Un Lun Dun

“Maybe I could try to lure them out here one by one,” said Jones.

“There are six, right?” said Obaday.

“That’s crazy, Jones,” said Deeba. “They’d never buy it. We have to try to find another way round.”

“Well,” said Obaday, “I’ve been listening carefully, and I can only count five voices in there.”

One by one, Deeba and her companions stopped speaking, and turned to Obaday.

Whistling jauntily and doing up his fly, a man sauntered around the corner towards them. He was very tall and fleshy, and he squinted behind dark glasses. He wore a long pointed hat.

When he saw them, he froze. They froze too.

“She’s here!” the man bellowed. “She’s here!”

There was a commotion within. The door was pulled open, sending Obaday sprawling and the companions tumbling inside.

They were in a hall, in the center of which was a big table covered in food. Meats and cheese and fruit were piled in pyramids.

In one corner stairs led up. Deeba saw layers of smoke drifting from them, thankfully too dispersed to pay attention. The room was full of junk: suits of armor, old globes, game pieces, oily engines, and all ma

The man from the corridor ran in behind them and slammed the door. Deeba and her companions faced the Hex.

There were three men and three women, all freakishly similar to each other. They wore identical jackets and trousers and conical hats. Each hat had different letters neatly stitched into it. The man who’d followed them in had i. The others had iv, ii, v, vi, and iii.

“Quick!” shouted the book. “Before they cast a spell!”

“Get her!” shouted the man wearing i. “It’s the girl.”

“You heard Aye,” said a woman who wore iv.

Jones reached for his club. Before he had a chance to move, the Hex pointed at Deeba with a simultaneous motion. They all spoke a word at the same instant.

“Alive!”

“Come!”

“Girl!”

“That!”

“And!”

“Get!”

A crackle of light burst from each of their forefingers, flew together, and became one. It zipped through the air, whining.

Obaday appeared in front of Deeba. He still held his little mirror, and he swung it like a racket. He intercepted the humming light and belted it out of the air, as if returning a serve. It slammed with a phutt! into the table.

“How’d you move so fast?” gaped Jones.

The couturier looked rather amazed himself.

“But…I don’t think it was going to hit her,” said Lectern.

“They were aiming at that armor,” said the book. “That was an ordersquito.”

The companions looked at the armor, then at each other. Then at Obaday’s mirror, and finally at the end of the table, where the little spell had been deflected.

On the table, one of the huge piles of fruit rumbled, spilled, tumbled into a new configuration, and stood up.

86. The Unintended Attacker

The fruit-thing rose, and unfolded.

It was taller than Jones. Deeba saw pears and peaches, apples and grapefruit all moving together like muscles. It stretched out arms at the end of which were bunches of bananas splayed into open hands. Its head was a watermelon, with bulging kiwi-fruit eyes.

The thing looked ridiculous.

“We’re being menaced by fruit?” said Obaday sarcastically. “Oh scary.”

“Wait!” said the book, and “No!” said Jones, but Obaday had picked up a knife from the table and swung it casually at the thing.

The fruit-figure caught Obaday’s wrist with one of its bunch-of-banana hands, and it began to squeeze. Obaday stared at it in astonishment, and then cried out in pain. The melon-head was mouthlessly snarling.

“Not what we had in mind,” said one of the Hex.

“We were thinking of a tin-man sort of thing,” said another.

“But a fructbot will do,” finished a third.

There was a crack from Obaday’s wrist, and he screamed.

The fruit-monster swung cherries and strawberries and black currants sausaged into a tail, ending in a pineapple like a spiked club. It sent Obaday sailing through the air to land with a horrible thud.

The fruit-devil raised its banana claws, and ran at Deeba.

The Hex laughed and watched their inadvertent creation on the rampage.

Deeba leapt away from it. Jones grabbed it and tried to electrocute it, but the charge seemed only to a

The towering fruity menace slammed its bananas and its pineapple into the wood of the table, sending food flying. Each blow bruised and smashed the fruit that made it, but the fragrant stuff still held together. Deeba dodged its sweet-smelling blows.

It stamped, and snarled, its fruit-face terrifying and malevolent, crouching like a murderer.

“Deeba!” Jones shouted. “Get out of here! Finish the job! I’ll hold it off!”

She grabbed Curdle and tensed. But she hesitated.

One of the Hex was watching her. Before she got three paces, she realized, they’d cast another spell, and this time it would hit her full-on. Obaday was unconscious, the utterlings and Lectern were useless, and Conductor Jones was being pounded by the fruit. It smacked him with blow after terrible blow.

“Right,” she said, and pulled the UnGun from her belt.

“No, Deeba!” said Jones. “You need the ammo!” He ducked, but got hit anyway by a pineapple smash. “You’ll only have one bullet left,” he groaned.

“You’ve seen what the bullets do,” said Deeba. “Whatever they have to. One’s all I’ll need.”

She pulled the trigger.

There was a reverberating UnGun roar.

The report stung Deeba’s hands, but she kept her stance, lowered the UnGun a little, to aim at the astonished Hex.

From the tiny spaces between the fruit of the attacker’s body rushed rapacious black specks. A tide of hungry ants.

The fructbot turned and spun on its heel, raised its hands, and beat itself with its tail. But though it must have mashed thousands of the insects, millions remained, racing over it and its crevices and chomping with their little scissor-jaws. Deeba could actually hear a whisper of munching.

“It’s not enough to hit it,” she said to Jones. “You have to actually take bits away.”

The fruit figure was shrinking fast, its struggles weaker and weaker.

A trail of ants was crossing the floor in a line, disappearing into a crack in the floor, each bearing a nugget of fruit-flesh.

“To be honest,” Deeba said, “I was sort of hoping it might be one giant one.”

“Stop staring at that thing and look at the Hex!” the book shouted. Deeba spun.

The Hex stood grim and angry, their hands clenched in a complicated six-way clasp. Jones tried to vault the remains of the table to get to them, but he was way too battered. They glanced at him and spoke simultaneously.

“Where!”

“Now!”

“Are!”

“Stay!”

“You!”

“Right!”

Jones froze. His eyes shifted from side to side, but he couldn’t move.

The Hex stared at Deeba.

“Forget taking her for questioning,” spat the one called ivv. They shouted words again.

“Time!”

“It’s!”

“Heart!”

“Your!”

“Beating!”