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holding it tight. It was damp and dirty – and now it was his only hope.
    “Hey, you little bastard! Bite me, would you?” Basta’s voice reached him through the quiet night air. “You can run, but I’ll get you yet, do you hear? You, the fire-eater, Silvertongue and his hoity-toity daughter – and the old man who wrote those accursed words! I’ll kill you all! One by one!
    The way I’ve just slit open the beast that came out of the book.” Farid hardly dared to breathe.
    Go on , he told himself. Go on! He can’t see you! Trembling, he felt for the next tree trunk, sought a handhold, and was grateful to the wind for blowing through the leaves and drowning out his footsteps with their rustling. How many times do I have to tell you? There aren’t any ghosts in this world. One of its few advantages. He heard Dustfinger’s voice as clearly as if he were still following the fire-eater. Farid kept repeating the words as the tears ran down his face and thorns gashed his feet: There are no ghosts, there are no ghosts!
    A branch whipped against his face so hard that he almost cried out. Were they following him? He couldn’t hear anything except the wind. He slipped again and stumbled down the slope. Nettles stung his legs, burrs caught in his hair. And something jumped up at him, furry and warm, pushing its nose into his face.
    “Gwin?” Farid felt the little head. Yes, there were the tiny horns. He pressed his face into the marten’s soft fur. “Basta’s back, Gwin!” he whispered. “And he has the book! Suppose Orpheus reads him into it again? He’s sure to go back into the book sometime, don’t you think? How are we going to warn Dustfinger about him now?”
    Farid twice found himself back at the road that wound down the mountain, but he dared not walk along it and instead made his way on through the prickly undergrowth. Soon every breath he drew hurt, but he did not stop. Only when the first rays of the sun made their way through the trees, and Basta still hadn’t appeared behind him, did he know that he had gotten away.
    Now what? he thought as he lay in the damp grass, gasping for breath. Now what? And suddenly he remembered another voice, the voice that had brought him into this world. Silvertongue. Of course. Only Silvertongue could help Farid now, he or his daughter, Meggie. They were living with the bookworm woman these days. Farid had once been there with Dustfinger. It was a long way to go, particularly with the cuts on his feet. But he had to get there before Basta did. .
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    Chapter 3 – Dustfinger Comes Home
     
    “What is this?” said the Leopard, “that is so ‘sclusively dark, and yet so full of little pieces of light?”
    – Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
    For a moment Dustfinger felt as if he had never been away as if he had simply had a bad dream, and the memory of it had left a stale taste on his tongue, a shadow on his heart, nothing more. All of a sudden everything was back again: the sounds, so familiar and never forgotten; the scents; the tree trunks dappled in the morning light; the shadow of the leaves on his face. Some were turning color, like the leaves in that other world, so autumn must be coming here, too, but the air was still mild. It smelled of overripe berries, fading blossoms, a thousand or more flowers dazing his senses – flowers pale as wax glimmering under the shade of the trees, blue stars on stems so thin and delicate that he walked carefully so as not to tread on them. Oaks, planes, tulip trees towering to the sky all around him! He had almost forgotten how huge a tree could be, how broad and tall its trunk, with a leaf canopy spreading so wide that a whole troop of horsemen could shelter beneath it. The forests of the other world were so young, their trees still children.
    They had always made him feel old, so old that the years covered him like cobwebs. Here he was young again, just a child among the trees, not much older than the mushrooms growing among