“Words!”
“You!”
“Renegade!”
“Are!”
“Spoken!”
The utterlings redoubled their motions, and another invisible-but-detectable oddity racing towards them slowed, and stalled.
Renegade spoken words, you are banished, thought Deeba.
“Oh my,” said the book. “I think I know what’s happening. The Hex are spellspeakers—”
“But the utterlings are making their words disobey,” said Deeba.
“They’re words, and they rebelled themselves,” the book said. “They know what to say to persuade other words to follow suit.”
“Somebody bleeding well gag the Hex!” the book shouted. The six magicians were opening their mouths to try a third time, but Deeba swung the UnGun at them and they froze.
Jones shoved cloth torn from their own clothes into each of the Hex’s mouths. He picked up lengths of chain from the cluttered room and connected all six of them. He sat wearily on the stairs holding one end of the metal.
“If I hear a word out of any of you,” he said, “I’m conducting the juice, and you won’t like that. So shhhhh.”
The Hex looked wide-eyed, and nodded to show how carefully they would obey.
Deeba circled the utterlings, which were talking silently and animatedly with their hands, pausing sometimes, presumably as the Hex’s words answered them.
“So,” Deeba said. “Somewhere in there—” She pointed at the air in front of them. “— are the words to banish them and kill me?”
“Yes,” said the book. “But the utterlings are doing a good job of persuading them to do their own thing.”
“What if they decide to do what they were supposed to, later on?”
“I don’t think they’re very interested in that,” the book said. Bling had begun walking around the room, pointing things out to the rebellious words. “See? It’s showing them around. They want to be tourists. They only just got born.”
“If they do what they were supposed to, then they’re finished,” Deeba said. “I suppose the last thing they want to do now is what they were told. Then they’d be done.”
The last of the ants was carrying off the last shreds of the fruit. There was nothing left but pips, stones, and stalks, lying on the floor very vaguely in the shape of a man.
“Isn’t there something we can do for the utterlings?” Deeba said quietly to the book. “They’re nearly gone.”
“I don’t think so. They’ve already lasted longer than most of their kind.”
“But…we can’t just let them disappear!”
“I don’t want them to, either,” the book said. “But it’s not under our control.” Deeba watched the dwindling figures.
“Can’t I just speak them again? Cauldron. Bling.”
“It doesn’t work that way. You didn’t speak them in the first place.”
“Well, Mr. Speaker’s certainly not going to speak them again,” said Deeba. “Even if he could…” She stopped suddenly. “But they’re not his things anyway, anymore. They rebelled. Why can’t they speak themselves?”
“Don’t be silly,” the book said. “They haven’t got any mouths.”
“There are people who can’t make sounds but they still talk,” Deeba said. “They use their hands. Or they write things down. Why can’t the utterlings do that? They are doing it, look. They could talk themselves back.”
Cauldron and Bling were gesturing energetically to the Hex’s invisible words.
“Tell them to say themselves,” Deeba said. “That could work. Couldn’t it?”
“It…might,” the book said hesitantly.
“Of course it will,” said Deeba. “Promise me you’ll tell them to try, as soon as they’re done talking to the spell-words. Promise?”
“What do you mean?” said the book. “Why can’t you tell them?”
“Because I have to go,” Deeba said. “Time’s running out.” She sat next to Jones.
Obaday was moaning and clutching his broken wrist, while Lectern tended him. The utterlings were escorting the newly independent words around the world that most words never had the time to notice.
“Come on then,” said Jones. Deeba could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The Smog’s somewhere upstairs. Time to track it down.”
“Jones,” she said. She sighed. “Look at yourself.”
“Come on now,” he groaned.
“Seriously. That fruit-thing knocked you around. You can’t even walk. And anyway…” She lowered her voice. “Do you really trust Obaday to keep watch over the Hex?” Jones laughed morosely. “You have to watch them, be ready to shock them if they get uppity. They can’t come after me.”
“Deeba, you can’t go on your own.”
“Do you think I want you not to come?” For a moment she could hardly speak. “I don’t even want to go myself. But I got no choice. Look at you, man!” She prodded him gently, and he had to fight to stifle a moan. “You’re a liability. Besides,” she added. “I won’t be on my own. I’ll have Lectern.” They watched the Propheseer.
She was dabbing at Obaday. Curdle butted gently against her, and Lectern gave a little squeak and twitched her hands and dropped her scrap of cloth. It fluttered down and snagged on Obaday’s pins-and-needles hair. Lectern frowned and tried, and failed, to pluck it off.
“A milk carton, a bad-tempered book, and her?” said Jones.
Deeba and Jones began to giggle, a little hysterically. But there wasn’t much time, and even as she laughed, Deeba knew she had to go.
88. The Baleful View
Deeba crept up the stairs, the UnGun raised. Lectern came hesitantly behind her, carrying the book. Curdle jumped energetically from step to step.
“Come on,” the book whispered to Lectern. “Keep up, keep up.”
After several twisting flights, they reached the top. At the end of the hallway was a door, from above and below which Smog oozed.
“We better be fast,” Lectern said. “This Smog’s going to sense us any minute.”
The corridor shimmered in the vivid colors of night. One whole wall of the passageway was windowed.
“Look at that,” breathed Lectern.
They stared out onto UnLondon at war.
There was the streetlamp glow, rising where the inhabited boroughs were, and between them the coiling dark of smogmires. But that night, UnLondon was also flickering in the illumination of many fires. There were the flashes of combustion, and the glowing beams of flashlights from the streets, from the dark cut of the river, where they danced with their reflections, and coming down from the sky, from aircraft and other flying things, racing in all directions.
“It’s kicked off,” said Deeba. “It really has.”
She could hear the sounds of battle.
“Look,” she said.
Below the rising and falling roofscape of the floors below them, they could see the factory forecourt. It was full of a huge fight. Behind the walls and thrown-up barricades, and on roofs to either side, battalions of smombies threw missiles. Stink-junkies pumped smoke and fire.
The attackers, just beyond the entrance, were the UnLondoner troops that had gathered with Deeba by the river.
They fired weapons and swung grappling hooks over the walls. Many wielded big fans, and swung them like axes at the Smog as it approached, blowing its smaller clots away. The dirty smoke scattered, gathered again at the edges of the yard, and re-formed for counterattacks.
“Un Lun Dun!” Deeba heard the rebels shout. “Un Lun Dun!”
“There are more of us than there were by the river,” Deeba said. “People are joining.”
“But most UnLondoners still think Unstible’s on their side, don’t they?” Lectern said.