was covered in ash and was now starting to choke on the smoke. Being stuck at the top of an extraordinarily high tree isn’t much fun, even when that tree doesn’t happen to be on fire. His arms were killing him and the smoke was making it almost impossible to breathe. Lex was right: Jeremiah couldn’t save himself, and he knew it.
Lex silently counted to three and then leapt off the opposite side of the branch as far out as the cord would allow, with the effect that he then swung in a descending arc towards Jeremiah. When Lex smashed into him, it was with such force that the nobleman would not have been able to remain clinging to the rope even if he’d wanted to. He had no choice but to grab at the thief’s shoulders instead.
Gritting his teeth and trying to ignore the unbelievable weight that was Jeremiah, Lex pressed the button to release more cord and their momentum caused them to carry on swinging. This branch was a particularly long one and overhung the water below? which currently seemed to be an absurd distance away. It was like jumping off the edge of a cliff.
As they began to fall, the cord unravelled itself at lightening speed and Lex only prayed that it was long enough, since he had never had to test it at such a great height before. If he had just been carrying himself then he might have stood a chance of keeping hold of the cord when it finally snapped taut but, with Jeremiah as well, Lex knew that the second they ran out of cord his hands would be wrenched away and they would freefall the rest of the drop.
It must have taken them a mere five seconds to fall all the way down the tree but it seemed like much longer. They were both yelling as they fell? although Lex yelled with excitement as well as fear. He found the fall fun at the same time as he found it terrifying. Or perhaps he found it fun because it was terrifying.
The only part of it Lex didn’t like was that the fire became more ferocious as they got lower. And, although they were clear of most of the branches, they could still feel the suffocating heat; they still got smoke in their eyes and ash in their mouths.
Finally, the cord ran out with a snap so abrupt that Lex and Jeremiah actually flew up a couple of feet when the handle was torn from Lex’s hand before falling the rest of the way. Fortunately for both of them, the cord ran out only about a metre above the sea. They fell in with a splash.
The water was relatively shallow there? only about waist high? and Jeremiah was back on his feet with impressive speed, splashing noisily towards Lex who was still coughing up water. When he reached him, Jeremiah grabbed Lex’s collar, hauled him to his feet and said, ‘If you don’t give me that book right now I’m going to take it from you by force!’
‘Good luck,’ Lex replied. ‘It’s not on me. Jesse’s got it. He’ll have won the round by now.’
Indeed, in another moment, Lex and Jeremiah both found themselves plucked from the water and put back on the shore of the beach where they’d started. The three Gods were all there, as were Jesse, Tess and the sprite.
‘I won!’ Lex exclaimed, speaking directly to Lady Luck. ‘I won, didn’t I?’
Something would have had to have gone very wrong in those last few minutes for Lex not to have won. After all, he had left Jesse standing there with the book in his hand. And, now that he looked, he saw that Lady Luck was holding it. But he still needed her to say it.
‘Yes, darling,’ the Goddess replied, smiling widely. ‘You won. And you carried out a magnificent rescue!’
‘ Magnificent rescue?’ Jeremiah repeated, his face turning positively scarlet with anger. ‘That was not a magnificent rescue! It was a-’
But he was interrupted at that moment by the explosion. It lit up the sky and seemed to shake the very ground on which they stood. The humans instinctively threw themselves to the ground, arms over their heads. When they finally dared to look up again, the library tree was gone. All that remained of it was the dark ash settling on the surface of the ocean, along with a few loose pages.
‘I suppose Herman put gunpowder in the centre of the tree,’ Lady Luck tutted. ‘Oh well, it’s about time. I don’t know why he didn’t just destroy those books long ago, if he didn’t want anyone to read them. More like the God of Silliness than the God of Knowledge, if you ask me. But what wonderful timing on your part, Lex!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, everyone might have been blown to bits if you hadn’t won right when you did!’
‘I suppose you could say that I saved everyone,’ Lex replied, looking as smug as possible.
‘Well, everyone except poor Lorella,’ Lady Luck said, looking at Thaddeus with rather a self-satisfied expression on her face. ‘In your own round, too. Why, it’s almost embarrassing!’
‘I still have the companion,’ Thaddeus muttered, looking extremely hacked off.
Lady Luck laughed. ‘A sprite! Oh dear. I really don’t think a sprite is going to be much good for the final round I have in mind.’
‘Why don’t you just worry about your own player?’ Thaddeus snapped. ‘And let me worry about mine!’
‘As you wish.’
And with that, Thaddeus disappeared, taking the unhappy-looking sprite with him.
‘Look,’ Jeremiah said to Kala. ‘I really don’t see why Trent should be awarded hero points. I was only hanging from that branch because of him! It was his fault I was there in the first place! Besides, I didn’t ask him to save me!’
‘But he did,’ Kala said coldly. ‘So he gets hero points. That’s the way this works. You should never have allowed yourself to be put in that position in the first place. He only threw a toy snake at you, after all.’
Jeremiah went pink with embarrassment. ‘I thought it was real for a moment,’ he muttered. ‘Snakes make me… uncomfortable.’
‘Wasn’t that an unfortunate coincidence for us?’ Kala snapped.
Jeremiah clenched his jaw and said nothing. Lex felt smug. Receiving a dressing-down from your Goddess right in front of everybody couldn’t be a very pleasant experience. On the rare occasions when Lady Luck was unhappy with Lex, at least she expressed her displeasure in private.
Tess had been sitting on the sand behind Jeremiah looking bored, but at that point she looked up and caught Jesse’s eye. He waved. She gave him a shy smile and waved back. And then she and Jeremiah were both gone, taken away by their sulky Goddess.
‘Well,’ Lady Luck said. ‘That’s that. A most satisfactory conclusion to the second round.’
‘I’m ahead of Jeremiah in points now, right?’ Lex asked.
‘Yes, dear. He has winning points from the first round but you have winning points and hero points. An inspired idea, on your part. Now you’ll get to start first in the third round.’
‘How about giving me a clue as to what it’s about?’ Lex prompted.
He’d tried to get a hint as to what Lady Luck’s round would entail before but he’d been unsuccessful every time and he was again now. She just smiled and said, ‘You’ll see. One thing I can tell you, Lex, and that’s that it will be glorious!’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lex was extremely pleased with the footage of the second round when he watched it in his Divine Eye later. As usual, it had been heavily edited in order to make the players look more impressive than they really were. It was, therefore, not clear exactly how Jeremiah had ended up clinging to a rope at the top of the tree. Obviously, Kala felt that his reaction to the toy snake was not something she wanted to share with the public.
Lex’s ‘rescue’ on the other hand, looked spectacular, what with the tree ablaze all around them and time running out. There was even a rousing soundtrack accompanying the part where Lex and Jeremiah plummeted together through the burning tree. Lex was especially pleased with how much soot and ash there’d been on his face and clothes, for it made the whole thing more heroic-seeming, somehow. In addition, from the way the scenes had been put together, it looked like the tree exploded just seconds after Lex and Jeremiah landed in the water. By the time Lex had finished watching it, even he was feeling impressed with himself. In the last Game, some enterprising company had brought out a limited-edition Lex Trent action figure fighting a minotaur and medusa. Lex rather hoped that this time there might be a Lex Trent action figure with a burning tree and a vulture bird, or something.
But, after the second round was over, the main thing Lex was interested in was the book he’d stolen from the
