by Alex Bell
‘I don’t know, I just assume. It is a logical assumption,’ Schmidt said defensively.
Lex said nothing. But Schmidt realised that he knew he’d just clumsily tried to hide something from him. And Lex knew that Schmidt knew that he knew. What a nightmare this whole situation was!
‘Well, it looks like you’re right,’ Schmidt said briskly. ‘The stairs will have to be tackled the old-fashioned way.’
‘For Gods’ sake, why can’t you keep your damn balance for more than ten bloody seconds!’ Lex snarled, almost tearing his hair out in exasperation.
They were just over halfway up the staircase, about twenty feet above the cold ice floor below. The going had been painfully slow for Lex. There is no fast way to ascend an ice staircase - no fraudster can alter this material fact, no matter how talented he might be. By clinging to the railings, they were managing to stay upright - most of the time - but slipping on the ice was unavoidable and the effort of climbing required the whole body to be constantly tensed. Lex was feeling tired himself but the fuss that the lawyer was making was absolutely disgraceful. He just kept on falling over! And what was worse, he was actually letting go of the balustrade when he did, so that a couple of times he had actually fallen down a few stairs before managing to stop himself.
‘We seem to be taking one step forward for every two steps back!’ Lex exclaimed. ‘Why won’t you just hold onto the rail when you slip? You’d stay upright then. I mean it doesn’t take all that much intelligence to grasp that simple fact, does it?’
The lawyer was out of breath and Lex could tell from the way he was moving that he had hurt himself when he’d fallen. What an infuriating old idiot he was!
‘You’re slowing me down!’ Lex hissed. ‘Stop being so obstinate and hold on to the damned balustrade!’
Lex turned to continue the climb when Schmidt did something utterly unexpected. He pulled a pork pie out of his bag . . . and bit into it. The body switch was instantaneous. Lex sucked in his breath in startled pain. He was now standing further down the stairs in the lawyer’s body. Every muscle seemed to be on fire.
‘You greedy idiot,’ he wheezed, stifling the familiar distaste at hearing himself talk with Schmidt’s voice. ‘We have to eat together, remember? Get back down here and finish the pie with me.’
‘You think you can do so much better,’ Schmidt said in an odd tone from above him. ‘I’d like to see you prove it.’
Lex looked up, hardy believing his ears. ‘You switched us on purpose?’
‘Yes, I want to learn. Show me how it’s done, Lex.’
‘All right,’ Lex retorted, never able to resist a challenge. ‘All right, I’ll show you how it’s done, old man. Although really, for something so simple, I would have thought that a verbal explanation would have been more than sufficient.’
Lex stuffed the pork pie into his pocket and then gripped the banister in his gloved hand. Or tried to. He glanced down with a frown. The old man’s hands were shaking. Lex silently willed them to stop. It didn’t work. Scowling, Lex struggled his way up a few stairs before his feet inevitably slipped on the ice and, despite his best efforts, he was unable to retain a firm enough grip on the banister to prevent himself from falling over. He swore irritably and dragged himself back upright. After several more minutes, he was getting rather sick of continually bruising himself and called up to the lawyer who was now several stairs ahead of him, ‘Okay, you’ve made your point.’
‘My dear boy,’ Schmidt called back, ‘I haven’t even begun to make it.’
And the lawyer quickened his pace, leaving Lex toiling further behind.
‘Hey!’ Lex shouted. ‘Give me back my body, you bastard!’ When Schmidt continued to ignore him, Lex proceeded to shout insults in the most foul language he could think of before grudgingly deciding to conserve his energy for the rest of what was clearly going to be an exceedingly torturous climb. When he at last reached the top, Schmidt had clearly been waiting for him for some time - he was sitting at the top of the stairs with Lex’s bag at his feet. Lex took a bite out of the half-eaten pie and then passed it to the lawyer. It was decidedly satisfying to see his employer wince on arrival in his own body once again.
‘You made your point,’ Lex growled, standing and picking up his bag. ‘But I wouldn’t do that again if I were you. Trust me, if it becomes a contest, I can make your life much more painful than you could ever make mine.’
‘I believe you,’ Schmidt replied solemnly.
‘Glad to hear it,’ Lex snapped.
He turned away to survey their new surroundings, calmly finishing off the pie as he did so.
‘Well?’ the lawyer asked coldly after a moment.
‘It looks as if I may have made a rather horrible mistake,’ Lex said.
They were standing on a large, circular upper floor. That was all right; Lex had expected some kind of landing. But the problem . . . the real problem . . . was that there were no doors.
‘It’s a dead end,’ Schmidt said flatly. ‘We’re going to have to get all the way back down those stairs again.’
‘It was very kind of you,’ Lex remarked, ‘to allow me to finish the climb up here rather than tell me it was a dead end as soon as you found out.’
‘What can I say? I have the soul of a teacher,’ Schmidt sneered. ‘I did not want to interrupt your lesson before it was finished, Mr Trent.’
‘Well, I’m not going back down those stairs,’ Lex declared.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Not after we’ve climbed so high. No way.’
‘But this is a dead end!’
‘Not for long,’ Lex replied.
He put his bag on the floor and started rummaging through it. By the time he had pulled out a sledgehammer, a huge ice pick and a rather bemused-looking penguin, Schmidt was beginning to realise that this was no ordinary backpack.
‘What the hell is that thing?’ he asked.
‘Magic bag,’ Lex said. ‘I took it from the ship. It’s bigger inside than out. Isn’t it cool?’ he said with a grin. ‘Just think, if you hadn’t thrown my old bag away I never would have found it.’
‘Your penguin’s leaving,’ Schmidt said, for want of anything more sensible to say.
Lex glanced up with a frown as the creature shuffled off down the stairs, its feet slapping loudly on the ice.
‘I didn’t pack him. I guess there’s a few things in here that the enchanter left behind.’
‘Look, you’re not seriously thinking about hacking your way through the wall with those things, are you?’ Schmidt asked, gesturing to the ice pick and sledgehammer.
‘Oh, don’t be stupid,’ Lex replied mildly. ‘I was looking for this.’ And he pulled from the bag a tall, pointed enchanter’s hat. It was silver with the usual embroidered moons and stars.
‘That’s what your brilliant mind has come up with, is it? A hat? Thank the heavens, all our problems are solved!’
‘Or soon will be at any rate,’ Lex muttered.
He lifted the hat over his head but froze when Schmidt cried out in alarm, ‘You’re not thinking of wearing it, are you?’
Lex looked puzzled. ‘Why not? Is silver not my colour?’
‘The enchanter will be angry,’ Schmidt warned.
‘What the enchanter doesn’t know,’ Lex replied cheerfully, ‘won’t hurt him.’
And he lowered the hat onto his head, grinning at the way Schmidt flinched as if he was expecting flames to burst from its pointed tip.
‘You worry too much, Monty.’
‘Well, what good will it do you, anyway?’
‘The enchanters keep some of their power in their hats,’ Lex said, glancing at him. ‘Don’t they, sir?’
Schmidt raised an eyebrow. He was testing him! The little brat was testing him!
‘Do they, Lex?’
‘Yes,’ Lex replied. ‘They do. I thought you might have known.’
‘It’s not my business to understand the ways of the enchanters any
more than it is yours! But these hats were not made for humans. We are not used to magic the way they are. It might be dangerous to—’
‘Thank you, Mr Schmidt, consider your duty of care towards me discharged. I have been duly warned. Now, let’s see about these walls.’
Lex looked at the curving ice wall that surrounded them on the circular landing. There was no way of knowing what lay beyond. They might be able to break through into another part of the upper castle or they might blast through to find nothing but more solid ice before them or a gaping drop to the floor below. It would be safer to go back down the ice staircase and start again somewhere else. Explosions are never a good idea when the superstructure of a building consists almost entirely of sand.
Lex did not know exactly how to use the hat, or even if he could use it, but it was certainly worth a try before resorting to the ice picks. He held out his hands, palms facing towards the walls, the way he had seen the enchanters do, and spoke the first magic word that came into his mind. ‘Alakazam!’
The wall imploded.
Which was ultimately a good thing, but the way the floor trembled was a little worrying. Schmidt and Lex both slipped over on the ice, despite clinging to the banister. A large crack appeared down the middle of the floor and icy dust rose up from it and fell from the ceiling. For a moment, with the ice trembling beneath him, Lex was forced to seriously contemplate the possibility that the entire staircase would collapse. Fortunately, however, moments passed and the staircase remained more or less intact. What was more, it was clear that the explosion had gone right through the wall and out the other side to where they now had a clear view of a long sand bridge. Heat was pouring out from the gap in waves and Lex could see that the icy floor nearest the wall was already beginning to melt. Without speaking to one another, Lex and Schmidt very carefully and tentatively dragged themselves towards the door, wincing as the ice groaned when they passed over the crack down the middle.
When they at last reached the safety of the sandy floor on the other side, Schmidt rounded on Lex, almost foaming at the mouth. ‘Alakazam? Alakazam? Did you have any idea at all what you were doing back there? Take that hat off before you kill somebody!’
‘What’s your problem? It worked, didn’t it?’
But he raised his hands to the hat anyway, intending to remove it. ‘Uh oh,’ he said, tugging at the hat. ‘I, uh . . . can’t get it off.’
‘Can’t get it off?’ Schmidt repeated, looking horrified. ‘Can’t get it off?’
‘Can’t get it off, yes, that’s what I said!’ Lex replied, feeling irritated and just the tiniest bit alarmed. It must have been because he’d used the magic on it. After all, the hat had come off fine when he’d tried it on before.
‘I warned you not to put it on. Here, let me try,’ the lawyer said, gripping the hat and trying to pull it from Lex’s head.
‘Oh, never mind the hat for now,’ Lex said after several rather undignified moments of pulling and tugging. ‘We’ll deal with it after this round.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Schmidt said.
Neither did Lex but he wasn’t about to admit his discomfort to the lawyer. The truth was that he had only ever expected to be wearing the hat for a few moments. He felt vulnerable with it stuck to his head like this . . . almost as if the enchanter might be able to sense the fact that he was wearing it. For all Lex knew, the enchanters might indeed possess such a sensitivity. And there was no getting away from the fact that he had stolen the enchanter’s ship. He shivered involuntarily. He had always intended to steal something from an enchanter one day - some tiny little thing that probably wouldn’t be missed for a very long time, if it was missed at all - but a huge, powerful ship stuffed full of valuables was something altogether different and, for an instant, Lex experienced the disquieting fear that he might be in over his head this time. He shook these fears off hastily. What was done was done and he must keep a clear head for the Game.
He turned his attention to their new surroundings. They had broken into one of the sandy rooms and at the moment the heat was making a pleasant change from the frozen iciness before but Lex knew that that would change pretty quickly. They both stripped off their fur coats and stuffed them into Lex’s magic bag. It was a relief to feel sand underfoot again. Unlike the previous room, this one had no windows, but the same flickering torches in brackets were on the walls, just as they had seen in the corridor on the way into the castle. There was a sand bridge stretched across the length of another huge room, suspended some thirty feet in the air with nothing but more sand stretched out beneath them. Lex didn’t particularly like the look of that bridge. There were no railings to hang on to and no obvious pillars supporting it. But they had to get across to the other side somehow and the sand staircase behind them only led back down, not up.
‘Well, at least the sand should be easier to walk on,’ Schmidt was saying. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t just go through the sandy rooms to begin with; anything’s got to be easier than trying to walk on ice.’
But ice is solid, Mr Schmidt, Lex thought. Sand is not. He didn’t speak aloud. After all, that would not have been at all conducive to persuading the lawyer to cross the bridge. Besides which, he had already spotted another couple of stone people down there . . .
CHAPTER TEN
THE BROKEN MIRROR
Moving between the hot and cold rooms as they progressed through the castle was in itself uncomfortable, but infinitely preferable to being frozen or toasted alive. There had been a couple of heart-stopping moments in the hot rooms when the sandy floors had given way beneath them and they had been forced to sprint for the nearest exit. Lex had thoroughly enjoyed this, of course, finding the thrill of almost plunging to his death utterly exhilarating, but Schmidt had not seemed quite so entertained and had quickly grasped the importance of avoiding the sandy rooms where they could. Despite the thrill, Lex tried as hard as he possibly could to avoid the hot rooms for he did not want Schmidt to guess the truth behind those stone statues and start panicking and upsetting everything.
But then they found Theba and the secret was out.
They had just come out of an ice room and into another sandy corridor when they found him - frozen in stone like all the others. Lex tried to hurry Schmidt past him before he could notice but the sharp-eyed lawyer was not to be deceived.
‘Gracious me, that’s the prophet’s companion!’ he exclaimed in horror.
‘Ah ha.’ Lex made a weak attempt to laugh it off. ‘There is a certain resemblance.’
‘It’s no resemblance, it’s the spitting image!’ Schmidt snapped.
‘So it is,’ Lex replied. ‘Astonishing. Come on, we can’t hang around here all day.’
He was most eager not to linger in the sandy rooms any longer than was necessary, but the damned lawyer was still ogling at the statue as if it were the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen in his life. It was, indeed, identical to Theba in every way. The thin gangster with the greasy hair had a terrified expression on his face and, now that Schmidt looked at the other stone people in the corridor around them, he was obviously realising that they all wore the same expression. The penny finally dropped.
‘Medusas!’ he croaked.
Lex sighed. ‘It seems that way. The prophet must have escaped the attack because he’s blind.’
Schmidt was instantly panic stricken as Lex had known full well that he would be.
‘We’ve got to get out of here at once!’ the lawyer exclaimed, already looking round for possible exits.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Lex said coldly. He uncurled his fist to reveal the mirror he had concealed there. ‘And I have the only mirror. I’ve been using it to look around corners. Everyone knows a medusa can only turn you to stone if you look directly at her. So if you want to move safely through the castle then I suggest you stay with me.’
Lex turned on his heel and walked away, not giving Schmidt any time to wrestle with himself. There were medusas in the cast
le - the sensible thing was to push on quickly and not stand about in the open discussing the danger. Schmidt obviously came to the same conclusion, for he hurried after Lex almost at once.
Unfortunately, the supply of blue doors seemed to have entirely run out and so they had no choice but to continue moving through the sandy rooms and corridors, checking around each corner with the mirror for medusas first. Medusas liked heat and hated the cold, which was why Lex had known that, in the icy rooms, they would be safe from them.
Lex and Schmidt had taken their coats off but even then the heat was unbearable. Sweat trickled down their skin, dampening their clothes, and despite taking frequent gulps of the water Lex had packed, they felt permanently dehydrated. Soon the water was almost all gone and Lex - with a considerable lack of good grace - was forced to give the last bottle to Schmidt for the old lawyer was clearly feeling the heat even more than Lex.
