the tiles, he trotted along the corridor until he came to another doorway. This time no one had been so considerate as to leave the door ajar. He pressed his ear to the panel, thinking that if the people within sounded friendly he could knock and ask to join them, but all he heard was silence.

Oh, well. Try another.

He must have gone past at least half a dozen other doors, all of them appearing to have empty rooms behind them, before he found another that was open.

There was a murmur of conversation from inside. Putting his head around
the edge of the jamb, Flip could see in the candlelight a number of figures dressed in robes of different colors huddled around a table. They seemed to be arguing, but at the same time deliberately keeping their voices low, as if they didn’t want anyone to overhear. He had the sense that a surprise visitor might not be welcomed with overwhelming gladness, and tiptoed on his way.

A little further along, he discovered another partly open doorway, and this time the room was empty, empty of people anyway, though in every other respect it was full. Above his head an enormous wrought-iron key protruded from the lock; it seemed twice the size of the doorknob. The room was large too, almost as large as the dormitory in which the companions had been put for the night. Every available storage space within was taken up by books and scrolls. Some were arranged in a semblance of order on the shelves that lined the walls or in the free-standing bookcases that occupied much of the floor space, while others were heaped in a haphazard higgle-piggle on the various desks and tables that occupied the rest of the room. The smell of old musty parchment and leather hung in the air.

Flip’s nose wrinkled.
Boring,
he thought.
Loads of old … what’s the word? Ah, yes, “grimoires.” Spell books. Loads of old spell books. Samzing would swallow his brains if he saw this lot.

But Flip crept into the library anyway.

There was an elaborately carved chair leg close to where he stood. As he looked up it, he could see that the chair was pulled up to one of the desks. A drawer hadn’t been properly shut. Flip told himself that he wasn’t a snoop by nature, it was just that as an Adventurer Extraordinaire, he had a perfectly understandable interest in everything that was going on, and sometimes, well, quite often, this involved a little bit of peeking and probing into places that people might not expect him to be peeking and probing into. He had a naturally inquiring mind, he concluded but, to repeat, he wasn’t a snoop. Not at all.

As quickly as he could, he shimmied up the chair leg and stuck his head into the open drawer.

Just junk
, he thought with a disappointed frown: a couple of quill pens with their points broken, a few bits of paper with lots of crossings-out on them, a pencil sharpener with its blade missing, a tangle of elastic bands that looked like they’d snap if you tried to use them, a crumpled wrapper with what presumably had once been the end of a candy bar inside it, but which now looked like something plucked out of a bank of moss, only more lethal. Flip shuddered.

He jumped up onto the lip of the drawer and heaved himself onto the desk. Picking his way carefully through a litter of papers, books and half-empty mugs, he saw that a space had been cleared in the center of the surface for a large, fat,
leatherbound book, which was opened to the middle. He glanced at the book without interest, then looked away before glancing back again.

Walking from one side to the other across one of the pages was a little furry creature, whispering to itself as it read. Its appearance was not unlike his own, except that it was smaller, quite a lot smaller. For the first time in a long while, Flip felt
brawny
. On the other hand, the thick, black-rimmed pair of spectacles that the creature was wearing could easily have fit Flip’s head, and might even have been too big for him.

“Um, hello,” he said.

The creature looked round at him and blinked. The oversized spectacles bobbled disconcertingly on its nose. Now that the face was turned to him, Flip could see that the glasses were fastened in place with a splodge of chewing gum.

“Oh, hello,” said the creature in an uninterested squeak. “Are you a familiar?”

“Familiar with what?”

“Not familiar
with
anything. A familiar. That’s what you call a creature owned by a wizard for the purpose of running errands and generally being a nuisance. Some of the wizards have owls” – the creature and Flip shuddered in shared revulsion, a bond of sympathy springing up between them immediately – “and others have a lizard or a rat.”

“Oh, that kind of, er, familiar,” said Flip with an air of omniscience that he wished were more convincing. “I thought you meant the other kind.”

The creature looked at him blankly, its eyes enormous through the thick glass of the spectacles.

Flip hurried on. “Yes, I’m a familiar, all right, and not just any familiar. I’m the Chief Familiar of Samzing the Great.”

His new acquaintance gave a sigh that sounded perilously close to a yawn. “They all call themselves ‘the Great,’ sometimes ‘the Mighty,’ or sometimes both. They do it to cover up their basic insecurities.”

“Yes, well,” Flip said, “my master,
my
master Samzing actually is great, you see. Not like all them imitations.”

The creature exuded dubiety. “Really powerful, is he?”

Flip rubbed his chin as if trying to think of a way of expressing in terms that mere mortals could understand, just how powerful Samzing was. “Let’s put it this way,” he said at last. “Samzing prefers to save his strength, you know what I mean?”

The little creature sniffed dismissively.

“He’s slow to anger,” added Flip desperately, “but when he does … when he
does
, well, his spells do things that no other wizard could get spells to do.”

The enormously magnified eyes began to cross in boredom.

“And he’s a nice guy,” Flip concluded.

At once, the creature’s distorted gaze was interested again. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“I, um—”

“They’re not all nice guys, you know. I suppose this Samzing of yours must be pretty nice to let you go running around on your own like you are. Some of the wizards around here you definitely wouldn’t trust with your sister. They’d have her turned into a newt or a puff of green smoke in no time. I’m lucky I don’t have sisters, but—”

Flip raised a paw to stem the flow. “My name’s Flip. What’s yours?”

The creature gave a don’t-you-know-anything? shrug. “I don’t have a name. I’m a memorizer, as you can see.”

“What’s a memorizer?”

The shrug was repeated. “I was selected by my master because of my prodigious memory. That’s ‘very big and remarkable memory’ to you,” he added as a condescending aside. “Everything I see I remember. More important, everything I read I remember. So he tells me what books he wants to read and I read them for him, then afterwards I tell him all the best bits. Saves him reading the whole book, you see.”

“Sort of the way library books tend to fall open at the—” began Flip, earning a stare of incomprehension before the memorizer continued its explanation.

“All of these grimoires – that’s—”

“Books of spells to me,” Flip supplied.

“Hm, not so dumb as you … never mind. All of these grimoires, you see, are packed with spells for doing just about anything you could imagine, but there’s a lot of repetition. If my master had to read the whole book, he’d be spending most of his time reading about spells he already knows. So, I just tell him the ones he doesn’t, and they’re getting fewer and fewer and harder and harder to find, I can tell you. He knows so much magic that he’s no longer just ‘the Great,’ or just ‘the Mighty,’ or even just ‘the Great and All-Fired Mighty,’ he’s—”

“I’m not interested in your master’s name,” said Flip, interrupting before he was drowned in the flood of words. “I’m more interested in yours. I’ve told you mine, but you’ve not told me what you’re called.”