Muddle and Win (5 page)

There was a short silence in the briefing room. It was the sort of silence that felt horribly like the descent of a huge brass hammer.

‘Your mission, Agent Muddlespot. Infiltrate. Contact. Arrange defection. We’ll handle everything else.’

Muddlespot squinted at the flames. He wondered how many agents had been sent on Mission Alpha before him. And what had happened to them. And how many of them had finished up in his dustpan.

He had an uncomfortable feeling that it had been rather a lot.

Infiltrate
. Well, that should be easy enough.

‘We go through the trap door?’ he asked.

‘Normally we would, but  . . .’

‘ . . . It’s, uh, blocked.’

‘Blocked?’ squeaked Muddlespot.

You couldn’t
block
the trap door. You could lock it, weigh it down, sit over it armed with fiery swords and that, but there had to be a way of getting through. That was the point.

‘We’ve tried it. The whole upper shaft is blocked. To a depth of about fifty fathoms.’

‘What with?’

‘We
think
it’s pure diamond. No way through it. To get into her head, we have to do it the hard way – to Earth first, and then in through an eye or ear, without the subject realizing it’s us.’

‘Insinuation, we call it,’ said the other guard.

‘And the – er – Sleepless Watch?’ Muddlespot ventured timidly. He had heard that bit and hadn’t liked it at all. He knew what it meant. It meant the Enemy. It meant angels.

Angels were not called ‘angels’ in Pandemonium. The messages that came up from Low Command gave them names such as ‘The Unenlightened’, ‘The Accursed’, ‘The Braindead’ or ‘The People Who Have
Really
Got It Coming’. But the rank and file – the guys
who
had to go up there and meet them face to face – just called them ‘The Fluffies’ and shot on sight.

Muddlespot had never met an angel and he didn’t want to. He saw them occasionally in the carvings on the palace walls and that was already quite enough. They were stern-eyed figures with wings, carrying lances of lightning and swords of fire that looked every bit as dangerous as Corozin’s brass hammer. (Some of their harps and trumpets looked pretty dangerous too.)

The palace carvings, of course, always showed the angels getting the worst of things. In fact, some of the most humorous scenes featured large numbers of angels very much on the receiving end. Muddlespot was not fooled. He thought about those trumpets and wondered how he could possibly duck a hail of B flats.

He probably wouldn’t even hear them coming.

‘You’ll, er, take care of them for me?’ he pleaded.

‘Death to the Fluffies,’ intoned one guard.

The other held out a claw. A small pile of little black spherical objects appeared in his talons. ‘Your tar bombs, Agent Muddlespot. Guaranteed to stick a Fluffy’s feathers when used at close range.’

‘Your pitchfork,’ said the first guard, producing one. ‘To operate, grip firmly and thrust. In the right hands it will pierce the heavenliest of heavenly armour.’

Muddlespot looked at his hands.

‘Your communications set: dish, powder, matches  . . . Use to report success only.’

‘Pentagram, five-point, summoning for the use of—’

‘Runes, mystic, casting for the use of—’

‘Furnace, No. 19 portable—’

‘Standard Disguise Set: Handsome Stranger, Fellow Traveller, Suave Gentleman—’

‘Enhanced Disguise Set: Headmaster, Web Pal, Stand-Up Comedian—’

‘Don’t use the Headmaster – his cover’s been blown—’

‘And your Battle Manual, edition MCCCLXXVIII, latest issue from Low Command.’ Both guards saluted.

The Battle Manual was a huge book, bound in black marble with brass fittings and pages of silky-smooth leather, or possibly human skin. It was four times the size of Muddlespot himself and creaked evilly when the guards rested it against the pile of other equipment that had suddenly accumulated in that little room. In the black marble burned letters of fire. They read:
How to Tempt
.

‘Um  . . .’ said Agent Muddlespot, eyeing the teetering pile of equipment.

All right. He probably
could
carry it all. Carrying was just a matter of quantity, and quantity isn’t the same in Pandemonium. But how was he going to keep it all sorted? How would he remember, in an emergency, what did what? He could just see himself reaching for a tar bomb and pulling out the furnace instead. A well-aimed furnace might pack more punch than an angelic piccolo, but there was no way it was going to beat one on the draw. He’d have been happier if they had just handed him a nice brass dustpan and brush.

‘Synchronize watches,’ intoned one guard, adjusting a large timepiece that had just appeared attached to his wrist.

‘Mars is in Sagittarius  . . .’ replied the other, doing the same.

‘Er – should I have a watch too?’ asked Muddlespot.

He had a sudden sinking feeling that time was running out.

He was right.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Er  . . .’

‘Then let’s
GO
! Let’s
GO
!’

AT THE END
of the corridor was a narrow flight of stairs. Up these stairs Muddlespot ran, with the guards urging him on from before and behind. His kit was in his sack and the sack was on his shoulder, and his tongue was hanging out with the effort of moving it all so far and so fast. Things scuttled in the shadows and whipped out of sight as he passed. Carved faces screamed at him silently. Up he ran, six flights, from the very bottom of the palace to the roof that looked out over the spires of Pandemonium.

Here on the flat terrace was a flying machine, built of batskin stretched over a frame that might have been mere wood but was probably bone. It was a twisted, lopsided, slithery thing, like a huge insect that had fallen in someone’s bath and then been
hit
with the soap. By the time Muddlespot hauled himself out onto the roof, the leading guard had already put on some goggles and a flying scarf and was swinging the propeller. The machine buzzed sickeningly into life.

‘Chocks away!’ roared the guards, as they bundled into the cockpit.

Of course it was Muddlespot who had to pull the little horn-shaped chocks away from the wheels, and then run after the machine, which had started to canter across the roof terrace, and pile both himself and his kit sack into the back seat – where, it turned out, there was no seat, let alone a seatbelt or life jacket or nice smiling person telling him how to fasten one and blow the whistle on the other. (Corozin was, in fact, a fairly minor figure in Pandemonium, and his private airline was as basic as they came.)

The nose lifted. The rooftop dropped away beneath them. They soared out over the gulf of Pandemonium. All the brass spires pointed up towards them like the trunks of slender conifers on a mountainside ablaze. Before them was darkness, and into the darkness they steered, on and on.

The distant glow from the city behind them reflected on something ahead. It was a gate, with nine
doors
made of iron and brass and adamantine rock. It grew as they flew towards it.

It grew and grew, until it seemed the size of a small mountain and wide enough for an army of giants to march out in line abreast. Muddlespot went from wondering who was going to open it for them to wondering if there was really anyone anywhere who was big enough to open it at all.

Still it grew, huge, blank, impenetrable, and now Muddlespot saw that the whole adventure was going to end right there. Because, plainly, and whatever the guards and even Corozin might say, that gate just wasn’t going to open for them.

It didn’t open. It went on growing until the rivets were the size of hillocks and the nearest keyhole was like the mouth of a huge cave, yawning wider and wider as if to swallow them  . . .

And it did. They flew through the keyhole with the guards whooping and cackling like children in a tunnel. Their voices echoed round the iron chamber and struck sparks from the metal. Then they were out into the wild abyss beyond, which was made of heat and cold and wet and dry, and was torn by great winds that tossed their craft to and fro and up and down, until Muddlespot’s eyes bobbled in his
head
and he began to feel very uncomfortable indeed.

And on they flew. And on. Until the clouds parted, and they were skimming over the rooftops of Darlington Row.

‘Alert!’ cried an angel, high on a crystal tower. A thousand amber eyes opened.

(That was his watch mate, waking up. Angels are not challenged in the eye department. They can have as many as they need. A watch angel needs quite a lot of them.)

Together they looked at the scene below. They called the Seraph. In an instant he was with them. All along the watchtowers a shudder ran – the militant rustle of a million soft white feathers. Something was happening.

Cold-eyed, lean-jawed, the Seraph brooded like a thundercloud. He uttered a single word. ‘Scramble!’

Golden trumpets blew. Flights of doves exploded from the towers like thistledown in a wind. They banked, one squadron after another, and swooped down upon Earth. Over the air came a message, loud and clear:
‘Enemy craft approaching the Darlington Sector. Intercept and destroy!’

There it was, a dark and clumsy insect, chugging steadily across the skies to the very heart of the High Security Zone. A sitting target.

The squadrons banked in pursuit.

Muddlespot was struggling into a parachute that the guards had passed back to him. It was the act of shrugging the awkward thing onto his shoulders that made him tilt his head back and lift his eyes to the sky – the sky of white, puffy clouds that now, suddenly, seemed to be speckling with little black dots. Little black
fast-moving
dots.

He gaped at them for a moment. Then he let out a shriek.

One of the guards looked up. ‘Doves at six o’clock high!’ he cried. ‘Evasive action!’

The hell-plane flipped onto its side and dropped like a stone. Pursued by the threatening coos of enraged doves, it zigzagged desperately over the neat front gardens of Darlington Row. The air hissed. Little white missiles showered all around them. Three landed in a row within inches of Muddlespot’s nose, and burned a neat line of holes in the bat skin. The holes smoked at the edges.

‘Aaahahaahah!’ cried a guard in terror, as the plane
flung
itself to the right and the first dove squadron peeled away.

‘Five o’clock! Five o’clock!’ cried his fellow.

‘And three and seven and eight o’clock!’ screamed Muddlespot, who had taken the time to look around.

In they came, merciless, swooping out of the sun  . . .

And you can weave and spin, you can dive and climb and do Immelmann turns, but there’s no evading the doves. You can run, but they’re faster than you are. And you can’t hide. They get you whatever you do. They get you every time.

(Just ask anyone who owns a car.)

In they came. Again the sky hissed. Little piles of dove poo splattered on the wings. The engine coughed. A sulphurous fume flew back from the cowling and blinded Muddlespot where he sat. The attacking squadron banked away but others were still pursuing. The sky was full of enemies, swift, implacable and armed to the anus.

‘Target ahead!’ cried one of the guards.

Trailing a stream of yellow smoke, the machine shot through an open window. Muddlespot, peering fearfully from his seat, looked out on a landscape of
carpet
and tablecloth and doorways and cat bowls all reeling backwards beneath him.

‘Get ready to jump!’

Everything was spinning. Now, what was beneath him was an upside-down lamp and shade sprouting from a very upside-down ceiling. And above him, also upside down, drifted the face of Sally Jones, huge, saying something like ‘
Let me do that for you
.’

‘Jump, Muddlespot! Jump!’ screamed a guard as everything righted itself.

‘Um – I’ve got this sudden pain!’ wailed Muddlespot.

‘Send us a card about it! JUMP!’

‘But I don’t want to die!’

A long, leathery arm reached back from the cockpit and grabbed him by the neck. ‘
Sure
you do!’ the guard cried. And hurled him out into space.

Air rushing  . . .

Insides wriggling in terror  . . .

Which way is up?

A moment ago,
that
was  . . .

A chaos of light, and of unfamiliar things, spinning before his eyes  . . .

And some of it is getting horribly nearer, horribly quickly  . . .

The air is bellowing in his ears  . . .

WHACK!

Miraculously, the parachute had opened above him. The canopy billowed into a beautiful, comforting half-sphere, with a pair of jaunty slit eyes and horns blazoned on the middle of it. Somewhere above him the wounded machine flew on, its engine coughing and its smoke-trail thickening. The ground was swaying up to meet him, but no longer rushing as if to crush him to pulp. He had time to look around, to try to understand this place that was to be his field of action, and that he had never seen before.

The smells hit him immediately. They were strong and unfamiliar. Soap scum, leather, carpet dust and old cat – he knew none of them. He recognized the scent of an oven (there were quite a lot of ovens in Pandemonium), but the sweet, moist overlay was totally new to him. He knew nothing about baking. Ovens were for meat – preferably meat that was still living. Dough was to Muddlespot as sunspots would be to an Amazonian slug. It just did not compute.