‘Un-Be,’ Nobodaddy corrected him. ‘You should know the terminology by now. Oh, and when I said I didn’t want to do that? I lied. Why would any creature not want to do the thing it was created for? If you’re born to dance, you dance. If you’re born to sing, you don’t sit around keeping your mouth shut. And if you come into being in order to eat a man’s life, then finishing the job and Un-Being after it’s done is the supreme achievement, the absolutely satisfying climax. Yes! A thing of ecstasy.
‘It sounds like you’re in love with death, to be honest with you,’ said Luka, and then understood the meaning of what he’d said.
‘Quite,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘Now you get it. I do confess to a measure of self-love. And that is not a noble quality, I readily concede the point. But, I repeat: ecstasy. All the more so in a case like this one. Your father has fought me with all his might, I should tell you. My compliments to him. He clearly feels he has powerful reasons to stay alive, and maybe you are one of those reasons. But I have my hand on his throat now. And you are right: when I said you were too late, I lied again. Look.’
He held up his right hand, and Luka could see that half of the middle finger was missing. ‘That’s all the life he has left,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘And while we’re talking, he’s emptying out, and I am filling up. Who knows? Maybe you’ll still be around to witness the great event. You can certainly forget about getting home in time to save him, even if you do have the Fire of Life in that Ott Pot around your neck. Congratulations on getting that far, by the way. Level Eight! Quite an achievement. But now, let’s not forget, Time is on my side.’
‘You turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and no mistake,’ said Luka. ‘What a fool I was to be taken in by you.’ Nobodaddy laughed a cold laugh. ‘Ah, but if you hadn’t gone along with me, there would have been none of this fun,’ he said. ‘You’ve made the wait so much more enjoyable. I really have to thank you for that.’
‘It’s all been just a game to you,’ Luka shouted, but Nobodaddy wagged the half-finger at him. ‘No, no,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Never just a game. It’s a matter of life and death.’
Dog the bear stood up on his hind legs and growled, ‘I can’t stand this fellow any more. Let me at him.’ But Nobodaddy was out of Dog’s reach up there on his rampart, and there seemed to be no way up. Then, in his deep, deep voice, the Titan spoke, the scarred Old Boy himself. ‘Leave him to me,’ he said, and got up from his kneeling position behind Soraya; and rose; and rose; and rose. When a Titan grows to his full size the Universe trembles. (The Universe also tries to look away, because nakedness enlarged in this way is much, much bigger than regular-sized nakedness, and harder to ignore.) Long ago, the Old Boy’s uncle had risen up like this and destroyed the sky itself. After that the battle of the Greek gods against the Twelve Titans had shaken the earth as the colossi fought and fell. The Old Boy, a veteran and hero of that war, scorning clothes as Greek Heroes and Ancients always had, rose up and grew so big that Soraya had to hurry to enlarge the flying carpet to its maximum size, before they were all pushed off it by the Old Boy’s enlarging feet. Luka was pleased to note the look of fear on Nobodaddy’s face as the Titan reached out an enormous left hand, grabbed him, and held him fast. ‘Let me go,’ squealed Nobodaddy – his voice was sounding inhuman now, Luka thought, it was goblinish, demonic, and, at this precise moment, it was shriekingly scared.
‘Unhand me,’ shrieked Nobodaddy. ‘You have no right to do this!’
The Old Boy grinned a grin the size of a stadium. ‘Ah, but I have a left,’ he said, ‘and we left-handers stick together, you know.’
With that, he drew back his hand as far as it would go, with Nobodaddy kicking and squeaking in his grip, and then he hurled that dreadful, deceiving, life-sucking creature far, far away, up into the sky, howling all the way to the edge of the atmosphere and then out beyond the Kármán Line, where the world ended and the blackness of outer space began.
‘We’re still trapped,’ Dog the bear pointed out grouchily, because he felt a little upstaged by the Titan’s titanic effort. Then, too loudly, and in too challenging a manner, he added, ‘Where are these Aalim, anyway? Let them show themselves, unless they’re too scared to face us.’
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ said Soraya hurriedly, but it was too late.
‘It is not known,’ said Rashid Khalifa, ‘if the Aalim have actual physical form. Perhaps they do have bodies, or perhaps they can simply take on bodily shapes when they need to, and at other times they are disembodied entities, spreading out through space – because Time is everywhere, after all; there’s nowhere that doesn’t have its Yesterdays, that doesn’t live in a Today, that doesn’t hope for a good Tomorrow. Anyway, the Aalim are known for their extreme reluctance to appear in public, preferring to work in silence and behind the scenes. When they have been glimpsed, they have always been hidden inside hooded cloaks, like monks. Nobody has ever seen their faces, and everyone is afraid of their passing – except for a few particular children …’
‘A few particular children,’ Luka said aloud, remembering, ‘who can defy Time’s power just by being born, and make us all young again.’ It had been his mother who had said that first, or something very like it – he knew this because she had made a point of telling him so – but soon enough the idea became a part of Rashid’s inexhaustible storehouse of tall stories. ‘Yes,’ he admitted to Luka with a shameless grin, ‘I stole that from your ma. Don’t forget: if you’re going to be a thief, steal the good stuff.’
‘Well,’ thought Luka the Thief of the Fire of Life, ‘I acted on your advice, Dad, and look what I stole, and you see where it’s got me now.’
The three hooded figures standing on the battlements of the Cloud Fortress of Baadal-Garh were neither large nor imposing. Their faces were invisible and their arms were crossed, as if they were cradling babies. They said nothing, but they didn’t need to. It was plain from the expression on Soraya’s face, and from Coyote’s cringing whine – Madre de Dios, if I warnt on a carpet in the sky right now I’d jus make a run for it an take my chances – and the quivering of the Elephant Birds – ‘Okay, maybe we don’t want to do stuff after all! Maybe we just want to live, and remember stuff, like we’re supposed to!’ – that their mere appearance struck terror into the people of the Magic World. Even the grizzled Old Boy, the great Titan himself, was fidgeting nervously. Luka knew that they were all thinking fearfully about Sniffelheim, about being imprisoned for ever in solid blocks of ice. Or possibly they were worrying about liver-eating birds. ‘Hmm,’ he thought, ‘it looks like our Magic Friends aren’t going to be much use in this situation. It’s up to the Real World team to pull this off somehow.’
Then the Aalim spoke, in unison, three low, unearthly voices whose triple coldness felt steely, like three invincible swords. Even courageous Soraya quailed at the sound. ‘I never thought I would be forced to hear the Voices of Time,’ she cried, and put her hands over her ears. ‘Oh, oh! It’s unbearable! I can’t stand it!’ and she fell to her knees in pain. The other magic beings were similarly distressed and writhed around on the flying carpet in evident agony, except for the Old Boy, whose tolerance for pain was obviously very great after that eternity at the mercy of the liver-munching Bird of Zeus. Dog the bear looked unimpressed, however, and Bear the dog, whose hackles were up, bared his teeth in an angry snarl.
‘You have taken us away from our Handloom,’ the soft sword-voices said. ‘We are Weavers, the three of us, and on the Loom of Days we weave the Threads of Time, weaving the whole of Becoming into the fabric of Being, the whole of Knowing into the cloth of the Known, the whole of Doing into the garment of the Done. Now you have taken us from our Loom and things are disorderly. Disorder displeases us. Displeasure displeases us also. Therefore we are doubly displeased.’ And then, after a pause: ‘Return what you have stolen and perhaps we will spare your lives.’