Magicians of Caprona - Diana Wynne Jones [38]
Then somebody cast yet another spell.
This time, it was a thick wet fog. No doubt, at the beginning, it would not have seemed so terrible, but, after all the rest, just when the fight was over, Paolo felt it was the last straw. All he could see, in front of his eyes, was thick whiteness. After he had taken a breath or so, he was coughing. He could hear coughing all around, and far off into the distance, which was the only thing which showed him he was not entirely alone. He turned his head from trying to see who else was coughing, and found he could not see Lucia. Nor could he find Bernardo, and he knew he had been holding Bernardo’s arm a second before. As soon as he realized that, he found he had lost his sense of direction too. He was all alone, coughing and shivering, in cold white emptiness.
“I am not going to lose my head,” Paolo told himself sternly. “My father didn’t, and so I shan’t. I shall find somewhere to shelter until this beastly spell is over. Then I shall go home. I don’t care if Tonino is still missing—” He stopped then, because a thought came to him, like an astonishing discovery. “We’re never going to find Tonino this way, anyway,” he said. And he knew it was true.
With his hands stretched out in front of him and his eyes spread very wide in hopes of seeing something—which was unlikely, since they were streaming from the fog, and so was his nose—Paolo coughed and sniffed and shuffled his way forward until his toes came up against stone. Paolo looked down, but he could not see what it was. He tried lifting one foot, with his toes scraping against the obstruction. And, after a few inches, the obstruction stopped and his foot shot forward. It was a ledge, then. Probably the curb. He had been near the edge of the road when he ran away from the elephant. He got both feet on the curb and shuffled forward six inches—then he fell upstairs over what seemed to be a body.
It gave Paolo such a shock that he dared not move at first. But he soon realized that the body beneath him was shivering, as he was, and trying to cough and mutter at the same time. “Holy Mary—” Paolo heard, in a hoarse blurred voice. Very puzzled, Paolo put out a careful hand and felt the body. His fingers met cold metal buttons, uniform braid, and, a little above that, a warm face—which gave a croak as Paolo’s cold hand met its mouth—and a large furry moustache beneath the nose.
Angel of Caprona! Paolo thought. It’s the Chief of Police!
Paolo got himself to his knees on what must be the steps of the Art Gallery. There was no one around he could ask, but it did not seem fair to leave someone lying helpless in the fog. It was bad enough if you could move. So hoping he was doing the right thing, Paolo knelt and sang, very softly, the most general cancel-spell he could think of. It had no effect on the fog—that was evidently very strong magic—but he heard the Chief of Police roll over on his side and groan. Boots scraped as he tested his legs. “Mamma mia!” Paolo heard him moan.
He sounded as if he wanted to be alone. Paolo left him and crawled his way up the Gallery steps. He had no idea he had reached the top, until he hit his elbow on a pillar and drove his head into Lucia’s stomach at the same moment. Both of them said some extremely unpleasant things.
“When you’ve quite finished swearing,” Lucia said at length, “you can get between these pillars with me and keep me warm.” She coughed and shivered. “Isn’t this awful? Who did it?” She coughed again. The fog had made her hoarse.
“It wasn’t us,” said Paolo. “We’d have known. Ow, my elbow!” He took hold of her for a guide and wedged himself down beside her. He felt better like that.
“The pigs,” said Lucia. “I call this a mean trick. It’s funny—you spend your life being told what pigs they are, and thinking they can’t be, really. Then you meet them, and they’re worse than you were told. Was it you singing just now?”
“I fell over the