Luka understood. If these burning doughnuts encircled the Heart of Magic – the Torrent of Words, the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge, all of that – then the quest was hopeless. ‘This fire,’ he said, without much hope, ‘the fire the Rings are made of, that isn’t the same fire as the Fire of Life – or is it?’ Nobodaddy shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is the ordinary sort of fire, that turns whatever it touches to ash. The Fire of Life is the only flame that creates – that restores instead of destroying.’
Luka was at a loss for words. He stood on the deck of the Argo in the darkness and stared at the sheets of flame. Bear the dog and Dog the bear came to stand in silence on either side of him. And then, without warning, they both began to laugh.
‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ barked Bear the dog, and fell down and rolled onto his back and waggled his legs in the air. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ And Dog the bear began to dance a jig on the deck, which made the Argo lurch alarmingly from side to side. ‘Ho! Ho!’ he roared. ‘If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it. After all that fuss … it’s just this?’
Soraya was bemused, and even Nobodaddy looked perplexed. ‘What on earth are you doing, you foolish beasts?’ demanded the Insultana of Ott.
Bear the dog struggled upright, out of breath on account of having laughed so hard. ‘But look,’ he cried. ‘It’s Fifi, that’s all it is. It’s only a great big supersized Fifi, after all this fuss.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Soraya asked. ‘There’s no woman out there!’
‘Fifi,’ giggled Dog the bear. ‘The Famous Incredible Fire Illusion of Grandmaster Flame. F-I-F-I, Fifi! That was our name for it in the circus. So Captain Aag is behind all this! We should have known.’
‘You know the Grandmaster?’ Soraya actually gasped.
‘Grandmaster, bah!’ answered Bear the dog. ‘He was a phoney in the Real World, and he’s still a phoney here. These fantastic defences you’re so afraid of, they’re no defences at all.’
‘Fifi is an illusion,’ explained Dog the bear. ‘Smoke and mirrors! She’s a magic trick. She isn’t really there at all.’
‘We’ll show you,’ said Bear the dog. ‘We know how she works. Put us ashore and we’ll put a stop to this silliness once and for all.’
Nobodaddy held up a warning hand. ‘Are you sure,’ he asked, ‘that the Captain Aag of your circus days is the same as the Grandmaster Flame of the Magic World? How can you be certain that these Great Rings of Fire aren’t the real thing, even if the circus illusion was a fake?’
‘Look up there,’ Luka said sharply. ‘Where did they appear from?’
Circling in the sky above their heads, horribly illuminated by the giant flames, were seven vultures wearing ruffs around their necks, like European noblemen in old paintings, and also like circus clowns.
That set Bear the dog and Dog the bear off again. ‘Ha! Ha!’ Dog the bear laughed, jumping off the Argo onto the shore. ‘Old Aag’s beaky buddies just spoiled his trick by flying through it!’
‘Ha! Ha!’ agreed Bear the dog. ‘Watch this, everyone!’
Whereupon they both ran directly at the Great Rings of Fire, and disappeared into the blaze.
Soraya shrieked, and Luka covered his mouth with his hands; and then in a flash the Rings vanished, the light changed, Bear and Dog came running back, the counter in the top right-hand corner of Luka’s field of vision dinged up to 7, and the Heart of Magic lay revealed, lit up by the Dawn of Days.
The Heart of Magic – and also Captain Aag, astride a fire-breathing dragon.
6
Into the Heart of Magic
‘Is this an illusion, too?’ Luka boldly asked Captain Aag. ‘Is this another of your pesky magic tricks?’ Captain Aag gave what might have been intended as a laugh but came out as a sort of snarl. ‘Security,’ he said, ‘is not an Illusion. Security is the Foundation of any World. Alas! Those of us who labour in the field of Security are often misunderstood, regularly abused, and frequently ignored by those whose safety and values we protect, and yet we struggle on. The Maintenance of Security, young feller-me-lad, is a Thankless Task, I’ll have you know; and yet Security must be Maintained. No, Security is not a Deception. It is a Burden, and it has fallen upon me. Fortunately, I do not work alone; and a loyal Fire Bug’ – here Luka saw the little telltale flame hovering at Aag’s shoulder – ‘who makes haste, overcoming all obstacles and distractions, to bring me word that thieves are on their way, a heroic Fire Bug such as we have here, such a Bug is not the creation of flimflam or prestidigitation. Such a Bug is Virtue’s Child. Nor is the murderous and terrifying Dragon Nuthog the product of any conjuring trick – as you will soon discover.’
He was a man of hair and anger, this Aag, whose henna-tinted locks stood out from his head like wrathful orange serpents; a man, too, of chin hair, whose russet beard stuck out in all directions like the rays of an ill-tempered sun; a man of eyebrows, quarrelsome scarlet bushes which curled upwards and outwards above a pair of glaring black eyes; and a man also of ear hair, long, stiff, crimson strands of ear hair, that corkscrewed outwards from both those fleshy organs of hearing. Blood-red hair sprouted up from Aag’s shirt at the collar and out from his pirate’s greatcoat at the cuffs, and Luka imagined the Captain’s entire body covered in a luxuriant growth, as if that body were a farm and hair its only crop. Soraya, also a flame-haired person, whispered in Luka’s right ear that this Grandmaster’s bushy excessivity of hair might give all redheads a bad name.
The hair was Aag’s anger made visible. Luka could see that from the way it waved around, shaking itself in his direction as if it were a fist. Why was he so angry? Well, there was the little matter of the destruction of his circus by Luka’s curse, that much was obvious; but, in the first place, that circus was now revealed to be a side issue, merely the minor Real World plaything of the Gatekeeper of the Heart of Magic, and, in the second place, that hair had been growing for a long, long time, so Captain Aag had plainly been furious all his life, or, if he was by some chance immortal, then he must have been angry since the beginnings of Time.
‘His original name was Menetius,’ Nobodaddy whispered into Luka’s left ear, ‘and he was once the Titan of Rage, until the King of the Gods lost patience with his crosspatchery, killed him with a thunderbolt, and hurled him into the underworld. Eventually he was allowed to return to this lowly job – he’s no more than a doorman now – so here he is, in a worse mood than ever, I’m sorry to say.’
The seven vultures had arranged themselves in the air above Aag and the dragon, like guests at a banquet, waiting for a feast. Aag, however, was for a moment in a playful mood. ‘In other places, such as the Real World,’ he said from the dragon’s back, almost as if he were speaking to himself, looking off into the distance and adopting a thoughtful expression, ‘such terrible creatures as one might encounter – the Yeti, the Bigfoot, the Unbearably Unpleasant Child – are what I like to call monsters in space. There they are, but that’s all they are, unchangeable, therefore always the same. Whereas here, where you have no business to be, and where you will very shortly be no more, our monsters can be monsters in time as well; that is to say, they can be one monster after another. Nuthog, here, is actually called Jaldibadal, and she’s a Magical Chameleon: quite the quick-change artist is old Jaldi when she wants to be, but she’s a lazy good-for-nothing creature a lot of the time. Show them, Nuthog, why don’t you? There’s no real rush to cook them in dragon-fire, after all. The vultures can wait for their lunch.’