Lex Trent: Fighting With Fire

by Alex Bell

  Lex silently counted to three and then leapt off the opposite side of the branch as far out as the cord would allow, with the effect that he then swung in a descending arc towards Jeremiah. When Lex smashed into him, it was with such force that the nobleman would not have been able to remain clinging to the rope even if he’d wanted to. He had no choice but to grab at the thief’s shoulders instead.

  Gritting his teeth and trying to ignore the unbelievable weight that was Jeremiah, Lex pressed the button to release more cord and their momentum caused them to carry on swinging. This branch was a particularly long one and overhung the water below − which currently seemed to be an absurd distance away. It was like jumping off the edge of a cliff.

  As they began to fall, the cord unravelled itself at lightening speed and Lex only prayed that it was long enough, since he had never had to test it at such a great height before. If he had just been carrying himself then he might have stood a chance of keeping hold of the cord when it finally snapped taut but, with Jeremiah as well, Lex knew that the second they ran out of cord his hands would be wrenched away and they would freefall the rest of the drop.

  It must have taken them a mere five seconds to fall all the way down the tree but it seemed like much longer. They were both yelling as they fell − although Lex yelled with excitement as well as fear. He found the fall fun at the same time as he found it terrifying. Or perhaps he found it fun because it was terrifying.

  The only part of it Lex didn’t like was that the fire became more ferocious as they got lower. And, although they were clear of most of the branches, they could still feel the suffocating heat; they still got smoke in their eyes and ash in their mouths.

  Finally, the cord ran out with a snap so abrupt that Lex and Jeremiah actually flew up a couple of feet when the handle was torn from Lex’s hand before falling the rest of the way. Fortunately for both of them, the cord ran out only about a metre above the sea. They fell in with a splash.

  The water was relatively shallow there − only about waist high − and Jeremiah was back on his feet with impressive speed, splashing noisily towards Lex who was still coughing up water. When he reached him, Jeremiah grabbed Lex’s collar, hauled him to his feet and said, ‘If you don’t give me that book right now I’m going to take it from you by force!’

  ‘Good luck,’ Lex replied. ‘It’s not on me. Jesse’s got it. He’ll have won the round by now.’

  Indeed, in another moment, Lex and Jeremiah both found themselves plucked from the water and put back on the shore of the beach where they’d started. The three Gods were all there, as were Jesse, Tess and the sprite.

  ‘I won!’ Lex exclaimed, speaking directly to Lady Luck. ‘I won, didn’t I?’

  Something would have had to have gone very wrong in those last few minutes for Lex not to have won. After all, he had left Jesse standing there with the book in his hand. And, now that he looked, he saw that Lady Luck was holding it. But he still needed her to say it.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ the Goddess replied, smiling widely. ‘You won. And you carried out a magnificent rescue!’

  ‘Magnificent rescue?’ Jeremiah repeated, his face turning positively scarlet with anger. ‘That was not a magnificent rescue! It was a—’

  But he was interrupted at that moment by the explosion. It lit up the sky and seemed to shake the very ground on which they stood. The humans instinctively threw themselves to the ground, arms over their heads. When they finally dared to look up again, the library tree was gone. All that remained of it was the dark ash settling on the surface of the ocean, along with a few loose pages.

  ‘I suppose Herman put gunpowder in the centre of the tree,’ Lady Luck tutted. ‘Oh well, it’s about time. I don’t know why he didn’t just destroy those books long ago, if he didn’t want anyone to read them. More like the God of Silliness than the God of Knowledge, if you ask me. But what wonderful timing on your part, Lex!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, everyone might have been blown to bits if you hadn’t won right when you did!’

  ‘I suppose you could say that I saved everyone,’ Lex replied, looking as smug as possible.

  ‘Well, everyone except poor Lorella,’ Lady Luck said, looking at Thaddeus with rather a self-satisfied expression on her face. ‘In your own round, too. Why, it’s almost embarrassing!’

  ‘I still have the companion,’ Thaddeus muttered, looking extremely hacked off.

  Lady Luck laughed. ‘A sprite! Oh dear. I really don’t think a sprite is going to be much good for the final round I have in mind.’

  ‘Why don’t you just worry about your own player?’ Thaddeus snapped. ‘And let me worry about mine!’

  ‘As you wish.’

  And with that, Thaddeus disappeared, taking the unhappy-looking sprite with him.

  ‘Look,’ Jeremiah said to Kala. ‘I really don’t see why Trent should be awarded hero points. I was only hanging from that branch because of him! It was his fault I was there in the first place! Besides, I didn’t ask him to save me!’

  ‘But he did,’ Kala said coldly. ‘So he gets hero points. That’s the way this works. You should never have allowed yourself to be put in that position in the first place. He only threw a toy snake at you, after all.’

  Jeremiah went pink with embarrassment. ‘I thought it was real for a moment,’ he muttered. ‘Snakes make me . . . uncomfortable.’

  ‘Wasn’t that an unfortunate coincidence for us?’ Kala snapped.

  Jeremiah clenched his jaw and said nothing. Lex felt smug. Receiving a dressing-down from your Goddess right in front of everybody couldn’t be a very pleasant experience. On the rare occasions when Lady Luck was unhappy with Lex, at least she expressed her displeasure in private.

  Tess had been sitting on the sand behind Jeremiah looking bored, but at that point she looked up and caught Jesse’s eye. He waved. She gave him a shy smile and waved back. And then she and Jeremiah were both gone, taken away by their sulky Goddess.

  ‘Well,’ Lady Luck said. ‘That’s that. A most satisfactory conclusion to the second round.’

  ‘I’m ahead of Jeremiah in points now, right?’ Lex asked.

  ‘Yes, dear. He has winning points from the first round but you have winning points and hero points. An inspired idea, on your part. Now you’ll get to start first in the third round.’

  ‘How about giving me a clue as to what it’s about?’ Lex prompted.

  He’d tried to get a hint as to what Lady Luck’s round would entail before but he’d been unsuccessful every time and he was again now. She just smiled and said, ‘You’ll see. One thing I can tell you, Lex, and that’s that it will be glorious!’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I WISH MY HANDS WERE ORANGES

  Lex was extremely pleased with the footage of the second round when he watched it in his Divine Eye later. As usual, it had been heavily edited in order to make the players look more impressive than they really were. It was, therefore, not clear exactly how Jeremiah had ended up clinging to a rope at the top of the tree. Obviously, Kala felt that his reaction to the toy snake was not something she wanted to share with the public.

  Lex’s ‘rescue’ on the other hand, looked spectacular, what with the tree ablaze all around them and time running out. There was even a rousing soundtrack accompanying the part where Lex and Jeremiah plummeted together through the burning tree. Lex was especially pleased with how much soot and ash there’d been on his face and clothes, for it made the whole thing more heroic-seeming, somehow. In addition, from the way the scenes had been put together, it looked like the tree exploded just seconds after Lex and Jeremiah landed in the water. By the time Lex had finished watching it, even he was feeling impressed with himself. In the last Game, some enterprising company had brought out a limited-edition Lex Trent action figure fighting a minotaur and medusa. Lex rather hoped that this time there might be a Lex Trent action figure with a burning tree and a vulture bird, or something.

  But, after the second round was over, the main thing Lex w
as interested in was the book he’d stolen from the library tree. Lady Luck had been watching him the whole time he’d been playing in the second round, so she must have known he’d taken it, but she said nothing about it. Probably because she didn’t much care. Books bored her very quickly. But Lex was thrilled. Not only did he now own one of the last two surviving forbidden books from the tree (the other being the one now in Lady Luck’s possession), but it was a book about Desareth and his wishing animals! Now, finally, Lex would get to the bottom of them.

  He set the ship off towards Dry Gulch, which was a three-day journey at top speed. Then, when Jesse went down to the hold to go to sleep with Rusty for what remained of the night, Lex sat cross-legged on the bed and got out the book. He had not told Jesse about it, nor did he intend to. After all, it was a forbidden book. As such, it was utterly priceless and − perhaps as a result of being so thoroughly dishonest himself − Lex did not trust anyone where utterly priceless things were concerned. But, once the cowboy had gone below and Lex had securely locked his door and closed all the curtains, he opened the front cover of the book and started to read.

  It was quite a slim volume and had actually been handwritten by Erasmus Grey himself. In fact, it was not really a book at all, but more of a journal. Lex doubted that Grey had ever intended anyone else to read it. It seemed that Grey had had something of a preoccupation with Desareth, who had already died about one hundred years before Grey was born. Desareth, Grey wrote, was brilliant. But he was also mad. Mad as a cracker. If he’d been sane, he could have set his hand to anything and succeeded. He could have ruled the world. Worlds, even. As it was, his brilliance was so great that it managed to shine through his madness . . .

  Lex skipped the almost adoring account of Desareth and his life and jumped forward to the bit about the Wishing Creatures. It seemed that they were one of the projects on which Desareth had worked the hardest for the longest time. Once Lex had read about what they were, how they worked and what they did, it all clicked into place. Suddenly it all made sense.

  The Wishing Creatures granted spoken wishes. This had been one of Lex’s very first theories but he had dismissed it when he had picked up one of the Swanns and wished for money, and it hadn’t worked. Now he knew why. The Wishing Creatures did grant wishes. But they each only granted one particular wish. You had to know what to wish for or it wouldn’t work.

  Grey wrote that each animal belonged to a set of three and that there were twelve known sets in existence: dolphins, dragons, elephants, griffins, mermaids, monkeys, phoenixes, swanns, tigers, unicorns, witches and wolves.

  At the back was an index of all thirty-six animals along with their wishes. Some of the wishes were listed as ‘confirmed’, some as ‘rumoured’ and some as ‘unknown’. After all, unless you were Desareth himself then presumably the only way to find out what a particular creature’s wish was would be to guess it.

  Lex ran his eye down the list and saw that some of the wishes were extraordinary and magnificent. The green Elephant, for example, granted the wish that every apple the owner touched would turn into gold. The blue Mermaid’s wish caused the first person the owner saw after making their wish to fall desperately and permanently in love with them. And the golden Phoenix’s wish could cure any illness.

  Others, however, were rather less impressive. Indeed, a couple of them didn’t seem to make any sense at all. That, Grey wrote, was where Desareth’s madness started to show itself. Why go to all the trouble and expense and effort of making these Wishing Creatures, only to give them an utterly pointless wish? The red Monkey’s wish, for example, could produce an unlimited number of hard-boiled eggs. And the orange Griffin’s wish turned sand into mud.

  Even worse than the pointless wishes, however, were the dangerous ones − the worst one being the black Wolf, which granted the owner their wish that they’d never been born. Lex shuddered to think how that wish had been discovered.

  Naturally, Lex hoped that the Creatures he already owned would have wonderful, fantastic powers. He ran his eye down the index at the back in desperate search of the Swanns. The first one he found was the white one. According to Erasmus Grey, the white Swann’s wish would silence any musical instrument. Desareth, apparently, had hated music of any kind, so perhaps to him this had seemed logical. To Lex it was utterly useless and he was profoundly disappointed. Other creatures turned apples into gold and all his rubbishy Swann did was silence music. He tried not to feel too despondent. After all, it might be a good party trick at some point.

  He looked down the list at the next entry, which was the red Swann. But this one was no better. The red Swann’s wish, it seemed, was to cause people to swap places. But it transpired that there were several conditions. Firstly, the wisher could not themselves be one of the people to swap; secondly, the names of both men had to be known to the wisher in order for it to work; thirdly, both men had to be in close proximity to one another; and fourthly, and most ridiculously of all, one of the men had to be dead.

  ‘This is frickin’ ridiculous!’ Lex muttered under his breath. ‘I might just as well have the one that turns sand into mud!’

  Why the heck would anyone want to swap two men who were physically near to each other, anyway, when one of those men was a corpse?

  But the next creature was the worst one of them all. The list had not been done in any kind of order and the next one Lex’s eye fell upon was the blue Dragon. It seemed that its wish was to turn the wisher’s hands into oranges.

  Lex had to read the entry twice to make sure he’d read it correctly. Grey had marked this wish as ‘confirmed’, meaning that someone, somewhere, at some point had actually made this wish and it had come true.

  Lex took the Dragon out of his pocket and glared at it ferociously. What sort of a person said I wish my hands were oranges, anyway? Lex would have thrown the Dragon out the window and into the sea if it hadn’t been for the fact that Jeremiah might give him something to get it back for Tess, and he could hold the Dragon over the nobleman’s arrogant head until then. Perhaps he might even be able to get him to speak the wish once the Dragon was back in his possession. It would serve the stuck-up git right to have to go through the rest of his life with oranges for hands.

  Lex tossed the Dragon aside on the bedspread and searched the list for the remaining Wishing Creature he owned − the black Swann.

  ‘I suppose it probably just turns pumpkin pies into poo,’ he said sourly − and rather sulkily − as he ran his eye down the list.

  But when he finally located the black Swann, it did not have a useless wish, or even a dangerous wish. In fact, it had no wish at all in the book, for Grey had marked it as ‘unknown’. The bright side was that the Swann might still have a half-useful wish, but the problem was finding out what it was. It could be just about anything. Lex spent more than an hour that night trying out different wishes in the hope of stumbling across it but, really, it was quite hopeless. He was so pissed off by the end of it that it was on the tip of his tongue to say he wished he’d never found the Swanns, but he forced himself not to, just in case it were to come true. Indeed, whilst the black Swann was in his possession, he was going to have to try and remember to be extremely careful what he wished for.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SLOW SID

  On questioning Lady Luck, Lex learnt that the library tree had housed only originals. Some of the books had been copied but Herman had ordered these all burned when he first banned the books. However, just because the God had ordered it so, didn’t necessarily mean that it had actually happened.

  ‘So, theoretically, there could be copies of a forbidden book out there?’ Lex said.

  ‘Yes, dear, I suppose so. They’d risk a lot of trouble if they were found out, though.’

  Well, if there was anything worth risking trouble for, Desareth’s Wishing Creatures was surely one of them. Lex nurtured a faint hope that he was the only one who knew about them, but he strongly suspected there must be others out there who
knew of the Creatures and were looking for them, too.

  He would just have to put them out of his mind for now. He needed to have all his attention focused on infiltrating Dry Gulch House as a cowboy and then finding the Sword of Life. And then he was going to win the third round, and the Game. After he’d done all that, then he would turn his attention back to the Wishing Creatures of Desareth. He would track them down somehow and he would have them for himself. If they belonged to someone else then he would pinch them; if they were lost then he would find them; and if they were long buried then he would dig them up. Between the information in Erasmus Grey’s book and Lex’s own natural talent for getting what he wanted, he would have those Creatures − as many of them as he possibly could.

  The enchanted ship took three days to reach Dry Gulch. They soon left the sea behind them and, as they journeyed on, the landscape became less green and more brown and scrubby. Lex knew they were getting close when cactuses and tumbleweed started to appear an awful lot.

  He used the first day to fine-tune the skills Jesse had taught him back at the Majestic: card-shuffling, poker-playing, pistol-twirling, knife-spinning, coffee-drinking, bean-eating and so on. Of all these things, it was bean-eating that Lex disliked the most. Not because he had anything against beans per se, it was simply that Jesse insisted he eat them without a spoon.