‘The Headmaster tells me that Aubergine Wealth has gone missing,’ said Nerlin at dinner that night. ‘There’s no one at his home in Switzerland, nor has he been anywhere near his secret hideaways that we’re not supposed to know about. The Headmaster sent people to check. They say that the Belgian Fish Repair Shop where he has a secret apartment, the Leek Weaving Works in Wales where he has another hidey hole and the Potato Museum on Tristan da Cunha are all deserted. No one has been anywhere near them in months. It would appear that Mr Wealth and the seventeen-billion-plus dollars he made at the Summer School have done a runner.’
The Floods and the Hulberts were all gathered in the Friday Night Dining Room at Castle Twilight to celebrate the fact that it was Friday night and dinner time.
‘I suspect that Mr Wealth thinks we don’t know what he’s done,’ Nerlin continued. ‘He probably thinks he’s safe until school starts next week and we’ll all assume he’s gone on holiday.’
‘Maybe he has,’ said Ffiona.
‘Mr Wealth does not do holidays,’ said Nerlin. ‘He thinks they are a waste of money.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mordonna, putting her arm round Winchflat’s shoulders. ‘Once again our resident genius is in control of the situation.’
When Aubergine Wealth had passed out behind the curtain back in Manhattan, he thought no one had realised he was there. When he had come to and everyone else had gone back to Transylvania Waters, he was sure that no one had known he hadn’t gone with them. There had been a lot of things going on, what with transferring all the wealth back to its original owners and removing every single trace of the Summer School. So it had been a fair assumption. After all, who would miss one person, especially one person who didn’t actually have any friends to look out for him?48
But Winchflat had noticed because Winchflat noticed absolutely everything, even the numbers of feathers on the left wing of a sparrow that had been sitting on the windowsill outside the room where they were having their last Summer School meeting.49 He hadn’t been able to count the feathers on the sparrow’s right wing as it was sitting sideways. Although he assumed it was the same, he wasn’t happy with guessing and decided at some point in the future he would have to make a machine to let him see through sparrows so he could count all the feathers with complete accuracy. With such an eye for detail, it would have been surprising if he hadn’t seen Aubergine. He had even noted exactly how much blood the economics teacher had lost as it trickled down the crack in the floorboards.50
Mmm, clever, he thought when he discovered the anti-spell lead shield buried under Aubergine’s scalp, but it only took a couple of seconds to lift a tiny bit of the lead and slip a bugging device into his brain. If Aubergine discovered it, he would assume that the lead was blocking the device’s signals, which of course it wasn’t. It took more than some heavy metal to outsmart Winchflat.
‘So where is he now?’ said Nerlin.
‘They are at JFK airport,’ said Winchflat, ‘trying to decide where to fly to.’
‘They?’ said Mordonna.
‘Yes. Aubergine Wealth appears to have got married.’
‘Are you sure?’ said the Headmaster. ‘When you say married, you do mean to another living person and not a pocket calculator or a spreadsheet?’
‘No, it’s a person,’ said Winchflat. ‘A human being.’
‘Not a witch?’
‘No, it’s an ordinary human. If it was a witch, my bug would say so.’
‘And can your bug tell us what they are saying?’ said Nerlin.
‘Only what he is saying, not her,’ said Winchflat. ‘I can usually tailor bugging devices for each situation, but Mr Wealth getting married was not a possibility that I thought was remotely likely.’
Aubergine and Chrysanthemum decided they would go back to Transylvania Waters, and not some remote part as far away from Castle Twilight as possible, but to a small house built right into the outer wall of the castle itself. They also decided that to avoid detection, they would actually fly to Belgium and then travel the rest of the way by horse and cart. Belgium would be the last place the Floods would expect them to go. They bought their plane tickets and went through security and, of course, as soon as Aubergine stepped into the electronic scanner, the lead shield in his head set off all the alarms.
‘Take your shoes off, please, sir,’ said the security officer.
‘Take your belt off, please, sir,’ the officer said when that made no difference. ‘Pull your trousers up, please, sir.’
This went on until Aubergine Wealth was down to his underpants and small children were hiding in tears behind their parents. Actually everyone was hiding behind something because Aubergine Wealth in his undies was a sight that no living creature should be made to look at. Even Chrysanthemum, who adored her new husband, felt herself beginning to go faint. It wasn’t because he was displaying anything rude so much as the strange colour and texture of his skin. It was like pea-soup-coloured corrugated cardboard that had been soaking in water for a very long time.
But even then Aubergine Wealth set off the security alarm each time so they took him away to a special x-ray room and scanned him. As soon as they did that everyone could see his lead anti-spell head shield and that explained everything. Aubergine had been watching the screen too and that was when he saw Winchflat’s secret tracking device.
I wondered why I had a bit of a headache when I came to, he thought.
He was just about to tell Chrysanthemum about the bug when he stopped himself. He guessed that Winchflat – and it had to be him because no one else was clever enough – could hear every word he was saying. He motioned to Chrysanthemum to say nothing and scribbled her a note explaining the situation.
Brilliant, Chrysanthemum wrote back.If we play this right it could work to our advantage.
What’s your plan? wrote Aubergine, quite happy for his wife to take charge.
First we will buy two airplane tickets for Mongolia, she explained.When we get there, we will remove the bug from your head and implant it into a yak. The Flood boy will track the yak through the wilds of Mongolia while we travel on the Trans-Siberian railway back to eastern Europe where we will slip into Transylvania Waters disguised as tourists.
Brilliant, Aubergine scribbled, falling in love with Chrysanthemum all over again – which was a bit confusing because he hadn’t fallen out of love with her since the first time.
‘I think we should go to Mongolia,’ Aubergine said in a loud clear voice. ‘No one will ever look for us there.’
‘They’ve just bought two tickets for Mongolia,’ said Winchflat.
‘Are you sure?’ said Mordonna. ‘It seems a bit of an obvious place to go.’
‘That is true,’ said Winchflat, ‘but I think that’s why they’re going there. They’ll think it’s so obvious that we won’t expect them to go there.’
‘It’s all beyond me,’ said Nerlin, but then there were a lot of things that were beyond him. He may have been Top Wizard by the fact of being King of Transylvania Waters, but wizards are like humans in that respect. Hardly anyone is king of anywhere because they are intelligent or resourceful. They usually get the job because their dad had it and he got it from his dad and so on back in history until the first ancestor became king by killing everyone else who wanted the job. The fact that they are not best friends with thinking is probably quite a good thing. Otherwise they would just sit there feeling really guilty at having all that privilege without having earned any of it.51
Unlike other royal families, the Floods did NOT wear dead animals on their hats and necks.
Nerlin is seen here wearing Andrew and Christine – the two Royal Ermine, who are very much alive.
‘Mmm, the old double-bluff trick,’ said the Headmaster. ‘It’s that sort of devious thinking that has made Aubergine Wealth so incredibly rich.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mordonna. ‘Well, I have cousins in Mongolia: Surge and Alexeye. We can send word for them to watch the airport for when they arrive.’
Once they realise we are going to Mongolia, Chrysanthemum wrote, I expect they will have spies waiting at the airport.
Of course they will, Aubergine wrote back. Probably Surge and Alexeye. They are Mordonna’s cousins. They run a yak kebab shop and are incredibly stupid.
Because he firmly believed in the famous statement Knowledge is Power – to which he added the footnote And Power is Money – Aubergine Wealth always made sure he knew as much about everyone as he possibly could. The details that he knew about every single one of the students and teaching staff at Quicklime College and all of the Floods and a million other people were staggering.52
He not only knew that Mordonna had two distant cousins in Mongolia and that they owned The Jolly Gulag Yak Kebab Shoppe, but he also knew how many pairs of socks each of them owned and what colour they were. He knew that Surge was allergic to thistles and had an inside leg measurement of eighty-seven centimetres on his left leg, but only eighty-five centimetres on his right leg, which meant that when he got drunk on Old Kremlin Ale, he always walked round in circles until he tripped over himself.
He knew that Alexeye was married to the All Mongolian Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, Tattyana Khan, who was a direct descendent of Ghengis Khan and owned two-and-a-half pairs of socks, all a dark shade of grey. Most of the information Aubergine had stored in his head and on three massive computers was completely useless, but you never knew when some little detail might make all the difference between ending up with fifteen cents or fifteen million dollars.
So as the plane lumbered towards Ulan Bator, which his computers told him was home to thirty-eight per cent of the Mongolian population, twenty per cent of whom lived on less than $1.25 per day, Aubergine sifted through Surge and Alexeye’s details to see if there was anything that might be to his advantage.
There was.
It turned out the two brothers had their very own illegal yak farm right up in the far north of the country. It was hidden deep in thick pine forest in the second largest land-locked country in the world.53 Because the two brothers were wizards, albeit not great wizards like their Floods cousins, they were powerful enough to create illegal six-legged yaks. As everyone knows, the leg is the tastiest bit of the yak and absolutely the best part for making yak kebabs.
We will go to their yak farm, Aubergine wrote to his wife, and transplant Winchflat’s bug into one of their six-legged freaks and we will then take it across the Russian border and set it free in the most massively huge, mind-numbingly, boringly repetitive pine forest in the world where it will never be seen again.
Is there any way you could make copies of the tracking bug? Chrysanthemum wrote back. If there is, we could put one in the yak, another in an eagle and one in each of the Kebab brothers.
Brilliant! Aubergine wrote, falling in love with Chrysanthemum yet again, which meant he was now in love with his wife three times at once.
He could just make out the slight bump the bug made underneath his lead head shield. He concentrated, summoning all his magic powers, and focused on the bump. He could feel it wriggling under his skin and suddenly there were two of them. He focused again and then there were four. He hoped that Winchflat would just think the distance the bug was transmitting over was causing some sort of shadow and not suspect that anyone had actually cloned the device.
Sure, he is the cleverest wizard in the family of cleverest wizards, Aubergine thought, but he just thinks he’s so clever that no one else would ever be able to copy any of his wonderful devices.
Sure enough, when the plane landed in Ulan Bator, one of the few places on earth that sounds as if it’s been spelt backwards, the two Floods cousins were waiting. Surge and Alexeye had disguised themselves as each other – which, considering they were identical twins, was a bit pointless – and were dressed as Belgian tourists. This had been a really stupid thing to do because Mongolia gets so few visitors that anyone who does go there for a holiday is instantly surrounded by newspaper reporters, opticians who assume they must need glasses, a very small crowd of screaming children and a very large crowd of screaming sheep.
The chaos at the airport allowed Aubergine and Chrysanthemum to slip through Immigration virtually unnoticed, especially when Aubergine showed the officials his I-Am-From-An-International-Charity-That-Is-Thinking-Of-Giving-Your-Country-A-Huge-Amount-Of-Money-Card. Outside, the terminal was almost deserted apart from a three-legged yak tied to a broken-down old cart.
‘Excuse me,’ said Chrysanthemum to the yak driver, ‘would you mind moving? You’re standing in the taxi rank.’
‘I am the taxi rank,’ said the driver. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Take us to a nice, quiet hotel, please,’ said Aubergine in a clear, steady voice so that Winchflat wouldn’t miss a word.
‘Hotel? What’s that?’
‘It’s the place where visitors stay.’
‘Ahh, you mean the pig sty,’ said the yak driver. ‘Bit of a problem there, I’m afraid.’
‘Why is that, then?’
‘Well, there is an international beetroot convention in town and all the beds are taken.’
‘International?’ said Aubergine.
‘Indeed, sir, people have come from far and wide,’ said the driver. ‘Some as far as right down the end of the road past the big rock, and they are all wide.’
‘Would this help?’ said Aubergine, pressing a fifty-tugrik note into the driver’s hand.54
‘Oh my,’ said the driver. ‘So the rumours are true. There is such a thing as a fifty-tugrik note.’
‘So can we get a room?’ said Chrysanthemum.
‘For such wealth I will sell you my house,’ said the yak driver. ‘My wife and fifteen children and I will move into my mother’s cave. Well, I call it a cave. It’s more of a hole in the roots of a big tree.’
‘We only need it for a few days,’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘You can have it back then.’
The yak driver was speechless. He had been impressed when he had seen that the two visitors actually had all their teeth, but the idea that the two foreigners would pay fifty tugriks just to borrow his house for a few days was beyond belief.
When they have gone, he thought, I will call the Guinness Book of Records (Mongolian Edition).Though I doubt they will be believing such wealth and extravagance.
‘And when we leave,’ Chrysanthemum added, ‘we will give you two more fifties. One for your inconvenience and one to forget you ever saw us.’
This will probably get into the All of The Russias Edition, the yak driver thought before he fainted.
When he regained consciousness, he drove them to his house and led them inside. He loaded his wife and children onto the cart and took them away. Fifteen minutes later the yak came back, pushed the door open and went to sleep in the kitchen. The driver had explained that this might happen as the creature was a Homing Yak.
‘But do not worry,’ he said. ‘He does not snore, though I would advise you to keep the windows open.’
A strange bit of advice as the house did not so much have windows as holes in the wall through which the cold Mongolian wind whistled a sad, plaintive air, a seriously-cold-thirty-degrees-below-freezing plaintive air that made the two travellers grateful for the soft clouds of warm steam coming from the piles of yak dung that covered the kitchen floor.
So we need to remove the four tracking bugs from your head, wrote Chrysanthemum.
Can you do that sort of thing? Aubergine wrote.
No problem, wrote Chrysanthemum. I was in the Girl Guides.
So Aubergine drank seven bottles of Old Kremlin Ale, including the lumps, and passed out. When he came round he felt as if he had been kicked in the head by a yak, which he had because Chrysanthemum had done the operation on the kitchen table, right next to the sleeping yak, which was thrashing about in its sleep due to a nightmare involving a giant beetroot and a short-circuiting electric balalaika. Its thrashing had knocked the table over, which had hit Aubergine on the left side of his head, and then its flailing feet had hit him on the other side.
‘All done, my darling,’ said Chrysanthemum, wrapping Aubergine’s head in a bandage and mopping up the blood. ‘I’ve put the bugs inside the bandage so they will appear to be in the same place.’
Aubergine Wealth was not an electronics expert. In fact, he found torches rather confusing. However, as every five-year-old knows, it doesn’t require much time or skill to build a wi-fi multi-channel transponding auto-tracking remote control, and in five minutes Aubergine had bodged together such a device out of a toilet roll tube, a bent hairpin and some lichen. The device allowed him to control which one of the four tracking bugs would be sending out a signal.55 He then deactivated three of them. Of course, Aubergine could have simply destroyed the original bug, but he had always resented Winchflat’s vastly superior brain and this way he could prove he was just as clever as any of the Floods.
Back at the airport, Mordonna’s two distant cousins were clever enough to realise that spying on Aubergine by hiding behind a tree and watching him would not work.
‘He will see us,’ said Surge, who was the brain of the operation.
‘This is true, brother,’ said Alexeye, who left the difficult stuff like thinking to his brother. ‘And we will see him.’
‘We’re supposed to, stupid, but he is not supposed to see us.’
‘Oh.’
‘But do not worry, for I have a foolproof plan,’ said Surge. ‘I have tied a ball of red wool to the taxi. All we have to do is follow it and we will know where they have gone.’
Like all taxi drivers the world over, the yak man had taken a long and complicated route to reach his destination. He had taken so many turns and returns and fresh turns that the wool ran out right outside the kebab shop, long before he had delivered the travellers to his house. The wool had, however, woven itself into a rather nice bathmat.
That evening Aubergine and Chrysanthemum disguised themselves as two peasant girls by rubbing yak dung in their hair and wrapping their feet in wet felt and went to The Jolly Gulag Yak Kebab Shoppe just as the two brothers were closing up for the night.
‘Hello, boys,’ Chrysanthemum said in a Mongolian peasant flirty voice that sounded like a rabbit being dragged through sharp gravel. ‘Fancy a beetroot?’
She waved a bunch of beetroots at the brothers and lured them into a dark alley, where Aubergine was waiting to greet them with unconsciousness caused by a bang on the head with a gigantic world-record-winning beetroot he’d stolen from the international beetroot convention down the road.
It only took a moment to implant the tracking bugs into their skulls and when they came round a few hours later, they assumed it had been the sight of the world’s largest beetroot that had made them faint.
The eagle wasn’t quite so easy. For a start, eagles don’t like beetroots,56 but they do like rats, and as there were more rats in Ulan Bator than beetroots it didn’t take long to catch a couple. However, attracting an eagle’s attention is quite difficult. You can’t just wave a rat in the air and shout, ‘Here birdy, birdy.’
Oh look, a human waving a rat about, the eagle will think.Now what shall I do, fly down and try and get it, or simply grab one of the ninety-six other rats I can see that haven’t got a human attached to them?
Difficult choice, it will think. NOT.
As luck would have it, however, there was one rather stupid and very shortsighted eagle floating above the town that day. It was very hungry on account of not being able to see the ninety-six rats running around below it, but it could see one rat that appeared to be waving at it.
Ooh, dinner, thought the eagle and swooped down.
Yum, yum, get off, ouch, yum yum, nice rat, it thought in that order as Aubergine grabbed its leg, Chrysanthemum tied the bug to its other leg then Aubergine stuffed the rat in its open beak.
Then they gave the taxi driver not one, not two, but three fifty-tugrik notes57 and the three of them set off for Surge and Alexeye’s secret six-legged yak farm, making sure before they set off that the bug tied to Aubergine’s head was the only one that was activated. It was a slow journey because the taxi driver kept taking the three notes out of his pocket and counting them, and every time he did, he fainted with happiness.
‘We will go and hide out in the ever-so-vast endless pine forests of Russia,’ Aubergine said in a nice clear voice so Winchflat would catch every word. ‘No one will look for us there and if they do, it is so vast and endless they will never find us.’
‘Tell them we will work our way east until we reach the coast where we will settle down to enjoy our vast wealth,’ said Chrysanthemum.58
‘What’s that, my darling?’ Aubergine continued. ‘You would like to live in a small village on the far eastern coast of Russia? I would like that too.’
‘The money, mention the money,’ said Chrysanthemum.
‘With all this enormous wealth to carry, our journey may be slow, but just think, when we reach our destination we will probably be the richest people for five thousand miles.’
‘Brilliant,’ said Chrysanthemum, falling in love with Aubergine again, so they were now in love with each other a total of five times with an average of two and a half times each.
‘We will dine on caviar and champagne and that will just be breakfast,’ said Winchflat.
When they reached the yak farm, they captured the biggest strongest six-legged yak, implanted the fourth bug under his skin and led him away to the Russian border.
Ooh, that’s a big forest, the yak thought to himself. I bet it’s full of thousands of girl yaks and nice tender grass to eat and lovely sparkling mountain streams to drink from.
When they got back to Ulan Bator, Aubergine gave the taxi driver a sedative before handing him their remaining Mongolian money, which included several legendary one-hundred-tugrik notes.59 The total value of tugriks they gave the taxi driver was more than fifty-seven Australian dollars, enough to buy a small place in the country called All Of It.
Even though Winchflat was now tracking the yak and not Aubergine any more, the two runaways were still cautious. Rather than go directly to Transylvania Waters they flew via several places to Monte Carlo, where they spent a happy week fraudulently winning lots of millions at the Casino until they were politely asked to leave. The authorities knew they must be doing something illegal to keep on winning over and over again, but no matter how hard they tried, they could not work out what it was they were doing.60
48 Until he met Chrysanthemum, Aubergine’s best friend had been his pocket calculator and even that hadn’t liked him very much because Aubergine could do financial calculations a lot faster than it could. Adding two and two, he couldn’t do, but adding two billion and four thousand and nine he could do with his eyes shut. In fact, he could even do it with his eyes wide open just as long as the numbers he was adding were money and not vegetables or sheep.
49 Forty-three.
50 Twenty-three cubic centimetres.
51 Of course, in some countries, the kings and queens do have to make sacrifices to get the job. In Britain, for example, they have to have their ears stretched so they stick out a really long way and have their chins removed and talk with a really stupid accent. (See The Dragons 1: Camelot for more information about talking posh.)
52See the back of this book for some little-known Floods facts.
53 Aubergine made a mental note not to buy a boat while they were there.
54 About four Australian cents.
55 The hardest thing was finding a toilet roll tube. Mongolian toilet paper is actually a small hedgehog wrapped in rhubarb leaves.
56 Except for the Scottish Golden Beet Eagle, though that actually prefers artichokes.
57 Twelve cents.
58 Remember – Winchflat can hear everything Aubergine speaks, but nothing anyone else says.
59 Eight cents. I keep reminding you of the Australian to Mongolian exchange rates because I’m assuming that many of you are as rubbish at maths as I am. So for the last time – four Australian cents is about the same as fifty Mongolian tugriks.
60 I know, but I’m not telling you. I might go on holiday there myself one day and want to use the same system.