Alex Bell - Fighting with fire

‘Wilhelmina, my dear, this is Trent Lexington. One of Jeremiah’s school friends, come to watch him play. Isn’t that nice?’

‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ Lex managed. So this silly old bat was Jeremiah’s mother. And Lex had her purse in his pocket! It was only with a great deal of self-control that he managed not to smirk where he sat.

‘Likewise, I’m sure,’ the woman said, still looking rather tearful. Perhaps she was fretting about the possibility of poor dear Jeremiah getting killed in the Game. Lex was glad in that moment that he had no such fussing relatives? except for Lucius? inconveniencing him and cramping his style. Who needed parents, anyway?

Lex took another gulp of tea and thought hard. Time to get to work. But how to go about it? He could hardly come straight out and ask Jeremiah’s parents if their son had any useful little weaknesses or character flaws that a scoundrel might try to exploit. They may not be the brightest pair he’d ever met but even they were surely likely to get suspicious about those sorts of questions.

‘Ai can’t tell you how much ai’m rooting for Jeremiah!’ he gushed. ‘I do so hope that he wins!’

‘Of course he’ll win!’ Mr East boomed, as if the very suggestion that he might not was absurd. ‘The boy was born and bred to win!’

‘Yaas, of course he was!’ Lex agreed before making a show of looking around for non-existent eavesdroppers, lowering his voice and saying, ‘And ai’m quaite sure that that phobia of his won’t interfere with his ability to play the Game one jot. Not one single jot.’

Mr and Mrs East instantly both looked rather annoyed and Mrs East said huffily, ‘It’s perfectly natural for a young man his age to be afraid of rattlesnakes.’

Lex wasn’t sure what the young man his age bit had to do with it but he just nodded along, anyway.

‘Absolutely!’ Mr East agreed. ‘Mark of intelligence, if you ask me! Besides, there’s hardly going to be any rattlesnakes in there, are there?’ He pointed at the silver surface of the sea.

‘No, sir,’ Lex replied. But we’ll see what we can do about that.. ‘But what about that other thing?’

Guesswork, once again. There was no guaranteeing there was another thing, after all. And, indeed, for a moment both of Jeremiah’s parents looked blank.

‘Oh, perhaps he didn’t tell you,’ Lex said, looking embarrassed. ‘Perhaps ai shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ Mrs East snapped. ‘Do you really think our son would have told you things that he didn’t tell us? I expect you’re referring to that upset with the brandy at the Academy. But Jeremiah doesn’t drink anymore,’ she said, fixing Lex with a frosty look.

‘Doesn’t drink, you say?’

‘Not one drop. He knows his own limitations. We brought him up in such a way as to make sure of that.’

‘I say, perhaps we oughtn’t to be talking about such things out in the open like this,’ Mr East said, suddenly catching on to the impropriety.

Lex nodded his agreement. It was almost time for him to go, anyway, but there was just time to do one last bit of damage first. He leaned forwards across the table a little and said, ‘Ai daresay ai shouldn’t tell you this, but ai have it on good authority that this Lex Trent fellow Jeremiah’s up against is absolutely petrified of bats.’

‘Bats?’ Mrs East said sharply. ‘Bats, you say?’

‘Yaas, bats. Little winged rats, you know.’

In fact, Lex had no phobias. None whatsoever. He wasn’t scared of heights or spiders or rats or bats or snakes or anything. These were irrational fears and simply baffled him. There’d have been about as much truth in the statement, Lex Trent is scared of the colour blue, as there was in the statement that he was afraid of bats. In fact, he rather liked bats. They were sweet little things when they didn’t have their fangs out. But he may as well toss a bone Jeremiah’s way and see if anything happened, although he suspected the nobleman wouldn’t have the wit to make good use of the information. It would take a special kind of cunning to produce a bat in the middle of the Game, after all. Lex would have managed it somehow, but he doubted Jeremiah would. Still, hopefully he might waste a bit of time and energy in the attempt.

‘Ai have a friend who knew Trent when they were law students back in the Wither City,’ Lex said. ‘And apparently, one night, a swarm of bats descended on them and this fellow Trent went absolutely nuts. Freaked out altogether, so old Jonesy said. Practically wet himself.’

‘You don’t say?’ Mr East said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. The man was so transparent he might just as well have been made of glass.

‘Best not tell Easty though, eh? Ai mean, it wouldn’t be sporting, would it? And ai’m sure Jeremiah doesn’t need tips like that to win. He can win without them.’

‘Of course he can!’ his parents said in perfect unison.

‘Of course he can,’ Lex echoed.

Lex left soon after that, stuffing a couple of crumpets into his pocket to enjoy with Jesse later and then going back to the ship the way he had come, through one of the tourist boats, taking the opportunity to pinch a few more wallets along the way. He was pleased to find that he hadn’t lost his touch. He barely had to brush past someone and their wallet would be in his pocket. It was ridiculously easy and the reason, as he remembered now, that it had ceased being fun. There was no exciting challenge in it.

That was why he had moved on to daring cat-burglar exploits as the Shadowman, pinching spectacularly valuable things from museums, until he’d got caught up in the last Game and someone had shamelessly stolen his alter ego. He’d therefore been forced to re-invent himself as the Wizard. The tiny enchanter’s hats he now left as his calling card were magical. A little bit magical, anyway. If you said Abracadabra then a small flame shot from the tip. Lex had found a magically refilling cupboard of them on board the enchanted ship and had no idea what they had originally been for, but they worked very well as his calling card now because the fact that they were magical meant that they could not easily be reproduced by copycats. Which meant that Lex got to keep all the glory and notoriety for himself.

He slipped back on to the boat, quickly got changed and then went up to the top deck where Jesse was watching the other ship come in. Lex had noticed its approach from the teashop and had realised then that it was most definitely time to go. It was Jeremiah’s ship. He recognised it by the mermaid rising up along the prow and the painted blue and gold exterior. It was a grand ship in a boring sort of way, he supposed, but it couldn’t possibly compare with the gleaming, silver enchanter’s ship, where even the sails were made out of metal, and ancient, magical black runes were painted all along its sides.

It was fast approaching midday? the allotted time for the start of the round? and even the toffs were no longer showing much interest in their crumpets. They were all lined up eagerly, waiting for the other players to arrive and for things to get interesting.

Finally Jeremiah’s ship pulled in next to Lex’s. Lex couldn’t prevent his lip curling as he saw that it clearly ran on wind and oar power? not on magic. It was really quite pathetic and he felt a glow of smug satisfaction at the fact that Jeremiah had been forced to dock his ship right next to Lex’s and thereby emphasise the fact that the two really were in completely different classes. There was much cheering from the toffs below, though, and Jeremiah appeared up on deck to give them a bow, whereupon the crowd went crazy in quite an over-the-top way, in Lex’s opinion. After all, Jeremiah was only bowing, not throwing fistfuls of money down at them. But he was wearing fancy clothes with shiny buttons again, and had that handsome, noble look, and that sort of thing mattered to some people. Or, at least, it mattered to the stupid people, concerned only with appearances rather than actual talent. Lex wasn’t overly bothered by it, for he had no time for stupid people and never had. And never would, either.