Soraya was bemused, and even Nobodaddy looked perplexed. “What on earth are you doing, you foolish beasts?” demanded the Insultana of Ott.
Bear, the dog, struggled upright, out of breath on account of having laughed so hard. “But look,” he cried, “it’s Fifi, that’s all it is. It’s only a great big supersized Fifi, after all this fuss.”
“What are you talking about?” Soraya asked. “There’s no woman out there!”
“Fifi,” giggled Dog, the bear. “The Famous Incredible Fire Illusion of Grandmaster Flame. F-I-F-I, Fifi! That was our name for it in the circus. So Captain Aag is behind all this! We should have known.”
“You know the Grandmaster?” Soraya actually gasped.
“Grandmaster, bah!” answered Bear, the dog. “He was a phony in the Real World, and he’s still a phony here. These fantastic defenses you’re so afraid of, they’re no defenses at all.”
“Fifi is an illusion,” explained Dog, the bear. “Smoke and mirrors! She’s a magic trick. She isn’t really there at all.”
“We’ll show you,” said Bear, the dog. “We know how she works. Put us ashore, and we’ll put a stop to this silliness once and for all.”
Nobodaddy held up a warning hand. “Are you sure,” he asked, “that the Captain Aag of your circus days is the same as the Grandmaster Flame of the Magic World? How can you be certain that these Great Rings of Fire aren’t the real thing, even if the circus illusion was a fake?”
“Look up there,” Luka said sharply. “Where did they appear from?”
Circling in the sky above their heads, horribly illuminated by the giant flames, were seven vultures wearing ruffs around their necks, like European noblemen in old paintings, and also like circus clowns.
That set Bear, the dog, and Dog, the bear, off again. “Ha! Ha!” Dog, the bear, laughed, jumping off the Argo onto the shore. “Old Aag’s beaky buddies just spoiled his trick by flying through it!”
“Ha! Ha!” agreed Bear, the dog. “Watch this, everyone!”
Whereupon they both ran directly at the Great Rings of Fire, and disappeared into the blaze.
Soraya shrieked, and Luka covered his mouth with his hands; and then in a flash the Rings vanished, the light changed, Bear and Dog came running back, the counter in the top right-hand corner of Luka’s field of vision dinged up to 7, and the Heart of Magic lay revealed, lit up by the Dawn of Days.
The Heart of Magic—and also Captain Aag, astride a fire-breathing dragon.
CHAPTER SIX
Into the Heart of Magic
IS THIS AN ILLUSION, TOO?” Luka boldly asked Captain Aag. “Is this another of your pesky magic tricks?” Captain Aag gave what might have been intended as a laugh but came out as a sort of snarl. “Security,” he said, “is not an Illusion. Security is the Foundation of any World. Alas! Those of us who labor in the field of Security are often misunderstood, regularly abused, and frequently ignored by those whose safety and values we protect, and yet we struggle on. The Maintenance of Security, young feller-me-lad, is a Thankless Task, I’ll have you know; and yet Security must be Maintained. No, Security is not a Deception. It is a Burden, and it has fallen upon me. Fortunately, I do not work alone; and a loyal Fire Bug”—here Luka saw the little telltale flame hovering at Aag’s shoulder—“who makes haste, overcoming all obstacles and distractions, to bring me word that thieves are on their way, a heroic Fire Bug such as we have here, such a Bug is not the creation of flimflam or prestidigitation. Such a Bug is Virtue’s Child. Nor is the murderous and terrifying Dragon Nuthog the product of any conjuring trick—as you will soon discover.”
He was a man of hair and anger, this Aag, whose henna-tinted locks stood out from his head like wrathful orange serpents; a man, too, of chin hair, whose russet beard stuck out in all directions like the rays of an ill-tempered sun; a man of eyebrows, quarrelsome scarlet bushes which curled upward and outward above a pair of glaring black eyes; and a man also of ear hair, long, stiff, crimson strands of ear hair, that corkscrewed outward from both those fleshy organs of hearing. Bloodred hair sprouted up from Aag’s shirt at the collar and out from his pirate’s greatcoat at the cuffs, and Luka imagined the Captain’s entire body covered in a luxuriant growth, as if that body were a farm and hair its only crop. Soraya, also a flame-haired person, whispered in Luka’s right ear that this Grandmaster’s bushy excessivity of hair might give all redheads a bad name.
The hair was Aag’s anger made visible. Luka could see that from the way it waved around, shaking itself in his direction as if it were a fist. Why was he so angry? Well, there was the little matter of the destruction of his circus by Luka’s curse, that much was obvious; but, in the first place, that circus was now revealed to be a side issue, merely the minor Real World plaything of the Gatekeeper of the Heart of Magic, and, in the second place, that hair had been growing for a long, long time, so Captain Aag had plainly been furious all his life, or, if he was by some chance immortal, then he must have been angry since the beginnings of Time.
“His original name was Menetius,” Nobodaddy whispered into Luka’s left ear, “and he was once the Titan of Rage, until the King of the Gods lost patience with his crosspatchery, killed him with a thunderbolt, and hurled him into the underworld. Eventually he was allowed to return to this lowly job—he’s no more than a doorman now—so here he is, in a worse mood than ever, I’m sorry to say.”
The seven vultures had arranged themselves in the air above Aag and the dragon, like guests at a banquet, waiting for a feast. Aag, however, was for a moment in a playful mood. “In other places, such as the Real World,” he said from the dragon’s back, almost as if he were speaking to himself, looking off into the distance and adopting a thoughtful expression, “such terrible creatures as one might encounter—the Yeti, the Bigfoot, the Unbearably Unpleasant Child—are what I like to call monsters in space. There they are, but that’s all they are, unchangeable, therefore always the same. Whereas here, where you have no business to be, and where you will very shortly be no more, our monsters can be monsters in time as well; that is to say, they can be one monster after another. Nuthog, here, is actually called Jaldibadal, and she’s a Magical Chameleon: quite the quick-change artist is old Jaldi when she wants to be, but she’s a lazy good-for-nothing creature a lot of the time. Show them, Nuthog, why don’t you? There’s no real rush to cook them in dragon-fire, after all. The vultures can wait for their lunch.”
Nuthog, the dragon—or, more properly, Jaldibadal the Changer—gave what sounded very like a tired, serpentine sigh and then mutated, with what looked very like a monstrous unwillingness, into, first, a giant metallic sow, and then, one after the other, a huge, shaggy woman-beast with the tail of a scorpion, a Monstrous Carbuncle (a mirrored creature with a diamond shining out of its head), and an immense mother-tortoise, and finally, with what felt very like a sullen resignation, back into a dragon again. “Congratulations, Nuthog,” said Captain Aag sarcastically, and his black eyes glittered with anger and his bushy beard flared out around his face like the red flame of an evil match. “An excellent show. And now, O indolent beast, get on with it and fry these thieves alive, before I lose my temper.”
“If my sisters were here beside me, to release me from your spell,” Nuthog spat back, in a voice of considerable sweetness, and in surprising rhyme, “you wouldn’t speak so bravely, and we’d send you back to Hell.”
“Who are her sisters? Where are they?” Luka hissed at Nobodaddy; but then Nuthog blasted the Argo, and all the world was flame. “It’s odd, this business of losing a life,” Luka thought. “You ought to feel something, but you don’t.” Then he noticed that the counter in the top left-hand corner of his field of vision had gone down by fifty lives. “I’d better think fast,” he realized, “or I’ll run out of chances right here.” He had re-formed in the same place as before, and so had Bear and Dog. The residents of the World of Magic were unharmed, though Soraya was complaining loudly. “If I wanted to be sunburned,” she said, “I
would go and sit in the sun. Point that flamethrower, please, in some other direction.”
Nobodaddy was examining his Panama hat, which looked very slightly scorched. “That’s not right,” he grumbled. “I like this hat.” BLLLAAARRRTTT! Another blast of dragon-fire, another fifty lives lost. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Soraya cried. “Don’t you know that flying carpets are made of delicate stuff?” The Elephant Birds were also extremely upset. “Memory is a fragile flower,” complained the Elephant Drake. “It doesn’t respond well to heat.”
Things were rapidly arriving at crisis point. “Nuthog’s sisters,” murmured Nobodaddy, “were imprisoned by the Aalim in blocks of ice, over that way in the Ice Country of Sniffelheim, so that Nuthog would obey Aag’s orders.” BLLLAAARRRTTT! “That’s one hundred and fifty lives gone in no time at all, just four hundred and sixty-five left,” Luka thought as he came back together; and when he looked around him this time, Soraya and the Flying Carpet had vanished altogether. “She has abandoned us,” he thought. “Which means we’re done for.”
Just then Dog, the bear, asked Jaldibadal a question. “Are you happy?” he demanded, and the monster looked surprised.
“What sort of question is that?” Nuthog asked in return, forgetting to rhyme in her confusion. “I’m in the process of burning you to death, and this is the thing you want to ask me? What’s it to you? Suppose I was happy; would you be happy for me? And if I was not happy, would you sympathize?”
“For example,” persisted Dog, the bear, “are you getting enough to eat? Because I can see your ribs sticking out through your scales.”
“Those aren’t my ribs,” answered Nuthog, looking shifty. “Those are probably the skeletons of the last people I gobbled down.”
“I knew it,” said Dog, the bear. “He’s starving you, just as he underfed the animals in the circus. A bony dragon is an even sadder sight than a skinny elephant.”
“Why are you wasting time?” Captain Aag roared from Nuthog’s back. “Get on with it and finish them off.”
“We rebelled against him back in the Real World,” said Bear, the dog, “and he couldn’t do a thing about it, and that was the end of him in that place.”
“Cook them!” shouted Captain Aag. “Grill them, roast them, blast them, toast them! Bear sausages for dinner! Dog chops! Boy cheeks! Cook them and let’s eat!”
“It’s my sisters,” Nuthog told Bear, the dog, mournfully. “As long as they are imprisoned I have no choice but to do as he says.”
“You always have a choice,” said Dog, the bear.
“Also,” said a voice from the sky, “were these perhaps the sisters you were looking for?”
Everyone aboard the Argo looked up; and there, high above them, was Queen Soraya of Ott, on King Solomon’s Magic Carpet, Resham, which had grown large enough to carry three enormous, shivering monsters, just released from their prison of ice, too cold to fly, too unwell to metamorphose, but alive, and free.
“Bahut-Sara! Badlo-Badlo! Gyara-Jinn!” shouted Nuthog joyfully. The three rescued Changers uttered weak, but happy, moans in reply. Captain Aag had begun to look distinctly panicky on Nuthog’s back. “L-Let’s all stay calm now,” he said, stammering a little. “Let’s all remember that I was only following orders, that it was the Aalim, the Guardians of the Fire, who put the three excellent ladies here on ice, and instructed me to work with you, Nuthog, to guard the Gate to the Heart. Let’s understand, too, that Security is a hard taskmaster, who requires some tough decisions, and that in consequence it can happen that some innocents suffer for the sake of the greater good. Nuthog, you can understand that, can’t you?”
“Only my friends can call me Nuthog,” said Nuthog, and with a smooth little wiggle she flipped Captain Aag off her back. He landed with a bump right under her smoking nose. “And you’re no friend of mine,” Nuthog added, “so the name is Jaldibadal. And I’m sorry to tell you that, no, I don’t understand.”
Captain Aag stood up to face his fate. He looked like a very wretched pirate indeed, all hair and no fire. “Any last words?” inquired Jaldibadal sweetly. Captain Aag shook his fist at her. “I’ll be back!” he roared.
Jaldibadal shook her scaly head. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid you won’t.” Then she unleashed an immense flame that wrapped itself around Captain Aag, and when the flame died away, there was no more Captain, just a small pile of angry-looking ash.
“Actually, of course,” she added, once Aag had been, so to speak, put out, and his vulture troupe had fled into some distant sky, never to be seen again, “there are Powers in the Heart that could bring him back to life if they chose. But he doesn’t have many friends here, and I think he’s probably had his last chance.” She blew hard on the little pile of ash that now lay under her nose, and it was scattered to the four winds. “Now, young Sir,” she said, looking straight at Luka, “and, I should say, Sir Dog and Sir Bear, how can I be of assistance?”
Her sisters on the Flying Carpet flapped their wings experimentally; and found, to their great pleasure, that they could fly again. “We, too, will help you,” said Badlo-Badlo the Changer, and Bahut-Sara and Gyara-Jinn nodded their assent. The Insultana Soraya clapped her hands in delight. “That’s more like it,” she rejoiced. “We’ve got an army now.”
In all the excitement nobody noticed a small fiery Bug rushing away from them as quickly as it could fly, making its way deep into the Heart of Magic, whooshing along as quickly as a wildfire running before a helpful wind.
Nobodaddy was acting strangely, Luka thought. He was fidgety, scratching constantly at his Panama hat’s scorched brim. He seemed irritable, pacing up and down and rubbing his hands together and speaking in monosyllables, when he spoke at all. Sometimes he seemed almost transparent and at other times almost solid, so plainly Rashid Khalifa at home in Kahani was struggling for life and health, and maybe that struggle was having a bad effect on Nobodaddy’s mood. But Luka began to have other suspicions. Maybe Nobodaddy had just been humoring him, toying with him for his own warped amusement. Who knew what sort of twisted sense of humor such a creature might have? Maybe he had never expected Luka to get this far, and in fact, didn’t like the idea that they were now flying toward the Fire of Life itself. Maybe he hadn’t been honest, and didn’t want the quest to succeed. He’d need watching carefully, Luka decided, in case he tried to sabotage everything at the last moment. He looked, walked, and talked like the Shah of Blah, but that didn’t make him Luka’s father. Maybe Bear and Dog had been right: Nobodaddy was not to be trusted an inch. Or maybe there was an argument raging inside him, maybe the Rashid-ness he had absorbed was at war with the death-creature that did the absorbing. Maybe dying was always like this: an argument between death and life.
“Who wins that argument is a matter for another day,” Luka thought. “Right now, I’ve got to stop thinking of him as my dad.”
Soraya’s Flying Carpet was aloft again, after briefly landing to allow all the travelers, and the Argo, of course, to come aboard. Jaldi, Sara, Badlo, and Jinn, the four Changers, in their dragon-shapes, flew in strict formation around the Resham, one on each of the Carpet’s four sides, protecting it against any possible attack. Luka looked down and saw below him the River of Time flowing from the distant, and invisible, Lake of Wisdom at the Heart of the Heart (which was still too far away to be seen)—the River flowing into, and then out of, the immense circle of the Circular Sea, at the bottom of which, he knew, slept the giant Worm Bottomfeeder, who coiled his body all the way around the Circle just so that his head could nibble at his tail. Outside the Circle, directly beneath the Flying Carpet at that moment, were the vast territories of the Badly Behaved Gods—the gods in whom nobody believed any longer, except as stories that people once liked to tell.
“They don’t have any power in the Real World anymore,” Rashid Khalifa used to say, sitting in his favorite squashy armchair, with Luka curled up on his lap, “so there they all are in the Heart of Magic, the ancient gods of the North, t
he gods of Greece and Rome, the South American gods, and the gods of Sumeria and Egypt long ago. They spend their time, their infinite, timeless time, pretending they are still divine, playing all their old games, fighting their ancient wars over and over again, and trying to forget that nobody really cares about them these days, or even remembers their names.”
“That’s pretty sad,” Luka said to his father. “To be honest with you, the Heart of Magic sounds a lot like an old folks’ home for washed-up superheroes.”
“Don’t let them hear you say that,” Rashid Khalifa replied, “because they all look gorgeous and youthful and luminous and, well, perfect. Being divine, or even ex-divine, has its perks. And inside the Magic World they still have the use of their superpowers. It’s in the Real World that their thunderbolts and enchantments no longer have any effect.”
“It must be awful for them,” Luka said, “to have been worshiped and adored for so long, and then just discarded, like last year’s unfashionable clothes.”
“Particularly for the Aztec deities from Mexico,” Rashid said, putting on his scary voice. “Because they were used to receiving human sacrifices; the throats of living people were cut and their lifeblood flowed into the gods’ stone goblets. Now there’s no blood for those disused gods to drink. You’ve heard of vampires? Most of them are bloodthirsty, long-in-the-tooth, undead Aztec gods. Huitzilopochtli! Tezcatlipoca! Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli! Macuilcozcacuauhtli! Itztlacoliuhqui-Ixquimilli—”
“Stop, stop,” Luka begged. “No wonder people stopped worshiping them. Nobody could pronounce their names.”
“Or it may be because they all behaved so badly,” Rashid said.