Myth Alliances

NINE

"Can't we just pop out?" I asked, squinting at the wall. Now that I had stopped to look, the door, the walls, the ceiling, and even the windows were covered by a flickering blue haze. I backed into the center of the room, as far from the perimeter as I could get. "One of them did. The others just walked out."

"They know what spell they set," Tananda pointed out. "We don't. We might manage to transport ourselves and still get fried."

"What can we do?" I asked, trying not to sound as panicky as I felt.

Tananda looked at the magik field thoughtfully. "Polarity," she stated at last. "It's supposed to keep people out, but not necessarily in. We could try to push it outward."

"Okay," I agreed, slowly. I had pried open a few magik traps in the past. I wished Aahz had been there to offer his advice, but it would probably be along the lines of "you know what you're doing, kid, do it!" Which was no help at all, under the circumstances. If I knew Pervects they wouldn't linger over their food. They could be back any minute.

I rubbed my hands together as I stared at the blue fire. But what was I waiting for? I had to find a way out.

Now that the Pervect Ten had finished with their sorcery there was plenty of magik around. I could feel the pulses of minor spells, like the nutter of leaves in a forest. I pictured the lines of force in my mind. Here the lines deep within the earth were green. It wasn't very strong, but it was close. I drew as much of it up into myself as I could.

When working with magik you had to think in very positive terms to keep control of forces that were greater than you. Lose your concentration while you were constructing a magikal framework, and the resulting backlash could tear you to pieces. Lose your focus while defusing a trap, and smack! You did your opponents' work for them. I summoned up the image of a huge pair of hands, and imagined them pushing at the blue force blanketing the door. It moved! The whole curtain shifted backwards about five paces.

"Hold it!" Tananda ordered. "Look behind you."

I halted the progress of the hands, but kept them in place as I glanced around. The curtain shielding the far wall had also moved forward five paces. Very, very carefully I pushed the spell back to where it started. In my mind I formed four big pairs of hands and pushed outward. This time the walls moved but the lid of the spell started to come down on us as its supports were moved further apart. I tried pushing in all the directions. I succeeded in stretching the spell every which way but never finding a hole in it through which we could escape.

"I've never seen one that moved before," Tananda mused, peering at the force field curiously. "That's really interesting. It dragged over the table but didn't burn anything. These are still intact." She picked up a pair of gaudy-framed spectacles that lay on the wooden top. "That's what was in the box the Ten were putting a spell on," I declared, excitedly. "It's a clue. We'll take them to Zol. He'll help us figure out what they are."

"When we get out of here," Tananda reminded me. "We can't wait here for them to come back, then ask them pretty please to remove their security spell because we got trapped in it."

"Then we won't," I stated, grimly.

"What? What are we supposed to do with a huge cage of burning blue fire?"

"We'll take it with us," I explained. "It doesn't hurt inanimate objects. All we have to do is shrink it around us and walk out of here. As soon as they get back and notice it's gone, they'll dispell it and start over. We'll just have to make sure that neither we nor anyone else touches it until then."

A slow grin curled the side of Tananda's mouth. "That's so ridiculous it's brilliant," she nodded. "I'll help you. We have to hurry."

I dismissed my invisible pairs of hands inside the room and reconstituted them outside. "All together now, push!"

The spell became very tall and narrow. I hoped when the top of the now rectangular shape vanished through the ceiling that it wouldn't hit any poor, innocent Wuhs working on an upper floor. Tananda and I held onto one another as we shuffled in the center of the narrow square, walking out through the antechamber, into the hallway, past the defensive spells that Tananda disarmed then rearmed as we passed. To my relief we did not run into any of the Pervect Ten. Before we reached, the main entrance I put the disguise spell back on us, but if any of the Pervects had looked out the window, the tower of magik would attract their attention long before the little figures inside it did. To prevent any Wuhses from approaching us to pass the time of day I created the illusion of a couple of wheelbarrows full of rotting offal.

"That looks so bad I can almost smell it," Tananda grinned admiringly. "You really know your illusions, handsome."

It took us some time to get back to the inn. We stood at the open door, reluctant to go inside lest the spell towering over us kill anyone in the upper storey.

"Zol," I called, seeing the author sitting at a table chatting quietly to a couple of Wuhses. Bunny peered around the side of the booth and smiled with relief. Gleep, curled on the floor beside them, raised his head from the floor. His eyes widened with joy, and he sprang to his feet.

"Gleep!" he cried, charging over to greet me.

"No, Gleep!" I shouted. "Stop! Go back! Don't touch the…"

There was a blinding flash of light as he galloped through the spell's boundary. When my sight returned I dropped to my knees beside my poor, fallen pet. I cradled his head in my lap. He had probably been charred to death by the incineration spell. He… he was still green. The mustache under his long nose was still white. And his eyes…

"Gleep!" he exclaimed. His eyes flew open. He tilted his head back so he could lick my face with his long, forked tongue.

His eyes were still blue. He was all right! I hugged him, and he slurped my face again. I gagged. His breath was as stinky as Pervish cooking.

Zol and Bunny hurried over to us with Wensley scurrying nervously behind.

"What has happened?" the author asked.

"Don't come any closer!" I yelled.

"Yes," Zol pondered, throwing out an arm to prevent Wensley from stepping right into the edge of the spell. "I see it now. My goodness, where did you find that?"

Now that we were safely around the corner of the inn facing away from the castle, I plunged the bulk of the spell down into the earth. Tananda and I sat down, and I told the others what we had seen. "And once they let go of the power all of these active spells began working again, including this one. Now we can't get out until the Ten turn it off and take it home."

"Yes, you can," Zol agreed, peering at it closely. "Mistress Tananda was right about the way the spell is constructed. It is a case of polarity. You were inside when it resumed operating, and the Pervect Ten left the room. If you had gone with them, you wouldn't have felt a thing. If you examine the individual tongues of flame that make up the walls, you would see that they have a blunt end and a pointed end. The pointed end is the dangerous one. When you arrived back just now, they were pointing in. This kind of spell works like a door on a two-way hinge. First it swings out, then it swings in."

"Oh!" I exclaimed, as enlightenment dawned. "And Gleep swung it in. So the points are facing away from us?"

"That's right! So now all of you can come out."

Very nervously, Tananda and I rose to our feet. I bent down and looked Gleep in the eye.

"You jump out at the same time we do," I ordered, sternly.

"Gleep," he stated blandly, but I noticed his eyebrow ridges rise. He understood me. I wrapped my arm around his neck.

"One, two, THREE!"

We bounded out. Another brilliant flash of light blinded us for a moment. I could feel my hair crackle on my head, but no blaze of fire tried to consume me. When we let go of one another I patted myself down to make sure nothing was burning. Gleep's long neck snaked all around me as he looked to make sure I was all right. Tananda brushed her hair back, and pulled her tunic down so her decolletage returned to its normal buoyancy.

"That's a nasty one," she remarked. "I'll have to remember that trick." We'd barely straightened up when I heard another crackle from behind me. I spun around just in time to see the column of blue light collapse and vanish. The Pervect Ten were calling their safeguard spell home.

"A very sophisticated use of magik," Zol Icty agreed, leading us back to the table. Montgomery, our host, brought us a tray full of food and beer. I fell on the food as though I'd been starved for weeks. Tananda served herself more daintily, but she filled her plate as high as I did mine. Being terrified and nearly incinerated did help us work up an appetite. "We are up against very intelligent opponents. You say they had a computer in the room?"

"Yes," I affirmed, washing down a mouthful of cheese with a swig of beer. "The little one was reading from an almost infinite scroll. I think it would be the longest scroll in the history of the world, but I couldn't see where it was rolled up."

"It's in virtual space," Zol explained, smiling. "A kind of magik. I could teach you, but that is not the best use of our time now. Can you get me in there?"

We looked at Wensley. He writhed uneasily.

"They're in there all the time except when they eat or sleep or come to supervise us."

"Tonight is time enough," Zol assured us. "I am awake a good deal of the night anyhow."

"You don't want to go back again?" Wensley squawked, aghast.

"How do you want us to figure out what they're doing?" I demanded. "Ask them?"

The Wuhs had no answer to that.

Once again we found ourselves sneaking into the great room of the castle. The Wuhses on what anywhere else would have been guard duty carefully looked the other way as we passed, with all the subtlety of a child counting to 100 in a game of Hide and Seek.

Apparently it had not made the Pervect Ten suspicious that their security spell had been stolen that afternoon. The gleaming blue cage was back in place, this time tethered with lines of force to the walls of the castle, preventing it from moving again. That didn't worry me, because now we knew how to pass in and out of it without being killed.

The little flames were pointing inward when we reached the room, a sign that the Ten were not in it. Very carefully I used a tendril of magik to ease open the door wide enough to peer through. As I hoped, the room was dark and silent. I signaled to the others. We tiptoed in.

I had left Gleep at the head of the corridor curled up under a couch set in an alcove. If he saw any Pervects heading towards us he had instructions to cry out. At the sound of "Gleep!" we were to run into the anteroom and pop back to the inn. He would meet us there as soon as he could get away from them. They'd be unlikely to suspect an innocent-looking baby dragon of subterfuge. I hoped.

"Now, Pervect code is very hard to break," Zol explained, as he sat down in the child's chair and flexed his long fingers. I noticed with surprise that he fit into the seat fairly well. "They tend to like permutations of complex numbers as their secure logarithm."

Bunny sat on the desk beside her hero, watching him raptly. I felt a twinge of jealousy, wondering what I would have to do for anyone to admire me like that. Tananda came up and wrapped her arm around me.

"Don't worry, hot stuff," she told me, with a little smile. "She'll snap out of it. She likes you just the way you are."

I flushed. Bunny was my friend. I wasn't trying to im- press her. Was I? Embarrassed, I moved off to take a look out the door. I hoped none of the Pervect Ten was going to get up in the middle of the night to work on their plans for conquest. The hall was empty. My breathing was the loudest thing at this end of the room.

Zol wasn't doing so well. Using all his fingers and thumbs he was pushing the buttons on the board so fast they chattered. I noticed that there was a small symbol in the center of each button. Since I had seen written and printed Pervish I knew they stood for letters of their alphabet, though I couldn't read them. In the screen images and words flashed. I couldn't tell what any of them meant, but one kept coming up time and time again: a big X.

"What's that mean?" I said, pointing.

"Well, in some languages it means do not enter," Zol began, his fingers dancing along. "In Pervish and a few others it is an archaic way of writing 'ten,' which in this case would be appropriate, but I believe it also has the added meaning of 'the unknown variable,' this being the key to the library of documents locked within this computer. There are quite a lot of them. That is one of the few facts I can glean. The rest is protected by the password, which the X indicates. Since I don't know it I have been putting in my guesses as to possible keywords. I've tried over a thousand words in every combination of capital and small-case letters, plus permutations and combinations of profit/loss formulae, which are familiar to every Pervish college graduate, but I've been unlucky so far. Still, there's hope. I'm bounded only by the number of keys here on the keyboard, and there's a finite number of combinations…"

I glanced nervously at the door. "How long do you think it will take you?"

"Oh, well, this is not like cracking a safe, you know," Zol stated, cheerfully as ever. "I might stumble upon the correct key any moment now." "And the longest it could take?"

"Oh…" Zol paused a moment to think. 'Two or three years. At the outside."

"We don't have three years," Wensley whispered. "My people are already suffering because these Pervects won't leave!"

"Naturally not," Zol agreed. "You Wuhses are sensitive souls. You would see the Pervects as nonparticipants in your cooperative lifestyle." His hands never stopped moving, but suddenly images began to pour out of the magik mirror, wreathing the Kobold in colored smoke. I saw faces: Pervects, Imps, Deveels, Klahds, Wuhses and plenty of races that I didn't recognize. "I'm trying to unlock any files that may have been left upon the desktop."

With a skeptical expression I let my eye fall upon the otherwise clear table. Zol smiled. "Just like the books from which you saw the little Pervect reading, there is also a desk, though it exists only inside here."

"Ah," I breathed, enlightened at last. "Magik."

"Yes, indeed," Zol declared. "We Kobolds thrive upon this kind of magik."

The longer he worked, the more agitated the specters surrounding him became. The faces grew ugly and hollow-eyed, threatening him with claws and fangs. They distorted into big blobs with hair scattered on their surfaces.

"Stay away from me now," Zol warned. "Those are viruses. I've been inoculated, but you haven't. If they touch you they will take over your mind. Ah!"

Suddenly the whole end of the room lit up. I recoiled from it, narrowly avoiding a cluster of the blobs.

"That's the map," I confirmed, eyeing the circling blobs.

"It's the only thing in the files that's not password protected," Zol informed me. "But what does it represent?"

"It's not part of Wuh," Wensley stated.

"I don't recognize it, either," Tananda frowned. "It's certainly not Trollia or Klahd." "I'll have to compare it with maps of the other dimensions I've visited," Zol remarked.

"How?" I asked. "You can't memorize something like that."

"I don't have to," the Kobold assured me. "Coley will remember it for us." From his shoulder bag he removed a silverbacked book. When he opened it I saw it had no pages. It was a computer, but in miniature. He held the shiny screen toward the map. I peered at the bright surface with interest. Unlike the computers I had seen on Perv, this one featured color images as well as words. At the moment it had a picture on it of shutterbugs, those tiny denizens of Nikkonia who could capture images on the translucent cells of their wings. They looked so real I reached out to touch them and found my hand stopped by a clear barrier. The shutterbugs looked up at me and gestured impatiently for me to get out of their way. I dodged to one side. One of them held up his thumb, squinted one eye shut, then began fluttering his wings. Zol watched it until it looked up at him to signal that it had finished.

"And a backup, please."

The second shutterbug stepped forward, framed the scene with its hands, then began fluttering. In a moment it, too, was finished. Zol clapped the covers of his miniature computer closed and put it back in his satchel.

"Now, to Kobol!"