Holly returned the salute. ‘Yes, Commander. Thank you, Commander.’
‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a debriefing with a pixie we’ve managed to place inside the goblin triads. He has been wearing a scale suit for six months and he’s having a bit of an identity crisis.’
Vinyáya left, her silver mane rippling behind her. The automatic doors closed with barely a whisper.
Foaly dragged Holly from her seat.
‘I have so much to show you,’ he babbled excitedly. ‘The fairies here are nice, but a bit on the square side. Sure they ooh and aah, but no one appreciates me like you do. We have our own shuttle port, you know. And field equipment! You are not going to believe the spec. Wait until you see the new Shimmer Suit. And the helmet! Holly, this thing comes home on its own. I built a series of mini-thrusters into the skin. It can’t fly, but it can bounce wherever you want it to. The thing is beyond genius.’
Mulch covered his ears. ‘Same old Foaly. Modest to a fault.’
Foaly aimed a kick at Mulch, pulling it at the last second.
‘Keep it up, Diggums. I could snap at any moment. I am half beast, remember.’
Mulch moved the hoof away from his face with a finger. ‘I can’t help it,’ he whined. ‘All this melodrama. Someone has to poke fun.’
Foaly turned once more to his precious wall screen. He selected and enlarged an artist’s impression of the island of Hybras.
‘I know this all sounds very cloak-and-dagger, and I know you think I’m making an anaconda out of a stinkworm. But believe me, somewhere on that island there is an unsuspecting demon who is about to make a reluctant visit to Earth and make life very difficult for us.’
Holly stepped close to the screen. Where was that reluctant demon? she wondered. And did he have any idea that he was about to be snatched from his own dimension and propelled into another?
As it happened, Holly’s questions were inaccurate on two counts. Firstly, the demon in question was not actually a demon, he was just an imp. And secondly, the imp in question was anything but reluctant. In fact, visiting Earth was his dearest wish.
CHAPTER 3: FIRST IMPRESSION
THE ISLAND OF HYBRAS, LIMBO
ONE night, Imp No1 dreamed he was a demon. He dreamed his horns were curved and pointed. His hide was coarse and armoured, and his talons were sharp enough to rip the hide from a wild boar’s back. He dreamed the other demons cowered before him, then scurried away lest he injure them while in the throes of his battle spasms.
That night he dreamed this magnificent dream, then awoke to find he was still merely an imp. Of course, technically, he did not have this dream at night. The sky over Hybras is forever tinged with the red glow of dawn. But No1 thought of his rest period as night, even though he’d never seen one.
Imp No1 dressed quickly, rushing into the hallway to check his reflection in the lodge mirror, just in case he had warped in his sleep. But there was no change. Still the same unimpressive figure as usual. One hundred per cent imp.
‘Grrr,’ he said to his image. And even the No1 in the mirror was unconvinced. And if he couldn’t scare himself, then he was not a scary creature and might as well get a job changing baby imps.
There was some potential in the mirror. Imp No1 had the general skeletal structure of a proper demon. He was about the same height as a sheep sitting on its rear. His skin was grey as moon dust and pebbled with armoured plating. Spiralling red runes wound their way round his chest, up along his neck and across his forehead. His eyes had striking orange irises, and his jaw had a noble jut about it, or so he liked to think, though others had called it protruding. He had two arms, slightly longer than an average human ten-year-old, and two legs, slightly shorter. Fingers and toes: eight of each. So nothing weird there. One tail, more of a stump, actually, but excellent for burrowing holes if you’re hunting for grubs. All in all, your typical imp. But at fourteen years old, the oldest imp in Hybras. Roughly fourteen years old, that is. It was hard to be exact when it was always dawn. The hour of power as the warlocks used to call it, before they got sucked into the depths of cold space. The hour of power. Very catchy.
Hadley Shrivelington Basset, a demon who was actually six months No1’s junior, but already fully fledged, strolled down the tiled corridor on his way to the bathroom. His horns corkscrewed impressively and his ears had at least four points. Hadley enjoyed parading his new demon self in front of the imps. Generally, demons shouldn’t even bunk in the imp lodge, but Basset seemed in no hurry to move out.
‘Hey, imp,’ he said, snapping his towel at No1’s behind. It connected with a sharp crack. ‘Are you going to warp any time soon? Maybe if I get you angry enough.’
The towel stung, but No1 didn’t get angry. Just nervous. Everything made him nervous. That was his problem.
Time for a quick subject change. ‘Morning, Basset. Nice ears.’
‘I know,’ said Hadley, tipping the points one after another. ‘Four points already and I think there’s a fifth coming up. Abbot himself only has six points.’
Leon Abbot, the hero of Hybras. The demons’ self-proclaimed saviour.
Hadley snapped No1 again with the towel.
‘Don’t you get a pain in your face, looking in the mirror, imp? Because you’re giving me a pain in mine.’
He put his hands on his hips, threw back his head and laughed. It was all very dramatic. You’d think there was an artist in the wings doing sketches.
‘Eh, Basset. You’re not wearing any silver.’
The laughing stopped, to be replaced by a froglike gurgle. Shrivelington Basset bolted down the lodge corridor without pause for more bullying. No1 knew scaring people half to death shouldn’t give him any satisfaction, and generally it wouldn’t. But for Basset, he’d make an exception. Not wearing silver on your person is much more than a fashion disaster for a demon or imp. For them it can be fatal, or worse. Painful for all eternity. This rule usually only applied by the volcano crater, but luckily Basset was too scared to remember that.
No1 ducked back into the senior imp dorm, hoping his room-mates were still snoring. No such luck. They were knuckling the sleep from their eyes and already searching for the target of their daily ribbing, which was of course him. He was by far the oldest in the senior dorm – no one else had made it to fourteen without warping. It was getting to the point where he was a permanent fixture. Each night his legs protruded from the foot of the bed, and his blanket barely covered the swirling moon markings on his chest.
‘Hey, Runt,’ called one. ‘Are you going to warp today, do you think? Or will pink flowers grow out of my armpits?’
‘I’ll check your armpits tomorrow,’ sniggered another.
More abuse. This time from a couple of twelve-year-old imps who were so pumped up that they were likely to warp before class. But they were right. He would have gone for the pink flowers option too.
Runt was his imp nickname. They didn’t have real names, not until after they warped. Then they would be given a name from the sacred text. Until that moment, he was stuck with No1 or Runt.
He smiled good-naturedly. It didn’t pay to antagonize his dorm-mates. Even though they were smaller than him today, they could be a lot bigger tomorrow.