Nuthog the dragon – or, more properly, Jaldibadal the Changer – gave what sounded very like a tired, serpentine sigh and then mutated, with what looked very like a monstrous unwillingness, into, first, a giant metallic sow, and then, one after the other, a huge, shaggy woman-beast with the tail of a scorpion, a Monstrous Carbuncle (a mirrored creature with a diamond shining out of its head) and an immense mother-tortoise, and finally, with what felt very like a sullen resignation, back into a dragon again. ‘Congratulations, Nuthog,’ said Captain Aag sarcastically, and his black eyes glittered with anger and his bushy beard flared out around his face like the red flame of an evil match. ‘An excellent show. And now, O indolent beast, get on with it and fry these thieves alive before I lose my temper.’
‘If my sisters were here beside me, to release me from your spell,’ Nuthog spat back, in a voice of considerable sweetness, and in surprising rhyme, ‘you wouldn’t speak so bravely, and we’d send you back to Hell.’
‘Who are her sisters? Where are they?’ Luka hissed at Nobodaddy; but then Nuthog blasted the Argo, and all the world was flame. ‘It’s odd, this business of losing a life,’ Luka thought. ‘You ought to feel something, but you don’t.’ Then he noticed that the counter in the top left-hand corner of his field of vision had gone down by fifty lives. ‘I’d better think fast,’ he realised, ‘or I’ll run out of chances right here.’ He had re-formed in the same place as before, and so had Bear and Dog. The residents of the World of Magic were unharmed, though Soraya was complaining loudly. ‘If I wanted to be sunburned,’ she said, ‘I would go and sit in the sun. Point that flame-thrower, please, in some other direction.’
Nobodaddy was examining his panama hat, which looked very slightly scorched. ‘That’s not right,’ he grumbled. ‘I like this hat.’ BLLLAAARRRTT! Another blast of dragon-fire, another fifty lives lost. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Soraya cried. ‘Don’t you know that flying carpets are made of delicate stuff?’ The Elephant Birds were also extremely upset. ‘Memory is a fragile flower,’ complained the Elephant Drake. ‘It doesn’t respond well to heat.’
Things were rapidly arriving at crisis point. ‘Nuthog’s sisters,’ murmured Nobodaddy, ‘were imprisoned by the Aalim in blocks of ice, over that way in the Ice Country of Sniffelheim, so that Nuthog would obey Aag’s orders.’ BLLLAAARRRTT! ‘That’s one hundred and fifty lives gone in no time at all, just four hundred and sixty-five left,’ Luka thought as he came back together; and when he looked around him this time, Soraya and the flying carpet had vanished altogether. ‘She has abandoned us,’ he thought. ‘Which means we’re done for.’
Just then Dog the bear asked Jaldibadal a question. ‘Are you happy?’ he demanded, and the monster looked surprised.
‘What sort of question is that?’ Nuthog asked in return, forgetting to rhyme in her confusion. ‘I’m in the process of burning you to death, and this is the thing you want to ask me? What’s it to you? Suppose I was happy; would you be happy for me? And if I was not happy, would you sympathise?’
‘For example,’ persisted Dog the bear, ‘are you getting enough to eat? Because I can see your ribs sticking out through your scales.’
‘Those aren’t my ribs,’ answered Nuthog, looking shifty. ‘Those are probably the skeletons of the last people I gobbled down.’
‘I knew it,’ said Dog the bear. ‘He’s starving you, just as he underfed the animals in the circus. A bony dragon is an even sadder sight than a skinny elephant.’
‘Why are you wasting time?’ Captain Aag roared from Nuthog’s back. ‘Get on with it and finish them off.’
‘We rebelled against him back in the Real World,’ said Bear the dog, ‘and he couldn’t do a thing about it, and that was the end of him in that place.’
‘Cook them!’ shouted Captain Aag. ‘Grill them, roast them, blast them, toast them! Bear sausages for dinner! Dog chops! Boy cheeks! Cook them and let’s eat!’
‘It’s my sisters,’ Nuthog told Bear the dog mournfully. ‘As long as they are imprisoned I have no choice but to do as he says.’
‘You always have a choice,’ said Dog the bear.
‘Also,’ said a voice from the sky, ‘were these perhaps the sisters you were looking for?’
Everyone aboard the Argo looked up; and there, high above them, was Queen Soraya of Ott, on King Solomon’s magic carpet, Resham, which had grown large enough to carry three enormous, shivering monsters, just released from their prison of ice, too cold to fly, too unwell to metamorphose, but alive, and free.
‘Bahut-Sara! Badlo-Badlo! Gyara-Jinn!’ shouted Nuthog joyfully. The three rescued Changers uttered weak, but happy, moans in reply. Captain Aag had begun to look distinctly panicky on Nuthog’s back. ‘L-Let’s all stay calm now,’ he said, stammering a little. ‘Let’s all remember that I was only following orders, that it was the Aalim, the Guardians of the Fire, who put the three excellent ladies here on ice, and instructed me to work with you, Nuthog, to guard the Gate to the Heart. Let’s understand, too, that Security is a hard taskmaster, who requires some tough decisions, and that in consequence it can happen that some innocents suffer for the sake of the greater good. Nuthog, you can understand that, can’t you?’
‘Only my friends can call me Nuthog,’ said Nuthog, and with a smooth little wiggle she flipped Captain Aag off her back. He landed with a bump right under her smoking nose. ‘And you’re no friend of mine,’ Nuthog added, ‘so the name is Jaldibadal. And I’m sorry to tell you that, no, I don’t understand.’
Captain Aag stood up to face his fate. He looked like a very wretched pirate indeed, all hair and no fire. ‘Any last words?’ enquired Jaldibadal sweetly. Captain Aag shook his fist at her. ‘I’ll be back!’ he roared.
Jaldibadal shook her scaly head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you won’t.’ Then she unleashed an immense flame that wrapped itself around Captain Aag, and when the flame died away there was no more Captain, just a small pile of angry-looking ash.
‘Actually, of course,’ she added, once Aag had been, so to speak, put out, and his vulture troupe had fled into some distant sky, never to be seen again, ‘there are Powers in the Heart that could bring him back to life if they chose. But he doesn‘t have many friends here, and I think he’s probably had his last chance.’ She blew hard on the little pile of ash that now lay under her nose, and it was scattered to the four winds. ‘Now, young Sir,’ she said, looking straight at Luka, ‘and, I should say, Sir Dog and Sir Bear, how can I be of assistance?’
Her sisters on the flying carpet flapped their wings experimentally; and found, to their great pleasure, that they could fly again. ‘We too will help you,’ said Badlo-Badlo the Changer, and Bahut-Sara and Gyara-Jinn nodded their assent. The Insultana Soraya clapped her hands in delight. ‘That’s more like it,’ she rejoiced. ‘We’ve got an army now.’
In all the excitement nobody noticed a small fiery Bug rushing away from them as quickly as it could fly, making its way deep into the Heart of Magic, whooshing along as quickly as a wildfire running before a helpful wind.
Nobodaddy was acting strangely, Luka thought. He was fidgety, scratching constantly at his panama hat’s scorched brim. He seemed irritable, pacing up and down and rubbing his hands together and speaking in monosyllables, when he spoke at all. Sometimes he seemed almost transparent and at other times almost solid, so plainly Rashid Khalifa at home in Kahani was struggling for life and health, and maybe that struggle was having a bad effect on Nobodaddy’s mood. But Luka began to have other suspicions. Maybe Nobodaddy had just been humouring him, toying with him for his own warped amusement. Who knew what sort of twisted sense of humour such a creature might have? Maybe he had never expected Luka to get this far, and in fact didn’t like the idea that they were now flying towards the Fire of Life itself. Maybe he hadn’t been honest, and didn’t want the quest to succeed. He’d need watching carefully, Luka decided, in case he tried to sabotage everything at the last moment. He looked, walked and talked like the Shah of Blah, but that didn’t make him Luka’s father. Maybe Bear and Dog had been right: Nobodaddy was not to be trusted an inch. Or maybe there was an argument raging inside him, maybe the Rashid-ness he had absorbed was at war with the death-creature that did the absorbing. Maybe dying was always like this: an argument between death and life.