Christopher was not altogether sure he was looking forward to that. But he could hardly wait to see Tacroy again. Tacroy was the only person he knew who did not treat him as a useful Thing. He scrambled out of bed almost as soon as he was in it and shot through the slit in the spells, hoping Tacroy would realize and be early.

Tacroy was there, leaning against the crag at the end of the valley with his arms folded, looking as if he was resigned to a long wait. "Hallo!" he said, and sounded quite surprised to see Christopher at all.

Christopher realized that it was not going to be as easy as he had thought to pour out his troubles to Tacroy, but he beamed at Tacroy as he started scrambling into his clothes. "It's good to see you again,"

he said. "There's no end of things to tell you. Where are we going tonight?"

Tacroy said in a careful sort of way, "The horseless carriage is waiting in Eight. Are you sure you want to go?"

"Of course," Christopher said, doing up his belt.

"You can tell me your news just as well here," Tacroy said.

This was off-putting. Christopher looked up and saw that Tacroy was unusually serious. His eyes were crinkled up unsmilingly. This made it too awkward to start telling Tacroy anything. "What's the matter?"

he asked.

Tacroy shrugged. "Well," he said, "for a start, the last time I saw you, your head was bashed in-"

Christopher had forgotten that. "Oh, I never thanked you for getting me back here!" he said.

"Think nothing of it," said Tacroy. "Though I must say it was the hardest thing I've ever done in any line ofwork, keeping myself firm enough to bring the carriage through the interworld and heave you off here. I kept wondering why I was doing it too. You looked pretty thoroughly dead to me."

"I've got nine lives," Christopher explained.

"You've obviously got more than one," Tacroy agreed, grinning as if he did not really believe it. "Look, didn't that accident make you think? Your uncle's done hundreds of these experiments by now. We've fetched him a ma.s.s of results. It's all right for me-I get paid. But there's nothing in it for you that I can see, except the danger of getting hurt again."

Tacroy truly meant this, Christopher could see. "I don't mind," he protested. "Honestly. And Uncle Ralph did give me two sovereigns."

At this Tacroy threw back his curly head and laughed. "Two sovereigns! Some of the things we got him were worth hundreds of pounds-like that Asheth Temple cat, for instance."

"I know," Christopher said, "but I want to keep on with the experiments. The way things are now, it's the only pleasure I have in life." There he thought. Now Tacroy will have to ask about my troubles.

But Tacroy only sighed. "Let's get going then."

It was not possible to talk to Tacroy in The Place Between. While Christopher climbed and slithered and panted, Tacroy was a floating nebulous ghost nearby, drifting in the wind, with rain beating through him.

He did not firm up until the opening of the valley where Christopher had long ago written a large 8 in the mud of the path. The 8 was still there, as if it had been written yesterday. Beyond it the carriage floated.

It had been improved again and was now painted a smart duck-egg blue.

"All set, I see," Tacroy said. They climbed down and picked up the guide ropes of the carriage. It immediately started to follow them smoothly down the valley. "How's the cricket?" Tacroy asked in a social sort of way.

Now was Christopher's chance to tell him things. "I haven't played," he said gloomily, "since Papa took me away from school. Up till yesterday, I didn't think they'd even heard of cricket at the Castle-you know I'm living at the Castle now?"

"No," said Tacroy. "Your uncle never has told me much about you. Which castle is this?"

"Chrestomanci Castle," said Christopher. "But yesterday my tutor said there was a match against the village this Sat.u.r.day. n.o.body dreams of asking me to play of course, but I get to work the score-board for it."

"Do you indeed?" said Tacroy. His eyes screwed into wrinkles.

"They don't know I'm here of course," Christopher said.

"I should just think they don't!" Tacroy said, and the way he said it seemed to stop the conversation dead. They walked on in front of the carriage without speaking, until they came to the long hillside with the farmhouse squatting in a dip halfway up it. The place looked bleaker and more lonely than ever, under a heavy gray sky that made the rolls of moor and hill seem yellowish. Before they reached the farm, Tacroy stopped and kicked the carriage out of the way when it nudged the back of his legs, trying to go on. His face was as bleak and yellowish and wrinkled as the moors. "Listen, Christopher," he said, "those folk at Chrestomanci Castle are not going to be pleased to find you've been here doing this."

Christopher laughed. "They aren't! But they're not going to find out!' "Don't be too sure about that," Tacroy said. "They're experts in every kind of magic there."

"That's what makes it such a good revenge on them," Christopher explained. "Here I am slipping out from under their stupid stuffy boring noses, when they think they've got me. I'm just a Thing to them. They're using me."

The people at the farmhouse had seen them coming. A little group of women ran out into the yard and stood beside a heap of bundles. One waved. Christopher waved back and, since Tacroy did not seem to be as interested in his feelings as he had hoped, he set off up the hill. That started the carriage moving again.

Tacroy hurried to catch up. "Doesn't it occur to you," he said, "that your uncle may be using you too?"

"Not like the Castle people are," said Christopher. "I do these experiments of my own free will."

At this, Tacroy looked up at the low cloudy sky. "Don't say I didn't try!" he said to it.

The women breathed garlic over Christopher when they greeted him in the farmyard, just as they always did. As usual, that smell mixed with the smell from the bundles as he loaded them. The bundles always had this smell in Eight-a sharp, heady, coppery smell. Now, after the practical lessons he had had from Flavian, Christopher paused and sniffed it. He knew what the smell was. Dragons' blood! It surprised him, because this was the most dangerous and powerful ingredient of magic. He put the next bundle on the carriage much more carefully and as he gingerly picked up the next one, knowing some of the things it could do, he looked across at Tacroy to see if Tacroy knew what the bundles were. But Tacroy was leaning against the wall of the yard staring sadly up the hill. Tacroy said he never had much sense of smell when he was out of his body anyway.

As Christopher looked, Tacroy's eyes went wide and he jumped away from the wall. "I say!" he said.

One of the women yelled and pointed away up the hill. Christopher turned to see what was the matter, and stared, and went on staring in amazement, standing where he was with the bundle in his hands. A very large creature was on its way down towards the farm. It was a kind of purplish black. The moment Christopher first saw it, it was folding its great leathery wings and putting its clawed feet down to land, gliding down the hill so fast that he did not see at once how very large it was. While he was still thinking it was a house-sized animal halfway up the hill, it had landed just behind the farm, and he realized he could still see most of it towering up above the farmhouse.

"It's a dragon!" Tacroy shrieked. "Christopher, get down! Look away!"

Around Christopher, the women were running for the barns. One came running back, carrying a big heavy gun in both arms, which she tried frantically to wrestle up onto a tripod. She got it up and it fell down.

While she picked the gun up again, the dragon put its gigantic jagged black head down on the farm roof between the chimneys, crushing it in quite casually, and gazed at the farmyard with huge shining green eyes.

"It's huge!" Christopher said. He had never seen anything like it.

"Down!" Tacroy screamed at him.

The dragon's eyes met Christopher's, almost soulfully. Among the ruins and rafters of the farm roof, it opened its huge mouth. It was rather as if a door had opened into the heart of a sun. A white-orange prominence spouted from the sun, one strong accurate shaft of it, straight at Christopher. WHOOF. Hewas in a furnace. He heard his skin fry. During an instant of utter agony, he had time to think, Oh bother!

Another hundred lines!

Tacroy's panting was the first thing Christopher heard, sometime after that. He found Tacroy struggling to heave him off the charred bed of the horseless carriage onto the path. The carriage and Tacroy were wobbling about just beside Christopher's pajamas.

"It's all right," Christopher said, sitting up wincingly. His skin smarted all over. His clothes seemed to have been burned off him. The parts of him he could see were a raw pink and smirched with charcoal from the half-burned carriage. "Thanks," he gasped, because he could see that Tacroy had rescued him again.

"You're welcome," Tacroy panted. He was fading to a gray shadow of himself. But he put forth a great effort. His eyes closed and his mouth spread into a grin with it, all transparent, with the gra.s.s of the valley shining through his face. Then, for a second, he became clear and solid. He bent over Christopher. "This is it!" he said. "You're not going on these jaunts ever again. You drop it, see? You stop. You come out here again and I won't be here." By this time he was fading to gray, and then to milkiness beyond the gray. "I'll square your uncle," his voice whispered. Christopher had to guess that the last word was "uncle." Tacroy had faded out by then.

Christopher flopped off the carriage and that disappeared too, leaving nothing but the empty, peaceful valley and a strong scent of burning.

"But I don't want to drop it!" Christopher said. His voice sounded so dry and cracked that he could hardly hear it above the brawling of the stream in the valley. A couple of tears made smarting tracks down his face while he collected his pajamas and crawled back through the split in the spells.

14.

Again there was nothing wrong with Christopher when he woke up. He listened to Flavian that morning with a polite, vague look on his face while he marveled about that dragon. His marveling kept being interrupted by gusts of misery-he would never see Tacroy again!-and he had to work quite hard to keep thinking of the dragon instead. It was awesome. It was almost worth losing a life to have seen a sight like that. He wondered how long it would be before someone in the Castle noticed he had lost another life. And a small anxious part of him kept saying, But have I lost it-yet?

"I've ordered us a packed lunch," Flavian said cheerfully, "and the housekeeper's dug out an oilskin that should fit you. We'll be off on our hike just as soon as you've finished that French."

It was raining quite heavily. Christopher took his time over the French, hoping that Flavian would decide that it was too wet for walking. But when Christopher could not think of any further ways to spin out the history of the pen of his aunt, Flavian said, "A little soaking never did anyone any harm," and they set out into a strong drizzle a little after midday.

Flavian was very cheerful. Tramping in the wet, with thick socks and a knapsack, was obviously his idea of heaven. Christopher licked up the water that kept running off his nose from his hair and thought that at least he was out of the Castle. But if he had to be out in wind and wet, he would have preferred to be in The Place Between. That brought him back to Tacroy, and he had to struggle with gusts of misery again.

He tried to think of the dragon, but it was too wet. While they tramped across several miles of heath, all Christopher could think of was how much he was going to miss Tacroy, and how the soaking gorse bushes looked just as desolate as he felt. He hoped they would stop for lunch soon so that he could think about something else. They came to the edge of the heath. Flavian pointed in a breezy, open-air way to a hill that was gray with distance. "That's where we'll stop for lunch. In those woods on that hill there."

"It's miles away!" Christopher said, appalled.

"Only about five miles. We'll just drop down into the valley between and then climb up again," Flavian said, striding cheerfully down the hill.

Long before they reached that hill, Christopher had stopped thinking of Tacroy and could only think how cold and wet and tired and hungry he was. It seemed to him to be nearer teatime than lunchtime when he finally struggled after Flavian into a clearing in that far-distant wood.

"Now," said Flavian, tossing off the knapsack and rubbing his hands together. "We'll have some really practical magic. You're going to collect sticks and make a good pile of them. Then you can try your hand at conjuring fire. When you've got a good fire going, we can fry sausages on sticks and have lunch."

Christopher looked up at the boughs overhead, hung with huge transparent blobs of rain. He looked around at the soaking gra.s.s. He looked at Flavian to see if he was really meaning to be fiendish. No.

Flavian just thought this way was fun. "The sticks will be wet," Christopher said. "The whole wood's dripping."

"Makes it more of a challenge," Flavian said.

Christopher saw there was no point in telling Flavian he was weak with hunger. He grimly collected sticks. He piled them in a soggy heap, which collapsed, so he built the heap again, and then knelt with cold rain soaking into his knees and trickling under his collar, to conjure fire. Ridiculous. He conjured a thin yellow spire of smoke. It lasted about a second. The sticks were not even warm from it.

"Plenty of will as you raise your hands," Flavian said.

"I know" Christopher said and willed savagely. Fire! Fire! FIRE!!

The pile of sticks went up with a roar in a sheet of flame ten feet high. Christopher once more heard his skin fry, and his wet oilskin crackled and burst into flame too. He was part of a bonfire almost instantly.

This is the life the dragon burned! he thought amid the agony.

When his fifth life took over, which seemed to be about ten minutes later, he heard Flavian saying hysterically, "Yes, I know, but it ought to have been perfectly safe! The wood is sopping wet. That's why I told him to try."

"Dr. Pawson rather suggested that very little is safe once Christopher gets going," a dry voice observed from further away.

Christopher rolled over. He was covered with Flavian's oilskin and, under it, his skin felt very new and soft. The ground in front of him was burned black, wet and smelly with rain. Overhead, the wet leaves on the trees were brown and curled. Gabriel de Witt was sitting on a folding stool some yards away, under a large black umbrella, looking annoyed and very much out of place. As Christopher saw him, the smoking gra.s.s beside the stool burst into little orange flames. Gabriel frowned at the flames. They shrank down into smoke again.

"Ah, you appear to have taken up the threads of life again," he said. "Kindly douse this forest fire of yours. It is uncommonly persistent and I do not wish to leave the countryside burning."

"Can I have something to eat first?" said Christopher. "I'm starving." "Give him a sandwich," Gabriel said to Flavian. "I recall that when I lost my life, the new life required a great deal of energy as it took over." He waited until Flavian had pa.s.sed Christopher a packet of egg sandwiches. While Christopher was wolfing them down, he said, "Flavian says he takes full responsibility for this latest stupidity. You may thank him that I am lenient with you. I will simply point out that you have caused me to be called away at the moment when we were about to lay hands on a member of the Wraith gang I told you of. If he slips through our fingers, it will be your fault, Christopher. Now please get up and extinguish the fire."

Christopher stood up in some relief. He had been afraid that Gabriel was going to forbid him to work the Scoreboard for the cricket match tomorrow. "Dousing a fire is like conjuring in reverse," Flavian told him.

So Christopher did that. It was easy, except that his relief about the cricket caused little spurts of flame to keep breaking out all around the clearing.

When even the smoke was gone, Gabriel said, "Now I warn you, Christopher-if you have one more accident, fatal or not, I shall take very severe steps indeed." Having said this, Gabriel stood up and folded his stool with a snap. With the stool tucked under his arm, he reached into the umbrella and started to take it down. As the umbrella folded, Christopher found himself, with Flavian beside him, in the middle of the pentacle in the Castle hall. Miss Rosalie was standing on the stairs.

"He got away, Gabriel," she said. "But at least we know how they're doing it now."

Gabriel turned and looked at Christopher, witheringly. "Take him to his room, Flavian," he said, "and then come back for a conference." He called out to Miss Rosalie, "Tell Frederick to prepare for a trance at once. I want the World Edge patrolled constantly from now on."

Christopher pattered off beside Flavian, shivering under the oilskin. Even his shoes had been burned.

"You were a crisp!" Flavian told him. "I was terrified!" Christopher believed him. That dragon had crisped him thoroughly. He was absolutely sure now that if he lost a life in an Anywhere, it somehow did not count, and he had to lose that life properly in his own world, in a way that was as like the death in the Anywhere as possible. Moral, he thought: Be careful in the Anywheres in future. And while he was putting on more clothes he skipped about with relief that Gabriel had not forbidden him to go to the cricket match. But he was afraid the rain would stop the game anyway. It was still pouring.

The rain stopped in the night, though the weather was still gray and chilly. Christopher went down to the village green with the Castle team, which was a motley mixture of Castle sorcerers, a footman, a gardener, a stable lad, Dr. Simonson, Flavian, a young wizard who had come down from Oxford specially, and, to Christopher's great surprise, Miss Rosalie. Miss Rosalie looked pink and almost fetching in a white dress and white mittens. She tripped along in little white shoes, loudly bewailing the fact that the trap to catch the Wraith had gone wrong. "I told Gabriel all along that we'd have to patrol the World Edge," she said. "By the time they get the stuff to London there are too many places for them to hide."

Gabriel himself met them on the village green, carrying his folding stool in one hand and a telegram in the other. He was dressed for the occasion in a striped blazer that looked about a hundred years old and a wide Panama hat. "Bad news," he said. "Mordecai Roberts has dislocated his shoulder and is not coming."

"Oh no!" everyone exclaimed in the greatest dismay.

"And how typical!" Miss Rosalie added. She pounced around on Christopher. "Can you bat, dear?

Enough to come in at the end if necessary?"

Christopher tried to keep a cool look on his face, but it was impossible. "I should hope so," he said. The afternoon was pure bliss. One of the stable lads lent Christopher some rather large whites, which a sorcerer obligingly conjured down from the Castle for him, and he was sent to field on the boundary. The village batted first-and they made rather a lot of runs, because the missing Mordecai Roberts had been the Castle's best bowler. Christopher got very cold in the chilly wind, but like a dream come true, he took a catch out there to dismiss the blacksmith. All the rest of the Castle people standing around the green in warm clothes, clapped furiously.

When the Castle began their innings, Christopher sat with the rest of the team waiting his turn-or rather, hoping that he would get a turn- and was fascinated to discover that Miss Rosalie was a fine and dashing batswoman. She hit b.a.l.l.s all around the field in the way Christopher had always wanted to do.

Unfortunately, the blacksmith turned out to be a demonically cunning spin bowler. He had all the tricks that Tacroy had so often described to Christopher. He got Dr. Simonson out for one run and the Oxford wizard out for two. After that the Castle team collapsed around Miss Rosalie. But Miss Rosalie kept at it, with her hair coming down on one shoulder and her face glowing with effort. She did so well that, when Flavian went out to bat at number ten, the Castle only needed two runs to win. Christopher buckled on his borrowed pads, fairly sure he would never get a chance to bat.

"You never know," said the Castle bootboy, who was working the Scoreboard instead of Christopher.

"Look at him. He's hopeless!"

Flavian was hopeless. Christopher had never seen anyone so bad. His bat either groped about like a blind man's stick or made wild swings in the wrong place. It was obvious he was going to be out any second. Christopher picked up his borrowed bat hopefully. And Miss Rosalie was out instead. The blacksmith clean bowled her. The village people packed around the green roared, knowing they had won. Amid the roars, Christopher stood up.

"Good luck!" said all the Castle people around him. The bootboy was the only one who said it as if he thought Christopher had a chance.

Christopher waded out to the middle of the green-the borrowed pads were two sizes too large-to the sound of shouts and catcalls. "Do your best, dear," Miss Rosalie said rather hopelessly as she pa.s.sed him coming in. Christopher waded on, surprised to find that he was not in the least nervous.

As he took his guard, the village team licked its lips. They crowded in close around Christopher, crouching expectantly. Wherever he looked there were large h.o.r.n.y hands spread out and brown faces wearing jeering grins.

"Oh, I say!" Flavian said at the other end. "He's only a boy!"

"We know," said the village captain, grinning even wider.

The blacksmith, equally contemptuous, bowled Christopher a slow, loopy ball. While Christopher was watching it arc up, he had time to remember every word of Tacroy's coaching. And since the entire village team was crowded around him in a ring, he knew he only had to get the ball past that ring to score runs. He watched the ball all the way onto the bat with perfect self-possession. It turned a little, but not much. He cracked it firmly away into the covers.

"Two!" he called crisply to Flavian.