Myth Alliances

TWELVE

It took three days of number-crunching and data-wrangling while the Kobolds worked on reducing their original list of thirty-five dimensions to the Pervect Ten's most likely destination. Zol saw to it we were housed comfortably, in a little podlike house that looked like an egg laid by the big building. We were all starting to get indigestion from the local food, but none worse than Gleep. Between the starch and the grease of the processed packets, his digestive system was producing stenches beyond all previous efforts, some of which were legendary. In the end I took him miles out beyond the manicured gardens and let him hunt for his own food in the fenlands. Once I had been assured there was nothing sentient out there, I didn't worry about Gleep. Dragon digestive systems are notorious for being able to find nourishment in almost anything.

Gleep dug happily in the marshes, scaring lizard-frogs and marsh slugs while he looked for something to eat. He emerged from one particularly nasty bog clutching a football-sized, grayshelled creature that had far too many spiky legs and eyes. I winced as he crunched on its carapace and slurped down eye stalks, all with relish. At least he never seemed to eat anything cute. Or if he did, I mused, I'd never seen it. I chose not to worry about the concept. He licked his moustache back to fluffy whiteness and trotted over to me with a pleased air.

"Come on," I urged, hooking my hand through his collar, though I stood about as much chance of keeping him next to me if he didn't want to be as I did harnessing a tornado. We stalked back to the pod-house, shedding mud as we went. The whole Kobold system seemed to be in harmony with cleanliness and order. By the time we stepped inside we were both as clean as if we had had baths. Gleep pranced up and collapsed next to Tananda to groom his scales with his long tongue. She sat in an easy chair with her feet up on the table, cleaning her nails with a long knife. Wensley paced back and forth. A groove in the silver-gray carpet proved he had been engaged in that activity for some time.

"Where have you been?" Wensley wailed, coming over to wring his hands at me. "What are we waiting for? Every minute, the Pervects could be digging their claws more deeply into our backs. Wuh is in danger, and we are sitting here."

"Just how much money do you owe them?" Tananda asked. "Couldn't you just work out a solution and pay them off?"

"We have nothing to pay them with," Wensley whined. "No liquid assets worth speaking of. We would prefer not to deed them the equivalent in land, and our people chafe at the notion of working off the fee as involuntary personal assistants."

Indentured servants, I translated. I gave a moment of thought to being personal valet to a Pervect, and the pictures that sprang to mind made me shiver.

"As it is, they control all our manufacturing. We have no tourism. 'Come and see our historical castle, currently under permanent occupation by an outside consulting firm.'"

"Listen, cutie," Tananda began, stopping her manicure to point the knife at him. 'The Great Skeeve is taking time away from his very important studies to help you. Do you want him to back out? I'm sure he'd be thrilled to go back to the work he was doing when you interrupted him."

"No!" Wensley exclaimed. He came over to wring my hand, his eyes wide with horror. "Forgive me, Skeeve. I wasn't thinking. Of course you must do what you think is right… I hope you still consider our problem worthy of your attention. Please, don't abandon us. What would we do?"

Why couldn't I come up with retorts like Tananda's? I wondered. I glanced over at her. She threw me a broad wink.

"Of course I'll help you," I confirmed. "It's just gotten more complicated than it started out being."

"I understand, I understand," Wensley babbled gratefully. "Forgive me for not comprehending the time involved in a comprehensive plan such as the one that I know you have formulated."

I wish I had his faith. I was saved from having to come up with one by a glad cry from outside.

"Results!" Zol announced, coming down the path waving his notebook. Bunny came in behind him, her eyes shining. "The very place! I am sure that this must be the solution to the enigma. The map matched the terrain within 89 percent plotted points of similarity, and the spectacles would fit the inhabitants." He flung open his book to show us the name. "Scamaroni!"

My eyebrows lifted. I should have realized when I had first examined the list of dimensions whose denizens met our criteria that the Pervects would have homed in on that one. Even in the Bazaar the name had become a byword for easy marks. To have been "Scammed" was to have fallen for a great selling job, such as the Deveels were masters of. But plenty of other demons and merchants had made their way to Scamaroni over the centuries. Unlike the Wuhses, who realized they had gotten in over their heads and asked for help, the Scammies never seemed to learn. It sounded like the Pervect Ten had lit upon Scamaroni as the next link in their chain of conquest.

Just to make sure we landed in the right dimension, we diverted back through Wuh. As soon as the pigeon-bearing statue under the familiar gray-blue sky appeared Wensley bolted. Tananda, Bunny and I looked at one another.

"Gleep, fetch!" I shouted, pointing in the direction of the fleeing Wuhs. The ground thundered as my pet set off in pursuit. I ran after them, but Wensley outdistanced me, dodging around a corner in the middle of town. With an uneasy look over my shoulder at the castle looming over me, I sprinted down the narrow lane. The sounds of bleating and whimpering let me know which alleyway to turn into. Wensley lay on his back as Gleep dragged him by one leg back in the direction they had come.

"Oh, please, Master Skeeve!" he begged, as soon as he saw me. "Please, please don't make me come with you. I'm not good in fights. I'm not clever enough to figure out how to liberate a dimension." Gleep hauled him to my feet and let the leg drop. He sat up on his haunches and begged for a reward. I felt in my belt pouch for a packet of crisps and flipped it to him. He caught it and gulped it down, licking his chops. The Wuhs scrambled to his knees and tugged on my tunic hem. "Let me stay here. I'll gather information for you. I'll conduct interviews. I'll do analysis. I'll scrub lavatories. Just don't make me go with you." He burst into tears and blew his nose on my sleeve.

"I don't understand," I remarked, as Tananda, Zol and Bunny came running up behind us. "You didn't mind traveling by D-hopper to Klah or Deva."

'That was shopping," Wensley sobbed. "This might be confrontation."

"Please consider it, Master Skeeve," Zol suggested. "Wuhses aren't very assertive. Pushing him into difficult circumstances won't help break him of his fears. He might collapse when you need him most."

That could be disastrous for us. I looked at the others, but Tananda and Bunny waited for me to make the final decision. I wished, not for the first time, that Aahz was here, either to pick the sorry Wuhs up by his shirt front and shake him or to let him crawl away and hide.

"All right," I agreed at last. 'Try and find out where the spectacles are being made, and if your friends know anything else. We'll be back as soon as we can." Wensley was blubberingly grateful.

"You are as wise as you are mighty," he gasped out. I stepped back and wrung out my soggy shirt. By the disgusted look on her face, Tananda wasn't going to snuggle up to him any time in the future.

"Very well," Zol stated. "We have the coordinates. Will you do the honors, or should I?"

"Allow me," I said, reaching into my belt pouch for a pinch of magikal flash powder to cover up the fact that I was going to use our D-hopper. Wensley clambered to his feet, staying far enough away that we would have had to lunge to get him into the sphere of the device's influence. He waved a brief farewell, then took to his heels again with the expression of a deermoose surprised by lightning. The light blazed up, imprinting an image on my retinas of the Wuhs with the expression of a deermoose surprised by lightning.

"Sad," Tananda tsked, as we gathered around the D-hopper. "I thought we were getting somewhere with him."

Bunny fondled Bytina, who now rode in a color-coordinated pouch on her belt. "Maybe he needs a computer."

"Maybe he needs a personality transplant," Tananda suggested, dryly.

"Those can have some nasty side-effects," Zol frowned. I looked from one to the other, wondering how one went about transplanting a personality. Would it be like possession? What if the new mind didn't like the body it was put into?

But I had no more time to speculate upon higher philosophical processes. At the press of the control stud we found ourselves on a main street in a prosperous-looking city under a blazing hot sun. People, dressed in dark colors in spite of the day's heat, crowded the wooden sidewalk that ran past the gray stone-fronted buildings, pushing by us without a word of courtesy. A huge Scammie in a coat that reached his knees rammed right into me and kept going. Caught off guard, I teetered for a moment on the curb, waving my arms furiously for balance. With a cry I stumbled off into the path of a beast drawing a carriage, bearing down on me at a gallop. The animal, a six-legged, barrel-chested, long-tailed creature that looked like a cross between a rat and a horse, pawed the air with three-toed feet and let out a loud squeak of alarm. The driver hauled back on his reins, sniffed hard at the air, wrenched the animal to the side and kept going. He didn't say a thing. His expression remained unperturbed, as though he hadn't seen me, or even observed that his dray animal had nearly had an accident. I noticed that he was wearing dark glasses against the brightness of the day. Perhaps the Scammies had poor eyesight, and their psychometric talent or keen sense of smell allowed traffic to flow along as well as it did.

Tananda grabbed one of my arms and hauled me back onto the curb and up a flight of stone steps where Bunny and Zol had retreated to get out of the crush. We found ourselves on a hilltop overlooking a main street. Above us was a solid-looking government building of some kind, with prosperous Scammies coming and going through the molded bronze doors.

"I think it would help if we blended in," Zol noted.

I agreed. I stopped to study the Scammies. They tended to be taller than Klahds, with greeny-bronze faces and hands, all the flesh that was exposed by their garments, long-sleeved robes that swept the ground. The faces were inverted triangles. A round mouth down near the sharply pointed chin was nearly concealed by the most distinctive feature of the Scammie physiognomy: the nose. The average nose, ridged and glistening like a segmented worm, was longer than my hand, more like a junior trunk. The huge nostril, for there was only one, ran upward from just above the little mouth to right between the eyes. Those I could not see well, because nearly everyone on the street was wearing dark glasses.

'The spectacles!" I exclaimed, pointing.

"Disguise first," Zol cautioned me, as a uniformed Scammie, clearly an authority figure of some kind, turned his trunk in our direction. He started sniffing. Quickly, I formed a mental image of the five of us, then erased our features and superimposed Scammie mouths and noses, surmounting them with glasses to disguise our eyes. It helped that the natives, too, were upright creatures with their eyes on the front of their heads. I had little time to do more than clothe us all in identical robes before I bent down to take a good sniff of the nearest passerby. I wasn't that proficient at non-visual illusions, but if fitting in here meant disguising our natural aroma, I was certainly going to try. Their body odor was pleasant, like oranges with vanilla overtones. The police officer stopped sniffing. He tilted his triangular head with an air of confusion, then turned back to directing traffic.

"Mmm," Tananda smiled, lifting a wrist to her nose. "Nice. You can design a perfume for me any time, handsome."

Gleep stared at me with puzzlement in his round eyes. They were now black like the rat-horse's, with the rest of his form to match, because it was the only nonverbal creature I'd seen yet. He was troubled because not only did I not look like me, but I didn't smell right.

"It's okay, Gleep," I reassured him, petting him behind the ears. He looked dubious, but my voice was still famil- iar. I put my hand on his head and took a really good look around.

It had been only four days since we had lost track of the Pervect Ten, but they hadn't wasted a moment. It had not simply been the man in the carriage wearing dark glasses. Everybody we could see, in every direction, was wearing colored spectacles exactly like the pair I now had in my belt pouch. The reason the Scammies crowded one another so rudely on the sidewalks was that none of them was paying attention to where he or she was going. They bumped into vehicles, walls and one another, but no one seemed to get angry or upset. It was eerie. I had never seen traffic accidents resolved without swearing before.

"They all seem to be very happy," Bunny observed.

"They are under a spell," Zol confirmed, his voice rising with concern. "Their minds are under the control of the glasses. Tell them, Master Skeeve! Take your case to the common Scammie. Help them! Only the truth can save them now! Speak to them and set them free!"

His alarm galvanized me into action. I saw before me another world on the brink of falling under the influence of the Pervect Ten. We had been too slow to stop the infiltration, but those demons wouldn't keep the Scammies under their thumb, not if I could help it. I ran to the top of the stairs, spread out my arms and cried out to the people of Scamaroni.

"Take off your glasses!" I shouted. "They're part of a plot by a group of females from Perv who want to enslave your entire dimension. They're enchanting you! They are poisoning your minds!"