by Tom Holt
“Jeez, sorry, mate,” whispered the Dragon King. “I only stopped by to see how you were making out. Didn’t mean to make you jump.”
“Shut up and stay still,” Cupid snarled. He chambered the third round and tried to recover his composure.
“Always wanted to watch a top-flight pro like yourself at work,” the King continued. “I think it’s marvellous, the way you fellers—”
Cupid forced himself to relax. “Look,” he said, “if you don’t shut up and keep still, the next one’s for you. You got that?”
Since the only female in sight was Jane, the King froze as effectively as if he’d been carved from stone. Cupid closed his eyes, counted to five, and raised the rifle to his cheek.
Deep breath in. Centre the crosshairs. Half breath out, and — steady…
Bang.
“SWITCH THAT BLOODY THING OFF!”
The King looked suitably mortified. “Sorry, chum, I really am, only they make me carry this damn bleeper thing, it’s in case anybody needs to call me in a—”
Cupid breathed out through his nose. “Thanks to you,” he said, “and a freak ricochet, the microwave is now hopelessly in love with the sink unit, which in turn is besotted with the electric kettle. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“I’ve switched it off now. Sorry.”
“You haven’t got a digital watch that bleeps, have you?”
“No.”
“Ticklish throat? Feel a sneeze coming on?”
“Nope.”
“Splendid. Now, since I happen to have one shot left, perhaps we can get on with it.”
Chamber the round. Lift the rifle. Centre the crosshairs. Deep breath in. Half breath out. Cuddle the trigger, and — “Nice one!” exclaimed the King. “Right up the—”
“I was aiming,” Cupid sighed, “for the heart. But it doesn’t actually matter all that much, not in the long run.”
“That’s all right then,” said the King happily. “Now, will you take a cheque?”
What Cupid didn’t realise was that one of his shots — the one that nailed Abe Lincoln, for what it’s worth — rebounded off the edge of the frame and ended its journey in the carpet. The carpet.
Carpets, especially the sentient, magical variety, are no fools. The specimen in question had been dozing quietly in front of the fire, resting after an unusually taxing day, when it became aware that someone was shooting at it. It did what any sensible item of soft furnishing would have done in the circumstances, and got the hell out of there.
For the record, it still had Justin on it. The negative Gs generated in the descent from 40,000 feet had knocked him out cold, and Jane and Asaf had been too wrapped up in each other to pay him any mind.
The carpet, then, zoomed off into the empyrean and kept going. As it flew, however, it found itself reflecting on its life so far, with particular reference to its solitary nature and the lack, to date, of sympathetic female companionship.
(We use the term female in this context for convenience only. Technically, what the carpet was longing for was companionship of the inverse-weft variety; but for all practical purposes, it amounts to the same thing.)
It was just beginning to feel sad and moody when something whizzed past its hem, leaving behind a blurred memory of a sleek cylindrical body and a tantalising whiff of perfume.
“Cor!” thought the carpet. “That was a bit of all right.” It did a double flip and followed the object’s vapour trail. What it was in fact following was an M43 ballistic missile with a 700-megaton warhead, launched after half an hour of frantic debate in the B-team bunker when the assistant scientific officer rested his coffee cup on the instrument panel.
The carpet sped on through the sky, established visual contact and fell hopelessly in love.
“Hi,” it said, swooping down parallel with the missile and shooting its hems. “My name’s Vince. What’s a gorgeous metallic tube like you doing in a place like this?”
The missile made no reply, but there was a twinkling of LED readouts on its console that might be equated with a fluttering of eyelashes.
“Like the tail-fins,” the carpet persevered. “They suit you.”
The rocket slowed down, ever so slightly. A product of ninth-generation missile technology, the M43 is officially classed as semi-intelligent, presumably so that it feels at home in the company of military personnel. It’s intelligent enough, at least, to recognise a basic chat-up line when it hears one. When you’re an instrument of mass destruction, however, you don’t tend to get many offers. Public executioners, lawyers and people who work for the Revenue tend to have the same problem.
The rocket bleeped.
“Say,” said the carpet, as suavely as a piece of knotted wool can manage. “How about you and me grabbing a bite to eat somewhere? I happen to know this little place…”
The other nuclear missile, fired by Side A, shot over Kiss’s head, neatly parting his hair with its slipstream.
Pausing only to use profane language, the genie hurried after it, caught it with his left hand and disarmed it with his right. He did so deftly, confidently and with the minimum of fuss, because the very worst epitaph the Planet Earth could wish for would be “Butterfingers!”
Having programmed it to carry on into a harmless orbit, he sat down on a sunbeam and recovered from the retrospective shakes. A sense of humour was one thing but this time, in his opinion, Philly Nine had gone too far.
“Want to make something of it?” Philly demanded, materialising directly over his left shoulder.
“Oh, come on,” Kiss replied wearily. “We’ve been here already, remember? Beating the shit out of each other with mountains, chasing about across the sky, all that crap. I’m really not in the mood.”
“Tough,” replied Philly Nine. “Because I am.”
Kiss frowned. “You are, are you?”
Philly nodded. “Because,” he amplified, “you’re starting to get on my nerves. Nothing personal, you understand.”
With exaggerated effort, Kiss stood up. “Has it occurred to you,” he said, “that since we’re both Force Twelve genies, there’s absolutely no way either of us can beat the other?”
“Yes. I don’t care.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Kiss scratched his head. “You wouldn’t prefer to settle this by reference to some sort of game of chance, thereby introducing a potentially decisive random element?”
“Not really. Two reasons. One, you’d cheat. Two, I want to bash your head in, and drawing lots would deprive me of the opportunity.”
“I wouldn’t cheat.”
“Says you.”
“When have I ever cheated at anything?”
“Hah! Can you spare half an hour?”
“I resent that.”
“You were supposed to.”
The light bulb beloved of cartoonists lit up in Kiss’s head. “It’s no good trying to provoke me,” he said. “Sticks and stones may break my bones…”
“Good, I’d like to try that.”
“You know what your trouble is, Philly? You’re unregenerate.”
“That’s probably the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about me.”
“It needn’t be drawing lots, you know. We could try cutting a pack of cards, or throwing dice. Or snakes and ladders. Best of five games. Wouldn’t that be more fun than scurrying round trying to nut each other with granite outcrops?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Positive.”
Kiss grinned. Blessed, he’d read on the back of a cornflake packet once, are the peacemakers, and he’d done his best. That, he felt, qualified him for the moral high ground; and the nice thing about the moral high ground was being able to chuck rocks off it on to the heads of the unregenerate bastards down below.
“In that case…” he said.
“You’re not going to believe it,” muttered a technician in Bunker A, “but one of our missiles has gone off.”
&n
bsp; “What?” The Controller swivelled round in his chair. “And I missed it?”
“Presumably. You can’t remember pressing anything marked FIRE, can you?”
“Just my bloody luck,” grumbled the Controller. “We start World War Three, and I miss it. That’s a real bummer, that is. It would have been something to tell my grandchildr…”
He tailed off as the inherent contradiction hit him. The other inhabitants of the bunker shrugged.
“Never mind,” said the wireless operator. “We’ve got plenty more where that one came from. Now, try and remember what it was that you did, exactly.”
“More wine,” breathed the carpet heavily. “Go on, let’s finish off the bottle.”
The atomic bomb shook its warhead. Nuclear weapons aren’t accustomed to intoxicating liquor, and it was starting to see double. All it wanted right now was to go home and sleep it off.
“A brandy, then? Coffee? We could go back to my place and have a coffee.”
It occurred to the bomb that if it showed up back at the silo with its exhaust residues smelling of drink, it would have some explaining to do. It nodded, and lurched against the table for support. Suddenly it didn’t feel too well.
“Waiter,” said the carpet, “the bill, please.”
The waiter was there instantly, assuring the carpet that this one was on the house, and could it please take its friend somewhere else quickly, because…
The bomb hiccupped. Geiger counters on three continents danced a tarantella. The waiter threw himself under the table and started to pray.
Cautiously, the bomb got up and promptly fell over. Fortunately for generations of cartographers yet unborn, it fell into the carpet, which lifted gracefully into the air and flew away.
Justin chose that particular moment to wake up.
He opened his eyes. Next to him, he noticed, there was a big black cylindrical thing, like a cross between a sea-lion and a fire extinguisher. There was stencilled writing on its side: THIS WAY UP and HANDLE LIKE EGGS and DANGER! The casing was warm.
The shop! He remembered about the shop. He glanced at his watch; Uncle would be home by now, and he’d be absolutely livid. He had to get back to the shop as quickly as possible.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The carpet frowned at him; that is to say, some of the more intricate woven motifs seemed to crowd more closely together.
“Not now,” it hissed. “Can’t you see I’ve got company?”
“We’ve got to get back to the shop,” Julian said. “Now.”
“That’s all right,” the carpet replied in a loud whisper. “That’s exactly where we’re going right now. Be there in about five minutes.”
Julian breathed a sigh of relief and snuggled up closer to the warm flank of the ICBM, which had started to tick.
“That’s all right, then,” he said.
TWELVE
Never in the history of superhuman conflict have two Force Twelves ever tried to fight it out to the bitter end.
Generally speaking, they’ve got more sense. They know that it’s next best thing to impossible — nothing is definitively impossible in an infinite Universe, but there’s such a thing as so nearly completely impossible that even an insurance company would bet on it never happening — for either participant to kill the other, or even put him out of action for more than a minute or so. It’s a simple fact that, in this dimension at least, genies can’t be killed or injured, although they can of course do a hell of a lot of damage to anything else in the vicinity. Think of a bar-room brawl in a John Wayne Western, and you get the general idea.
They can, however, feel pain; and so they do their level best to avoid fighting each other in any meaningful sense. A direct hit from a mountain hurts, and is best avoided for that very reason.
The battle between Kiss and Philly Nine was, therefore, something rather special; and when word reached the back bar of Saheed’s, there was a sudden and undignified scramble for the exit. This was going to be something to see.
“GO ON, YOU BLOODY FAIRY, RIP HIS EARS OFF!” shouted a small Force Two, who had climbed a lamppost to get a better view.
“Which one are you cheering for?” asked a colleague.
The Force Two shrugged.
“Both of them,” he replied. “I mean, it’s bound to be a draw, so… COME ON, PUT THE BOOT IN! STOP FARTING AROUND AND BREAK SOMETHING!”
“But if neither of them’s going to win, what’s the point in cheering at all?”
The Force Two shrugged. “It’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he replied. “CALL THAT A RABBIT PUNCH? MY GRANNY HITS HARDER THAN THAT.”
“As I recall,” commented the other genie, “your granny was Cyclone Mavis. Wasn’t she the one that pulled that coral island off Sumatra right up by the roots and plonked it down again fifty miles to the east?”
“So I’m being factually correct. Where’s the harm in that?”
Half an hour later, the two combatants paused for a breather.
“It’s only a small point,” panted Kiss, picking shards of splintered basalt out of his knees, “but what are we going to do about paying for the breakages?”
“Split ’em between us, I suppose,” Philly replied, lifting a small Alp off his ankle and discarding it. “That’s probably simpler than trying to keep tabs as we go along.”
“Fair enough,” Kiss replied. “Otherwise it’d be like trying to, work out the bill in a restaurant. You know, who had what, I thought it was you that ordered the extra nan bread, that sort of thing.”
“Ready for some more?”
“Yeah, go on.”
“Or do you want to phone whatsername? She’s probably wondering where you’ve got to.”
Kiss shook his head. “More important things to do,” he replied wearily. “I mean, she can’t expect me to phone her if I’m fighting for my life against overwhelmingly superior demonic forces, can she?”
Philly rubbed his nose. “I dunno,” he said. “You know her better than I do.”
Kiss thought about it. “Maybe I’d better just give her a quick call,” he said. “I mean, she may have started dinner or something.”
Philly put his head on one side and gave Kiss a thoughtful look. “That’d take priority over mortal combat with the prince of darkness, would it?”
“You haven’t had much to do with women, I can tell.”
“I suffer from that disadvantage, yes.”
“Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”
Easier said, Kiss discovered, than done. When eventually he found a public telephone (he was in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the time) he discovered that all his loose change had shaken out of his pockets during the fight, and his phonecard was bent and wouldn’t go in the slot.
Easier, he realised, given that I’m capable of travelling at the speed of light, to nip round there in person. He gathered up his component molecules and jumped — There is a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation of how genies manage to transport themselves from one side of the earth to the other apparently instantaneously; it’s something to do with trans-dimensional shift error, and it is in fact wrong. The truth is that genies have this facility simply because Mother Nature knows better than to try and argue with beings who only partially exist and who have all the malevolent persistence and susceptibility to logical argument of the average two-year-old. Let them get on with it, she says; and if they suddenly find themselves stuck in a rift between opposing realities, then ha bloody ha. — and, before the electrical impulses that made up the thought had finished trudging along his central nervous system, he had arrived. He felt in his pocket for his key.
And stopped. And sniffed. Fee-fi-fo-fum, he muttered under his breath, I smell the blood of a Near Easterner somehow connected with fish. Or rather the socks. And the armpits. Not to mention the residual whiff of haddock which is so hard to lose, all the deodorants of Arabia notwithstanding.
Funny, he thought.
He opened the door and
strolled in; to find Jane, his betrothed, apparently joined at the lips with a skinny dark-haired bloke in a salt-stained reefer jacket and grubby trainers.
It’s at times like this that instinct takes over. An instinct is, by its very nature, impulsive. Instinct doesn’t stand on one foot in the doorway thinking, “Hey, this really lets me off the hook, you know?” before discreetly tiptoeing away to see if it’s too late to get the deposit back on the wedding cake. Instinct jumps in, boot raised.
Three seconds or so later, therefore, Asaf was lying in a confused huddle in the corner of the room wondering how he had got there and why his ribs hurt so much. Jane was standing up, gesticulating eloquently with her right hand while trying to do her blouse up with her left; and Kiss was leaning on the arm of the sofa, listening to what Jane had to say and thinking, Shit, I think I’ve broken a bone in my toe.
And just what precisely, Jane was asking, did he think he was playing at? And what made him think he had the right-?
“Hold on,” Kiss interrupted. “That bloke there. Are you trying to tell me he was supposed to be doing that?”
It wasn’t a way of putting it that Jane had foreseen, and for a moment it checked the eloquence of her reproaches. “Yes,” she said. “And—”
“This, not to put too fine a point on it, mortal—”
“Here,” broke in Asaf, “who are you calling a mortal?”
“You.”
Asaf fingered his ribs tentatively. “Fair enough,” he said. “Hey, are you another one?”
“Another what?”
“Another bloody genie. Because if you are…”
WHOOSH!
“G’day,” said the Dragon King, materialising next to the standard lamp and knocking over a coffee table. “Perhaps it’d be a good idea if I explained…”
Somebody threw a glass decanter at him. Who it actually was we shall probably never know, but there were three obvious suspects. He ducked, looked round to see where the decanter had met the wall, and winced at the sight of good whisky gone to waste.
“Not you again,” Asaf said. “Not on top of everything else. Haven’t you people got anything better to do?”
