‘I’ve got to fuel up for my tennis match this afternoon. Anyway, what’s wrong with spotted dick and custard?’
‘All the dead flies in it!’
‘They’re raisins. A good source of concentrated—’
‘Anyway, look, I just wanted to ask what you think we should do. Shall we pretend not to know you?’
‘Yes,’ said Effie. ‘Good idea. You take charge and help the others work out what to do next. You need to find out everything you can about Albion Freake, don’t forget. I’m also worried about what’s happened to Laurel Wilde. And what’s Skylurian’s role in all this?’
‘All right,’ said Maximilian. ‘I’ll get digging. You see what you can find out from Terrence. Maybe he knows something about Skylurian that will be useful.’
‘I wish I hadn’t won this stupid prize,’ said Effie.
‘I know. But it’s only for two days.’
‘How am I going to go to the Otherworld now?’
‘Maybe at night?’ said Maximilian. ‘He’ll have to leave you on your own to sleep, presumably?’
‘Yes,’ said Effie. ‘I’ll go tonight.’
Of course, she still had to get her box back from her father. But at least she now had the book he so wanted. Surely he’d give it back to her now?
16
The Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange had one rickety school bus into which you could fit approximately twenty children before you started breaking the law. It was bright yellow, or had been once. Even going through the bus-wash in town, which it did annually, did not completely remove the decades’ worth of slogans that witty pupils had written onto its back with their fingers. ‘Clean me.’ ‘Also available in yellow.’ ‘No children left in this vehicle overnight.’
No one ever usually came to watch the NASTY league tennis matches, especially not the away fixtures. But this one sounded like it might get violent, and so the bus had been slowly filling up with the more bloodthirsty members of the school, who were always willing to travel if it meant a chance of seeing someone get badly injured. But just before the bus left, a rumour went around that suggested that all three hundred Blessed Bartolo pupils were going to be attending the match, and that their worst violence was usually directed at the visiting teams’ supporters. At that point, most of the children on the bus remembered their homework or a sick aunt and there was quite a crush as they scrambled to leave.
So in the end it was just Coach Bruce, the four members of the tennis team and a couple of reserves (the third reserve had run away with the supporters), along with Terrence Deer-Hart, who had remained by Effie’s side all day, and of course Lexy, Raven and Maximilian, who were still pretending not to know Effie but were working on strategies to help her and Wolf, or at least keep them safe. They sat together at the back.
The bus therefore seemed quite empty as it wound its way up through the Old Town, past the university, the Library of Folklore, the puppet museum, the piano repair shop, the Esoteric Emporium and all the strange delicatessens and coffee shops around the gated entrance to the Blessed Bartolo School grounds. As the bus bravely spluttered up the cobbled streets, Coach Bruce attempted a team talk. This was hard to follow, but seemed mainly to be about the ‘ethical grey areas’ surrounding the achievement of great glory.
‘Just to be clear,’ Coach Bruce said at the end of his talk. ‘There will be no drug tests after this match, as Dr Cloudburst is unfortunately ill. Do you hear me, children?’ He winked meaningfully. ‘NO DRUG TESTS TODAY.’
The children looked baffled, as they always did when Coach Bruce started talking about drugs. After all, not one child in the entire history of the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange had ever used performance-enhancing drugs. The odd bit of magic? Perhaps. But illegal substances? Definitely not. The concept of the desperate child athlete who would do anything to succeed only really existed in Coach Bruce’s imagination, where it had nevertheless taken a strong hold.
After Coach Bruce had finished talking, the children and Terrence Deer-Hart all clapped. This was not because they understood or agreed with anything he had said, but simply in order to make him feel better.
The Blessed Bartolo sports centre was nowhere near the main school building. The rickety old school bus climbed slowly out of the Old Town, wound its way through one of the less pleasant areas of Middle Town and then along a precarious cliff-road before winding back down to the remote car park at the end of a jetty, where the visiting teams were told to leave their school buses.
Blessed Bartolo pupils and staff travelled to their sports centre through a tunnel that had been used by smugglers for centuries but was now owned by the school. The tunnel was heated and lit, and had a mono-rail system that was extremely efficient and could get all three hundred pupils to the sports centre in less than half an hour. The mono-rail carriages were, apparently, lined with fur and ancient tapestries and each one had a mini-fridge filled with drinks and snacks to get the children in the mood for supporting their teams.
The car park at the end of the jetty was unlit, and had been constructed in a way that exposed it to the worst of the north wind and also, at high tide, to the occasional breaking wave. Visiting teams, if they survived the car park (they didn’t always, and Blessed Bartolo’s always claimed the victory), then had to walk down the narrow stone jetty to reach the visitors’ entrance to the vast, black-domed sports centre that loomed out of the sea like the hump of a mythical creature.
The meteors were still and quiet tonight. Instead, a fine mizzle coated the children, Coach Bruce and Terrence Deer-Hart as they shivered their way up the jetty. The stone path seemed to go on for ever, stretching into the dark and the cold and the wet. As the waves broke perilously close to the small party, Terrence wondered if he might die out here. If he did, he told himself, at least it would have been in the cause of true love. He tried to warm himself with thoughts of Skylurian Midzhar. He imagined her striding down here in her high heels without the weather or the sea bothering her in the slightest.
When they eventually reached the visitors’ entrance to the sports centre, the small party was drenched, freezing and on the verge of hypothermia. How relieved they were to see the grey metal door! Of course, as anyone familiar with away fixtures will be able to predict, they then discovered that the door was locked and there was no one to meet them. Coach Bruce started trying to page someone from the Blessed Bartolo sports staff, but seemed to have the wrong code. Eventually Maximilian got out his spectacles and Wolf helped him pick the lock when Coach Bruce wasn’t looking.
‘Here, sir,’ called Maximilian. ‘I think it’s open now.’
‘Is this definitely the way?’ asked Terrence Deer-Hart, peering in.
The door had opened with a creak to reveal a concrete passageway that seemed even colder and darker than the stone jetty. There was the sound of something dripping. Drip, drip, drip. There was an occasional unidentifiable screech. Maximilian had an old phone with a torch function, and Raven illuminated the end of her wonde. The metal door slam-crashed behind them as they made their way towards a metal staircase that led, at length, to the visitors’ changing rooms which were, of course, mouldy, damp and unheated. Still, at least they had arrived.
Luckily, Terrence Deer-Hart didn’t seem to want to follow Effie into the girls’ changing room. Effie was not a bad person, but she had sort of half hoped that he might die, or at least get lost somewhere along the way, or give up on her in the cold car park. But no, he now assured her that he was going to be in the front row taking notes through the tennis match. He wanted, he said, to know everything about her.
He had become extremely tiresome. Effie had expected him to ask her lots of annoying questions about her life, which he had done. But once he’d got bored of that he had begun moaning about his sales figures, his shortness, the fact that his parents never really loved him and his lack of success in what he called ‘the romance department’. Still, his ‘luck with the ladies’, he
had said meaningfully to Effie, was possibly about to change. Then he had winked at her in a peculiar way. And all that had just been over lunch.
So Effie was relieved to find herself alone at last in the changing room, putting on her tennis kit. Her team-mate Olivia had changed before getting on the bus, which meant she had frozen on the jetty but at least didn’t have to endure this changing room. Effie tried to block out the damp smell by trying to remember the strategies that they had decided on in yesterday’s team meeting. The big question in her mind was whether or not to wear the ring. Was it cheating if she did? Or was it ‘strategy’? Effie didn’t want to be a cheat.
On the other hand, she needed to generate some M-currency. She had no idea where hers had gone, but it was very, very low. If she played tennis wearing the ring, she’d be able to convert the energy she expended into M-currency. If she and her friends were going to have any chance of defeating Albion Freake, she’d need M-currency. And she was planning to go to the Otherworld later, which also used M-currency.
Effie also suspected that the match with Blessed Bartolo’s was not going to be straightforward. Coach Bruce had told her to wear the ring for ‘psychological reasons’. Still, it didn’t feel right. In the end, Effie decided to keep the ring on until the warm-up was over, but not wear it for any competitive points. After the warm-up, it could go in her tennis bag, where she could keep an eye on it.
When Effie walked out of the changing room and into the sports centre, she was immediately taken aback by the amount of noise. The place was completely full. Effie couldn’t see any of her friends, or Coach Bruce. Even the sight of Terrence Deer-Hart might have been mildly comforting. Instead, all Effie could see was a mass of black virgin wool, cashmere and silk, and the cruel, angular faces of the Blessed Bartolo student body.
A man strode over to Effie. He looked sort of familiar, although he was wearing the uniform of the Blessed Bartolo’s sports faculty. This was a precisely tailored black silk tracksuit with lime green felt trim. This one was completed with a baseball cap with the word UMPIRE on it. He was carrying a plastic tub.
‘Well, hand it over,’ said the man. He even sounded familiar.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Effie.
‘Don’t start all that again,’ said the umpire. ‘Give me the ring. You can’t play with it on. We both know that would be cheating.’
Effie realised that the person under the large black cap was Dr Green. She hadn’t known that he taught at Blessed Bartolo’s. Was he one of their PE teachers? It seemed unlikely. He wasn’t exactly the most athletic man she’d ever seen. How had he become their tennis umpire? But none of that mattered. She was stuck. There was no way she could not hand over her ring if the umpire was asking for it. If she did, she’d be dropped from the tennis team and probably expelled from school as well.
‘Get on with it, girl,’ growled Dr Green.
The spectators close to Effie had quietened. They’d realised that a confrontation was going on between their teacher and this small Tusitala girl – the one who was supposed to be such a great tennis player. Blessed Bartolo children loved any kind of confrontation, violent or not. The ones nearest to Effie and Dr Green leaned closer. This wasn’t just so they could hear better, but because many of them were tricksters able to draw energy out of troubling situations.
A few rows up sat Leander and his friend Gregory. Gregory was currently topping up his own M-currency by eating small dried pieces of animal heart. His mother had just had a new box sent from Brain & Son’s Cured Meat & Pickles in the north-west corner of the Old Town. The dried hearts were extremely expensive, due to their complex (and rather disgusting) production methods. Elsewhere in the tennis centre other Blessed Bartolo children were eating candied snakes’ eyes, dragons’-blood cakes and ‘lucky’ rabbits’ ears.
Leander got up and walked down the few steps to where Dr Green and Effie were standing. He seemed to be moving extremely fast, while around him everything had slowed to an almost complete halt. Effie felt light-headed for a moment. It was as if the world in front of her had split into two different time streams.
‘I’ll look after that, sir,’ Leander said to Dr Green. He glanced at Effie with an expression that was neither friendly nor hostile, but his eyes intensified ever so slightly when they caught hers. Then a sort of invisible fog briefly came down over the three of them. When it lifted, Leander had taken the ring, and Dr Green seemed to have suffered some kind of amnesia.
‘What are you standing there for, girl?’ he asked Effie. ‘Hurry along. Let’s get this match under way. You’re on Court One, I believe.’
Effie looked up at Leander. Had he just stolen her ring, or rescued it from Dr Green? He’d used magic – but what sort of magic had it been? But she didn’t have time to find out.
‘What are you doing?’ said Wolf, coming over. ‘They’ve already cheated and won the toss. They’re serving.’
‘What about the warm-up?’ said Effie.
‘Apparently we’ve forfeited the chance for a warm-up because you’re late.’
‘But I’m not!’
‘Officially, you are.’
‘By thirty seconds! And that’s because . . .’
One of Effie and Wolf’s opponents walked over.
‘Hello, I’m Tabitha,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother telling me your names. I don’t care what they are. I’ve come to tell you that unless you’re ready to begin immediately we’re going to claim the first set.’
Tabitha’s voice was like fine crystal, but her eyes were as deep and dark as bottomless pits. Her tennis outfit was a 1920s-style tennis dress made – like almost everything else here – of black silk. Her black visor had the words TENNIS TEAM spelled out in what appeared to be diamonds. There were clearly no rules against wearing jewellery to play sports at Blessed Bartolo’s. Tabitha was wearing several strings of pearls around her neck and a pair of antique diamond drop earrings.
Effie and Wolf hurried into position. The surface of the Blessed Bartolo tennis centre was like nothing Effie had ever played on. It was not hard greeny-grey acrylic like the courts at her school, or concrete, like many of the other schools’ outdoor courts. It was shiny, soft and bright green. It looked bizarrely like a luxury carpet that had recently been mown and heavy-rollered. Which, as it happens, was exactly what it was. Some indoor tennis centres did have ‘carpet’ as a surface. But none had carpet quite like this. Needless to say, it played extremely fast.
The first four serves, from Tabitha’s partner Barnaby, were aces. Effie didn’t even see the ones headed for her. She and Wolf looked at each other as they changed ends. They had never even lost a game before in all their tennis matches. Normally Wolf served first, because his serve was the strongest part of his game. But his right arm had inexplicably gone numb, so Effie offered to go first instead.
Unfortunately, as soon as she threw the ball up above her head, Effie went temporarily blind. She swung her racket down onto air. The ball dropped at her feet. The Blessed Bartolo children all laughed.
Magic. It had to be. Effie blinked a couple of times. Nothing. She could still see absolutely nothing but darkness. This was ridiculous.
‘Time warning,’ said Dr Green from his umpire’s chair.
‘I’m just . . . it’s just . . .’ said Effie.
Maximilian’s voice came into her head.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked, telepathically.
‘I’m blind,’ said Effie with her mind. ‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Don’t let them see you’re upset,’ said Maximilian. ‘Don’t panic. OK, I just have to think. Who can blind with their magic? Hang on. I’m going to ask Raven. She’s saying she’s read a book and . . .’ Maximilian’s voice left and then returned. ‘Right. It’s something a mage can do, apparently. But mages don’t use spells. They can only use their minds to change things. So that means someone in here is using their mind to convince your mind that you can’t see. You have to believe more strongly that you can.’
‘Time penalty,’ said Dr Green. ‘Love fifteen.’
Effie tried hard to repel the magic attack happening in her mind. But she didn’t know how to go about it, and everything was more difficult without her ring. But she needed to be quick, or . . .
‘Love thirty,’ said Dr Green. ‘Another time penalty and you’ll forfeit the game, and then the set. Are you injured, Miss Truelove?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Effie. Maximilian was right, she shouldn’t let anyone see how much this was frightening her. ‘Sorry.’
Wolf came over. Effie didn’t realise this until his voice was right by her ear.
‘What’s happening?’ he said.
‘Some mage has got into my mind and affected my sight. They must have done the same with your arm. We’ve got to repel them, but I don’t know how.’
‘Use your M-currency,’ said Wolf.
‘I don’t know how to,’ said Effie. ‘I don’t even know what magic a true hero can do. And I’ve lost my ring. The only possible thing I can think of is . . .’
‘Game forfeited,’ said Dr Green.
‘What?’ said Wolf. ‘What can you do?’
‘If I had . . . There was this thing. This boy stole my ring, but he has this staff, a caduceus.’ Effie searched for Maximilian in her mind. He was there, quietly, observing. ‘Go into my memories,’ she said to him. ‘You’ll see what I mean. Find Leander and get his caduceus for me. He’s stolen my ring, after all, so it’s quite fair. Maybe he’ll even give me my ring, back if we can take something of his.’
‘OK,’ said Maximilian back. ‘I understand. We’re on it.’
‘How’s your arm?’ said Effie to Wolf.
‘Not great. I’m going to play this game left-handed. Look, I’ll get you in position for each point until your sight comes back. We can’t let them see that they’re upsetting us.’
‘I agree,’ said Effie. ‘We have to act strong, even if we don’t feel it.’
Tabitha served to Effie who still couldn’t see a thing. If she had been able to see she would have realised that the serve was almost unplayable anyway. It was a fast, wide kick serve that hit the dividing curtain before any normal person would have time to hit it. In order to properly receive such a serve you’d have to be standing on the edge of Court Three. And there would have to be no curtains dividing the courts.