Zal and Zara and the Great Race of Azamed

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Zal and Zara and the Great Race of Azamed Page 4

by Kit Downes


  “Let me go!” He grabbed his ankles and tugged, but Zara clenched her fist and the magic in the soil tightened its grip. Two of the apple tree’s roots wove forward to wrap round Zal’s ankles.

  “Not until you listen to me,” said Zara. “Your father has lost everything else. He doesn’t need to lose his son too.”

  Zal stopped. He twisted his head round to look at her.

  “What?”

  Zara knelt down beside him and explained how all the Thesa capital had gone into the racing carpet, and that with the workshop gone, there was little chance of regaining it. Zal’s face grew paler and his expression more horrified.

  “What are we going to do?” he finally murmured.

  “Well, I’ve got a better solution than throwing yourself at Haragan’s knives,” said Zara. “We need to weave a new carpet and compete in the race – and we need to win.”

  “What? How is that a solution?” exclaimed Zal. “We have no materials and no money!”

  “We’ll pick them up on the way,” said Zara. She muttered a few magic words and the earth relaxed. Zal quickly rolled free and shook the earth from his shoes.

  “But what are you talking about?” he demanded. “We can’t weave a carpet in a day and a night. No one can!”

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Zara. “What we need to do first of all is guarantee that we’re going to win.”

  “You…”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We need to find out how to weave a rainbow carpet!”

  “Rainbow carpet?” said Zal. “A rainbow carpet! You need a doctor. Rainbow carpets are what the Blue Caliph rides around on in stories and songs. They can’t really be made. This is a worse idea than mine!”

  “Thanks for admitting that yours was bad,” said Zara, “but you’re wrong. They can be woven. Come on, I’ll prove it to you.”

  Zara started towards the gate, but Zal stayed where he was and crossed his arms. Rip, who had begun to follow Zara, looked uneasily back and forth between them.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Zal said. “I need to talk to Dad, work out what we’re—”

  “You said yourself, he wants to give up,” Zara interrupted. “And yes, you are coming. Come on.”

  “No, I’m… Hey! What the…? Stop!” Zal cried as his legs suddenly moved of their own accord, carrying him towards Zara in a stumbling walk. Without any intention on his part, his feet rose, moved forward and fell back to the ground – and no matter how he strained and wrenched his muscles, he could not stop them.

  “Just a joint-control spell,” said Zara. “Just move with it and you won’t feel any pain.”

  “No! Stop! Let me go!” Zal shouted as Zara ran through the gate and he began reluctantly to run after her. Rip barked with delight and followed.

  Green

  With the spell bringing Zal along behind her, Zara led the way out into the streets. The sun had been up for some time, but Azamed’s business day was just dawning. Shop doors and shutters were flung open. Market stalls and carts lined the streets. Merchandise and produce spilled from the shops and onto tables, shelves and sometimes even the pavement. The streets were awash with sellers and shoppers, all rushing about, shouting and arguing, laughing and crying. Oxen, cattle and even a few dragons and desert gryphons were led through the crowds by their careful owners. The scent of food – grain, fruit and meat – filled the air. The two biggest items for sale were new blooming flowers and beautifully woven racing carpets.

  As Zal had said, the race was on everyone’s mind. Flags with the race symbol fluttered everywhere. Signs in the windows of restaurants and pubs advertised good balconies to view it from. Printers worked non-stop to produce maps and score cards, and dozens of bards, minstrels and storytellers were busy singing of past races and their contestants.

  Zara and Zal moved through the crowds, with Rip weaving around people’s legs and barking at any dog or cat smaller than him.

  “Let me go!” Zal shouted, both from rage and to be heard over the noise of the market.

  “Stop making a fuss!”

  “Making a fuss? Give me my legs back!”

  The spell had not gone quite as smoothly as Zara had intended: it made Zal take steps that were either too big or too small, and every fifth one veered slightly to the left. Zal knocked over two baskets of pomegranates, broke an oil jar and shook the perch of a blue and yellow parrot that screeched loudly in his ear.

  “It’s not as if I’ve taken them off you,” Zara said.

  “You know what I mean. Reverse the spell now, and… Where are we going?”

  “To prove to you that rainbow carpets are real,” Zara replied. “And then to find out how to weave one. That flies.”

  “But rainbow carpets aren’t real. They’re impossible!”

  “Trust me.”

  “Trust you? Give me back my legs!”

  The rainbow carpet was the greatest legend of Azamed. The best carpets were those that mixed several colours: the more, the better. In all logic, the ultimate carpet included all seven – a rainbow carpet. It would have every advantage and, in theory, no disadvantages. But making one seemed to be impossible.

  Myths said that it was possible. The legendary Blue Caliph had apparently owned one, which he’d ridden many times to defend the city from the Serpent Hordes and the Fuj Empire. He had really been Caliph Lubun the Fourth but had been called the Blue Caliph after an unfortunate accident during a tour of a paint factory. Even after the colour had finally faded, the name had stuck. But he had been three Caliphs before Caliph Rabo the First, in whose reign Azamed had discovered writing and begun properly recording its history. Any stories from before that, such as Caliph Hasa the Mad defending Azamed from invasion by a race of giant fish, were suspect. After all, how would fish have crossed the desert?

  Whatever the truth of the legends, no one in living memory or recorded history had ever succeeded in weaving a seven-colour rainbow carpet. This was not for want of trying: two or three people came up with a new idea and tried it out each year. Zal had even seen a couple of attempts. The carpets had been woven with all seven colours, and their structures were sound; a seven-colour magician had come to add the magic, and then the project had failed. Seven-colour carpets would not retain magic. It flowed from the magician’s hands, into the weaving, and then spilt straight out again in hopeless, muddled confusion. No carpet-weaver had found a pattern or material or combination of both that could hold in all seven colours. No magician had found a way of stopping the spillage. No rainbow carpet had ever left the ground.

  There were various theories as to why this was. No one could balance all seven just right; the seven colours of magic repelled each other at such close quarters; the Celestial Stork disliked the number seven; the giant fish had placed a curse on the combination as revenge for their defeat by Caliph Hasa, and so on. The most popular theory was that carpet wool could only contain a certain amount of magic, in the same way as a sponge could only hold so much water: something else would be needed to hold it in. Various materials and alchemical coatings had been tried, but none had worked. In Azamed, the seven-colour rainbow carpet was regarded as being too close to impossible to be worth the time. The songs and stories of the Blue Caliph were still savoured by children, but only a fool would try to weave one.

  “Where are we going?” Zal shouted.

  “I just told you!”

  “No. Where, in the city, are we going?”

  “The Guild, of course! Where else?”

  Zal remembered the age-old adage that the mad should be humoured and decided to keep quiet for the rest of the journey. He concentrated on trying to get back control of his legs by willpower as he followed Zara along the streets, over the bridges and up and down the public stairways that wound around Azamed’s mountain.

  At one landing, he looked out across the yellow desert and saw in the distance a long caravan crawling its way towards Azamed from the west. It must have come from Endsa
li or Caldyn or one of the other giant ports that existed where the desert became the ocean, thousands of miles away. Great ships from other continents carried manufactured items across the waves from the far west to the ports: pots and pans, tools and weapons. These were loaded onto the caravans and sent across the desert to Azamed, where they would meet other caravans coming from the rainforests to the east. These would carry raw materials: ores, timber, cloth and precious stones. In Azamed they would be exchanged and traded. The manufactured goods would go where they were required in the east and the raw materials would be carried across both the desert and the ocean to where they were needed in the factories of other continents. The Caliph of Azamed taxed every transaction, and so the city grew and flourished.

  The Guild of Magicians was as old as the city. The Shadow Society – their greatest competition – was fifteen years younger. The Guild was a union of close to all the magicians in Azamed and it decided on the prices members could charge for their services and what was acceptable business practice. For example, a Guild magician could charge three gold pieces for successfully curing a camel’s fear of bats, but they could only charge one and a half gold pieces if their solution was to make the camel wear a blindfold. The Guild also owned the second largest library in Azamed and ran one of the city’s two schools for children gifted with magic. The other school was run by the Shadow Society.

  Zal had passed the high walls around the Guild school many times, but he had never before been inside them: the grounds were for staff and pupils only. Zara led him up to the large gate and knocked.

  “Who goes?” came a deep voice from the other side.

  “Zara Aura, Rainbow House and … her intended husband. And dog.”

  “No—” Zal began.

  “Shut up, Zal.” The gates opened a fraction and Zara dragged him through, Rip hopping in after them. Zal looked around and was surprised to see no one on the gates on the other side.

  “Where did the gatekeeper go?”

  “What gate…? Oh! There isn’t one,” said Zara. She reached back and tapped the wood of the gate. “It’s the gates themselves.”

  “Welcome to the Guild, young sir,” said the deep voice. “If you are lucky, you may leave alive and intact.”

  “Oh!” said Zal. “Well … um … thank—”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Zara and pulled Zal away. “Never talk with talking gates,” she advised, “any more than you need to. If you start a conversation, it can take hours to get through them.”

  As they walked through the grounds of the Guild towards the main building, Zal looked around with great interest. They were surrounded by very beautiful gardens. There were long green lawns, each blade of grass enchanted to grow to exactly the same length. The flower-beds were brilliant jungles of miniature trees with trunks as long and thick as fingers. Giant carnivorous plants grew in the corners, all spikes and spines, and their branches darted out every few seconds to snatch insects from the air.

  “Keep your distance from those,” Zara advised.

  There were also ornate fountains and small waterfalls where the water flowed up instead of down, and in circles, spirals and corkscrews through mid-air, glistening white and gold in the sunlight. Dozens of small birds and butterflies filled the air with soft songs and calls and the rustling beat of their wings. None ever seemed to fly higher than the wall. The scent of pomegranates drifted from a grove of trees where the fruit grew all the way up and down the trunks.

  Zal was particularly fascinated by the students. Zara wasn’t one to show off her magic, but what he saw here impressed him a great deal. There were students sitting in a circle three feet off the ground as they enjoyed their breaktime outside. One of the larger fountains had a wide pond, and seven students were walking – even running – on the water as they played a ball game. Another rather plump boy was standing calm and poised as he made giant, jagged crystals sprout from the ground in fantastic colours. A moment later he was running about in terror as they began sprouting from his hands.

  “That’s Hani,” said Zara. “He’s talented but a bit hasty. He’ll be fine in a while. He’s in my house and he’s also competing in the race.”

  A teacher reached Hani and began removing the crystals from the sobbing boy.

  “Your house?” said Zal.

  “School house,” Zara said. “There are eight. One for each colour, and Rainbow House for multi-colours like me.”

  Most of Azamed’s magicians were born at the instant when the Celestial Stork beat her wings, sweeping her magic into the world. However, it helped if one or both of your parents was a magician, as Zara’s mother had been. Most magicians were born with only one colour of magic within them. Those who contained more than one colour were rare, so their services were very much in demand. Some contained more colours than others, and the very rarest held seven colours like Zara. She only knew of eight others like her in Azamed but suspected Haragan might be a ninth. They were almost never out of work and Arna Aura was confident he could spend a very comfortable retirement on Zara’s eventual earnings.

  “Right,” said Zal. “So where are we going?”

  “To see Qwinton. My favourite teacher.”

  The Guild building was a disappointment to Zal. After the wonders that had filled the gardens, it seemed far too plain, ordinary and practical. He expected to see a miracle round every corner but instead was lucky if he saw a mop. Zara led him and Rip up to the fourth floor, which a sign identified as the teachers’ rooms. The door bearing the name “Qwinton” was the third they came to.

  “Before we meet him,” said Zara, “you should know that he once had an accident with a Cassiak spell.”

  “A what?” said Zal.

  “He’s a bit bonkers,” she said, and knocked.

  There was a high-pitched scream from the other side of the door.

  “Just a minute! Just a minute! Everything’s fine! Fine! Perfectly fine!”

  “It’s Zara, Master Qwinton,” Zara said. “Could we come in, please?”

  “Zara? Wait a minute… We? We! There’s more than one of you?”

  “No,” Zara said. “There’s just one of me, and my friend. Can we come in, please? I need your counsel.”

  “My counsel? You need my counsel? Well, that changes everything!” The door flew open, revealing Qwinton. He was a short man with a ruffled beard and rumpled clothes, and his thick glasses had become askew on his nose from all his bustling about. “Come in, come in, my dear. And who are your friends here?”

  “This is Zal Thesa …”

  “A pleasure! A pleasure, my dear boy.”

  “Hello.” They shook hands.

  “… and his dog, Rip.”

  “His dog? AAAAAAAAARGH!” Qwinton jumped back into the very untidy room and fell backwards over a chair, landing with a crash. Then he looked again at the puzzled Rip. “Oh, wait! It’s a dog. That’s all. Just a dog. Please, come in. Come in.”

  “Thank you,” said Zara with a big, reassuring smile. She pulled Zal into the room and kicked the door shut behind them.

  “Sit down,” said Qwinton. “Take a seat. Take the chairs, the bed, tables, floor, walls, ceiling. It makes no difference where.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Zal. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Zara sat beside him and Rip leapt up onto his lap.

  “Ah! A jumping dog,” Qwinton nodded, his beard trembling. “That’s good. Very good. A sign of health and activity.”

  “I make sure he takes plenty of exercise, sir,” said Zal. He had always been taught to be polite to magicians. He felt this to be of double importance in the Guild school, where it was rumoured that if you talked in lessons you could be punished by being turned into a beetle for your entire lunch break.

  “Splendid! Splendid!” said Qwinton.

  “Thank you for seeing us, sir,” said Zara. She was about to say more, but Qwinton launched off again.

  “Ah, yes! So many of my colleagues would have turned you away like an un
dercooked fish in a restaurant. But then, they’re not as addled as I am. And I should know, I cast the spell that did it. None of the others has come close.”

  “Really?” said Zal, causing Zara to scowl at him.

  “Yes! I cast the spell that addled me. Well, hitting my head on that low branch while flying my carpet backwards might have done something. It might even have made me get the spell wrong. But it was the spell. All my own work!”

  “Yes, Master,” said Zara. “But I was hoping you could tell us something about rainbow carpets.”

  “Rainbow carpets? Rainbow carpets… Aha! This is because the race is drawing near, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m afraid so,” said Zara.

  “No need to apologize, my dear,” said Qwinton. He bounced to his feet, rubbing his hands together. “I can do a lot better than tell you about it. I can, and I’m going to, show you my greatest, most secret, most precious treasure, which I keep so safe and so secret that it is almost sanctified!”

  He stopped and looked around.

  “Now then, where did I put it?”

  Qwinton began rummaging in his wardrobe, throwing clothes and books over his shoulder. Six white doves fluttered out and perched around the room, venting soft coos.

  Zara leant close to Zal and whispered, “He’s shown it to me twice before. He has a very short memory.”

  “Found it!” Qwinton cried. He turned round, holding a small wooden chest with a large bronze lock. “Now, where did I put the key?”

  “It seems to be in the lock,” said Zal, pointing at the chest.

  “Oh, of course!” said Qwinton. “I put it in the last place a thief would think of looking for it. But you two are not thieves, so go ahead.”

  Zara took the chest and placed it on the table. She turned the key and opened the lid. Zal leant over her shoulder, and Rip placed his front paws on the table top for a better view. Zara lifted a small roll of material out of the box and unrolled it across the table surface.

  Zal gasped as it unfurled.

  It had been torn from the end of a carpet. A rainbow carpet. All seven colours of the rainbow were present in it, stretching from its tasselled edge to its ragged one. It was only a fragment of a whole carpet, but it shimmered with the unmistakable gleam of magic. It had been enchanted, the magic had been retained and Zal’s weaving knowledge told him without a single doubt that the carpet had flown.

 

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