SandRider Read online

  “And then Sam will be better?” asked Kaznim.

  The Queen blinked away tears. “I hope so. I really, really hope so.” She stood up quickly and brushed her hand across her face. “I must go,” she said. “I’m going to find Mum and Dad. I have to tell them.”

  Kaznim nodded. So this must be a Princess, not a Queen, she thought. She was impressed that the King and Queen would want to know about Sam Heap. Most Kings and Queens didn’t care at all if one of their subjects was ill. “It is nice of the King and Queen to care so much,” she ventured shyly.

  The “Princess” looked puzzled and then she smiled. “Oh, there isn’t a King here,” she said. “There’s just me. I’m the Queen. I meant Sam’s Mum and Dad, who are mine, too.” The Queen reached down and held Kaznim’s hand once more. “Thank you for helping Sam,” she said, then she turned, ran to the stairs and jumped on. Amazed, Kaznim watched the light sparkle off the Queen’s golden crown as the stairs took her slowly down.

  Kaznim spent the next ten minutes occupied with wondering if Sam Heap was a prince. Surely he must be, if he shared his parents with the Queen. But if that was so, why wasn’t Sam the King? In Kaznim’s country a girl only got to be Queen if she had no brothers. It didn’t make any sense at all. But then not much in this strange place did.

  The Sick Bay corridor fell quiet and Kaznim sat in the shadows, bored and lonely. It was then she remembered, somewhat guiltily now, the gold box that she had stolen from Subhan-Subhan. Glad of something to do, she took the box from her pocket and ran her fingers over the ancient gold streaked with blue, the battered edges and dark metal hinges. Then she pulled open the clasp and looked inside. Nestling in a shaped bed of red velvet was the most exquisitely tiny hourglass that Kaznim had ever seen. Very carefully she lifted it from its bed and held it up. She had seen hourglasses before, full of sand, which ran through at a steady pace. But this one was different. Made of gold and lapis, it contained little silver grains that shone even in the dim lights of the corridor. It was exquisite. Entranced, Kaznim stared at it. There were many more grains of silver in one half than in the other, so she turned the hourglass so that most of them were in the top half and she could see them cascade down. To her surprise, they did not move. She turned it around, around, and then around again, yet not one of the grains dropped through. Kaznim was giving it one last go when, to her amazement, a grain of silver floated up from the bottom of the hourglass and buried itself in the mass of grains in the top. Kaznim nearly dropped it in shock. It was Magyk.

  Kaznim stared at the hourglass. This must be what the Egg Boy called his Egg Timer—the one he’d boasted that the sorcerer had given him. Kaznim remembered now that the Egg Boy had said that a grain went through once every three hours. She looked at the small huddle of grains left. If only she could count them, she would know how long it would be until her little sister, Bubba, was safe. The hourglass was a frightening reminder of the power that the sorcerer Oraton-Marr had over her family. Someone rushed past into the Sick Bay and Kaznim quickly shoved the Egg Timer into her pocket.

  Kaznim pushed away thoughts of her mother and sister. She blinked back tears and returned to studying the box. In two neat piles on either side of the empty hourglass bed were thick cards of different colors and shades. She took the cards out and saw a sprinkling of sand lying at the bottom of the box. Kaznim ran her finger across the sand, and felt even more homesick. She played with it for a while, letting it slide back and forth across the polished silver inside the box, then, afraid of losing the precious sand, she put the lid on the box and began to look at the cards.

  There were twelve cards, ranging from a deep purple to bright, fiery red. Kaznim laid the cards out on the bench beside her and, beginning with the darkest purple card, she fanned them out and smiled—she had found a rainbow inside a pot of gold.

  Kaznim looked at the cards more closely. On each one was a diagram of a cut-through egg with a small creature curled up inside it. She noticed that in each image the creature grew a little, beginning as a tiny shrimp and finishing as a perfect little dragon. Kaznim was so engrossed in the pictures that she did not notice the ExtraOrdinary Wizard emerge from the Sick Bay. The first she knew of him was when his shadow fell across the cards, like that of a sand eagle falling over a small desert creature. Hastily, she gathered the cards together.

  “Ah,” the ExtraOrdinary Wizard said. “Still here?”

  Kaznim nodded. She wondered where else he thought she might go. She noticed that his gaze was fixed on the pile of cards.

  “Nice pictures,” he said. “What are they?”

  Kaznim thought fast. “They’re a card game. You . . . you play it on your own.” She looked up to see if he believed her. It was hard to tell. His green eyes looked cloudy and he had a deep frown between them.

  “I’m glad you have something to pass the time,” he said. “It must be boring for you, stuck here.”

  Kaznim nodded. She felt bad about lying. But the pictures on the cards belonged to home, to her desert and the hot sands. Kaznim found she even felt proprietorial about the horrible Egg Boy and the Egg. It was her world and it wasn’t any business of the strangers in this noisy, heavy stone tower. Defiantly—for she could tell that the ExtraOrdinary Wizard wanted to look at the cards more closely—she put the cards back into the box and closed the lid with a snap.

  The sudden wail of the emergency siren from the stairs stopped the ExtraOrdinary Wizard from asking anything more. The stairs sped up and he hurried over to wait beside them. Kaznim shoved the gold box deep into her tunic pocket.

  “Marcellus!” she heard the ExtraOrdinary Wizard say. “Hurry. There’s not a moment to lose.”

  Kaznim saw a youngish man in black and gold with his hair styled in a strange bowl cut stumble awkwardly off the stairs. He was carrying a small leather case that reminded Kaznim of her mother’s Apothecary bag. The ExtraOrdinary Wizard grabbed his arm and hurried him along the corridor into the Sick Bay. The doors swung closed and once again all was quiet. Kaznim looked back at the stairs, expecting Tod to arrive, but there was no sign of her. There was nothing she could do but sit and wait. Which is what she did. Occasionally someone hurried into the Sick Bay but no one thought to come out and tell her how Sam was. Or to ask how she was.

  Time ticked slowly by and Kaznim sat in the empty corridor, biting back tears. She felt utterly deserted.

  JO-JO

  Tod had been delayed by searching for the last of Sam’s brothers. She had eventually found Jo-Jo Heap moping alone in the rooms of his on-off girlfriend—a young witch named Marissa of whom not one of his family approved. When she finally hurried Jo-Jo along the Sick Bay corridor, Kaznim was lying curled up on the bench, asleep. A pang of guilt stabbed Tod as she and Jo-Jo slipped into the Sick Bay.

  Marcellus Pye was sitting at the table packing a variety of small shiny instruments into his bag. He was surrounded by all the Heap brothers—except for Jo-Jo and Sam himself. Next to Marcellus sat Septimus, his purple robes splattered with dark stains of blood. Beside Septimus, Edd was busy writing up some notes for Dandra, then there was Nicko Heap, his sunburned face and brightly braided hair looking out of place in the sparse whiteness of the Sick Bay. Erik was talking in a low voice to the oldest Heap brother, Simon, who wore a similar black tunic to Marcellus although less encrusted with gold and, Tod noticed, less encrusted with blood, too.

  When Jo-Jo came in they all looked up at the same time and Tod had the odd sensation of five identical pairs of eyes acting as one.

  “You took your time,” Erik growled.

  Jo-Jo looked flustered. He was still embarrassed to have been found tearfully waiting in Marissa’s rooms. At the sound of Tod’s footsteps on the stairs, Jo-Jo had thrown the door open and said, “Oh, Marissa, please—” and had then realized who it was. He had tried to close the door on Tod, and it was only when she had told him about Sam that Jo-Jo relented and agreed to come.

  “Where’s Sam?” Jo-Jo asked, trying to make
up for his lateness. “Can I see him?”

  “I’ll take you through,” said Septimus.

  Tod and Jo-Jo followed Septimus into the Quiet Room. Sam was sleeping peacefully on his high, narrow bed, with, to Jo-Jo’s surprise, a tortoise resting on a clean white bandage wrapped tightly around his stomach. Marwick was dozing in a chair beside him and on the other side of the bed sat Dandra, watching her patient, her fingers resting lightly on his wrist.

  Dandra looked up and smiled wearily. “He’s very weak,” she said. “He’s lost so much blood. But they got the blade out.” She pointed to an oblong metal dish resting on a table beneath a small, high window.

  Septimus picked up the dish and showed it to Jo-Jo and Tod. “Vicious thing,” he said. A long, thin sliver of steel lay at the bottom of the dish, bright and sharp in a sudden shaft of moonlight. The ghostly inhabitants of the Quiet Room glanced at one another. Some of them were almost transparent, shocked by what they had recently witnessed.

  Jo-Jo, too, was shocked. “Cool,” he said, trying to hide his dismay at how ill his brother looked. “Yeah. Totally cool.”

  There was a strained silence and then Dandra said, “Alice, you look exhausted. Time for bed.”

  SNEAK PEEK

  Tod wandered out through the stillness of the nighttime Sick Bay, past the subdued group of Heaps who had settled down for the night vigil, and slipped silently into the dimly lit corridor. She was so tired that she would have walked straight past Kaznim without a thought, had a small snuffle not alerted her to the presence of a curled-up form sleeping on the waiting bench.

  Bother, thought Tod. The last thing she wanted was to have to wake Kaznim, get her back down the stairs and then find somewhere for her to sleep—which was not going to be easy, as the dorm was full. Sternly, Tod told herself not to be so mean. Kaznim was lost and alone in a strange place and she knew only too well how that felt.

  Tod went over to Kaznim and shook her gently. “Kaznim. Kaznim . . . wake up.” The girl stirred and her arm knocked something to the floor. It landed with a clatter and Tod knelt down to pick it up. It was a gold box. The lid had come off and some multicolored cards had spilled out. Tod gathered the cards together and as she touched each one a faint buzz of alien Magyk fluttered through her fingers. Tod was surprised—she hadn’t thought that Kaznim had anything Magykal about her.

  In the dimness of the corridor’s nightlights, Tod could not see if she had found all the cards. Not wanting to lose any of what was obviously Kaznim’s treasured possession, she took a small FlashLight from her Apprentice belt—a thin green cylinder with a black spot at one end and a white spot at the other. Tod pressed the white spot and a beam of darkness shone from the black. Blearily, she pressed the black spot and a needle-sharp beam of light came shining out from the white. She scanned the floor beneath the bench looking for any stray cards and found a surprising amount of grit and two cards: a bright red and a pale blue. On the red card the FlashLight showed the diagram of a tiny dragon curled within an oval.

  Intrigued, Tod sat down on the bench beside Kaznim—who was still deeply asleep—and looked at the cards. At first glance the drawing on each card looked very similar. They both had the outline of the oval within which a little creature lay. But the pale blue card showed a more simple shape, whereas the red one showed a perfectly formed tiny dragon. Tod gazed at them both for some seconds, and then with a jolt, she realized what she was looking at. It was a cut-through of an egg, and the blue card showed the dragon at an earlier stage of development. Or was it, Tod suddenly thought with a stab of excitement, an Orm?

  With all traces of sleepiness now gone, Tod took the rest of the cards from the box and spread them out on the bench. She glanced guiltily at Kaznim. Something told her that Kaznim would not approve of this. In the beam of her FlashLight, Tod began to examine the cards, which were numbered from one to twelve. As she concentrated on putting them in order, the FlashLight beam strayed onto Kaznim’s face. The girl’s eyelids fluttered and suddenly she was awake. Kaznim sat up with a start.

  “It’s all right, Kaznim,” Tod murmured, hurriedly shoving the cards back into the box.

  Kaznim stared at Tod, for a moment wondering where she was—and then she remembered. She looked down and saw her box in Tod’s hands. “That’s mine,” she said. “Give it back.”

  “Here you are,” Tod said. “It fell on the floor.”

  Kaznim looked at Tod suspiciously, then she checked the box. Something was missing. “My sand!” she cried out, jumping down from the bench. “You’ve lost my sand!”

  Tod realized what the grit actually was. “It fell out,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Yes there is! We can sweep it up!” Kaznim was distraught. “It’s my sand. From home. My sand . . .” With that she burst into tears.

  Tod kneeled down and shone her FlashLight beam onto the floor. She was still learning Basyk Magyk, and one of the simple spells she had read—although not yet practiced—was a Collecting spell for small particles. Tod decided to try it. Anything was better than scraping sand off the floor at half past one in the morning with a grumpy little girl eyeballing her.

  The excitement of trying some Magyk for a real purpose drove the sleep from Tod’s fuzzy head. From her Apprentice belt, she took a small piece of ancient Magyk paper. She laid it on the floor and placed a grain of Kaznim’s precious sand on the middle of it. Then, muttering, “Like to like together spin, like to like gather in,” Tod made a circling sign above the paper with her right index finger. There was a small blue flash and the grains of sand began to whizz around in circles. In the beam of her FlashLight, Tod saw them heading toward the paper. “Like tiny ants,” she murmured, smiling at her success.

  Suddenly the sand stopped its orderly procession toward the paper. The grains began to run around the floor as though they had grown legs. Tod stared at them in dismay. What had gone wrong? And then she realized. She had forgotten that simple spells stay open until their task is done. The spell was now making the sand behave like tiny ants. Relieved that she had not likened the sand to spiders—Tod had a fear of spiders—she muttered, “like sand,” and the procession resumed.

  Triumphantly, Tod tipped the sand into Kaznim’s gold box. She got no thanks at all. Kaznim snatched the box and looked at Tod with a new suspicion in her eyes. “Where’s Ptolemy?” she asked.

  “Who?” Tod asked, puzzled.

  “My tortoise. Where is he? Is he still with Sam? Is Sam all right?”

  Tod was relieved that they were on safer ground. “Sam is still very weak. But they took out a piece of a knife blade. Your tortoise is still with him. Dr. Draa says Ptolemy will help Sam get a good night’s sleep.”

  Kaznim frowned. “That’s my name,” she said.

  “What is?” asked Tod. The Magyk had left her and she felt stupid with tiredness.

  “Draa. I am Kaznim Na-Draa.”

  “What a coincidence. Well, tomorrow when you come and see Sam you will meet Dandra.”

  “Dandra?” Kaznim looked shocked. “Dandra Draa?” Dandra Draa was a name Kaznim had heard throughout her childhood. And whenever it was said, it was accompanied by a downward stab of the left thumb—the sign of the Eternal Curse.

  “Yes, Dr. Dandra Draa. She’s our physician here. She runs the Sick Bay. She is really nice.”

  “Dandra Draa is not nice,” Kaznim said very determinedly.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll like her when you meet her,” said Tod, thinking what a strange person Kaznim was turning out to be.

  “No, I won’t,” Kaznim told her. She balled her left hand into a fist, pushed her thumb out and jabbed her fist toward the floor in a movement that was full of hate. Tod stared at Kaznim, shocked. Defiantly, Kaznim returned the stare. And then, spitting out the words one by one, she said, “Dandra Draa killed my father.”

  CARDS ON THE TABLE

  A year ago the Junior Girls’ Apprentice Dorm had had a makeover. Each bed now resided wi
thin its own private, tented space. Such was the dorm’s popularity since the arrival of the tents that Apprentices who would have normally lived at home now queued up for a chance to “live in the Wizzer,” as they called the Wizard Tower. It was rare for the dorm to have a spare bed, and that night as usual there were none. Tod was so tired that she could not think where else Kaznim could sleep, so she gave up her own bed. Kaznim seemed exhausted by her outburst against Dandra and as soon as she lay down she fell into a deep sleep. Wearily, Tod went to fetch some cushions and a spare quilt—there was enough space in the tent for her to sleep on the floor.

  But Tod could not sleep. Her brain refused to switch off and thoughts whirled around her head like a merry-go-round. She lay staring up at the blue and green stripes of the silk that rose up above her, thinking about the cards in Kaznim’s box, and about the sand from Kaznim’s home. The more she thought, the more she was certain that Kaznim knew all about the Egg of the Orm. Maybe, Tod thought excitedly, she had even seen it.

  Tod made a decision—she must show the cards to Septimus. Right now. And if she was going to have to be a low-down sneaky pickpocket to get them, then that was what she would be. Stealthily, Tod pulled back Kaznim’s quilt and drew the gold box out of the sleeping girl’s pocket. Careful not to spill any of the wretched sand, Tod removed the cards, replaced the box and gently covered Kaznim up again. Then she tiptoed out of the tent into the quiet of the dorm and made her way up to the seventh floor.

  Tod burst into the Sick Bay. “Look!” she said. “Look what I found!”

  Six Heaps sitting around the central desk looked up in surprise.

  “Tod,” Septimus said wearily, “it is two o’clock in the morning. You should be asleep.”

  Tod faltered for a moment. She felt like a child who was being told off for not going to bed. But she remembered what her father used to say to her: “If you think something is important, Tod, then it is.” And so Tod pushed the cards into Septimus’s hands. “Can you Feel something?” she asked.