“Quick!” shouted the book. “Before they cast a spell!”
“Get her!” shouted the man wearing i. “It’s the girl.”
“You heard Aye,” said a woman who wore iv.
Jones reached for his club. Before he had a chance to move, the Hex pointed at Deeba with a simultaneous motion. They all spoke a word at the same instant.
“Alive!”
“Come!”
“Girl!”
“That!”
“And!”
“Get!”
A crackle of light burst from each of their forefingers, flew together, and became one. It zipped through the air, whining.
Obaday appeared in front of Deeba. He still held his little mirror, and he swung it like a racket. He intercepted the humming light and belted it out of the air, as if returning a serve. It slammed with a phutt! into the table.
“How’d you move so fast?” gaped Jones.
The couturier looked rather amazed himself.
“But…I don’t think it was going to hit her,” said Lectern.
“They were aiming at that armor,” said the book. “That was an ordersquito.”
The companions looked at the armor, then at each other. Then at Obaday’s mirror, and finally at the end of the table, where the little spell had been deflected.
On the table, one of the huge piles of fruit rumbled, spilled, tumbled into a new configuration, and stood up.
86. The Unintended Attacker
The fruit-thing rose, and unfolded.
It was taller than Jones. Deeba saw pears and peaches, apples and grapefruit all moving together like muscles. It stretched out arms at the end of which were bunches of bananas splayed into open hands. Its head was a watermelon, with bulging kiwi-fruit eyes.
The thing looked ridiculous.
“We’re being menaced by fruit?” said Obaday sarcastically. “Oh scary.”
“Wait!” said the book, and “No!” said Jones, but Obaday had picked up a knife from the table and swung it casually at the thing.
The fruit-figure caught Obaday’s wrist with one of its bunch-of-banana hands, and it began to squeeze. Obaday stared at it in astonishment, and then cried out in pain. The melon-head was mouthlessly snarling.
“Not what we had in mind,” said one of the Hex.
“We were thinking of a tin-man sort of thing,” said another.
“But a fructbot will do,” finished a third.
There was a crack from Obaday’s wrist, and he screamed.
The fruit-monster swung cherries and strawberries and black currants sausaged into a tail, ending in a pineapple like a spiked club. It sent Obaday sailing through the air to land with a horrible thud.
The fruit-devil raised its banana claws, and ran at Deeba.
The Hex laughed and watched their inadvertent creation on the rampage.
Deeba leapt away from it. Jones grabbed it and tried to electrocute it, but the charge seemed only to annoy the fruit. It flicked him away. The little half-transparent utterlings could only scamper out of its path and occasionally slap it, completely without effect. Lectern cowered.
The towering fruity menace slammed its bananas and its pineapple into the wood of the table, sending food flying. Each blow bruised and smashed the fruit that made it, but the fragrant stuff still held together. Deeba dodged its sweet-smelling blows.
It stamped, and snarled, its fruit-face terrifying and malevolent, crouching like a murderer.
“Deeba!” Jones shouted. “Get out of here! Finish the job! I’ll hold it off!”
She grabbed Curdle and tensed. But she hesitated.
One of the Hex was watching her. Before she got three paces, she realized, they’d cast another spell, and this time it would hit her full-on. Obaday was unconscious, the utterlings and Lectern were useless, and Conductor Jones was being pounded by the fruit. It smacked him with blow after terrible blow.
“Right,” she said, and pulled the UnGun from her belt.
“No, Deeba!” said Jones. “You need the ammo!” He ducked, but got hit anyway by a pineapple smash. “You’ll only have one bullet left,” he groaned.
“You’ve seen what the bullets do,” said Deeba. “Whatever they have to. One’s all I’ll need.”
She pulled the trigger.
There was a reverberating UnGun roar.
The report stung Deeba’s hands, but she kept her stance, lowered the UnGun a little, to aim at the astonished Hex.
From the tiny spaces between the fruit of the attacker’s body rushed rapacious black specks. A tide of hungry ants.
The fructbot turned and spun on its heel, raised its hands, and beat itself with its tail. But though it must have mashed thousands of the insects, millions remained, racing over it and its crevices and chomping with their little scissor-jaws. Deeba could actually hear a whisper of munching.
“It’s not enough to hit it,” she said to Jones. “You have to actually take bits away.”
The fruit figure was shrinking fast, its struggles weaker and weaker.
A trail of ants was crossing the floor in a line, disappearing into a crack in the floor, each bearing a nugget of fruit-flesh.
“To be honest,” Deeba said, “I was sort of hoping it might be one giant one.”
“Stop staring at that thing and look at the Hex!” the book shouted. Deeba spun.
The Hex stood grim and angry, their hands clenched in a complicated six-way clasp. Jones tried to vault the remains of the table to get to them, but he was way too battered. They glanced at him and spoke simultaneously.
“Where!”
“Now!”
“Are!”
“Stay!”
“You!”
“Right!”
Jones froze. His eyes shifted from side to side, but he couldn’t move.
The Hex stared at Deeba.
“Forget taking her for questioning,” spat the one called ivv. They shouted words again.
“Time!”
“It’s!”
“Heart!”
“Your!”
“Beating!”
“Stopped!”
In the split second they spoke, Deeba rearranged the words in her mind, and a dreadful fear gripped her. She wanted to pull the trigger, but— absurdly, even at that moment when everything was about to end— she remembered that she would need one bullet at least to face the Smog and she hesitated.
She could almost sense the Hex’s words flying across the air between them and her. Oh no, she thought. Her chest constricted, and she went numb.
87. Words of Persuasion
But even as a chill began to creep through Deeba’s limbs, the utterlings leapt in front of her.
Bling and Cauldron were getting fainter and fainter. She could see right through them. But it didn’t seem to affect their energy. They were jumping up and down frantically, waving their limbs.
Deeba couldn’t quite make anything out, but she had a strong sense that something was decelerating. A point of focus. A particular vibration in the air. The utterlings leapt on the spot and gesticulated. No one but the utterlings moved.
“I can’t help noticing,” Deeba said eventually, “my heart’s still beating. What exactly’s going on?”
The utterlings signed quickly at the strange patch of air. The Hex stared at them in rage and shouted again.
“Banished!”