Scene One

In which we meet the plot

Lord Redfox died peacefully of a heart attack, and everyone agreed that it was appropriate.

The traditional way for an Alpha to die is at the hands of another werewolf, younger and more aggressive. But Redfox had not been a traditional alpha. He had spent his life as a peace maker; he had stopped the trade in dryad skins, set up mining co-ops with the dwarfs and was considered singly handedly responsible for bringing several species of dragon back from the brink of extinction, and now he was sitting in the morgue, thought Yellowbird, doing nothing more interesting than cooling gently.

The fact that something is appropriate doesn’t stop it being a huge anticlimax.

Yellowbird had a glass of well aged scotch in his hand, after all it was practically a butlering tradition to dip into the liquor cabinet, and anyway he was mourning thank you very much, and he was looking out of the large glass windows, which looked out on the wrought iron gates.

“They’re here”, he muttered to himself, “body’s not even cold yet and already the first of them are here”

He took a closer look – plumes; – the pompous jackass actually went and put giant feather plumes on his horses. Oh that goes so well with the golden mermaids on the sides, and the ivory canopy. Yellowbird stepped away from the window shaking his head. Plumes. On the other hand, he thought, given how much that thing must weigh he made excellent time getting here.

Yellowbird let himself fall into the red plush recliner, it was very faded and the stuffing was poking through in a few places, but it was comfortable, and Lord Redfox had never cared what something looked like as long as it did its job.

He could hear a thumping sound, followed by the sound of yelling from outside. He sipped his scotch and didn’t bother to check. That young fool outside would never make it through the thirty days. You always saw people like him, who thought that it was first come first serve when it came to wills, and Lord Redfox had a huge family, so he certainly wouldn’t be the last. But werewolf wills, they were – competitive, – the man would only be here a day or two and then something would have forced him out, and good riddance to the fat pink slob.

Yellowbird swirled his scotch and thought. No, the real power players, they will wait. Oh they be very active in a dozen completely untraceable ways but they won’t make a move for the manor itself until the last possible moment.

He drained his glass and stood up, he was no longer the butler of Redhall, he knew that, but the work wouldn’t stop just because the master was dead.

“We will be very busy, over the next few days”, he announced to the house in general “I shall stay until the will has been read and everyone has gone home”. Then in a much quieter voice he added to himself, “Then there will be time to rest”.

He walked away, and life went on.

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Scene Two

In which we meet our hero

Greg never wished chaos on his office; no sane boss would, but he was always glad when it descended; if only because it gave him a huge advantage over everyone around him. He didn’t understand why other people didn’t seem to be able to remain calm under stress, but he had accepted it as his personal edge a long time ago.

He was pacing a wide lap around his entire building; he found that this made him easier to get to at times like this. The telephones were playing a piece of Mozart whenever they rang, and Greg had hoped that this would have a calming effect on his workers, but looking around he could see them flinch on every beat; he made a mental note to try heavy metal next time.

He noticed Sandra from the front desk sprinting towards him; she had forgotten to take her headset off first and its cord was flying behind her, whipping passersby. “Problem Boss! The Troll Bridge Workers Strike! The Company Settled.”

“To the full demands?”

“Yes Boss!”

“Get Mikey to call his contact in the company, this smells of corruption. And get Clare to do some interviews with the dryad community, those extra apples will have to come from them.”

“Yes Boss!” and she was gone, she ran flat into Frankie who waded on without noticing. “Sah!” bellowed the huge man “The report’s out and we were right, Dess Kanke was embezzling”

Greg yelled back over the background roar of telephones, “Casey has an ‘I told you so’ story prepared, run it page 5”

“Yes Sah” and he waded away. Tony Tony, his chief reporter vaulted cleanly over him, stack of papers in hand and laughing like a schoolboy. He loves this, Greg realized, everything in need of fixing and everyone relying on him.

Greg felt a tug on his trousers and turned to see two giant brown eyes looking up at him, “Hello Lucy”

“Hey sir. The copiers jammed sir”

“Give it good hard kick Lucy, I’m no mechanic”

“Yes sir” and girl wandered off in the vague direction of the copier room. Greg shook his head and paced away, he wasn’t quite sure how Lucy had come to work at his newspaper, certainly he hadn’t hired her, and he would have remembered that, wouldn’t he?

The chaos sunk in on him again. There were people yelling, telephones ringing, paper being ripped from one pile and thrown into another, verbal sparring and at least one small fist fight, – it was like being back at school again, – there was Andrew, the new boy on the front desk, running toward him; ducking and weaving the whole way like a ballerina who has had something unpleasant and slimy dropped down the back of her leotard. He got within two meters of Greg and pulled back sharply; wearing the expression of a man who has run as fast as he could to deliver an important message and is only now considering the effect it might have on the recipient.

“Well Andrew, what is it?”

“Ahhhh.” Said Andrew, his eyes drifting to the gaps between cubicles

“What’s your message Andrew?”

Andrew swallowed, “We regret to inform you”, he said standing to attention for reasons best known to himself, “of the passing of your uncle Redfox, His will shall be read on the 30^th of October at eight o’clock in his home of Redhall”. Then he stood there staring directly ahead; there didn’t seem to be anything else.

“Get Ants to do that thing he does with airline tickets and get me two first-class for Alice Springs tomorrow, and tell Tony Tony to come to my office after today’s paper goes out.”

Andrew nodded, but he was still at attention and staring straight ahead.

“Dismissed?” Greg guessed, and Andrew sprinted away looking about as relived as a theme park visitor who has just found the toilet block.

Then Greg got back to work. After all the world doesn’t stop turning just because someone’s uncle died.

There was a crunching sound, followed closely by a soft tinkling sound like a dozen little gears rolling on the floor. Exactly like that as a matter of fact. Greg shook his head and paced off to where they kept the spare copier, and life went on.

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Scene Three

In which our heroes unite

The office was peaceful. The work was all done. The paper was out. There was nothing else left to do, but there was still half an hour on the clock so everyone just lay around drained and exhausted, but happy. Tony Tony loved these moments; tomorrow everyone would be running around all over again, but for now the whole world was calm.

Tony Tony remembered that Greg wanted to see him in his office, he wondered if he would still be there. Then he answered himself, of course Greg would still be in his office; the man had no idea how to relax.

He eased himself up from the pot plant he had been resting his weight against and set off down the hallway. The whole way down people called out to him, and reached out to pat him or shake his hand, Sandra even lifted herself from where she was half passed out over the emergency copier, to give him a hug. This was their victory and everyone felt that it was well earned.

Greg’s office was second from the end and it looked exactly like all of the others, on the door was written ‘Greg – Editor’.

Tony Tony had found that people were always disappointed the first time they walked into Greg’s office, there was always this expectation that an editors office should be some luxurious place, fit for a power mad emperor. Tony Tony had been around for awhile and he had come to the conclusion that an office isn’t nearly as important as what it contains.

Greg was sitting at his desk with three piles of papers and four variations on the theme of highlighter. Tony Tony wasn’t even slightly surprised. “Hey Greg,” he said,” What’s up?”

Greg glanced up, and even though his face was blank Tony Tony caught the strange sensation of warmth, “Hello Tony Tony, how’s that charity you set up?”

“Scrying crystals for the blind? It’s going great man, we got just over a thousand donated crystals last week and we’re still growing! My business partner showed me the plans she drew up yesterday”

“What plans?”

Tony Tony was feeling mischievous, and with a grin replied, “You remember how I said it would be nice to have my own building to use as a distribution hub? I mean we are distributing the donated crystals all over the city”

“Yes, I remember”

“And you remember that my business partner trained as an architect”

“Yes” Pause “I see, really?”

“Absolutely, I have the plans for the start of my own little empire sitting on my desk at home, and all I need is a little money to push it through.

This seemed to be what Greg had been waiting for. “Would a hundred thousand be enough?”

Tony Tony felt alert all of a sudden, he had known Greg longer than anyone else in this country and he knew his editor rarely thought hypothetically, “It would defiantly help a lot.”

“My uncle Redfox is dead”

“Well. Sorry to hear it”, Tony Tony leaned back in his chair and focused on the ceiling, “You told me about him once didn’t you? He was an alpha and about the only member of your family didn’t violently object when you decide to become a vampire”

“Yes, he was very progressive in that respect, and now he’s dead. Now, tell me what you remember about werewolf inheritance law”

“Well, not much, the big one is that a beneficiary must be present at the reading of the will or they forfeit their inheritance”

“And their share is distributed between those who are present”

“That right, it’s a bit of a strange law I always thought”

“So does everyone else, but it’s traditional at this point”

“Ok, so what you’re saying is that there’s a good chance you will be in this will.”

“Yes, and even if I’m not, as a close blood relative I still stand to inherit a share if a beneficiary doesn’t make it”

“Right, I guess that’s plan B. Was your uncle rich?”

“The fact that he lived in Transylvania made the country about 70% richer than it would be otherwise”

“I’m going to call that a yes. Ok, so you have rich uncle and stand to inherit, where do I come into this?”

“’Had’ a rich uncle, and you come into this because I’m going to need your people skills to get there”

“To the reading?”

“Yes”

Tony Tony snorted,” I think a private jet would help you out a bit more there.”

“No Tony Tony, not here, here it would work against me. Think about those laws, if a beneficiary could ensure that he was the only one present then he would inherit everything. Werewolf inheritances get, competitive. It’s a game, and some of the older werewolves are very good at it.

“So you can’t travel openly.”

“Or legally, and if you help me to receive my inheritance I will give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

Tony Tony settled deeper in the chair with a slightly dazed expression on his face, “Can we just walk away like that?”

“Your business partner can cover the charity, Mikey can cover you here and we can call Rowind in again to cover me”

Tony Tony said nothing, he was hunched in his chair and he had his fingertips resting on his forehead. Greg seemed to know what to do; he touched Tony Tony’s shoulder and waited until their eyes met “Please Tony Tony”, He said, “I need your help with this one.”

Tony Tony watched back. Then, very slowly an amused smile spread across his face, “Exploiting werewolf law in a life or death situation against opponents with everything to gain.” He chuckled and offered his hand, “I’m in”

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Scene Four

In which our heroes cross a desert.

There was a loud thud as the planes undercarriage hit the ground. Followed by a much louder thud as the fuselage hit the ground. Then there was a horrible drawn out grinding noise as several million dollars of meticulously folded and riveted aluminum dragged itself across the ground and ripped itself to buggery. Finally there were some gentle tinkling noises, backed by the low bass rumble of a single tire rolling away from the wreckage. Then there was a long uncomfortable silence.

“Well”, announced Tony Tony to the otherwise silent plane, “that is the last time I fly on a plane that Ants picked out!”

“Oh don’t be so dramatic”, said Greg, while folding up his newspaper;”We made it, didn’t we?”

“Well, we’re back at ground level again, I don’t think I can argue with that” he glanced out of his window, his heart beat starting to return to an almost normal level, “Hey”, he said, “We fell way short; I can see Uluru in the distance.”

“Really?” said Greg who had finished collecting their luggage from the over head compartments, “That’s good, we’ll head there then.”

“What? I thought you wanted to go to Alice Springs.”

“No, I just wanted our flight records to reflect that that was where we were going.”

Greg was a very calming person to have around in an emergency and Tony Tony caould feel his customary grin starting to return. “You are a very difficult man to predict, you know that Greg?”

“Thank you, I’m relying on that to make me hard to stop.”

“Ok”, Tony Tony hoisted himself up and together they headed for the back of the plane, “So you wanted to go to Uluru this whole time?”

“No, but both Alice Springs and Uluru have plenty of road access, we’re heading for Adelaide.”

“Adelaide? What’s there?”

“A large colony of Wind Surfers”

Tony Tony considered this, “I tried windsurfing once, and it was fun, once I stopped falling off but-”, He threw his head back, his eyes unfocused “-Right, from that article we did a few years ago, that giant annual migration that they do. To Italy, right”

“Right, which geographically speaking is a hop skip and a jump from Transylvania”

“Thus taking everyone by surprise when you show up half a continent away from where you should be”

“Well I had planned on lying low for another twenty nine days once I was in Transylvania, but yea, you understand”

Tony Tony thought about this, and then whistled through his teeth while nodding slightly.

“Thank you, you’re up.”

A rather pretty stewardess in a rather ruffed uniform was sweeping towards them. Tony Tony locked eyes with her, rested his hand on her shoulder, and gave her his most winning smile. “I want to thank you for what you did back there, keeping everyone calm.”

“Oh”, she said faltering slightly, “I that’s my- I mean it was my- Thanks” She looked away, blushing.

“I’d like to take you out to dinner sometime, do you have a number?”

*

About a minute later he met up with Greg outside, “I don’t think that getting her number was really necessary”

“Well it worked didn’t it? I notice she didn’t object to two potentially concussed passengers walking out through a jagged hole in the side of an aircraft into a desert they have no equipment for.”

“Tony Tony, how old do you think that girl was?”

“I’d say, early twenties”

“This would make her literally half your age”

“Well you don’t need to bring that up”, said Tony Tony, looking hurt, “and anyway”, he said, his grin returning, “I’m not married at the moment, and that makes me fair game. So if you have problem with my methods”, he said, his grin getting much wider, ”You could always do it yourself”

Greg said nothing at first but after a while he said, very slowly, ”Tony Tony, do you remember when we met the Countess of Lester, and you told me to turn on the charm?”

“Yes”, said Tony Tony, his grin now taking up most of his face, “Yes, I do!”

“Good. As long as you remember that, I know you didn’t take that suggestion seriously.”

They walked in silence for a moment.

“Tony Tony?” said Greg

“Yes?”

“What was going on when you got her talking about clever linguists?”

“Cunning; and it was just research; I asked her what kind of man she liked.”

“Ah, well I know you’re experienced with the tongues of Japan and Morocco”

“Yes, I have a certain familiarity with the tongues of all 7 continents”

“Good grief, even Antarctica?”

“Even Antarctica.”

“Tony Tony?”

“Yes?”

“You do realize that I know exactly what you’re talking about, right?”

“I was wondering, but thank you for clearing that up.”

They kept walking

“Greg?”

“Yes?”

“Uluru is a very long way away across a patch of baking hot desert.”

“That’s right”

“Do you have any idea how we are going to get there?”

“Not as such, no.”

They stooped walking

“Hum”

“Yea”

They continued to not walk.

“You trained as a mage, didn’t you?”

“Yes; I also dropped out. Anyway we’re not looking to blow up the desert.”

“Right, but you’re a vampire”

“Yes?”

“I’ve never been very clear on what being a vampire lets you do. Can you turn into a cloud of bats or something?”

“No that’s a feat only a high level vampire can perform. They can also control animals, heal the sick, and make their eyes glow an imposing shade of red. I mostly got in it for the immortality.”

“So what level are you?”

“First”

“What does that let you do?”

“I can levitate small objects, as long as I’m touching them.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

Tony Tony found this eyes being drawn back to the downed aircraft.

“Small objects, heh?”

“Yep”

Tony Tony’s eyes found a part of the tailplane that had ripped off, his grin became more pronounced.

“How about light objects?”

*

Fifteen minutes later the Uluru avenger[1] was speeding away across the desert.

“I have to say Tony Tony that this was one of your better plans.”

“Thanks Greg, I like it too”

“But can you explain to me again why we can’t sit on top?”

“The airflow over the top needs to be smooth and fast, if we were up there we wouldn’t have any lift”

“Right, and the reason we can’t go more than a few feet off the ground?”

“That’s down to ground effect; we would lose our cushion of air if we tried to go any higher. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason, I am glad we’re mobile. But in future I would appreciate it if I didn’t end up staring face down at rough ground moving past about three inches from my face at 100 kilometers per hour.”

“I’ll bear it in mind”, said Tony Tony, looking apologetic “Where were you planning on going when we reached Uluru?”

“I had planned on renting a car and driving down to Adelaide”

“That’s a two day trip isn’t it?”

“At least”

Tony Tony thought about this,” I think”, he said carefully, “that I know a way to get us there faster.”

“What, how?”

“One of my ex-wives’ former fiancés set up here, he was an inventor.”

Tony Tony waited, but Greg was silent.

“He lives a little bit out of town; we should hang a left here.”

[1] Greg had wanted to know what they were avenging, and Tony Tony had replied that they were avenging in a general sense.

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Scene Five

In which we get hints of opposition

Ring-Ring Ring-Ri-Click

UTI764

Ring-Ring Ri-Click

Well Charlotte?

It’s a bust Mam; they wandered off as soon as the plane stopped

Damit girl, why didn’t you stop them?

I was in the wrong part of the plane! By the time we were released from emergency duties they were already gone.

Right. You brought them down in the desert like I asked?

Yes Mam

Then where could they have got to?

We-We landed near Uluru, Mam

What?! Stupid girl! Enough inaccessible desert to swallow most of Europe and you put them down right next to a major tourist attraction!

Yes Mam, sorry Mam

Alright. Never mind, it’s too late to change it now.

Should I go after them, mam?

No, it would look suspicious if you left now. Make your way back to France by the usual means and await orders.

Yes Mam

Send your files to Devlin and Johnson, They’ll check out the car rental places around Uluru.

Yes Mam. Good day Mam

Good day, Charlotte

-Click

Several thousand miles away, Lord Greenbadger lowered his headphones and took a sip of his cranberry juice. Well, he thought, that was unexpected

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Scene Six

In which our heroes cross a lot more desert, at a much higher speed.

Greg was trying, but the object he was looking at wasn’t making much more sense inside his head than outside it. Still certain nasty suspicions were beginning to form.

“Tony Tony?”

“Yes?”

“What, exactly, am I looking at?”

“Well it’s a Zorb, they’re big in this place, and great for desert crossing”

“That bit I understand, What I’m having trouble with are these things attached to the side”

“Oh”, said Tony Tony, non-comitial

“Yes Tony Tony, What exactly are they”

“Well they’re speed boosters, you know, so we can go faster, I mean that is-”

“They’re RAM jets aren’t they Tony Tony”

“Dats a right”, said the grizzled toothless man beside them, “me own rocket powered balls” , he said with gratuitous winking, “available for hire or rent”.

“Are they safe?” Greg asked.

The question seemed to confuse the man

Greg let the matter go, “I don’t think we’ll be able to steer these thing, except in the sense of large scale geography. Do you have a double hulled one?”

“Aha, dat wouldn’t work, dey would tip ova.”

“Ah, good point. Then-”

“Sides with a single hull, there’s more room fo, tumblin” said the man, while winking and nudging like a malfunctioning GIF

The was a long silence, broken only by the continuous ‘eh, eh,eh’ from the man.

“Ah, we’re both men”, Tony Tony helpfully pointed out. The man didn’t stop winking and nudging.

Greg was tired of waiting, “Let’s just pay the man and get out of here” he said to Tony Tony, already climbing into the closest monstrosity

Tony Tony followed him, “huh, I wonder how you start this thing?” he said.

Something flew in through the entrance hole, landing neatly in front of Greg. He picked it up; it looked suspiciously like an old Playstation controller. He held it out to Tony Tony and asked the question that had been bugging him since they had arrived, “Tell me the Truth Tony Tony, is this guy completely insane?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you Greg, but I am very keen to find out.” replied Tony Tony.

Tony Tony brought his finger up to the X button. Greg made no move to stop him.

There was a deafening roar from outside, and centrifugal forces suddenly became an intimate part of the two men’s lives.

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Scene Seven

In which our heroes are tailed

Devlin was dozing in the hot sun when Johnson knocked on his window and climbed into the driver’s seat, He jerked upright and tried to cover his lack of professionalism, “Well, did it help when I left?”

“Not really”, replied his partner, “he just kept the innuendos coming, by the end of it I swear he was implying something about livestock”

“Oh” Said Devlin, sagging visibly, “well in that case I’m sorry I, you know, left you there”

Johnson nodded sagely, “It’s all right I understand”

“No really, I”

“It’s alright”

There was silence for a beat

“So did you get any information?”

“Actually yes, they were here, they took a Zorb and went north”

“Ok,” Devlin rubbed his forehead, “where does that lead us? No-one else saw them, so they must have come straight here. That means they must have known about this place in advance, so we should check the connections in-between those two and the old man”

“The old man had quite a lot to say on the connections between those two and himself”

“Really! What did-”said Dante, slowing down as thought caught up with him, “never mind. North. What’s north? Most of Australia really, so we have no idea where they’re going.”

“Ah but we do, I broke into the old man’s house on my way out and-”

“You broke into his house!” Said Devlin, horrified

“All is fair in love and war”, Said Johnson, mildly.

“Yeah but-,” he paused, searching for words and then gave up, “What did you find?”

“All the spheres had tracking devices, they’re one went north at first but course corrected south south east, they’re making a direct line for Adelaide”

“Adelaide, why are they going there?”

“I don’t know, but if we can stop them there it won’t matter much”

“Right, can we catch up with them?”

“No. Even in the jet, they have too much of a head start”

“So we report ahead.”

“Yep”

Devlin nodded and found himself drifting away, he let it happen. The matter was settled until they got back to the jet, and there wouldn’t be any more work until they could use its high powered antennas.

He found himself wondering about his partner and why he was doing this job, presumably he had his reasons. Twenty nine more days, he thought to himself, and then, if we do our job right, we all get what we want.

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Scene Eight

In which our heroes go swimming

It was a beautiful sun rise. Tony Tony knew that that wasn’t much of a conclusion to reach, but still, since he was watching it while it went past him at ridiculous speed, spinning like a top, he felt that he was justified in a one adjective description.

The stretched as best he could against the high G forces; the ball had been surprisingly comfortable after he had gotten used to it.

“Good morning”, came a voice from above him.

Tony Tony glanced up to find Greg pinned roughly to the ceiling, as these this are figured in a spinning ball anyway. “Morning”, he replied, “Wow, were we going through the whole night?”

“Yes, I’m not entirely clear on why we haven’t run out of fuel yet”

Tony Tony Grinned, “Given the way mad scientists usually work, this is probably a, ‘You don’t want to know’ situation,”

Greg nodded, “I can’t be sure but I think that we’re coming up on the sea, the horizon is has been getting shinier for some time now.

Tony Tony looked, but it was impossible, “Ok, I’ll believe you, what are we going to do when we hit it.”

“Well first of all we need to find some way to stop this thing, I’d much rather not crash”

Tony Tony nodded, and then his brow creased, “Wait, shouldn’t this thing float?”

Greg nodded rather too slowly for Tony Tony’s taste, “I think it will float, at least at first, and I don’t think the RAM jets will be stopped by a little water ether.”

Tony Tony let the image form in his mind, “Ah. Right.” he said, and then rather more cheerfully, “Well I bet that would get us to Italy eventually”

Greg wasn’t smiling, He was looking out of the sphere , and he looked as worried as a man can look without displaying emotion as a matter of course. Tony Tony heard him yell something, and suddenly they weren’t on desert any more, they weren’t really in sea either, and they didn’t appear to have access to gravity.

There was something blue and shiny filling Tony Tony’s field of vision, and it was getting bigger, sea, his mind provided, just before they plowed into it, and then plowed out of it, bobbing up out of the water, and then further out of the water and on to a huge outcropping of rock, which it started to climb.

Greg yelled again, and Tony Tony, who had been planning to do it for a while reached over and turned off the RAM jets. The world vas suddenly a lot quieter, containing as it did only the sounds of crunching rock and avalanches as the thing continued to climb. “What was that?” called Tony Tony.

“I said, don’t turn off the engines”

“Ah”, said Tony Tony as the thing reached the top of its climb and sailed gracefully over, “Oops”

They went down. It was rather faster than when then they had went up.Tony Tony thought that this was rather unfair, it was like the ball was trying to make up for lost time.

They hit the water, and bobbed up again, but this time not nearly as high. Tony Tony was very aware of the water pouring through the entrance hole. He heard Greg yell something, but he was already gone, out through the hole and into the water, Greg was right beside him. Together they watched as their temporary transport found a new home on the seabed.

There was a long pause, while the two of them floated. Then Tony Tony turned to Greg and asked, “What was it that you were trying to say before we got out”

“I said to bail out”

“Oh”, they were silent again, and then Tony Tony started laughing. He couldn’t help it; it just came naturally, welling up inside him. He laughed at their choice of transport, the mission they were on, the things that kept happening to them, their lack of clean clothes, The world in general, and as he laughed he began to feel better.

He was still laughing several minutes later when someone grabbed him from behind and lifted him out of the water.

“Dude, was that ball yours?” said his rescuer, Tony Tony felt a blast of something herbal waft across him

“Ah, yeh.” said Tony Tony, not really worrying about consequences.

“Ball dude, that was a crunchy stunt you pulled there”

“Huh?” Said Tony Tony, who was having problems following what this man was talking about.

“Straight up Bull’s-eye, Balls out, not Balls up”, clarified the man.

“Oh, great man, thanks” guessed Tony Tony.

“No worries man, I’m Woon”

“Well nice to meat you mister Woon, I’m Tony Tony”

“Hey T.T, But hold man, Mister Woon was my Father, call me, Mr. Ian Woon”

“Good morning, Mr Ian Woon, I,ll- ”, There was something on the man’s breath that was making it hard to focus, and rather too late Tony Tony noticed that he was being held on a surf board, which was hovering about two feet above the waves. Tony Tony finished his sentence,”-you’re a windsurfer aren’t you?”

“That’s right man, riding the turbulence, surfing the squalls, until the day I die Man”

Tony Tony noticed others on the boards sailing at a leisurely pace towards them; One of them scooped Greg out of the water. Tony Tony saw the opportunity and seized it, “You’re heading to Italy aren’t you?”

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Scene Nine

In which a shark bites with his pearly teeth

When Greg had told him that he needed him for his people skills, Tony Tony had assumed that he had been making an excuse for some company, now however he was beginning to suspect that his editor had been truthful. He was also beginning to realize that it is possible to suffer hospitality.

Mr. Ian Woon turned around in front of him, “Hey, T.T Balls out, check this.”

Tony Tony felt that he was beginning to hate that phrase; he gripped the sides of the board. Mr. Ian Woon brought the board within a foot of the water, and then turned it completely upside down.

Despite everything Tony Tony did feel impressed as he watched Mr. Ian Woon Wash his hair in a casual , dignified manner, then again maybe that was just the blood rushing into his head. Something large and shark-shaped, it may have been a shark, jumped at them, and fell about twenty meters behind them.

Suddenly Tony Tony wasn’t having quite as much fun, “You get many sharks around here?”, he asked.

“Oh natch, dude. This is the big red; Australia man; everything here wants to take a bite out of you.”

Tony Tony couldn’t help himself, “even the women?” he asked innocently.

Mr. Ian Woon laughed and, to Tony Tony’s great relief, turned the board upright again.

Tony Tony, felt the blood settle in his body again, it was a warm feeling. “Were did these boards come from anyway?” He asked Mr. Ian Woon

“The Prof back there came up with them”, said Mr. Ian Woon, jerking his head back, “We were Cowing together one night, me and him, and he suddenly goes all nuts on me and starts playing with McDonalds cups, so I leave him to it and next morning he’s messed with all our boards and now we fly man, like for real, not in our heads.”

Tony Tony’s reporter instincts kicked into high gear, he noticed the slightly neater looking surfer carrying Greg behind him, he began to understand why the spinning disks on the underside of the boards looked so familiar to him, but he was a reporter who knew his audience and above everything else one question came to the fore. “Cowing?” he asked.

“Eating grass, man”

“Ah”, chuckled Tony Tony, who was enjoying himself again. He stopped to consider, it was unlikely to say the least that he had stumbled across the original windsurfers, but still, Mr. Ian Woon was clearly a man on the inside of this story, and he clearly wanted to talk. Tony Tony could practically feel the notepad in his hand. When this is over, he thought, I may just write a book.

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Scene Ten

In which a trail is lost

Deep sea salvage was definitely not a job the jet’s winch had been designed for, making it fortunate that the bay was actually quite shallow, Devlin watched the screen as the deflated, soggy, transparent sphere was lifted from the water, and he chose not to voice his opinion on what it looked like. Johnson watched his partners face and made a similar decision.

“There’s no one inside, could they have drowned?” offered Devlin.

“We won’t know until the divers go in, and that won’t be our job, but my gut says no, I think they got out, it’s definitely not far to shore from here”

“If you swim up the coast.” said Devlin, “If they went down the coast instead then its two hundred kilometers to the next decent beach.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?” asked Johnson

Devlin had the feeling that he was being tested, “I suppose it would simplify matters if it was. But no; I don’t think it will be that easy”

“Then the next move is to sweep up the beach.”

“Right, there’s no cover out here, if we go slow then we can’t miss them. At the very least we should see footprints.”

Johnson nodded and nudged the throttle forward, “And what do we assume if we find nothing?”

Devlin’s brow furrowed, “Either they went down the coast and drowned, or someone picked them up. But we don’t know if it was by boat or plane.”

“Plane is unlikely; it would need the ability to land on water to start with.”

“Nevertheless, it’s possible, especially if they arranged this in advance”

Johnson nodded, “So they’re either at the bottom of the sea, or literally anywhere. Two hundred kilometers of coastline is too much to search with divers so either way, they’re gone and we’re lost.”

The two men watched the monitors as their jet swept slowly up the beach.

“Are we going to give the old man his Zorb back?” Asked Devlin, after a long wait.

Johnson’s eyes didn’t move from the display, “Why?” he asked.

“Well, he only rented it to those two, so if we keep it isn’t that like stealing it?”

Johnson kept watching the display. “I don’t think those two intended to bring it back”

“Nevertheless”

Johnson looked up and considered his partner carefully. After a very long pause he lowered his eyes to the monitor again, “If we don’t find them, then it can’t hurt to take it back for him. It’s not like we’re footing the gas bill”

Devlin nodded, looking relived, and let himself fixate on the screen again. Nothing more needed to be said, and the great ominous jet swept onwards.

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Scene Eleven

In which our heroes bite off more than they can chew

Greg was sitting on a rocky outcrop, just over the horizon from Italy, and he was a very impressed man. He was impressed by the way that the wind surfers had ridden the wind currents. He was impressed by their boards, which had taken them from Australia to Italy, if not exactly in comfort, then certainly in style. He was impressed by the board designer, a man that had called himself Prof, and who seemed to have an impressive and varied grasp on just about everything. He was impressed by the rocky outcrop that Mr. Ian Woon had picked out, the view of the sunset on the sea was, impressive, and he was impressed by the windsurfer’s taste in incense, he wasn’t quite sure what they were burning, but whatever it was it was having an impressively relaxing effect on him.

He was also impressed by Tony Tony’s social skills, and he was impressed with himself for bringing him along. Tony Tony and Mr. Ian Woon were sitting around the campfire laughing together and chatting like brothers. As Greg watched Mr Ian Woon introduced Tony Tony to a tall and well tanned woman wearing what might by charitably called a bohemian costume. Somewhat to his surprise Greg found himself raising no objections, so what if this girl looked twenty-five at most? It wasn’t like they were hurting anyone.

Greg let himself flop back onto the rocky beach; sitting up suddenly seemed like it would take too much effort to be worth it. He just lay on that beach admiring the stars and was somewhat surprised when Tony Tony jumped on him, which he had imagined he would be doing to the tanned girl at this point.

“Heeey Slim G”, breathed Tony Tony, he sounded a little unfocused. “I got us a travel partner”

“Wha?” asked Greg trying to make sense of this turn of events.

Tony Tony, turned Greg’s head towards a boulder away from the massed group, where the girl from before was doing something with her feet, silhouetted against the setting sun, a few seconds later Greg realized that she was also holding a rapier, with which she was practicing jabbing and thrusting motions. This was, Greg realized, not a small detail and something which he really should have noticed earlier, he wondered if something was wrong with his head. Then he wondered if there was something wrong with Tony Tony’s head when what he was saying began to filter through.

“She’s Mr. Ian Woon’s daughter, apparently, her name’s Free Flower. Mr. Ian Woon thought it would do her some good to see more of the world, at ground level obviously, and I agreed to let her come with us. I think it’s a good plan”

Greg did not think it was a good plan, he thought it was a bad plan. He found to very easy to raise several objections, not least of which was the fact that he didn’t want to split the money any more than what he already was. He searched for some way to discourage Tony Tony. “What does she think about all this?” he fished.

“Oh he talked to her about all this of course, she’s fine with it. Apparently she wants to be a champion fencer; she’s hoping she’ll meet some strong people to fight against on the way”

Greg amended his opinion to god damn awful idea. The very last thing he wanted to be doing was trying to lay low while traveling with an aggressive, sword welding girl who was wearing an outfit certain to attract the attention of every man in Eastern Europe.

Before he could voice any of this however he found his eyes drawn over Tony Tony’s shoulder.“Impressive”, he managed to gasp. Tony Tony turned, and looked upwards. Eventually everyone else did so as well.

It was an impressive cloud, storm, Greg corrected himself; storm was definitely the right word in this case. It was towering, billowing, and many other adjectives too, but that wasn’t the impressive part. The impressive part was the way it whipped and thrashed towards them, like a caged beast trying to break free, the way it clamored, rising, and crushing, with all the rage of an Italian family.

Greg turned away and looked around. No one else did, he recognized the look in their eyes. There is a look that artist, or engineers, or jailers get when they are faced with a impossible challenge, It’s a look that betrays a pumping heart, racing adrenaline, and a complete certainty about what is going to be happening in the next few minutes.

Mr. Ian Woon had said that no-one would be going up until morning, so that they could make a dramatic entrance on the morning breezes, but Greg knew that wouldn’t matter now. There are an infinite number of universes for every outcome of a dice roll, but there is no universe anywhere in the Multiverse where these people would not rise to challenge this storm.

Then everyone started moving as one windsurfer, they scattered left and right and clambered over one another to get to their boards. Free Flower caught Greg by the back of his shirt and hoisted him onto her board; her eyes never left the storm. And then they were off.

They climbed higher and higher, and the wind got choppier and choppier. The surfers rolled expertly with the breezes. Still they climbed higher, and still the wind got more violent. Greg noticed that some of the surfers were getting left behind, but still they climbed.

Free Flower and her father were leading the charge, taking Greg and Tony Tony with them. Greg thought the storm was even more impressive from up here, He imagined the front as enraged dragons, bearing down on them.

The winds here were intense; they slipped through the cracks in jet blasts and rode the roaring updrafts like a volcano. They were almost inside the clouds themselves.

Then Greg’s imaginary dragons became somewhat more real.

He heard a panicked Mr. Ian Woon scream “Smoke dragons!”

Then everything went to hell.

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Scene Twelve

In which our heroes go tight rope walking

It took Tony Tony a very long time to regain consciousness, and when he finally did he kind of wished he hadn’t.

His senses came back to him slowly. Smell came first, the oldest sense, he remembered from an article he had written once, but smell didn’t really do much except confirm that he should have done a better job with washing last night. Somewhat discouraged, he let his sense of touch feel his surroundings, he was clearly lying on something, it felt too rough to be anything manmade and too regular to be anything natural. In frustration he opened his eyes, and even this didn’t help, all he could see was solid whiteness, it was like looking at the inside of a ping pong ball.

“Where am I?” he asked,

“You’re laying on top of a dragon”, came Greg’s voice from nearby, Tony Tony, nodded, as solemn as a mountain gorilla, and wished that he could lose consciousness again. That didn’t seem to be an option; holding his head he sat up and looked around.

He was indeed on a dragon; it was large, white and completely unaware of their existence. Tony Tony was somewhat underwhelmed, “shouldn’t it be more vicious?”, he asked Greg.

“According to Free Flower, they’re only like that a sunset”

Greg nodded, which hurt quite a bit more that it should have, he made a note of this. “What happened?” he asked

“You fell off of Mr. Ian Woon’s board. Free Flower dived and caught you, but you broke her board when you landed on it. Then the three off us landed on the back of this dragon, and we held on until it stopped bucking. Since then we’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

“When did I go out?”

“You hit you head pretty hard when you hit the board.”

Tony Tony held his head, it still hurt. He took a better look around him, it seemed easier now. Greg was sitting cross legged next to him, watching him carefully. Free Flower was laying some distance away, hands crossed behind her head in the classic star watching position, except that there were no stars.

He also noticed something that he hadn’t noticed before, long stout chains were wrapped around the dragon’s body and leading off to the left, and right, behind and up, and although he couldn’t see it Tony Tony would have bet on below as well. He tried to make sense of this, but his head didn’t seem to work right. He pointed a shaky finger at the chains and gave Greg an inquiring look.

“They seem to go everywhere”, Greg replied, “we’ve been talking about them and we think it’s a lattice of dragons.”

“A lattice of dragons?” Tony Tony asked, Greg was clearly using English, but the sentences he was forming weren’t making a lot of sense.

Greg pointed up, “Dragon here,” he said, ”Dragon here”, pointing left, then right, down and inward. Tony Tony noticed that his finger lingered on the inward. “Someone chained a couple of thousand dragons together and made a giant flying box.”

Tony Tony let the questions spin around this head, until they calmed down enough that one became the most obvious, “Why?”

“Either as a juvenile prank, or because they wanted to lift something, either way we’ll find the answer at the center.”

“Were you making a joke there?”

“What?”

“About a thousand dragons’ being a juvenile prank.”

“Oh. No.”

“Oh”

Tony Tony held his head again there didn’t seem to be anything else to say, and that is always a bad sign in a reporter.

“Are you up to walking?”, asked Greg

“Where did you want to go?”

Greg pointed inwards again. “There’s no rush if you’re not up to it”, said Greg, “They won’t go nuts again until sunset, and it’s barely sunrise”

Tony Tony thought about this, the truth was that he needed some more time to rest, but he didn’t know how Free Flower knew about dragons, and he wasn’t sure he could trust her to know all the berserk times of by heart. “I’ll go.” he said.

Free flower must have been listening, because she immediately jumped to her feet and started walking inwards. She crossed over the dragon and walked onto the chain without significantly changing her stride. Tony Tony thought her sense of balance was incredible, and he watched as she strode into the mist and was gone.

Greg helped Tony Tony to his feet and then walked to the chain himself. He was much slower over the chain than Free Flower had been, picking his way delicately along. He didn’t fall though and Tony Tony was impressed, until he realized that Greg was using his levitation to stabilize himself. Greg took one look back, and then the mist swallowed him too.

Then it was just Tony Tony, alone on the back of the dragon. He walked his way to the edge of the dragon, looking braver than he felt, and looked down. He had somehow been expecting vertiginous heights, instead it was just the same ping pong ball inner as the sky, and he was surprised to find that this was absolutely no comfort.

He put his first foot on the chain, then his second foot. Not so bad, he thought to himself, and he made his way down the chain like this, doing a kind of hip heavy shuffle, which would have been very fashionable in certain dance halls. The mist was ridiculously thick and the dragon behind Tony Tony disappeared in barely any time. He had no way of knowing how long the chain was, so he just kept walking.

All things considered, he thought he was doing rather well, and then his front foot slipped. The chain came up to meet him at high speed, and he grabbed it and hugged it tighter, his other foot slipped, and then his arms lost their grip, and he was left there dangling, by his hands, over a indeterminable drop.

Tony Tony called for help, put it was no good, the mist swallowed all sound. He tested his arms seeing if he could lift himself back onto the chain, maybe twenty years ago, he thought, while he continued dangling there. He remembered the playgrounds of his youth, and picked out the direction of the center, and finally he began to swing, hand over hand, down the length of the chain. Say what you like about Tony Tony, but he was not a man that quit easily.

Tony Tony felt light hearted, or was that light headed? He was a long way up. He realized he was moving a lot faster under the chain, than he had been over it and for the first time since he had woken up this morning he felt like smiling. He was almost disappointed when hands grabbed him and started pulling him upwards.

“What happened to you?” asked Greg

“Fell.” explained Tony Tony

Greg didn’t say anything back; perhaps he was relieved to see Tony Tony smiling again.

This dragon looked, to Tony Tony’s eye, exactly like the last, and it had exactly the same array of chains. Free Flower was waiting at the center, and once she had seen that Tony Tony was safe, she turned and walked inward again. The other two followed her.

That’s how they went on, chain after chain, dragon after dragon, again and again, through a solid white sky. Until Tony Tony began to suspect that someone had set his life to infinite repeat, and failed to tell him.

At what must easily have been the four billionth dragon, Free Flower, stopped for a moment, and then she turned and started walking left. Greg and Tony Tony, followed her, for dragon, after dragon, after dragon.

Then, quite suddenly, something different loomed out of the mist. Tony Tony had no idea what it was but he almost cheered out of shear novelty.

“It looks like, an island”, said Greg.

Tony Tony looked closer and realized that he was right, “Why on earth would someone want a flying island?” he asked, mostly rhetorically.

Greg said nothing, but Free Flower kept walking, so the other two kept following. Tony Tony’s feet touched grass; this cheered him up a great deal, so much that his sprit wasn’t hampered at all by Greg wondering aloud how grass could grow so high.

“Oh what does it matter, Slim G?”, asked Tony Tony, completely rhetorically. He danced around and walked backwards in front of the other two, “I say, that we have our own little bit of a paradise here. We should enjoy it”.

Greg was looking at him rather strangely, “Tony Tony, I think the thin air is getting to you.” he said.

“Spoil sport” Tony Tony shot back. He spun away, and walked flat into man about seven foot tall, and about as broad across the shoulders.

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Scene Thirteen

In which our heroes solve a mystery

It was later. Much later, and really Free Flower couldn’t be any more specific than that. This annoyed her in a vague way.

They clearly weren’t prisoners, since the store room that they had been locked in included a huge open air window. The window opened on a short inverse cliff, and then beneath that a 20,000 foot first step, but it was clearly a open window.

She was leaning on the window sill and considering the cliff; since the sky wasn’t much to look at. She had decided that she could probably handle the cliff; after all she had a great head for heights, and the skinny pale one could probably handle it too, but the grey haired one would fall, beyond all doubt, she had seen the way he had been affected by the altitude.

There was really nothing else to see out the window, so she turned her attention back to the room, she had earlier spotted five different kitchen ingredients that could be improvised into explosives, but she had left them alone; she didn’t think it was wise to burn her bridges until it was really necessary.

She started listening to her traveling companions again. She had been surprised to see that they hadn’t tried to escape as soon as they were thrown into the storeroom; it was like they had been in this situation before; the skinny one in particular seemed to be very good at thinking logically.

They were discussing the mystery of the plants that they had seen growing out of every crevice in the building. She had to admit that that one puzzled her, Trolls weren’t any good at subtle work like gardening; quite apart from anything else they didn’t have the manual dexterity.

The skinny one suggested the goatmen, and that idea sat well with her, the trolls and the goatmen had a very close relationship, and they would have the dexterity for gardening. But no, that wasn’t right; goatman were always ravenous, there was no way they could work with food like this, and anyway she had seen flowers on the way in; food and decoration right next to each other, she just didn’t think goatmen would understand that.

She listened to the men discussing; they brought up many good points, and they were trying hard, but in the end they were stumped too.

Eventually more time passed.

When the knock at the door finally came Free Flower was relived; she had been becoming worried that they had been forgotten. She trooped out silently behind the troll, and was pleased to see that the others did the same.

The grey haired one was trying to talk to the Troll, but the skinny one hushed him, she wondered where the skinny one had learned about trolls from; he had known that it was pointless for a human to talk to a troll. She hoped that they were being taken to see one of the Goatmen, their voice box didn’t let them speak human languages either, but they would understand her if she spoke to them. If there were none here, and that didn’t seem unlikely given all the plants that they passed, then they would be forced to kill a path to the door.

They came to a great hall, luscious with vegetation. In the center, proud and very central, was a grove of apple trees. The answer came to her at once, as it came to the other two too.

“Dryads!” she called out.

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Scene Fourteen

In which our heroes experience the language barrier.

Gregs heart rate was perfectly normal, and his face was blank, and he wasn’t sweating, or breathing fast, but he knew, despite this, that he was excited. Of course it was Dryads, it just made so much sense that they would be working with trolls; one was a culture of giant herbivores, which revolved entirely around apples, and one was a race of sentient apple trees. It was just too perfect; he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been tried before.

And the best thing was that dryads could not only understand human languages, they could speak them too. He had been hoping that there was a Goatman on board, but this was even better.

He stepped forward and began to speak.

He spoke wonderfully; he was eloquent, concise, he remembered everything and said it perfectly. He told the Dryads of their quest and their trials so far, he asked for their help, and he did it so skillfully that when he was done, the last strains of his words hung in the air like music, and it was like the whole universe would gladly bend to help them.

There was a long silence.

Then one of the Dryads made a sound like a grizzly bear with laryngitis snoring into a tin can.

There was another long, and more uncomfortable, silence, and it began to dawn on Greg that there is a huge gap between being able to learn a language and actually learning it.

Greg tried to turn to the people behind him without actually turning his head, “Did either of you catch what language that was?”

“I don’t know”, said Tony Tony, “Turkish?”

“It’s Dryadish, the native language of the Dryads”, pointed out Free Flower

“Oh”, said Greg, in dull surprise, “Can you speak Dryadish?”

Free Flower shook her head, and Greg realized he had asked the wrong question.

“Can you understand Dryadish?”

Free Flower shook her head again. Damn, thought Greg.

He turned back to the Dryads and pointed to himself, “Greg”, he said, slowly and loudly. No one did anything for so long that Greg considered repeating himself, but then one of the younger looking Dryads pointed to herself and made a noise like a man tobogganing down a pebble mountain while playing a frantic drum solo.

Undiscouraged Greg began to restate his speech from before, through the medium of improvised sign language. He was even slightly put out when Tony Tony interrupted him by saying, “I bet Clare could speak Dryadish.”

Greg let the image of one of his reporters fill his mind. Clare, he thought, tall woman, slim, willowy. For the first time in his entire life he attempted to apply that adjective to a woman, and found it fitted perfectly. A suspicion began to form in his mind, “She’s not, you know, half Dryad, is she?”

“Quarter, actually. It was her Maternal grandfather”

Greg tried to wrap his head around the logistics of this new information; as much as Dryads looked like women, they were clearly still trees; Rough bark and all. “Her father must have been an interesting man”, he concluded, resolving to think the matter through at a more opportune time. “Can I borrow your phone, Tony Tony?”

Apparently he could, since Tony Tony handed it over. Greg dialed the number he had memorized ten years ago.

It was a familiar voice that answered, “Hello, Daily Soap Box, How May I Direct Your Call?”

“Hello Sandra, its Greg here.”

“Ah Evening, Boss”, pause, “How Did You Know It Was Me?”

“Lucky guess, listen I need to talk to Clare”

“Putting You Through Now, Boss”

There was ringing, and then.

Click-“Sir, is that you?”

“It’s me, listen, can you speak Dryadish?”

“A little, Sir. What my mum taught me”

“Thank gods. I need you to translate for me”

“I’m ready sir”

He told her what he wanted to say, and she burst out laughing. It wasn’t the reaction he had been expecting.

“What’s the matter?”

“Sir that will never work; Dryads are nature’s businessmen, they won’t even understand what you’re asking them. Dryads don’t grant favors, it always has to be a deal, a trade.”

Greg nodded; he knew he didn’t have much to trade. “Tell them that I’m lord Redfox’s natural born son”

Even through several hundred kilometers and a radio connection, Greg could still feel Clare’s eyes boggling, “Are you?”

“Just tell them that”

Clare giggled, “All right, but if you’re lying to them, then you had better hope that they don’t find you out. Sir.”

“Thanks for the tip Clare, are you ready?”

“Sure thing sir, hold the phone up for them”

Greg did so. A sound like a tap-dancing avalanche began to emanate from the phone.

*

Five minutes later they were in another locked room, but the others didn’t seem to mind much. “Look they have beds!” cried out Tony Tony, happy to the point of tears, “and a real life bathroom!”

Greg left him to it, he wanted to wash as well but he decided it could wait a while. He noticed that Free Flower had walked straight to the window and was watching out.

Greg realized that he was glad Free Flower was there, she had recognized the Dryadish when neither he nor Tony Tony could. In spite of his initial misgivings he was beginning to suspect that she would be a valuable asset.

He joined her at the window ledge, “Where did you learn to recognize Dryadish?” he asked

“I’ve been around”, Said Free Flower, and that seemed to be it. She didn’t volunteer any more information, and Greg didn’t push the issue. Together they watched as the sun set and the dragons grew restless.

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Scene Fifteen

In which we acquire another group.

Clare’s eyes were on her screen but she wasn’t reading. Greg and Tony Tony were off on an adventure somewhere, making deals with the wild Dryads, and probably doing all kinds of other exciting things too, and here she was, doing exactly the same thing she did yesterday. The injustice rankled.

Clare was bored, and if she was anything Clare was a woman who didn’t deal well with boredom. She was also high enough in the command chain to be able to set her own assignments. Tony Tony and Greg were doing something secret, and in Clare’s mind the word secret was synonymous with interesting.

Certainly the readers were interested by interesting stories, weren’t they?

Tony Tony and Greg were off on an adventure, she was stuck here, but she had a duty as a reporter to chase this story, right?

She walked the width of her office and poked her head out the door, “Oh Frankie”, she called, “just out of curiosity, how much tracking do you remember from your army days?

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Scene Sixteen

In which recent events are discussed

Lord Greenbadger sipped a glass of red wine, and watched the sun rise. The wine was in fact of an excellent vintage, but to him it all tasted the same. Wine, art, fine music, he enjoyed all of them in their own way, but they were really all there for the benefit of his guests. Lord Greenbadger had leant long ago the benefit of appearance.

The sunrise however, was beautiful. Lord Greenbadger let himself drink it in while he thought about Lord Redfox’s Will. They were, he thought, five days in, and the visitors to the manor hadn’t dropped off yet. That was to be expected perhaps, it would take time for overseas visitors to arrive, and many of those he had already chased off would want to come back for another shot, you saw those trends in other wills, and Lord Redfox had had an enormous family. Still it meant another busy day for him; he had managed to chase off all five people who had showed up yesterday, and today it looked like he could expect another five.

He considered Bluequail, Lord Bluefinch’s son. The man had, like all the others, through ignorance or arrogance, shown up in the belief that it would be easy to claim his inheritance, Lord Greenbadger allowed himself a faint smile, five days on and he certainly no longer believed that. Still the little man was holding on, and Lord Greenbadger was somewhat impressed, he was like a little scrappy bulldog. But still, Lord Greenbadger sipped his wine and dismissed the man from his mind; he would be stepping up the pressure today, and he felt fairly sure that his Cousin would do the same, so the man would never make it to the reading; if he managed to stay in the house, then he would just drop of stress, which would solve the problem nicely, even if it would smell somewhat.

He turned his attention to the man Greg. That one had come out of left field for him; he hadn’t even been aware of the man’s existence, much less that he could be a serious threat. Not for the first time he was impressed by his cousin’s foresight, she had seen him coming years ago and prepared accordingly. He had been monitoring his cousin’s communications and been very impressed with what this, – Greg, – had managed.

There was a new group forming in the offices of the man’s news paper, Greenbadger was letting them; if they kept reporting back on their progress then it would be a good source of information for him, and he was rather curious to find out, exactly what this, Greg, had been doing with the Dryads.

That just left his cousin, the good Lady Greenroe. With the greatest respect to the new man, Lord Greenbadgr felt that she was still his greatest threat. She was cunning, ruthless, and she had a pre established worldwide network. It was only the fact that she was mostly ignorant of communications that allowed him to keep a somewhat upper hand, and he knew it.

Lord Greenbadger drained his glass. That would be it, he thought to himself, her, me and him, around that table on the thirtieth. And then it would be Lord Redfox’s move.

The sun was almost up. He let the last of the sky turn a brilliant early-morning blue, and then he stood. It would be a busy day; he could feel it. He turned on his heel and walked back inside his house.

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Scene Seventeen

In which troops are mobilized.

Clare felt like a drill sergeant, as she paced back and forth; inspecting her assembled men. She reached the end of the row, turned and walked back; making notes as she passed.

Frankie defiantly looked the part; he had managed to dig up good quality hard weather gear at very short notice. She saw that he was standing like a coiled spring; a man on top of the diving board. Clare realized he was fighting the urge to snap to attention, and she felt like giggling.

Andrew was wearing his normal work clothes; wrinkled and smelling somewhat like fear. Clare wasn’t happy about him, but Sandra had made it quite clear what she thought about walking off the job, and it didn’t seem to matter how many times Clare explained that they were following up a lead, Sandra was still immovable.

She left Andrew shivering like a cadged animal, and walked past her third man. Ants was slouched in a large plush armchair[1]. Although now that Clare thought about it, – slouched, – was definitely the wrong word, since it implied that the subject was still upright; Ants had found a way to sit comfortably while his head was scraping the carpet. Clare wondered why she didn’t find this odd, and then it occurred to her that she had never seen Ants in any position other than sprawling and looking bored.

They may have been only one third soldiers but Clare still felt like a drill sergeant. She turned on her heal at the end of the line and called “Atend-Shun!”. Frankie rapped his heals together in a text book attention, and looked much relived. Andrew froze up like a board; making Clare worried that he was going to tip over. Ants rolled his eyes over to her and gave her a contemptuous look. That’s about what I expected, thought Clare; satisfied.

She turned and walked in front of them, turned away for a moment to gather herself, and then turned on her heel to address them. “Men!”, she belted out, in the most booming voice a slim, twenty three year old woman could muster, “Are you ready to take part in the greatest adventure of our lives?”

“Yes Sah!” snapped out Frankie, in a far more impressive booming voice.

“R-r-right”, said Andrew, looking terrified

Ants grunted, It sound vaguely affirmative.

“Ants!” said Clare, keen not to lose the momentum, “Is the helicopter, ready?”

Ants nodded; dusting the carpet.

Clare turned to Frankie, “Are you still ready to fly the helicopter?”

“Yes Sah, I am.”

“Andrew, are you ready to man our communication equipment; defending it to your death?”

“Well- Death, I mean, I never-”

“Andrew!”

“Yes!”

“Good!”

Clare felt wonderful, when they make a movie of my life , she decided, I want this scene to be in it. “Everything’s ready then. Ants; man your station here. Frankie, Andrew; follow me to the roof. Wove Out!”

And indeed they were moving out, and everything was going well, and then her phone rang.

Scene Eighteen

In which a deal is made.

Greg was in front of the Dryads again, alone this time. He was holding Tony Tony’s phone up again; listening to what sounded to him like a small nuclear confrontation, fed through a wet mesh wall.

Eventually the sound stopped and he held the phone against his ear, “They’re offering you a deal Sir,” said Clare , “you have to stop some sort of apocalypse that’s going on down below right now. If you do that, they’ll take you to Transylvania.”

Greg focused on the important thing, “Apocalypse?” he asked

“Their word; not mine.”

“Actually I suspect their word was something like-” he scratched the phone against his four day beard.

Clare sounded shocked, “How did you know that.” She asked, “Sir.” she added, apparently quite genuinely

“Lucky guess, can you tell me where we are?”

“Sure sir, if you could just hold up the phone for me again”

“You know what Clare; I’m suddenly not so curious.” said Greg, who had been locked in his room for most of the day, and was quite keen for something to happen.

“Ok Sir, what do you want me to do?”

Greg considered, “Tell them I accept”, he said.

*

Five minutes later Greg was staring down on a ping pong ball sky, Tony Tony and Free Flower were there beside him.

Tony Tony looked up at Greg and asked, “Are you really Lord Redfox’s son?”

“What?”

“What you told the Dryads earlier, are you really Lord Redfox’s son?”

Greg looked at his friend carefully, weighing him up. Finally he replied, “Yes I am”

Tony Tony looked confused, “Why did you always call him your uncle then?”

“It’s a werewolf thing, we never use close titles to refer to our relatives”

“Why?”

Somehow it had never occurred to Greg to ask that question, “I don’t really know, it’s just always been like that.”

“Ah”, said Tony Tony, grinning wryly, “It’s traditional”

Greg felt like he could laugh, “Yes”, he said, “I suppose it is.”

The Troll that had escorted them to the edge came back now. He, or she, Greg couldn’t be quite sure which, had three bundles in his arms. For a mad moment Greg thought of little troll babies, but then the troll handed them out and he saw that they were backpacks, a little bit old, but otherwise fine backpacks.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so Greg started to pull on his backpack, which turned out to be surprisingly heavy, full of food maybe? Out of the corner of his eye, Grey noticed the others doing the same.

He got the backpack on; including the fiddly little security straps, and then he stood and waited. The troll seemed to be waiting too; at any rate it wasn’t doing much. Greg wondered how they were going to get down to ground level, some kind of air taxi? A special dragon perhaps?

“What do you think is in these things?” asked Tony Tony. Greg shrugged, he didn’t really have an answer, and he didn’t think it was that important, free stuff was free stuff.

Something was poking him in the back; he shifted uncomfortably and reached underneath his pack. When his hand came back it was holding a plastic gripping handle on a short piece of cord. Far too late his brain started to make the connection between the cord, the sky and the large troll, who was still standing behind them.

“Tony Tony,” he said slowly, “I’m not sure these are-”

Then the troll pushed them over the edge.

Greg took freefall well; he stayed calm and observed around him. He could see dragons whipping upwards and past him, like the floors outside a glass elevator, the sky was still the same impenetrable white. Somewhere above him Free Flower was sweeping acrobatically, she looked like she was having fun, so he left her to it. Tony Tony was thrashing around, and looked like he was using the kinds of words that make rushing wind a bonus. Greg yelled at him to calm down but his words were swallowed too, it probably didn’t matter though, Tony Tony had great survival instincts, he would pull the cord before he hit the ground.

Suddenly the sky cleared under his feet, and Greg dropped into clean and clear sunshine. He was elated, then a moment later, confused; very, very confused. He pulled his rip cord so he could get a better look.

It looked like the beetle from a horror movie he had seen as a child; in that it was at least twenty stories high. Then he noticed that the area behind it was devoid of trees, and he understood.

“It’s a tree clearer”, he said aloud, “A mobile lumber factory. That’s incredible!”

He noticed that Tony Tony had opened his chute as well, and was drifting down next to him, giving him a funny look. “And an apocalypse”, he added, “I can see why the Dryads are upset. But still you have to admit this is clever; think of the profit margins on this thing!”

Tony Tony just smiled and shook his head, and together they took in the sight in front of them.

“I say we land a little way away”, said Greg, “that way we can check out the guards and the procedures”

“Nah,” said Tony Tony, “The sun’s starting to go down, I say we just land on it, go the ‘honored diplomat’ route, it’s always worked before.”

Greg nodded, and together the two men drifted down.

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Scene Nineteen

In which our heroes have a familiar experience.

When morning came, Greg opened his eyes and stared at the bottom of the bunk above him. He was a prisoner; this time there was no ambiguity. Greg felt annoyed, “We’ll walk right in, the man says. “Honored diplomats, the man says.”

Tony Tony’s voice came from the bunk above him, “look will you leave it Greg, I said I was sorry. Anyway it’s always worked for me before”

“Yes, but I bet you were always wearing a clean suit before”

“My suit is clean”, said Tony Tony, sounding indignant, and Greg had to admit that it was, he had seen Tony Tony, painstakingly washing his suit in their room’s sink.

“Less wrinkled then”, said Greg. But he knew that it wasn’t really Tony Tony’s fault, and he left him alone.

The two men lay in silence. There wasn’t much to listen to this deep in the beetle, but there was the white noise from the light, and somewhere, the dripping of a tap. Since they hadn’t been given a tap or anything like it, Greg wondered if the sound was being piped into the cells to irritate the inmates, if it was, then it was working.

“Free Flower was right behind us when we landed, right?” asked Tony Tony.

Greg was very happy to have something else to focus on. “Yes, I think she was”

“Well they didn’t take her in with us; do you think the woman’s prison is in another part of the beetle?”

Greg thought about this, “These cells probably don’t get much use, way out here.” He said. “So there wouldn’t really be a need for separate gender cells”.

“Then she’s probably still free.”

Greg realized that it wasn’t a question, he answered anyway. “They probably wouldn’t put her in the same cell as us, but yeh, if they had caught her we would have heard them outside.”

“So is that the plan? We’re just waiting for her to rescue us?”

“It’s not the manliest option, but yeh. I don’t think we could escape from here so we’re basically waiting for someone else to do something.”

Tony Tony shifted in the bunk above, “I’m not so sure about that ‘can’t escape’ thing. Remember when we ended up in that Turkish prison together?”

“I thought we swore never to mention that again.”

“Ok then, how about the time we were in Scott base, and the people there ended up locking us in a store cupboard, ‘for our own protection’. The point I’m trying to make is that this is definitely not the first time we have been in prison, and it wouldn’t be the first time we would’ve escaped either.”

Greg let his eyes search the room, taking in the bullet proof, one way glass which served as their door, the toilet which had to be flushed from outside their cell, and most of all, the thick, thick walls which didn’t make a sound when you hit them, “Somehow,” he said, ”I don’t think it will be that easy”

“So, we wait?”

“We wait”

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Scene Twenty

In which expensive things are found

Free Flower was lost.

It was annoying, but there you go. She just wasn’t good at the insides of building.

She knew she had seen, among other things, a well equipped emergency room, numerous rooms filled with sturdy looking equipment which she hadn’t recognized, and absolutely countless break rooms; filled with cigarette machines. She tried to remember the order they had come in, but failed. Then she tried to retrace he steps back to where she had come in, but failed. She was truly lost, and it was annoying her.

She couldn’t even say how long she had been, alternatively walking and resting, she felt sure that it must be at least morning, but she had no watch to check. The beetle seemed to follow a schedule of its own, sometimes the corridors were swarmed with workman, and sometimes it was completely deserted.

She had been worried, at first, about the number of people who had seen her, and she had tried to appear businesslike; as though she were someone important. After a while she had realized it didn’t matter, no one was going to report the half naked woman wandering the corridors, she suspected they were afraid that someone would make her stop.

She was in yet another endless corridor with doors lining both sides. She walked along, testing door handles as she went. One opened for her, but it was a broom closet, containing nothing more interesting than a worn down mop. She closed the door and walked on.

As she walked, one of the doors opened for her. She turned on the impulse and walked in, brushing against the exiting technician as she did so. The man made a shocked kind of flutter as the door closed between them, but the door didn’t open again, and she hadn’t really expected it to.

The room was filled with squat monoliths of plastic and aluminum. They didn’t visibly do anything; they just sat there, looking grave and important. Free Flower didn’t know much about computers, but she noticed that the room was air conditioned, and she knew enough to read that as a good sign.

The technician looked as though he had been doing something important, his tool kit, filled mostly with abstract pieces of plastic, was still sitting open by one of the monoliths, which she noticed was open too. Free Flower thought about what she was going to do if the technician came back, but she decided that she could probably handle him no matter what his intentions.

She looked inside the monolith; it wasn’t any shinier than the outside, but it hummed deeply, like a choir of Franciscan monks celebrating the apocalypse.

Free Flower took a step back and thought about her next move. They were here to shut this whole operation down, and she had clearly stumbled upon an important place in the beetle, maybe even the nerve center. There were probably more elegant ways to close down a logging operation, but finding such an important place was incredible providence, and in the story of her life she would be doing herself a great disservice if she ignored this plot device.

She noticed that, sitting out of place in the technician’s toolbox, was a fifteen inch crescent wrench.

She took one last look around the high tech canyon. This looks expensive, she concluded.

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Scene Twenty One

In which our heroes meet their captor

Greg was surprised when the guard came to get them; he would have left them for seventy two hours, so that they would be a little bit broken when the interrogation came; someone was clearly keen to speak to them.

They walked through featureless corridors.

It occurred to Greg that he would’ve also kept them in separate sound proof cells, and given them a corner rather than a toilet.

There were two armed guards directly in front of them and two guards directly behind, there was also a guard about twenty feet behind and in front of the procession. It was, thought Greg, a slick job, professional. This seemed odd to him; it was a weird mismatch of competencies; so good at prisons, yet so bad at interrogations, he wondered just who was running this operation.

Greg tried to map out their path in his head, but it was impossible, there was just nothing to distinguish one corridor from another. There weren’t even people, the whole place seemed deserted. Throughout the whole trip Greg saw only one other man; a computer technician who hurried down a side corridor towards them, but then saw them and sprinted in the other direction, looking shocked. Greg wondered if word had been put out to avoid them, it wasn’t unreasonable; it would defiantly stop them from spreading messages around the crew, but then if the crew had been ordered to avoid them he would have expected to see them peeking around corners and through half open doors. It was all very odd.

They walked into another corridor, and Greg noticed that at the end of it was a much more ornate door than all the others, in fact it looked like someone had gone to the huge effort of decorating it with fig leaves of gold plating, Greg thought it was a nice affect, but completely unnecessary. He formed that opinion before he saw the room.

After he had walked through the door, Greg revised his opinion. No man, he knew, could ever walk from the blandness of the rest of the beetle into this room without suffering a heart attack. A step up was needed, something to dull the need for aesthetic stimulation before hitting it with the equivalent of a sense grenade; that was what the door was for.

“Do you like it?” asked a voice in an easy Texan drawl.

Greg nodded.

Then he remembered where he was and forced his ears and his eyes to work together again. Where? He thought. There! He answered.

He was sitting on the leather couch, wearing the kind of cowboy suit that Greg had only ever seen in movies, and smoking a cigar. Greg thought he looked completely ridiculous, and rich to the point of obscenity.

The man indicated to two lazy boys in front of him; Greg took Tony Tony by the shoulder and steered him down, then he took the other seat for himself. Tony Tony was still staring into space. Greg hoped he would snap out of it soon, he knew he wasn’t good at one to one situations.

The cowboy man spoke first, “I am glad you dropped in when you did, boys” he drawled, “I was only dropping by to check the running of this part of my business, another day and you would have missed me entirely”

Greg nodded again, he didn’t know who this man was or what he wanted; so he was holding his cards very close to his chest.

The man was clearly waiting for a response, but when none came he seemed to change to tactics. He held up a bottle of amber liquid, “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

Greg thought of subtle poisons and shook his head. “Suit yourself” the man said, pouring himself a generous measure.

He took a sip and fixed Greg with his eyes, “Who are you?” he asked directly.

Greg looked at Tony Tony, saw that he was still staring into space, and decided to go with what worked. “I’m a diplomat”, he said, with as much confidence as he could muster, “From the Dryads”

“Really,” said the man, “I wasn’t aware there were any apple trees in the Amazon”

Amazon eh? Greg filed that information away for later. “I don’t believe there are, but the Dryads seem to object to such large scale logging.”

The man nodded, stood up, and walked to the window which made up most of two of the walls.”Tell me Mister…”

Greg invented wildly, “Johnson”

“Johnson, do you believe in the greater good?”

“Yes, I believe so”

“With this machine I can collect lumber at a rate that is an order of magnitude faster than what was possible before, I have used that lumber to build houses, school, and hospitals, can you argue that this is a bad thing?”

Greg couldn’t. He formed a dozen counter arguments, mostly about the damage he was doing to achieve his good ends. But he didn’t use any of them, instead he said, “Your prison procedure are inadequate”

The man looked as though he had just been slapped with an octopus. Greg loved that look; do something unexpected and suddenly it’s a whole new game, he thought, and I’m the one writing the rules.

“What do you mean?”

“Prisoners who come in together shouldn’t be housed together; they give each other support, keep each other sane. You should house them in separate sound proof rooms; just leave them there for a few days then they’ll be more favorably disposed to whatever deal you offer.”

The man stroked his mustache thoughtfully, “I suppose that’s true”, he conceded

Then there was a grinding noise and everything lurched sideways. Tony Tony’s survival instincts jerked him back to earth “That sounded expensive”, he said.

Then there was a much bigger lurch, and the man was thrown against a wooden sculpture, he lay still. Greg’s brain kicked into overdrive, new game, new rules. He grabbed Tony Tony, who had been making for the fallen Texan, and together they made for the door.

Evacuation alarms were blaring and by the time they made it to the door only one guard was left; he saw them and the fallen man at the same moment, and made his choice. “Stay here!” he demanded, while gesturing at the ground, and then he ran inside.

Greg and Tony Tony sprinted down the hallway. Tony Tony tried to follow the lighted arrows to the EvacBlimps but Greg caught him by the collar and pulled him into a darkened corridor.

Then a series of explosions ripped the structure.

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Scene Twenty Two

In which we learn little because it’s a very short scene.

Johnson was watching the sunset when Devlin barreled out of the jet, “They’re in the Amazon”, he yelled.

Johnson sighed, “Let me finish my coffee first”, he said.

“Our orders were to take off as soon as we knew where we were going”, said Devlin

“It will take us all night to fly to the Amazon, an extra few minutes won’t hurt”

“Nevertheless, we have our orders”, said Devlin, in tone of voice that seemed to suggest that this settled the argument.

Johnson sighed again, he was beginning to wish that he had been partnered with someone a bit older, less eager to prove himself, and most of all, less love struck. He drained the rest of his coffee in one gulp, “Coffee’s finished” he said, “Let’s go.”

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Scene Twenty Three

In which our heroes receive a warning

The sun wasn’t even out yet, everything was dark.

Tony Tony liked to rise with the sun. Many people took that to mean that he could somehow go with less sleep than the people around him, but that wasn’t it; sun rise was just the time he was set to wake up.

So he was annoyed when someone shook him awake and he looked up to see stars above him. “Go away, Greg”, he grunted, “It’s still morning”.

“Get up!” whispered a voice which clearly wasn’t Greg, “I need to tell you something important.”

There was a lot of sleep deprivation in-between Tony Tony’s instincts and quick action, but they drove through it like a hydraulic ram. With a ripping sensation in his brain his danger sense came to the fore,. Tony Tony’s whole body was tensed like a spring, and then he relaxed it; he knew he didn’t have to fight; something just wasn’t right with that idea.

The figure lifted away from him, and hurried into the jungle. There were still some lights from the numerous small fires burning on the wreck of the beetle, and Tony Tony took the opportunity to get a good look at the figure. But it was no good; the figure was wearing a full traveling robe, pulled low down in front of the face. Wondering where a person found a full traveling cloak nowadays, Tony Tony followed.

They had chosen to sleep in the middle of a clearing. The clearing had been burnt there by some sort of flaming liquid, but they had decided that the risk of toxicity was lower than the risk of sleeping outside in the Amazon rainforest. Greg walked a little bit out of the clearing, and the figure was waiting for him there.

“Listen”, the figure said; using the deep, flat tones which women use when they are trying to disguise their voice as a man’s, “There’s a woman in Transylvania, she’s your enemy, she’s the one who crashed your plane over Australia”

“Right?” said Tony Tony, feeling justifiable cynical.

“Yes” said the ‘not a woman’, “She doesn’t want Greg at the reading of the will”

That caught Greg’s attention. “That so?” he said

“Yes, she’s sending men after you, they’ll be here soon”

“Really?” said Tony Tony, looking around.

“Yes, now listen, you can’t go with them, whatever happens don’t go with them”

“Ok” said Tony Tony, “but how will I know when they’re here?”

The heavily robed woman pointed over his shoulder. He turned and saw the huge plane, sweeping the debris of the beetle with a spotlight. “Ah”, he said.

“Don’t go with them,” said the woman anxiously.

“Ok!”, said Tony Tony, getting into the spirit of things.

The woman turned to go, but then spun back.

“And don’t hurt them.”

“Ok!”, said Tony Tony.

The woman turned to go, but then spun back.

“And don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

“Ok”, said Tony Tony

The woman turned to go, but then spun back, grabbed him by the collar, pressed herself against him, and kissed him, hard. Tony Tony wondered why she had ever pretended to be a man in the first place.

Then the woman broke away, hurried into the jungle, and was gone.

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Scene Twenty Four

In which our heroes receive an offer.

“There they are”, said Devlin, “In the middle of the clearing.”

“Good,” said Johnson, “Finally. Lower the intensity of the spotlight; we know where they are now, and if we stop blinding them it will work as a peace offering”

Devlin nodded, and dialed it down. “Is there a procedure for this?” he asked.

“We land next to them, and then one of us goes out and meets them”

“One of us?”

“We’re threatening enough as is”

“Right.”, said Devlin, looking around for a place to land, “There’s nothing here” he muttered

“What?”

“There’s nowhere we can land, this whole place is solid rainforest with a few gaps too small to get the jet through”

“What about a convenient piece of metal from, whatever the hell that thing was”

“It’s all too buckled,” said Devlin, “Which of us is going down?”

“Do you want the job?”

“Yes actually I do”

Johnson smiled; Devlin suspected he was thinking something about the follies of youth. “Alright,” he said, “the jet can only hover for 30 seconds at a time, so after I drop you off I’ll have to fly a wide circle around to keep my engines clear, that ok?”

“I’m ready”, said Devlin, he distinctly heard Johnson murmur ‘Of course you are.’He ignored it and walked to the door.

“Alright, when you’re ready.” said Johnson.

He opened the door and rolled down the ladder, and then he slid down, slowing himself by brushing his fingers on the rungs. He hoped he looked impressive.

When he turned around they were all watching him. He took note of the fact that they had picked up a woman from somewhere, it was too late to call it in now, and he would have to improvise. “Mr Greg” he said, Mr. Tomson, Mam, I am Agent Devlin from the FBI. I’ve been sent here, light of what has happened, to offer you sanctuary, if yo-

“I call bullcrap and accuse you of working for a woman in Transylvania”, Mr. Tomson cut across him.

Devlin fought to stop the shock spreading across his face; he wasn’t sure he was successful. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”, he said, in his best, ‘not utterly shocked’ voice.

It wasn’t good enough. An easy smile spread across Tony Tony’s face, it was the kind of smile that cats get when they corner a mouse, or fat people get when they see an ‘all you can eat’, it was the kind of smile that said, I’ve got you and you can’t get away.

“Well thanks for the offer, Agent Devlin, but I think we can find our own way”

“What? We’re in the middle of the Amazon, how do you plan on going anywhere?”

Tony Tony gave a knowing jerk of his head, and Devlin turned just in time to see something huge drop out of the sky. The thing landed only a few feet to his left, and to his shock he recognized it as an albino smoke dragon; his uncle had had a ranch until an arsonist had burned it down, to his greater shock he recognized the rider as a hulking great troll. When did that happen? Why were they here? What happened in the days they couldn’t follow them?

To his utter horror the three of them started climbing on the dragons back.

Devlin thought. He knew that he couldn’t force the three of them to stop; there were too many of them, and then there was the dragon, the troll, and he had just noticed that the woman was carrying a sword. The jet’s weapons could handle them, but he had been ordered not to use lethal force. After all that time waiting, his quarry was mere feet away from him and they were walking away, and there wasn’t anything that he could do about it.

“Wait!” he cried out desperately.

Tony Tony stopped walking, but he didn’t stop smiling. “Yes?” he said.

But Devlin’s mind was blank; no miraculous words came to his rescue. Tony Tony shook his head and chuckled. Devlin could only watch numbly as he boarded the dragon, and then disappeared into the twilight sky, fading to a dot, and then vanishing into the rising sun.

Devlin didn’t think he had ever felt so powerless in his entire life.

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Scene Twenty Five

In which one of our antagonists has a good mope.

The day slipped past for Devlin, and before he knew it, it was sunset. He sat on what looked very much like a gun turret and let the heat seep into him.

Her footsteps were completely silent, but he knew she was there; all men in love have this power. She stood behind him and wrapped her arms around him, “Bad day, honey?” she said

“Worse than you can imagine” he replied; he let himself fall back, resting himself against her, “I’m glad you’re here Charlotte.”

She ran her fingers through his hair, “Tell me all about it”, she said

“They got away. I had them right there, honest to god, right there; but Mr. Tomson knew who I was working for, and they just walked away.” He could feel himself sinking slightly just talking about it.

“He knew who you were working for? How could he know that?”

“I don’t know”, moaned Devlin, ”I wish I knew but I don’t, I’ve been wondering about it all day.”

He felt Charlotte sigh, she started to rub his hand, and he found it relaxing. “How bad is it, are they gone for good?”

“No. Apparently Jonson managed to put a tracking device on one of them while I was standing there like a moron, I don’t really know how he managed that. We’ve just been watching the readout all day long”

“Where are they headed?”

“South east; it looks like their heading for Transylvania, which means that we utterly failed.”He paused, and then said the next bit very quickly. “And it also means that Jonson expecting lethal authorization to come though any minute now, Charlotte I’ve never killed anyone before!”

He felt glad she was still holding him, “I don’t know what I’m going to have to do when we catch up with them”

“Look into my eyes”, she said. He did so, she had beautiful blue eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

Devlin suddenly felt that the world was simplified, he had his goal, and he knew he could focus on it. “I want to finish my mission” he said, “I want to win your mothers approval, and I want to marry you.”

“And when the time comes to complete your mission, what are you going to do”

“Whatever is necessary.”, Devlin could feel his confidence growing, life is always easier with a plan

“But, you can’t do that tonight, so what are you going to do instead?”

“Get a good night’s sleep”

He felt her sigh, and she squeezed him tighter, pressing herself against him. “What are you going to do first?”

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Scene Twenty Six

In which one of our heroes goes home, briefly

For the first time in almost twenty years, Greg smelled the cool Transylvanian air again. He breathed in deeply, savoring it like a noticeably tasteless wine, which nevertheless comes with many memories attached.

Tony Tony was watching him, “You’re happy” he said

Greg considered the statement; “Yes” he said “I suppose I am. By shear random chance we set up a good history with a group which might become very powerful in the future, and we got to where we were going with twenty two days to go”

Tony Tony was grinning, “Were you sure the whole time that the Dryads would keep their deal?” he asked.

“No”, said Greg, “I kept thinking we would have to steal parachutes again. But no, they were good businessmen, they kept their side of the bargain, and now we just have to lay low until the reading of the will.”

He realized that Free Flower was nudging him in the ribs. He turned around, almost gleefully, and then he saw what she had seen. “Well bugger,” he said, “They were good businessmen”

It could be a coincidence, he acknowledged the possibility; he just didn’t believe it. It was entirely possible that the place they had landed could just be a sacred site to the Dwarfs, and five hundred armed warriors, out on a training jog, were just hurrying towards them to explain that fact, but Greg thought it was more likely that the shrewd Dryads had realized that they had a valuable asset in Lord Redfox’s son, and found away to sell him to the highest bidder while still upholding their deal.

Greg was impressed by the Dryad’s business sense. He was also very annoyed, and resolved to never trust a talking apple tree again.

Still, as he understood it, his uncle had mostly ended the century’s long feud between werewolves and Dwarfs. He wasn’t sure what the Dwarfs wanted with him, but he had a feeling that the threat of violence was there to keep him in line, rather than to actually be followed through on.

This hope was lessened somewhat when the Dwarfs reached them and spread out into a well executed surround maneuver. Dwarfs disappeared behind rocks, and reappeared with guns trained on them, and suddenly Greg realized that no matter which way he turned he was staring into the barrels of a great many weapons.

Greg decided to go the diplomacy route anyway. “Well met,” he said, “To what do we owe this greeting?”

One of the Dwarfs;, who was clearly the leader, by merit of having the largest horns on his helmet, stepped forward. “Are you Redfox’s son?”, he asked, in a voice almost as gravelly as a Dryads.

Greg noticed three things in that sentence.

The first was the absence of the honorific. That really didn’t bode well; a werewolf Lord never appeared without his title, and Greg thought the name looked naked without it.

The second was the fact that the Dwarf knew that he was his uncle’s son. That meant that he had been right about the Dryads selling him away, he wondered how they had managed to conduct an auction without the ability to speak a human language. Maybe they could speak Dwarfish, he thought.

The third was that it was clearly ridiculous that the Dwarf would have a thoroughly modern automatic rifle slung over his back, while wearing chainmail and a horned helmet. He wasn’t quite sure about Dwarfish culture, but he felt sure that the chainmail at least wasn’t traditional.

He thought all this in the tiniest fraction of a second, considered it in the second, and acted on it in the third. “Technically I am, but I was never close to my father while I was growing up.”, he laughed, and he knew it sounded genuine, “Heck, until I was seven I couldn’t even remember his name half the time, people kept having to remind me.” He knew he was convincing, heck it was very nearly the truth.

Greg thought that he could see a couple of Dwarfs out of the corner of this eye, shifting uncomfortably, but he kept his eyes on the leader, who was clearly unimpressed. “I think you are lying to me, I think you are a filthy human liar.” He said.

Oh dear, thought Greg, certain aspects of the Dwarfen religion coming back to him, we’re dealing with a fanatic. Well, that’s reasoned debate out of the window, he looked around, and noticed that the follower’s guns were still being pointed at him in an efficient and professional manner, I really wish I had another option, he thought.

The leader had started to hum, it was a deep throbbing tone, his followers took up the pitch, and soon the whole cliff top was thrumming with the noise. The leader opened his mouth and began to speak.

And so Ka’tol the painfully tall went from the gaze of TAK and he knew his wife, who bore him a son, And thou came the birth of the three tribes of Hu’man. And as Ka’tol went from the gaze of TAK and was not a Dwarf, so were his son’s not Dwarfs, nor their son’s else. And all who trade with the hu’man, or give him bread, are not Dwarfs. for the Hu’man are hideous aberrations, and if they displease thou, thou must dash their heads against the stones.

The leader stopped speaking. Gradually the humming died away. There was a long respectful silence; even nature seemed to be holding its breath. Eventually Tony Tony spoke “I can’t help but notice that shooting us is not the same as dashing our heads against stones.”

The leader looked at Tony Tony, Greg saw madness in those eyes. “We tend towards an allegorical interpretation of the Dek’bul”

“But I thought that the Dwarfs and the humans were peaceful, and that’s been like that for centuries, it was only the werewolves that kept the feud going, and that ended-”

“PERVERTS!”, screamed the leader, and now Greg saw rage and madness in his eyes, they meshed well together. “They are PERVERTS and not Dwarfs! So says TAK! Werewolves and vampires, they are all human! We do not forget!”

“Forget what?”, asked a bewildered Tony Tony

“WE DO NOT FORGET!”, screamed the leader, apparently under the impression that saying something loud enough makes it automatically true, “The Dwarfs are nearly gone, but as long as we live, Dwarfs remain! WE shall prune the diseased branch, AND BUILD DWARFS ANEW!”

Greg noticed, with more sheer terror than he had felt in a long time that Free Flower was drawing her sword. Before he could even move, for the T[1] time in the last week, everything went to hell.

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Scene Twenty Seven

In which our hero regains consciousness.

Greg felt very muzzy, and the back of his head felt sticky. He didn’t remember hitting his head, he didn’t remember a lot actually. He lay there; in what he felt sure was grass, until it occurred to him that not being able to remember the recent past was not a normal thing.

He focused.

There had been a crazy Dwarf, yes, and he had been yelling, and there had been guns, danger, that was right, and Free Flower, she had drawn her sword, why had she done that? No answer came; he resolved to think about it more when the time was convenient.

What had he done? He had grabbed the closest thing, the Dwarfs helmet, right. Greg’s brow furrowed, a cultural artifact, that could get him killed the next time he met the dwarf, ah well, he was going to be killed this time as well.

Why had he taken the helmet? Right, he had done the levitation trick. Down a cliff face! Had he really done it down a cliff face? He looked up, apparently he had.

The Dwarfs must still be up there he thought, there was no way they would have assumed he was dead. After he had taken a Dwarf’s helmet, they would have thought nothing of climbing down the cliff and seeking out his corpse, just to desecrate it.

Where was the helmet? He focused around him and found the helmet within arm’s reach, there was blood on one of the horns. He felt the back of his head gingerly, it was a fairly deep cut but it seemed to have closed, and it matched the horn, so that was one mystery solved.

What else was injured? He focused on his own body, and virtually every part lined up with a complaint. He was bruised, and shaken, and scratched everywhere, and his leg seemed to be broken. He focused on his leg, it was in a lot of pain, and it seemed to have an extra, unusually flexible, knee. Yep it was broken. Bugger.

Greg knew that he had to move, he had to move now; if at all possible he would like to have moved several minutes ago. But a man can’t just amble away on a broken leg, and then there was the question of just where he was going. Anywhere; as long as it’s not here, he answered himself, and he set about looking for something to use as a crutch.

While doing this he glared at the helmet, it was no help at all. He also yelled, “Help!” in a loud clear voice, more for the sake of completeness than because he expected anyone to hear. He also threw himself out of the way to avoid the bright yellow taxi, which swung out of nowhere and almost hit him.

This is it, thought Greg, I’ve lost it; finally, I’ve lost it. He watched as a huge, hairy, blond man leaned out of the window and stared at him. Maybe I got shot on that cliff top and I’m delirious from blood loss. The man opened his mouth. Maybe this is the afterlife; maybe the afterlife is a little Transylvanian meadow, filled with huge, hairy taxi drivers. Something weird must be going on, because there are some serious problems with this being real. The man spoke, he said, “You call Help, I answer, I am Crazy Sven, I am being, how you say? Modern day Superhero!”

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Scene Twenty Eight

In which the correct way of setting a broken leg is mentioned, with counter points

If there was one thing that Greg was good at, it was staying calm and playing along. He had remembered an old Dwarfish ritual for dishonoring a defeated Dwarf. Well, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ as Frankie was fond of telling him, he broke off the blooded horn and slipped it into his pocket. “I need a ride”, he told Crazy Sven

“Ya, you do!” said Crazy Sven, who popped open the back door of the cab.

Greg tried to climb in, but had trouble lifting himself up. Crazy Sven opened his door, walked behind Greg, threw Greg into the cab like someone might load something soft and unbreakable, and jumped back into the driver’s seat. “Ver to Mac?” he barked, while swiveled in his seat.

Greg was still muzzy, “Take me to someone who can fix a broken leg” he said

“YA!” screamed Crazy Sven, like a battle cry. He moved the accelerator from no pressure, to flat against the floor; the wheels spun, and they were away.

They were, at least for the moment, far away from the Dwarfs that, he was sure, were swarming down the mountain at this moment. Another problem for another day, he thought, he considered it a more immediate problem that he had apparently escaped from one group of maniacs by getting into the car of another. “Why are you called Crazy Sven”, he asked

“Is, how you say? Irony”, said Crazy Sven, “I am being only sane man, so they call me Crazy. Is like, call hoops player Tiny. Ya? Cause he is being Tall”

Greg decided not to question this. “Where are you taking me?” he asked.

“Like you say, Leg Fixer”

“Oh, and who is that?”

“Leg Fixer!”

“Right. What I mean is; who is the Leg Fixer?”

“Me!”

“You?!”

“Ya me; Crazy Sven is Crazy Surgeon”

Greg thought about this, “Is there any way I could have a surgeon who isn’t crazy?”

“Ya, you Can have Crazy Sven”

“I mean, is there a surgeon without the word Crazy in his name?”

“Nein!”

Greg was momentarily distracted by the possibility that he had worked out where Sven’s accent came from. “Oh, are you German?”

“Nein, Crazy Sven the Crazy Surgeon is not a Crazy German”

“Oh”

The Taxi skidded to a halt outside a small wooden hut. Crazy Sven grabbed Greg and walked into the hut with him over one shoulder. “You know, I’m not sure that a broken leg needs a surgeon.” protested Greg.

“Oh HO Ho, are you being licensed medical professional now?” Said Crazy Sven, throwing Greg onto a surprisingly comfortable bed.

“No” said Greg, a nasty suspicion occurring to him “Are you?”

“Nein!”, and before Greg could stop him, he had grabbed his leg and pulled.

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Scene Twenty Nine

In which one of our heroes meets a folk hero.

Tony Tony didn’t know how long he had been running for; hours, he guessed.

Tony Tony was well past middle age and was starting to show it around the waist, but he had spent the majority of his journalistic career running. He had run towards people with celebrity profiles, and away from people with guns, and that life, spent in a career path where the ability to run is as fundamental as the ability to write, had left him with the legs of a twenty year old Olympiad.

When the shooting had started he had exited the scene doing what he thought of as a one hundred kilometer sprint, and then he had just kept running for the sheer thrill of it. He had been on a desk job for the last few years and he was enjoying the feeling of seeing the scenery flying past him again.

He had no earthly idea where he was. It really didn’t look like Transylvania anymore. He pondered this while he was still sprinting, and then he spotted something odd. He could have sworn blind that he had been in an uninhabited wilderness, and yet in front of him was an exquisitely built, carbon fiber, suspension bridge. Tony Tony had traveled widely in his time, and he didn’t think it was possible for an exquisitely built, carbon fiber, suspension bridge to be a natural feature of the landscape[1].

He slowed to a jog, and then a quick walk, and then an amble, and finally he stopped. He looked at the bridge, taking it in, looking for some note of its purpose. But there was nothing; it was just a bridge, sitting in the middle of nowhere, with no obvious purpose.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” came a voice from behind him.

Most people, Tony Tony thought, would have spun around if a voice spoke to them when they thought they were alone. But Tony Tony wasn’t a young man, and his instincts were better. “Yes”, he said, “It’s very well made. But I don’t really see what it’s here for.” Then he turned around, slowly.

The man had been resting in the shade of a boulder when he had run up. He was what Tony Tony’s father would have called, a proper gentleman. The man rose to his feet in a dignified manner, his long white hair falling back to frame a rather sad and solemn face. “It is well made.” the man said,”I am very proud of it; it may even be my finest work thus far. ”

The man walked out to meet Tony Tony. He had a measured stride, like a loping, careworn lion. “As to why I built it; there is a Dwarfish shrine about three miles in that direction” he indicated over the bridge, ”and every year the pilgrims were having to ford the river below our feet. I felt that this was unreasonable, particularly on the elderly, so I built the bridge. It is my hope that this time next year it will have been well worn by the feet of the Dwarfs whose journeys I have eased.”

Tony Tony, thought of his recent experience with Dwarfs, “Would Dwarfs accept human help like that?” he asked. There was something familiar about the old man.

“Oh my, yes”, said the dignified do-gooder, “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Well, it’s just” began Tony Tony “Doesn’t their religion have this thing about, you know…”

“Ah yes, should I take it that you have run into the other kind of Dwarf?”

“Other kind?”

“Fundamentalists, ones who insist on a literal reading of the Dek’Bul.”

“Ah”, said Tony Tony, thinking of guns and spittle. “Yes, I suppose I have.”

“You have my condolences, did you escape unmolested?”

“Well I’m alive, aren’t I?” said Tony Tony, who thought that it was an unnecessary question.

The man’s eyes grew wide, “Oh, I am very sorry, do you mean to tell me that you have met the Tak’Dek?”

Tony Tony felt that he was getting very tired of people throwing words at him and expecting him to understand “Just who exactly are the, Tak’Dek?” he asked

“They are militant fundamentalists; the others just host bad talk shows and distribute pamphlets”

“Ah” said Tony Tony, “The ‘dash their heads’ brigade?”

“Yes”

“Then yes, they’re the ones”

The man rested, his hand on Tony Tony’s shoulder, “Then you are a very lucky man, the Tak’Dek rarely leave survivors”

Tony Tony didn’t feel lucky, he felt angry,”You mean that everyone knows about those nuts, and they’re just allowed to roam the countryside completely unopposed?” He was nearly shouting.

The man looked a little hurt, “They are hardly unopposed” he said, “The moderate community denounces them, several governments have made them officially criminal, there’s even a vigilante army roaming around and fighting them whenever they can”

“Well where was any of that when we needed it?” shouted Tony Tony.

The man didn’t miss it, “We?” he asked

“Myself and my two traveling companions” said Tony Tony, “We were attacked, and now I don’t even know if they’re alive”

The man hugged him, “I am so sorry, can you contact them?” he asked

“No” said Tony Tony, remembering that Greg’s cell phone hadn’t worked since it went swimming in Australia.

The man seemed to reach a decision, “I’m going to help you Mr…”

“Tomson” said Tony Tony, trying to think what Greg would do in this situation, stay calm obviously, “But friends call me Tony Tony”

“I hope to be your friend, Tony Tony, all my friends call me Gileppi”

Tony Tony felt sure that he had heard the name somewhere before, but he had more pressing matters to deal with. “How are you going to help me, Gileppi?” he asked.

“One of my friends is the leader of that vigilante group I told you about, if anyone knows what happened to your friends, it will be her”

Tony Tony nodded, feeling grateful. He looked up, the sun was starting to set; he must have been running much longer than he thought he had. Gileppi saw the sun and understood. “We can leave tomorrow” he said, “But first we need to find somewhere for you to sleep.”

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Scene Thirty

In which our secondary heroes find their adventure.

Clare hung out of the side of the helicopter, it wasn’t really necessary, but she knew she looked great with her hair flying in the downdraft. Because of this, while Frankie had technically seen the mess first, she was the first one to get a clear look.

It was a beautiful day. The sun was climbing into a deep blue sky, and it was just starting to get warm. From her vantage point she could see for miles, and what she could see right now was a huge collection of flattened jungle and twisted metal. “Well, well, well” she said, under her breath, “Tony Tony, what have you been up to?”

The chopper landed on a somewhat flat sheet of metal. Clare jumped off, and tried to guess what the thing they were standing on was. She had nothing. It looked like; well it looked like someone had collected together a lot of metal, welded it together, and dumped it in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. She took another look around; it was a bit ambitious for a piece of modern art.

She felt the reassuring bulk of Frankie behind her. “What are your orders?” he asked.

Clare wasn’t sure how exactly she had become the leader of this expedition; true she had been the one who gathered everyone together, but that had felt like play acting. She wasn’t even sure that she actually outranked Frankie at the paper. Still the way to be a leader is to lead people. “Circle out” she said, “Bring me clues about what this thing was.”

Then again, she thought, perhaps I’m being too hasty about calling myself the leader; Andrew does everything that anyone tells him, and I’ll just bet that Ants wouldn’t do a single thing if I phrased it as an order.

She tried to imagine what happened here. This had been the co-ordinates of Tony Tony’s phone when she had last talked to Greg; so Dryads had been here, had they done this? It looked like a lot of destruction for a group of immobile trees to do.

“Sah” called Frankie from the top of what looked to Clare a lot like a gun turret. Clare jogged up to him, wondering whether ‘Sah’ was considered an acceptable way to address a woman.

She reached Frankie’s side. Frankie said nothing, he just pointed, and Clare followed his finger. “Wow oh wow” she exclaimed, “How on earth did we manage to miss that?”

For as far as the eye could see it looked like the trees behind the mess were all somehow shorter. It was like looking down the length of a canyon. She looked at the other side of the mess, it was hard to see from where she was standing, but it didn’t look like the canyon continued. So they had a canyon of shorter trees, ending at the mess.

She took at closer look at the canyon; there were lots of short brown things dotted around. “Logging operation” she realized aloud.

Then all the words started coming at once. Logging operation, in the Amazon, Illegal, Dryads, Sentient trees, rage, destruction. Then other words started to appear, outrage at trees slaughtered, illegal logging: abuse of law, series of articles, Pulitzer Prize, “Andrew!” she yelled, as she marched back to the helicopter.

Andrew wasn’t in the helicopter; Clare hadn’t even seen him get out. “Andrew!” she yelled, “Andrew! Where the hell are you?” She heard a strange little noise, like someone clearing their throat while trying not to be noticed. She looked down, Andrew was there.

“Andrew” she said, “Get Ants on the phone, we have a report to make.”

Andrew was fidgeting with something in his hands, and he was clearly trying to say something; he kept stopping and starting, and tripping over his words. Clare got sick of waiting, “Well hop to it!” she barked.

Andrew jumped back and held up something that looked like a briefcase. Clare noticed that he was holding it like a shield and looking away from her with his eyes closed; she wondered if she was being too hard on him.

She lifted the briefcase thing out of his grasp, and he immediately darted into the helicopter. Clare took a closer look at the thing she was holding; it was much heavier than she had been expecting, and it had ‘security footage’ written on the side in giant white letters. Clare looked up with a slightly dazed expression on his face, I was definitely too hard on him, she thought.

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Scene Thirty One

In which one of our heroes remembers what he forgot.

Gileppi had managed to find him an old walking stick, it was made of hardwood and Tony Tony found he liked it a lot. He imagined himself in his mind’s eye; he suspected that he was beginning to look the part of the heroic adventurer, his beard was starting to grow soft, and his clothes were beginning to fray around the edges.

They had been walking for most of the day, and Gileppi had told him that they couldn’t expect to reach the army until tomorrow. Still, Tony Tony was happy; they had covered a lot of ground today and he had seen the scenery change before his eyes, it was relaxing; he wished he had started hiking earlier in life.

“How do you know the leader of this army?” asked Tony Tony

“She grew up near me” said Gileppi, who Tony Tony thought looked like a wizened wizard with his giant walking stick, “She would volunteer to help out on my farm occasionally”

Farm, thought Tony Tony, who still hadn’t worked out where he knew Gileppi from. “And you just sort of kept in touch over the years?” he asked, aloud

“I’m afraid not” said Gileppi, “I’m sorry to say that over the years we completely lost touch, when we met again for the first time I initially didn’t recognize her”

“That must have been embarrassing”

“Indeed. However she seemed to expect it, you see in the intervening years she had become a full werewolf, and her appearance was somewhat altered”

“Really! The army is lead by a werewolf?”

“Oh yes”

“That’s awesome and I can’t wait to meet her”

“Very good”

“So how did you meet her again?”

“She came to me asking for weapons.”

“Weapons?”

“I am a good engineer; she hoped I could supply her troops with weapons.”

“Did you?”

“No”

Tony Tony’s brow furrowed, “Why not?”

“I don’t think that directly fighting back is the right move. In my view it only creates martyrs, which of course only makes the Tak’Dek more appealing to the disaffected youth.”

Tony Tony considered this; he had to admit that he saw a certain amount of logic. “But you’re still friends with her?” he asked

“Oh yes, we had a nice long chat and a cup of tea; we still meet up occasionally.”

“So, your long hard days as a gunsmith are behind you?”

Gileppi laughed, he had quite a pleasant laugh, “Yes!” he said, “Gileppi the Gunsmith is no more, nowadays I-”

But the use of the title had made something go click inside Tony Tony’s head, “I knew I’d heard of you!” he blurted out, “You’re Gileppi the Goat Fucker!”

There was a very long silence. The two men kept walking out of shear inertia.

Tony Tony considered every situation he could think of, and concluded that there was no situation in the universe where his last sentence wouldn’t be a faux pas. “Sorry”, he began.

“No, no it’s quite alright; I’m used to it”

“I mean it’s-”

“I know”

“I mean that name must haunt you a bit”

“Indeed, I have built fine bridges for most of my adult life, and I’ll forever be remembered for my one youthful indiscretion”

“Well I mean, that’s a big indiscretion, how did it, you know, happen?”

“I don’t drink whiskey anymore”

“Ah”

Together the two men walked into the gathering sunset; somewhere above the clouds a large jet kept an eye on them.

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Scene Thirty Two

In which one of our heroes get lonely

The sunrise over a mountain peak is a beautiful sight. The light sparkles down the snow, and it’s like a thousand little rainbows trapped beneath the ground. Greg noted this, but he found no joy in it. He wasn’t a man who was known for his appreciation of nature, and anyway he had something else on his mind at the moment.

He spun on his heel and allowed himself to collapse against the wall.

“You are being, how you say, little Emo girl.” said Crazy Sven, in what Greg thought was an unnecessarily accusative voice.

Greg just smiled and nodded; even after two days staying with Crazy Sven he still wasn’t quite used to the other mans manners, or his grammar.

“You not want to talk about it?” asked Crazy Sven

Greg considered this, he had thus far avoided telling his host what he was travelling to do, and how he had ended up at the bottom of a mountain with a head wound and a broken leg. Nevertheless, it had been far too long, and he was worried about Tony Tony and Free Flower. “I lost the people I was travelling with” he said

Crazy Sven snorted like a tickled pig, “That is not being a problem” he said, “Just make yourself a call to them”

Greg shook his head “We were attacked” he said, “I don’t know if they are still alive, and I can’t call them in case they’re captured and the signal gets traced back to me.”

“Ah” said Crazy Sven, drawing himself to his full height and nodding sagaciously, “Crotchbitters”

Greg let the specist slur pass, it was far from the least defendable thing he had heard Crazy Sven say, “Right” he said, “So you see my problem”

“Still no problem” said Crazy Sven, with a sense of absolute certainty

“What?” asked Greg, who didn’t see how hundreds of armed dwarfs out for blood could possibly be called no problem.

“You you were on top of mountain right?”

“Yes” said Greg, a little uncertainly

“So we drive up top of mountain and go corpse hunting”

Greg thought about this, it occurred to him that he had no idea what dwarfs did with their dead, “Do we know how to do that?” he asked

“Oh ya” said Crazy Sven, “My brothers and I got through college doing it, back where I come from it is the basis of the economy”

*

Within five minutes Greg was regretting agreeing to corpse hunting.

It wasn’t that the idea of finding the corpses disturbed him; he thought that even finding a mutilated corpse would be better than not knowing what had happened.

Nor was it that he didn’t feel up to the expedition physically; Crazy Sven’s splint may have been made out of the leg piece of an piece of sixteenth century armour, and a lot of duct tape, but it was very sturdy.

What was disturbing Greg was the evident enthusiasm that Crazy Sven had for the job at hand. No one likes to be around someone who enjoys their job too much, and Crazy Sven definitely qualified in this case.

Crazy Sven was telling him with great relish about the time that he, his twelve brothers, and their manly sister, had all broken into a tomb to steal Lenin’s body, only to find that another group was half way through doing the same thing. From what Greg had picked up, there had been a punch up, and then they had all gone out to get a bear.

“Do you mean beer?” asked Greg.

“What are you, some sort of girly man? I mean a bear, we all went out and got lots of bears. Oh we were how you say? Cut, that night”

Greg nodded, he wasn’t really listening; he was trying to resist the urge to reach over and pull the handbrake. He wasn’t really sure what application of the laws of physics was allowing the yellow taxi cab to climb up an inverse cliff, but Greg didn’t want to risk interrupting it. For that matter Greg didn’t even want to draw attention to it; in case he scared the effect off and caused the cab to take its well deserved fall directly backwards.

Greg realised that the cab was levelling off. He opened his eyes, and noticed that they were on the same rocky hilltop where the Dryads had dropped them off. He almost didn’t recognise it; the whole area was absolutely covered with a thick layer of corpses.

Crazy Sven started whooping and jumped out of the cab. Greg followed him because Crazy Sven had parked the cab with its back end sticking over the edge of the cliff, and Greg had no desire to stay in the machine now that the universe might start paying attention again.

The instant Greg stepped out of the cab the smell of blood hit him, it was like a physically force, and it almost knocked him off his feet. Then he noticed the flies. They were everywhere, and Greg knew enough about insects to know exactly why they would be drawn to corpses. Disgusted, Greg resolved not to touch anything and wished that he had brought plastic bags to cover his shoes with. Then he reconsidered this and resolved not to leave the cab’s side at all.

He forced himself to take in the scene in front of him, letting the geography involved arrange itself in his mind. The corpses seemed to be scattered in two major ways. There was an enormous pile in the middle of the cliff top, and Greg noted that these corpses seemed mostly unmarked, apart from two days of decomposition of course. All the other corpses seemed to be spread evenly around to ground at the base of the pile, and these ones seemed to be a lot worse off, the one closest to Greg seemed to have had its lower jaw ripped clean off.

And they were all Dwarfs, which really wasn’t a minor detail. Greg tried to make sense of all this; the Dwarfs had lost a battle, badly lost by the look of it; given that the survivors hadn’t come back for the dead, and then what? All the undamaged corpses had been stacked in a pile? Greg would be the first to admit that he hadn’t read the Dek’Bul, in any kind of determined way, but stacking corpses in the open air didn’t make a lot of sense as a burial custom. Could they have ended up in a pile in some other way? Nothing came to mind.

Greg remembered the reason that they had came. “Are there any human corpses?” he called to Crazy Sven

“Nein” Crazy Sven called back, “They are all being crotchbitters”. Greg noticed that he seemed to be lifting jewellery off of the corpses. But he just shrugged, spoils of war, he supposed, even if it was someone else doing the actual fighting.

Guns, his mind chipped in. Greg turned back to the battle field, that’s right, he thought, the Dwarfs that attacked us were all armed with high tech weaponry, but he couldn’t see a single gun now. So what had happened to them?

Greg could feel the frustration starting to grow within him, he let it grow, and fill him up, and then he breathed out, and it was gone.

He ran through the facts in his mind. The Dwarfs had outnumbered them five hundred to three, more like two after he had exited stage left, and they had been better equipped as well, but something had happened, and they had lost, badly. Then something else had happened, and all their guns had been taken. And while all this had been going on Tony Tony and Free Flower had escaped unhurt. So where were they?

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Scene Thirty Three

In which we discover that our Antagonist is not as good at dealing with frustration as our hero

Devlin was feeling frustrated. It was like the Amazon all over again, except now he was in a position of power and was completely unable to use it, actually forget the word like, it was exactly the same as what happened in the Amazon.

“Why don’t we just take him in?” asked Devlin again, “I mean, he’s right down there and he doesn’t even realise that were up here.”

Johnson didn’t bother to answer, his partner had been asking variations of the same question all day long, and he had been hearing variations of the same answer all day long as well.

“I know he’s not our primary target and we need to wait until he leads us back to Mister Greg” he continued, “but if we were to bring him in now maybe we could convince him to just tell us where he is”

Johnson didn’t give any indication that he had even heard, he was just reading a book and checking the screens whenever he came to a boring paragraph.

“And no matter what you say, I’m not still angry about what happened in the Amazon” he seemed to consider it important that he got this point across. “It would be unprofessional to seek revenge on someone just because they were rude.”

Johnson responded this time; he swivelled in his chair and started to speak, “The screen” he said “Look at the scene”

Devlin did look, “What is that?” he said, “Some kind of party?”

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Scene Thirty Four

In which one of our heroes joins a party

It was a party, Tony Tony was disappointed. He had somehow imagined that the army would be a group of serious men sitting around a campfire, talking in hushed tones about the horrors of war. But it was a party; there was really no other name for it.

Still, Tony Tony had had to adapt to some rather extreme things in his time and the experience had left him a very adaptable man. It was a good party; there was dancing, and women wearing not enough clothing, and music, and sword juggling. There was also quite a lot of alcohol, Tony Tony noticed, that settled the question of whether this was a frequent occurrence; they were clearly celebrating something.

A tall, striking woman with long wolf-like ears strode up to the two of them, Tony Tony thought she looked familiar, “Goat fiddler!” she said in a delighted tone of voice, “You stopped in just in time, can you still drink whiskey in pints?”

Gileppi didn’t seem to be even remotely confused by this, “As you well know Reddrummer, I have never even attempted something so blatantly impossible”

Reddrummer put her arm around his shoulder, “Well then this sounds like the perfect time to start, old man. Who’s your cute friend?”

Tony Tony took the opportunity and introduced himself, “You must be the beautiful werewolf who leads this army”

Reddrummer laughed, it was the kind of laugh that a woman develops if she spends too much time around heavily armed men; it was quite pleasant, once you started adjusting your stance to brace for it.”Beautiful eh? Gileppi you trained this one well.” She turned her head and yelled out to the surrounding environment, “Somebody get this man a small cigar!”

At least three people, who Tony Tony noticed all seemed to represent different species, appeared out of nowhere to offer Gileppi a cigarette, and again Tony Tony noticed that Gileppi seemed to take this all in his stride.

“So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” asked Reddrummer to Gileppi.

“My friend Tony Tony,” said Gileppi, indicating at Tony Tony, “Was in a group of people who were attacked by the Tak’Dek”; and it was his hope that you could tell him what happened to them”

Reddrummer nodded, suddenly she looked a lot older “Thats the worst part of my Job” she said, she look sadly at Tony Tony, “Would you like a cigarette too?” she asked

“I don’t smoke” said Tony Tony, “I was travelling with a man and a woman, and we were on the Transylvanian mountains when we were attacked”. He knew he was being hasty, even rude, but he couldn’t help it, he was so close to the answer.

“When did you say this was?” asked Reddrummer

“Early morning, two days ago, the woman-“

“Was Tall? Tanned? Brunet?” said Reddrummer, looking astonished

“Yes”

“Carrying a sword?”

“Yes!” said Tony Tony, who wished she would get to the point.

A smile crept across Reddrummer’s face, “Nice ass?” she asked

“Yes” said Tony Tony, he felt buoyed, that wasn’t a description that tends to get applied to a corpse

Reddrummer reached up and gently turned his head to the right, and there, by the campfire, was Free Flower.

He ran to greet her while behind him Gileppi smiled gently. “That’s very lucky” said Gileppi, “How did she get here?”

Reddrummer pressed a beer into his hand, “Let me tell you a story”, she said.

She began to talk; eventually the sun set.

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Scene Thirty Five

In which tea is drunk

It was going to be another early night. That really annoyed Ernest Kanke, but he really had no alternative. He knew that he was being watched; after all it’s not really paranoia if you hire private investigators who confirm your suspicions.

He had reentered the country a little too quickly; that was his fault, he had been distracted. So now, until the suspicion against him died down, he had to give the impression that he had enjoyed a relaxing holiday, and that he hadn’t just lost a multibillion dollar investment because of a man called Mr. Johnson, and a group of Dryads.

Fucking Dryads! He thought, with uncharacteristic venom.

He knew that it would be a problem; the beetle had absorbed a lot of his fortune, and many other fortunes as well. Furthermore he knew that many of the respectable businessmen he had convinced to invest in his scheme were the kinds of people who didn’t consider ‘ripping someone a new one’ to be a figure of speech.

He knew that if he could stall for a year, then he would be able to release funds from his other investments. He could buy them all out and save himself, but it was a huge drain on his funds.

Dryads! It had taken him a good thirty years to build up his fortune and now it was gone. Dryads! He had had to cancel the schools he had been building in Africa; he had felt the need to go and explain it personally; one of the children had started crying. Dryads! He sipped from a cup of tea and glared at the walls of his house, he wondered if he would ever be able to stomach another apple.

Mr Johnson, he thought, changing the subject of his obsession. He had skydived onto the beetle. Something had clearly made a flyover. He drank more tea while he digested this information, there would be a radar pattern, he thought.

He let himself be lost in thought, eventually he started to smile. It was not a nice smile.

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Scene Thirty Six

In which one of our heroes recaps.

Tony Tony let himself wake up slowly. He felt very relaxed, and warm, that may have been the alcohol. He had spent the night in one of the greatest parties he had ever attended, fueled, he suspected, by the news that at least one of his companions, and possibly two had survived.

He was sitting around the embers of the campfire. When he looked around he could see some of the hardcore trying to continue that party, but most people were like him; half passed out, and relying on something other than their own two feet for support. He looked around for Free Flower, but he couldn’t spot her anywhere. That wasn’t really a surprise though; she had kept deserting the party during the night, to run drills with the army’s sword master.

Tony Tony stretched and sat upright. He suspected that he should be aching; he hadn’t been able to get a good night’s sleep on bare ground since he had spent a week reporting on the Lizardmen revolt in the Congo. He put his numb, painless feeling down to the alcohol, and prepared to feel the backlash of his sleeping arrangements later in the day.

Tony Tony’s mouth was dry so he went to get water. Reddrummer, was passed out over the nearest water barrel, and Tony Tony left her alone. Apparently the story of how she had come to find Free Flower was an interesting one. Tony Tony had been told it by Gileppi [1]. Apparently when the Dwarfs had attacked, she hadn’t run; she had fought back against 500 to one odds, with a rapier no less!

Tony Tony thought that the whole thing sounded like part of a bad movie, and he supposed that someone was adding artistic license somewhere along the line. Still she was alive, and by her own testimony Greg had managed to get away as well; Tony Tony was surprised to realize that this was a huge weight off his mind..

According to Gileppi, when Reddrummer had turned up to investigate the huge massing of the Tak’Dek forces she had found the Dwarfs having to run uphill to get to her. The huge party Tony Tony had just attended was apparently set up in celebration of the wiping out of a large portion of the enemy forces, and the capture of many modern, high efficiency guns.

Tony Tony, found a barrel of water that looked halfway clear, then he dunked his head in it, meaning it wasn’t very clear anymore. Dunking his head didn’t really do anything, but it was something he had seen a half-giant do many years ago, and something he had always wanted to do.

When he looked up, water dripping from his hair, he noticed that someone had set up a poster on the side of a multicolored tent. It depicted something which looked very much like the leader Dwarf doing something anatomically impossible with his helmet. Tony Tony grinned warmly. I’ve found one of my party, he thought, and I know that the other one has a good chance at being alive now. Things are looking up.

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Scene Thirty Seven

In which events are truly underway

Clare was having one of those strange moments when a leader has to look like they are the ones in control, or at the very least have some idea of what’s going on.

She didn’t have the slightest idea where all the bespectacled scientists had come from. She had said to Ants that she needed to bring experts in to look at the mess, and now there were hundreds, literally, hundreds of the aforementioned people, crawling all over the place and theoretically under her command. She knew that there was a logical connection between the two things, but she hadn’t been the one who had made it.

They had set up a temporary command under a large piece of metal which stuck up from the mess. There everyone who could be spared was pouring over the security footage which Andrew had dug out. It wasn’t that the footage was damaged in anyway, but it was taking a very long time to get information from the tapes; there was just so much of it to watch.

She had put Andrew in charge of the recordings; mostly to keep him out of the way, but he had taken to the task with intensity which surprised Clare. She wanted to put that down to good leadership, but she knew that it was really just simple dumb luck, and then she started wondering how many great military victories were the results of dumb luck.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure running toward her, ducking and weaving the whole way, like a puppet with someone joggling the strings around. She didn’t even need to focus on him, “Hello, Andrew”, she said, as he reached her; out of breath.

“Mi- Miss Clare”, he panted, “W-we found something, you should see”

Clare noticed that Andrew still didn’t seem to be able to make eye contact with her, but he had gotten through a complete sentence this time, I should write a self help course, she thought.

She followed Andrew back to their makeshift command center, where dozens of computer screens let off an eerie glow even in the bright noonlight of the Amazon. All the staff of the center[1] were clustered around one of the computers in the corner. She walked up at looked into the monitor.

The recordings were in black and white, but she could see that whoever had decorated the room that the monitor was depicting had excellent taste. She recognized the faces of her editor and her immediate boss, sitting in lazy boys no less, Clare almost laughed seeing that. At least she knew for sure that they had been there. She looked at the third person that the camera showed. Well hello, she thought, who are you? The man, whoever he was, was sitting on what was clearly an expensive couch and looked like he was the one in charge. I’ve found my lead, she thought.

She turned suddenly to Andrew, who jumped back in shock, “Get a clear picture of that man’s face to Ants” she said, “and when that is done, follow the footage backwards and forwards. I want you to be able to tell me within the hour exactly how Tony Tony and Greg got there, and how they left.”

Andrew made a sharp jerk of the head, which may have been a nod. Then he sprinted outside before turning and sprinting back in, looking embarrassed. As he started giving orders Clare excused herself and walked back into the noonlight. She could feel a wicked grin spreading across her face, things are looking up, she thought.

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Scene Thirty Eight

In which our heroes are observed

Lord Greenbadger sipped some variety of fruit punch; he had found it in the back of the fridge and it hadn’t changed color, so he had decided that it was probably safe to drink.

He was sitting in his chair in front of his laptop. Slouched might be a better word actually, with his legs tucked in so tightly that his chin was actually resting on his knee. The recognized the picture that the team in the Amazon was sending home. Well well well, he thought, Ernest, you’ve got sloppy.

He remembered being asked to take part in Ernest’s logging program, but he had turned him down. Now with the benefit of hindsight he was glad he had. He would have liked to have said that it was due to good planning that he had opted out of the logging scheme, but really it was dumb luck.

Letting them get a picture of you, he thought, that’s going to cost you, Ernest. Lord Greenbadger, had considered it really unfortunate that the second team had chosen to stay in the Amazon, but this was so entertaining that he was almost glad they had.

Still they were now nothing more than a sideshow, and he had bigger things to worry about.

He thought about Greg. Devlin and Johnson had lost the man. He had heard his cousin yelling at Johnson about putting the tracking device on the wrong man. Lord Greenbadger was very impressed that Johnson had managed to plant a tracking device at all, given that he was about a good kilometer away when Devlin had been talking to them.

Lord Greenbadger didn’t think that he Greg would chose to put in an appearance now; it wouldn’t fit the pattern, but he would want to get in contact with the other two. After all, he would want to stop them worrying. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Devlin and Johnson, he knew the location of Mr. Tomson, and it was possible that they had located the girl as well; Lord Greenbadger hadn’t been able to dig up much information on her.

Lord Greenbadger didn’t really smile; he had had a busy day yesterday and he was still very tired, but he did nod in a self satisfied way. If he did choose to contact either of them, then he would be wonderfully placed to profit.

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Scene Thirty Nine

In which a new opportunity arises

Devlin felt that he was really beginning to lose his mind. He was also really beginning to understand what his doctor kept saying about stress. He could feel his heart tight in his chest, and his throat was dry, and he hadn’t managed to sleep while he was off duty, so the front of his brain felt like some meat fisted twat had grabbed it and was squeezing.

When Johnson had walked in Devlin had thought, this is it, I’ve lost my sense of time as well. But then he had seen the clock on the jets display, and that had just left him confused. “What are you doing up?” he asked, “Your shift isn’t for another two hours.”

“We have new orders”, said Johnson, sitting down

Devlin’s brow corrugated, “Nothing came through on the radio” he said

“These orders aren’t from her ladyship” said Johnson lightly, while playing with the display

Many words flashed quickly through Devlin’s head; words like ‘mutiny’ were very prominent. “Where did they come from?” asked Devlin, fighting to keep his voice calm.

“One of my other bosses” said Johnson, like a man commenting on the weather.

Devlin felt fairly sure that this was against the spirit of their contracts at least, “Why do you have more bosses?” he asked, horrified now

“In case someone else requires my services” said Johnson, “I have just been advanced an impressive sum for a single job, which should take all of five minutes. We have to find a large airborne target, probably a blimp, which is upsetting one of the people I work for, I have a radar signature, and it’s nearby. Then, after we’ve found it, we have to bombard it with breacher missiles until it stops being a large airborne target. If you want to help me with this, I will happy split my retainer with you”.

Devlin took all of this in, in a kind of numb horror. Abandoning a task like this, and no matter how he put it that’s how it was looking to Devlin, went against everything he had tried to be over the years. Some old pilots instinct warned him that they were flying into a patch of cloud, but he was barely even aware of it. “And if I don’t want to help you?” he asked, like a man trying to talk down a gunman.

“Then you really should have said something before I started to change our course five minutes ago.” said Johnson, coolly. He pressed a button on the display, and Devlin watched the first breacher arc away from the jet.

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Scene Forty

In which an order is given

Charlotte was watching the vigilante camp when her cell phone went off. She answered it, already knowing who it would be.

Charlotte, are you in France?

Yes, Mam

I’m sending you new coordinates now; they’re for a little peasant army camp in the Transylvanian mountains. I need you to get there right now.

Yes Mam

I want you to go in there undercover; one of our targets is there, but it’s not our main target. I need you to work some information out of him. I want you to see if he knows where the primary target is, and then stick close to him if you think you have a chance of meeting the primary target yoursellf. Devlin and Johnson can’t see enough from that silly jet of theirs.

Yes Mam

Good girl, hop to it.

Yes Mam

The phone went dead. Charlotte put it away and thought a string of unpleasant words. Now she had a problem; Her ladyship had no idea that Charlotte had seen Tony Tony close up before this point. It was all very well for her to say, go in under cover, but Charlotte knew she would be recognized in seconds. She thought through the problem, there seemed to be only one way out.

Wishing that she knew more than one top level vampire, Charlotte prepared for an unpleasant trip.

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Scene Forty One

In which we meet the most dangerous person in this story

Charlotte had never seen Miss Alpha at rest. It stood to reason that somewhere there must be a little apartment where she spent her sleeping hours, but Charlotte had never seen it. She also had never seen Miss Alpha off guard, it didn’t work like that; you never went to visit Miss Alpha, you talked to the closest bat, and then she decided if she wanted to see you.

This time it looked like Charlotte was in luck. The cave seemed to billow out as thousands of bats made their way to the exit and collapsed into a human form. “Hello, Miss Epsilon” the figure said.

Charlotte resisted the urge to bow, “Thank you for seeing me” she said, like her mother had taught her, “It is always my honor.”

Miss Alpha did a little girl twist, “Thanks, Miss Epsilon” she said, with a slight lisp. Charlotte was sure it was an act. “Can I help?” She asked.

Charlotte was relived; as incredibly terrifying as Miss Alpha was, she always got straight to the point. “I need to change my appearance” she said

“Oooo” said Miss Alpha, “Why does a pretty lady like you want to do that?”

As much as Charlotte wanted to lie, she thought better of it. After you had been around a while you started to hear, stories, about people who had lied to Miss Alpha, “I need to go undercover” she said, “And the man I’m meant to be meeting for the first time invited me to dinner last time we met” she continued, feeling that this wasn’t something she could really hide.

“Ooooo, Ok!” said Miss Alpha, pointing her palm at Charlotte. There was no preamble; Charlotte felt her body changing shape. Every atom in her body started to bubble and wave, and then wrench Itself into an entirely new position. It wasn’t entirely pleasant.

“But it’s just for a day or two” said Miss Alpha, “So call me before it goes away”. Then she exploded into a cloud of bats, and was gone.

Charlotte lay on the rock of the cave mouth, gasping breath into unfamiliar lungs, and she realized the position she was now in. The mission’s success depended on Miss Alpha’s goodwill; if she chose to stop helping then no-one else could change her into this form again, and she would have to forfeit all the work she had done with Tony Tony, and no-one else could go back in because it would look too suspicious.

Charlotte had been prepared for mind control, but this was something different; she was entirely in Miss Alpha’s power.

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Scene Forty Two

In which Chaos reigns

Tony Tony didn’t think he had moved so fast in his whole life. When the first dragon had hit he had been running before he had even registered what had happened. He guessed that he had to be the furthest away from the camp now, and it was only now that he risked a look back.

It was a truly great battle, worthy of an epic poem. The jet ducked and weaved and spun and dived, and fired missiles; that wasn’t a minor fact. While the Dragons swarmed.

On the face of things the Dragons were the clear winners, they were more mobile, and there was more of them, but to Tony Tony’s great surprise, they weren’t winning. The pilot of the jet was putting it through some maneuvers that seemed to fly in the face of the laws of physics. It was very impressive, but Tony Tony knew that there was no way that he could keep it up forever, if nothing else it looked as though the wings would tear off soon.

With a shock Tony Tony realized that he recognized both the jet and the dragons. The jet had been there in the Amazon, it had disgorged a fake FBI agent, who had tried to take him in. The dragons were the same ones that he had climbed over for years on end at twenty thousand feet. That angry cloud behind them, which seemed to be chasing the jet, must contain the Dryads, he realized. He wasn’t happy with either of those groups being anywhere near him, so he kept running.

“Wait, wait, wait for me” called a woman’s voice behind him.

Tony Tony turned around, and saw a copper haired woman running up behind him. He considered running faster; his trust reflex seemed a little strained nowadays. But he had left the camp so fast that he had forgotten to pick his bag up, while this woman seemed to have had the presence of mind to bring food along. Plus, she was curvy, and even in a life or death situation Tony Tony still liked to consult with his secondary head. He stopped running, and let the woman catch up with him.

“Hi,” she said, panting a little “I’m Alice”

Tony Tony nodded, “That’s nice, I’m Tony Tony. Tell me Alice, how fast can you run?”

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Scene Forty Three

In which our hero gets active again

Greg was in a picturesque, village when the battle had started, but even over a mountain range it is hard to miss a swarm of dragons attacking a jet.

He watched the battle with mild interest; he was sure that there would be a story behind it, and he suspected that Tony Tony would feature in the story somehow. But he didn’t see how it would affect him directly. He supposed that it might draw attention away from him, which was always a good thing.

Crazy Sven was still in the small town equivalent of a pawn shop; trying to invent a legitimate way to find himself in possession of seventy wedding rings, which were all engraved with different names. “I am being a, how you say? Man whore. They are of the gold, you want or not?”

Greg was still thinking about how to get in contact with Tony Tony and Free Flower, and he was having trouble coming up with a way which wouldn’t lead interested parties directly to him. He was also starting to get bored with the jet plane/dragon battle, and he started to play with the dwarf horn that he had hung around his neck.

His wandering eyes fixed on a vertical stripe which stuck into the sky like a needle poking the setting sun. He had thought of them of course, but he had hoped he would think of something else; going anywhere near that tower was not something he ever wanted to do. But it had been almost a week, and he hadn’t managed to think of anything else.

He turned around and called out to Crazy Sven, “Hey, how do you feel about a road trip?”

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Scene Forty Four

In which charity is done

Tony Tony woke up very slowly. He had been sleeping on rough ground all night, and this time there was no alcohol in his system. His back ached like someone had used it as a punching bag, and then bit it repeatedly. He decided that must be the reason that he had woken up so early, the sun wasn’t even up yet, and that wasn’t like him at all.

Alice had slept next to him, she was still soundly asleep, Tony Tony felt envious, and old. He realised that he could see quite clearly, despite the darkness. He thought that was very odd, and he looked over the hills below him.

There was a village below, and it was on fire. Tony Tony couldn’t help but feel responsible; after all the only way it would make sense for both the Fake.B.I and the Dryads to be here is if they were following him. He looked around, trying to see what had happened to the battle. But the sky was clear, and though there were a lot of fires in the visible landscape right now, none of them looked very familiar.

Tony Tnoy’s first instinct was to run down the hill and start helping the village out, but he stopped first and thought things through, it was something that Greg kept trying to get him to do.

He now knew that Free Flower was alive, and by the looks of things, it was silly to have ever worried about her. He also knew that Greg had escaped the Dwarfish ambush, and Tony Tony knew from experience that it wasn’t really necessary to worry about him. He worried anyway, but even if he could get in contact with Greg, it was beginning to occur to Tony Tony that it just might not be a good idea; if people wanted to bring Greg in badly enough that they would dedicate a giant jet to the task, then it was probably a bad idea to draw attention to him.

So with nothing left to do that left the village. He started thinking about how he could help out. The fires seemed to be mostly under control by this point, but there would be injured people; there were always injured people, and Tony Tony wouldn’t have survived as long as a reporter if he hadn’t learnt a few medical tricks.

He turned to Alice, and wondered whether it would be right to wake her. It probably wouldn’t be right to just walk off and leave her. He looked down at the village again, and then back at Alice. He knew he had some paper in his pocket; it was the back of a beer label from the army camp. He rummaged in Alice’s pack, feeling rather guilty about doing so, but again he was a reporter, and this wasn’t the first time he had done it.

He found a stick of charcoal and started writing on the back of the label. Alice, he wrote, I’ve gone to help out in the village down below, I didn’t want to wake you because it looked like you needed the rest. Then he tucked the impromptu letter into her hand. It wasn’t much of a letter he knew, but it was before dawn after all.

He started walking down the side of the mountain. As the sun rose he thought it made the ruined village look quite pretty.

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Scene forty Five

In which our hero has things fired at his head.

The sum was already high in the sky by the time that Greg woke up. The front seat of a taxi is a surprisingly comfortable place to sleep, once you get used to it. By the looks of it Crazy Sven had been awake all night; Greg realised all of a sudden that he had never seen the man sleep. That might explain a few things, he thought.

He suddenly realised that he couldn’t really see the sun in the sky. He focused forward. Crazy Sevn had apparently been driving all night as well, they had covered a lot of ground, and Greg could see the E.M.L tower closing in on them.

Home, he thought, or one of them at least.

Crazy Sven took the Taxi through the stone arch in such a violent skid that Greg was glad that someone had made the arch intangible[1]. Greg saw the embossed gold letters as he passed. The Experimental Magic League, it read, we will eventually solve all your problems. Not the way I see it, thought Greg to himself; there are hundreds of reasons why magic will never be more than an interesting play thing, and they all live in this building.

Crazy Sven brought the car to a dignified halt; halfway up the steps, and leaning on a stone lion. Then he got out and looked around. “Dis is fonney place” he said, Greg was almost certain that wasn’t his normal accent, “Why are you having the desire to come here?”

Greg got out as well, in his case it involved climbing over a stone lion, “I need to get in contact with my friends” he said, “There are a few people who owe me some favours”

“Ah”, Said Crazy Sven, “You are going to being, shaking down some punks, ya?”

“I hope not” said Greg, “My first exit from here was, less than dignified, I would like to have the option of returning at some point in the future.”

“Ya,” said Crazy Sven, “let’s find ourselves a robecrotch”.

Greg wasn’t entirely sure when he had started to enjoy travelling with Crazy Sven, it was like the sheer surrealism of doing it had entered his life like white noise, and wasn’t really there unless he focused on it.

It had been a very long time since he was last here, Greg squared his shoulders and marched purposefully up the stairs, head held high. He reached the heavy oaken doors, wrenched them open, and ducked as a rock whizzed over his head and turned into a pigeon.

“Dammit!” cried a voice from inside, “it’s a pigeon again!”

“Yeh” said a rougher voice, “but did you see how far it flew? I bet if we add more sloth hair we could even get them to explode!”

“Yeh!” said the first voice again, it didn’t sound even slightly angry now, “maybe we could get them all to explode at once, that would be completely badass!”

Slightly shaken, and remembering why he hadn’t fit in in the first place, Greg straightened up, he turned to the two nuts inside and said, “I’m looking for Louise Green, You wouldn’t know where to find her would you?”

One of the nuts, a heavyset youth with dirty blond hair, looked up, “You mean Professor Green?” he asked

Greg thought about the Louise Green he had known, “Probably” he admitted.

“Upstairs”, said the youth, who was now doing something with his fingers which probably counted as serious fire risk.

Greg left him to it; it didn’t seem worth the effort to get anymore information out of them.

While he climbed the stairs he thought about the shear mess and disorder of this place. There were vines cascading from one of the tall towers, and he passed one of the strange parts of the wall that kept exploding and fixing itself, no one had managed to turn that off since his time, he saw.

He reached the top of the staircase, and stomped automatically on the left foot of one of the suits of armour, the left leg could swing up on its own, he remembered, there were some mistakes that you didn’t make twice.

He was in a long hall of doorways with things written on the doors. One of the doors seemed to have many little explosions going on behind in, one of them appeared to be holding back a small ocean, Greg ignored both of them and kept walking; he knew the office that the new Professor Green would have probably taken.

While he was walking he noticed that Crazy Sven hadn’t followed him up. Greg thought about the shear mayhem that a civilian could unleash here, in this place.

He thought about the dimensional horrors that they kept locked up in the basement, and in the new guy’s locker.

He thought about suits of armour, which tended to roam the hallways in lynch mobs, simply because everyone felt that they were much too busy to stop them.

He thought of simple spells, that anyone could cast, but only masters could control.

He thought about all of this, and then imagined a huge, hairy man of unspecified nationality thrown into the mix.

Then Greg kept walking, there was nothing that Crazy Sven could do which would surpass the kinds of thing which the teachers did to illustrate their points, or for a good laugh.

Greg reached the end of the hallway, and stood in front of the door there. Professor Green, the door read, Master of communications. He could remember this office clearly. At some point before his time, there had been some kind of ‘Drain the power of a dead god’ experiment[2], and the office on the floor below had been completely drained of magic, nothing more would work there.

Greg squared his shoulders again, and as an afterthought ran his fingers through his hair, and wished that Crazy Sven had owned a shaving razor. Then he pushed on the door and walked in.

Louise was sitting at her desk, typing on her laptop, when Greg walked in. She didn’t look surprised to see him, but then it was very hard to surprise Louise Green, she was the undisputed master of rewriting her plans to include acts of gods. She indicated to the empty seat in front of her desk, and Greg sat down. “How can I help you?” she asked

Greg had forgotten how blunt she could be, “Not even a hello?” he asked, “I thought we parted on fairly good terms”

Louses still didn’t look surprised, but her eyebrows did climb a little higher on her face, “Since when did you start needing greetings?” she asked

That gave Greg a shock of self recognition, “I don’t know” he said, “fairly recently I think”

Louise nodded, “It’s not quite what I would have expected from you but, very well. Hello Greg, how are you today?” It sounded like she was reading the words of a card, and Greg couldn’t help but fell patronised.

He decided to skip the small talk, “I need you to help me contact a friend”, he said, “If you can pull this off, then you can forget about that giant rat you let escape when I was covering for you.”

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Scene Forty Six

In which some old faces appear.

The sun was starting to set over the ocean. Devlin could feel the Dragon they were riding on start to buck a little, like a man who is twitchy after spending the whole day driving. They go nuts around sunset, he remembered. That had caused his uncle a lot of problems. Devlin didn’t think it really mattered anymore; they had lost the jet.

He had kept it flying for as long as he could, but eventually the wings had torn clear off, and they had lost the jet. That meant that the mission was over; the jet had been their edge, the one huge advantage they had had over everyone else.

But it was gone, and that meant that the mission was basically over, and that meant he couldn’t impress Charlottes mother, and that meant no wedding.

They hadn’t managed to get the dragon to change its course or height since they had bailed out and landed on it, at least if it bucked long enough then they would eventually reach ground level, or water level in this case.

Devlin looked at Johnson, the man hadn’t said a word since the jet had gone down, but then again neither had he. He tried to talk to him, “I blame you for this” he said.

As a conversational gambit, it wasn’t exactly the best, but then it had flowed so naturally off of his tongue, and it had the added benefit of being true.

Johnson said nothing; he had been sitting on the edge of the dragon, staring down with his back to Devlin, for the last few hours.

Devlin thought about the sun, sunset to sunset, he thought, that made it more than a few hours, and food was running out. Devlin was sure that the twitching he could feel under the dragons skin was getting stronger, one way or another, he thought, it will all be over soon.

He stood up and spread his arms. He imagined himself as a tragic hero; Lost to a world which didn’t understand him. Thinking these kinds of sad thoughts made him feel a lot better. He shut his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose, savouring the smell of the ocean breeze.

Then something extremely fragrant blocked his nose. “Wooooo dude” said a strange voice by his ear, “Surfing a bucking dragon, that’s a crispy stunt dude.”

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Scene Forty Seven

In which a character makes her move

Tony Tony smiled in the predawn glow as he woke up. After you have been sleeping on the ground for the last few nights even a hard mattress is a little slice of heaven, everything is relative.

He felt the weight of Alice on his arm, and he smiled at her too. She had snuggled up to him last night, and Tony Tony hadn’t seen any reason to say no.

He realised that he had grown quite fond of the girl. She had really helped out yesterday, the fires were out, and everyone who could be saved was now in a stable condition. They had done their part and now the village was safe again, Tony Tony felt gratified.

He knew that Alice was clearly too young for him, but then he had met one of his ex wives in much the same way, and he had had the same thoughts then too.

The light was starting to get stronger. As the first clear rays brushed her face Alice fluttered her eyelids and opened her eyes. Tony Tony hoped he would have the opportunity to see her do that again, he found it very attractive.

“Morning”, he said, he could hear the smile on his voice, and it made him feel like laughing.

“Morning” she smiled back at him. She moved to snuggle closer, but then seemed to think better of it and pulled herself into a sitting position. Tony Tony noticed that Alice had been tired enough get half undressed before going to sleep, she didn’t seem notice and, grinning like a hyena, Tony Tony had no intention of telling her.

“Nice dreams?” he asked.

Alice turned to him and let her eyes roam up and down his body appraisingly; Tony Tony wished that he had taken the time to get undressed before going to sleep too. “Very nice dreams” Alice said, with a tone in her voice which sent a flush of heat through Tony Tony.

Alice twitched like she wanted to get closer again, but again she seemed to think better of it. She did however pull herself around so that she was facing directly towards him. She brought her knees up and rested herself on them, like a little girl stretching, Tony Tony had no objection. “What do you do, Tony Tony?” she asked

Tony Tony smiled, “I’m a reporter”, he said. “What about you?” he asked, with genuine curiosity.

Alice didn’t really look although she had expected to answer the question herself, she pouted at the ceiling, “I’m a hair dresser” she said.

“Really!” said Tony Tony, now surprised and curious, “What are you doing in the middle of the wildness?” he didn’t think there would be much call for hairdressers in a vigilante army.

Alice sucked on her bottom lip for a moment, “I was travelling with the Transylvanian vigilantes”, she told him, “But, as you saw, the camp was blown half way to smithereens, and I saw you running like you knew what you were doing. So now I’m here.” Tony Tony thought that her story missed the point completely, and rambled a bit.

“What about you?” she asked, apparently relived to turn the question back on him. “What are you doing way out here?”

Tony Tony didn’t see much point in lying outright, “I was travelling with some friends, all over the world” he said, no one could possibly dispute that.

Aice looked around, “Where are your friends then? I thought you were travelling alone.”

Tony Tony shruged, “You know the way of things, hustle, bustle, and confusion, we got separated.”

“Oh” said Alice looking a little disappointed, “Do you know what happened to them afterward?”

Which really wasn’t a guileful thing to say, thought Tony Tony, I wonder who she’s working for and why they want Greg? “I really don’t know” he said aloud, with a look of complete honesty on his face, “I came across one of them in that army camp, but you saw how that turned out.”

“She was in there?” asked Alice, looking alarmed, “Oh my gods, is she alright?”

“Obviously I can’t say for sure,” said Tony Tony, feeling a little upset that he couldn’t, “But I’m sure that she’ll be alright.”

Alice nodded a little but she was staring at the wall to the side of Tony Tony.

Tony Tony wasn’t sure if it counted as giving information to enemy, but he couldn’t bear to see Alice like this, so he told her the story that Gileppi had told him, the story of how Free Flower had ended up in Reddrummer’s army. By the end of it Alice was smiling again, and Tony Tony was gratified.

“Thank you for telling me that” she said. She inched herself along so that she was a little closer to him, and started to run her hand up and down his arm in almost sub conscious way.

“It was my pleasure” he said, “I think it’s a good quality of yours that you can care so much about the fate of someone that you’ve never met.” He watched for some tell tale blink to betray her, but nothing came, apparently she really had never met Free Flower. Well that was one clue to the puzzle at least.

Alice pulled herself a little closer, and lay down next to him, holding his arm like a bed sheet. She closed her eyes again and rested her head on his shoulder. Tony Tony didn’t think that he had ever seen her look so good.

He knew that he should really just let her rest, but in Tony Tony’s head certain thoughts had inertia, and he had wanted to do this all morning, ever since she had seen the mistake she had made undressing last night. “You know, I not surprised that the army wanted you with them.” He said

Alice didn’t open her eyes, but she did smile and shift a little bit. “Why?” she asked, in the tone of voice that people use when they know that the punch line of a very funny joke is right around the corner.

“You’re clearly a very good hairdresser, and I really mean that, where I come from there are some people who would love to meet you.” said Tony Tony, half amused, half sincere

“Oh” said Alice, flexing her body like a cat, “And why do you think that?” She was smiling more than ever now, and she was close enough that Tony Tony could feel small ripples running through her body, as though she were already laughing.

“Well, when I first saw you, I was absolutely certain that you were a natural redhead”, he said completely innocently.

For a moment Alice didn’t do anything. Then her eyes snapped open, her hand flew down, her eyes grew wider, her head turned down, her eyes got wider still, she sprang away, grabbed her pants, and was out the door.

Tony Tony laughed, great booming laughs, which shook the room. It was worth it, he knew, he hadn’t guessed that the effect on her would be so strong. Even at the cost of her hanging off of his arm and flexing herself, it had been worth it.

He pulled himself off of the thin mattress, and started dressing. He noticed that Alice had left a few items of clothing behind; he folded them neatly and put them in the middle of the mattress. He hoped that she remembered to put her pants on before she got too far, he didn’t think the villagers would have ever seen a beautiful, half-naked woman running through their streets with two tone hair before.

Once he was dressed he walked outside to greet the rising sun. All the critical work was done, he knew. But there was still a ruined village to rebuild. Tony Tony met up with the men who were carrying lumber, and he got to work.

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Scene Forty Eight

In which things get a little better

Devlin let the wind flow through his hair, it made a whistling noise. He wasn’t really sure what had happened, but the mission was kind of, sort of under weigh again. That didn’t exactly make him feel happy, but it did make him feel a little bit better.

He was sitting on the board of a windsurfer, and Devlin had decided that he would use their proper title from now on. They had saved him and he was grateful. He just wished they would stop offering him ‘medicinal herbs’ wrapped in tinfoil. He knew that they were being hospitable; he thought that this probably counted as a high honour, but he had had enough of all that in College.

Johnson was managing to stand up behind the windsurfer who was giving him a ride. Devlin wondered where he had learnt to do that, certainly it was something he hadn’t managed to do.

He was sitting behind a man wearing the strange combination of a three piece suit and a rainbow, ‘nuclear disarmament’ headband. Devlin wondered how he was steering the board; he was holding it so steady that it was like sitting on the ground in a strong headwind.

They were a long way up, still above the ocean, and that meant that he didn’t really know how fast they were going, so he just relaxed and went with it. That seemed to be what Johnson was doing, and he looked positively joyful about this high flying ride.

Devlin nudged the man in front, “Where did you say you were taking us again?” he asked

“Like we said last night man, you’re off to see the wonderful mages of Oz, man. They can get you a nice new jet man, and then you can do…. whatever it is that you were trying to do.”

Devlin tried to remember last night. He had a vague mental image of people dancing around a camp fire, while someone played steel drums inside his frontal cortex. He decided to take the man’s word for it, he suspected that he could have been told that he was a delicious Varity of frog last night, and he would have just smiled and nodded.

So Devlin thought about the mages. His instincts prepared a ‘flight or fight’ response, but he beat them down. Go with it, he told himself, you’re not going to get a nice structured mission on this one, so just go with it, and improvise.

He still wasn’t happy about the mages though. It was considered common wisdom that the only reason that that school existed at all was so that all at people who wanted to learn magic could be safely isolated from everyone else.

When Devlin thought about it the only good thing he had ever known to come out of the study of magic was the scrying crystals, and even they were unreliable for almost anything useful. Devlin was not an engineer of any kind, but he had a distinct feeling that the communication device you were relying on shouldn’t be affected by the colour of the shirt you were wearing.

However, like the man said, they were off to see the mage’s. Devlin had been considering the odds of a group of wind surfers’ just stumbling across them in the middle of an ocean like they had. Someone up there likes us, he thought; let’s go find out how much they like us.

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Scene Forty Nine

In which a metaphorical hammer is raised.

Ernest Kanke was having a very bad day.

When he had woken up he had stumbled out of bed and knocked his head against his wardrobe.

Then when he had gotten door stairs for breakfast he found that someone, process of elimination said it was him, had left his refrigerator door open. The motor had burned out and all his food had defrosted, this had meant that he had had to make to with warm apple juice and a steak from his freezer, which had turned out to be frozen on the inside when he had tried to bite into it.

After this terrible breakfast, he had had his whole day made all the more worse by a call from Mr. Lucent; responsible businessman, and great supporter of the local police force.

Mr. Lucent had directed him to a paper he had read called ‘The Daily Soapbox’ and indicated that he would have a few questions to put to Ernest Kanke, whenever he could find time in his busy schedule to do so.

Ernest Kanke had managed to track down a copy of the paper, which had required buying it off a teenage girl who he had thought had been far too flirtatious for his tastes. When he looked at the paper, he had found splashed across the front page a picture of his former logging enterprise, with the title ABUSE OF POWER, UPROOTING INNOCENTS.

He had compulsively ripped the paper into pieces and cast them on the wind, which then meant he had to go and buy another copy from the overly friendly thirteen year old; so he could read the article.

The article was well written, and as well balanced as is possible, while stabbing a poison tipped lance into him at every opportunity.

He knew that it was inevitable that he would be discovered one day, though he had hoped for a few more years than this, but he had always taken comfort in the fact that it should have been incredibly difficult to find out that he was the man pulling the strings. Yet right on the third page[1], was a giant picture of him and a short biography!

He checked the writer of the article, Clare Summers, it read with great pride. Right, he thought. With a name he would need all of five minutes to track this, Clare Summers, down, and then after he had done that, he could contact one of the many men he kept around with guns and cash flow problems, and they would. No. That wouldn’t work. The story would keep growing, and if the writer died then that would set tongues wagging, and then Ernest Kanke would join the list of people who had lost everything through a bad reputation.

He thought about what he should do next.

He knew the next step in the process; it looked as though this – Clare Summers – had caught the other news agencies flatfooted. They would want to buy in, and she would sell to the highest bidder. As long as the story was localised to this small name paper, it could be overshadowed, but he would lose that ability the instant that the big papers got their hands on it.

He knew that this was something he had it do personally; a telephone call would never suffice. Earnest Kanke kept a bag of the things he needed for travelling[2] in his lounge, in case he got called away suddenly. He grabbed it as he went past, on his way to the Amazon.

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Scene Fifty

In which our hero lays in bed

Greg knew that the sun was probably high in the sky at this point, but it didn’t bother him much; He was deep in the structure of the tower, but even if he could’ve seen the sun, it wouldn’t have bothered him; Louise had said that she wouldn’t be able to see him until after lunch.

He was in one of the old dormitories – he had forgotten the name – and even if the sheets smelled a little musty they were comfortable.

He did remember the unofficial name of this Dorm. When he had been a student they had called it the ‘Dead Dorm’, and most of them had avoided it. They were avoiding it now, which meant that Greg had spent the night, and morning in a deep, relaxing peace.

He knew he should probably get up and go to do something, at the very least he should track down Crazy Sven and check that he wasn’t getting into trouble, but he felt that that could wait a little bit, five minutes should be enough. Maybe a little bit more than five minutes.

Time passed.

Greg remembered why they called it the dead dorm, but he had never understood why everyone seemed to avoid it. Certainly it must be disturbing to have your magic switched off as soon as you entered the room, but it wasn’t like they were relying on their magic anyway; no one with any sense relied on magic, it was just too unreliable[1]

Greg noticed a sudden flash of light outside the doors of the dorm.

That would be McLarkey’s buzzbell. He remembered that one; he didn’t think it was likely that he would ever forget. Clark McLarkey had been a teacher in Greg’s brief time as part of the league. He had been so sick of students getting up late that he had arranged for a magic shock to run through every bed in the league tower at a certain time in the morning. The students weren’t happy about this of course, but they didn’t have the ability to remove it, and all those with the ability to remove the spell were either too busy or too amused. After a while it had become a tradition, and everyone just got used to getting out of and back into bed at a certain time in the morning.

McLarkey’s buzzbell couldn’t reach him in here, of course, but it did let Greg know how late in the morning it was getting. He should really get up soon. Any minute now.

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Scene Fifty One

In which Alpha states her terms.

Charlotte ran through the woods. She was panicking now.

The hair which flicked in her face as she ran was turning from copper back to dull silver. She checked in every dark crevice she passed, but she must not have found what she was looking for since she kept running. She could feel her body starting to slim, it made her feel heaver somehow.

Finally she reached a huge cave with long streamers of moss falling down from the top of the mouth. With a huge broken smile on her face, she ran directly in. Something fluttered down past her face and she grabbed it with both hands. Shoving her prize in front of her face, she said to it, “I need to speak to Miss Alpha, please”

The bat’s head twisted around, looking for escape. But then it stopped, and it looked directly at her, and its eyes filled with far more cunning than a twelve pound flying rodent should possess. The cave suddenly filled with bats. They swarmed on Charlotte, like bathwater after the plug has been pulled out, and then suddenly, they all collapsed together, and Miss Alpha was standing there.

“You’re changing back” she said

Charlotte was panting, but she remembered her manners, “Yes, Miss Alpha” she said, “And thank you for seeing me, it is an honour.”

“That’s alright, Miss Epsilon” Said Miss Alpha, “Do you want me to change you again?”

Charlotte nodded, she knew that the right time to withdraw from the mission was probably now; she didn’t think that he knew where to find Mr. Greg, but she didn’t want it to end just yet.

Miss Alpha raised her hand again, palm out. Then she stopped, “Do you have chocolate?” she asked, “I like chocolate.”

Charlotte had been expecting Miss Alpha to lay out her terms since the bats had started to swarm; still chocolate wasn’t what she had been expecting. She tried to think what Miss Alpha had meant, and then it came back to her; there was a chocolate statue it the centre square of the town she had helped. She remembered being told that it had survived the fires because in was never-melt chocolate, a gift from the magic league. She wondered what Miss Alpha wanted with a magic chocolate statue, probably not my place to know, she thought.

“I can get it for you,” she said, “The next time I need a top up on the appearance spell.”

“That’s good” said Miss Alpha, and she pushed forward with the palm of her hand, like someone trying to move a fridge. Charlotte felt a huge surge of energy flow through her. She could feel her body filling out and her hair tingling as it changed form. She noticed that all her hair had changed. Ah well, she thought, I had told him I was a hairdresser.

She felt the energy of the Spell fade, and she fell to her knees on the floor of the cave. She was grinning a little bit, although she couldn’t have told you why. She looked up, but the cave empty, and Miss Alpha was gone.

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Scene Fifty Two

In which our hero gets mixed up in magic.

It looked like the inside of a computer system, Greg thought, a computer system designed by alien SciFi nerds with too much time on their hands.

Louise’s private lab gleamed and blinked with glowing lines everywhere. Had it been anyone else then Greg would have just assumed that it was showing off for the benefit of tourists, but Louise didn’t show off.. All the Glowing and blinking must have a purpose therefore, though Greg would be dammed if he could work out what it was.

Louses was standing in the centre of the room, she was wearing a very fetching outfit made from silver fabric and glowing blue lines. She was mumbling to herself, and Greg knew better than to interrupt.

Greg didn’t trust magic, at all, it was one of the reasons that he had failed to make it as a mage. He didn’t really trust the scying crystals either, no matter how frequently they turned out to be safe. Magic had a way of saving itself up and biting when you didn’t expect it; it was a living thing, you couldn’t be sure how it would react.

Still the scying crystals had been Louise’s project, she had forced enough order into the unrestrained mayhem of the E.M.L to actually make it do something useful, she was the expert and if anyone could control them, it was her.

Louise finished mumbling and lowered her arms, she turned slowly to Greg. “It’s ready” she said, “Now tell me again what I’m looking for.”

Greg blinked twice, “It’s a yellow crystal. It will be around his neck. You still have his Cell phone number in your head?”

Louses nodded, “I have a question for you Greg” she asked, “If you have his cell phone number them why don’t you just call him?”

“I want this call to be private, Louise; I don’t want anyone else eavesdropping”

“Are you going to expect me to cover my ears and hum quietly in the corner?” It sounded like a joke, but it was really hard to tell with Louise.

“Just make the call.” Greg said, “Please.”

Louise nodded and turned back to the centre of the room, “Do you know what colour shirt he will be wearing?” she called back over her shoulder.

“Blue, I think” said Greg

Louise nodded, and raised her arms again. The air in the room suddenly felt a lot heavier.

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Scene Fifty Three

In which contact is made

When Tony Tony saw the ghostly image of Greg walking towards him, he dropped the log he was carrying in shock. The log rolled down the hill and spooked a chicken. The chicken flew away, knocking a loaf of cooling bread off of a window sill. The housewife saw what had happen to her bread and she ran to get it, throwing her peg bag over her shoulder and causing pegs to scatter all over the road. A group of children saw the pegs and ran towards them in excitement; they ran straight across the road, which meant that old Mr. Johnson had to swerve to avoid them. Mr. Johnson’s car was open top, so when he swerved to avoid the children, his old yellow cat flew out of the car. Tony Tony was completely transfixed by the approaching apparition, which is why he didn’t notice the flying cat until it hit him in the back of the head and took him to the ground.

When Tony Tony picked his head out of the dirt Greg was still there. He smiled and offered Tony Tony his hand; Tony Tony didn’t think he had ever seen him smile before. He reached up and tried to take Greg’s hand, but it was like grasping at air, or possibly a super model. Tony Tony let his eyes fall, “Is this real” he asked, he felt warm and light headed; he supposed that might be the result of the flying cat.

“Yes Tony Tony” said Greg “it’s real. You should get up and try not to be so obvious with your speaking; you’re the only one who can see me.”

“You know” said Tony Tony out of the corner of his mouth, “You’re really not helping your ‘This is real case’.” But then he stood up anyway

“Do you know where Free Flower is?” asked Greg

“Hold on” said Tony Tony, “My question first. Why on earth didn’t you call me, I mean it must have been a week since we got separated, and you didn’t even think to call?”

Greg raised his eyebrows, it looked like a deliberate action “I think our communication is being monitored” he said, “Some of the things that have happened to us have been a little too convenient for my taste.”

Tony Tony knew that was the answer, hell he had even thought of it by himself. He didn’t want to accept Greg’s explanation, but he did so. “Next Question,” he said, “How you are a ghost now, are you a ghost now?”

“Ghosts aren’t real Tony Tony”

“Said the vampire to the reporter”

Greg smiled and sighed, “All right, the way I’m doing this is by way of that crystal you keep wearing.”

Tony Tony touched the yellow stone around his neck, “Oh yeh” he said, “I keep forgetting that I have this thing. Wait, since when do you know about scying crystals?”

“I don’t” said Greg, he put a lot of emphasis on the next words, “I still don’t trust them. This little stunt needs an entire specialised room and the supervision of an expert to pull off”

“You know an expert?” asked Tony Tony, Raising his eyebrows

“I know the expert” replied Greg, raising his own eye brows in a slightly mocking manner. “But to get back to my question is Free Flower alright?”

Tony Tony chuckled, “I think it was stupid of us to have ever worried about her” he said, and then he told Greg the story of how Free Flower had single handily fended off and killed a small army of Dwarfs. Greg was clearly impressed; Tony Tony thought that the story was likely to become a favourite of his at cocktail parties for years to come. “What about you” he asked, “What happened to you after the ambush?”

Greg smiled, and then told Tony Tony one of the strangest stories he had ever heard, it involved a man named Crazy Sven, who was apparently a crazy surgeon, but not a crazy German. Greg even rolled up his pant leg to show where his broken leg had apparently been splinted with duct tape.

Tony Tony shook his head, “Your man sounds like a nutter’ he said.

Greg nodded; he didn’t seem prepared to argue.

“What’s the new plan?” Tony Tony asked

Greg looked up, and suddenly he was the hard faced strategist that Tony Tony had known. “We can’t meet up” he said, “Not if we’re being watched. I’ll have to lay low by myself. What did you say you were doing right now?”

Tony Tony told him about the village, and how he had seen it burning and blamed himself.

“Good” said Greg,”Stay and help out, I’ll find some way to contact you again if I need you again. And Tony Tony, the one really important thing I need you to remember is-“

Greg lurched as though he had been tackled, and the image faded.

That was bad timing thought Tony Tony.

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Scene Fifty Four

In which we get a chase scene

Greg hit the ground hard; he hadn’t been ready and hadn’t braced himself at all. His head bounced off the cobble stone floor and he felt his broken leg jar slightly.

“He’s here, I don’t believe it Johnson, he’s here!” said a voice above him.

Greg didn’t even wait for his vision to clear, he snapped his body around and felt his fist connect with something fleshy, and then he slapped the ground and ran.

He could feel his feet pounding on the ground, and he could hear the sound of his heart beating in his ears. He dodged around a grey haired man who filled the doorway ahead of him, looking shocked.

“Don’t let him get away!” said the first voice, which sounded as though it was chewing on a large plum. Greg moved automatically, up the stairs, down the corridor, through the kitchens.

His thought started to return to him and he turned down the corridor that the experienced students liked to send the new ones through. He dodged, ducked, dipped, dived, and dodged, and suddenly he was on the other side.

There was a cacophony of clanking armor behind him as his two pursuers had their progress impended by a lynch mob. Greg almost slowed down, but then he heard a thudding noise as one of the men made it through. That’s insane, Greg thought, I’ve never seen someone that determined before.

He reached a stair well and ran down three steps before just jumping clear over the edge. There has to be one here, he thought; let’s see him get through this. He was in another corridor, and one door was open.

There was the pentagram inside. Greg ran for it, his follower was about a second behind him. Greg crossed the circle, waving the basic protection runes in front of him. He made it to the other side without incident. Done it, he thought, pleased with himself. Then he turned around.

While it is very hard to cross a pentagram if you don’t know the protection runes, that isn’t to say that it’s impossible. Five students in black robes, and the Angel they were summoning all stared in amazement as Greg’s pursuer tried to push himself into the circle against the force of a modest hurricane.

The barriers are there for the user’s protection.

Greg didn’t want to see how this ended. He ran took several shortcuts and then he was running out of the entrance hall. He realised that Crazy Sven was running with him, “Where did you come from?” he asked

“Ah, Tis like you are, how you say? Bomb squad. You run, I run too”

Something smashed out of the tower, riding a pillar of fire and screaming like a carnivorous chainsaw. “Run faster!” Greg yelled.

Something short steped into their path. The dwarf pointed his axe at them. “Hello” it said, “My name is Ka’Ta’Ka’Ma’Ta’Ta’Ma’Ka’Ta’Ka, you killed my farther, prepare-“

Wondering when his life had gotten so weird, Greg dodged the Dwarf and kept running.

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Scene Fifty Five

In which something is lost.

Charlotte was conflicted, and confused, and generally in two minds about everything. This was a fairly normal state for her, but this time was worse than usual. She had fallen for Tony Tony, there didn’t seem to be much point in lying to herself about that. She had fallen for Tony Tony, but she was still in love with Devlin, and she didn’t know what to do.

The fact that she didn’t know where Devlin was made it all the more worse. She wished she could find him, but no matter how she looked, there didn’t seem to be any sign of him. He wasn’t responding to any kind of phone call, or anything else for that matter.

Men! Charlotte thought angrily. Then she corrected herself, Human men! I bet the world was all nice and simple before they showed up and made everything complicated. But angry thoughts didn’t solve anything.

It was getting late; the sun was starting to set.

Tony Tony would be going to bed soon, on that hard mattress, in a broken down house, in the middle of a coco farming village which was barely dignified with a name. He would want her to join him, she knew, and Gods knew that she wanted to, but she was afraid that if she was by his side tonight, then she wouldn’t be able to leave tomorrow.

Paralyzed by indecision, Charlotte watched the sun go down.

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Scene Fifty Six

In which a helicopter figures

Clare was jerked violently out of sleep. She gazed around her tent, trying to force her blurry eyes to focus properly. It sounded like a helicopter, except louder, much louder. On second thought it sounded as though a helicopter was beating the air into submission around it. Malfunction, Clare thought, but no, there was more than one helicopter. Sabotage, she thought, but no, they were getting closer. Somehow whatever was making that noise was flying and closing in on them.

When she realised that they could expect company Clare jumped out of bed like someone had just zapped her with an electric line. She darted around the tent, smoothing her hair with one hand, while pulling on yesterday’s clothes with the other. That done, she stumbled out of the tent and looked up.

It was helicopters, and they did seem to be flying by beating the air into compliance. Clare looked for a crest, or some sort of marking, but there was nothing. The helicopters were a neutral white, but Clare doubted that their purpose was entirely peaceful.

They came into land on the mess.

The noise was incredible; Clare could feel her hair whipping her as it was blown back. The engines started to calm, and the blades started to slow, but before either had changed very much a man jumped out of the lead helicopter.

He was a surprisingly tall man, and he had a ridiculous moustache. Clare knew the face. “Ernest Kanke” she said under her breath. She felt very nervous; she had never expected to meet the man in person.

Kanke was looking around the gathering crowd; he spotted her and their eyes locked. He looked perfectly turned out, as though he had been dressed by his personal barber before stepping out of the helicopter. If he had then it was definitely worth the effort; he radiated power. Clare was suddenly very aware that she hadn’t brushed her teeth this morning.

Kanke walked away from the helicopters and towards her. The crowd parted before him like the black sea before a cruise liner. Clare knew that all eyes were on her. They don’t know what to do, she realised, so they’re waiting for me to make the decision for them. She didn’t know what to do either, but that wasn’t right; because a leader has to always know what to do. Pick something! She spread her arms wide in a gesture of welcome. “Ernest Kanke” she said, “I’m glad to meet you”

Kanke reached her. He didn’t loom, he just stood a respectable distance back and smiled. “Clare Summers” he said, “Likewise”

Then, just like that, the baseline had been set. Clare wondered just where this was going to lead.

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Scene Fifty Seven

In which a heist is planned.

This is going to suck, Charlotte thought. Miss Alpha drove a very hard bargain; the people of the town seemed to love the statue.

The town had suffered an almost direct hit from an air to air missile, and everything in the centre square had burned down, apart from the fireproof statue. It wasn’t even a good statue, Charlotte thought, there is a limit on what even the finest sculptor can do with chocolate, and every single member of the family that the statue depicted was cross-eyed. But the people loved it, they brought wreaths of flowers and laid it at the base, it was their symbol of defiance against the world, and more specifically, the parts of it that would be willing to attack them.

Charlotte felt a slightly calloused hand rest on her shoulder; she laid her own hand over it. “Hey Tony Tony” she said.

Tony Tony sat down beside her. “It’s beautiful isn’t it?” he said, he had a kind of Glow about him.

Charlotte brow corrugated for a moment. He couldn’t mean the statue surely, she thought, she let her eyes wander out at bit. “The buildings?” she guessed

“Yeh” sighed Tony Tony, “they get knocked down, and three days later they’re going up again. This village is resilient”

Charalotte was a little more cynical, “Pity about it not being fireproof” she said

Tony Tony made his thoughtful face, “You know I was talking to one of the village elders about that, apparently they’re going to use the spaces between the walls to store water, this time round.”

Charlotte thought about this, “won’t that make it cold in the winter?” she asked

“Hell’s yes” said Tony Tony, “It doesn’t seem to bother them much”

Charlotte let herself rest against him, he smelled like sweat and charcoal. “Anyway” he was saying, “there is one part of the village which is fire proof.”

Charlotte took her head away and looked at him, she didn’t like where this was going. “That statue” he clarified, mistaking her look for a question. “It’s a really silly looking statue isn’t it? But they’ve turned it into such a symbol. I was working on the new town hall and I asked one of the men where the foreman was, and he pointed at the statue! Everyone laughed of course, but I think we’re all glad that the statue is here.”

Charlotte buried her head in his chest, fighting the urge to cry. It wasn’t fair, she thought; if I don’t take the statue I turn back and have to leave, if I do take it everyone will be demoralised and I’ll want to leave. She wrapped her arms around Tony Tony and tried to imagine holding him there forever. He wrapped his arms around her too, she hadn’t cried, she was sure of that, but he seemed to understand. If she had been able to see his face she was sure he would look utterly befuddled.

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Scene Fifty Eight

In which a character returns to the best home he has known

Devlin was in two minds about absolutely everything. This wasn’t normal for him; he always saw dozens of alternatives beckoning him away from whatever task he had undertaken, but the way forward was always clear. The way was always to stick to the mission, to follow the goals. He was still thinking like that, but now he seemed to have two missions.

The first was familiar, find Mr Greg, stop him from being present for the reading of his uncles will, win Charlotte’s mother’s approval, and marry charlotte.

The second mission was new, he thought it was new, it was pulling him along too and it was strong. It seemed to involve seeking out evildoers and smiting them, it didn’t seem to come with a way to complete the mission; presumably he was just meant to keep doing it until he ran out of evildoers.

He could fly now as well; he wasn’t sure when that had happened. He had a vague idea that this was something he had always done, but he didn’t have any memories to support that idea. Devlin was confused, and tired, and he didn’t know what had happened.

There are certain instincts that all humans have, and the instinct to go home when we are hurt is one of the strongest. Devlin didn’t really have a home; he felt absolutely no love for the house he had grown up in, but an image did form in his mind. He felt pressure between his shoulder blades, like someone giving him a friendly shove out the door, and the landscapes started to wizz past.

There was the jet or the husk of it anyway. Devlin realised that he had never given the jet a name. That seemed like a real oversight now, a living thing deserves a name, and Devlin had thought about the jet as being alive. It was all too late now, he thought, it may have been alive, but now it very dead.

He let himself fall towards it. As his feet touched the fuselage he felt a lot of the worry leave his mind; he was safe here. He sat down and felt the heat of the metal hull.

Nature was already taking it back he saw, the joins where the wings had been were blossoming a furry coating of rust, and enterprising creeper plants were climbing over any place low enough to reach. Devlin didn’t really want to stop it; the same thing would happen to him one day.

“I knew you’d come here” someone said, “You took much longer than I thought you would.”

Devlin did bother to turn around, he had been wondering when he was going to see Johnson again. “What do you want?” he asked, he was feeling moody, and he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to talk to Johnson or to be left alone.

“You’re my partner” said Johnson, “I felt it was my job to come and find you”

That answer seemed very suspicious to Devlin, it sounded like it was tailored to his own thoughts. He wasn’t really sure of his own thoughts anymore. “Well now you’ve found me” he said, he didn’t say anything else.

Johnson was still standing behind him, “Do you want to know what happened to you back at the tower?” he asked.

Devlin thought this was a stupid question, he nodded glumly.

“Apparently” said Johnson, “The students were trying to summon a cherub. They managed it, but then you broke into the circle and it possessed you”

Devlin remembered the felling of hot lead being forced down his spine and didn’t say anything.

“The Cherub has to leave voluntarily, and according to what they told me, once an angel has a toe hold in this world it won’t leave voluntarily. So there’s really no cure.” Johnson watched for a reaction to this bad news.

Devlin didn’t respond at all, he didn’t even move.

“The Cherub should be affecting your mind apparently” Johnson pressed on, “Are you feeling more violent, and vengeful?”

Devin moved his head slowly, he might have been nodding.

Johnson sounded like he had given up. “I’ll be waiting inside the jet” he said, “in case you return from catatonia”

He waited for a response, but when none came he walked away.

Devlin sat where he was and felt the heat of the sun.

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Scene Fifty Nine

In which there is a perfect photo opp

Clare strided out of her tent. She was beaming; in her mind’s eye she saw herself, whipping hair framed against the sunset. This is an adventure, she thought, negotiating successfully with a borderline hostile opponent. Mr Kanke exited the tent after her, he was smiling slightly too, she thought that was a good sign; both of them were walking away happy.

She walked with him back to the choppers, and was gratified to see all the pilots scrambling to get back before they did. Many people had just been waiting around for them to appear, and that mde her feel like a rockstar; people were actually standing on each other’s shoulders to get a better look at her.

Don’t let it go to your head, she warned herself, if this man thinks that he can take advantage of you then he will crush you like a bug. She kept herself alert, watching her companion for any sign of what he was thinking. She had watched him back in the tent as well; he had been looking for any sign of weakness from her, but then he had stopped. She didn’t think she had shown any weakness.

Even while she was alert she was happy, she felt as though she had completed some kind of life’s goal, which she had never known she had. The sunset was golden and its light spilled over Mr. Kanke’s monstrous helicopters like molten gold.

Mr. Kanke put his first foot on the rung of the helicopters stairs, and then he turned and extended his hand. Now Clare felt like a world leader. This place is filled with reporters, she thought, I hope someone takes a picture of this. She took his hand and they shook, his hand was surprisingly soft. Then he was in the helicopter and was disappearing into the sunset.

Clare watched until the helicopters had almost disappeared. Then she noticed Frankie and Andrew standing to either side of her, my loyal lieutenants, she thought. “Had a nice day boys?” she asked, the way she had used to in high school.

“Yes Sah” said Frankie, “What are our new orders Sah?”

Clare was amused that he had assumed that there would be new orders, there were of course, but she hadn’t given it away.

“Collect everyone together” she said, “We’re going home. Oh and boys? Tell everyone to expect a huge bonus”

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Scene Sixty

In which a bad decision is made.

Charlotte had excellent night vision. Even in the darkness of the cloud-covered night she could see the statue clearly in the middle of the square.

She had spent the best part of a day trying to find some alternative to taking the statue, but she had thought of nothing. What it came down to in the end was this; she wanted to stay with Tony Tony, and that would mean taking some risks, she couldn’t let him see her in her normal form.

No-one else was around. The village was still relying on candles for light, and it was a waste of candles to stay up late routinely. Everyone else was asleep; Charlotte had the village all to herself.

She ran for the statue. No one could possibly have seen her, even if they were looking out the window at this moment. Still, she didn’t feel comfortable out in the open.

She reached the statue and grabbed at it. It felt as though her arms were being wrenched out of their sockets. Ah, thought Charlotte, not my body, I’m not as strong as I’m used to. Charlotte let herself fall to a sitting position at the base of the statue. She had spent all her time wondering whether to steal the statue, and hadn’t really considered the actual mechanics of how.

Now that she thought about it, Charlotte wasn’t sure that she could have taken the statue away even with her strength. It was probably bolted to the ground, and she didn’t know how strong it was, she wouldn’t want to break it.

Charlotte wasn’t good at working to a goal, and she almost quit right there, but something made her keep going. It was a cold night, and she desperately wanted to snuggle in with Tony Tony, but she had to do this now.

Charlotte stood back up, and looked around. I’ll need to make some sort of pulley, she thought.

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Scene Sixty One

In which the loss is discovered.

Tony Tony woke up late, he was doing that more and more he found.

He didn’t understand at first why he had woken up; he had woken up very suddenly and he was sure there should be a reason. He then became aware of a huge amount of noise around him; it was like the town had declared a party. He thought this was very rude of them; Tony Tony liked parties, but he generally liked them when he was awake and well rested. After all it was very early in the morning, and he had been having his favourite dream, the one about the bagpipe playing octopus.

Far too slowly other important parts of his brain came back online. That wasn’t a party outside, or at least it wasn’t the kind of party that Tony Tony liked; the people sounded far too angry.

Tony Tony staggered away from his mattress, pulling his shirt over him. The kitchen was deserted as he walked through it, and that was odd; old mother Granmas never left her kitchen.

He got out of the front door, and got no further. He hadn’t realised just how many people lived in the village, everyone was outside, and everyone was angry. At least they’re not angry at me, he thought.

He looked around for Alice, but he couldn’t see her, and red hair should really stand out in the crowd. He knew that she had gone to sleep next to him. She must have gotten up first, he decided, while the mob was still forming. He hoped she would be all right, he didn’t know how well she could look after herself.

He looked around for what was powering the mob, but the people stretched around the corner, and out of sight. He nudged an old woman, who he vaguely recognised from the village’s Coco forges. “What’s going on?” he asked.

The old lady turned to him. She didn’t seem as angry as the others, but there was something which Tony Tony found terrifying about her eyes. They were eyes that were already witnessing an execution. “They say it’s the statue” she said, “They say that someone has taken it, or so they say.”

Tony Tony was shocked, he said “What?”, but he had heard he the first time round, and at any rate he didn’t wait for an answer.

He thought about how he could get to the front of the crowd. He couldn’t push his way through; the people were standing far too close. He couldn’t walk over the top of the people, even if they were dense enough, he still didn’t think it was a good idea to antagonise these people right now. He thought about the advantage he had over the rest of the people here, and he rushed back inside.

There was a thing in the kitchen which was a little too small to be a window, and a little too well framed to be a hole that someone had punched in the wall. Its primary purpose was to let smoke out, but Tony Tony guessed that he would fit through it if he wiggled a little bit.

He propped himself up on the stove, being careful to avoid the hot cooking plate, and squeezed through the smoke hole. He was directly above the mob now and looking down on someone’s bald spot. He turned himself through a 180 degree turn, breathing in at the corners, and reached up to grab at the roof. He pulled himself up, willing the rather weak tiling not to break and send him falling. It didn’t break, and panting slightly, Tony Tony pulled himself up on the roof.

He got to his feet and looked. There were a few others on other roofs who had had the same idea he had had, but mostly he was alone, and he had an unobstructed view.

The statue was really gone, and the mayor, or at least the man who wore a funny wig and liked to give orders, was standing on a podium and addressing the crowd. He was talking about putting together teams of search parties to comb the countryside until they found the statue. Tony Tony liked that idea; he thought he might have some ideas about where to start looking.

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Scene Sixty Two

In which a mission is resumed.

Johnson didn’t like Charlotte. He thought that she was a manipulative and silly little girl.

Nevertheless, there was no denying that his partner was in love with her, and Johnson was an old enough man to know the importance of admitting when you were in over your head. He had tried to communicate with Devlin again last night, and again this morning. As far he could tell, Devlin had not done as much as move a muscle in all that time.

He knew that he had met his match, and that was why he had brought out the organisational directory.

Officially the organisational directory didn’t exist, then again officially the organisation didn’t exist. The reasoning was the same in both cases. In the case of the organisation it didn’t exist because the ladyship didn’t want it under government scrutiny. In the case of the organisational directory, it didn’t exist because the people in the organisation didn’t want her ladyship scrutinising their private communications.

Johnson let his thumb scroll down the index until he found Charlotte’s secure telephone number. He typed her private number into his phone and then let his eyes rest on the screen for a moment while his thumb hovered above the final button. No other way, he thought, and then he pressed dial.

The phone rang.

Then it rang some more.

It was continuing to ring, and Johnson was just considering stopping and dialling again, when suddenly the ringing stopped, and he heard Charlottes voice on the other end. “Hello?” it said.

Johnson paused for a moment and considered the facts. Charlotte sounded out of breath, and he could clearly hear the sound of a stream behind her words. He filed these facts away for latter pursuit, and started to speak. “Devin has been possessed by an angel” he said.

He could feel the panic blossoming on the other side of the phone, “Oh my gods!” said Charlotte, “is he okay?“

“He’s gone Catatonic” Johnson said, he didn’t like having to ask for help from someone half his age. “He needs you here” then after a brief internal struggle he added, “I haven’t been able to talk him out.”

“I’ll be there, I’ll come, I’ll help” spluttered Charlotte, “Just tell me where you are.”

Johnson feed her the coordinates; he could now hear a whooshing sound and the thudding of running feet. It’s going to be a long trip if she is going to run the whole way, he thought.

He remembered something important that he should have told her. “Listen, Charlotte” he said, “There’s something important I’ve realised, I think that-“

But he never got any further. A huge spark arced from the plane and earthed itself in his ear; he dropped the phone in shock. There were sparks leaping from every metal surface in the jet, they lit the cabin with an unpleasant light, and they made the air fizz.

Devlin walked into the cabin. He was crackling with electricity, and his eyes were glowing with a harsh white light. “We have delayed too long” he said, his voice was still human, but now it had the certainty of a man who knows that if the world does not conform to his will by itself, then he can simply force it to. “We are going to continue our mission to capture Mr. Greg”

“Capture?” asked Johnson, who thought that this was a positive sign.

“And then we shall judge him, the unholy shall be burned until they are pure”

Johnson thought that this course of action would be likely to leave someone crisp, but not really pure. He attempted reason[1], “We don’t know where Mr. Greg is” he pointed out.

“We know where Mr. Tomson is.”

“That’s not exactly true, we know where the tracking device is, but that thing was heavy and unwieldy, he’s probably dropped it somewhere by now” said Johnson, he was surprised by how calm he felt; maybe he didn’t really expect to live through this.

Devlin seemed unimpressed, Johnson tried reason one last time. “We can’t follow the signal” he said, “The jet won’t fly without any wings.”

Devlin was perfectly still, but the electricity never stopped. Just when he thought that Devlin had achieved a particularly energetic state of catatonia, Devlin lifted his right arm. He put his hand palm first against the wall of the jet.

The sparks all around Johnson got a lot more intense; it was painful to touch anything, and he swore that the plane was glowing. He looked out of the windshield; the ground was getting further away.

“Why are we finding Mr. Tomson?” he asked, mostly to himself, but Devlin answered anyway.

“To extract the information we want” he said.

Sparking like a malfunctioning bug zapper, and moving like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water, the jet flew into the sunset.

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Scene Sixty Three

In which someone in the know is worried.

Lord Greenbadger had a very impressive library. He didn’t really like to read, but he liked information, he loved information. This wasn’t the library that he let his guests see of course, he liked to keep his information private; after all it was his greatest edge. He kept a token library in his living room, and he invited his guests to read from it. it contained all the books that a gentleman of his standing was expected to possess, and as such it was very respectable, but if you knew where the secret catch was then behind it there were many, older books.

He dragged the old wooden ladder along the shelves, there wasn’t much room between the shelves and he had to hug it close. When he had reached the section that he wanted, he climbed up and pulled a single book out from the throng. He held it close to his chest; this was the book that he wanted.

There was a single desk away from the shelves’ and there was a reading light on it. He laid the book on the desk and sat down on the chair. Then he turned the light on and studied the book.

It was a heavy book, clearly old, and important since it had been bound in leather. The writing on the front had faded, but he could still make it out when he looked at it out of the corner of his eye.

It read; ‘Furious Angels, and how to avoid them’.

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Scene Sixty Four

In which a celebration is interrupted

The town was happy again, and Tony Tony was glad to see it. There was still talk about tracking down the people who had stolen the statue and stringing them up by the smallest available body part, but now it seemed good natured, like one might scold a child.

It had been surprisingly easy to find the statue. That was a good thing; there had been talk of calling in mercenaries to join the search, and that had worried Tony Tony, who had dealt with mercenaries before and didn’t think he had enough money to make them stop fighting afterwards.

But there was no need to worry about that anymore; the thief had left the statue right out in the open, just sitting by a picturesque mountain stream. Tony Tony didn’t quite know what to make of that, he thought that maybe the thief had realised what was coming after him, and decided to cut his losses. He didn’t really think that it was likely, but he couldn’t help giggling whenever he imagined a shady man with a mask looking back at the pitchfork wielding mob and then running for his life[1].

He didn’t know exactly where Alice was. He hadn’t seen her since the disappearance of the statue, and he couldn’t help but suspect that the two things were related. He worried that whoever had taken the statue had kidnapped her as well, but he dismissed his worries as groundless; it would be impossible to find anyone in the mob he was travelling in, everything was too disorganised, she probably was around and he just hadn’t seen her.

Besides if the thief had dropped the statue then he would have certainly left behind a live human. Tony Tony had done a little smuggling in his time, and though he had never tried to move a protesting person, he felt sure that it would be far more difficult than moving even the heaviest statue.

Of course a released person would tell your trackers where you were going and what you looked like. Unless they couldn’t carry a tale. Dead men told no tales, they were proverbial for it.

Before Tony Tony could pursue this new line of worrying someone clapped him on the back, and said something hearty in a language that Tony Tony didn’t understand.

This was their victory. This a victory which belonged to all of them, even if in this case they hadn’t actually done much work. Word had spread and all the other search parties were joining them, like a dozen feeder streams, all leading into one great tide of humanity, which surged back towards the village.

Someone seemed to have declared a party; a big one. Tony Tony was surprised and gratified, their village burns to the ground, he thought, and they celebrate anyway.

Huge bottles of beer were being passed around, along with, surprisingly, slabs of chocolate. There were banners and streamers in dozens of bright colour, and someone had managed to collect together three dozen rusty saxophones, Tony Tony passed one on when it came his way, but the man next to him took up the challenge, and soon the mob was marching to music that was, if not very good, then at least upbeat and enthusiastic.

People were getting into it as well.

To Tony Tony’s left a man old enough to be his father was turning cartwheels in time with the music. On his right a woman of the ‘Sweet Old Grandma’ mould was using the edge of a battle axe to lever the cork off of a beer bottle. A little in front and to the right a nubile young girl was looking backwards and giving, the look, in Tony Tony’s direction. Tony Tony was gratified, and was about to give the look back, when he realised that her eyes were aimed at the cart wheeling man next to him. Tony Tony laughed out loud, and silently wished them the best of luck.

Someone had pressed something clear in a bottle into his hands, and Tony Tony had been sipping it for a few minutes. So when he first saw the black pointy thing slipping across the sky like an escaping bar of soap, he put it down to high spirits and high Spirits.

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Scene Sixty Five

In which a confrontation becomes inevitable

Johnson looked down through the screen, it was flicking a little bit, but there was no mistaking what it showed. “He left it behind” he said, “It looks like some sort of army camp down there. There are lots of scorch marks around, so they probably evacuated fairly quickly.”

Devlin didn’t say anything, or move at all, he didn’t seem to move much anymore.

Johnson pressed on. “He probably left his pack behind, it’s a newbie mistake, but then he was never a soldier. Or he might have taking it out to lighten his load, a decretive piece of melted metal isn’t exactly the kind of thing that you would call a vital piece of equipment.”

Devlin didn’t move now either, but Johnson thought that his eyes looked less intense than they had earlier, like his partner had checked out from behind them.

Johnson was sweating a lot, he didn’t really like electrically, or at least he didn’t like it now. There weren’t many views that Johnson clung to with real certainty, but he was on the verge of making the view that electricity’s place was inside wires or in kitchen appliances, one of them. Sparks were still leaping back and forth inside the cabin, and Johnson had been shocked so many times that he was almost used to it. Almost.

He decided to press on, hoping the he could get his message across “Whether he left it deliberately or accidentally doesn’t really matter, the important information to take away here is that Mr. Tomson isn’t here, and that we have no idea where he is”

Devlin didn’t respond to this either, his eyes still looked blank.

“Would you like to land and look around?” Johnson asked, with more than a little disrespect in the tone, trying to communicate with Devlin was frustrating him.

Devlin moved now, it was so slow that it wouldn’t normally have warranted a reaction from Johnson, but after hours of stillness Johnson jumped at the movement, all the sparks flared up as well in apparent response.

Devlin walked to the windscreen and looked out, Johnson noticed that the eyes were harsh and alert again, like windows to an empty universe. He tried to see what Devlin was looking at, but he didn’t see anything very noticeable.

“There” said Devlin, “He is in the Parade. We will go there”

Parade? Thought Johnson; he looked in the direction that Devlin was looking in. When he really started to focus Johnson could just make out a thin ribbon of colour hidden away in what looked like another mountain entirely. They were too far away for Johnson to even be sure that it was people, let alone a single person in the middle of a parade; he didn’t really think it looked like people.

But it didn’t seem to matter what he thought, the jet was moving again, and whether he liked it or not, he was coming along for the ride.

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Scene Sixty Six

In which a character runs into trouble with her boss.

It had been a very long helicopter ride, and customs had been much too thorough for Clare’s liking.

She had hoped that her visit to the office would be a brief one, purely to serve notice that she was back in the country and that she would be happy to come in to get some work done, after she had had some sleep.

She wasn’t so lucky though; almost before the lift doors opened Clare heard Sandra call out to her from the front desk “Rowind Said That He Wants To See You At Your Earliest Convenience.”

Clare still remembered how empathetically Sandra had stated her views on Abandoning Work, and she waited to hear the smug tone in her voice, but it wasn’t there. That worried Clare, she wondered just how angry Rowind was if her ‘friend through a steel door’ was too concerned to gloat over something.

She nodded and started to walk towards the corridor that held the editors office. Frankie and Andrew had followed her up in the lift. As she walked away to the right, Frankie walked to the left, rejoining the mass of reporters like he had never left. Andrew stood there looking scared and confused, which was his usual expression. Sandra jerked her head, and he darted gratefully behind the desk. Clare notice that while he looked as scared as ever, his run was more measured and he kept his head held high.

But there was no time to wonder about the change that had overtaken Andrew. Clare walked down the corridor and found the editors office. She opened the door and walked in, remembering to knock halfway through. The office looked almost exactly the same as when Greg had inhabited it, but now Rowind was sitting at the desk, in a huge leather executive chair that made Clare think of fighter jets. The chair had been the only piece of furniture that Rowind had brought with him, and Clare wondered why he was so attached to it.

Rowind had also brought a pipe with him. Clare had never seen him smoke it, and neither had anyone else that he had talked to, apparently chewing on it just helped him think. He was chewing on it now, while glaring at Clare and not saying a word. Clare took the hint and sat down.

“What kind of a stunt did you think you were pulling, Miss Summers?” Rowind opened.

If Clare had been standing she would have taken a step back from the force of the rebuke. Rowind was short tempered and emotional, he was notorious for it, but he had never spoken to Clare like that before.

Clare ran through several responses, most of them were rephrasing of ‘Going to get a get story for the paper.’ She spent too long deliberating, and Rowind cut in with a different question. “Do you have any idea what kind of a situation you’ve set off here?”

“No?” said Clare by way of answering, she really had no idea what her editor could be talking about.

With an irritable jerk of his hand Rowind sent a newspaper sliding in her direction across the table, he had clearly been keeping it close at hand.

With a furrowed brow Clare picked up the paper, it was the USA Today, which was odd; she had agreed not to sell her information to anyone, the paper should have nothing to go on.

She unfolded the paper. It had a giant picture of her on the front, looking very noble, and the caption read ‘Lone Voice silenced, Is this too much?’

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Scene Sixty Seven

In which information is extracted.

Tony Tony felt the searing sensation press into him again; it was too much; his mind went blank.

He knew that he was yelling again, his throat felt raw and ripped; he just hoped it was only swear words that he was yelling, rather than anything that could be used against him later. The pain stopped again, and Tony Tony could hear the sound of crackling meat. He reviewed the last few seconds of this life, and couldn’t remember giving anything away

There was a man standing not too far away, he was shivering slightly and had the look in his eyes that people get when they’re watching a car crash. Tony Tony wondered why he wasn’t helping him, although he supposed that the bystanders didn’t always help out at car crashes either.

The only other man there was the man who had tried to convince them that he was an FBI agent. Except that he wasn’t the same as last time. Last time he hadn’t been so blank, and ruthless, and Tony Tony couldn’t help a mad little smile, so sparkly. The man spoke again, “Where is Mr. Greg” He asked.

Tony Tony was silent. They first time the man had asked Tony Tony had brushed him off with what he had thought was a fairly witty remark. The times after that he had just screamed that he didn’t know. Now he was just hoping that silence was the right answer, or at least not the wrong answer. It didn’t work of course; the man pressed his hand into Tony Tony’s face again.

Tony Tony felt the searing again, it felt like having his face forced into a vat of burning petrol, which slipped through his eyes to the back of his throat, and then sunk to his centre where it spread out and consumed him.

The pain seemed to go on for much longer this time, though it was hard to judge time from the inside. When it lifted Tony Tony realised to his shame that he could remember saying the words, ‘Magic league’ and ‘The master’

“No” he said, through a hoarse throat, wishing more than anything that he could take his last words back. The man said nothing; he just turned around, Tony Tony apparently not worth his attention anymore. As the jet began to move the sunset cast disturbing shadows on him.

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Scene Sixty Eight

In which apples should have been brought

Greg looked down the gorge. it was a sheer cliff going down a very long way, and at the bottom a fast moving river carved its way across the landscape, it had foam on it. Greg shook his head, fording the gorge just wasn’t an option.

He turned his attention back to Crazy Sven, who was still arguing with the troll. Greg had tried to explain that there was no point in arguing with a troll, but Crazy Sven seemed to see that as a challenge to yell louder.

“LOOK TO ME YA BIG LITTLE GIRL” said Crazy Sven, “I AM NOT BEING, HOW YOU SAY? ARSEHOLE, THESE ARE BEING APPLES.”

Greg thought that that was stretching the truth a little bit; Crazy Sven was offering McDuffs apple pies to the troll, they were warm, a fact that Greg chose not to speculate on.

Greg settled back against an old pillar which didn’t seem to be supporting much. He knew that they were wasting time, but at this point they seemed to have an infinite amount of time to waste. He didn’t think it could go on for much longer anyway; Crazy Sven had been yelling at the top of his lungs for the last half-hour, and his voice would surly break soon.

Greg became aware of an old man walking along the edge of the gorge. He took a closer look at the man; wondering when his brain had decided that harmless looking old men were more interesting than a huge man of unclear nationality hurling abuse at a troll.

The man looked up and met his gaze. He was a dignified looking old man, like a county gentleman with his estate somewhere else at the moment, and his eye contact was steady, apparently the man also considered Greg more interesting than the altercation that was happening on the bridge, Greg wondered what sort of life he had led.

The man pulled level with Greg and stopped. There was a long moment where the two just watched each other, neither willing to give anything away. Then the man nodded, and leaned against the pillar next to the one that Greg was resting on, Greg made no move to stop him.

“Goodday to you” said the man

Greg nodded and said, “Goodday”. Then he turned back to crazy Sven and the troll, the other man did the same.

They stood like that four a small moment. Each just watching the scene in front of them, without apparently paying attention to the person next to them. Then finally the man spoke, “If I may ask, how did this happen?” he asked.

Greg thought it was a reasonable question; after all it wasn’t something you saw every day. He answered, “We were driving along this road and we came across this bridge, we want to go to the other side, but the troll that’s guarding it wants his weight in apples before he will let us across.”

The man turned his head slightly to take in the taxi parked just before the bridge, and then he turned his head back to the troll.

“So as a result your partner is trying to convince him that a McDuffs Apple pie is much the same thing?”

“Yes”

“I do believe that’s stretching the truth a bit”

“Yes”

A thought seemed to come to the man, “I was under the impression that Troll’s ears are pitched too low to even hear human speech.”

Greg nodded slowly, his eyes still on the Bridge, “That’s right,” he said, “And it works in reverse as well, the speech that trolls use to communicate is too low for humans to pick out.

“And your partner is aware of this?” asked the man, his forehead creasing.

“Yes”

“Then why is he attempting to yell at it?”

Greg shrugged “In the time it have known Crazy Sven I have come to realise that its often better not to ask questions that start with ‘why’.”

The man nodded, “Perhaps so. Where were you attempting to get to?” he asked

Greg thought that this was a rather personal question, but something told him that he could trust this man. “There’s a town not too far from here” he said, “Founded by Lord Redfox, I was planning on heading in that direction.”

The man nodded, “Foxvision. I’ve been there once or twice, a nice place I thought. But now you have found yourself stuck because you cannot cross this bridge?”

“Yes”

The man seemed about to say something, but then another thought seemed to drive the first out of his mind, “If you can’t communicate with him then how do you know what he desires as a toll?”

Greg indicated towards a large sign sitting in front of the bridge. It had large letters painted on it which looked like they had been painted on by someone who couldn’t really write, but who were copying the letters from another piece of paper. The sign read, “Toll for Troll, One Troll Weight in APPLES”

The man looked at the sign in confusion, and then he hopped down from the pillar and walked up to it. He stopped in front of the sign and looked at it in confusion. Then he walked around to the back of the sign in confusion. Then, without much confusion, he started to wrench the sign out of the ground.

Greg thought that the dissonance was hurting his brain; the man looked to Greg like a grandpa of the ‘Dignified but kind’ mould, suited to giving gentle encouragement and advice to his grandchildren, or maybe just sitting on his deck with a glass of fine champagne, and admiring his rose garden; heavy physical labour simply didn’t suit him.

The sign was rammed hard into the earth, and Greg could see the sweat beading on the man’s forehead while he wrenched at it. Greg didn’t really think that the sign would be parting with the earth for anything less than heavy earth moving equipment, but to his great surprise the dignified looking man gave a huge grunt, and the sign came away.

Greg wondered what was going to happen next. He watched as the man turned the sign around and planted it back in the ground, rather more gently than it had been before. Greg forgot himself and stared.

There was writing on the other side of the sign as well; it read, in rather neater writing “We are pleased to inform you of the opening of a new toll less bridge to ease travel through this region, you will find it approximately one kilometre to the left of this sign along the gorge. Many thanks and a safe journey, Gileppi the bridge builder.”

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Scene Sixty Nine

In which a character becomes too famous for her own taste.

Clare woke up late. Her house was a mess, and smelled slightly of unwashed dishes. She had a groggy feeling in her head and an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach, but at least I’m not tired anymore, she thought.

There had been a full debrief for Rowind last night. He had been very upset about a lot of the things that she had done. He wouldn’t fire her, she was sure of that, mostly sure of that, though he had kept coming back to the thought that the difference between Genius and Hubris is success, and success is an unreliable thing.

Anyway he had gotten a bit better when she had pointed out the papers share of the payout which was now in their accounts, but only a little bit better; Rowind was one of those people who believed strongly in journalistic ethics.

Clare got a glass of water from the sink and gargled with it, before spitting it away. Rowind had suggested that it might be a good idea not to come into work today, and that if at all possible she should prevent the other news outlets from knowing that she was back in the country. Clare thought that he was just being paranoid, and she decided that she would definitely be in for work today, although she had every intention of being in a little late, owing to her need to ‘recover from her stressful expedition.

Clare smiled to herself and pushed her hair around, she could feel that it was a tangled mess, but it didn’t really matter, she had known that she would have to wash it since she had come back from the Amazon.

Before she did anything else she wanted to get a look at today’s paper, to see if they had forgotten about her already.

She walked to her door, wearing nothing but an unwashed pair of pants and a tight grey tee-shirt that she had really grown out of when puberty had kicked into high gear. She opened her door and took the paper off her door step.

This was when the whole thing went a little bit nuts.

Reporters came from everywhere, jumping out of vans or out of bushes, or simply jumping. There were so many cameras going off that Clare felt like she was in the middle of a fireworks factory. And absolutely everyone and everything was collapsing on to her, like water rushing to fill a hole in the ocean.

Clare didn’t have the hard won survival instincts of Tony Tony, and so she just stood there, mouth gaping. When, at the last possible moment, she slammed the door, she could hear the sounds of several people running head first into it.

Then there was only the sound of their questions; so many questions that it sounded like a particularly aggressive brook. Clare sunk to her knees, her legs apparently checking out for the day, and she listened with numb horror to the sound cutting through her walls and spreading through her whole house.

Then her instincts finally caught up with her. She moved quickly back into the house, making sure to duck under windows. She made it back to her bedroom and pulled on a baggy jumper. Before pulling her phone down from her bedside table and calling the one person that she thought might be able to help her now.

The phone crackled and spat, and then a voice sounded down the line

“Hello?” it said

Clare was so relieved to find that she recognised this voice, “Sandra” she said clinging to the voice like a lifeline. “Sandra”

“Clare, Is That You?” asked Sandra, “Do You Have Any Idea What You’ve Unleashed Girl? I’ve Been Fielding Calls About You All Morning, I Think I Might Have A World Leader On Hold“

Clare sank against her bedside cabinet, “Sandra,” she managed to say, “I think that I’ve gotten in way over my head.”

Sandra laughed, and Clare was reassured to notice the gleeful edge to her tone. “Damn Right You Have Girl, But Don’t Worry; Mama Sandra Is Going To Make This All Better, And Maybe Next Time You’ll Follow My Advice.”

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Scene Seventy

In which a timely warning results in an otherwise sane woman talking to cats.

You say he’s coming back.

…

Why?

…

How can you be sure?

…

Very well, what else do you have to tell me?

…

I see, I’ll see what I can do

…

Goodbye

…

Louise dropped the phone back into the cradle clumsily; she was not used to using phones, the tower had its own methods of communications. She sat back in her chair and rubbed her temples, it was enormously unfair being to only sane woman in a virtual asylum; it meant that she was the go to girl if anything actually needed to be accomplished.

Apparently now there was an angel lining up to attack her tower[1]. That was sheer arrogance she thought, an angel; a mere lesser cherub thought that it could attack The E.M.L. Well it would soon find that even if mages didn’t make the best soldiers, they still made dangerous opponents if they were given the right motivation.

She walked out of her office and swept a hand behind the door, coming up holding a small yellow cat, which blinked at her, too shocked to react in any other way. She held the cat by the scruff of its neck, and pulled it closer to her face.

“I’m sure you heard all of that” she said, “Contact the rat kings, and have them use their subjects to pass on the message to all the students, Tell them that the student who successfully destroys the angel will have unlimited free Peanut oil for the remainder of the year[2]“. The cat almost looked as though it nodded, Louise put it on the ground, and it darted away.

Louise walked away in the opposite direction to the one the cat had taken; there were other preparations to be made. As she walked she whispered things to the door knobs and the fire places, which stood up and saluted her.

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Scene Seventy One

In which a character turns into a cloud of bats

Charlotte was angry, angry and confused; which made her even angrier. She had gotten Johnson’s call and had immediately rushed out to help Devlin, only to find that the coordinates she had been given lead to a scorched crater in the ground, and nothing else.

She had left the statue undefended to get out here in time; didn’t that old man understand how important that was? Well of course he couldn’t, but that was hardly the point.

She had taken a room in an old village inn, staffed entirely by dirty old men, who kept leering at her unpleasantly. She almost wished that one of them would try something; she could use the exercise.

She was sitting like this, feeling sorry for herself when her phone rang. She checked the number first this time, if it was Johnson again then he could just sweat it out. But it wasn’t Johnson; it wasn’t even a number she recognised. Confused, she answered it.

Hello

….

Yes of course

…

He’s where?!

…

Why?!

…

Right, and what do you want me to do about it?

…

Give me one good reason why I should go do that. He should have known what he was getting himself into, hanging around that place.

…

Of course I still love him, what kind of question is that.

…

Fine, I’ll go. Who are you anyway?

..

Hello? Hello? Whatever.

Charlotte put her phone away. She realised, a little too late, that that conversation would have looked extremely odd to someone who only caught one side of it.

She looked around, but all the old men were leering at her the in the same way that they always did. Though she thought that the bar’s only other costumer; a Dwarf with his axe leaning against the bar, was less attentive on his drink than he had been a moment ago.

She walked outside; it was a clear sunny day, which she felt was inappropriate. I’m going into battle, she thought, I better be remembered in songs for this. She ground the sole of her shoe into the ground, closed her eyes, and was gone.

Back in the inn, the Dwarf removed his ear piece and smiled.

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Scene Seventy Two

In which a village is sighted.

Greg had expected the old man to look uncomfortable when he woke up, but to his surprise the man slept like an angel. Greg was a little put out by this; he had been beginning to think that his ability to sleep in car seats was the result of some inner tough man ability. He supposed that this could still be the case; after all he still didn’t know what kind of life the old man had led.

He could see a faint glow on the horizon, his first thought was that they were getting close to Foxvision, but that couldn’t possibly be right, the sun was up. Mages, the answer came to him, mages doing some kind of explosion test, as they tended to do. He grabbed Crazy Sven by the shoulder, “we have to avoid that bright spot” he said

“What and why would we. Being the Crazy Sven, run from little Girly Crotch light?”

“Its mages,” said Greg, “It’s got to be mages” he felt that this would be sufficient

“So?” said Crazy Sven, “I am finding that the CrotchRobes are How you say? More fun than barrels through a monkey”

It occurred to Greg that he had no Idea what Crazy Sven had done while they had been in the E.M.L, “I think they’re doing explosive testing up ahead” he said, realising as he said it that it was probably the wrong card to play.

To his surprise Crazy Sven’s reply went the unexpected route, “What other kinds of testing do they do?” he asked. Greg noticed that he had managed to get his grammar mostly right this time; he was wondering if this was a freak accident when Crazy Sven cut him off again, “anyway” he said, “fun!” and with that he wrenched the steering wheel and took the cab off road.

The lurching started again immediately, Greg had gotten too accustomed to driving on roads, so he jarred his hip against the door handle on the first bump. He heard someone voice behind him, “Oh dear me” it said, “Are we built to travel off road?”

Greg wedged himself in the smallest cranny he could find, “I don’t think it matters” he said, “It’s what we’re doing.”

“Ah” Said the man, who to Greg’s mild annoyance was sitting in a perfectly regal manner in the back seat, Greg couldn’t work out how he was remaining stationary. “Do we know the origin of that strange light up ahead?”

“I think its Mages” said Greg, he was making sure that he used the word ‘think’, he was beginning to think that given the kind of life he lead it was a bad idea to say anything that might be quoted back to him.

“Oh indeed”, said the man, who seemed quite at peace with the news. Greg stared; he was beginning to think that the man wasn’t normal. “Doesn’t that worry you?” he asked, “I mean mages do have a reputation of being dangerous people to be around”

The man smiled and nodded, “Indeed” he said, “but if you are not doing anything to prevent it then either you are managing the risk, or you don’t have any control over where we are going. Either way there’s little need for me to worry about it”

Greg tried to find a flaw in thins logic, but none was apparent.

“Incidentally” the man continued, “Are you aware that there is a canyon in-between us and the light?”

Greg kept his face blank, bit significant parts of his brain went ‘Wha!?’ to each other. He turned around just in time to feel the bumping stop and to see the cab starting to angle downwards.

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Scene Seventy Three

In which a plan is discussed.

Clare was grateful to be out of her house; and she was very grateful that she had got out of her house without anyone outside it knowing. However she was very put out that when the realtor had sold her her house, he had failed to mention that there were secret passageways leading into it. The knowledge now didn’t really make her feel safe, and she decided that she would be blocking off the tunnels as soon as she got home again, when this all blew over.

She was in Sandra’s apartment, she had slept there last night; something she only seemed to end up doing when she was in serious trouble.

She could hear Sandra’s voice from the kitchen, “Do You Want Orange Juice?” She asked. Clare was on the verge of saying no, she didn’t like imposing on hospitality, especially when the host is likely to remember at a later date, but some part of her was very aware that it hadn’t eaten dinner last night, “Yes” she said.

Sandra walked in with two tall glasses of the fruity tasting stuff that people tended to buy at supermarkets. She gave one to Clare, who had wrapped herself in a blanket in the corner, and then sat in an old leather chair herself. “Frankie Should Be Here Soon” she said, “And He Should Be Bringing Andrew With Him. I Don’t Think That Ants Was Very Keen On Helping Us, But I Threatened To Mess With His Internet Connection, So He Should Be Here In Some Form Or Another. When We’re All Here We Can Start.”

Clare nodded, she was still thinking about the tunnels leading out of her house. “How did Frankie know how to get me?” she asked Sandra

Sandra looked surprised and, Clare thought, a little annoyed that she was still thinking about that, “They Were Just The Old Steam Tunnels” she said, “Frankie Used To Use Them In His Army Days. Besides, Andrew Guessed They Were There As Well, Apparently He Used To Explore Them Around His Old College.”

Clare nodded, it all seemed really anticlimactic in a way, her house was an old one, and its steam pipes had needed a specialised maintenance tunnel, they weren’t really secret, they were just redundant and ignored by everyone who had known that they were there at all. Still, it was a tunnel leading directly into her house, and Clare didn’t like that, it didn’t make her feel safe.

There was a knock at the door and Sandra went to open it.

Frankie filled the doorway like a huge British refrigerator. He walked in, Clare noticed that Sandra careful slid around him, and took her seat again before he had a chance. Andrew bobbed along behind him like a little boat caught in the wake of a much larger, fast moving continent; all the chairs in the small lounge were taken, so he just sort of squatted down on an available area of floor.

Sandra didn’t have a very large apartment, and particularly with Frankie here there wasn’t a lot of room for anyone else. She wondered where Ants was going to sit when he arrived, knowing him she thought, he’ll probably hook his legs over the kitchen counter and hang down from there.

Frankie put something small and expensive looking on the kitchen counter. He flicked it on, and what was clearly a screen flashed to life, There were the sounds of a small war from the other side, someone was yelling orders and the sound of gun fire filled the room.

Clare’s eyes caught up with her brain, she saw Ants lying upside down on a couch somewhere; he had a controller in his hand and he was wearing a headset microphone, like the one that she was used to Sandra wearing. Ants flicked his eyes at them, and thumbed a button on his controller. The sound died down to a reasonable level, but kept going anyway. “Let me know when you need something” he said, his eyes turning back to whatever he had been looking at.

Sandra seemed to take this in her stride, “Well” she said, “Now That We’re All Here” she glanced at the screen here, and gave at a significant look that Clare was sure that Ants couldn’t see. “We Should Go Over Our Plan”

All eyes turned to her, apart from Ants, whose ears picked up a little bit. “You Can’t Stay Here” Sandra said, “Another Day And The Press Will Start Speculating On Your Untimely Death. The Key Here Is That We Have To Make You Boring”

“Boring?” repeated Clare

“Yes, You Have To Avoid Doing Anything Interesting. If You Do That For A Week Or Two Then Everyone Will Get Bored And Leave You Alone.”

Clare thought about the moment when the sheer press of the diving Press had threatened to swallow her alive. Being left alone sounded absolutely great right now. “How do we do that?” she asked.

“The Important Thing For You To Do Is To Keep Your Normal Routine Going, You’re Going To Go Into Work Today And Everyday For The Next Few Weeks At Most.”

Clare thought of crowds of reporters outside the daily soapbox, “Will Rowind like that?” She asked.

Sandra, seemed to defer to Frankie on this one. Frankie looked at Sandra, and then back at Clare before answering. “Rowind believes strongly in the rights of the reporter” he said “But he trained with our editor and he dose appreciate that the newspaper is a business, he’ll probably ask you to do a series of articles on what’s happened since you’ve gotten back”

“Which You Are Going To Do” said Sandra, “But They Are Going To Be Written Like A Puritans Guide To Sex; Dull And Uninvolved.”

Clare felt that she could get behind this plan, “Ok” she said “I’ll play my part” For the first time since yesterday she was starting to feel good about the future.

“Good” Said Sandra, “Now For The Rest Of Us. Ants!” The figure on the screen made a small grunting noise. “I Need You To Get Sockpuppets Going On All The Major Forums, The Key Message Is ‘She’s boring and I wish the news would show something else.’ Got That?” Ants made another grunting noise, at a slightly higher pitch than the last one. “Good” said Sandra.

“Frankie Will Be Your partner for the series of articles” She continued, “He Is A Good Judge Of People, And He’s Big Enough To Discourage Any Rough Business” Frankie looked at Clare and smiled gently.

“I’ll be Coordinating The Whole Thing” Sandra went on, “And Smoothing Everything Over At The Paper.” She looked absolutely gleeful at the thought of the whole thing.

She stopped there and didn’t seem to have anything more to say. Clare noticed the missing player “What about Andrew?” She prompted, “What is he doing here?” Sandra looked rather thoughtful; as though she had never really thought about the answer to that question, she looked at Andrew. Everyone else did as well[1].

Andrew looked very uncomfortable under all the scrutiny. He drew little circles on the carpet with his finger tip. “Wanted to help” he muttered with his eyes facing down.

Clare knew she should feel some pity, but then she realised that it was one of the most coherent sentences she had ever heard Andrew form. Then the pity came of course, but it had to wait until the shock died down. “Do you remember how to get into that old steam tunnel?” she asked

Andrew looked up and nodded, making something very close to eye contact.

“In my bedroom”, she said, “At the bottom of my wardrobe is a cardboard box with ‘Mom’s Christmas Jumpers’ written on the side. Could you sneak in and get that for me? I think I’m going to be dressing down for a while.”

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Scene Seventy Four

In which the sun rises

The air was chill on the battlements, but Louise didn’t mind it. It put her in mind of great stories from the past, epic dragon charges and so forth, and that was the frame of mind she was in. She could see herself in line with the great leaders of the past; Queen Hectoberum stood on one side of her today, Nigel the fork twister on the other.

It looked like almost all of the students in the school had answered her call. The windows and walls of the tower bristled with glowing people, who periodically exploded humorously.

Everyone was waiting for the battle to begin[1], they were all very eager to throw the latest thing that they had made explosive in the direction of the squishy angel. Mages might make bad soldiers, Louise thought with a small smile, but they were damn terrifying opponents anyway.

The E.M.L tower was a very tall one, and Louise could see clear to the horizon. The sun was starting to rise; it was like an extremely enthusiastic fireworks display, or maybe a giant glowing egg, or possibly a nuclear furnace with enough power to melt the earth into a blob of impure iron. There was something about the sunrise which always made Louise feel poetic.

The sunrise also helped Louise see more clearly, at this point she saw the black sparking thing advancing on the tower, with the attitude of something which has been traveling all night, and intends to reach its destination come hell or high water.

Louise closed her eyes and let the calls of the birds around her enter her mind; she wanted to see what they thought about the intruder. They birdsong entered through her ears and filled her, she let the chirps and calls take on their true form. Ya, bugger off, The birds called, Bugger off, ya bugger.Louise opened her eyes, good she thought, we know exactly where it is and that it isn’t an illusion.

She spread her feet a little further apart, and flexed her knees. The sparky thing was getting closer; it now looked like a jet with its wings ripped off.

She started to think about what kind of strategy would be effective, they need a live host, she remembered, well that’s easy to work with.

She thought about the forces that she had managed to assemble, we should mob it , she thought, we should let it get closer and then all jump on it at once, this will be an easy battle if we can stay coordinated.

The jet was starting to get very close now. Another ten seconds, she thought, and then we can cut loose. She spread her arms out as though she intended to catch the jet herself.

A dragon soared past her and dived at the jet, its rider was playing on a guitar which was flinging lightning bolts around in a semi random manner. Oh that’s right, she remembered, I have absolutely no control over what’s going on here.

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