The Shah of Blah’s description of the Lake and its inhabitants, which Luka had heard so often that he knew it by heart, proved to be startlingly accurate. Shining schools of little canny-fish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly coloured smartipans, and the duller, deep-water shrewds. Flying low over the water’s surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths, and Luka recognised the Lake’s little groups of islands, too, the Theories with their wild, improbable growths, the tangled forests and ivory towers of the Philosophisles, and the bare Facts. In the distance was what Luka had longed to behold, the Torrent of Words, the miracle of miracles, the grand waterfall that tumbled down from the clouds and linked the World of Magic to the Moon of the Great Story Sea up above.
They had given the hunters the slip and arrived at the notorious South Face of Knowledge without being caught, but looming above Luka was an obstacle far more forbidding than he had imagined, the sheer cliff of the Mountain, a rugged wall of black stone upon which no plant had managed to find a foothold. ‘If a plant can’t do it, how can I?’ Luka wondered in dismay. ‘What sort of mountain is this, anyway?’
He knew the answer. It was the Magic Mountain, and it knew how to protect itself. ‘Knowledge is both a delight and an explosive minefield; both a liberation and a trap,’ Rashid used to say. ‘The way to Knowledge shifts and changes as the world changes and shifts. One day it is open and available to all, the next it is closed and guarded. Some people skip up that Mountain as if it were a grassy slope in a park. For others it is an impassable Wall.’ Luka scratched the top of his head, just the way his father liked to do. ‘I guess I’m one of the others,’ he thought, ‘because that doesn’t look like any grassy slope I’ve ever seen.’ To be blunt, the Mountain looked impossible to climb without serious mountaineering equipment, to say nothing of the proper training, and Luka lacked both. Somewhere above him, at the top of that world of stone, the Fire of Life burned in a temple, and there was no way of knowing where that cave might be, or how to go about finding it. Luka’s principal advisers were no longer at his side. Queen Soraya of Ott had not crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and the much less trustworthy (but formidably well informed) Nobodaddy had evidently decided – for whatever reason, and no not that one! – to withdraw his support.
‘Might I remind you,’ said the voice of Nuthog, in gentle tones, ‘that you do still have help available, and that that help possesses – may I point out? – wings.’
Nuthog, Badlo and Sara were still in dragon-mode, and Jinn quickly dragonised herself as well. ‘With four fast dragons at your service you should be able to reach the Fire Temple quickly enough,’ Nuthog said. ‘Particularly if those four fast dragons happen to know where on the summit the Temple actually is.’
‘To know approximately,’ said Badlo, rather more modestly.
‘We think, anyway,’ said Sara, and that didn’t sound convincing at all.
‘At any rate,’ added Jinn, more helpfully, ‘before we get going, it would probably be a good idea if you punched … that.’
That was a silver knob embedded in the stone wall of the South Face. ‘It looks like a saving point,’ Luka said, ‘but why is it silver, not gold?’
‘The gold button is in the Temple,’ said Nuthog. ‘But at least you can save the progress you’ve made so far. And be careful. From now on, every mistake you make could cost you a hundred lives.’
That was alarming, Luka thought as he punched the silver button. It left almost no room for mistakes. Four hundred and sixty-five lives allowed him four slip-ups, maximum. Besides, while Nuthog’s offer of flying him up to his goal was certainly generous, and practical, too, Luka clearly remembered his father’s words about the Mountain of Knowledge: ‘If you want to reach the summit of the Mountain and discover the Fire of Life, you must make the final ascent alone. The Heights of Knowledge are reached only if you earn the right to do so. You have to put in the hard work. You can’t cheat your way to the Top.’ He had said something else after that, and Luka remembered thinking that that last bit was the really important part, but he couldn’t call it to mind. ‘That’s the trouble,’ he thought, ‘with being told all this stuff at night, when you’re always dead tired and falling asleep.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Luka to Nuthog, ‘but I think I’m supposed to solve this riddle and get there by myself. To fly up on your back … well, it just wouldn’t be right.’
For some reason that idea, not right, stuck in his head. The words kept replaying, again and again, as if his thoughts had become stuck like a scratched record, or caught in some sort of loop. Not right. Not right. What was a thing if it was not right? Well, yes, wrong, that was what most people would say, but it could also be –
‘Left,’ he said aloud. ‘That’s the answer. I went right, and fell into the World of Magic. Now maybe if I somehow go left, I’ll find my way through it.’
Luka remembered his big brother Haroun’s many teasing warnings, back home in Kahani, which felt, just at that moment, very far away indeed. Just be careful not to go down the Left-hand Path. That’s what Haroun had said. ‘But I don’t like to be teased,’ Luka reminded himself, ‘and so maybe I should do the opposite of what he said. Yes! Just this once, I’m not going to listen to my brother’s advice, because Right-thinking people can never really understand what it is to be on the Left, and that hidden Path is exactly the Path that will get me where I need to go.’
After all, his mother Soraya would be on his side. Maybe you are correct to believe that the left way round is the right way, and that the rest of us are not right, but wrong. That’s what she had said, and that was more than enough for him.
‘I’ll go with you,’ said Bear the dog loyally.
‘I’ll go too,’ said Dog the bear, not quite as enthusiastically.
And then Luka recalled the really important part of what Rashid Khalifa had told him about the Mountain: ‘To climb Mount Knowledge, you have to know who you are.’ Luka, sleepy, bedtime Luka at home far away and long ago, hadn’t really understood. ‘Doesn’t everyone know that?’ he had asked. ‘I mean, I’m just me, right? And you’re you?’ Rashid had caressed his hair, which always soothed Luka and made him drowsy. ‘People think they’re all sorts of things they aren’t,’ he had said. ‘They think they’re talented when they’re not; they think they’re powerful when they’re actually just bullies; they think they’re good when they’re bad. People fool themselves all the time, and they don’t know that they’re fools.’
‘Well, I’m me, anyway; that’s all there is to it,’ Luka had said, just as he had fallen asleep.
‘There he is! There’s the Fire Thief! There he goes!’
‘It’s Coyote! He has a burning brand between his teeth!’
‘Look at him go! See him dodge and swerve!’
‘Stop him! – Oh, they’ll never catch him! – Stop that Coyote! – Oh, he’s like hairy lightning! – Stop, thief! Stop the Fire Thief!’
Luka snapped out of his reverie and saw Coyote emerging from the shadows at the foot of Mount Knowledge with fire blazing from his mouth, and streaking round the Mountain towards its far side, running faster than Luka would have believed it was possible for a coyote to run. He was heading across stony ground in the opposite direction from the Rainbow Bridge, leading his pursuers deliberately away from Luka’s probable escape route and into the Wild Waste that lay beyond the Lake. This was an area of semi-desert, more properly known as the Waste of Time, a large expanse of arid land which had been overrun, long ago, by a virulent outbreak of Slackerweed. This rapidly spreading weed, previously unknown in the Magic World, had first choked and destroyed all other plant life – except for a few of the hardiest cacti – and then bizarrely self-destructed, as if it had no idea what to do with itself, and no real desire to find out. It just lay apathetically on the ground until it withered away, leaving behind this yellow wilderness dotted with the skulls of long-dead creatures. Snakes slithered out from under rocks and buzzards wheeled overhead, and it was well known that the gods, accustomed as they were to luxury and opulence, were not fond of entering this zone, where, Rashid Khalifa had told Luka, the air moved slowly, the breeze blew without any real sense of direction, and there was something in that wind that induced carelessness, laziness and sleep. Only a few of the guardian deities who had answered the Fire Alarm had been willing to follow Coyote into the Waste, and their pursuit of the fleeing animal seemed slower, groggier and less purposeful than it should have been. Coyote, however, seemed immune to the infectious lethargy in the air. ‘The Wild Waste is his natural habitat,’ Luka thought. ‘He’ll give those gods a good run for their money there.’ And positioned at intervals along the route Coyote had chosen were the Lion, the Big Bear, the Little Bear, the Wolf, the Squirrel and the Frog. Would the Waste of Time affect them, Luka wondered, or had Coyote discovered an antidote? It wasn’t important. The decoy relay had begun.