The Long Road Home

The little girl in the green pyjamas watched the snow fall out of the upstairs window. She had, to her own certain knowledge, never seen snow before because she had lived almost her entire life in a jungle, living in a tree hollow under the shadow of the Great Skull Rock. The little girl, whose name as we should realise by now was Rachel Rummage, had lived a peaceful life, never wanting for anything, never cold, never hungry but a prisoner all the same, sleeping nights in terror of the giant bat that lived in the hollowed out cave at the summit of the Great Skull Rock.

Rebecca's father, James, assured her that in Levercastle snow fell every Christmas, after which he had kindly explained Christmas to her. Rachel imagined that being cold was always unpleasant, that long nights would make her feel sad and that having to wear wellington boots to avoid wet feet in snow would be a tiresome chore. She was surprised to find that all these things were bearable if you could live in a warm, cosy house called Rainbow Reach with your mother and your father. She had also imagined that living in the world of men, far away from Faerie, would mean she missed all the friends she had made after she had left the Skull Garden.

Happily she did not have to get used to a life where she never saw the brave Sir Cobb, the powerful Phoebe September or the mighty Princess Anabyl Spireshine. Levercastle was a town unlike many others where the little holes in reality that allow the world of men and the world of folk to interact are many. The residents of Levercastle are generally happy with the arrangement because many of them have stories like Rachel's and know that there is more to the world than might, at first, meet the eye.

"Hey you, time for bed means time to get into bed, not time to loll around on the window seat in your pyjamas," said dad, James, coming in to Rachel's bedroom.

"I was just looking at the snow," Rachel said. "Remember I've never seen snow before."

"So which would you rather?" James asked. "Look at snow or hear a bedtime story."

"How about hear a story while watching the snow?" Rachel asked.

James sighed and sat down next to his daughter on the window seat. He watched the snow flakes with her for a minute. Then he asked:

"What story do you want to hear?"

"Tell me a story about when we came here, when Lester opened his brother's grave," Rachel said.

"That only happened in September, honey," James said. "Don't you want a story about Avan Weatherstrong, or one of the stories about Anabyl when she escaped the Terra Draconis after the Vanishing, I just got a parcel from the Archive chronicling Sir Cobb's journey through the Upside Out."

"No, I want to enjoy remembering what happened three months ago," Rachel said. "I just want to hear it like it's a story, but to know I was there."

"Okay," James said. "I guess that would be fun, in a weird kind of a way."

And so James recounted the events of three months previously, as if it was a story, but both of them knew that all of this had really happened:

So the story goes there was once a man who lost his brother and could not find him no matter where he looked. In the end, out of desperation, the man tracked down the Master of Mischief to ask for help with his quest.

"Are you quite sure you want to find your brother?" the Master of Mischief asked. "You may not like what you find."

"All I want in this world is to see my brother's face once more," the man said. "Please help me, or if you will not then send me on my way, for I know that you are prone to play games. I know that not all of your games are kind."

"Do you understand the threads I would have to pull? The patterns I would have to break? The mischief I would have to do to give you your heart's desire?" the Master of Mischief asked.

"If I knew what needed to be done to find my brother," the man replied. "Then I would not bother you. Please, will you help me?"

The Master of Mischief smiled his smile, the only part of the Master of Mischief that remains the same no matter which particular face he has chosen to wear that day. The Master of Mischief knows more than he ought to, for which reason the Master of Mischief lies to people, but always for the betterment of all worlds, or so he tells us.

"I am in a good mood today," the Master of Mischief said. "So I will help you. Go to death's garden and dig with a spade. You will find your brother under the earth."

And that is where the story ends. Well, most versions of the story, for stories are lies, and stories are mischief of the purest kind in all places but one. The one place where all stories are reflections, or chronicles, or accounts is the Faerie Archive at Sommerslip. The story is told there almost as rendered above, but there is one major difference. After the Master of Mischief says 'So I will help you' the sentence ends. Underneath is printed, in neat block capitals:

CONTINUED IN 'THE TALES FROM BRIDGETOWN - BOOK ONE'

Of course Lester Topping didn't know any of that. As far as Lester Topping was concerned he had received a letter from his twin brother Chester recounting that Chester had stopped off in Bridgetown to pick up some supplies and was heading on in three days to a distant shadow.

Having become quite lonely without the companionship of his brother Lester had raced to Bridgetown, got himself lost, missed the window to meet up with his brother and been asked by a curious man in a tall hat to watch a mermaid in a tank. None of that resembled the story of the man who had sought the assistance of the Master of Mischief for help with looking for his brother, for that reason no one who knew the story and travelled with Lester put the two things together, not even Lester himself.

This is how the Master of Mischief works. He lies. For the betterment of all worlds, or so he tells us.

So when Lester Topping found himself in death's garden, looking down at a small wooden box revealed within the tomb that, allegedly, marked the remains of his twin brother, his confusion was, perhaps, understandable.

He was glad that the tomb did not appear to contain Chester's remains, Lester could only imagine how upsetting that would be. Still, that did not completely rule out the possibility that within the small wooden box was an urn containing Chester's ashes. There was no note or inscription to explain the tomb's contents, Chester had proven himself an avid communicator, the content of his communications was gnomic at best.

"You should probably open it," Phoebe said, standing with the others, respectfully, at the edge of the grave site. "You have looked for this place for a long time. Whatever is in there will be your answer."

Would it? Lester wondered as he approached the box and lifted it out of its hollow by the two brass handles hanging from the sides. He knew that it should but now that he was, in theory, at the end of his journey he couldn't convince his brain that the moment was at hand.

The box was not heavy. It had, rather, a reassuring solidity that strongly implied the container's importance. The wood of the box was a nice golden brown, not too dark, not too light, like the burnished surface of a fiddle. Brass corners had been fitted to prevent the wood finish from scuffing or splintering. The handles in the side held firm, appearing as if they were part of the wooden body of the box itself. The craftsmanship of the item could not be second guessed, it was impressive in its simplicity.

There was no lock on the box, just a simple latch, a switch that moved from right to left, embossed with the symbol of the hourglass. With a smooth click the lid was open, Lester lifted the lid on well-oiled hinges to reveal the contents.

The box did not contain an urn filled with ashes. It contained a brass hand mirror, its reflecting surface turned down to rest on a cushion of red velvet. Without even thinking about it Lester picked up the mirror to look at his face.

"What is it?" someone asked, he thought it was Eos.

"I don't know, exactly," Lester said, studying his face in the mirror. "Oh, this mirror is broken."

"What do you mean?" Frederick asked. "Is it cracked? It must have cracked before someone put it in there, no shock would reach it through the earth and the rock and the box and the padding."

"No," Lester said. "It's not cracked. It's just when I talk my lips don't move. My whole face is stuck, like a photograph. I can't even... ah, no. I can wink. I can see my eye it looks like its inside something, like I'm wearing glasses or..."

"Your face," Phoebe said. "It shows you that your face is a mask."

"It does," Lester said. "I've worn a mask, all this time. I didn't even know it." He stopped for a second, he could feel his face smirk although the image in the mirror remained completely still. "That means that when I was at Lady Crimzona's party I was wearing two masks, one on top of the other. How silly."

"Well," Rachel asked. "Aren't you going to take the mask off?"

"I had better," Lester said. "It's been far more fun than I thought it would be to wear a mask for all these days, but now I think, somehow, that it is far more important that I take the mask off. So, here goes."

Lester reached up under his chin and caught the edge of his Lester mask. He felt his false face lift off the surface of his real one. It came away easily, not even fixed to his head by a length of cord. Magic had kept Lester's mask in place, in the mirror it was easy to remove for it was all part of the same spell.

Before Lester could see his real face he turned away from the hand mirror to look at the blank white object in his hands. He looked up at the faces of his friends and smiled.

"How do I look?" he said, playing a game for he already knew.

"Honestly?" James said. "Exactly the same."

Chester's grin broadened, for now Lester knew that he was Chester, his own missing twin brother. The absurdity of disguising oneself as one's own identical twin brother was delicious to both of them. Chester realised that it was he who had felt a small twinge of regret at the need to remember all the things that made up Chester Topping, eccentric, traveller and alchemist. Lester wasn't good for much, that was all part of the mask, what Chester had discovered through Lester was a constant and abiding sense of innocent wonder at the world and all it contained. Sometimes, Chester knew, he was far too clever by half.

"I don't get it," Frederick said. "I don't mind being the first to say it but I am willing to bet I'm not the only one. I don't understand what's happening."

"It's all part of the plan, dear boy," Chester said to Frederick. "All part of my plan to get the Quintessence Crystal into the hands of people better suited to its guardianship than myself and poor Professor Rummage there."

"Professor Rummage?" the gnome asked looking up at James. "And here was I just thought he was a common or garden talking mouse when first we met."

James coloured red.

"I didn't, I don't... remember," he said. "I'm a professor? What of?"

"Well, mostly, folklore," Chester said. "It's a little more complicated than that. As far as the world we come from knows, Jimbo, you are an anthropologist and expert on the mythical beasts of world cultures. Anyone inside our social circle knows that you are the foremost expert on the natural history and evolutionary biology of such creatures, that's a key part to how we ended up in this pickle."

"Dragons," Anabyl chimed in. "James found out about the Vanishing, what had happened, where the crystal was."

"Indeed, brave knight," Chester said. "Most unfortunate for he was not the only party interested in the acquisition of such knowledge. As a consulting alchemist to the Grand Order of the Covenenant of Lies I was sent to Levercastle, Professor Rummage's place of residence, to ensure his safety, and the safety of his beautiful family.

"Alas, I was too late, by the time I arrived the wicked agents of Count Bartolomeo Okulas had already turned James into a mouse, saying that they would give him twenty-four hours to see sense and that they would return on the morrow when they expected he would share his secret. I had to think fast, I came up with a plan that was the child of expedience more than prudence.

"I am, in fact, rather glad that things have played out as they have. I cannot claim any particular good judgement on my own part in that, I rather think that I provided an opportunity for several wrongs to be righted in the great tapestry. Our stopgap measure was, therefore, exploited by the Master of Mischief rather than expedited by him."

"Oh, my dear Monsieur Topping," said a new voice that everyone recognised but nobody could place. "How desperately cynical of you. Why could I not merely have found myself in a giving humour?"

The curious man in the tall hat emerged from shadows that no one could remember being there a moment before.

"Apologies," Chester said to the Master of Mischief. "I did not intend my invocation to carry such strength."

"No apologies necessary, alchemist," the Master replied. "I came of my own volition. Mostly because I like to see those who do not wish to deal with me squirm. Partly because I am tired of this business and would like to see it done."

"What is there left?" asked Chester. "I think I have explained everything."

"Well," Frederick said. "There you and I are going to have to differ. I still don't really understand what's going on. You're not Lester, you're an alchemist who looks like himself and James the mouse is really a professor of dragons and there's something to do with Count Okulas, aside from that... I don't really know what we're all doing here."

"Allow me to fill in the gaps," the Master of Mischief said as his famous grin slowly painted itself from one of his ears to the other. "Chester and James were sought after for James's forbidden knowledge by Count Okulas. The one place Chester knew that James could be hidden that Okulas would not find was the same place that the Quintessence Crystal was hidden. James, his family and Chester came here, to the Skull Garden.

"When they all began to forget things Chester understood what was happening. He forged the Lester mask using the garden's own magic to make the enchantment more powerful," the Master shot a sidelong glance in Chester's direction. "That was very cunning by the way," he said, and then returned to his story. "Knowing nothing but the story Chester had told the mask Chester sent himself away to Bridgetown, Lester arrived. Such a bizarre and powerful magic suddenly manifesting in the Patchwork Market attracted my eye. I settled to study it immediately.

"When I understood what was happening I saw the potential to undo one of the most heinous acts that has ever been committed in all the lands of Faerie. The Vanishing of the Terra Draconis was a work of sorcery and witchcraft that, although literally diabolical, was outside my direct influence. Nobody said that I wasn't able to assist those who wished to put things right.

"My only problem is that, as Master of Mischief, I am one of the most powerful figures in the whole of creation. I have to be subtle if I want to weild my powers, hard as it is to believe I am not invincible. In short, I must be perceived to be neutral.

"So, I nipped reality, I tucked it, tipping people on particular paths down little back alleys of my own devising, ensuring that the great mechanism of mischief brought things out as they have become. Frederick, Phoebe, Anabyl, Eos, you are, between you, quite capable of guarding the Quintessence Crystal from the hands of evil doers. James, Chester, Rebecca and dear little Rachel, you are to be freed from a burden too great for you to bear."

"And what about me boss?" the gnome said. "When does the little girl's wish end?"

"It's not your place to ask such questions," the Master snapped at the gnome. "You'll live as I wish and be grateful for the opportunity."

"Yes boss," the gnome said miserably.

"Don't you talk to my friend like that!" Rachel cried out, outraged.

"Darling," Rebecca said. "That's the Master of Mischief, he's very important."

"I don't care how important he thinks he is," Rachel insisted. "The gnome's given me and James our wish, and helped out with all the other stuff too. I think he deserves to be free now and nobody should be rude to him, not even a scary man in a big hat."

"Dear Rachel," the Master said, kneeling down to bring their heights closer together. "You misunderstand. This gnome is not your friend. He is with you because he is bound to you. He is just an accidental random conglomeration of mischief that calls itself a gnome. I doubt he can feel emotions. He's nothing, really, beneath your notice."

"He's my friend," Rachel said. "And he's never done anything mean or horrible. I don't know what you're talking about but it sounds mean and horrible to me. Mean and horrible people are nothing. The gnome is the gnome."

The grin disappeared from the Master's face. Most were silent, the gnome and Rebecca drew in breath sharply.

"Sometimes," the Master said sadly. "It seems even I can forget my place. Very well Cholmondeley, you shall have your own garden, but first we should see to the end of the wish."

"And how do we do that, exactly?" Rachel asked. "If you know so much then you can help us. We haven't done very well at the job ourselves."

"Why, all the answers your poor father ever needed are behind this door," the Master said pointing to a simple wooden door in the base of the Skull Rock that had certainly not been there a moment before.

The Master opened the door and it was as if they were looking out of a house onto a street. Opposite their position was a small wooden fence, painted blue, that surrounded a two storey detached house completely surrounded by well defined, but slightly overgrown flower beds.

"Rainbow's Reach awaits Professor Rummage," the Master said. "And all the stories that you hold within your head will return within its walls. Once that is done so will Cholmondeley's work."

Saying goodbye to all the friends they had made on the long road home James, Rebecca, Rachel and Chester went through the Master's door and back to James's home where their long adventure had begun so many years before, or so it seemed.

When James remembered exactly who he was, and where he had been, and the nature of those things, he understood that life in the Skull Garden unfolded at a vastly different rate to time in his own world and he had, in fact, been gone only a single night as far as his world was concerned.

Unfortunately this meant that, unless Rachel wanted to squash into a crib, which she did not, she had to sleep that night in her parent's bed. None of them minded that arrangement at all and the next day a brand new bed was bought for the little girl who had grown up in the Skull Garden not knowing anything of who she was or where she came from.

The Guardians of the Quintessence Crystal took their responsibilities very seriously indeed, and their stories are even now depicted, along with all the rest, within the deep, dark stacks of the Faerie Archive. That would probably be the best place to read them for, although the Master of Mischief will claim that he can tell you what came next everyone knows that the Master lies to people. Although, you can be assured, he only does so for the betterment of all worlds. Or so he says himself.

THE END

The Princess Liberated

Frederick hadn't acted in his capacity as pest-controller for a while now. He had heard that, in the age of dragons, a jobbing knight would start small with giant rodents and work their way up through lizard men and vampires as a way of scaling their monster killing abilities to the level of dragon.

As the giant bat expired on the blade of Frederick's sword he found himself doubting this theory. Of course, to the layman the idea of working your way up the food chain to dragon slaying appeared reasonable. Frederick did not know for certain that it was not. However, if what he had heard about dragons, and their smaller, sentient cousins the draco, was to be believed the king of all mythical beasts was in a different league to the rest.

You could hack your way through armies of trolls, gryphons and giant snakes but it probably wouldn't serve you well when it came to facing the old, wise and wily dragons of yore. It was as desperate a comparison as saying that taking out a goblin horde was any sort of preparation for taking out an Ogre Champion. The two games were fundamentally different.

It didn't really matter, as far as Frederick could tell, how many foot soldiers you carved up, when you faced the lich in command those experiences counted for nothing.

Even taking on a giant bat was a different game to besting a minotaur, for example. The two monsters had completely different temperaments, strengths, weaknesses and common strategies. The one lesson taking on a bestiary of hostile creatures taught you was that no two were alike enough to be the same fight. There was enough variety within a single species to fox those who did not exercise the proper caution.

That said, sometimes you got lucky. The transformed Lady Crimzona had proven a much weaker foe than this similarly sized giant bat. Frederick imagined that this was due in no small part to the fact that Lady Crimzona was not used to being a giant bat, this fella had got very used to his capabilities. He had even landed a couple of nasty swipes on Frederick's chest and thigh.

So, possibly, there had been some variety in the capability and threat presented by dragons of various types. Maybe some dragons went down easier than others. If there was one comforting thought a knight could take into such a confrontation it was that maybe this dragon would be having an off day.

"Are you alright?" Phoebe asked from behind Frederick as he stood, instinctively holding his left hand over the scratches on his chest and hanging his weight so that it favoured his right leg.

"I'll be okay," he panted. "He was... feisty, is all."

"If I wasn't filled with magical potency," Harvey said. "I would have to get someone to remind me never to annoy you."

"You annoy me all the time," Frederick said. After a battle etiquette choices frayed and crumbled. Frederick allowed himself to be more blunt.

"Yes," Harvey said. "Because I am filled with magical potency. You might be good at monster slaying but you can't follow a simple logical through-line, can you?"

"Not the time, Harvey," Phoebe said absently, pulling a jar of unguent from her knapsack. "Then, it never is, is it?"

Harvey shrugged and subsided as Phoebe approached Frederick and started smearing the greasy paste onto his wounded leg.

Frederick had listened to lurid bardic accounts of fighting men and the women who tended to their wounds. The poetic temperament would have you believe there was some sort of romance, or passion, about a nurse tending a wounded soldier. In some instances maybe there was. However the undoubted, undiscussed presence of unsavoury ingredients in most of these pastes presented large challenges to the development of such a heady emotional atmosphere.

The unguent was enhanced with enchantments but that didn't stop it smelling of vinegar, fat and bad milk mixed together. Neither did it abate the deep burn it put into the wounds upon its application. The burn quickly faded, the odour of the healing medium lingered, in some cases for days.

"Well, now that we have that over, we should probably find that tricky crystal," Harvey said, standing by the entrance as if he were inspecting the hold of the arrow trailing rope embedded in the rock. The head of the arrow was a clockwork device powered by an alchemical crystal that burrowed into rock to form a tight bond.

As the mouth of the cave was where the party had entered the chances that the Quintessence Crystal was lying there, unremarked upon and undiscovered, was vitually nil. Everyone could tell that Harvey was mooching about adjacent to the nearest source of fresh air to avoid the smell.

"Good idea," Phoebe commended him. "Why don't you start somewhere other than where we came in?"

A look of disgust evident on his face Harvey complied with Phoebe's request. Frederick had learned that the djinn often did things voluntarily, rather than wait to be bound by Phoebe. Frederick believed he could understand the sprite's motivation. In a way it was a cruel trick of the binding that the one bound would often prefer to do something because they were obedient, not because magic was compelling them to do it against their will.

That left a question though: Was Harvey really doing what he wanted? Was he truly acting on his own agency? Just because he chose to obey did that mean that he had somehow 'beaten' the binding, or did it just serve to enslave him at an even deeper level?

Frederick's tricky philosophical puzzles would not be answered now as Phoebe cried out. She didn't say 'aha' but it was a noise that meant 'aha' so more or less the same thing. Phoebe carried a small wooden chest out from a dark corner in the back of the bat's lair. The front was closed and bolted but not locked. Frederick reasoned that the person who had left the chest here had believed that anyone who would slay that bat to get to the chest probably deserved the contents.

That bat itself had not been a terrible problem, any mediocre knight should have found it within themselves to dispose of it effectively. The chest's real security was that it was in one of the most distant shadows, right at the limits of organised reality, cloaked in deep magic that would hide the garden's existence from seekers and interfere with the memories of those who had visited. The bat was just a further inconvenience for one who had beaten the heavy duty barriers to entry.

Phoebe opened the chest to reveal the quintessence crystal. Frederick had hoped for something more than your basic glowing crystal, in this he found a small note of disappointment. The quintessence crystal was certainly a bit larger than other magic crystals Frederick had seen but it was, otherwise pretty much identical in every other respect. It glowed a soft yellow-white that filled the cave, there was a high, clear note, resonating from the crystal at a low volume.

"Let's see if this ring that the story-gatherers gave us does the trick then," Phoebe said, donning the small piece of silver jewellery. As it sat on Phoebe's finger the crystal in the ring began to resonate in sympathy with the quintessence crystal. "Oh," Phoebe said, alarmed. "It does work! Quick, grab my hands!"

She held out her hands, Frederick took hold of the left and Harvey of the right, there was a moment of uncertainty, an odd see-sawing feeling in Frederick's gut and then they weren't in the Skull Cave any more.

They were in a long stone corridor that stretched on for as far as the eye could see in either direction. Stone arches divided the corridor into sections at regular intervals. Frederick's ever-present knight paranoia noted that there was just enough space for an attacker to hide in the small recesses in the corners of each section. Doorways, tipped with pointed arches, were visible in some of the sections.

The corridor was lit from above with a soft, flat, grey light. Frederick looked up to see that the light was cast from a roiling layer of luminous clouds above their heads. The shapes of dragons heads, and the forms of people and buildings were occasionally visible in the ever-shifting cloud bank. As soon as you saw a shape, so clear that you could make out the pattern of a dragon's scales, the windows in a tall building or the lines on a person's face, it disappeared back into the mass, invisible once more.

"Well, this is in no way sinister," Harvey said.

"So, what now?" Frederick asked. "We've got into the crystal, what do we do now?"

"I don't know," Phoebe said. "I guess we just have a look about, see if we can pick up Anabyl's trail."

They took a few steps along the corridor, their footsteps making flat clamping sounds against the stone. Frederick found the noises quite disconcerting. He had been expecting a confident ringing echo, not this barely audible slapping noise. He imagined it was something to do with magic, these things usually were.

"Wait," Harvey said after they had gone about twenty paces. "I think..." he paused, closed his eyes and lowered his head. "I think I can feel the... her. I think I can feel Anabyl."

"What do you mean?" Frederick asked. "Feel her how?"

"This," Harvey motioned at the ceiling and the floor with some airy hand waves. "All of this is our minds interpreting the crystal lattice and the energies contained within. We're not part of the qualic stream, the, uh, essence of the Terra Draconis, locked into the crystal lattice. I think the energies are represented by the clouds up there. I don't think that Anabyl is part of that either. She's locked out of the stream, so she's somewhere else in the lattice. I'm made of pure magic so I can feel the resonance of her presence, it's not even that far away."

"Okay then," Phoebe said. "Well, let's get moving."

Harvey lead the other two down a number of corridors that looked, at least to Frederick's eye, exactly the same as the first one they had arrived in. The corridors were all identical and appeared to cross back and forth at random. The corridor intersections were not at the traditional ninety degree angles from one another but often at more a forty-five degree slant, some sloped up, or down, the passages themselves appeared straight but Frederick began to believe that they were subtly curved. Each segment was straight but connected to the next at an almost imperceptible angle.

After walking through this labyrinth for about ten minutes a figure became visible in the distance, standing at an intersection.

"Come on," Phoebe said. "That must be her."

As they drew closer they realised that rather than being a properly defined person the figure was like a three dimensional opaque black shadow. It was roughly person shaped but a little blobby on the right hand side.

"This isn't her," Frederick said.

"No," Harvey responded. "It is, but it's just... I think she's out of phase with us. The crystal resonates with a particular tone, when we're inside its lattice we are riding the waves of that tone, experiencing the crystal's reality as a series of tonal moments at the same part of a repeating wavelength. Anabyl's just experiencing the same thing on a different part of the same wavelength."

"I was with you right up until you said 'resonates'," Frederick said. "Look, I don't need to know what's happening. I just need to know that we can fix it."

"I can fix it," Harvey said. "Although it may bind us more tightly to the lattice. Getting out of here might be trickier than we thought."

"We can't worry about that," said Phoebe. "You'll have to do... whatever it is you need to do, Harvey."

"Very well," Harvey said. "Could we all, possibly, link hands again?"

They all did and Harvey closed his eyes again, concentrating. Frederick began to feel very giddy, the vertigo was sudden and he was forced to drop onto one knee.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Quiet," Harvey said. "Need to focus."

Frederick's senses were beginning to see-saw, the corridor bending and shifting about him. There was a moment when he believed he could see a stone plaza in a great city beyond one of the stone arches then the image was gone and there was just the voice.

"...be long now Wish, you'll see, these shadows probably mean that..."

There was the sound of a sword being drawn.

"Who are you?" the voice demanded, its tone had switched from soothing to harsh in the time it had taken to draw the sword.

"Princess Anabyl Spireshine?" Harvey's voice asked. "I believe you know my companions. Give them a moment to recover."

"It's us, Anabyl," Phoebe said, her voice sounded shaky, Frederick's vision was still blurred and he felt very much as if he'd like to be sick. Frederick blinked a couple of times and tried to take a steady breath.

"Phoebe?" the woman with the sword asked. "And... Sir Cobb."

"Yes," Frederick managed to bite back the nausea and speak. "It's us. We've come to get you out of the crystal."

"Hear that, princess?" said a voice Frederick didn't recognise. "We're getting out of here."

Frederick's vision finally settled down enough that he could see who he was looking at now. Anabyl certainly looked a lot different than the last time they'd crossed paths. For a start she appeared to have ditched the penchant for frilly dresses for a quieter gender-neutral look in breeches and a thin wool jacket. She wore a long dark cloak bound on the left shoulder by a large metal brooch.

As Anabyl had grown her face had lengthened and become leaner, the light of chaotic mischief in her eyes had not burned out but now came with a kind of controlled danger. Her long dark hair was wrapped up in a bun on top of her head.

Standing to Anabyl's right was a young boy in more ragged clothing, the other speaker. Putting things together from the story they had read in the Archive Frederick realised that this must be Wish Forbetter.

"How long have we been in here?" Anabyl asked. "A while, I imagine, if you're the ones to come rescue me."

"We saw you off from the market after facing down Sir Vaskorn about a month ago," Frederick told her. "We understand that you found a way to visit the Terra Draconis in the meanwhile."

Harvey cleared his throat.

"As much as I hate to break up the reunion it's time I dispelled my own magic to get you all out of here," he said.

"Yes, probably a good idea," Phoebe said. "So how will that work?"

"You just all need to place your hands on me, preferably about the shoulders from my point of view and we'll soon have you all back to the cave."

"What about you?" Wish asked. "Aren't you coming with us?"

"I'm afraid not," Harvey said. "I have... other things to devote my energies to."

"What?" Phoebe's question sounded like some sort of reprimand, this wasn't unusual.

"Sorry, Feebs," Harvey said. "Guess I lied to you again. A while back, just before I found you, I was actually floating in the Undone. Didn't even know myself, to be honest, I was just stuff. I annoyed the wrong person, ended up dispersed. So the boss comes to me and offers me an out, not just out of the Undone, out of service to you, a chance to be something else, more than just Harvey Raine, the chaos sprite.

"He told me that if I took the out I would be bound to you again, the way Ma Moorshade always wanted it but the boss explained that if I sacrificed myself for a wish that I would be allowed to move on. The boss is like that, always talks in riddles. Guess it runs in the family. Anyhow, when I saw that the young lad here was called Wish I knew what was coming. If I'd told you about it earlier you might have argued or delayed and, honestly, I don't think you have time.

"If I expend every iota of magic I have I can probably get the four of you out of the Quintessence Crystal lattice, but there won't be enough of me left for me to exit. I guess I will just have to trust the boss to come get me."

"But we can't just leave you behind," Frederick said, he wasn't sure either why he said it or why he meant it but both were true.

"You can, and you have to, your journey's not over by a long chalk," Harvey said. "Come on folks, time's a-wasting."

Frederick could tell that Phoebe was itching to start a row about this. At the same time he could see the realisation on her face that Harvey intended to do this. Plus it was possibly the first selfless thing he would do in his existence. How could she argue with that?

So she didn't. Along with the others she put her hand on Harvey's shoulder. Once they were all in place Harvey looked around them all as if to say goodbye and then he began to glow. Harvey's glow, set against the flat grey-white from the ceiling of the lattice, was a warm and comforting orange-pink. It shone from his eyes and from the lines on his face. The light caught the djinn in a bright halo until Frederick thought that the sprite was no longer present in person, he looked, rather, like a painting of himself. Then the glow from his halo became too bright and Frederick's nostrils were suddenly filled with the scent of bat droppings.

Now there were four of them, stood in the skull cave staring at the Quintessence Crystal. For a moment they could not speak.

A voice from outside broke across the silence.

"If you expand that line so that it becomes the radius of a circle," said a voice that Anabyl, Phoebe and Frederick all recognised. "I mean, we could be months searching for this grave, if it's even here."

The three adventurers exchanged a glance.

"James?" came from Frederick's mouth before he had even really understood the concept fully.

And indeed it was James although no longer a mouse, and Lester, and Rachel, along with James's wife, Rachel's mother, Rebecca. But what they did when they all met once more in the Skull Garden I shall tell you next time.

Meet The Rummages

"Delighted for you," said the gnome. "Couldn't be more so. Absolutely. Delighted. However, I do feel that the full spectrum of experience associated with the word 'adventure' has now been thoroughly fulfilled. I don't want to appear rude but I have a whole existence to be getting on with. There's a meadow in a quaint little shadow not too far away by bridge and I would very much like to live my life there starting, oh, well, as soon as possible."

"I don't think now is the time, honestly," Eos said. "Can't you see that James is unwell?"

"Unwell?" the gnome said as if he honestly hadn't noticed. The little sprite turned his attention to the former mouse, now a tall man hunched over and sitting on a tea chest being fussed over by Rachel and Rebecca. Lester watched on, not really certain what to think.

"Then there was a morning in winter, my mother had a cold," James said. His words floated up from his chest through the arms he had folded on his knees. His head was buried in this little cocoon, his words having the lilt of delirium. "Porridge on the hob, good boy, helpful boy, porridge is easy. Burned so badly to the bottom of the pan mum had to throw it out. Scrap metal for the scrap metal man. Lots you can do with scrap. Got to be able to melt it, to shape it. Not my department. Call an engineer!"

"He'll be fine," the gnome said. "I have a good ear for mischief. Whatever's happening I think it's temporary."

"You know what's wrong with him?" Rachel asked, turning her full attention in his direction.

Although the gnome had wanted Rachel's whole attention, and everyone else's, not moments ago, now it looked extremely uncomfortable. No doubt it would have been fine to have everyone looking in the gnome's direction to discuss the gnome's requirements and demands. The probem here was that now the gnome had cast himself in the role of advisor, such a role stood in the way of attention to requirements and demands.

Lester had to admit that he could understand that feeling completely. He was awash with unsuitable emotions at the moment. Fear of abandonment, sadness at the meandering aimlessness of his journey, irritation that he had spent so long on a road that provided no more than a diversion from Lester's own concerns, guilt that he felt anything other than concern about James's well-being.

Maybe if he could work his way up to a good session of delirious ranting he would be okay afterwards, Lester reflected. There didn't appear to be any other appropriate way of communicating his own feelings of loss that didn't seem self-indulgent and whiny.

Not that he would have had a problem with being self-indulgent and whiny if that had been a layer in a complex personality, but it wasn't. Lester was beginning to realise that when it came to personality self-indulgent and whiny pretty much summed him up. Oh, and meek, and directionless, and not much use.

Look at the gnome. On the one hand it was here demanding stuff when another person was in dire straits not five feet away. The sprite somehow managed to act as if it was oblivious to this while stamping its foot and carrying on like it was the only being that mattered in the whole of Faerie. On the other hand at least the gnome had some sort of motivational through-line. At least it was a force to be reckoned with.

Lester stood in the corner and didn't know what to think and tried not to be any bother. At least he wasn't any bother. At the same time he was becoming extremely tired of not being any use, either. His head was actually starting to throb at the concept of his own complete irrelevance to everything. On his travels he had met knights and magicians, merchants and royalty, what had he ever been through any of it? He had been Lester who could lend a hand with anything not too difficult.

Lester promised himself that as soon as equilbrium was restored he would rock the boat a bit, he would upset the apple cart. He would make his presence felt. Not so felt that people lost their tempers or anything, just felt enough to make Lester feel less on the edges of everything.

"Uh, well," the gnome said. Lester marvelled that he'd managed to fit all that thinking into the space between the gnome becoming awkward and deciding what to say next. "I can see that a lot of what's happened to James... ah, your father, is as a result of mischief casually melting away some deeper enchantments."

"What do you mean 'deeper enchantments'?" Rachel asked.

"Anything mischievous, I can detect," the gnome said. Although it was plain that there would be a time to talk further on the gnome's wish list, for now he was relishing the role of 'expert'. "But I couldn't tell that your dad was enchanted, not when we first met, he just looked like a mouse. A normal mouse. Oh, yes, he could talk, but that isn't such a big deal, you know."

"So what does that mean?" Rachel asked.

"It means that the magic that transformed James into the mouse was very complex and meant to bind. I'm not entirely sure that he was supposed to forget that he was a man, or your dad, or whatever, but I think that's a separate enchantment, after all, you don't remember much about before being in the Skull Garden either, do you?"

"No," Rachel said. "Honestly, I still don't."

"When we took you there," Rebecca said. "You were very young, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you didn't remember what happened before. I forgot everything while I was in the garden too. I only began to remember when I left, and then, well, I got dispersed."

"So you see," the gnome said, inserting himself back into the conversation, determined to monopolise everyone's attention. "The effects of the garden are slow and deep, but not permanent. I wouldn't advise anyone to remain there for too long, could get tricky."

"So how long before Ja- my dad, is back to normal?" Rachel asked.

The gnome got half way into a shrug before James himself broke into the conversation:

"They were all in the castle when the storm came!" he said. "There was the dragon and the frog. They weren't alone. They thought they were. But the mouse was careful. It stayed out of sight. Mice can hide, best hide, best way to stay out of the way. Not like the man who went to see the master of mischief, no. Desperate man, clever man, but desperate, confused. Needed to find his brother, needed to find a way to his brother, not just a disguise you see... really. Because you can't have two mice. Don't you see? Two mice are always bad. Two bad mice."

James looked around at the assembled group, who were all still trying to unravel this stilted dialogue. All except for Lester.

In the couple of seconds it usually took him to lose the initiative Lester realised that no-one had said anything, further, he realised that he had something to say.

"Are you telling me that I went to the master of mischief?" he asked James.

James's glowing, beatific expression dropped into one of deep disappointment.

"That's what you took from that?" he asked.

"It's me, isn't it? You're not the only one who's had their memory messed with," Lester said. "I am looking for my brother and... the man in the tall hat, he is the master of mischief."

"Oh, yes," the gnome chipped in. "That's the boss, Loki, everyone knows that."

Everyone looked at the gnome.

"Well," the gnome corrected himself, gruffly. "I thought everyone knew that."

"It has to be said," Eos said. "I'm sure there are lots of people who have looked for a missing brother through history. I heard a story myself about a man who went to Loki asking for help with a missing brother. I heard it when I was a girl. That story obviously isn't about you, Lester."

"And in the story," Lester asked Eos, feeling more purpose than he could ever remember having felt before. "What did the master of mischief tell the man to do?"

"Loki sent the man to death's garden with a spade. When he dug the ground he found all of his brother's secrets. I always thought it was a metaphor."

"Are you saying you think my brother is dead?" Lester asked.

"I'm saying that I think the brother of the man in the story was dead," Eos said. "We've already established that it wasn't you."

Lester's scalp had started to tingle as all the elements came together: frequent encounters with the master of Mischief, adventuring with escapees from the garden of death, stories about secrets buried in that garden. It didn't really matter what Eos said, Lester knew what he felt about his recent experiences. Everything was just beginning to make sense and Lester wasn't going to let that stop.

"We need to go to the Skull Garden, right now," Lester said.

"Oh, at last, thank you!" the gnome cried in agreement.

"Lester..." Eos said, the first chiming note of dissent.

"No, Eos," Lester said. "I know what I feel, for once, and what I feel is that my brother is in the Skull Garden."

"If he is then, surely, he's dead," Eos said. "Do you believe that Lester?"

"If he's dead then that's what he is," Lester said. "But if I've learned one thing about Chester these last few months it's that he is a man who is rarely where you thought he was and seldom what he seems."

"I know a way," Rebecca said. "But... should we all go?"

"You have to all go," the gnome said. "I need you there, so I can be free."

"Well, technically that's just me and dad," Rachel said, the little pause where she changed 'James' to 'dad' still noticeable but less so than it had been.

"You don't understand," Rebecca said. "We might forget who we are, that's what the Skull Garden does."

"It's a powerful magic," the gnome said. "But it is built to endure. It would take weeks, maybe months to forget everything completely. You can go long enough to set me free, then you can leave."

"But we never could," Rachel said. "You could not reach the edge before the bat would leave the Skull Cave, it would get us all."

"We can fend off a single bat," Lester said.

"It's a giant bat," Rachel pointed out.

"We've done it before," Lester insisted.

"I think you'll find that was Frederick," Eos said.

"So. What?" Lester asked. "We're going to all just give up? The gnome is enslaved to this wish forever? I never find out what happened to my brother?"

"Now hang on just a minute!" the gnome cried out, anxious at the possibility of never being the master of his own destiny.

"I can get us out," Rebecca said. "I got out before, but I'm worried about James. He hasn't recovered from leaving the garden yet. I think it's the mouse enchantment, he's so confused."

"I think," Eos said. "That we shall have to wait until James is maybe a little better, but at that point we shall ask Rebecca to take us to the garden and then we shall see what is what."

And that is exactly what they did, but what they found when they returned to the Skull Garden for the very last time is a story for another day.

Lester And James Distract A Wolf

"So what are we doing again?" Lester asked, twitching the wrist of his right hand, uncomfortably grasping a short sword, to swish the blade about a bit in the air.

"We're a distraction," James said. His sword remained still, his eyes searching the forest path intently.

"Okay," Lester said. Lester hadn't felt proper misery now for quite some time. Panic, confusion, fear, awkwardness, guilt and even terror, all yes; misery, not so much. He didn't even really know how to express his misery because the reasons for it would either sound stupid or selfish or both.

Since James had found his own form in the Undone; since they had escaped, all three of them, into this charming little shadow kingdom; since they had set out into the woods in the hope of picking up a trade route back to Bridgetown, Lester's misery had grown.

Was Lester miserable about James now not being a mouse? It was true that the lanky, intense individual that had replaced the sarcastic, emotionally complex little rodent was a bit of a system shock. Someone's physical shape should not play such a huge part in how one related to them, Lester felt. Yet here was James, now not a cheeky mouse, instead a charismatic and intelligent man approaching a distinguished middle age.

The transformation appeared to demand that people took James more seriously, not to mention the man's kind and lovely wife. Rebecca had known the man James for longer than the mouse James. From the first moment they had been together Lester knew that Rebecca would never have viewed her husband's rodent form as anything more than a horrible affliction. Lester had never known James as a man and so had always thought of him as a mouse with amnesia.

The amnesia was another thing that had put Lester off kilter. A mouse could have amnesia and it was possible for an observer not to take the whole thing terribly seriously. After all what important memories could a mouse have? When the mouse was a man, the pain of forgetting written in the lines on his face, you were forced to confront your own flippancy.

None of this was a recipe for much more than confusion and a period of necessary adjustment, of course. The problem was the misery and sense of loss that accompanied the confusion. Lester realised that whilst he and James had both been bewildered, both seeking things that appeared impossible to find, that their bond had formed organically, without either one of them noticing. In a world where the finding of a clue to the location of a brother, or a memory that might help upon the road to a mislaid daughter, was a task of gargantuan proportions the funny young man in the pinstripe flannel suit and the amnesiac mouse had each other.

James had gone with Lester on an amazing journey, through some of the strangest places in Faerie, they had seen the ruins of a sorcerer's palace, the edge of the Undone and the colourful stalls of the market at the centre of everything. James's journey had restored to him many (although still not all) of his memories, his daughter, his wife and his physical form. Lester had managed to harvest an elliptical letter and a bottle of potion he had used up to escape the Undone.

Lester knew that his quest was ongoing, and probably a worthwhile endeavour, but when he compared his progress to James's the results were not encouraging. Still, Lester felt incredibly selfish for resenting his companion's progress and feeling the blank, empty helplessness of his current empty-handedness.

Even trying his hardest to put all this aside Lester still felt that he was losing the best friend he had ever had, before he'd even ever really had a chance to tell this friend how he felt. He couldn't help but gain the impression that James believed that they were companions because of circumstance and not because of friendship. As James now had a family to think about, and some handy opposable thumbs, it became more and more apparent that Lester was somewhat of a third wheel in any situation James might find himself in.

That was difficult and caused a sadness that Lester couldn't just squash down out of the way.

"You know," Lester said, filling the empty, silent air with a distracting burble of noise. "Things have happened pretty quickly today. I'm not even sure that I know what we're standing here for."

"I just said," James repeated, absently, "we're a distraction."

"Yes," Lester said. "I got that. I just don't know what we're a distraction from, or indeed what it is we're supposed to be distracting. It has something to do with a wizard. I remember the wizard, and you, you were talking to a mouse."

"Yes," James said. "Gargantuus Redstorm, who lives in the wall just yonder, told us that he was the member of a tribe that gathered intelligence for Silas Strumpkin, a wizard who lives in that house over there." James pointed at the house just visible along the path about fifty feet away. "Wizard Strumpkin is currently engaged in commune with the weave, trying to gain some information paid for by a noble in the next shadow. A rival noble has sent a lupine mercenary to kill Strumpkin whilst he is vulnerable. Gargantuus and his tribe are not able to warn Silas and so we are here to defeat the mercenary before it can get to the wizard."

"Right," Lester said. He took a look down at the lumpen, poorly forged metal rod in his hand. A poorly constructed melange of sword and mace. He had never held a weapon before now, he wasn't sure that this was the weapon to start with. Also, how was he supposed to be of any use fighting a wolf? There were more questions. 'Why?' seemed to be one of the most pertinent, so he asked it.

"Gargantuus knows that Silas has recorded a spell of transportation in his book of spells. If the wizard awakes from his trance alive and in good humour Gargantuus will persude him to send us back to Bridgetown."

"So all we have to do is kill a wolf to save a wizard and we go back to where we started from?" Lester said. "Done much wolf killing, have you?"

James shook his head.

"Almost none that I can remember," he replied. "We're not really supposed to kill it, we're just supposed to keep it busy until Rebecca can kill it with an arrow."

"Oh, okay," Lester nodded. "And what happens if the wolf comes from the other direction?"

"Then she'll be in the ideal position to kill it before it ever sees her or us," James said, his tone was beginning to gain an edge of annoyance. "You weren't listening at all back there, were you?"

"Not really," Lester admitted, allowing a little ire to leak out in his tone. "I'm tired, and afraid. I'm pretty hungry and... if I'm entirely honest... I was busy wondering why a mouse was called Gigantuus."

"It's a mouse thing," James said. "I discovered this when I was one. Mice think of themselves as the biggest creatures in the world. Anything bigger than them is, to them, just as big as them. So they like to call themselves big, tough names, to recognize their awesome stature and whatnot. They're mostly a species of proud warriors."

"I see, they always struck me as a little nervous," Lester said.

"They're very proud of their flight reflex. They have almost no voluntary control over it," James explained. "I had more because I wasn't born a mouse. Regular rats and mice will run automatically in the face of overwhelming odds without even really being aware that they're doing it. They call it 'saviour ghosting', well, they do when they get away intact."

"Wow," Lester said. "There's quite a lot going on with those mice then. I never knew."

Silence fell, which was not a good thing for Lester as his mind was instantly alerted at his failure to actually admit what was really troubling him when he had said 'if I'm entirely honest'. Worse Lester had realised that he had given James a hard time about not being entirely honest when he himself had been too confused to be honest on several recent occasions.

Lester had made a decision to improve his honesty and was now failing miserably to speak up and be direct about things. Lester didn't feel comfortable with the notion that emotions could be difficult, they were going to happen no matter how complex or inconvenient they were going to be, but that didn't make them any simpler. Lester was in danger of becoming wreathed in sadness again. He had to talk or his feelings would overwhelm him.

"So, you're glad... to be a person again?" Lester asked. If he brought up a topic of conversation that put James's transformation on the table maybe he would find a way to say the difficult things.

"It's definitely an advantage," James replied. "If I could just get my memory, my daughter and my home back then I would feel a lot better still."

"Yes," Lester said. "That would be nice. Having everything sorted out would be nice."

James looked over at Lester, the clear, grey-green human eyes in James's human face were far more expressive than the small dark eyes of the mouse he had been. Lester found human James too human to deal with. Adding guilt to the misery Lester realised that his sense of loss came with the realisation that he was no longer the most important person in the duo. He was a drifter looking for an elusive brother. James... well, James was some kind of important.

Someone had robbed James of his memories and put him into a faraway shadow not far from the edge of the Undone. Someone had turned James into a mouse and dispersed his wife. Someone had wanted James hidden away and imprisoned. Whatever James's full story was it was a story that mattered a great deal to several powerful people.

What about Lester and Chester Topping? Chester was so important that he had been forced to hide himself from everyone, including his twin brother. All Lester was trying to do was find him. Lester was not important. Lester was just Lester.

"If I can do anything to help you find Chester, when I have the power to do so, then I will, of course," James said quietly.

There was no time to respond to that. Lester saw a movement on the path, not far from where they stood. It looked as if the mercenary had arrived.

Lester looked pointedly at the approaching figure, James turned to look in the direction Lester was indicating.

"Just concentrate on staying safe," James said. "Try to knock him back, give Rebecca a clear shot."

Lester nodded. The sudden tension in his stomach made him completely unable to feel sadness, or inadequacy, or guilt. Lester shifted his grip on his wonky sword. He wondered if he could get used to this sort of thing, like a knight.

About sixty seconds later Lester had firmly decided that, no, he was never going to make a knight. The wolf was being kept back but this was mostly due to a lunatic ferocity he was managing to exhibit in his sword waving antics. The adrenaline flooding his system prevented him from looking over to see if James was doing any better but, regardless, a few seconds later the whole thing was over when an arrow in the chest put down the ravening lupine mercenary.

"Remind me to avoid being a decoy again," James said, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees, exhausted.

"Same here," Lester replied.

They got about a minute to gather themselves together before Rebecca joined them on the path and the three of them went back towards the wizard's house. Once James had talked once more with Gargantuus, and the three of them had shown that the mercenary had been thwarted, they went back to the house with their rodent companion.

After a few hours Silas Strumpkin came out of his trance and, upon being told by Gargantuus of the bravery of the three strangers was happy to make them a portal to transport them into the Patchwork Market. So James, Lester and Rebecca stepped through the portal back to their destination, but what happened to them when they got there is a story for another time.

In Which Saeed and Avan Find Vasky Jantnor

"I don't deal with criminals," Avan said flatly.

"Too bad for you," Vasky Jantnor replied. "What are your options? I'm already under threat of execution, you can't harm me without becoming a criminal yourself."

"I can force you to share what you know," Avan growled, he pushed his face closer to the bars. Vasky Jantnor met Avan's glare steadily, his yellow eye glittering in the light from the torches on the walls.

"You won't," Jantnor said coolly. "You don't believe in using that kind of magic."

"I can deal with criminals," Saeed cut in. Since he had met Avan he had been happy to allow the prince to lead. After all Avan Weatherstrong was a legend and Saeed was just a thief who had made some poor decisions. Over time, however, Saeed had come to realise that there were disadvantages to being Avan Weatherstrong and advantages to being Saeed. An example was the fact that Saeed did not feel compelled to indulge in a circuitous political pantomime to associate with street trash.

"Look at you, Prince Weatherstrong," Jantnor said, a white toothed grin spreading across his face, "fraternising with the enemy."

"What do you want me to do?" Saeed asked before Avan could become defensive. "Ask and, if I am able, it shall be done."

"You could take a leaf out of your servant's book," Jantnor said standing and coming towards the bars of the cell, looking Saeed up and down. The draco was very tall, his movement lithe and sinuous. Saeed would not have liked to face Jantnor in unarmed combat, even half-blind as he was, thankfully the mercenary was caged. "This boy is very polite. I like it when people are polite, makes me cooperative."

Jantnor delivered his statement without removing his gaze from Saeed.

"I just want some comfort in here, son," Jantnor said to Saeed, "in my last days, something to bring a little light into this dark cell. I'm sure you'll find this a hoot. I keep a pet, a small white mouse, the type my more backward cousins regard as a snack but I call him Snowdrop and I keep him at my home. I left him two days ago with fresh food and water. If I don't have him returned to my care he will die. Probably he will anyway when I am executed. Until then I would appreciate it if you would bring Snowdrop to me, so I can tend to him as long as I am able."

"That's what you want?" Avan said. "Your pet?"

Jantnor still hadn't looked away from Saeed. He held a hand up, dismissing Avan.

"This ain't your deal, Prince," Jantnor said. "This is on the boy now. What do you say, junior? You bring a man his only comfort and joy in exchange for the information you seek?"

Saeed opened his mouth to do the deal and Jantnor moved his hand waving at Saeed to be quiet.

"Be careful, son," Jantnor said. "If you agree to this you have to enter the White Woods alone to go fetch. I won't take kindly to you sharing the burden. So only accept if you're up for the journey."

"If this is what must be done to find Miranda Felix," Saeed said. "And it is I who must do it, then that is how it shall be."

"Excellent news," Jantnor said, his tone quietly satisfied. "The prince and I shall eagerly await your return. You will know my house by the wooden training dummy in the front yard. I painted the symbol of my old troop on the wall, so that friends would know a welcome and enemies would be warned."

Jantnor displayed a brand burned onto the inside of his left forearm before turning his back on them and crossing his cell to lie out on his bed.

"If you want me," he said, "I will be napping here, be advised Prince Weatherstrong, I will hear you leave, and if you do I will never tell anyone where Felix is, whatever they bring to me for aid and comfort."

Saeed looked over to Avan. The prince did not appear to be in the best of moods. He turned to Saeed.

"I suppose you'd better be about your business," Avan said although his eyes betrayed another conversation lurking in his mind.

"I suppose I better had," Saeed agreed. Saeed did not know what objection Avan would have to this enterprise but, at this stage, he did not really care. "I will be back as soon as I am able."

With that Saeed left the dungeon, on his way to the White Woods.

Saeed was not so much of a fool that he had believed that acting as a companion to the greatest hero who had ever lived would be a position free of problems. However he had been badly mistaken as to the nature of those problems. The dangerous situations and fighting were inevitable, of course. However, Saeed had believed that the problems between himself and the noble prince would mostly be ethical, or differences in approach to a particular problem.

Actually, that's exactly what most of the issues were. However the final resolution of such issues was usually an urgent requirement. The sooner objectives could be completed the better for everyone. What was left behind, however, was a vast ocean of problems unresolved and conversations that there simply wasn't time to have.

Saeed was surprised that he felt some hurt that Prince Weatherstrong actually didn't appear to really like him. Of course, their initial meeting had not been optimal in this regard. Saeed was a thief and had engaged in an act of mercenary thieving when Avan interceded. Add to this the fact that Saeed proved himself a dupe, fooled into actions whose consequences were far in excess of what he had expected and he could fully understand the disapproval of wiser minds.

Where the hurt came in was that this first impression never appeared to be replaced in the Prince's eyes with anything closer to the person that Saeed was trying to put forward during his tenure as Avan's companion. Saeed wanted to show a greater consideration of ethical concerns, a deeper wisdom with its roots in the humility and shame of ill-advised actions that could not easily be undone.

Saeed had committed to this atonement and that commitment had not changed. However, he couldn't help but feel that Avan was, in a rather mean-spirited way, not giving Saeed any credit for these decisions.

It was this array of points: how Saeed's reform was not acknowledged in any way by his travelling companion, why the fact of this bothered him, and what he could do to reverse the situation, that occupied Saeed's mind as he rode his horse into the White Woods.

So distracted was Saeed that he quickly found himself at the end of the trail near to an abandoned hunting lodge. It didn't take Saeed long to see that this was not Jantnor's home so he turned his steed around and picked his way back to the last fork he had taken.

The White Wood was a quiet, cold place and Saeed had not encountered another living soul since he had arrived. Trying out a few more paths lead to more dead ends. Abandoned paths, paths that had been overgrown or turned into swamp, circular paths to abandoned mines or clearings that may once have furnished herbs but were now no more than barren scrub.

The day was almost over as Saeed realised that Jantnor had not been honest and straightforward in his request. The White Woods were a larger space than he had implied and Saeed, even given his excellent sense of direction, realised that he had no way of telling where Jantnor's home might be. There were hundreds of paths criss-crossing the wood, if the home were off the path in a secret corner of the forest then Saeed had no hope of retrieving the prize.

Saeed had never experienced such frustration, he felt foolish, but beyond that there were unpleasant currents of anger and humiliation. The prospect of failure in such an apparently simple task filled Saeed with a cold dread. What made it worse was that it wasn't the mockery of Jantnor that upset him so much as the quiet disdain that was almost inevitably going to come from Avan's direction.

Here was the issue with projecting new wisdom and humble acceptance of one's own past failings: once you realised that you still had failings after that acceptance things got complicated. You could easily begin to understand that your new wisdom wasn't as deep as you might have hoped; present humiliation had even more burn to it when stacked on the embers of past humiliation.

"Sad boy! Sad boy!" a voice rang out from up above.

Saeed looked up to see a small bird, a sparrow, sitting in a tree.

"Sad boy! Sad boy!" the sparrow chirped.

"Are you talking to me?" Saeed asked the sparrow.

"Technically," the sparrow replied, "I was talking about you. Now I'm talking to you."

"You have an impudent mouth for one so small."

"Small birds are always impudent," the sparrow replied. "We have to tease the bigger birds to maintain our territory."

"I see," Saeed said. "I had always heard of talking animals, but I have never met one properly. Oh, I once encountered a talking mouse but I understand he used to be a man. I don't know how that changes things."

"Is this why you are sad?" the sparrow asked. "Because you have never met a talking beast. Maybe you have and you just weren't ready to hear what they had to say."

"I can imagine that being the case," Saeed said. "I think... It makes some kind of sense. But no, that is not why I am sad. I am sad because I promised to do something and now I find I cannot do it."

"Well, that was a stupid thing to do," the sparrow said. "I never understand the actions of folk. You appear, at least to me, to be entirely contrary creatures. I have never promised to do something I could not do, nor would I."

"I didn't know I couldn't do it," Saeed said. "At the time I imagined it would be a simple matter to find a house with a wooden dummy in the yard and a strange symbol painted on its wall. I had no idea how big the White Woods were."

"I see," the sparrow said. "If that house had bread or seeds in it would you give them to me?"

"If you could show it to me and if it has any kind of bread or seeds inside its walls then you could happily have as much as you could eat," Saeed replied.

"Then I hope for my sake that you can keep this promise," the sparrow replied. "Follow closely, I have no time for laggards"

The bird hopped off its perch in the tree and flew into the forest. Saeed followed the bird closely, never losing sight of the fluttering black punctuation mark of its body. Sure enough the house was found within the hour, Jantnor's pet was retrieved within its home (a large skull that may once have belonged to a beast man or similar large animal). Using his thieves senses Saeed found his way out of the woods and returned triumphant to the jail.

Upon being presented with his pet Jantnor's expression became shifty and awkward.

"I am much obliged, son," the draco said to Saeed. "Now I must admit that I cannot tell you exactly where Felix hides herself away, but I do know a step along the route."

"I knew this would all be a big waste of time," Avan said.

"Hold on there," Jantnor said. "I'm a mercenary, that makes me a business man, I don't believe in short changing folk. What I've got may not be everything but I think it's close. You probably know that in our line of work there are people you can deal with that you may not exactly trust one hundred per cent. Felix, well I'm not sure I trust her even ten per cent. So when I took that job from her, the one that ended with me in here, I tailed her after the meet."

"She must have known you were following her," Avan said. "She's like that."

"Normally I would agree," Jantnor said. "It was one of those things that I figured wouldn't pan out, but in the back of my head I thought 'what if it does', so I did it anyway. I followed her to an abandoned tollhouse, used to stand to the side of the bridge connecting the Twenty Kingdoms to the Okulan Empire. Obviously Okulas didn't take too kindly to having the forces of order so close at hand, his men destroyed the bridge."

"So how did she get across?" Saeed asked.

"She didn't," Vantnor replied. "From behind a rock I watched her pay a ghost with silver and he opened up a different kind of bridge, a rainbow bridge, up to the moon over the Empire."

"You expect us to believe that?" Avan asked, his face impassive.

"Believe whatever you wish," Jantnor shrugged. "I traded my mouse for what I know, that's what I know."

"I know the bridge he's talking about, it is some distance away," Avan said to Saeed. "We shall have to use magic to get there."

Having no other option Avan prepared a magic portal that brought them within half a day's walk from the tollhouse. Vast mountains stretched upwards around a broad valley path in which were visible the remains of an old brick road. Many of the stones from the road were missing, weeds and grasses grew up in between those that remained. Avan and Saeed walked with silent purpose along the road towards their destination.

At the end of their journey the companions cautiously approached the ruined tollhouse that stood at the lip of the great chasm.

"I have travelled extensively for one so young," Saeed said. "But this is the first time I have ever trafficked with a ghost."

"They're really just a form of sprite," Avan said. "They are a sort of elemental, filled with the powers of death."

"That's not reassuring," Saeed said.

"It is not intended to be," Avan replied. "The dead can see the forces of the weave and the wheel with a clarity that the living seldom achieve. They have knowledge because they are almost totally unable to use their powers of insight. They know all the consequences of telling you about things that are to come, as a result they tend to keep their own counsel. It is almost impossible to coerce them, so they are often aloof."

"A fine grasp of the academics Prince Weatherstrong," said a voice from the shell of the tollhouse. The ghost emerged through a wide crack in the wall, a gentleman in a formal tunic, he had the appearance of wearing a wig and carrying a lantern. His face was thin, deeply lined and grave.

All Saeed could think of were questions about this apparition. One found its way out of his mouth before he could think better of it:

"I always thought," he said, "that ghosts could walk through walls."

"One day, no doubt, you shall learn better, Saeed ibn Abihi," the ghost replied. "Today, however, you are here on a business other than metaphysics."

"We seek access to the rainbow bridge," Avan said in the formal tone of voice the prince used whenever rehearsing a matter of protocol.

"Then it is best that you furnish me with the toll," the ghost said.

Avan pulled a silver piece from his money pouch.

"Will this suffice, tollkeeper?" he asked.

"Only honest hands have touched that metal, Prince Weatherstrong," the ghost answered. "I cannot take it in payment."

"Give it to me," Saeed said. "I am a thief. If it's dishonest hands he wants well, mine are as bad as anyone else's."

"Noble humility," the ghost addressed Saeed, "but you misunderstand, great sage. The silver itself must be dirty; stolen, to employ the vernacular."

"The toll to cross the rainbow bridge is a piece of stolen silver?" Avan asked, more in the spirit of confirmation than actual enquiry.

"Just so," the ghost confirmed.

Saeed reached into his own belt pouch, even as he did so he felt his cheeks begin to burn. The topic of the silver key that he had placed within the pouch had never appeared relevant to the current situation. As long as no one asked about it directly he was not compelled to talk about it. Paying the toll with it was going to raise questions, but if their journey was to continue without delay there was nothing to be done about it.

"Will this suffice?" Saeed asked the ghost, holding out the small silver key.

"Indeed it will Saeed ibn Abihi," the ghost said, a humourless grin lighting upon his face. "Then, you already knew that it would."

The ghost held out his right hand and Saeed dropped the key onto it, curious as to what would happen. As the silver hit the palm of the ghost's hand it sparked bright white for a second, a flat chime appeared to sound and the key disappeared.

"I shall open the way," the ghost said and raised his lantern up. The light within the housing intensified, starting to shift within the glass like a thing alive. The liquid glow spilled forth from one side of the lantern in a spray of unexpectedly intense colour stretching up over the chasm, piercing the clouds above and continuing on to the flat silver orb of the moon in the sky.

"Step forth, travellers," the ghost said. "The continuation of your journey is at hand."

Avan and Saeed stepped into the rainbow light and were transported along its length towards the Okulas Moon. What they found on the moon and what they did when they got there are stories for another time.

Lester and James In The House of Secrets

"How long is it until noon bell?"

James sighed. He had never realised before how impatient Lester could be. He had no way of knowing the precise time but it couldn't be more than half an hour after mid-morning bell. Lester had already asked his question five times.

"What's the problem?" James asked him refusing to say 'five minutes less than the last time you asked' again. "Yes, we have to stay still, but it's not the most tedious environment in the world. There's hustle and bustle, the various colours and shades of a dynamic market town. It could be much worse."

"That's your opinion," Lester said. "We have to wait here for ages and do nothing. That's not right."

"Well, what else could we be doing?" James asked. "Neither of us can do magic and neither of us are really cut out for cage fighting. Even if they had a rodent league. I don't think I'd be very good. I don't like the thought of hurting anyone, even a mouse."

Lester took a look about, at the market in the square, at the archway that housed the market bell, at the streets of Steephill Fell laid out beyond the market.

"We could spend a little more time looking for the trader's wagon," Lester said. "After all no one will be making a bronze mark within the next twenty minutes, probably."

"Phoebe told us to stay here," James said.

"Well, so?" Lester said. "She doesn't own us. We're free agents."

"That's a bit of a change in attitude," James said. "A couple of days ago it was yes Phoebe, no Phoebe, three bags full Phoebe."

"Three bags full of what?" Lester demanded, his annoyance somewhat undermined by the random thing he had chosen to identify as the source of his annoyance.

"Wool," James said. "Like in the nursery rhyme, you know, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full... one for the master... one for the dame... and one for... the little boy... down the... you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Don't worry," Lester said. "I've met a lot of strange people, you're not the strangest. You're just a bit crazy and you make up new words and it's like you talk in a completely foreign language sometimes. It's really kind of endearing, in a way."

"Well, anyway," James said. "I had received the impression that you had a bit of a fancy for the irritable witch, what's changed?"

"I don't know," Lester said. "Well, I do, I think Cobb likes her too and I can't compete with that. Besides, when we met Princess Butterstone I realised, well, I just like pretty girls, any pretty girls without any sort of discrimination; particularly the ones armed with dangerous weapons... is that weird?"

"A thousand teenage boys with internet connections would tell you no," James sighed. "As for the rest of us..."

"There you go again," Lester said, "talking complete gibberish, what's an 'into net'? And what does one 'connect' it with?"

"The internet," James said. "You know, the computer network, with all the pictures of naked ladies, and people arguing about Star Wars, and the emails filled with spam and malware?"

"I was with you right up to 'the'," realising that needed qualifying, Lester qualified it: "the first one.".

"Now that you come to mention it," James said. "I had noticed a distinct lack of technology in these parts. I think I'm quite angry. I'm the wrong species, I'm lost in the wrong world and I've lost my daughter." James stopped. There was a period of heavy silence. "Oh," James said. "My."

"You're talking about Rachel, aren't you?" Lester asked. "Rachel is your daughter."

"I don't like this," James complained. "My head's like a house full of stuff, but it's all in the wrong rooms, the settee is in the bathroom and the oven is in the garage. Every so often something suddenly goes back where it's supposed to be but all that does is make the rest of it seem even more confused." James felt the hideously heartbreaking cute of tiny mouse tears at the corner of his tiny mouse eyes. He couldn't give into the terrible sentiment of the mental image. "Hang it!" he said loudly. "You're right Lester, Phoebe's not the boss of us, let's go look for that wagon."

"Okay," Lester said, a smile spreading across his face. "Let's do it."

They started the rebellion small wandering in a broken circle around the fringes of the market and poking their head down a few of the streets always keeping the archway in sight. They'd already taken a look around the market when it was opening up so they opted, instead to have a quick walk about Steephill Fell proper.

It didn't take them long to find the high street where a number of more permanent shops were set up selling all the things the modern resident of the Crossway Realms could wish to buy. There was everything here from gentleman's outfitters to suppliers of magical trinkets, to shops crammed full of curios from far off Kingdoms.

Further along the main thoroughfare were a number of smaller shops and the road splintered into a number of specialist arcades, one for cobblers and tanners, one for dealers in fresh vegetables, one for fishmongers and one for tradesmen specialising in the repair of various items.

A little further along still and the road changed its nature to become more residential, interrupted by the presence of the odd tavern. It was while taking a cursory glance around these streets that James noticed the trader's wagon.

At least, he presumed it was a trader's wagon. It was a tall covered wagon painted in bright colours and bearing the legend 'Riseandshine & Titsadaisy - Goblin Merchants'. Beside the wagon was a nine foot tall metal statue of a man. That feature seemed a bit out of place, stood, as it was, in the gutter. James decided he had better things to worry about, such as catching up with his freshly remembered daughter.

"Lester," he said. "I think we may have found what we're looking for."

Lester turned to look at the wagon.

"Well, technically I'm looking for my brother," he said. "And I only have the word of a strange man in a tall hat that this is the way to find him. That does look like what you are looking for, though, yes."

"Well, come on then," James said, refusing to feel guilty about Lester's brother for the time being, "let's get over there."

Lester crossed the street and walked up to the wagon. As he approached the statue it surprised James by turning out not to be a statue but, in fact, a man made out of metal. Another piece of furniture dislodged itself in James's mind and slotted into a space that allowed James to understand its nature. This metal monster was an iron golem.

Golems were rare now, although once there had been an age when golems were widespread, many had since been smashed or melted down. There were many stories about golems and the problems they could cause because of their nature.

"Not so fast," the golem said, appropriately enough in quite a deep, slow voice. "This wagon is private property."

"Oh," Lester said. "I'm sorry, it's just it... well, we're looking for the owner is he about?"

"Mr Riseandshine is currently out on business," the golem replied.

"Oh, okay," Lester said. The trail end of the remark left James in no doubt that his companion was rapidly running out of conversational road.

"It's not really Mr. Riseandshine we wish to speak with," James said. "It's Rachel, the little girl he's travelling with."

"There's nobody here," the golem said. "Just Felix. Felix just watches the cart. Says 'Not so fast' if people come near. That's Felix job. Security."

There was a motion from the direction of the wagon, James looked over to see what had moved. The flapping wings and giant golden eyes set every rodent nerve in James's little mouse body alight with a keen instinctive pain. Without even thinking James scrambled forward and dove into Lester's top pocket, where he crouched in the darkness waiting for the vision of the death's head to fade from his retina.

"You can tell the mouse not to worry," said a voice that James didn't know. "I haven't been hungry ever since I died."

"Who are you?" Lester's voice asked.

"I am Micras Whitney," the other voice replied. "I live in the model castle in the back of the wagon. I am travelling with Tabarnas and Rachel."

His tiny rodent heart still thumping like a drum James risked poking his head out of the pocket to look at the monstrous form of the white owl perched on the edge of the wagon. Even knowing that this was a spirit form the creature was still terrifying to James's eyes.

There was a part of James that knew he was not a mouse, or at least was not meant to be a mouse. Right now, however, he was scampering about in a mouse body, with a mouse nervous system. This meant that his only thoughts regarding owls were running and hiding and desperate prayers about avoiding death.

"You know where they are?" James asked, sticking to the point, trying to control the quaver in his voice.

"Eos, she's a mermaid, she told me that they were going to the fishmonger's alley," Micras said. "Some kind of trouble."

That gave James something else to worry about. His daughter was in danger from fishmongers, something he didn't even really have a frame of reference for. This was the problem when parts of your identity were both old and new at the same time and then new information came in concerning the things that you hadn't even sorted out in your own head yet.

"When was this?" James's mouth said ignoring the sleet of nonsense that was happening in the rest of his mind.

"It was just after evening bell, yesterday," Micras said.

"That's over twelve hours ago!" James said. "You haven't seen any sign of her since then?"

"Tabarnas, Eos and Gerda, he's the other Iron Golem, they went off together, nobody's been back since," Micras said.

"Lester, you've got to take me to the fishmonger's alley, right now," James said.

"Yes, I will," Lester said. James got the impression that things were moving a bit too fast for Lester but that couldn't be helped, every tiny ounce of James's little mouse body was desperate to find his daughter and make sure she was safe. Vagueness and confusion would not be tolerated.

"Um, bye," Lester said to the golem and to Micras as he hurried back out onto the main street and up towards the entrance of the fishmonger's alley. They headed up the alley with the strongest briny smell emerging from it and found it lead into a quaint covered arcade that contained a number of fish stalls all offering a variety of seafood for sale.

"Now what?" Lester said.

"Ask someone," James said desperately. "I would but this isn't the time for 'oh, a talking mouse' and all that rubbish, please, Lester."

To be fair to him Lester finally got over James's panic and methodically went from stall to stall asking if anyone had seen a little girl, a goblin merchant, a mermaid or an iron golem. Right at the back of the alley there was a final stall that appeared to be offering a wide variety of pickled seafood in various glass jars. The stink from this stall was particularly strong and, as such, it was alone at the end of the alley opposite a dead blank wall of stout stone bricks.

Lester approached the old man tending the pickle stall.

"Excuse me," he said. "I don't suppose that you've seen a little girl come this way? Or possibly a goblin-"

The old man held up his hand for silence. Lester stopped talking.

"I'll tell you as I told the rest," he said. "She went through the magic door yonder." He pointed at the wall opposite the store front. "I said to her, be careful, you'll slip through the door if you mess about there, she didn't listen."

Lester looked at the wall and then back to the pickled fish merchant.

"Magic door?" he said.

"How do we get through?" James cut in no longer caring about the inevitable talking mouse comment that was bound to follow.

"You play patty cake with the bricks," the merchant said, fixing James with a serious stare. "The door opens, as I understand the thing it will take you where you need to go."

"Well, that's handy," James said. "Because I need to find my daughter."

"I didn't see no mice go through there, but then mice are small," the merchant said.

James couldn't be bothered to explain.

"Lester, let's move," he said to his companion.

"But," Lester said. "Magic door, does it work both ways?"

"I've seen people come out from time to time," the merchant said. "Never the same as went in."

"Lester," James said, trying his utmost to make his tone of voice dangerous, this continued not to work.

"Phoebe said..." Lester began.

"Phoebe said what she said because she assumed we would have to travel further to catch up with the trader's wagon," James replied quickly, hearing the impatient grate to his tone of voice. "We've found the wagon and the only thing standing between me and my daughter now is you and a game of patty cake with a wall. Don't argue with me Lester."

At this point Lester could very well have said: 'Or you'll do what? Poop in my shirt pocket?', but he didn't. It was one of the few occasions that James was glad that Lester constantly appeared to be about three moves behind everyone else.

He dutifully stood and patted the wall whilst reciting some rhyme about bakers. Upon completion of the first couplet the next slap turned into a swish as Lester's hand passed straight through the apparently solid brickwork of the stone wall.

"Door's open," said the merchant behind them.

"Go on," James said. "Walk through."

Lester paused for just a moment but then he stepped towards the wall and on through the stone bricks. James didn't know how the experience might have affected Lester but his ears popped and his paws went numb. The temperature of the atmosphere suddenly dropped from comfortable to cold. The light levels sunk dramatically.

For a few moments it was impossible to see anything in the gloom but eventually James's eyes adjusted. They were in some sort of cellar, lit only through thin slits cut into the top of the walls below the ceiling.

"I'm getting a sense of deja dungeon," James said. "How about you?"

Lester instantly turned one hundred and eighty degrees and pressed his hand up to the wall at his back. He played patty cake with the wall. It stubbornly remained a wall.

"Well," Lester said. "We're stuck here now, I hope you're happy with yourself."

"Lester," James said. "My daughter could be here, wherever we are. We are travelling towards my daughter. I don't really care about the operating methods of magic one-way doors."

"I'm just saying," Lester grumbled, "I don't like places like this."

"It's a dungeon," James said. "We've survived worse. Come on, you're on your way to being a seasoned adventurer. This is your second dingy castle in a week. Let's check the rest of the place out, see what kind of evil doer buried grumpy witches in this place. Your next crush might only be six feet of loosely packed earth away."

"You're not funny," Lester said. "Not at all."

"So shut me up by taking in the sights," James insisted.

Reluctantly Lester wandered out of the bare stone room they'd arrived in and down a number of even murkier corridors until he found a set of steps leading up. The ground level was less damp than the cellar, but that just meant it reeked of age and dust. Lester walked from empty room to empty room, occasionally discovering the remains of some forlorn item of furniture but no evidence of anything alive.

"What is it with the empty places?" Lester asked. "Mountain strongholds, weird stone houses, why can't we ever go anywhere nice?"

"The town was quite nice," James pointed out. "The one we just left, not the witch burny one. The Patchwork Market's a fun place to be, very vibrant."

"And then we leave," Lester said. "And come to a place like this. Oh, what's that?"

In a small room behind the remains of a kitchen Lester had spotted an hourglass resting on a shelf. There was a small metal plaque screwed into the wall above it. Lester approached the artifact to read the plate. Engraved into the metal was a short message:

Come, spend an hour and visit with us.

"What do you suppose that means?" Lester said.

"You've clearly never played a point and click adventure," James replied. "It means turn over the hourglass."

"I think I understood half of that," Lester said, reaching out for one of the wooden rods that formed the hourglass housing.

Before his fingers made contact there was the sound of breaking glass from a room behind them. Lester withdrew his hand as if his fingers had been burned.

"It wasn't me!" he protested.

"No, and it wasn't me either," James said. "So that begs the question, who was it?"

"So, what?" Lester asked. "Am I turning the hourglass or not?"

"Not before we find out what that noise was," James said. "Come on let's go back."

Sighing, Lester turned away from the hourglass and went back into the body of the house. Crossing the kitchen and a corridor they found the source of the glass breakage. Lying on the floor, surrounded by broken glass and tangled up with the snapped shaft of a broomstick was a figure James recognised instantly.

"You!" James said to the gnome. "What are you doing here?"

The gnome looked a little confused, he turned his head to the left and to the right trying to get his bearings.

"Oh," it said. "It's you, the nervous mouse."

"Yes," James said. "The nervous mouse. So how come you're here in this mysterious house."

"Well," the gnome said. "I'm always only allowed to travel within a certain range of either you or the little girl who made the wish," the gnome said. "For a while there you were separated by a vast distance, but now you're not. I think this broomstick has brought me back to within an acceptable proximity of both of you."

"You mean," James said breathlessly, "that Rachel is nearby?"

"Must be," the gnome said. "About as close as I was brought to you. I think this broomstick was from The Office. I don't like those guys. They're bossy."

"She's here!" James rejoiced, "she's within about thirty feet of where the gnome landed. Lester, we've got to find her, now."

"I got the message," Lester said.

The three of them ran around the house and out into the grounds surrounding it calling out Rachel's name. There was still no sign of her. They stood in the garden of the house, beside a neatly tended garden, outside the window the gnome's broom had crashed through and looked around hopelessly.

"I don't understand," James complained. "Your magic is broken," he addressed the gnome.

"Impossible," the gnome said. "There are few things in the world which are properly impossible but for my magic to be broken in this instance is one of them."

"Then where is she?" James asked.

"Hey," Lester said. "What's this?"

"Is it another hourglass?" James asked.

Lester wandered away from the house down onto the lawn and across to a simple stone sundial mounted on a column. A parcel was sitting on the dial face, wrapped in brown paper, tied up with red string.

"That's funny," Lester said. "This looks like one of the packages that... oh."

Lester picked up the parcel. Printed on it in neat block capitals was:

FAO LESTER TOPPING

"This is identical to the packages my brother used to send home," Lester said. "Absolutely identical."

"Well, but-" James was about to object to Lester enthusiastically untying the package but having just had a brush with fresh hope himself he checked his skepticism for the moment.

Inside the package was a small bottle of yellow liquid and a note. Lester opened the note and read it out:

"'Dearest Brother'." He paused and smiled. "That's me, oh wow, this is incredible," Lester paused again before continuing to read. "'I'm afraid I am short on time so must be brief. Keep the potion safe, you will know when you need to use it. Turn the hourglass in the pantry and continue on your journey. I will make contact again when the weave permits. Your Loving Brother, Chester Topping Esquire.'"

James looked up into Lester's face, the young man's eyes shining with tears.

"Well," James said. "Are we going to do it? Turn the hourglass?"

"Of course," Lester said. "If Chester said to do it then we have to."

So they did, but what happened next is a story for another time.