The sound went on, and on, and on, and Luka covered his ears. All around them pandemonium had broken out in the Heart of Magic. Crowds were running in all directions, flying creatures were taking to the air, swimming things to the water, riders to their horses. It was a general mobilisation, Luka thought, and then in a flash he understood what the sound was. It was a call to arms.
The game just changed,
muchacho, Coyote trotted over to shout in Luka’s ear.
You need help now, big time. Aint nobody heard that noise round here in hunnerds of years. That’s the Big Noise. That’s the Fire Alarm
.
‘It must have been that Fire Bug who raised the Alarm,’ Luka realised at once, disgusted with himself for having forgotten about that little tale-telling flame, the World of Magic’s tiniest Security operative, but, it seemed, one of the most dangerous. ‘It was hovering by Captain Aag’s shoulder and then it disappeared. We didn’t pay attention to it, and now we’re paying the price for our carelessness.’
At long last the siren of the Fire Alarm died down, but the hysterical activity all around them became, if anything, even more frenzied. Soraya dragged Luka behind the rhododendron bushes. ‘When the Fire Alarm sounds it means two things,’ she said. ‘It means that the Aalim know that someone is trying to steal the Fire of Life. And it means that all the residents of the Heart of Magic are rendered capable of seeing intruders
until the All-Clear, which doesn’t sound until the thief is caught.’
‘You mean everyone can see me now?’ Luka said in horror. ‘And Bear and Dog as well?’ When they heard that, the dog and the bear ran and hid behind the rhododendrons as well. Soraya nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s only one course of action. You must abandon your plan, and climb aboard
Resham
, and I will fly as high as I can rise and as fast as I can ride and I will try to get you back to the Starting Point before they find you, because if they catch you they may Perminate all three of you on the spot, without asking for an explanation of your presence or giving a reason for their drastic measures. Or else they’ll put you on trial and Perminate you after that. The adventure is over, Luka Khalifa. It’s time to go home.’
Luka was silent for a long moment. Then he said simply, ‘No.’
Soraya smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘Backchat he’s giving me now. “No,” he says. Tell me your grand plan, hero boy. No, no! Let me guess! You’re going to take on all the gods and monsters of the Heart of Magic, with a dog, a bear and four dragons as the sum total of your attack force; and you’re going to steal what has never been stolen, what nobody has tried to steal for hundreds of years, and then you’re going to get home? How? I’m supposed to wait around and give you a ride, is that it? Well, by all means. Go right ahead. That masterly scheme sounds like it will definitely work.’
‘You’re almost right,’ Luka said. ‘But you forgot I’ll have Coyote’s decoy run helping me as well.’
Hold it
, chico, said Coyote, looking alarmed.
Hold it there one
minute. Didn I say the game jus changed? That offer aint no longer on the table.
‘Listen,’ said Luka. ‘What do thieves do when the Fire Alarm sounds?’
They run for their life. Aint nobody done it for hunnerds of years but that’s what they done then. Warnt no use. Even the old Titan back in the day, he got taken an tied to a rock and an old vulture started chewin –
‘Eagle,’ said Luka. ‘You said it was an eagle.’
’Pinions differ as to the species of bird. Aint no doubt about the chewin.
‘So,’ said Luka determinedly, ‘running isn’t any use, unless you run in an unexpected direction. And, now that the Fire Alarm has sounded, which is the one direction in which nobody will expect us to flee?’
Nobodaddy was the one who answered Luka’s question. ‘Towards the Fire of Life,’ he said. ‘Into the Heart of the Heart. Towards the danger. You’re right.’
‘Then,’ said Luka, ‘that’s the way we’re going.’
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.’