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.All the same, he bent his head.Sophie was just putting the pan on top of the curly green flames whenHowl s voice rang out hoarsely from nowhere. Brace yourself, Calcifer! She s found me!Calcifer sprang upright.The frying pan fell across Sophie s knees. You ll have to wait! Calciferroared, flaming blindingly up the chimney.Almost at once he blurred into a dozen or so burning bluefaces, as if he was being shaken violently about, and burned with a loud, throaty whirring. That must mean they re fighting, Michael whispered.Sophie sucked a slightly burned finger and picked slices of bacon off her skirt with the other hand,staring at Calcifer.He was whipping from side to side of the fireplace.His blurred faces pulsed fromdeep blue to sky blue and then almostto white.One moment he had multiple orange eyes, the next, rowsof starry silver ones.She had never imagined anything like it.Something swept overhead with a blast and a boom which shook everything in the room.A secondsomething followed, with a long, shrill roar.Calcifer pulsed nearly blue-black, and Sophie s skin fizzedwith the backblast from the magic.Michael scrambled for the window. They re quite near!Sophie hobbled to the window too.The storm of magic seemed to have affected half the things in theroom.The skull was yattering its jaw so hard that it was traveling round in circles.Packets were jumping.Powder was seething in jars.A book dropped heavily out of the shelves and lay open on the floor,fanning its pages back and forth.At one end of the room, scented steam boiled out of the bathroom: atthe other.Howl s guitar made out-of-tune twangings.And Calcifer whipped about harder than ever.Michael put the skull in the sink to stop it from yattering itself onto the floor while he opened the windowand craned out.Whatever was happening was maddeningly just out of sight.People in the housesopposite were at doors and windows, pointing to something more or less overhead.Sophie and Michaelran to the broom cupboard, where they seized a velvet cloak each and flung them on.Sophie got the onethat turned its wearer into a red-bearded man.Now she knew why Calcifer had laughed at her in theother one.Michael was a horse.But there was no time to laugh just then.Sophie dragged the door openand sped into the street, followed by the dog-man, who seemed surprisingly calm about the whole thing.Michael trotted out after her with a clatter of nonexistent hooves, leaving Calcifer whipping from blue towhite behind them.The street was full of people looking upward.No one had time to notice things like horses coming out ofhouses.Sophie and Michael looked too, and found a huge cloud boiling and twisting just above thechimney tops.It was black and rotating on itself violently.White flashes that were not quite like lightstabbed through the murk of it.But almost as soon as Michael and Sophie arrived, the clot of magic tookon the shape of a misty bundle of fighting snakes.Then it tore in two with a noise like an enormous catfight.One part sped yowling across the roofs and out to sea, and the second went screaming after it.Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlSome people retreated indoors then.Sophie and Michael joined the rush of braver people down thesloping lanes to the dockside.There everyone seemed to think the best view was to be had along thecurve of the harbor wall.Sophie hobbled to get out along it too, but there was no need to go beyond theshelter of the harbor master s hut.Two clouds were hanging in the air, some way out to sea, on the otherside of the harbor wall, the only two clouds in the calm blue sky.It was quite easy to see them.It wasequally easy to see the dark patch of storm raging on the sea between the clouds, flinging up great,white-topped waves.There was an unfortunate ship caught in that storm.Its masts were beating backand forth.They could see spouts of water hitting it on all sides.Thecrew were desperately trying to takein the sails, but one at least had torn to flying gray rags. Can t they have a care for that ship! someone said indignantly.Then the wind and the waves from the storm hit the harbor wall.White water lashed over and the bravepersons out on the wall came crowding hurriedly back to the quayside, where the moored ships wereheaving and grinding at their moorings.Among all this was a great deal of screaming in high, singingvoices.Sophie put her face out into the wind beyond the hut, where the screaming came from, anddiscovered that the raging magic had disturbed more than the sea and the wretched ship.A number ofwet, slithery-looking ladies with flying green-brown hair were dragging themselves up onto the harborwall, screaming and holding long, wet arms out to more screaming ladies tossing in the waves.Every oneof them had a fishtail instead of legs. Confound it! said Sophie. The mermaids from the curse! That meant only two more impossible thingsto come true now.She looked up at the two clouds.Howl was kneeling on the lefthand one, much larger and nearer thanshe would have expected.He was still dressed in black.Typically enough, he was staring over hisshoulder at the frantic mermaids.He was not looking at them as if he remembered they were part of thecurse at all. Keep your mind on the Witch! the horse beside Sophie yelled.The Witch sprang into being, standing on the righthand cloud, in a whirl of flame-colored robe andstreaming red hair, with her arms raised to invoke further magic.As Howl turned and looked at her, herarms came down.Howl s cloud erupted into a fountain of rose-colored flame.Heat from it swept acrossthe harbor, and the stones of the wall steamed. It s all right! gasped the horse.Howl was on the tossing, nearly sinking ship below.He was a tiny black figure now, leaning against thebucking mainmast.He let the Witch know she had missed by waving at her cheekily.The Witch saw himthe instant he waved.Cloud, Witch, and all at once became a savagely swooping red bird, diving at theship.The ship vanished.The mermaids sang a doleful scream.There was nothing but sulkily tossing waterwhere the ship had been.But the diving bird was going too fast to stop.It plunged into the sea with ahuge splash.Everyone on the quayside cheered. I knew that wasn t a real ship really! someone behind Sophie said. Yes, it must have been an illusion, the horse said wisely [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]