The Paths Of The Perambulator

Well, he’d half expected as much. He and Clothahump were the prime movers in this business. He was neither embarrassed nor intimidated by the stares of his companions. He’d been through similar situations often enough in the past to have gained a certain amount of confidence. And it was too much to expect that for once he’d be able to hang back and let bloodthirsty types like Mudge and Colin do the heavy work. He sighed.

“You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already suspect. Are you sure you can’t tell us anything more about what we’re going to have to deal with?”

Again Colin turned his attention to the runes. “I can see something but I can’t define it. The runes are rarely precise. It isn’t something I’d know how to handle myself. I can tell you that it will manifest itself in two ways. The first will take the form of a magic only you can counter.”

“More spellsinging.” Jon-Tom grunted. “Well, I had to fight it out with another spellsinger once before, and he and I ended up the best of friends. If I have to go up against another one . . .”

“The runes read in multiples.”

“All right, then, if I have to go up against several singers, maybe I can convert them the way I did the other one. They may end up as our allies instead of our enemies.”

“It’ll be a wonder if you can turn these to friendships. I read no accommodating signs in the pattern. You will have a tough time combating them. The runes don’t say if you’ll survive the confrontation; so powerful, so evil and destructive is their particular brand of magic.”

Jon-Tom sat up a little straighten “I’ll handle it. What form is the second manifestation going to take?”

“That much, at least, is clear.” The koala stared at him appraisingly. “The runes say that you will have to do battle with your own greatest desire.”

That set Jon-Tom back on his heels. He thought immediately of the dreamworld he’d been drifting through not long ago, of the thousands of fans cheering and screaming at him and the promise of a respected and venerated career in government.

“But I’ve already done that. It was part of the illusion I experienced earlier.”

Colin looked back down at the fragments of wood and stone. “Maybe you’ll have to deal with it again. It isn’t clear here, but that’s the closest description I can give. You must prepare to deal with that desire as best you’re able.”

“Will we be successful in the end?” Dormas asked somberly.

“The runes don’t say. Finality of any kind is the hardest pattern to interpret. The runes lead to a place and time of ultimate confrontation, but that’s it. Beyond that point nothing is visible.” He started gathering up the runes and the corners of the pouch.

“O’ course, we don’t know ‘ow much o’ wot you’ve said is certain an’ ‘ow much a product o’ your fevered imagination, fuzzball.”

Colin glared at the otter but his expression quickly softened. “I could take that for an insult, pilgrim, but I won’t. Because it happens to be the truth. The reading felt unusually good here”—and he put one finger over his heart—”and here.” He moved it to his forehead. “Sometimes the casting is bad and I can sense it, but this one was as accurate as they come.” He glanced sideways at Jon-Tom. “I almost wish it were otherwise.”

“No, I’m glad you did the reading,” Jon-Tom told him thankfully. “I’d rather have some idea of what we’re up against, even if your description did border on the nebulous.”

Clothahump was peering through the pass ahead. “There is no point in putting off the inevitable. That is something that must always be coped with.”

The attacks commenced soon after they started through the far end of the pass. Landslides repeatedly threatened to trap and crush them in the narrow defile. Each time the boulders came crashing down toward them Clothahump raised his arms and bellowed a single powerful phrase. And each time the rocks were blasted to fragments.

“Not the ideal solution,” the wizard said, apologizing for the dust that soon covered all of them, “but I promise you a good cleansing spell as soon as we have done with this.”

Eventually there were no more landslides. Instead the clouds opened up and they were drenched with a misplaced tropical downpour. It washed away the rock dust but also threatened to wash them right back down the pass.

Again Clothahump went to work, raising his hands and grumbling about the amount of overtime he was having to put in at his age. The flood rushing down upon them was transformed into a vast cloud of warm steam. For ten minutes the pass was turned into a giant sauna. Finally the steam dissipated enough for them to proceed.

“Look at this,” Mudge complained, fingering one side of his vest. “ ‘Ow the ‘ell am I supposed to get these bloomin’ wrinkles out?”

“I am responsible for preserving your life, water rat,” Clothahump told him sharply, “not your appearance. It would do you well to be more attentive to the terrain ahead and less narcissistic.”

The otter regarded his filthy, damp fur and bedraggled attire. “As you say, Your Wizardship. I just ‘ope we don’t meet anyone I know.”

“That’s unlikely, pilgrim.” The koala put a paw on the back of Clothahump’s shell. “How you holding up, old-timer?”

“I am concerned with the simplicity of these attacks. There is little danger in any of them. That does not jibe with your reading.”

“Like I’ve said, there are plenty of times when I’m not too accurate. I thought this last one was right on the money, but I’m not going to complain if I overstated the threat.”

“You’re underrating yourself, sir,” Jon-Tom told him. “There aren’t many individuals for whom multiple landslides and mountain floods hold little danger. I guess whoever we’re up against doesn’t realize who he’s dealing with.”

“Perhaps not, my boy. Or he may be attempting to lull us into overconfidence. The insane can be exceedingly subtle. Still, you may be right. The sorcery we have had to deal with thus far is of a most mundane kind. If we run into nothing more complex, we shall have no difficulty in reaching our goal.”

“I can’t believe that Colin’s reading of the runes was that inaccurate.”

“Neither can I, man,” said the koala, “but there’s nothing wrong with hoping that I was.”

A voice shrilled down at them. Sorbl had returned from scouting a little way ahead. Now he circled low over his companions. “Just ahead, Master, friends! The pass reaches its end. Our destination is in sight!” He wheeled about, digging air, and glided out in front of them once more.

Increasing their pace, they puffed and panted the last few yards and finally found themselves looking down instead of up for the first time in weeks.

XII

Below lay a lovely little hanging valley, nestled between two towering peaks. The bottom was filled with a long blue lake. Evergreens lined both shores, though few rose higher than a dozen feet. The majority were gnarled and twisted, sure signs that powerful storms visited this valley frequently.

The tree line ended not far above the lake. A few isolated trees grew as much as halfway up the mountainside. Where they ceased to grow was sited the base of a monolithic, forbidding wall.

“The fortress of our enemy,” Donnas declared. “It has to be.”

Mudge squinted at it uncertainly. “That’s a fortress?”

Truly, Jon-Tom mused, it was a most unimpressive structure. The single outer wall was composed of plain rock loosely cemented together. What they could see of an inner roof was made of thatch instead of some sturdy roofing material like slate or tile. Portions of the wall were crumbling and in a sad state of disrepair. The winding pathway leading up to the wall from the lake was in worse shape still. It was not even paved.

“What we can see has not been in existence for very long,” Clothahump commented. They had started down toward the lake.

“How can that be?” Jon-Tom asked, confused. “It’s falling down.”

“In this instance that is not an indication of great age so much as it is of sloppy construction, my boy. It is poorly designed and ill built. Just like the series of attacks we had to deal with in the pass behind us. It indicates the presence of a lucky, haphazard opponent as opposed to a methodical and powerful one, although he may yet succeed in making lethal use of the perambulator’s twistings and turnings. We must remain on guard. Remember the runes.”

“I haven’t forgotten, sir.”

They walked along in silence for a while, each member of the party engrossed in his or her private thoughts. After a while Clothahump slid over until he was marching alongside Jon-Tom.

He finally gave the wizard a curious glance. “Something on your mind, Clothahump, sir?”

The sorcerer hesitated a moment, finally craned his neck to meet the tall young human eye to eye. “While I am confident, my boy, that we are dealing here with matters beyond the experience of most people, I cannot be certain of the outcome.”

“Neither can Colin, despite his runes.”

“Quite. Therefore, I mean to say a few things that perhaps should have been said before now.”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“What I am trying to say, my boy, is that I have been brisk with you at times. As brisk as with Sorbl on occasion. Sometimes it may seem to you from my tone, if not from my words, that I only make use of your talents and care nothing for you personally. This is untrue. I have grown—quite fond of you. I wanted you to know in case anything—happens.”

Surprised and overcome by this wholly unexpected confession, Jon-Tom could think of nothing to say.

“Bringing you to this world was an accident and insofar as blame can be ascribed to it, it falls upon my shell. Your appearance here in response to my desperate request for sorcerous aid was not well received. I was most displeased and disappointed.”

“I remember,” Jon-Tom said softly.

“Fate has a way of balancing the scales, however, and in your case, it has more than done so. Events have worked out better, 1 daresay, than either of us could have anticipated. Yet I fear I have been something less than a gracious host.” He raised a hand to forestall Jon-Tom’s protest. “No, let me finish. I am unused to personal expressions of humility, and if I do not finish now, I may never do so.

“You must try to understand that wizardry is a solitary profession. We who practice it have little time to develop social graces or refine interpersonal relationships. As the world’s greatest wizard, I have had to endure the weight of reputation for more than a century. As a result I sometimes tend to forget that I am dealing with mortals less versed in life as well as in the intricacies of my art. I fear my impatience sometimes carries over into rudeness.

“What I am trying to say, and I fear doing a poor job of it, is that you have acquitted yourself admirably mis past year. You have tolerated my personal peccadilloes gracefully, complained no more than could have been expected, and in general done everything that has been asked of you.

“I just wanted to tell you this so that you would know my true thoughts. I would not want either of us to pass on to a higher plane ignorant of these feelings. You give me hope for the youth of this world and have been a comfort to me in my old age.”

Before Jon-Tom could think of anything to say, the wizard had moved off to join Dormas in bringing up the rear. It didn’t matter. Time did not provide him with a suitable reply. There was nothing to say. The turtle’s speech was the nearest thing to an expression of genuine friendship he’d ever made. No, that wasn’t right. It was more than an expression of friendship. It bordered on a confession of affection. No matter how long he lived, he doubted he’d hear the like again.

Replying in kind would only have embarrassed Clothahump. Jon-Tom had come to know the wizard well enough to know that much. So he kept his response to himself and let the warm glow the wizard’s words had produced spread through his whole being.

Besides, there was no time to waste on sentiment. He had more important things to think about. There were useful songs to review in his mind, lyrics to recall. If Colin was half right, they would find themselves confronting something dangerous and unexpected anytime now, something only he was going to be able to deal with.

But he would never forget what the wizard had just told him, any more than he would let Clothahump forget those words the next time he flew into one of his rages and started bawling his young charge out for some imagined transgression.

They didn’t have long to wait for the koala’s predictions to begin to come true. The first attack came as they were leaving the scrub woods and beginning the long climb up the winding, dilapidated path to the structure clinging to the slope above. A cold wind sprang up, swirling around them, touching their faces and hands with all the forceful delicacy of a blind man. Such a wind was not to be unexpected at these altitudes, but the abruptness of it put all of them on their guard. This was not the time or place to take chances, even with a stray breeze. They huddled together and searched the land and sky surrounding them.

Colin had his sword out, clutched it tightly in his right hand. The muscles bulged in his short but powerful arms. “Dormas, you have most of our supplies. You stay behind us. You’re better built for fighting a rear-guard action, anyway. You, sir,” he said to Clothahump, “stay in the middle where we can protect you. And you—”

“Just a minim, mate. Who are you to be givin’ out orders? Maybe you forgot that we were the ones who ‘ad to rescue you?”

“Defending folks is my other profession, otter. I’m taking care of defensive tactics because I’m the one best qualified to do so.”

“Do tell.” Mudge moved over until he was standing chest-to-chest with the koala. “As it ‘appens, I’ve done a bit o’ soldierin’ in me time, too, and if there’re any orders that ‘ave to be ‘anded out ‘ere for defensive purposes, maybe we ought to—”

“Both of you shut up and concentrate on guarding your respective behinds.” Clothahump’s tone indicated that he wasn’t in the mood to listen to a debate on the nature of childish macho prerogatives. “It does not matter how we approach this asylum or what flimsy weapons we brandish. We are likely to be confronted by something that steel cannot turn.”

“You said that right, asshole.”

Colin and Mudge turned from one another to confront this new threat. There were four of them. They stood side by side, blocking the pathway leading to the fortress above. In stature they resembled Colin, being no more than four feet in height and broad in proportion. Each was colored bright red. Looking at them, Jon-Tom didn’t think they’d acquired their skin color from spending a lot of time vacationing in a sunny land, though from a southerly region they’d surely come.

Each boasted a pair of short, inward-curving black horns. Mouths seemed to stretch from ear to ear and were filled with short, pointed teeth. Their pupils were bright red on black irises. They were pointed like those of a lizard.

“He who brought us here sought far for us,” the first imp declared. “He says you shall go no farther. You worry him by your presence, and he has no time for worry. He bids you depart from this place now or suffer the consequences.”

“Sorry,” Jon-Tom replied calmly. “We won’t be just a minute. All we have to do is release his unwilling guest and then we’ll be on our way.” He took a step forward.

The second imp held up both clawed hands. “You shall not pass. Away with you!”

“You may be right, Old One,” Colin murmured to Clothahump. “Steel may not be the right weapon to use here. But you’ll forgive me if I find out for myself.” So saying he lunged forward and brought his long saber down smack against the forehead of the imp with the raised hands.

The blade passed completely through the red-skinned ho-munculus to strike sparks from the ground. A shaken Colin backed cautiously away from the grinning creature.

“You don’t listen so good,” it told him.

“No,” agreed the imp on his left. “Maybe a demonstration’s in order.”

Each imp reached behind itself. Mudge reacted to this threatening gesture by drawing his own sword while Clothahump hunkered down inside his shell and started retreating.

But it wasn’t bows and arrows or swords and scimitars or pikes or knives or any other kind of traditional weapon that the imps produced. Instead each one brought forth a different kind of musical instrument. One held a bizarre flute that twisted and curved in on itself loosely in one hand. The second in line was clutching a flat wooden container with strings running over its top and bottom in a crazy-quilt pattern. The third displayed something akin to Jon-Tom’s duar, save that it had only a single set of strings, and the last imp in line had swung a string of small drums around to rest on the upper curve of his belly. Or were they a part of the body itself? They might as easily have been a line of bulging, flat-topped tumors.

For that matter, all the instruments appeared to be growing out of the compact red bodies.

Mudge edged over close to Jon-Tom. “Spellsingers from ‘ell, mate. That’s wot they be.” The otter threw Colin a quick glance. “Me apologies to you, fuzzball, for decryin’ your rune-castin’. This much o’ that prophecy seems to ‘ave come true, though I wish it were otherwise.”

“So do I.” Despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness, the koala continued to hold his sword out in front of him, aware that it was no more a useful talisman than a weapon against this quartet.

“There’s four of ‘em, lad,” Mudge whispered. “Can you ‘andle four of ‘em at once?”

“I don’t know,” his tall friend confessed. “Each of them carries a different instrument. Maybe they’re only effective when working together. If that’s the case, I’ll only have to counter one spellsong at a time. We’ll know soon enough.” Slowly he brought the duar around to a playing position.

The second imp regarded him out of wide black-and-red eyes. It hardly looked alarmed, Jon-Tom thought. Amused, perhaps.

“Oh, ho, so,” it chirped, “another singer! We were told we might encounter such. That’s much better. Death and destruction is always tastier when rendered with a little spice. Make it interesting for us, man.”

“I intend to,” Jon-Tom told it grimly.

The imp regarded its companions. “Look to your tunes, to your chords and phrases, and beware your harmonizing!”

The first song was aimed not at Jon-Tom but at the member of the offending trespassers who’d dared to strike an opening blow. The words struck Colin hard. He dropped his sword, his eyes going wide, and he staggered backward with both hands clutched to his belly. Mudge instantly put his own weapon down and, moving as only a otter can move, just did manage to catch the koala before he collapsed to the ground. He held the wheezing, vomiting Colin under both arms. A single chorus had reduced him from a powerful, alert fighter to a physical and mental basket case.

The imps didn’t bother to finish the song. A few bars and lyrics had lain the strongest of their opponents low. At the first notes Jon-Tom’s jaw had dropped in astonishment, though the song had not affected him. But then, it hadn’t been directed at him, either.

“You see”—the second imp sneered—”what we can do. Our master has given us the strength of spellsinging that arises from the deepest well of confusion, from the black pits where unpleasant songs of sorrow and despair mix together to form the most depressing soul-suffocating sludge. Our music moans of dark moments and wails of woeful weeping. No living creature is immune. None can ignore its effects.”

“I’m afraid he’s right, Mudge.”

“You won’t see me denying it.” The otter gently lowered the still softly retching koala to the ground, trying to fight off the cold chills that were coursing through his own body. “Wot an ‘orrible noise. ‘Tis more sickenin’ than I imagined music could be. But I saw your face when they started singin’, mate. You recognize it.”

“Yes, I recognize it, Mudge.”

“Then you’ve got to try an’ counter it, for all our sakes. If they sing much more o’ that, they’ll burn out our ears and then our ‘earts. ‘Tis worse than anything I’ve ever ‘eard or ever ‘oped to ‘ear.”

But Colin was not done. Breathing hard, he rolled over onto hands and knees, recovered his sword, and started crawling toward the quartet. Mudge tried to stop him, but the koala was still strong enough to shake the well-meaning otter off. The determination on his round gray face was something to behold.

Unimpressed, the imps put their voices together and began to sing again. A new song this time, one even more affecting and lugubrious than the first.

“Yourrr cheatin’ hearttt . . .!”

Jon-Tom found he was sweating. Straightforward traditional country-western they were singing. Even though he was on the fringes of the music, it staggered him. He’d never expected anything so awful, so bright and brassy, so thick with saccharine lyrics and sickly chords. The imps sang on, harmonizing beautifully, their voices dense with despair and self-pity.

Colin couldn’t take it. He had no experience of that degree of moroseness, and it knocked him flat. With a last burst of energy he threw his sword at the quartet’s lead singer. A few strains of Hank Williams knocked the blade to the ground.

Then they turned to face the only one capable of standing against them. Jon-Tom held his ground, his fingers poised over the duar’s strings, ready for whatever might come.

The simple Conway Twitty tune was a test, he knew, and he handled it easily enough, striking back with Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.” One imp gave ground, frowned, then returned to the lineup with a will. The hellish quartet segued instantly into serious solemnity with a typically maudlin Patsy Cline standard. Sweat broke out on Jon-Tom’s brow as he countered with van Halen’s effervescent “Jump.”

As they traded songs the air itself seemed confused, uncertain of whether to give vent to rain or sunshine. Songs in four-part harsh harmony by Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, and Ronnie Milsap made it hard for the travelers even to breathe by turning the air into a cloying stew. Jon-Tom tried to lighten the atmosphere as best he could by responding with the more exuberant music he could think of, from Loggin’s “Footloose” to a medley by Cyndi Lauper.

But there was no one to help him, and it was four against one. As always, his strongest ally was his own playing. The more he sang, the stronger his spellsinging became.

The imps began to retreat, falling back a step at a time as Jon-Tom advanced upon them. They were unable to deal with his exhilaration or the relentless vitality of his music. They drew closer and closer together until there was no space between them at all. Like four figures fashioned of Silly Putty, they began to merge, in body as well as in voice. When the convergence had concluded, Jon-Tom found himself facing a four-headed, eight-armed giant instead of the impish humanoid figures who’d first challenged him and his companions on the trail. It had the same four faces, played the same four instruments, but the body had grown swollen and distorted. Like a bloated four-headed slug it wove and danced before him, all the while continuing to sing, sing of a world in which work led only to poverty, beauty only to heartbreak, and love only to misery and loneliness.

As they sang on, something new became apparent. There was an air of desperation about their music. It carried over into the expressions on the four faces. Jon-Tom was winning. They knew it and he knew it, and worst of all, they knew he knew they knew it.

He pressed his attack with a vibrant, volcanic rendition of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” while letting Dormas take a temporary lead. The song seemed to invigorate the ninny as well, and she kicked and pawed at the stumbling, retreating monstrosity. The music flowed out of him. He felt good: strong; full of voice; his fingers a blur on the strings of the duar. It was an echo of his performance during the perturbation, when he’d played to that imaginary Forum crowd of thousands.

Utterly desperate now, the imp-monster counterattacked with the heaviest weapons in its arsenal—a string of greatest hits by Hank Williams himself. Taken aback by the overwhelming melancholy of the lyrics, Jon-Tom felt himself knocked back on his heels. Mudge was there to prop him up and to shout encouragement in his ear.

“Don’t let ‘em get you down, mate! You’ve got ‘em on the run, you do. Stand up to it, fight back, let ‘em have everything you’ve got!”

With the otter standing behind him and Dormas and Clothahump ranged to either side of him, Jon-Tom did just that, blasting out a string of platinum bullets by Stevie Wonder, the Stones, Tina Turner, and the Eurythmics. When the imp-monster sagged, he laid a little of its own medicine on it in the form of a soulful version of “Purple Rain.” The imps’ color began to run from red to lavender. “You’ve got it, lad, you’ve got it now! Finish it off!” Pulling itself together, the imp-monster tried to rally its former confidence and muster enough energy to attack with prosaic weapons like spears and swords. Mudge and Dormas made ready to defend Jon-Tom from this unmagical but possibly lethal attack.

Their defense was not required. Jon-Tom had his own, knew exactly what he was going to use for a lyrical coup de grace. His fingers strummed faster than ever, and he felt as though the energy of the song would lift him off the ground. Certainly the imps had never encountered anything with the relentless energy of the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance.” Momentarily transformed into a miniature particle-beam generator, the duar struck to heart of the monster. There was a small, very localized explosion. Everyone covered their faces, trying to shield themselves from the flash. Jon-Tom did his best to protect himself by flinging the duar up in front of his eyes, but he was still temporarily blinded.

When his vision finally returned, all that could be seen where the imp-monster had once stood was a ten-foot-high nonradiant mushroom cloud. It dissipated rapidly. The rocks and pathway were covered with bits of thin red flesh, as though a giant balloon had blown up in front of him.

“Cute.” Dormas was eyeing the remnants of the cloud. “What do you call it?”

“Pure nastiness.” He led them around the site of the explosion, giving the cloud a wide berth. It was impossible. There was no such thing as a thermonuclear explosion scaled down to midget size. Or was there such a thing as “no such thing” in this crazy world?

“There’s the entrance!” Mudge pointed upward with his sword. “Nothin* to stop us now, mate.”

Jon-Tom tried to keep up with the otter by lengthening his stride. “Don’t be too sure, Mudge. Remember the rest of Colin’s prophecy.”

The otter forced himself to slow down so that the others could catch up. “Cor, I ain’t worried no more, mate. Wotever ‘tis, you can ‘andle it. You just proved that, you did.”

“Do not let confidence give way to cockiness, water rat.” Clothahump was panting hard as he struggled up the steep path. “Though clumsy and not particularly skilled, there is much raw power at work here. I should not care to face it if its manipulator was better disciplined. I cannot believe we have penetrated his defenses so easily here, any more than I believed how quickly we made it through the pass.” He cast an appraising eye at Jon-Tom. “Our spellsinger has yet to confront and deal with his heart’s desire.”

“I think I may already have done that, sir, but I’m ready in any case.”

“Good,” said Dormas sharply, “because here they come.”

Pouring from the fortress gate was a ragtag army of heavily armed soldiers. Well, perhaps not an army, Jon-Tom told himself. Twenty to thirty troops, none of them demonic in shape or appearance. They were waving swords over their heads and screaming like banshees.

Colin steeled himself. “They think they’ve got us out-numbered, but I’ve handled nearly that many by myself. And we have the magic of both wizard and spellsinger to protect us. They haven’t got a chance.” He sounded more curious than uncertain. “One thing I don’t understand, though. Why would an evil sorcerer send only females against us, and only human ones at that?”

Jon-Tom might have ventured a guess, but he couldn’t speak. He could only cling limply to the duar and stare up the slope as the thirty redheads came charging toward him. They had blood in their eyes and murder on their minds.

Mudge and Clothahump were also paralyzed by the sight, but only momentarily. They were not as intimately affected by the manifestation as the man in their midst, though they had been afflicted with the same shock of recognition. Meanwhile Jon-Tom made no move to defend himself from the onrushing attack, not with his duar or with his ramwood staff. He just stood and stared, a man struck dumb by the sudden realization of what it meant to confront his heart’s desire.

An arrow whizzed past his head. He blinked but could not bring himself to move, to dodge. He couldn’t do anything because each of the onrushing Valkyries looked exactly like its sister, and that meant all of them looked like his beloved Talea.

Talea of the bright spirit and long red hair. Talea of the questionable occupation and brave heart. The same Talea he’d proposed to and who had spumed him because she wasn’t ready to be tied to one man or one place but whom he’d never ceased to love. A score and more of his heart’s desire running, racing toward him with something other than love in their hearts. He hadn’t seen her in over a year. He was totally unprepared to see her now, here, in this place, far less in multiple guises.

“What’s wrong with the spellsinger?” Colin wanted to know. He held his saber ready to greet the first of the new arrivals.

“I’ll tell you wot’s wrong, fuzzball,” said Mudge. “This whoever ‘e is don’t fight fair. Every one o’ them long-legged beauties is the splittin’ image o’ our friend’s lady-luv.”

Colin absorbed this revelation, nodded tersely. “We’re dealing with a vile bastard for sure. What do you recommend?”

The mob of maddened Taleas solved the problem for them. All feelings of empathy aside, there are few options available when someone tries to split your skull with a battle-ax. Colin parried neatly and stepped aside as the first woman’s rush carried her past him.

Mudge defended himself against a sword stroke, skittering backward and drawing his longbow. A spear splintered stone at his feet, and one fragment cut through his fur, almost reaching the skin. He looked toward Jon-Tom, and something in his voice made the tall man turn to face him. Something Jon-Tom had never heard there before.

Anguish.

“I ‘ave to, mate,” the otter wailed helplessly, “I ‘ave to! We all ‘ave to.”

The otter’s words and actions combined to make Jon-Tom move. He lurched toward his furry friend. “Mudge—no!” His feet didn’t seem to be working. He felt as if he were trying to sprint through freshly laid asphalt. “Don’t!”

But the otter let the arrow fly as the woman in front of him raised her sword for a killing blow. It struck her square in the left breast, directly over the heart.

Mortally wounded, the figure did not react as it should have. There was no gasp of pain, no collapsing body. Instead the female form began to writhe and contort. A whistling sound came from it as it shrank in upon itself, compacting and shrinking down into the shape of a fist-sized red-orange mass floating in the air before them. Then it exploded, sending tiny orange-and-red bits flying in all directions. There was a sweet, cloying, and yet somehow nauseating smell in the air. It was as though someone had just blown up a watermelon stuffed with freckles.

“Bugger me for a tart’s tailor,” Mudge muttered aloud, “the bloomin’ broads ain’t real.” He glanced excitedly at his companion. “You see that, Jonny-Tom? They ain’t real!” He notched a second arrow into his bow and fired. Another Talea metamorphosed into an exploding puffball.

Colin parried another ax swing and cut sideways. His blade passed completely through the body of his attacker, which promptly went the decorporalizing route of Mudge’s two assailants. Displaying an agility that belied her age, Dormas pivoted and struck out with both powerful hind legs. Their supplies went flying. So did the Talea whose neck she’d broken. Change, compaction, poof—out of existence. The pattern repeated itself again and again.

And still Jon-Tom was unable to bring himself to raise his staff and fight.

Though the cluster of Taleas was fashioned of something other than flesh, there was nothing ephemeral about their weapons. One ax cut deeply into the flank of Clothahump’s shell.

“C’mon, mate,” Mudge urged him, even as he was defending himself against an assault by three redheads, “fight back. You ‘ave to, and it ain’t the loverly Talea you’ll be fighting with.” He struck with his sword. Shrink, whistle, pah-boom. He worked his way back to his friend, yelling at Colin as he did so. “Over this way, fuzzball! We ‘ave to defend this twit. He ain’t ready to defend ‘imself.”

The koala nodded, dispatched another opponent as he retreated to help protect the useless Jon-Tom. He was enjoying himself. For the first time since he’d begun his long journey, he had a chance to fight back against their unseen nemesis. It was a pleasure to be able to resort to good, solid swordplay for a change. He’d about had his fill of magic and mysticism.

Together he and Mudge, and to a lesser extent Dormas, greatly reduced the-number of Talea-doppelgangers.

Sorbl was busy as well, swooping and diving while clutching a honeycomb dagger in each foot, the red hair making individual targets easy to hit. Mudge and Colin kept reminding the dazed Jon-Tom that their opponents were no more human man they were Talea and for him to fight back.

But how? His friends and his brain told him one thing, but his eyes were filled with contradictions.

“Put it out o’ your mind, mate,” the otter instructed him as he dodged a spear thrust and put an arrow in still another assailant. “You’re too easy a target. We can’t ‘old ‘em off you forever.”

Even as he spoke the remaining Taleas had clustered around them and were trying to separate Jon-Tom from his stubborn bodyguards. Despite their valiant effort, Colin and Mudge were driven in opposite directions, away from Jon-Tom and from each other. Dormas and Sorbl were trying to protect Clothahump and had no time to spare for someone who wouldn’t raise a hand to defend himself.

Then one of the Taleas burst through, charging down on Jon-Tom, holding her sword over her head. He could only stare. Talea, it was Talea, from her flowing hair to the tips of her toes. Yet he’d just watched while a dozen identical Taleas had turned into something small and brightly colored before exploding. They had been cloned by some devilry, called up by a sinister magic. They were not his beloved. His heart’s desire was a phantom.

Then it was time for reflexes to take control from an unwilling mind. As the sword came down he brought up the front of the ramwood staff. The blade glanced off the nearly indestructible wood and slid harmlessly off to the side. He wasn’t even nicked. Continuing the defensive motion, he brought the club end of the staff around to strike his attacker just above the temple, staggering her. The pain that shot through him had nothing to do with the recoil his arm muscles absorbed. Recovering, she brought the sword around in a low arc, aiming for his legs and trying her best to cripple him. He had no choice but to thumb the concealed button on the side of the staff, releasing the six-inch-long blade hidden in the shaft.

Closing his eyes as he did so, he stabbed swiftly. The point went right through his assailant’s throat. She let out a violent gurgle and fell away from him, but there was no blood, not a drop, not even when he withdrew the blade. Contraction, change, explosion, and she—or rather it—was gone.

“See, mate!” Mudge called over to him. “None of ‘em is for real. They’ve been conjured up to confuse and bemuse us, and you most of all!”

Of course. When he’d defeated the impish spellsingers sent to stop them, he’d alerted the evil force within the fortress.

Recognizing the danger Jon-Tom posed, the perambulator’s captor had somehow conceived of and put into effect a defense specifically designed to take care of his most dangerous opponent. And it had nearly worked. Only his companion’s ceaseless defense on his behalf had preserved him from a death by deception.

They’d carried the load for him long enough. It was time to strike a few blows on his own behalf.

“You’re right, Mudge. I’m sorry.” Angrily he waded into the thick of the fight, swinging the club end of the staff in great sweeping arcs. Now that he’d been jolted out of his reverie, he fought with twice the resolve of his friends, furious beyond measure at anything that would employ such insidious intimacy against an opponent. The ranks of identical attackers grew thin as one after another blew up and vanished into the clear mountain air.

Showing unexpected speed, Colin ducked, twisted, and struck with one booted foot at an unprotected knee. The Talea on his left dropped her Weapon, let out a loud moan, and fell to the ground. She knelt there, holding her leg and rocking back and forth. The koala brought the long saber up and around for a killing blow. At the same time it struck Jon-Tom forcefully that this was the first time anything like a lingering cry of pain had been produced by any of their attackers. But having progressed from one mental and emotional extreme to the other, he was loath to make a fool of himself again. So he hesitated.

“Son of a bitch,” the injured Talea mumbled girlishly. Jon-Tom’s eyes went wide.

“Colin, no!” He managed to interpose himself between the fallen woman and the falling sword just in time to block the decapitating blow. Colin gaped at him for a moment but, with no time to argue, turned to deal with another attacker.

It wasn’t possible, of course. He held his staff out warily in front of him as he approached the figure that was rocking back and forth on the ground and clutching her injured knee. Lifting the spear end of the ramwood, he held it ready to thrust into the body beneath him. He was acutely conscious of the fact that the rapidly diminishing band of Taleas might be attempting to substitute craftiness for numbers. This might be a new ploy, designed to trap and bemuse him anew.

The figure seemed to see him for the first time, raised a hand in a feeble attempt to ward off the spear’s point. “Please, Jon-Tom, don’t you recognize me? It’s me, Talea!”

While the battle raged around him there was another, no less furious, boiling within him. It looked like Talea, it sounded like Talea, but so had all the others, and when pricked, they had gone up in puffs of orange-red gas. He had time to hesitate, to consider, because Mudge and Colin were temporarily in control of his flanks.

“I—I have to do this. Forgive me.” And he jabbed down with the point of the spear.

But only to puncture lightly, not to kill, tearing the slightest of cuts along one arm. The figure let out a little scream.

“You motherfucking bastard, you’ve ruined my blouse!” She started to sob.

Yes, it certainly sounded like Talea, but of more importance was the thin flow of blood that began to trickle down her arm. She grabbed at the wound and continued to curse him. It was difficult because she was crying so hard.

“She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding!” He whirled, shaking the ramwood staff joyfully over his head. “Did you hear me, Mudge, she’s bleeding!”

“Right, mate, I ‘eard you.”

Colin spared a glance for the tall man, then commented to the otter fighting at his shoulder. “Sounds like these two have a wonderful relationship.”

“Of course, I’m bleeding, you stupid imbecile! You stabbed me.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was so relieved and so happy, he could hardly speak. “I had to.”

“You had to stab me?” She looked down at her arm. Blood continued to filter through her fingers. “If you wanted to tell me mat you still love me, you could have given me flowers instead.”

“You don’t understand. Look. Look around you.”

She did so, and blinked, several times. Jon-Tom had to catch her to keep her from falling. She was warm and familiar against him. Her anger vanished, to be replaced by fear and confusion.

“Where am I, Jon-Tom? What is this place? And—and why do all those women look like meT’

“You really have no idea?” She shook her head, wide-eyed, and suddenly looking very small and vulnerable.

He eased her gently down to the ground, left her sitting there, holding on to her still bleeding arm. “I’ll explain it to you as best I can,” he assured her softly, “as soon as the rest of you are all dead.”

XIII

Thanks largely to the fighting skills of Mudge and Colin, the number of redheaded attackers was soon reduced to half a dozen. Acting under orders from an unseen master, these viragos retreated and prepared to roll heavy rocks down on the advancing intruders. They never had the chance to complete the planned ambush. Using his longbow, Mudge picked them off one by one. In so doing, he used the last of his arrows, but he was able to recover the majority of them from the surrounding rubble-strewn slope, where they had come to rest after passing completely through the spurious bodies of the Talea clones.

Jon-Tom and the others waited for the otter to conclude his collecting, a task in which he was greatly aided by Sorbl. Meanwhile the spellsinger held the hand of his heart’s desire and tried to comfort her. Talea, however, was her usual self again, which meant that she was in no mood to be coddled. She did acquiesce to Clothahump’s ministrations, allowing the wizard to bind the shallow cut in her arm. Actually Colin’s kick to the leg was giving her more trouble than Jon-Tom’s revealing spear stroke. With his help she rose and tried walking. She found she could move well enough but with a definite limp.

Her shoulder-length red hair framed her delicate face, which at the moment was full of frustration and confusion. “I don’t understand any of this. I was taking my ease with a friend in Darriantowne when the world turned inside out.”

“Male or female? Your friend?” Jon-Tom couldn’t keep himself from inquiring.

She managed a small smile. “Ever the hopeful lover, Jon-Tom?”

He smiled back and shrugged. “What else is there but hope when you’re hopelessly in love.”

“Female. Not that it matters. We were trying to acquire a necklace I’d admired for a long time.”

“By stealing it,” Clothahump said sourly as he repacked the medical supplies.

She stuck her tongue out at him, mitigated the charmingly girlish gesture by adding a finger. “Not all of us are as wealthy as you, master hard-shell.”

“One gains riches by not having a hard head,” he snapped back, but softly. He was in no mood for spurious argument. There were more important matters to be concerned with.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I’d just picked up this beautiful loop of amber and blue pearls when my friend Eila screamed. Everything went cockaloop, and when I could see straight again, I found myself in a strange place. Eila was gone and so was the store.” She turned, tilted back her head, and blinked. “I think I was in—that building.”

“What did you see?” Jon-Tom made no effort to contain his excitement. Some irrefutable evidence at last! “Who was your captor? What was he like?”

“I can’t remember. I can’t remember much of anything that happened from the time the store disappeared until you were standing over me holding that damn spear of yours. But I remember—something else. Something like I’d never seen before.”

Clothahump rejoined them quickly. “What was it like? Think, child!”

“I’m trying. It kept changing—I don’t know.” She rubbed at her eyes with both hands. “Everything kept changing. It’s all a blur in my mind. I remember shadows. Shadows of myself being peeled away from me, like the layers of an onion. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel a thing. Then I remember running down this mountain, holding a sword, with all those shadows surrounding me. I knew they were shadows because none of them said anything.”

“They looked real enough to us,” Jon-Tom told her.

“I remember”—and she looked up into his eyes with such earnestness that it made his heart hurt—”seeing you, Jon-Tom. I knew it was you. And Mudge and Clothahump too. I wanted to cry out to you, to throw away the sword and run to you, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” She started to cry again. This time she let him put his arms around her.

“It was as if someone else, that someone up in that building, was controlling my muscles, my voice. I couldn’t call out. And then I found myself trying to kill your friend.” Colin and Dormas had moved over to join them.

“Lucky for us you didn’t cut him first,” Jon-Tom told her.

“No danger of that. Lucky for her I used a kick before the saber.”

Jon-Tom ran the attack back through his mind, saw the koala striking out with his long sword first instead of his foot, the razor-sharp blade slicing through real flesh and bone. Saw the real Talea bleeding to death in his arms. Too close. It had been too close.

“Where are we?” She was trying to maintain her usual defiant pose, but to his surprise Jon-Tom could see that she was scared. She had a right to be. “What is this place? Has the whole world gone crazy?”

“Only at irregular intervals,” Clothahump explained as he proceeded, with Jon-Tom’s help, to tell her the tale of the perambulator and its captor and how the five of them had come to be there.

“And lastly,” the wizard said, “being unable to defeat us by other means, our opponent sought a way of destroying the spellsinger among us. This he did by seeking out and bringing under his sway the spellsinger’s true love, then copying her and sending all rushing down upon us. It would have worked if not for the soldierly poise of Mudge and Colin.”

“True love?” Talea frowned as she used the back of one hand to wipe the dried tears from her cheeks. “Whose true love?”

Jon-Tom turned away from her. “I’ve always thought of you as that, Talea, from the night Mudge brought us together alongside that couple you hadn’t finished mugging, to the day you told me you had to leave because you needed time to think our relationship through. You know that.”

“I know what? Why should I know that?”

He turned back to her. “I told you often enough.”

“Like hell you did, you great, gangling, impossible man! I thought all you wanted was to bed me. Every male I meet wants to bed me, including that obscene otter you hang around with, and he isn’t even of the same species.”

“Somebody mention me name?” Mudge looked up from his arrow-gathering.

“Never mind, Mudge.” Talea turned angrily back to Jon-Tom. “You never said one word about my being your only true love.”

“Couldn’t you tell how I felt about you?”

She let out a sigh of exasperation. “You men! You expect every woman to be a mind reader. How am I expected to know how you really feel if you don’t tell me?”

“Truthsayer,” said Dormas sagely.

“I just thought—” he tried to say lamely, but she was in no mood for excuses.

“ ‘You just thought.’ You men just think, and we poor women are supposed to divine what you’re thinking about, and if we don’t, then we’re callous and uncaring and insensitive!”

“Now just a minute!” he roared. “If you think all you have to do after disappearing on me is . . .” And they went on in that vein, arguing loudly and incessantly, about just who had let whom down.

Colin was standing nearby, cleaning his saber. Mudge ambled over, nodded toward the pair of combative humans. “Charmin’, wot? ‘Ave you ever seen a prettier couple?” The koala nodded, turned his sword over, and commenced to polish the other side. It was thick with red-orange dust. “Listen to them squall. ‘Tis true love for sure.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“Old acquaintance o’ mine. Carries a sharp knife an’ a sharp tongue an’ is quick to use both. Introduced ‘im to ‘er when the two of us had occasion to ‘elp ‘er out o’ a tight spot. They didn’t ‘it it off right away. She’s a bit o’ an independent, Talea is. Been awhile since they’ve seen each other. I imagine they’ve a bucket o’ mutual insults to catch up on.”

Mudge’s sarcasm was grounded more in the otter’s personality than in truth, for the argument soon gave way to recriminations and apologies. Before long, Jon-Tom and Talea were talking amiably and quietly. That was rapidly replaced by whispering, he doing a lot of smiling and she doing a lot of giggling.

“Bloody disgustin’,” Mudge said, observing the congenial couple.

“I take it you’re not looking for a permanent mate,” Colin commented.

“Wot, me? Listen, mate, the only thing that would ever slow this otter down would be two broken legs, an’ even then I’d do me damnedest to crawl out of any potential ‘ouse’old.”

“I feel differently. Not married yet, but I hope to be someday. I just haven’t found a lady with whom I’d feel comfortable for the rest of my life.” He hesitated a moment. “I find talking about personal relationships with females difficult. I’m much more comfortable when the conversation has to do with casting the runes or the arts of war.”

“Is that so? Well, then, if you’d like, I’d be ‘appy to give you the benefit o’ me extensive experience in that particular area in which you confess to a certain deficiency. If you can talk war, you can talk love, guv’nor.”

“I know some folks consider the two not dissimilar.” He eyed the otter warily. “It’s just that I’m interested in the diplomatic angles, and I think you’re more involved with subversion.”

“Nonesense, mate!” Mudge put a comradely arm around the koala’s broad shoulders. “Now the first thing you got to know is ‘ow to . . .”

“I’ve been through several different kinds of hell this past year,” Jon-Tom was telling Talea. “No matter where I was, in what danger, I was always thinking of you.”

“I never stopped thinking of you, either, Jon-Tom. In fact, there was a time when I thought I’d made up my mind about us. I tried to seek you out, only to find out that you’d gone off on some fool errand clear across the Glittergeist Sea.”

“Clothahump was deathly ill,” he explained to her. “I went because he needed a certain medicine that was only available in a certain town. As it turned out, the whole expedition was unnecessary, but none of us knew that at the time. We didn’t find that out until it was too late.”

“There are so many things in life we don’t find out until it is too late,” she murmured, waxing uncharacteristically philosophic. “I’m beginning to learn that myself.”

It required a tremendous effort of will for him not to press his affections on her, sitting there winsome and vulnerable as she was. But during their on-again, off-again relationship he’d learned one thing well about Talea: It was best not to push her, to insist on anything, because her natural reaction was not to acceed but to push back. Having found her again under the most unexpected circumstances, he was going to be as careful as possible not to drive her away again.

“It’s all right. I understand. All of us need time to learn about ourselves. We have plenty of time.”

She looked up at him sharply. “That’s not what you said before. You wanted a permanent commitment right then and there.”

“I’m not the same person I was before. I’m a full-fledged spellsinger”—that was only a small fib, he told himself— “I’ve been around, and I know a lot more about myself as well as about the world around us. Enough to know to let love or just friendship take its course.” He reached out to caress her cheek with one hand. “Right now it’s enough just to see you again, just to be near you. I just wish the immediate situation wasn’t quite so desperate.”

She nodded solemnly. “It’s all so bizarre and crazy, but I keep telling myself it must be so because you and Clothahump both wouldn’t lie to me.”

“We wouldn’t lie to you separately.”

“So I have to accept it. The proof of it is that I’m here.”

“I feel the same way.”

She hesitated. “If this is a matter of magic, Clothahump could be the one to handle it. You and I could leave.”

“I can’t.” He swallowed. The pressure of her hand in his sent fire racing up his arm. “I owe Clothahump too much. I have to help him see this business through to the finish, even if it means the end of me. Of us.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” she said with relief.

“It is?”

“I was afraid that part of you, that bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, that committment to justice when confronted by indestructible evil, might have changed also. I wanted to make sure it hadn’t. I couldn’t love you if you’d gone sensible on me.”

“Thanks—I think.”

“I know from what you’ve told me that we have to free this perambulator thing from its captor up there.” She indicated the fortress just above the place where they had paused prior to making the final assault. “I wouldn’t leave now even if you agreed to. I’ve been used. I feel used. I want to make that unseen bastard pay. He almost had me killed, which isn’t so bad. But he tried to make you do it. That’s dirty. I don’t like dirt, Jon-Tom. I like clean. There’s something up there that needs cleaning up.” She put both hands on his shoulders. Her lips were every close. He leaned forward.

“Maybe,” she whispered lovingly to him, “if we’re lucky, we’ll have the chance to chop and slice and dismember him all by ourselves.”

He licked his lips, sat back, and regarded the light in her eyes and the bloodthirsty grin on her exquisite face. This was his Talea, no mistake about it.

“Uh-yeah, maybe. Let’s try that leg again, okay?”

“Okay.” She let him help her up. When he let go, she took a few steps. The leg was stiff and it was hard going at first, but the rest had definitely helped her mobility. “Much better.” She put her hands on her hips and tried jumping a few small rocks. “It’ll get better still.”

“I’m glad.” He put his arms around her and this time had no second thoughts about kissing her. Finally they separated, and she pointed to her right.

“The hinny I’ve met, but I don’t recognize your short fat friend.”

“His name’s Colin, and he’s not fat, he’s as solid as iron. He’s a rune-caster, a reader of the future. Sometimes, anyway. His skill with the runes is about like my skill with the duar.”

“That bad, hmm?” Seeing the look that came over him, she smiled and patted his cheek affectionately. “Just kidding, spellsinger. Speaking of which, you have your duar. Can I borrow your ramwood staff?”

“Lend ‘er another staff o’ yours, mate!” Mudge howled gleefully.

“I should’ve split that otter years ago!” she said through clenched teeth. Picking up one of the vanished clone’s swords, she started chasing Mudge over the rocks. The cackling water rat eluded her with ease, taunting her each time she took a swing at him.

Colin strode by, intent on making certain their supplies were strapped tight to Dormas’s back. “Glad to see your fiancee’s leg’s better.” He glanced in the direction of the chase. “Sword arm seems okay too.”

“They’re old friends,” Jon-Tom told him.

“I know. I can see that.”

Eventually a winded Talea gave up and re-joined Jon-Tom. “One of these days I’ll feed that foulmouthed otter his works.” She reached up to push red hair out of her eyes. Then she put the sword aside to wrap both arms around him.

“Promise me something, Jon-Tom.”

“If I can.”

“When we find this evil one, let me be the one to slay him. I’ll make him bleed slowly.”

“Talea, sometimes I think you enjoy fighting too much.”

She stepped back from him, pouting. “If it’s a frothy petite woman you want, then you should never have fallen in love with me, Jon-Tom.”

“The woman I love is stronger than that, but she doesn’t have to be a barbarian ax murderess, either.”

Silence between them. Then her pout gave way to a scintillating smile. “They say that opposites attract, don’t they? Didn’t you tell me that once?”

“Yeah, and on reflection I think it was a pretty stupid thing to say. All I know is that I love you with all my heart, and if you want to carry a sword during the wedding, well, hell, that’s all right with me, so long as it doesn’t intimidate the wedding master.”

“Wedding master.” She looked uncertain. “You said you wouldn’t push, Jon-Tom.”

“No one is going to do any pushing except up this hillside.” Clothahump regarded them sternly. “We have rested long enough. It is time now for us to make an end of this matter, lest it make an end of us. There is no telling what we may encounter inside these walls. Talea likely saw nothing because it was intended that she not. All of you must be prepared for an attack of the most outrageous possibilities.

“We have journey far but have the longest way yet to go. And there is no telling when the next severe perturbation will occur. Let us make haste to find the perambulator and set it free.”

“I’m ready, by m’luv’s legs,” Mudge announced loudly. “Lead on, short, shelled, and stubborn! I’m with you for ‘avin’ an end to this business. There’re ladies waitin’ to be loved and liquor waitin’ to be drunk, an” I’m sick an’ tired o’ livin’ off the land when the land ain’t very accommodatin’.”

“You ain’t the only one, water rat,” said Dormas. “I’d hate to miss the opening trot of the social season.”

With Clothahump and Jon-Torr in the lead they advanced toward the single doorway above.

Though they were ready for anything, and Colin anc. Mudge were spoiling for another fight, the actual assault on the falling-down fortress was more of an anticlimax than any of them could have foreseen. Mudge reached the doorway first. The double doors were fashioned of hand-hewn wood, and not very well seasoned wood at that. They were high but otherwise unimposing. There were no guards to challenge them, no perturbed monstrosities to confront them. Nothing, in fact, to object to their entrance.

Mudge put a paw on the latch, pushed down, and shoved hard. The door swung inward a foot, two feet—and there was a loud crack. Everyone tensed, and the otter jumped a yard straight backward, but it wasn’t the sound of something attacking. The door had fallen from its top hinge. It swayed there, hanging precariously from the bottom loop of iron.

The otter slowly advanced to peer inside. “Well?” Clothahump prompted him.

“Scrag me for a Lynchbany tax collector, Your Sorcererness, if the bleedin’ place ain’t as deserted as a mausoleum!”

When they entered, they found the outer hall as silent and empty as a tomb, just as Mudge had indicated. But it hadn’t been that way for very long. Benches lay overturned, chairs were smashed against walls, candle standards had been twisted like candy. A few decorative banners hung listlessly from the curved ceiling while others were scattered in shreds across the stone floor. Several had been piled in a corner to form a crude bed. A couple of matching couches were missing all their cushions. They found those a few yards farther on. All of them had had their stuffing torn out and thrown around the hallway.

There were gouges in the floor and on the walls. Half-eaten food and other debris was scattered over everything. Dark stains on some of the furniture and floor at first suggested grisly goings-on. They turned out to be from spilled wine, not blood.

“Well, this is encouraging.” Jon-Tom studied the hallway ahead. It curved slightly to the right. Evidently Mudge didn’t share his opinion. The otter let out a derisive snort.

“Why? Because it proves that the bastard we’re fightin’ is a lousy ‘ousekeeper? Some’ow that don’t reassure me.” The otter’s eyes kept darting from filthy corners to shadowed eaves high overhead as they advanced deeper into the fortress.

“No. Because it hints that he might have exhausted his resources trying to stop us outside,” Jon-Tom replied. “Maybe he’s thrown everything at us he could think of and he’s run for cover.”

“I do not think so.” Clothahump indicated the destruction around them. “Look around you. Banners torn down to form makeshift bedding, chairs broken up to build fires in the middle of the floor: such a life-style would make sense only to a madman, and a madman would not have the sense to retreat. Nor do I think that after having defended his sanctuary so violently he would simply give up and run away. I admit that I did not expect us to enter so easily, but that is yet another indication that we are up against an unbalanced mind. What we see here is hardly the result of poor housekeeping.”

“You can bet on that,” Colin agreed. “It looks like there’s been a war here.” He pointed out places where a blade of some kind had cut not only into the furniture but into the stones of the wall itself. “Definite signs of fighting but no blood, no lingering aroma of death. I wonder who was fighting whom in here? You think others have preceded us and failed?” It was a sobering thought, one they hadn’t considered until now.

“I doubt it,” Clothahump murmured. “I know of no one skilled enough to detect this location and get here prior to us. That you arrived in the same territory at approximately the same time was due only to your unique ability to read some of the future.”

The koala turned his gaze back to the devastation they were striding through. “Then who’s been fighting here?”

“Our unknown opponent. I strongly suspect he has been doing battle with himself, as is not uncommon among the insane. I wonder how long he has been assailed by unseen demons and imaginary terrors?”

Sorbl fluttered along overhead, having to work hard to stay airborne in the confined space of the hallway. “Master, what kind of maniac opposes us for leagues and leagues, only to abandon the defense of his own home?”

“That is largely what we have come to find out, apprentice.”

“Look there!” Dormas came to an abrupt halt.

“Where?” Jon-Tom joined the others in looking around anxiously.

“Road apples!” the ninny muttered. “Sometimes I regret not having any hands. It’s hard to point with a hoof. Up there, off to the left ahead of us. I could swear I saw something move.”

“Come on, then!” Mudge sprinted down the hallway, skidded to a sudden halt. “Wot the ‘ell am I doing?” He waited for his companions to catch up to him before resuming, at a more prudent pace, his advance. And he permitted Jon-Tom and Colin to take the lead.

Clothahump noted that solid rock had replaced thatch and wood overhead. “We are inside the mountain proper now. This redoubt is much larger than it appears from outside. I wonder who raised it, and when. The exterior walls are of relatively recent construction, but this is old. Precalibriac, I should say. It wears the poorly constructed walls outside like a mask.”

Sorbl backed ah- nervously. “Master, I hear something.”

Weapons were readied, muscles tensed. “How many of ‘em?” Mudge inquired of their aerial scout.

“It did not sound like people moving about.” The owl sounded agitated. “It sounded like—like someone humming. Very loudly.”

“Which way?” Jon-Tom asked him. The hallway forked ahead of them. The right-hand tunnel bent away, dark and downward. He didn’t like the looks of it. The passageway on the left was weakly lit by a single torch. He was relieved when Sorbl suggested that they should go that way. Better to confront any opponent in the light than his own fears in the dark.

The instant they entered the branch tunnel, the sound that Sorbl had detected became audible to all of them. Even Jon-Tom and Talea, with their inferior human hearing, could sense it clearly. Sense it because it first manifested itself as a vibration rather than as true sound. He touched the near wall with his fingers. Yes, you could feel the thrum through the stone. Whatever was generating the noise was far more powerful than any individual.

Sorbl bounced from one wall to the other, crisscrossing the air above their heads. “It is near, Master, very near.”

Another bend in the corridor. The vibration and humming were joined by a high-pitched whistling and a sound like amplified panpipes. It was a mournful, powerful lament. Jon-Tom thought of the multitude of tones a good snythesizer could generate as well as the extraordinary range of sound his duar was capable of reproducing, but never in his experience had he heard anything quite like this. It was as much a disturbance in the fabric of existence as it was music.

Without warning the corridor widened and they found themselves staring into a vast hexagonal chamber. The six walls enclosing them were paneled in lapis and jasper, while the domed ceiling was lined with cut crystal. It reflected back the aspect of the chamber’s sole occupant.

So intense was the light that emanated from it, they could hardly look directly at it. It overwhelmed the torches that lined the walls as easily as it would have overwhelmed ten thousand such firebrands. As they shielded their faces their eyes tried to delineate its limits while their minds struggled to define it. The humming and vibrating it produced seemed to go straight through Jon-Tom’s being. He could hear its song in the bones of his legs and the tendons of his wrists. It was not painful or unpleasant, merely deep and penetrating. It rose and fell, questing and inconsistent, like the waves on a beach, and superimposed over the deeper rumble was that eerie combination of whistling and panpipes.

It was, of course, the perambulator.

Jon-Tom had expected something full of power and majesty. That would be in keeping with something capable of altering entire worlds by means of an interdimensional hiccough. He had expected it to be good-sized, and it was, for it almost filled the chamber. It was substantial but also light and airy. What he had not expected it to be was beautiful.

It hung there in the stagnant air of the chamber, and it was never still. Changing, shifting, metamorphosing, altering its structure from moment to moment, it looked like a series of interlocking dodecahendrons one moment, an explosion of colored fireworks the next. Each new shape was perfect and tightly controlled, and each lasted no more than a few seconds. Now it was an electrifying mass of sharp, fluorescent blades, now a series of infinitely concentric alternating gold-and-silver spheres. The spheres gave way to a collage of squares and triangles, which in turn were subsumed by an exploding mass of tiny glowing tornadoes. It was translucent and then it was opaque. It was a growling DNA-like helix spinning at a thousand rpm and throwing off blue and green sparks. The helix collapsed and left in its place a towering cone of light within which multicolored bands traveled from base to peak before bursting into the air at the crown as blobs of pure color.

As it changed and contorted, rippled and glowed, it sang, all whistles and panpipes and synthesizerlike dominant chords, a living fugue of color and sound.

“Crikey,” Mudge whispered as he joined his friends in gazing at the marvel, “you could bloody well charge admission.”

“There are isolated descriptions in the ancient texts.” Clothahump was equally transfixed by the ever-changing magnificence before them. “But they are based more on supposition than on eyewitness knowledge. To actually see a perambulator . . .” His voice trailed away, lost in awe.

“Exquisite,” said Dormas. “Wouldn’t it look grand over the entrance to the stalls?”

“Pretty but dangerous.” Colin had one arm over his eyes. “It doesn’t belong here. You said as much, Wizard, and I can sense it.”

“Seeing the future again?” Donnas asked him.

“No. Relying on my own inner convictions. It’s been here much too long. It wants out.”

“Is it intelligent?” Jon-Tom wanted to know.

“There are as many different definitions for intelligence as there are different varieties of intelligence, my boy.” Clothahump was drowning in wonder but not to the point of having forgotten why they were there. “A more knowledgeable sorcerer than I would have to say. But I am of one mind with our fractious, furry friend. It needs to be freed, to be allowed to depart this cold prison so that it may continue its journey through the cosmos.”

“Freed how?” Talea was brushing back her hair even as she was trying to shield her eyes. “I don’t see any ropes or chains binding it.”

Clothahump smiled as much as his relatively inflexible mouth would permit. “The ties that bind are not always visible, my girl. To tie down a perambulator in the manner you allude to would be as futile as trying to bottle a star. No, you require something else, at once barely perceptible and yet strong, like the forces that bind the building blocks of matter together. Something that even the perambulator cannot twist through.” He was staring straight at the explosively metamorphosing mass now and no longer trying to protect his eyes. He was functioning at the pinnacle of wizardry perception, and he drank in the light as he drank in the beauty.

Jon-Tom tried to stare, too, but his eyes kept filling with water, and to his chagrin he was forced to turn away from the brightness. “I don’t see a thing, sir.”

“Aye, if there’s a cage ‘ere, ‘tis more than a mite insubstantial,” Mudge added.

“So it is,” Clothahump told them solemnly. “As insubstantial as an evil thought, as fragile as sanity, as tenuous as a nightmare, but as strong as life and death. This perambulator has been imprisoned in a cage of madness powered by hatred. I see it as clearly as if it were made of iron.

“Think! A perambulator is in constant motion, ever-changing, but there is nothing illogical or irrational about it. Each universe it speeds through is founded upon logic and consistency, no matter how alien or different from our own. But every universe is subject to aberrations, to unpredictable flare-ups of insanity and illogic. These the perambulator studiously avoids. Until now. Because someone here has managed to entrap it in a sphere of madness, which is the only thing it cannot penetrate. It has been walled in and pinned down.

“But it continues to change, and each time we see it change, a perturbation travels swiftly through the world and affects the fabric of existence. Most of the time the changes are infinitesimal and we notice them not. A red bug becomes a yellow bug. A leaf separates from a tree only to fall up. A human’s tan deepens or the hairs fall from the tip of an otter’s tail.” Mudge glanced reflexively at his own.

“Normally a perambulator passes close by the world so infrequently that its presence is not remarked upon and its effects never noted. They move too fast to be detected, though sometimes their waste products can be measured by sorcerous means, even as it passes harmlessly through our own bodies.”

Jon-Tom struggled to find an analogy for his own world, but the only thing he could come up with wasn’t very pleasing. Could cosmic rays really be perambulator piss? Try laying that explanation on a particle physicist.

“That is what we have to deal with,” the wizard was saying. “A cage of insanity. Somehow we must destroy it.”

Jon-Tom found his attention wandering from the perambulator to the doorways that ringed the chamber. All stood empty—for the moment.

“Who could generate something like that?”

Clothahump, too, was studying the portals. “One of great power and utter madness. Both are required.”

“A sorcerer off ‘is nut. Great.” Mudge moved a little closer to his tall friend. So did Talea.

“So you think I am crazy?”

Everyone turned. Instead of appearing at one of the other entrances, the questioning figure had snuck up behind them.

He was alone. Nor did he leave much room in the narrow corridor for anyone else. He was nearly as tall as Jon-Tom and much more heavily built. Mental condition aside, the owner of the challenging voice was not someone Jon-Tom would have cared to meet in a dark alley.

Colin held his long saber tightly in both hands. “Wolverine. Biggest one I ever saw.”

“And quite mad,” Clothahump murmured.

Even Jon-Tom could see the wildness in the wolverine’s eyes, that faint burning light that was a mockery of the perambulator’s own. It was staring straight at them without really seeing them, as though the animal’s perception had become unfocused. He wore what originally must have been fine robes of silk and leather but which now hung about his massive body in rags.

In one huge paw he clutched a four-bladed battle-ax. Jon-Tom couldn’t have lifted it, much less made use of it. But the wolverine made no move to attack. Instead he seemed to be searching the chamber beyond them. It was almost as though their very presence confused him.

“I am not crazy. I am Braglob, supreme among the wizards of the Northern Marches, and there is nothing wrong with me.” He stretched his other arm out toward them. “Go away, get out, begone all of you! Leave me alone or it will go worse for you. I won’t warn you a second time.” He raised the immense battle-ax, holding it easily over his head.

Mudge slipped around behind Jon-Tom so he could notch an arrow into his longbow without being seen—and coinci-dentally take cover behind the human’s lanky form.

Clothahump took a step forward. “I am Clothahump of the Tree, supreme among all wizards, and I tell you that we can’t leave just yet. You know that we can’t.”

The wolverine’s heavy brows drew together as he struggled to make sense out of this comment. It occurred to Jon-Tom that this Braglob was completely out of it. Not that it made him any less dangerous. If anything, the contrary was true.

“You have been warned!” Braglob waved the ax over his head. “I am master of the perambulator. I will cause it to turn all of you into pebbles. No, into tiny crawling things, into worms I can use for fishing. You will know your own slime.”

“You will do nothing of the kind,” Clothahump replied with impressive self-assurance, “or you would have done it already. You have repeatedly made attempts to prevent us from reaching this place, yet we stand here before you. There is nothing more you can do. I do not believe you control the perambulator. You can imprison it in a single sphere of space-time, but you cannot control it. Once I thought it might be possible. After seeing both it and you, I am convinced it is not, for it is more astonishing and awesome than I believed possible, and you are less so.”

“Liars, intruders, trespassers, interlopers, all of you!” The wolverine hunkered down, and Jon-Tom tensed, trying to interpose himself between the huge creature and Talea. The redhead would have none of that and kept trying to edge around in front of him. Difficult to be chivalrous, he mused, when the woman you are trying to protect is only worried about whether or not she will have the opportunity to use her sword.

Braglob again studied them without seeing them. Clothahump was right, Jon-Tom thought. He is completely crazy. Despite the near fatal encounters incurred during the long journey up from Lynchbany, despite all the trouble caused by the perambulator, he found that he was still able to muster a soup§on of sympathy for their opponent.

Physically he was more than impressive, but the torn clothes, the dirty fur, mitigated that impression. Braglob clearly hadn’t bathed or groomed himself or had a decent meal in no telling how long. Here was an antagonist more to be pitied than feared. An individual at war with himself, striking out at invisible opponents, fleeing from the tormentors that had invaded not his fortress but rather his own mind.

“Let the perambulator depart,” Clothahump was saying quietly, “and we will leave too. We need not fight. There is no argument, no enmity between us: only an accident of supernature. Let it go.”

‘Wo!” Braglob snarled, showing powerful teeth. “The pretty stays. It makes me feel good. It warms me with its company.”

“See,” the wizard whispered to his uneasy companions, “he finds the perturbations reassuring. They convince him he is no crazier than the rest of the world.”

“I am not insane!” the wolverine shrieked in a shrill voice. “It is you who are mad, who want me put away so I cannot challenge the simpering, sickening status quo you find so comforting. You and rest of the world.” And he encompassed it with a single sweeping gesture. “But the perambulator will fix that.” He adopted a sly expression, grinning at some private thought. “I will keep it here close to me. The changes will come more and more often. Soon they will be permanent.”

“Being mad,” said Clothahump slowly, “you can do one of two things. You can make the rest of the world as mad as yourself or”—and he held out a hand in friendship—”you can make yourself unmad. If you would but let us, we might be able to help you. If your madness can be cured, you will no longer feel the need to live in an insane world. You won’t be able to in any event, because before too long, the perambulator is going to perturb the sun itself. It will blow up and you will die, mad or sane, as quickly as the rest of us. Give it up, fellow practitioner of the art. Give it up.”

“Prevaricator within a box, come no closer, I warn you!” The wolverine skittered back into the corridor a few steps and gestured threateningly with the battle-ax. Clothahump ignored the warning and continued his measured approach, reaching out now with both hands.

“Come now, since you still retain enough sense to execute spells, you must realize in some part of your brain that you are gravely ill. Why won’t you let us help you?”

“No, please, stay away!” It was not a threat this time but a cry for help wearing the guise of an admonition, a desperate, pleading whine. The wolverine had backed himself up against a wall and held the ax out defensively in front of him. Jon-Tom was startled to see that the giant was trembling.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mudge muttered as Clothahump continued to talk to their nemesis in soothing, reassuring tones. “No wonder ‘e’s off ‘is nut.”

“What do you mean, Mudge?” Talea asked him.

“Cor, you mean you can’t any of you see it? No, I expect you can’t. ‘Tis plain enough to me as the tail on me backside. This ‘ere Braglob, for all ‘is size an’ sorcerous skill, ‘e’s a bloomin’ coward. And I ought to know one when I sees one. No wonder ‘e’s crazy. As big as ‘e is an’ a wolverine to boot, why, if I ‘ad that size and those muscles and that kind o’ natural fightin’ ability an’ skill at magicking and was still a coward, I’d probably be a bit unbalanced meself.”

“So that’s what it is.” Now that Mudge had pointed it out, Jon-Tom wondered how he could have missed seeing it right away. The wolverine’s whole posture and attitude since they’d encountered him was indicative not of defiance but of fear. He was afraid of them. All the threats he’d made since confronting them were just so much bluff.

That did not, however, mean that he was harmless. He flung the battle-ax aside and tried to crawl into the wall, wrapping his face in both arms as he turned away from them.

“No, don’t come any closer, get away!’

How much of a wizard he was, they might never know, but madness can amplify magic as surely as it can physical strength. Insane people have been known to do extraordinary things, from bending the bars on hospital room windows to ripping off straitjackets while fighting a dozen men at a time.

Clothahump was blown backward by a blast of pure terrified madness, fueled by cowardice and powered by fear. He did have just enough time to draw in his head and limbs as he was thrown into a wall opposite. As he lay there rocking back and forth and trying to recover from the concussion, Braglob turned his paranoia on the rest of them.

“Go away, don’t hurt me, leave me alone!” he sobbed.

The wind that struck them stank of madness. Dormas dug in and somehow managed to hold her ground. Colin had a low center of gravity to begin with. He immediately dropped to the ground and dug into the floor with his powerful claws.

But Mudge was lifted and tossed backward. Only his otterish acrobatic ability enabled him to tuck and roll. He was only slightly bruised as he reached out and grabbed onto one of Dormas’s hind legs. He hung on as the insane gale tore at him, trying to blow him away, stretching him out behind the ninny like a furry flag rippling on a pole.

Jon-Tom had the duar around in front of him and was playing before the first storm-breath struck. The main force of the gale split and passed to either side of him. Talea stood at his back, shielded by his body and the aura of immobility in which he’d wrapped himself. Her red hair streamed out behind her. What wind did get through the spellsong ripped at Jon-Tom’s clothes and blew dust in his eyes. But it was not strong enough to knock him off his feet.

Braglob slowly turned to stare at Jon-Tom, having at least temporarily vanquished all other opponents. “You! Why don’t you go away too? I want you to go away!” He waved both arms at Jon-Tom. A stronger gust of wind battered him, but he was able to hold his ground. “Why don’t you go away?”

“Because I am not of your world, and so I do not respond to your madness.”

“What insanity is this?” roared the wolverine. “Another lie!” His face twisted violently. “It will have to be something special for you, then. Something unique. Something I have never tried before. Something even more devastating than your heart’s desire.”

“No, it won’t. This madness has to stop. Not only for our sake and for the rest of the world but for your own sake as well, Braglob. It doesn’t matter what you do from now on because . . .”

And he began to sing, “We’re not gonna take it. We’re not gonna take it. We’re not gonna take it anymorrre . . .!”

Dee Snider and the rest of the gang would’ve been proud.

Braglob let out a tremulous howl. At the same time the deep-throated hum and the song of the perambulator grew louder still. Jon-Tom sang on, aware that Talea was tugging at his shirt.

“Jon-Tom—look!”

There was something in the brilliantly lit chamber besides the perambulator. Gneechees. Not just one or two this time but a veritable snowstorm of them, each as bright and intense as the perambulator itself. And for the first time outside of a dream he found he could look at them directly instead of just out of the corner of his eye.

They danced in the air, coalescing until they’d formed a laser-pure spiral that wove its way around the perambulator. They appeared to be tiptoeing on its fringes, tangent to but not quite touching the substance of the apparition that it was. They had been drawn to this place by Jon-Tom’s spellsinging and remained to luxuriate in the instability generated by the perambulator.

Jon-Tom was growing hoarse trying to match his output to that of the otherworldly traveler. The sound battered at his body as much as at his ears. The music of the perambulator raged through his soul. He couldn’t go on much longer.

So he threw the dice, took the chance, and tried to draw to an inside magical straight by changing his song in mid-refrain, switching abruptly (as abruptly as the perambulator, in fact) from a defiant ballad to the sweetest strong song he knew.

Braglob was ill-prepared for the sudden shift in tactics. The wolverine staggered away from his wailing wall, fought to draw himself upright. You could see the change come over him. His expression softened. His body relaxed as the tenseness drained out of his muscles. Most revealing of all, the wild, undisciplined stare began to fade from his eyes. Gone was the terrified, frozen glare; gone the hopeless, defensive posture.

He blinked once, twice, did Braglob the Mad, and smiled at Jon-Tom.

Behind him there came an explosion of light and sound. Even though he was looking away from it, the sudden pulse of energy temporarily blinded him. Gneechees fled the chamber like a million retreating miniature suns. The humming and whistling of the panpipes retreated before a single reverberating note like the lowest register of some gigantic organ.

Jon-Tom made himself turn, heedless of the consequences. The single devastating flash of light had faded, and he could see that the perambulator had been transformed a last time, into a crystalline geometric conglomerate so utterly perfect, so heart-stoppingly beautiful that he thought he would burst into tears.

He turned away just in time. A second energy pulse even more powerful than the first lit the walls. Jon-Tom felt himself lifted off his feet by the sheer pressure of light. He saw himself turning, tumbling, doing a slow somersault in the air, and bouncing gently off the far wall.

The organ pedal faded with the light, and so did his consciousness.

XIV

Calm. It was so calm, he thought as he regained his senses. It was quiet in the chamber, but in his mind he still heard that climactic final note, felt the photons lifting him off the ground and shoving him against the stones. Yet as he picked himself slowly off the floor and checked his bones, he discovered that there was no reminder of that hard contact, nothing broken, not so much as a bruise to indicate where he’d struck the wall. Even his clothing was undamaged.

A small shape lay crumpled nearly, lithe and familiar. It let out a sob. He stumbled over to kneel beside it. “Talea.”

She was lying on her belly. He rolled her over, and she grabbed him tightly with both hands. He winced, having forgotten how strong she was. Then she recognized him and loosened her grip.

“Jon-Tom?”

“You’re all right?”

She did not reply immediately, as though the question required some careful consideration. “I guess so. I shouldn’t be. I think I bounced headfirst off the ceiling, like a ball in a game of whist.” She sat up without his aid. “But I feel okay. Just a little dazed. What happened?”

“The perambulator went away. It didn’t go quietly, but I think it went joyfuDy. By breaking Braglob’s madness we broke his control over it.” He was looking past her, toward the center of the now-empty chamber. “I think the perambulator, in its way, was saying good-bye to us as it departed. Or maybe it was nothing more than abstract noise. I guess we’ll never know.”

Their companions were slowly picking themselves off the floor. Clothahump was examining the air beneath the dome. Protected and cushioned by his shell, he’d recovered first. Mudge was brushing himself off while Dormas was trying to untangle her legs from Colin, who’d been blown into her by the force of the perambulator’s departure.

And there was one more who was recovering rapidly from the shock. Jon-Tom left Talea to cautiously confront their nemesis.

Braglob was flexing his muscles, testing first his legs and then his mighty arms. He appeared clear-eyed and alert.

“How do you feel?”

“Very strange, man.” The wolverine lifted the hem of what once had been a fine piece of clothing. “Why am I clad in rags like this? Wait—I remember now. Yes, I remember.” He raised his eyes to meet Jon-Tom’s. “Something about changing the world. I was going to change the world so that I would feel comfortable with it.”

“But you don’t have to do that anymore, do you? There’s no longer any reason to live in a crazy world because you’re no longer unbalanced yourself. You’re cured, Braglob. Your madness departed with the perambulator. A little spellsinging goes a long way.”

Mudge had rejoined Colin, leaned close to whisper to the koala. “Cured, ‘e says. Look at ‘em standin’ there grinnin’ at each other. If you ask me, the both of ‘em are nuts.”

Braglob listened, and as he listened, he was nodding slowly. “It is true. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing or why. I remember only that I was afraid. I’ve always been afraid. Eventually my fears drove me from my family, my friends, my home. To this place, where I resolved to deal with my fears by changing the world. I had to do that, don’t you see? It was the only way.

“My companions laughed at and tormented me until I fled to this remote region to escape their taunts. Even the smallest citizens, the rats and the mice and voles, threw things at me and chased me from their company. So I came here to practice my art. I studied hard. And I trapped the perambulator! Something the books said could not be done. I, Braglob, did this,” He searched the chamber behind Jon-Tom. “And now it is gone isn’t it?”

Jon-Tom nodded. “Gone like your madness and the fear that drove you mad. You couldn’t live with your private terrors, could you? You couldn’t deal with being a wolverine and a coward at the same time.”

“You understand, then. But I am no longer fearful. I feel as I should. The fears are gone, every one of them, along with the pain and the hurt that was with me every day, here.” He rubbed the back of his head and neck. “I feel—normal.” His smile vanished.

“But I was going to change the world. I can’t do that now. I was going to rule it. Tell me, man, is it better to live a sane but ordinary life or to be a mad emperor?” He reached for the massive battle-ax, which lay where he’d tossed it aside. “You have given me back my sanity but have stolen my dreams.”

Jon-Tom took a step backward, his gaze shifting rapidly from the ax to Braglob’s face. This was not turning out as he’d anticipated. Not only was the wolverine acting in a less than thankful manner, he seemed downright displeased about something.

“You could have left me alone to work out my problems on my own,” Braglob growled.

“Left you alone? You mean, you were enjoying being a coward?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you’re saying you were happy as a madman?”

“No, but I didn’t know that I was mad. I knew only that I was going to rule the world, or at least that I had the power to alter and affect it. Now I have no power at all.” He held the battle-ax lightly in one paw.

“You don’t need that now that you’ve had your sanity returned to you.”

“A wolverine who has no need of power? What alien philosophy is that? I had power and you stole it from me. But you are right. You did cure me. I am quite myself now. Quite.”

It suddenly struck Jon-Tom that having disposed of the perambulator and its perturbations, as well as having cured its captor, they now had to decide how to deal with an angry, intelligent, six-foot-tall wolverine with, so to speak, an ax to grind. Yes, Braglob was himself once more, with the temperament typical of a member of his species.

“Uh-oh, ‘ere we go again.” Mudge disengaged himself from Colin and made a dash to recover his sword and longbow. Dormas turned around so that her hind legs were facing the slowly advancing Braglob.

“Be reasonable. You’re not thinking straight,” Jon-Tom told the quietly furious wolverine. “There are six of us and only one of you.”

Braglob was not impressed. “Six against one wolverine. Fair enough odds, man.”

Jon-Tom didn’t want a fight. It was crazy. There was no reason for a fight. The perambulator, the real cause of all the trouble and the reason they had made the long journey to this obscure mountain valley, had been sent on its merry way. It was ridiculous to think that they had accomplished all that they’d set out to do, only to be faced with an entirely new and unexpected danger in the form of this now-healthy, belligerent Braglob character. It made no sense, no sense at all. He wasn’t going to stand for it!

However, he still had to convince Braglob of that.

“I could have lived with it,” the wolverine was muttering angrily. “I could have coped. We wolverines live all our lives on the edge of madness as it is. But power is hard to get and harder to hold. You took it from me.”

Jon-Tom was trying to think of what to say next when a small, squat shape stepped past him. “Your problem,” Colin said as he fumbled with his pack, “is that you’re not completely cured yet.”

Holding the menacing ax high overhead, Braglob halted and turned his attention to this new arrival. “What do you mean, not cured?”

“It’s obvious. You’re still a coward.”

The wolverine’s eyes grew wide, and his nostrils flared. “Still a coward, am I? I’ll show you who’s a coward, fat-bear. I’ll smash you like a bug.”

Colin held up a hand. “You’re still afraid. Not of me, or of any of the rest of us, but of the future. You don’t know what it holds in store for you now that you’ve become yourself again, and it frightens you. When you were mad, you didn’t give it a thought. Now you have to.”

“Everyone is a little fearful of the future,” Braglob snapped. “You as well as I. That is not cowardice, it is common sense. There is nothing that can be done about it.”

“On the contrary.” Colin extracted his familiar silver-and-black leather bag and stepped boldly forward. “I am a reader of runes. As a practitioner of the art, you know what that means. I can foretell the future. I can tell yours.” He shook the bag so that Braglob could hear the pile of runes rattle within.

The wolverine hesitated. “No one can foretell the future. All rune-casters are charlatans and cheats.”

“Not all. A few of us have the skill. None of us is perfect, but I’m pretty good.”

“It’s a trick. You’re trying to shield yourselves from my wrath.”

“Snakeshit. You can sit close and watch me. If I try anything that looks phony to you, I’ll be in easy reach. Maybe if I tell your future and it looks good to you, you’ll consider letting us leave without any bloodshed.”

A long pause. Then the ax descended—to hang loosely at the wolverine’s side. “Very well.” He gestured past Colin with his free hand. “You see five tunnels leading from this chamber in addition to the one I am standing in. Only one other leads to freedom. The other four are dead ends.” He sat down opposite Colin, blocking the hallway with his bulk.

“You can’t slip out past me, and the odds against you finding the other exit on a first try are slight indeed. You will remain here as hostages to my disappointment until I have decided whether to reward this fat-bear or grind all of you underfoot.”

“Fair enough.” Colin sat down close to Braglob.

“Let’s rush ‘im, mate,” Mudge whispered to Jon-Tom. “ ‘E’s big an’ tough and ‘e might get one or two of us, but the rest would get away clean. An’ if we ‘it ‘im fast enough, we might all of us make it. Let’s ‘ave at ‘im while ‘e’s sittin’ down an’ preoccupied.” His fingers began to slide slowly toward his sword.

Jon-Tom put a restraining hand on the otter’s wrist. “No. Let’s see what Colin can do first.”

“Wot, an’ wait while ‘e entertains ‘im at our expense? Better to ‘ave a go now while we’ve ‘alf a chance to surprise ‘im.”

“I said wait.”

The otter whispered something particularly vile, and Jon-Tom bridled, but he knew Mudge wouldn’t attack on his own. Being the first into a fray was not the otter’s idea of sensible strategy. So he fumed and kept his hand off his weapon.

For his part, Jon-Tom wondered what their best move would be should Colin’s reading fail to assuage the wolverine’s fury. Certainly he was big enough and fast enough to block the corridor he was occupying. Not even Sorbl would be able to slip past, for the roof was within reach of the wolverine’s weapon.

“My future, then, and be quick about it,” Braglob demanded, gesturing threateningly with the ax.

“You want this done right; it can’t be rushed. First the ground must be prepared.” Colin leaned forward and began smoothing the dust away from the polished stone beneath. “Everything must be just so, or the casting will be useless.” Using the dust and dirt he’d gathered, he drew an ellipse on the floor. “Perfection in preparation is the key to a successful reading.” He added several arcane symbols in the center of the ellipse. “See here. By concentrating the runes on this spot we’ll have the best look at your immediate future.”

Braglob leaned forward interestedly to study the symbols. “I have practiced the art, but I do not recognize these.”

“They’re not uncommon. It’s just hard to delineate them properly when all you have to form them with is dirt and dust.”

Braglob leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the symbols. “You are right. I believe I do recognize them.”

“That’s good, because it’s almost time to cast.” So saying, he grabbed the neck of the sack tightly with both hands and, with a swiftness even Mudge would have been hard-pressed to match, brought it down in a sweeping arc to land with a loud whomp on top of the wolverine’s skull. Previously Jon-Tom had only considered their metaphysical weight.

Braglob’s lower jaw dropped. Colin clobbered him with the bag of bone and stone a second time, and the wolverine keeled over to land chin first in the center of the circle as the sack exploded, sending the contents flying.

Mudge ran forward, bent to examine their opponent’s face. “Out cold. Well struck, mate. That’s what I calls predictin’ the future.”

“Yes, I thought a saw a period of extended rest in store for our combative friend here. It’s not easy to read the runes through the leather.” He eyed the shattered sack dolefully. “This will be hard to replace.”

“I’ll pay for the sewin’,” said Mudge grandly. “Wot say we leave ‘ere and find ourselves the nearest seamstress? Preferably one with talented ‘ands.” He gave the koala a hand in recovering the scattered runes.

“Should we finish him once and for all?” Dormas gave Jon-Tom’s ramwood staff a nudge. He didn’t like the idea of killing an unconscious opponent, but he looked to Clothahump for advice.

To his considerable relief the wizard agreed with his feelings. “My own prediction is that he will sleep for the rest of the day. This I base on my own reading of clever Colin’s runes.” There was a hint of a twinkle in the turtle’s eye. “When he recovers, he will be mad again, only it will be a different and far less threatening kind of mad. If he is guilty of anything, it is of acting like one of his own kind. I know wolverines. Braglob will not come after us. They have short memories as well as short tempers, and this one has a great deal of reality to catch up with. When he comes ‘round, he will have other things on his mind. Besides which, his species has no taste for an extended hunt and we will be well on our way.

“No, I think our misguided friend will be more interested in returning to his home and settling scores with his old tormentors rather than with us. Besides which, I am opposed to any unnecessary killing.”

Mudge had tired of hunting for bits of bone and wood and had been listening silently to the wizard’s declamation. Now he could no longer restrain himself.

“Unnecessary killin’? This oversized cowflop tries to destroy the whole world and then us in particular, an’ you say snuffin’ ‘im would amount to unnecessary killin’? Me, I never saw a killin’ so necessary!”

“You heard Clothahump,” Jon-Tom warned his friend. “There’ll be no bloodshed here.”

“Oh, who am I to argue with ‘Is Sorcerership’s ethics? I ain’t no grand master of magic. I’m just a simple gambler, I am. I just like to cover me bets right is all, especially when it’s me life that’s been pushed into the pot. ‘No unnecessary killing.’ If I’ve ‘card that once, I’ve ‘eard it a thousand times from the both of you twits. I’m sick of it, you lot! Don’t you understand that there ain’t no such thing as an unnecessary killin’? It defines itself, it does. I calls it takin’ out insurance, is wot I calls it.”

“Dormas, are you ready?” The hinny nodded. “Sorbl?” The owl landed atop the pile of supplies and responded with an agreeable hoot. “Let’s go, then.” He and Clothahump led them up the hallway, past the wolverine’s unconscious form.

“Oh, yes, let’s go, by all means,” Mudge grumbled as he shoved both paws into the pockets of his shorts and stomped off in their wake. “Nobody wants me advice, anyway.” His grousing echoed through the corridor as they retraced their steps to the world outside.

Jon-Tom forced himself to sound casual as he spoke to Talea. “You’ll come back to Lynchbany with us, won’t you?” He held his breath while awaiting her reply.

She said nothing for several minutes, staring straight ahead and looking solemn, but finally could contain the smile she’d been holding back no longer. “Of course, I’m coming with you, you silly spellsinger. Where else would I go in this bleak and barren country?”

He swallowed. “Maybe—maybe you’ll stick around a little longer this time? Not,” he added hastily, “that I’m trying to put any kind of restraints on you or anything. I know how much you value your independence.”

Her smile seemed to shove the clouds back to the moun-taintops as they emerged from the hallway onto the trail outside. “You know, Jon-Tom, anything can get old. Anything can become boring. Even independence.”

He had composed a lengthy and carefully considered reply when he caught Clothahump grinning at him. He understood what the wizard was trying to tell him immediately. There were times when be talked too much and ended up talking himself into a predicament from which he couldn’t extricate himself and in which he need not have foundered in the first place. So he just nodded down at Talea while adopting his most mature and farsighted expression.

“I understand.”

She appeared to find this the ideal response because she rose on tiptoes, grabbed him firmly around the neck, and bent him forcefully to her. He held the kiss until his back began to hurt.

Finally he straightened, caught his breath, and turned to regard the poorly constructed fortress in which they’d encountered so much wonder and danger. His ears still rang faintly from the force of the perambulator’s departure. It was a sight and sound he would never forget, a memory he would be able to call upon during times of darkness to rejuvenate and inspire his spirits. It had been his good fortune to look upon the majesty of the universe.

Hell, he’d jammed with it.

They made excellent progress as travelers always do when they are on their way home, and camped that evening on the far side of the mountain pass.

“Poor Braglob,” Jon-Tom murmured. “May he finally find contentment and happiness within himself.”

“ ‘Appiness ‘e may find.” Mudge scratched at one ear.

“But contentment? Not bloody likely. I never saw a contented wolverine. Those folks are always upset about somethin’. Even when they’re makin’ love, they’re yellin’ and screamin’ at one another. Fortunately there ain’t many of ‘em around. Probably because they don’t get along any better in bed than they do in society.”

Jon-Tom turned to face Clothahump. The wizard was leaning against a log on the opposite side of the campfire. His eyes were half shut, and he appeared to be contemplating the night sky, a broad sweep of stars and constellations very different from those Jon-Tom had grown up with.

“What do you think happened to the perambulator, sir?”

“What?” The turtle glanced over at his young charge. “Went on its way, of course. Across the cosmos. Out of this universe and into another. I was just thinking: What if one could be controlled across such distances and brought back? What might we learn of reality? What images might we gaze upon, what mysteries might we solve?” He sighed deeply.

“That is a burden you will suffer under yourself one of these days, my boy. The pain of not knowing, the ache of ignorance, the compulsion to know what lies on the far side of the hill, while realizing that no matter how much you learn, there will always be another hill to surmount. That is the curse on a seeker of knowledge, the curse of never being satisfied.

“When I was very young and apprenticed to the famous sorcerer Jogachord, I would ask him new questions constantly until finally, tired of being pestered, he would say to me, ‘Does there have to be an answer for everything?’ And I would reply in utmost earnest, ‘Yes!’ Then he would smile at me and say, ‘Apprentice, with that attitude you will go far—provided no one kills you first.’ “

“The curse o’ never bein’ satisfied? I suffer from that meself,” Mudge declared. “Only, it don’t involve idiocies like ‘too much knowledge’.”

“We all know what it involves, Mudge,” said Talea dryly. “You don’t have to burden us with the details.”

The otter looked hurt. “Now, ‘ow do you know wot I was goin’ to say, luv?”

“Because given the slightest opportunity, you always talk about the same thing, water rat. You have a one-track mind.”

“Aye, but wot a pleasant track it is, especially when it leads to—”

“Mudge,” Jon-Tom said exasperatedly.

The otter put up both paws defensively. “All right, mate. I can see that you lot don’t share me favorite topic o’ conversation. You’ll just ‘ave to suffer along for the rest o’ the evenin’ without ‘earin’ about me glorious exploits concernin’—oop, forgot. I ain’t supposed to talk about that.”

A sudden thought made Jon-Tom sit up straight. “Hey, if Colin can see into tomorrow, I wonder if he can predict if I’ll ever get home or not?”

Clothahump shrugged as best he could without shoulders. “Anything is possible, my boy. It might be worthwhile to find out.”

“It’d be a damned sight more than worthwhile.” He let his gaze wander around the campsite. Dormas was sleeping soundly off to one side. Talea lay curled up next to him, her face a portrait of false innocence, the outline of her body a delicious sine curve against the ground. Mudge sat nearby, his paws behind his head and his cap pulled down over his eyes.

But where was their rune-reader? Come to think of it, where was Sorbl? He rose, nervously surveyed the encroaching night, and murmured to Clothahump. “Braglob? You think he’s been tracking us after all?”

“No, no, my boy. It is most unlikely. In any case, he would have been detected by now. The wolverine scent is a strong one, and there are sensitive noses among us.” He climbed to his feet and joined Jon-Tom hi scanning the forest. “But your concern is not misplaced. I, too, wonder where our friend and my apprentice have taken themselves. Sorbl! You good-for-nothing famulus, where are you?”

Jon-Tom cupped his hands to his mouth. “Colin! Colin, answer us!”

“Now wot? I can’t talk about love an’ now I can’t sleep.” The otter jumped up. “The people I get mixed up with!”

They spread out but didn’t have to search far. The two missing members of their party lay beneath the great spreading branches of a cocklegreen tree. They were singing softly to each other of their contentment and of life’s disappointments. The almost-empty bottle that Sorbl was clutching in one flexible wingtip provided an explanation both for their disappearance as well as the impromptu concert.

Clothahump wrenched it from his apprentice’s grasp and held it upside down. A few golden drops tumbled from the mouth. He shook it at the thoroughly inebriated owl.

“You useless bag of feathers, we accomplished what we set out to do! You were supposed to stop drinking. That was our agreement. Whatever was left was to be conserved for medicinal purposes only!”

“Thash whet”—the owl swallowed and appeared to having some difficulty speaking—”thash whet it was ushed for, Mashter.” He promptly fell over backward. “You don’t have to hit me, Mashter.”

“Disgusting.” Clothahump threw the empty bottle into the bushes. “And that wants to become a wizard.” He turned and marched angrily back toward the camp.

“I’ll say ‘tis disgustin’. It bloody well stinks.” Mudge leaned close to me owl’s face. “Why didn’t you come and get me if you were goin’ to ‘ave yourselves a bleedin’ party?”

“Didn’t—didn’t want to dishturb you.”

“And, besides,” Colin said, his words grave and slow, “there really wasn’t enough for three.”

Mudge glared over at the koala. “An’ you call yourself a friend?” He rose and stalked off in the wizard’s wake, leaving Jon-Tom alone with the two revelers. He rose and walked over to kneel next to the koala.

“Colin?”

“Who?”

“Hey, that’s my line,” chortled Sorbl. He and Colin started cackling hysterically.

Jon-Tom waited a minute or two before putting a hand on the koala’s shoulder and shaking him. “Colin, listen to me. This is serious. I need to know if you can read my future. I need to find out if I’ll ever be able to go home again, back to my own world.”

“Well, I might be able to,” the koala replied with enforced solemnity. “I just might. Except for one thing.”

“What one thing?” A hand came down on his shoulder, and he looked up into Talea’s moonlit face. She was smiling down hopefully at him.

Colin raised himself up until his lips were close to Jon-Tom’s ear. “I can’t read runes tonight.”

“You can’t? But you’ve read them at night before.”

“I know. But I can’t read them tonight.”

“Why not?”

The koala put a thick finger to his lips, leaned close again. “Because Mudge and I threw them in that river we passed this afternoon.” His face contorted, and he and Sorbl fell to laughing uncontrollably again.

Jon-Tom gaped at him. “You did what!”

“Threw ‘em in the river. Never did much care for rune-reading, anyways. Folks always bothering you, asking you the damnedest things, never leaving you alone. The hell with it. I’m going home and into my brother-in-law’s eucalyptus-leaf pressing business, like my sister always wanted me to. That’s a nice, sensible, respectable occupation.”

“You couldn’t have waited one more day, could you?” He sat heavily back on his heels. “I don’t suppose you can read the future without runes?”

“What d’you think I am, some kind of magician?” The koala was rapidly falling asleep.

Talea reached over to run a hand through Jon-Tom’s hair. Her presence made him feel very much better. “Hush and don’t take it to heart, Jonny-Tom. For some of us the future is not to know.” She put her lips to his ear. “But I can predict some very good things coming to you in the near future.” Her voice dropped even lower, and Jon-Tom couldn’t help but grin as she continued whispering to him.

He was still upset, though, and told Colin so. The koala frowned, struggling to retain consciousness.

“As a matter of fact, I did read the runes one last time before we cast ‘em into the current of fate, so to speak. Sort of a farewell prediction.”

Jon-Tom bent forward. “Whose future did you read? Not mine, or you would’ve said so already. Mudge’s? Talea’s?”

“Nope.”

“Clothahump’s?” The koala shook his head. “Sorbl’s, then?”

“Nope. None of those. I was interested in where the perambulator was off to, after listening to you and the old one going on and on about how it can go anywhere and everywhere. I got curious, wondered if maybe it was going to come back to our world and start up the troubles all over again.”

Jon-Tom shook his head. “That’s nothing to worry about, unless by some unbelievable coincidence it lands in Braglob’s vicinity again. Though since he isn’t crazy anymore, even that isn’t very threatening. We don’t have anything to worry about anymore on that score.”

“Maybe most of us don?t, but you might.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because it’s on its way to your world. It’s going to stick around there for a while and do its dance. Things there are going to go a little crazy, maybe for a few years instead of a few months. I couldn’t see a time line clearly. Why, it’s probably there already, right now, even as we’re sitting here talking about it. And I’m afraid it’s gone and gotten itself stuck. That’s what the runes said, anyway.” He let his head back down on his hands, rolled over. “Now go away and let me sleep. All of a sudden I’m kind of tired.”

“No, wait!” Jon-Tom shook him again. “I’ve got to know in case I do get back. Maybe it’s stuck someplace where it can’t do any real harm. You’ve got to tell me where it’s going to go!”

Colin murmured something under his breath, blinked sleepily up at the insistent Jon-Tom. “Where? Oh, some little town called Columbia, in a district or state called Washington.”

Jon-Tom let out a relieved sigh. “That sounds pretty harmless. Way up in the north woods somewhere.”

“Or,” Colin mumbled uncertainly as he drifted back to sleep, “was it someplace called Washington, in the district of Columbia?”

“Colin? Colin?” Jon-Tom finally stopped shaking the erstwhile rune-reader. He was sound asleep and snoring loudly. “I wish I knew which was right. It may be there already, undetected and unseen, twisting and turning, working its mischief.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing you can do about it.” Talea was easing him backward, planting small but intense kisses on his neck and chest as she did so.

Soon he was gazing thoughtfully up at the stars. “What the hell,” he finally muttered, “they’d never notice the difference there, anyways.”

Then he was staring up at Talea instead of the stars, and not an iota of beauty had been lost in the transition . . . .