Alex Bell - Fighting with fire

Unfortunately, he needed to get into his bag first but, when he reached an arm around to try to swing it off his back, his hand came into contact only with more oily octopuses. There must have been four or five of them latched on to his bag. Jesse was doing even worse than Lex, for he seemed to have lost his knife and there were now a grand total of seven octopuses clinging to him.

‘You gotta weapon in that bag?’ Jesse asked, starting to look quite panic-stricken.

The water rushing in seemed to have set all the octopuses off, for now even the ones that weren’t actually on Jesse and Lex were making their way towards them, all making that horrible high-pitched whining sound.

‘No,’ Lex replied. ‘I’m trying to get to a book.’

‘A book?’ the cowboy said, staring at Lex aghast.

‘Yeah.’ Lex finally managed to swing the bag off his back, three of the octopuses flying off in the process to land on the floor at his feet with wet-sounding slaps.

‘What good will that possibly do? Is it big enough to squash ’em with?’

‘No, I’m going to read about them.’

‘ Read about them?’ Jesse repeated, staring at Lex like he was mad.

Lex ignored him and opened the book to the contents page. There was a whole section there about octopuses but the problem was that Lex didn’t know what they were called and, without a name, he couldn’t look them up. He was just about to start flipping through the relevant section, looking at the pictures, when a name caught his eye and he knew it had to be the right one: The Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii of Scurlyshoo. Even the name made him shudder.

He flipped the book open to the right page and straight away there was a photo staring up at him of one of the horrible blue-ringed octopuses. There was a large amount of text on the double-page spread but two equally unpleasant sentences leapt out at Lex instantly: The Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii is one of the most toxic sea creatures known to man. And: The Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii carries enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans within minutes.

When there are four or five of the little suckers clinging to you, whining frantically, that sort of thing is really not what you want to be reading. And to think that Lex had had one on his head! Why, if Jesse hadn’t stabbed it right when he did…

There was nothing to be gained by panicking, so Lex kept his head and desperately ran his eyes down the page looking for anything that would help. He skimmed past, one of the most venomous animals in the world, and no known antidote, as the octopuses clung tightly on to him all the while, about to bite at any second. Then, finally, he found what he was looking for. An innocuous little sentence at the bottom of the page stated that the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii? being closely related to land-slugs? had a low tolerance to salt. Thus they spent some of their time in the water and some of the time out of it, on beaches, coves or? Lex supposed? sunken ships that were full of air pockets.

Now, Lex had quite a lot of stuff in his bag seeing as it was a magic enchanter’s bag and so was much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. He was fairly sure he didn’t have any salt but he did have salty snacks? crispy things that tasted great, and slowly rotted your teeth, according to some people (who were probably very prim, bossy and wore fussy-looking glasses).

Ignoring Jesse, who was demanding to know what he had found out from the book, Lex thrust his hand into his bag, pulled out a bag of salty snacks, ripped it open and shook handfuls of crisps out on to the octopuses that were clinging to him. It was only a hunch, but it paid off. As soon as the crisps touched the octopuses, their skin began to bubble and smoke and they dropped off Lex, squealing even more loudly than they had been before.

Straight away, Lex grabbed a second bag, ripped it open and threw crisps at Jesse. Soon the octopuses on the cowboy were smoking on the floor at his feet as well. The others, who’d been making their way along the floor, stopped, presumably frightened by the noise their fellows were making.

Lex wasn’t going to waste time hanging around. He made straight for the open door, calling over his shoulder to Jesse, ‘Come on, quick!’

A moment later they were in the next room with the door firmly closed behind them. The previously water-filled room was mercifully free of octopuses, although the rotten boards did creak beneath their feet in a worrying way.

‘They’re one of the most poisonous sea creatures known to man!’ Lex gasped. ‘We were covered in them! How the heck did we get out of there without them biting us?’

‘They were trying to bite us,’ Jesse replied, pulling the sleeve of his jacket outwards so that Lex could see the tiny little pinpricks where the octopuses’ teeth had gone through but had been unable to reach the skin.

‘Their teeth aren’t long enough,’ Lex said, staring in horror at his own clothes, all with identical little holes in them. ‘If they’d managed to find some bare skin…’ He trailed off with a shudder.

Before going on, he and Jesse put on the spare coats that Lex had brought in his bag. They would offer more protection from the octopuses and they had hoods to shield their heads. They also each opened a packet of salty snacks to carry with them and fling at any other octopuses they might come into contact with. Lex had dropped the starfish again when the water had flooded out at them but there were plenty more stuck to the walls in this room, emitting their faint, greenish glow.

‘I have to say, these Games seemed a helluva lot more fun from the stadiums,’ Jesse grumbled.

Lex said nothing, but the truth was that he completely agreed with Jesse in that moment. This was not fun. At. All. He wondered briefly how the others were faring.

‘The sooner we find the captain’s medallion, the sooner we can leave,’ he said. ‘Come on, we need to get to the bridge.’

Lex would’ve liked to think that the poisonous octopuses were the only dangerous thing on the ship? the only thing standing between him and the captain’s medallion and glorious victory for the first round. But he knew better. Games did not tend to work that way? it would make them too boring. Gods? and the human spectators? liked a little variety. The likelihood, therefore, was that there would be several different nasties on board this ship? possibly a mixture of natural inhabitants (such as the octopuses) and things put there specially by the Gods.

When Lex heard a noise coming from behind a closed door a little later he braced himself to throw it open and discover what was behind it. It was no use trying to avoid the horrible stuff, for there were probably more traps around the captain’s medallion than there were anywhere else on the ship. The more traps they came into contact with, therefore, the closer to their ultimate goal they probably were. But before Lex could open the door, it was flung open from the other side and Jeremiah burst out.

It seemed that Jeremiah must have heard Lex and Jesse because he came flying out braced for attack, shouting and waving his sword. For a split second Lex didn’t realise it was Jeremiah and thought instead that it was something coming to get him, so he used the only weapon he had? he threw his packet of salty snacks in the nobleman’s face.

It was a surprisingly effective? if slightly ludicrous? form of attack, for Jeremiah stopped dead, clutching at his eyes with his free hand and yelling. Clearly some salt had got in there and was stinging. He was making a tremendous fuss about it, though. Anyone would think that he’d just had acid thrown in his face.