Zal and Zara and the Champions' Race

by Kit Downes

  “Go faster!” said Zara, straining. Sweat flowed down her forehead as she poured magic into the carpet as fast as the petals could suck it out.

  “I’m trying!” shouted Zal, as a tornado of flower petals spun up around them. They were trapped in a spinning column of yellow and violet, so thick that for a second, they could not see the sky. Zal sucked in his breath and pushed forward with all his might. The carpet burst through the tornado, sending petals flying. Zal breathed out with relief, and then felt the carpet flap loosely beneath him. He looked down to see that its colours were almost grey.

  “WRAFF, WRAFF!”

  “OH, STORK!”

  Gravity kicked in and the carpet began to fall. Only Zara’s magic prevented them from plummeting directly downwards. The carpet fell front end first in a steep, sloping death-dive, hurtling down towards the city.

  “OH, CAMELPAAAAAAAAAT!”

  Zal threw himself flat on the carpet, holding onto Rip with one arm and the front edge of the carpet with the other. He held on, cursing the Spring Sparrow, Forest Flamingo, the Precipice Pelican and every other minor bird god he could think of. Zara lay beside him, pouring in all the magic she could summon through her white knuckles. The red stone wall of the park rushed up to meet up them and they shot over it with centimetres to spare, into one of Shirazar’s large marketplaces.

  Camels honked, horses neighed and a cage of monkeys hooted as the Rainbow Carpet burst into their midst. A potter broke a vase, a stonemason dropped a tombstone on his toes and a hairdresser nearly cut his customer as the carpet’s slipstream washed over them, flaring the coloured awnings of their stalls. Zal and Zara squeezed their eyes shut and held on as they tore through the roof of a slipper-maker’s stall, smashed through a rack of fruit and vegetables, crashed through a cage of squawking chickens and finally plunged with a splash into an enormous tank of water outside a fishmonger’s stall.

  Water rushed up Zal’s nose and bubbles swirled before his eyes. He tasted salt as he almost sighed underwater with immense relief. The tank had saved them from being splattered across the pavement. Zal turned to follow Zara and Rip, who were swimming up to the surface, and found himself staring into the round, black, frightened eyes of a dozen live octopuses, huddled together in one corner of the tank, their tentacles trembling with fear.

  “NO!” shouted Zal. It came out as a stream of bubbles.

  The octopuses all released their ink at once. The water in the tank turned black.

  “Come on, come on! Work, work, work!”

  “Try over there, Zal. More water.”

  They were back in the hotel suite and the Rainbow Carpet was spread over the table. Zara stood beside Arna with Rip in her arms. They watched as Zal and Augur worked frantically over the Rainbow Carpet with sponges and buckets of rose water. Large pools of inky water lay on the floor around them, ruining the hotel’s expensive rugs. Zara shifted her weight between her feet. Rip moaned in her arms and Arna chewed his beard. Zal and Augur were oblivious to the tension, as they were wrapped up in their carpet-weavers’ concentration, working to save the Rainbow Carpet.

  “Oh, it’s no good!” Augur stepped back and lowered his sponge. “That’s all we can get off.”

  “No, no! Keep going!” said Zal, scrubbing harder. “We can save it! We’ve got to!”

  “Zal, stop. You’re making it worse,” said Augur. “The ink’s already soaked deep into the threads. We weren’t fast enough.”

  The furious fishmonger had pulled Zal, Zara and Rip out of the tank, yelling at them for scaring his octopuses. He had been even angrier when they dived straight back in and swam down to the bottom to rescue the Rainbow Carpet. As soon as they had hauled it to the surface, soaking wet, heavy with salt water and entirely covered in sticky black ink, they saw there was no chance of getting it to fly. Zal and Zara had rolled it up, carried it on their shoulders and run non-stop all the way back to the hotel with Rip leading the way. Augur and Arna had almost choked on their breakfast when their children had burst in, covered in ink themselves, yelling for them to get the emergency carpet-cleaning supplies out.

  “Oh, camelpat!” Zal ran his hand through his ink-stained hair. “Now we’re finished!”

  Zara stepped forward and forced herself to look at the Rainbow Carpet. She gasped. Rip whined and buried his face in Zara’s elbow. The sides of the Rainbow Carpet were as black as midnight. The middle, where Zal and Augur had tried their hardest, was a mottled patchwork of different shades of grey, some dark and some light. Not one speck of the seven colours of magic could be seen anywhere.

  “Can you re-enchant it, Zara?” said Augur.

  “Not in this state, I can’t,” said Zara. “Black’s not one of the seven colours. It needs to be the right colours before I can put magic into it.”

  She touched the carpet. Just this morning, it had been brimming with magic and she had felt a living, tingling connection between the magic inside it and the magic inside her. But now with the ink in the way, and with most of the magic stolen by the flower petals, it felt cold and empty, like touching an old grey cloth.

  “We’re finished!” said Zal again, dropping his sponge to the floor.

  “Now, now. Let’s not panic,” said Arna. “This isn’t a disaster… Well, OK, yes, it is. But it’s not the end of the world! We’ve got two dozen spare rainbow carpets. You can just race on one of those.”

  “That’s not the same, Dad,” said Zara. “Those are just rainbow carpets. This is the Rainbow Carpet. It’s special. It’s the first one we wove, the one we went through the Fire City to get. It’s our carpet.”

  Rip yapped in agreement.

  “And we might not be allowed to,” said Zal. “I read through the rule book before we came. Competitors are meant to race on the exact same means of flight used to win their kingdom’s championship race. It’s an anti-cheating measure. They won’t let us fly on another one.”

  “Surely they’d make an exception for this?” said Augur.

  “I’m not so sure, my friend,” said Arna. “You know what sticklers the Shirazans are for detail. Remember how much fine print there was on the breakfast menu?”

  “We’ve got to find a way to fix it,” said Zal, touching the carpet himself. “Is there anything you can do with magic?”

  “Ummm … maybe,” said Zara. “There might be a way, but I don’t know what.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one’s ever taught me a getting-ink-out-of-a-magic-carpet spell,” said Zara. “I’m not even sure if there is such a thing.”

  “Well, we’ve got to do something!” said Zal. “We can’t just stand here and wait for the ink to dry.”

  “No, you should both wash before you do anything else,” said Arna, looking at the trail of black footprints they had left across the floor. “Oh, why couldn’t this have happened in Azamed? There we’d have high magicians who understand carpet magic to consult about this.”

  “Wait, Dad. That’s it!” said Zara. “High magicians!”

  “Where?” said Arna, looking over his shoulder.

  “No, they’re who we need,” said Zara. “High magicians know all the seven colours and all kinds of advanced spell casting. Shirazan magicians don’t know much about carpet magic, but if there is a way to do it, they should be able to tell us!”

  “Well, that’s great,” said Zal, “but we don’t know any magicians here.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Zara, “I know where to find them.”

  “By the Celestial Stork’s beak!” Professor Maltho stared at the Rainbow Carpet with open-mouthed horror. “What on earth did you do to it?”

  The Professor was a tall, handsome man in his forties. He had wavy black hair that came down to his jaw and wore a monocle in his right eye. His long purple robes were those of a senior teacher at the Magicians’ Academy, the huge white castle in the middle of the city. It seemed to be a lot bigger on the inside than it was on the outside and because of the many powerful magicians who worked ther
e, it probably was. The Academy was one of the greatest schools of magic in the Seventeen Kingdoms and offered classes in every branch of magic from astro-numerology to frogspawn applications.

  “We didn’t do it deliberately,” said Zal.

  “I should hope not!” said the Professor. “Good grief! What a calamity!”

  “Can magic fix it, Professor?” said Zara. “There must be some way.”

  They were standing in the Professor’s study, which was a large room, high up on the fifth floor of a tall turret. The mid-morning sun poured in through its narrow windows and reflected off the complicated alchemy sets that covered tables and workbenches. Potions in all seven colours of magic flowed along thin glass tubes and bubbled, boiled or froze inside flasks. A large yellow sofa, made of Windtree wood from Pursolon, floated gently in the corner of the room. Strange rocks and crystals lined the shelves next to stacks of scrolls, jars of coloured powders and a dragon’s skull. A map of star constellations and a diagram of a rainbow hung on the walls beside a small oil painting of the Professor with his wife and children.

  “Oh, certainly,” said the Professor. “There’s no doubt about that.”

  He picked up a magnifying glass and studied the carpet’s blackened weaving more closely.

  “In its simplest form, magic is nothing more than the power of our brains over the seven shades that make up the natural world. Therefore, anything we can imagine is possible through magic.”

  “Thank Stork for that!” said Zal. “So you can fix it? We’re saved!”

  “Unfortunately, no,” said the Professor. “It’s certainly possible to remove the ink with magic, but I’m afraid I can’t do it for you. A magic carpet like this is as much a work of art as it is a means of flight. Only the magician who enchanted it in the first place can carry out such major repair work.”

  “Me?” said Zara. “But I don’t know how! I’m not a high magician.”

  “We came here because we thought you’d know,” said Zal.

  “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip,” said the Professor. “But that’s the way it is. This isn’t like washing a food stain out of a tunic or scraping mud off your shoes. It’s more like trying to repair a painting that’s been smudged or a statue that’s had its nose broken off. Only the artist who painted or sculpted it can restore it to exactly the way it was. If I, or any other magician, were to try, Stork knows what we might do to it by accident.”

  “Oh no!” said Zal, grabbing the carpet. “It’s been through enough! Zara, you have to do it.”

  “But I don’t know how,” said Zara. “I’m a seventh-year student. I don’t know rainbow dynamics or external shade casting yet. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “You’re just going to have to find a place to begin,” said the Professor. “Since there’s no such thing as a spell for removing octopus ink from a seven-colour magic carpet, you’re going to have to invent one. And it has to be one that will work specifically for this carpet.”

  “But how?” said Zara. “I don’t know any spells like that.”

  She looked at the blackened carpet again. Normally, it was easy to use her magic in any of the seven shades. She just needed to look at something that was one of the seven colours, then look inside and find that colour within herself. Then she could send it out, down her arms and through her hands into whatever it was, filling it with magic. But her magic washed over the black and grey Rainbow Carpet like water flowing over a stone. The ink felt like a solid wall that she couldn’t hope to break through.

  “Look, you said ‘with magic’,” said Zal. “What about ‘without magic’? Is there any other way we could do it?”

  “I should be asking you that. You’re the carpet-weaver,” said Professor Maltho. He stroked his chin and looked at the black and grey Rainbow Carpet again. “But … I suppose you might – and I do mean might – try using Rivertree balm. That may be able to get the ink off.”

  “Rivertree balm?” said Zara.

  “It’s a special potion that alchemists use for cleaning their lab robes after messy experiments,” said the Professor. “It’s made of five different ingredients that are all magical, but when they are mixed together they cancel each other out. It’s ideal for washing out magic potions before they can stain.”

  “That sounds perfect,” said Zal.

  “Wait a minute,” said Zara. “What’s the risk?”

  “It might work too well,” said the Professor. “It could wash off the ink, but also wash the dye out of the threads. You could be left with a white carpet, instead of a black and grey one, that still won’t fly.”

  “Oh,” said Zara.

  “But if you can’t do a spell, it’s better than anything else we’ve got,” said Zal. “And we’ve got four days until the race.”

  “I’ll write down the recipe for you,” said the Professor. “Though, now you mention it, the race might be the bigger problem.”

  “How?” said Zal.

  “Those mysterious flower petals you saw,” said the Professor. “We had better find out what they were before the race in case they strike again.”

  The Professor went over to the tall set of shelves that held his library. They were filled with dozens of scrolls on magic, and also writing tablets made of stone, wax and clay. There were rocks carved all over with strange symbols, and spells written in charcoal on sheets of tree bark or in blood on animal skins by the earliest magicians. One shelf even contained several of the peculiar piles of paper, glued together along one side between thick sheets of card and made in the far western kingdoms, called books. The Professor lifted down one of these volumes with a brown leather cover and carried it over to a table. Zal and Zara stood beside him as he turned over the cover, revealing the title, Methods for the Stealing of Magic.

  “If any magician has ever encountered them before, they should be recorded in here,” said the Professor, turning the pages. The book was written in thick paragraphs of swirling handwriting, divided up by beautifully drawn and coloured pictures.

  “Just how many methods are there to steal magic?” said Zara. The pictures showed magicians losing their powers to demons, having their shades sucked out into cursed jars or running in terror from packs of magic-inhaling aardvarks.

  “Far too many,” said the Professor. “And each one can be achieved in a number of different ways. We need to narrow it down to—”

  “Hey, wait!” said Zal. “That’s it!”

  They looked down at the page. The picture showed a beautiful girl in a long blue dress, kneeling with her head bowed and her eyes closed, as she held up a vase of yellow and violet flowers. The flowers were shedding their petals, which were not falling, but flying up into a swirling storm above the girl’s curling red hair.

  “What?!” said Professor Maltho, looking shocked.

  “That’s them. Those are the flower petals,” said Zal.

  “Definitely,” said Zara. “Well done, Zal… Professor?”

  “Those?!” said the Professor, with wide eyes. “Are you absolutely sure? Someone used the Crystal Flowers of Kandara on you this morning?”

  “What are they?” said Zara.

  “By the Stork’s feathers! Oh, they’re an ancient magical weapon,” said the Professor. “They were created by the magician-princess Kandara five thousand years ago. She used them to defend her kingdom from a horde of giant man-eating bats. But someone used them on you? By the River Robin!”

  “Why? Are they meant to be lost in the winds of time beyond the mists of history or something?” said Zal, remembering how the secret to weaving rainbow carpets had been lost for thousands of years in Azamed before he and Zara had come along.

  “No, they’re meant to be right here,” said the Professor. “They’re kept in the Academy’s own museum. But they were stolen from it a month ago!”

  “Stolen?” said Zara.

  “Yes, someone broke into the museum in the middle of the night and made off with the whole vase,” said the Professor
. “They picked all the locks, including the picking-proof ones, and walked through every security spell like they weren’t there. The only clues those fools in the Royal Protectors managed to find were some strands of black and orange fur inside the broken display case. It was the most audacious episode in the crime wave yet.”

  “The crime wave?” said Zal.

  “Oh, of course. I forgot you wouldn’t know about it. You were still in Azamed when it started,” said the Professor.

  He went over to his parchment-strewn desk and dug out a copy of a news scroll. Zal read the title – The Shirazar Star – and recognized it as the most popular one in the kingdom.

  “It’s been going on for three months,” said the Professor, unrolling it. “A string of seemingly impossible burglaries all over Shirazar. The Royal Protectors don’t want to admit they’re baffled.”

  The middle section of the scroll contained a two-foot long report on the crime wave. Beside it, there was a list in date order of every item that had been stolen so far with small pictures of each one drawn beside it.

  “The Vessel of Tears, the Mirror Curtain, the Crystal Flowers of Kandara, the Moon Bow, the Demon Chessmen, the Fire Scimitar and the Boomerang of Astigor,” read Zal, reading the list backwards from the most recent theft. “Holy Stork! What are all these things?”

  “Whatever they are, they don’t sound safe,” said Zara.

  “Most of them aren’t,” said the Professor. “What someone could want them all for is anyone’s guess. The only things they have in common are that they’re all old, valuable, magical and one-of-a-kind. But now that I think about it…”

  “What is it, sir?” said Zal.

  “Gentle Stork,” said the Professor, stroking his chin. “It’s not just the Crystal Flowers of Kandara that could have been used to make you crash. Every one of those items could have been used to bring down almost any means of flight!”

  “Every single one of them?” said Zara.