Thirty-fifteen.
Roaring with pain and fury, Kiss reached up into the air and grabbed a handful of cloud. As soon as it touched his hand the water vapour froze, until the genie was clutching the hardest, most fearsome snowball in history. He whirled round three times and let fly. On the other side of the horizon, hidden from sight by the curvature of the earth, someone howled.
Thirty-all
“You as well?” Jane said.
Asaf was about to express surprise, but thought better of it. Think about it logically, he told himself. Perfectly normal seeming young woman and wimp, floating about on carpet above the Indian Ocean. Reasonable to assume that they were in the same sort of fix as he was.
“Me as well,” he replied. “I’ve got this confounded bloody nuisance of a Dragon King who’s giving me three wishes.”
“I’ve got a genie,” Jane said, making it sound like some sort of horrible illness. “Wretched, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. My name’s Asaf, by the way?”
“Jane. Pleased to meet you.”
Asaf settled himself rather more comfortably on the carpet. “There I was,” he said, “minding my own business…”
“I was about to kill myself, when this Thing jumped out of a bottle…”
“…Dragged me half-way across the bloody continent…”
“…His wish was my command, he said.”
“Really? Mine keeps saying that.”
Jane nodded. “I think they all do. Not that it means anything.”
“Quite the opposite, in my experience,” Asaf agreed. “So how long have you had yours?”
Jane frowned. “I’m not quite sure,” she said, “but it feels like absolutely for ever.”
Asaf shuddered. “I know the feeling. And they’re so damned smug about it, too.”
“Mine was supposed to rescue me,” Jane said, with a glint of anger in her voice. “The one time I actually asked him to do something useful, and where is he?”
“To hear is to obey, I don’t think,” Asaf agreed. “Just who the hell do they think they are, anyway?”
Jane glanced at him sideways. A fellow sufferer, she thought. Nice to know I’m not the only one.
“So yours has been mucking you about, has he?” she asked.
“Don’t ask.”
“We could start a victims’ support group.”
Asaf thought for a moment. “Pretty limited membership,” he said.
“Well, there’s you, me and him for a start.”
“Him? Oh yes, him.”
Jane looked round at Justin, who had folded a corner of the carpet over his head and was lying very still. “Are you all right in there?” she asked.
“Help,” Justin replied. “I want to go home.”
“I think he’s eligible for membership,” Asaf said. “How did he get involved?”
“From what I can gather, it’s his uncle’s carpet.”
“Ah.” Asaf wrinkled his brow. “Sorcerer’s apprentice, you mean?”
Jane shrugged. “I think he was just minding the store.”
“Typical.”
The mountain hung in the air for a moment, 800 feet above the ground. Then it fell.
For a fraction of a second before it hit the ground, there was a shrill scream of agony and rage. Then silence, except for the sound of Philly Nine brushing granite dust off his sleeves.
Deuce.
The dust settled. Birds began to sing again. The inhabitants of the nearby village poked their heads out of their windows, wondering why there was now a mountain in the middle of what had previously been a flat alluvial plain.
And then there was a faint humming sound a long way under the surface of the earth. It could conceivably have been a high-speed drill, or someone digging extremely fast with his bare hands.
Kiss broke through the surface like a missile launched from a submarine and soared into the air, spitting out boulders as he went. As he passed the mountain’s peak, he stuck out a hand and grabbed. The mountain lifted.
“Look, granddad,” said a child in the village. “You can see it from the window. A great big mountain, just like I said.”
Granddad, woken from his afternoon nap and not best pleased, rubbed his eyes and looked blearily through the window. “Where?” he asked.
“Oh,” said the child. “It was there a minute ago.”
“Hello, Bruce,” said one of Saheed’s regulars. “I thought you’d be out looking after your customer.”
The Dragon King of the South-East sneered into his glass. “Got fed up with the whingeing little blighter and left him to get on with it,” he replied. “I’ve done my bit. If the stupid bloody wowser can’t find his own way to the happy ending from there, he doesn’t deserve it. Fancy another?”
“Why not?”
“Mind you,” continued the King, clamping his offside rear talon firmly around the brass rail, “I won’t say it was easy. Took some doing, though I say so meself.”
“I bet.”
“There comes a time, mind,” the King went on, “when a bloke’s just got to turn round and walk away. You carry on spoon-feeding these bludgers and the next thing you know, you can’t call your life your own.”
“Wretched, isn’t it?”
The King nodded. “Anyway,” he said, “there we go. And it wasn’t all crook, ’cos I was able to do a mate a favour along the way.”
“You don’t say.”
The King grinned and nodded. “Yeah. That sheila that Kiss was having so much strife with. Reckon I’ve offloaded her on me mark. Two birds with one stone, eh?”
“Clever.”
The King looked contentedly at the side elevation of his glass. “Reckon so,” he said. “Reckon he owes me a couple of cool ones next time he’s in.”
“You reckon?”
“Yup.”
Advantage — The voice hesitated. Being an ethereal spirit, with no real existence within any conventionally recognised dimension, it had no hands with which to turn the pages of the book of rules, and it couldn’t quite remember the precise wording of Rule 74. A tricky one, in any event. A grey area.
In the red corner: let your mind’s eye drift to a barren plateau in the very centre of the desperately bleak Nullarbor Plain, to where a huge basalt outcrop has suddenly appeared from nowhere. While the seismologists stare at each other in blank amazement, and the cartographers draw lots to see whose turn it is to go flogging out there to draw pictures of the bloody thing, a relatively tiny form whimpers and struggles directly underneath it, pinned to the deck like a butterfly to a board. That’s Kiss.
In the blue corner: the equally godforsaken north-east corner of Iceland has suddenly sprouted a new and exceptionally virulent volcano, which is pumping out red-hot lava with the frantic enthusiasm of a Japanese factory on the Emperor’s birthday. Up to his neck in the lava outflow is Philly Nine.
Advantage — Excuse me…
YES?
Is it possible to have a draw?
SORRY?
A draw. Like, when both sides are hopelessly stalemated and it’s obvious nobody’s going to win. Is that allowed?
I DON’T KNOW, replied God. I’D HAVE TO LOOK THAT ONE UP.
Could you? Only I think the sooner I give a decision, the happier they’ll be. It can’t be much fun for either of them.
HAVE YOU TRIED TOSSING A COIN?
The voice hesitated. On the one hand, what the big guy says, goes. On the other hand, there’s such a thing as professional integrity: being able to face your reflection in the shaving mirror each morning, although of course in the voice’s case that was pretty much a non-starter anyway.
Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d rather we went for an outright decision on this one. Or at least a draw. If that’s all right by…
YOU’RE THE EXPERT. DO WHATEVER YOU THINK IS RIGHT.
OK, fine. In that case…
JUST GIVE ME FIVE MINUTES, IF IT’S ALL THE SAME TO YOU.
Sure. Um-why?
BECAUSE IF I’M QUICK I SHOULD BE ABLE TO GET PRETTY GOOD ODDS ON A DRAW THANKS FOR THE TIP.
Question, thought the voice. What sort of an idiot would take a bet from God? Answer: an idiot who didn’t want to spend the next five million years at the bottom of the burning fiery pit, I suppose.