Fighting with fire

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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 was 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.