“What’s that, you say?” she called, surprised - but not outwardly irritated - at the boy’s interruption. Prior to that, she had still been musing upon the technological differences between her world and his, and had gotten round to arguing with herself as to why Niamagonic machinery was still perfectly capable of functioning even when translated into Benjamin’s realm (from what little the boy heard, it was probably something to do with ‘para-dime bubbles’ - whatever they were!)
“I said we’re getting close.” He briefly held the emberquick up, so that she’d know what he was talking about. “The song. The noise. It seems like we’re getting nearer.”
Lilac brought a hand to her brow, shading her eyes. “Hm,” she said, peering ahead. “I can’t see anything unusual. Do you want me to stay on course?”
“Yeah.”
“Straight ahead then, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“How long, do you think?”
“What - to get there?”
“Yes.”
“Um - dunno. Not long, though.”
It wasn’t as precise an answer as Benjamin would have liked to have given, but Lilac made no complaints. With a jaunty “Okay!” she took the boy at his word and spoke no more. For a while the journey continued peacefully, with Lilac singing softly to herself and Benjamin just about learning to relax, until it was broken by a sizzling, white-hot rocket which whizzed by and missed them so narrowly that the boy was sure he felt the heat of it being conducted by the frame of the tandem. It was only by virtue of being startled out of his senses that he did not release his grip upon the peg that served as his handhold, fearing - as he did in that terrifying, incandescent moment - that it was about to become hot enough to melt his fingers to the metal.
“You fleg!” Lilac yelled, and for one dismaying instant Benjamin thought she was referring to him. As it turned out, her ire - exemplified by a shaking fist as well as the shouts - was directed elsewhere: to a red-brick tenement, located about thirty metres to the right, and more particularly, to a very short man who seemed to be waving gleefully from one of the uppermost balconies. Tellingly, this very short man was standing next to what appeared to be a small array of tubes, all of which were set at angle, like an arrangement of mortars. Even more tellingly, one of the tubes was smoking.
“I’ll have you for this,” Lilac shouted. “That’s three I owe you now - three!”
The little man - who, from what Benjamin could discern, was wearing an old-fashioned flying helmet, complete with goggles, and a suit comprised entirely of straps and buckles - made a peculiar gesture, as though he was manipulating an invisible sock puppet. He then ducked out of sight, and re-emerged a second later as a shower of sparks fountained up from behind the row of tubes. It was obvious what was about to happen - and Lilac Zhenrei didn’t flinch in stating it: “He getting another,” she cried, calling down to the boy. “Pedal - now! As fast as you can.”
A second rocket whooshed by, this time to the rear. Though it wasn’t as close as the first, it burst with such a crack that Benjamin’s ears were left numb. Not just his ears, either; the shock seemed to thunder throughout his body, and for a terrible, deadening instant, he thought his hold on the emberquick had been lost. It required only a glance to see otherwise - to see that the crystal was still tight, and safe, in his grasp. Greater relief came when, turning back, he saw the little man toddle sheepishly inside as two other atulphi closed in upon the balcony. One was riding a pair of flapping, mechanical wings, the other jogging upon a rotating barrel in the style of a log-runner; and if they were not coughing, or waving away clods of smoke, then they were making free with curses potent enough to transcend language.
“Ha - haaa!” cried Lilac, whose fist, once threatening, was now held aloft in triumph. “He overshot! Did you see that? Poor, foolish Wolfgang - he’s brought a gullybag of trouble on himself, and I didn’t need to do anything. Ha - haa!”
Wolfgang? Benjamin thought. Would that be the same Wolfgang who - and then he saw the plump, iron-crested dirigible at rest on the top of the tenement, the same dirigible that had tried to roller-coaster over them when they had been coming in to land on the pier. “So what was that all about?” the boy asked, his heart pounding so hard that it seemed to punctuate his words with tiny hiccups. “Why the hell was he -”
“Oh, he wasn’t trying to kill us,” said Lilac, in the same matter-of-fact tone as used by dog owners when excusing their pet’s viciousness on the grounds that he was ‘just playing’. “No, no, no - that was never part of the deal.”
“Deal?”
“Yep. A pact. A bargain. Wolfgang and I - well, we were bored, so we thought we’d, uh, make a pledge to liven each other’s lives up. This was before the phragodols became such a problem, back in the days when silf-hunting was a much duller business.”
It was insane, but reasonable enough considering it was also just the sort of caper he could see Lilac getting herself involved in. “So you decided to play, what, tricks on each other?”
“Well, not tricks as such; not always. We wanted scares, mostly - harmless ones, that is.”
“And what happened just now was part of this deal.”
“It was.”
“A harmless scare.”
“Are you harmed? Am I?”
“So you and Wolfgang are friends, really.”
“I’d say so.”
“But I don't get it - if the phragodols are around now, and you and Wolfgang are mates...then why don't you stop?”
“Oh, I’ve tried. Trust me. But the fleg always thinks I’m figuring to steal in with a secret.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Um - pull the wool over his eyes. A fast one. You know.”
“But that’s just stupid.”
“Isn’t it! And before you ask, boy - no, he’s never made the same offer to me either. And even if he did, I wouldn’t take him up on it. Which makes me no better, I know, but that’s the way the wayfarer has chosen, and no way but that way can lead him astray. Which means -”
“You’ve sort of made your bed, and you have to lie in it.”
“Indeed.”
It’s just too daft, the boy thought, somehow both amused and disconcerted by the idea that Lilac hadn’t had the sense to include a get-out clause in the arrangement. And it was patently clear that no such arrangement existed, otherwise the subject wouldn’t have cropped up in the first place: Lilac and her companion would have drifted on by, and Wolfgang at the balcony wouldn’t have thrown them anything except, perhaps, a cheery wave. “So why didn’t you or Wolfgang agree upon, you know, a code-word or something, that you could use when you wanted to finish the game?” he asked, unwilling to believe that she could be quite so foolhardy as to make a deal without knowing how to end it.
“Put it like this,” she said. “I’ll never again imbibe more soakly-wen than is good for me.”
“So you were drunk,” said the boy, finding a moment amid his anxieties to be impressed by how blithely grown-up he had sounded on the matter.
“Something like that, yes.”
At which Benjamin, who had once sneaked a taste of Pete’s beer and found it weird and bitter, decided that he would remain teetotal for the rest of his life - though what the rest of his life would amount to up here, where his only defence against the dangers of the drop below (not to mention the belligerence of rocket-bearing midgets) came in the shape of so crazily reckless a dream-creature as Lilac, was not something he really wanted to contemplate.
***
But the boy soon calmed when he brought the emberquick back to his attentions and realised that they were ready to begin their descent. They had reached an area where the metropolitan cram of towers, walkways and overstuffed streets was beginning to give way to a more leisurely expanse of suburbs, and it was to there - or more particularly, to a certain point within that sprawl of smaller, though no less outlandish, structures - that the crystal indicated they should go. He called up to Lilac,
told her of what adjustments she should make in their course, and asked if there was anything of note in the area of their apparent destination. The lady shook her head. “It’s just part of the conurbs,” she said. “Houses, some big, most small, nothing grand. Nothing special, either. You sure that’s where we have to go?”
Just to be certain, the boy rechecked, holding the emberquick before his gaze and recalling his dream of fireworks (which this time came coupled with the strangely disturbing idea that it may well have been one of Wolfgang’s rockets, exploding in the distance, that had spurred this mad little quest in the first place) as he aligned the crystal to the spot where its music seemed most lucid. To be doubly certain, he tapped the emberquick against the tandem’s central stem, so as to ensure that its glow - and, by implication, its power - would be at its fullest, and checked once more: “Yes,” he replied, pointing. “It’s there. We’re dead on course. No two ways about it.”
Lilac shrugged. “So its not leading us that way,” she said, indicating a stack of Arabic domes that lay some miles rightward. “Or there,” she continued, referring to an isolated, many-tiered tower, situated even further away than the domes, that loomed over the urban landscape like an imperial citadel.
“Don't think so,” said Benjamin.
“Oh well.”
The mystery, then, would not be solved until they were right on top of it - or even inside it, if Benjamin was right in supposing that the answer was probably within one of those houses below. But with no clue forthcoming, he reserved his speculations for other issues, primary amongst which was the fact that he was seeing snow here, even on so warm and sunny a day as this. By Niamagonic standards, it was probably nothing unusual ... except that this snow had somehow contrived to fall only upon the trees and bushes, leaving the roads and buildings completely untouched.
15
Winter, as it transpired, had not come to these summery suburbs, and the whiteness of the trees, bushes, lawns and gardens was not due to snow. Instead, it was the flora itself that was white: every leaf, every flower and - now that he was low enough to see it - every branch and twig in between; all completely colourless, with no single stalk being creamier than the other, nor a single tree-trunk appearing icier than the rest. The cascading plants at Lilac’s flat had, he remembered, been similarly monochrome, and he devised an idea that maybe everything that grew in the soil of this land was bleached. But if he should be amazed or appalled by this, he couldn’t decide. Like so much of what was at large here, it was just too strange to be settled by an easy opinion.
It was not his most pressing concern at the moment, in any case; that honour was reserved for the emberquick, and more precisely, what it was that it was leading him to. And there was no doubt about it now, either; in one particular house in one particular street (for the emberquick refused to sing tunefully if focussed anywhere else) there lay the reason for this mysterious connection between the crystal and his first great dream. What he expected to find there, he didn’t know - and neither did Lilac. “Puzzles fall here like rain does in London,” she had said, by way of comment. “And given the choice, I’d take the puzzles; more tolerable, more refreshing, even if they should be a bit more prone to leave you scratching your head.”
The house in question was detached and small, and lay amid a length of equally detached dwellings that were as unique as one to the other as were the towering complexes of the city proper. Though each was surrounded by a comparable amount of garden, the houses themselves could be any shape, any style, and any colour whatsoever. There was, for example, a dwelling not unlike a squat stepped pyramid; and beside it, a tiny palace whose pink columns and elaborate cornicing made it appear more like an oversize wedding-cake. Opposite this there stood an ugly, fungal-looking thing that exhibited more doors than seemed necessary; and next to that, a circular, cornerless abode topped with a bristling crown of chimney stacks. The house that Benjamin was concerned with appeared to be a flinty, bulging cottage with a roof so bowed that it looked almost a cartoon of itself. Its garden was wildly overgrown, a white tangle of frosty fronds, gossamer strands and trees that loomed like avalanches waiting to happen; it was even worse at the back, where the untended shrubbery had merged into a giant, impenetrable mass that completely obscured the rearward part of building. Initially, though, it had seemed cosy enough; a charming, if scruffy, portrait of the kind one might find on a seasonal stamp. A while or so later, the boy found cause to think differently when he was close enough to see that the house was very probably deserted.
Without the provision of pavements, Lilac gently brought the tandem down to a spot on the cobbled roadway just outside the front gate. “So this is it, eh?” she said, as the boy unstrapped himself from the saddle. “It is,” he responded, without bothering to check with the emberquick. Glad to be on the ground at last, he as good as jumped from the vehicle, all thoughts about the house and its secret temporarily forgotten as he basked in the brief delight of a safe touchdown. Lilac descended more soberly, taking each peg one by one, and not flinching at all when the tandem gave its customary lurch. Checking the locale, Benjamin noticed a small group of outsize rabbits loitering at the far end of the street. Recalling the lady’s disdain for these ‘hurrix’ things, he half-expected to see her scowl when she caught sight of them; but there was only a flick of a glance, made as she stepped off the last peg, and an assurance - which may or may not have had anything to do with the matter - that their ride was safely locked, and thus not liable to be stolen.
(Another thing he noticed, regarding the rabbits: he actually started a little when he saw them, as if shocked by their appearance - which was palpably odd, considering it was not the first time he’d seen such creatures. And compared with some of the other Niamagonians he had encountered, they weren’t all that outlandish either; which made his reaction even more unfathomable.)
“What do you reckon, then?” he asked, after joining Lilac at the gate and taking a moment to silently appraise the place.
The lady shrugged, then shook her head. “Unsure,” she muttered, the fingers of her right hand drumming lightly against the gatepost. “I’d vouch for it being empty, but beyond that - well, who knows. Tell you what -” she vaulted over the gate, the action so fast and unexpected that Benjamin didn’t have time to believe what he was seeing until she was on the other side “- let’s go and find out, eh?”
“Um -” he pointed to the house, but kept his eyes on his companion “- we’re not trespassing, are we?”
“No-one to trespass against,” she said, as she turned and began to wade across the unkempt foliage. “Come on. No need to be shy.”
Stealing a look at the gang of hurrixes, and finding, thankfully, that they didn’t appear at all interested in what he and Lilac were up to, the boy cautiously followed. Preferring to simply open the gate rather than vault it (it was so rickety, he doubted it would survive another attempt), he traversed the garden by means of a short, brick pathway that was now mostly lost to albino undergrowth, and caught up with Lilac at the gashed, greying row of planks that served as the front door. There was no letterbox, nor keyhole; only a small, cracked pane through which the lady peered like an impatient visitor. “Can’t see much,” she mumbled, her hands cupping each side of her face like blinkers. She then stepped back, perused the frontage for a second or two, and went over to the nearest of the four shuttered windows that were set into a bay at the left hand side of the house. “Hmmm,” she murmured, peeking between the array of slats that comprised her chosen shutter. “You know, I think we’re going to have to go in. Can’t see anything from out here.”
“Are you sure there’s no-one inside?” asked Benjamin, taking a quick look round to ensure that they were not attracting the attention of the locals. Fortunately, he didn’t spy any twitching curtains in the places opposite, nor a nosey neighbour in any of the gardens. But that didn’t mean that he and Lilac had gone unnoticed.
“Absolutely,” came the reply. “And if I’
m wrong -” she suddenly began to tear at the shutter, pulling the slats away in fistfuls of dry, flaky shards “- then I expect we’ll know about it very soon.”
Benjamin, feeling a lot like a little brother who has gotten himself involved in one of his elder sibling’s escapades, could only watch, gobsmacked, as Lilac sprang up on to the window ledge and then proceeded to throw first her satchel, then herself, through what remained of the shutter. Once she was inside, he heard her shuffle about for a moment, after which she issued some appreciative noises, and a remark that the place was ‘interesting’. “I think we had a scholar here,” she said, before exhorting her companion to join her with another call of “come on!”
Doing his best to ignore the nagging thought that just because Niamago had no government, it didn’t necessarily follow that it had no police force either, Benjamin complied; he ambled over to the window, checked to see if there was any broken glass about, and when he was satisfied that the only injuries he was likely to sustain would be those incurred by splinters, climbed his way in. He was not as nimble in this task as Lilac, hampered as he was by the care he had to take in not snagging his dressing gown; once he was certain that the greater portion of his body had made it through the gap, he didn’t so much jump, as plop down on to the floor within. Ordinarily, he would have been embarrassed at so clumsy an attempt, as it was a matter of pride that he could usually clamber with some finesse. Right now, however, he was simply not bothered by it.