CHAPTER ONEBad News
'No, no, Iggy, you're hopeless! How on earth are we going to convince the neighbours you're just an ordinary cat if you can't even manage to chase a ball like a normal kitten?'
Ben shook his head at his cat in frustration. Some new people had recently moved in next door, and Iggy had complained that the woman kept giving him funny looks, as if she knew more than she was letting on, so Ben had been trying to teach him how to behave like a 'normal' cat.
Now Iggy -- known in another world as Ignatius Sorvo Coromandel, or The Wanderer -- sat and watched as Ben got down on his hands and knees and tried unsuccessfully to fish the last ball of screwed-up newspaper out from under the dresser where he'd just hit it. All this paper ball chasing was getting really, really annoying. He'd played along with Ben for a while, catching the ball, juggling it, running around, batting it from paw to paw like some clever furry footballer; but now he was very, very bored. He'd managed to get rid of about a dozen of the irritating newspaper balls now -- just out of Ben's reach beneath the carved Welsh dresser with all Mrs Arnold's best china on it -- and Ben still hadn't worked out that he was doing it on purpose. Which was probably because Iggy had perfected the 'oops-nearly-had-it-that-time, what-a-butterpaws-I-am!' technique of knocking each new ball just a bit too hard so that it shot across the floor and under the dresser.
Games. Humans seemed to love them. He couldn't imagine why. Safely unwatched, the little black-and-brown cat yawned grotesquely, then stuck his tongue out at the boy's back. 'I'm not an ordinary cat,' he rasped, his voice all sandpaper and vinegar. 'And I ain't no kitten.'
Ben pushed himself back upright and stared at his friend crossly with his mismatched eyes, one a sensible hazel-brown, the other an odd and vivid green. 'Well, I know that, and you know that, but you're supposed to be undercover! Cats with special wayfaring skills from the Secret Country are a bit hard to come by. You might find yourself getting caught and sold off...to some horrid petshop or something.'
Iggy sniffed. 'That's not funny, Sonny Jim.'
Ben had, in fact, rescued the little talking cat from Mr Dodd's Pet Emporium, a strange shop full of peculiar and remarkable animals, many of whom had been smuggled in from the Secret Country of Eidolon, where all the magical and extinct creatures live. But that had been before Ben had known anything about the Shadow World; or Mr Dodds (who in the Secret Country walked eight feet tall and had the head of an enormous dog); or that his own mother was Queen of Eidolon, which made him a halfling prince -- half of this world (since his dad was human) and half of the other: hence his different coloured eyes.
'Look, just one more try, eh?' said Ben, trying to sound reasonable. It was for Iggy's own good, after all.
'There's no more newspaper,' Iggy growled. 'You used it all up.' He gave Ben a smug sort of look: though because of all his fur it wasa little hard to judge his expression. Cats use their eyebrows a lot to express themselves, and they have the gift of being able to see exactly how another cat is using its eyebrows, but humans are a bit stupid like that and find it hard to tell just where a cat's eyebrows finish and the rest of its fur begins. Ben laughed. 'You don't get off that lightly: there's always more newspaper. It's under the sink.' And off he went to the kitchen to fetch some.
Iggy watched the boy's retreating back furiously. Under the sink. He might have known. Everything that didn't have a proper place anywhere else in the house got kept under the sink. Sometimes he thought it was where he belonged. Iggy sighed and ambled over to gaze boredly out of the window. Something moved, fast, a movement he caught just out of the corner of his eye. He blinked, then looked again, but all he could see was a falling leaf, a red and gold twist of fire, spiralling down out of the old oak treeto join a thousand other autumn leaves on the shaggy grass beneath it. Time was passing, in this world and the shadow world. Who knew what might be happening in Eidolon now?
He stared at the tree, as if it might give up its secrets to him; but nothing else seemed to be stirring out there.
'Come on, Ig, pay attention!'
Ben held out another ball of newspaper and Iggy sighed. Turning his back on the window, he tried to look alert and interested, but it was pretty hard. The ball went up into the air and he batted at it half-heartedly.
'Oh, Iggy, honestly!'
The thing had got itself caught up on the little cat's claws. Ignatius Sorvo Coromandel shook his paw in irritation, but all that happened was that the paper ball started to unravel itself. He stood on a corner and pulled at it with his teeth. Nothing happened. This was not very dignified, particularly for a cat of hisprestigious heritage. His father had climbed the highest mountain in Eidolon, and his mother had been a great explorer; but here was their one and only son, The Wanderer, with a piece of dirty newspaper stuck on his paw. He growled at it; but that did not achieve anything at all. He gave it an extra-hard tug and, with a sudden roar, the paper ripped away from his grasp and lay there on the carpet, defeated at last. 'Grrr!' said Iggy, standing over it. 'Grrrrr!!'
Ben shook his head. His friend had clearly gone quite mad. 'Oh, Iggy, for goodness' sake, do stop it. It's only a bit of paper!'
But the little cat's muzzle was screwed up in an expression of sheer loathing. Ben sighed and bent to pick up the offending scrap.
'Oh no ...'
There, square in the middle of the newspaper, on what had clearly been the front page of the Greening & Bixbury Times, was a grainy black and white photograph of someone horribly familiar. And under it ran the story:
LOCAL PRISON BREAK-OUT
'That's the beast who hit me over the head when I came through the wild road!' Iggy growled. 'Grrrrrr!'
The wild roads run between our world and the Secret Country, and only a few folk know where their entrances can be found, or how to travel along them. Ben had travelled the wild road into Eidolon through the great stone in Aldstane Park many times now, more or less safely.
'Yes, that's Awful Uncle Aleister,' Ben concurred, studying the photo with a sinking heart.
'What does it say?' the little cat demanded in his gravelly voice. 'He's still safely in prison, isn't he?' The fur had started to bristle on his neck.
Ben started to read:
'Ardbar Prison was last night the scene of a dramatic jailbreak. At around nine o'clock inmates report hearing a tremendous noise. "We thought it were a gas explosion at first," said Rodney Lightfoot (serving eleven years for catburglary), "because the kitchens're in a right dodgy state here." Then someone said, "It must be a bomb!' and then the power failed and all the lights went out. It were mayhem."
Prison Governor Collier takes up the story. "We implemented emergency measures and my officers immediately sealed the perimeter and encouraged the men to return to their rooms, where we locked them in for their own safety. However, when the back-up generator kicked in and the floodlights came on, we found there was a huge hole in the east wing and that one of our inmates was missing."
Prison officer Mr A. Tookey had come off duty earlier in the evening and headed as usual for the Red Lion public house. On returning to Ardbar to retrieve items he had left in the staffroom there, and he made a bizarre sighting: "There was smoke and dust everywhere; but out of the middle of it came a massive great ugly woman -- at least I think it was a woman -- I mean, some of the girls around here are pretty big, but even by local standards she was a real monster, about nine foot tall, with a load of orange and black hair and great big...er -- "'
'Grizelda!' exclaimed Iggy. 'That's got to be a description of that awful ogress who hangs around with the Dodman!'
Ben nodded grimly. 'It does sound rather like her.' He read on:
'"Anyway this, um, thing came out of there with a portlylooking chap tucked under her arm. Then all the smoke and dust and stuff swirled out on the perimeter field, and I thought it was a helicopter or something. Except it was really quiet, and those choppers generally make quite a racket. But when the smoke cleared I got the shock of my life: it was a bl***y great monster with a pointy head and these huge, batlike wings, just like this picture of a dinosaur I used to have on my bedroom wall when I was a lad! And then the woman-thing sticks the chap on the dinosaur's back and off they all go, up into the sky."
There were no other witnesses to this strange account, and other regulars at the Red Lion report that the officer had "been really hammered" and was prone to exaggeration when "under the influence".
"Last year it was flying saucers," said barmaid Sally Ellery, rolling her eyes.
However, the Gazette can report that our reporter spotted some enormous footprints in the grounds outside the walls of the east wing that did not resemble anything he had seen before. We called in dinosaur expert, Professor Hugh Juggley-Twitt, to examine the evidence.
Professor Twitt was initially circumspect in his assessment. "They look rather similar to casts made of footprints found in the Mid West of America which may date back to the late Cretaceous period. But those prints belonged to a species of flying dinosaur called a Pterosaur which has been extinct on this planet for the best part of 150 million years. So, obviously, these can't belong to anything like that! It must be a hoax."
We pressed the Professor for his opinion of what else might have made the marks, but he laughed nervously and said something about his reputation going up in smoke if we quoted him further, and left in a hurry; but not without taking several photographs of the footprints, "for future reference".'
'Wow!' said Ben. 'A dinosaur! Do you really think it is?'
'It's probably all a big mistake.' Iggy wasn't going to be drawn on the subject. '...
