‘Before I unfreeze everyone,’ the Insultana instructed Luka, ‘take your friends indoors and wait until I tell you it’s safe to come out.’ Her tone had changed completely, Luka noted; no trace of sharpness remained. In fact, it was positively friendly, even affectionate.
Luka did as the Insultana told him, hustling his little party into the grey bakery and then pressing up against the glass windowpane; so he and Dog and Bear and Nobodaddy only saw a little bit of the large-scale destruction that followed. The Insultana waved an imperious arm and the Respectorate unfroze. Now Luka watched the Otters swooping and diving around the city streets unleashing their enchanted paper planes, which seemed to be equipped with Rat-seeking homing devices and chased the Rats wherever they went, indoors and outdoors, under their bed sheets or up on roofs, and it wasn’t long before the attack succeeded and had the Rats on the run. Betel juice and eggs and rotten vegetables had been effective as insults, but the itching powder didn’t just hurt the Rats’ feelings and ruin their clothes and make them smell even worse than they did already. Luka saw even the nastiest-looking giant Rats – the mirror-shade-wearing, heavily armed, super-nasty Respecto-Rats of I – running in circles and screaming as the paper planes chased them and poured itching powder on their heads and down the backs of their necks. He saw them tearing at themselves with their long angry claws and ripping great lumps off their own bodies as they tried to stop the itching. The air was full of Rat shrieks, growing louder and louder, so loud that Luka had to cover his ears because it was almost too much to bear.
‘If that powder is what I think it is,’ Nobodaddy said at last, in a voice filled with wonder, ‘if that is indeed made, as I believe it may be, from the deadly Asian Khujli plant, mixed up, I don’t doubt, with powder from the seeds of Alifbay’s own, overpowering, though rare, Gudgudi flower … and if the Insultana has included material from the Sickening Yuckbone or Magic Itch Bean of Germany, spores from the Demonic Abraxas of Egypt, the Kachukachu of Peru, and whirligigs from Africa’s Fatal Pipipi, then we may be witnessing the end of the Rat Infestation of the Magical World. What is interesting about the formula which I believe the Insultana may have used is that ordinary people are immune to these occult powders; rodents alone are affected. Yes, she asked you to take shelter, but that was to protect the dog and the bear, as a precautionary measure; and above all, I surmise, to save us all from the Rats possessed of their last and lethal Frenzy.’
The Rats had indeed taken leave of their senses. Through the window of the grey bakery, Luka witnessed their mounting insanity and their dying throes. The thin-skinned masters of the Respectorate were literally scratching themselves to bits, actually ripping themselves apart, until there was nothing left of them but lumps of mangy fur and grey, ugly meat. The shrieking of the Rats reached a terrible crescendo, and then slowly the air grew quieter, and silence fell. At the very end Luka saw the Over-Rat himself come running down the street towards the River of Time, slashing himself as he ran, and at the end of the street he leapt into the River with a terrible cry and, as he was the one Rat in the World of Magic who was unable to swim, because he had always been too lazy and spoiled to take the trouble to learn, he drowned in the Temporal Flow.
And that was the end of that.
Slowly, slowly, the non-Rat inhabitants of the Respectorate came out of their homes and understood that their ordeal was at an end, and then in great happiness they rushed to the fences that separated the Respectorate from the rest of the Magical World and tore them down and flung away the broken remnants of their prison walls for ever. And if any Rats did survive the Great Itch Bombing they were never seen again, but crawled back into the darkness behind the cracks of the world, which was where Rats belonged.
Soraya of Ott on her green-and-gold carpet landed outside the grey bakery as Luka and his companions emerged. ‘Luka Khalifa,’ she said, and Luka didn’t even ask her how she knew his name, ‘you have done the World of Magic a great service. Aren’t you going to ask me for anything else in return? You guessed my name; that alone should get you at least the traditional three wishes, and you’ve only used up one. But for the idea of the Itch Bombs! Who knows what’s a fair reward for that. Why don’t you just think of the biggest, most important wish you can come up with, and I’ll see if I can do anything to help?’
And before Nobodaddy could stop him, Luka began to talk very fast, to tell this astonishing young girl who had the same name as his mother exactly why he was here in the World of Magic, and what he hoped to do, and why. By the end of his little speech the Sultana of Ott’s eyes had widened and her hand had risen to her mouth. ‘Perhaps, in my pride, I spoke too soon,’ she said, and there was a note of awe in her voice. ‘It may be that you have asked me for a thing I cannot give.’
But then she grinned a mischievous grin and clapped her hands like a child. ‘To steal the Fire of Life, which has never been done in the whole history of the Magical World! Why, that would be the most deliciously Disrespectful Deed in All of Time! It would be outrageous, and wonderful. In a phrase, it would be completely Over The Top, and therefore it behoves any true Otter to help. My fellow warriors of the OAF, the Otter Air Force, must return home to Ott – but, Luka Khalifa, Thief of Fire, I, the Queen of the Otters, will do everything in my power to assist you to perpetrate your dreadful – and most noble, and most dangerous, and absolutely most enjoyable! – Crime.’
‘I’m in a sort of hurry,’ said Luka bravely, ‘and you have this super fast carpet. Is there any way you could rush me past all the other levels and take me right to the Fire, where I need to be, and afterwards get me back where I started from?’
‘The River is long and deceptive,’ said Insultana Soraya, nodding thoughtfully. ‘And you still have to pass through the Mists of Time, where you can’t see a thing, and then there’s the Great Stagnation, where the River turns into a swamp and you can’t move, and the Inescapable Whirlpool, where Time spins round and round and you can’t escape, and the Trillion and One Forking Paths, where the River becomes a labyrinth – and you will certainly get lost in all those mazy waterways and never find the one single stream that is the true, continuous Path of Time. Very well,’ she said, in a voice that told Luka that a decision had been made, ‘I will join you in your adventure. There are at least those four stages – what did you call them? – “levels”? – four levels that I can enable you to skip. But after that we will just have to take things as they come.’
‘Why can’t you take me all the way?’ Luka blurted out, very disappointed.
‘Because, my sweet Luka,’ replied the Insultana of Ott, ‘this silken flying carpet given to me so long ago by King Solomon himself can do many wondrous things, but it cannot fly through the Great Rings of Fire.’
5
The Path to the Three Fiery Doughnuts
If you have not yet flown on a magic carpet, you probably don’t know about the seasickness. A flying carpet makes a slow, rolling, wavelike movement as it passes through the air, not exactly as if it’s floating on airwaves, but more as if the carpet itself has become a kind of silken air that can bear you aloft and take you wherever you want to go. It’s sad, but true, that your stomach may find this kind of travel disagreeable, at least for a while. And if you have never flown on a flying carpet accompanied by a nervous talking bear, an even more nervous talking dog, and an Elephant Duck and an Elephant Drake making the first flight of their otherwise flightless lives, to say nothing of a supernatural being who looks, acts and talks like your own father, as well as an ancient Queen who looks, acts and talks like a seventeen-year-old girl, and, in addition, a large amphibian boat tank named Argo, then you will just have to imagine the confusion that reigned aboard the green-and-gold Resham as it took off to begin its journey towards the Mists of Time. The flying carpet had grown considerably in size to accommodate all its passengers and cargo, and this exaggerated the waviness of the flight.