• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“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!”

“Stopped!”

In the split second they spoke, Deeba rearranged the words in her mind, and a dreadful fear gripped her. She wanted to pull the trigger, but—absurdly, even at that moment when everything was about to end—she remembered that she would need one bullet at least to face the Smog and she hesitated.

She could almost sense the Hex’s words flying across the air between them and her. Oh no, she thought. Her chest constricted, and she went numb.

87

Words of Persuasion

But even as a chill began to creep through Deeba’s limbs, the utterlings leapt in front of her.

Bling and Cauldron were getting fainter and fainter. She could see right through them. But it didn’t seem to affect their energy. They were jumping up and down frantically, waving their limbs.

Deeba couldn’t quite make anything out, but she had a strong sense that something was decelerating. A point of focus. A particular vibration in the air. The utterlings leapt on the spot and gesticulated. No one but the utterlings moved.

“I can’t help noticing,” Deeba said eventually, “my heart’s still beating. What exactly’s going on?”

The utterlings signed quickly at the strange patch of air. The Hex stared at them in rage and shouted again.

“Banished!”

“Words!”

“You!”

“Renegade!”

“Are!”

“Spoken!”

The utterlings redoubled their motions, and another invisible-but-detectable oddity racing towards them slowed, and stalled.

Renegade spoken words, you are banished, thought Deeba.

“Oh my,” said the book. “I think I know what’s happening. The Hex are spellspeakers—”

“But the utterlings are making their words disobey,” said Deeba.

“They’re words, and they rebelled themselves,” the book said. “They know what to say to persuade other