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With that, Cavea grabbed the dead figure and twisted in a kind of judo throw, hauling the corpse over his shoulder. Their attacker arched towards the water and the avidly waiting fish. As he sailed over, the smombie gripped Cavea himself, and pulled him with him into the pool.

  The two bodies vanished into the deep water.

  “No!” Hemi and Deeba shouted.

  The smombie’s head and Mr. Cavea’s birdcage both broke the surface. The water rippled as excited piranhas came to investigate. The smombie hauled clumsily at roots, to get out, but Mr. Cavea kept batting his hands away. The bird shook water from itself and trilled and hopped around its cage.

  “He says go!” the book shouted. “Now! Before the Smog gives up on this body.”

  “We can’t leave him,” Deeba said.

  “No way!” said Hemi.

  Cavea chirruped at them furiously.

  “Go. He says he won’t be able to hold him much longer.”

  Deeba could see hundreds of fish nibbling at the men in the water. The piranhas around the smombie swam away, to join those attacking Yorick Cavea.

  They don’t like old meat, she realized.

  “He says thanks for inviting him,” said the book.

  Hemi dragged Deeba. “We got to go,” he said urgently. He pulled her through the passageway the smombie had cut, under the sliced ends of vines dripping sap.

  Deeba looked back. Mr. Cavea was sinking. He gripped the smombie with one hand, and with the other, he threw open the door to his cage. As his body slipped into the piranha-infested water, the little bird flew out.

  Immediately, the human body stiffened, its hand still tight around the smombie’s neck. The two figures sank below the surface, the smombie still moving, the little bird circling above the pool.

  There was a rumbling, bubbling noise.

  The water of the pool was thick and foul with the juices of the fight and the dead body. It was unsettled like a stomach. Big bubbles rolled up in it.

  There was a farting sound, and a mass of gas erupted out of the deeps. Bubbles of black smoke gathered, and sent out tendrils.

  The bird-part of Cavea, still soaking, launched itself from a branch and circled the bolus of Smog.

  “Move,” whispered the book.

  “No, everyone stay still,” whispered Deeba.

  The bird whirled around the Smog so fast it tore off strips of cloud-matter. After several such provocations, it raced off up the stairs. The Smog billowed in a dirty mass after it.

  “He led it away,” Hemi whispered.

  “Good man,” the book said.

  “Brave man,” Deeba said.

  “Now can we please get out of here?” Hemi said.

  They opened the front door, and stumbled out of the forest in the house, bedraggled, sticky with resin and plant juice, scratched, bruised, hungry, and exhausted, into the afternoon of UnLondon.

  66

  Skipping Historical Stages

  People stared at them curiously. Sitting on his step opposite was the old man they had spoken to before entering.

  “So in my opinion,” he said, “you should avoid going in.”

  Deeba gave him a scorching look. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Hemi, can you find somewhere?” They stumbled off to a less crowded street, and Hemi read the signs until he found them an emptish house, where they washed as best as they could under the taps, went to the living room, and collapsed.

  “What exactly was that…smombie?” Deeba said.

  “They used to be really rare, but these days there are more of them,” Hemi said. “Smog gets everywhere. Into cemeteries, and through the earth into the graves.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” said the book.

  “Do you remember where I’m from?” Hemi snapped. “There’s not much gets people in Wraithtown more riled than mistreating the dead. We’ve been complaining about this for ages. Not that anyone listened.

  “Smog gets inside bodies and pulls them around like puppets. Some are nothing more than skeletons with clots of Smog around their joints. Some are like the one we saw in there.”

  “Aha,” said Deeba. “And sometimes they might look even more as if they’re still alive.”

  “Yeah…Of course,” Hemi said, his eyes widening as he remembered the Unstible-thing.

  “And how’d it find us?”

  “The Smog must’ve sent them all over the place.”

  “It probably didn’t expect to find you,” the book said. “There’d have been more than one. But the forest is well known enough that it was worth staking out. Which means that there may well be others, waiting for us elsewhere.”

  Deeba held up the feather and turned it in her fingers. Its key-shape was made of intricate whorls and beautifully plaited threads of matter. Its reds and blues glinted like colored glass.

  “So what now?” Hemi said.

  “Well,” the book said. “That was the first task. There are six more. The next thing we have to fetch is the squidbeak clipper. That’ll mean going to the docks. After that we need the bone tea. After that…”

  “We can’t,” Deeba said, twirling the feather.

  “What?” said the book.

  “What?” said Hemi.

  “Look…what are we supposed to do with all these things once we’ve got them?”

  “It depends,” the book said. “The clippers are supposed to, well, to snip something open. The bone tea’s there to send something to sleep. The snail…it’s not exactly clear what the snail’s for, but there are two distinct schools of thought—”

  “What do you mean ‘it’s not clear’?”

  “Don’t take a tone with me! I told you, prophecies can be vague.”

  “Yeah, and wrong,” muttered Hemi.

  “A lot of these things,” the book went on, “the idea is that as situations arise you’ll…sort of know what to do. Some stuff is explained in detail, some isn’t. Or it’s…well…contradictory.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Deeba said. “Trying to follow prophecies is obviously way too hard.”

  “But this was your idea,” the book said. “And look, we got what we needed, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, and it took us two days, and we lost two people!” Deeba yelled. There was silence.

  “Diss is dead, and Cavea probably is,” she said. “Do the maths. We still have six more things to get. At this rate that’s going to cost us twelve people, and there are only six of us left, and that’s if we count you, book, and Curdle! And, it’s going to take twelve days. And I haven’t got twelve days! You know that. I’ve got seven at the most.”

  “That started again, though,” the book said tentatively. “After the phone call. And the number may not be accurate…”

  “It’s too long. And too risky. You saw what happened to Diss! We can’t do it this way. Like you said, we don’t even know what we’re supposed to do with this stuff.” She held up the featherkey. “Like, what do I do with this?”

  “Well, you open a door, obviously,” the book said.

  “What door?”

  “A very important door. A door without the opening of which the Smog cannot be stopped!”

  “You don’t know, do you?” Deeba said.

  “No,” said the book.

  “No idea?”

  “Not really.” It sounded quite defeated. “I think it’s the doorway to the room where the squid beak is, but…no. Not really.”

  Deeba stamped around the room in rage.

  “We spent two days crashing around in a forest, and people died, and we aren’t even sure what for! I’m supposed to use it to get something to get something else! Why don’t I just get the last thing in the first place?”

  “As I say, the occasions tend to present themselves, and then it’s clear…” the book said.

  “I’d shut up now, if I were you,” Hemi muttered to it. The book took his advice.

  “If Diss hadn’t died getting us this,” she said, staring at the key, “I’d tear the
bloody useless thing up. I know it’s not your fault,” she said to the book. “It was my idea. And I know it would be nice for you if what’s written in you turned out to be sort of true. But we don’t have time. And it’s too risky. So go through the tasks, and tell me what each one’s supposed to do.”

  “Well, as I say, the squidbeak clipper’s supposed to hold on to something in the tearoom—”

  “Forget it,” Deeba said. The book hesitated, then continued.

  “The bone tea’s refreshing—”

  “No.”

  “But…we need it to give to the aleactor, to send him to sleep when we play ludo, so we can take the teeth-dice—”

  “I said no.”

  “The teeth-dice we need to chew up a—”

  “No.”

  “The snail, I think, can prove to us that slow and steady wins out—”

  “Are you joking? No.”

  “The black-or-white king’s crown explains an outcome—”

  “Whatever. Don’t even know what that means.”

  “—and the UnGun’s a weapon.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is it? A weapon? For real?”

  “For very real,” Hemi said. “I didn’t know it was in the prophecy, but everyone’s heard of the UnGun.”

  “It’s the most famous weapon in UnLondon’s history,” the book said.

  Hemi nodded—surreptitiously, so the book wouldn’t see that Deeba wanted independent verification of everything it was saying.

  “Why?” she said. “What did it do?”

  Hemi looked at the book, and Deeba was sure the book was looking back at him.

  “I dunno,” said Hemi. “Heroic stuff.”

  Deeba rolled her eyes. “What is it?”

  “A gun,” the book said, “only an un one. It says in me, ‘The Smog’s afraid of nothing but the UnGun.’ That’s what all this, all the seven tasks, leads up to. The fetching of the UnGun. It was put in a very safe place, where no one would mess with it, years ago.”

  “Smog’s afraid of nothing but the UnGun, eh?”

  “Yes,” the book said, then added nervously, “Well to be honest it actually says ‘nothing and the UnGun,’ but we realized that must be a misprint.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Deeba snapped. “So you did know you there could be mistakes in you?”

  “It was three letters,” the book said forlornly. “We didn’t think anything of it…”

  “Alright. Whatever.” Deeba thought. “A weapon. Alright. Right now we haven’t got much to fight the Smog with. We need a weapon, and the Smog’s obviously scared of this one.

  “So that’s what we’re going to do,” Deeba said. “We’ll skip the rest of the stuff. Save us some time. We’ll go straight to the last stage of the quest. Let’s go get the UnGun. Then we can deal with the Smog, and I can go home.”

  67

  Weapon of Choice

  “This is ridiculous.” Deeba could tell from the book’s voice that if it could walk, it would be refusing to. It would be digging in its heels. Unluckily for it, it was tucked under her arm, and she was walking rapidly. “I said this is ridiculous.”

  “I heard you,” Deeba said.

  “So? Are you going to stop?”

  “Nope.”

  Hemi, Curdle, and the utterlings ran after the arguing duo. Deeba was turning decisively but randomly down side roads as shadows lengthened in the UnSun.

  “Look,” said the book frantically. “You can’t pick and choose bits from a prophecy. That’s not how they work.”

  “Let’s be honest,” Deeba said. “We all know you have no idea how prophecies work.”

  Hemi winced and sucked in his breath, shook his hand in an ouch motion.

  “In fact,” Deeba went on, “it looks a lot like prophecies don’t work.”

  “The whole point is you need each of those things to get the next one, until we get to the UnGun,” the book said.

  “Even if we had time to try that, you don’t know,” Deeba said. “You’re the one that keeps saying what’s in you’s wrong. You want to do it your way to make some of it work again. But if we know it’s the UnGun we really need to deal with you-know-what, we’re going straight to it, instead of messing around with in-between bits. Unless,” she added with sudden interest, “there’s any more telephones on the way?”

  “N-no, there’s not,” the book said. “But in any case—”

  “We are not walking through each of your chapters, book! So. Give me directions, or…or I’m just going to keep wandering in circles until the Smog finds us.”

  Deeba and the book sulked at each other.

  “I vote you give her directions,” Hemi said.

  “Alright,” the book said at last, as they turned yet another corner pointlessly. They passed a tumbledown piano, one of UnLondon’s random pieces of street furniture. The book sounded beaten down and miserable. “I’ll tell you what’s written.

  “It’s going to be harder to get the UnGun than the key. Even if we had the crown of the black-or-white king. To get the UnGun we have to get past something truly terrifying, one of the most deeply feared creatures in UnLondon—”

  “Get on with it,” Deeba snapped.

  “Alright. It’s protected by the Black Window.”

  Hemi gasped. Deeba stopped.

  “The Black Window?” Hemi said in a hushed voice. Then he said to her more normally, “Are you laughing?”

  “Sorry,” said Deeba. She tried to stop. “Black Window!” She sniggered again, making Curdle turn excited circles. The utterlings watched her, bewildered.

  “I do not see what’s so funny,” the book said.

  “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” Deeba said. “Tell me about this Black Window. What do we have to do?”

  “This is no joke, Deeb,” Hemi said. “The Black Window’s nasty UnKin. Someone must’ve really wanted to protect the UnGun if they put it there.”

  “That’s why we’re supposed to work up to it,” the book grumbled. “In stages…”

  “Yeah yeah,” Deeba said. “Who must’ve really wanted to?”

  “Well,” said Hemi hesitantly. “Whoever…wrote the prophecies, I suppose.”

  “That makes sense,” said Deeba. “Sadists. Tell me what it is.”

  “The Black Window lives in Webminster Abbey,” the book said.

  “Oh you didn’t say that,” said Deeba, and laughed more.

  “I wish you’d treat this information with the awe it deserves,” said the book plaintively.

  “Webminster, though!” Deeba said, but her laughter died at Hemi’s face.

  “It is serious,” he said. “You wouldn’t catch me going near there normally.”

  “The window doesn’t just kill you,” the book said. “It takes you right out of the world. No body left, no clothes, no trace. Swallows up whatever comes close. It’s the perfect predator.”

  “I thought that was a shark,” Deeba said.

  “Alright, the shark’s the perfect predator. The Black Window is the pluperfect predator.”

  Deeba still wanted to tease them, but there was a fear in Hemi’s and the book’s voices that made her uneasy.

  “So how do I get to Webminster Abbey?” Deeba said.

  Deeba’s heart sank when she looked at the map. There were miles to go. Some of the areas they would have to cross were inhabited, some were empty—and now some were smogmires.

  “It’ll take ages,” Deeba said. “Oh no. Can’t we…I dunno, take a train or something?” Hemi stared at her as if she were mad. “There’s going to be more and more people coming after us, every minute.”

  She was proved right much sooner than she had expected.

  For an hour or so the rather dejected little group followed the route they had mapped, as briskly as their exhausted limbs would let them. They did nothing to attract attention to themselves, and apart from their clothes being a little more dirty than most people’s, there wasn’t much noticeable a
bout them. In the streets of UnLondon, a group of a girl, a half-ghost, a talking book, a piece of rubbish, and two living words was unusual, but not very.

  That was why, when Deeba first heard a motor approaching, she didn’t think it was anything to do with her.

  It got slowly louder and louder, until suddenly Deeba heard a voice call her name. She turned and looked up in dismay. Descending towards them, through a brief flock of scurrying laundry, was Rosa and Conductor Jones’s bus, the Scrollscrawl Sigil clear on the front.

  Murgatroyd was leaning from the platform, shouting, “Deeba Resham, stop! We need to talk!”

  68

  The Functionary’s Tireless Hunt

  Deeba and her companions ran.

  “Wait, Deeba, wait!” It wasn’t just Murgatroyd leaning out now. He had been joined by Conductor Jones, Obaday Fing, and even Skool, the brass helmet peering down.

  “This way!”

  “No, this way!”

  Deeba and Hemi dithered at every turn, while the book barked directions. They were in an area of moil houses and streets littered with skips and obsolete machinery, with no arches or overhangs under which they could hide. The bus followed them through the intricate streets, while UnLondoners watched curiously from windows.

  “Wait, Deeba!” The voices were insistent. “We want to help!”

  Deeba turned in to an alley full of clotheslines and clothes gyrating as if they were in a dryer, though there was no wind. They ran through layers of cloth like curtains, until at the end of the streetlet they reached a blockage, a steep wall of broken clocks, slippery as scree.

  “Listen,” whispered Deeba. The noise of the bus had ebbed.

  “They’ve gone,” whispered Hemi.

  “I think we lost them,” Deeba said, and indicated the tight alley. “It’s too narrow for the bus here.”

  Even as she said that, though, cords dropped out of the sky, from the bus hovering above the buildings. Conductor Jones rappelled down, landing in front of them.

  “Deeba, Hemi, Book,” he said, and held out his hands as they backed away. “Please wait. Listen. We’re on your side.”

  “Leave us alone,” Hemi said. “Leave her alone.”