Dragon on a Pedestal (3 page)

Millie reappeared. “I had to pack them off outside,” she said. “But we had better finish the meeting soon, or they’ll be in trouble again.”

“All we need is the Good Magician,” Arnolde said. “We have defined the problems; he must define the Answers.”

“It’s not like him to be this late,” the Zombie Master said. “Not when the matter is important. He doesn’t like to leave his castle, but he keeps a pretty strict schedule once he does. Perhaps I should send a zombie out—”

“He could be traveling by magic carpet,” Irene pointed out. “Or by direct conjuration. He wouldn’t bother with a footpath.”

A zombie in a ragged tuxedo appeared at the door. “Yes, Jeeves?” the Zombie Master inquired. It seemed there were a few indoor zombies, performing necessary chores.

“Carpish ashoy,” the creature announced, spitting out a decayed tooth in the effort of speech.

“Well, open a window,” the Zombie Master said.

The zombie dropped a chunk of sodden flesh from somewhere on its anatomy within the tux and went to a window. After some struggle, since its muscles were mostly rotten, it got the window open. Then it shuffled out.

Just in time! A flying carpet glided in, supporting two figures. The Good Magician had at last arrived.
The carpet landed on the floor with a bump. Humfrey and his son sat there. The Good Magician was a small, wrinkled gnome of a man with a bare pate and thick-lensed glasses. Hugo was evidently following the pattern of his father; though his skin was smooth, his head fair-haired, and his face innocent, he was very small for his age and already somewhat gnarled. By no stretch of euphemism could he be called handsome, and he was all too likely to grow into a man no prettier than Humfrey.

Too bad, Irene thought, that Hugo had not taken after his mother, for the Gorgon was as tall, stately, and good-featured as a human being came. Of course, few people ever gazed on the Gorgon’s features, and those who did were likely to pay a rather severe consequence. There were still a number of statues of Mundane invaders placed around Castle Roogna, souvenirs of the Gorgon’s part in that last great battle.

There was over a century between the ages of Humfrey and Hugo, but they were obviously two of a kind, physically. Alas, not mentally! Humfrey was a special kind of genius, while the boy—

“Come and sit down,” the Zombie Master said, rising to welcome the Good Magician. “We have been waiting for you.”

“I
am
sitting, Jonathan,” Humfrey grumped. As he spoke, the wrinkles around and across his face seemed almost to ripple. “I had other business.”

“Hugo can join the other children,” Irene said diplomatically. She knew the adults would not talk freely while the boy was present, though Hugo was unlikely to comprehend anything significant.

“No, we have another chore, and I’m behind schedule,” Humfrey said. “Your problems are these: the Gap Dragon is ravaging the country; you must not hurt it, for it is necessary to the welfare of the Gap, especially now that the spell is breaking up.”

“Spell?” King Dor asked.

“The forget-spell, of course,” Humfrey said, as if impatient with dullness. He probably had a lot of practice with that, traveling with his son. “It received a fatal jolt in the Time of No Magic twenty-nine years ago, and now is fragmenting and mutating. Forget-whorls are spinning off and causing mischief; they can incite partial or complete amnesia. Spray each whorl with this liquid to neutralize it temporarily, then move it out of Xanth to the Mundane regions where it has no effect.” He grimaced, remembering something. “Not much effect, at any rate; it does cause the Mundanes to forget that magic works—not that that is very much loss for them.” He handed the Zombie Master a small bottle of translucent fluid with a nozzle and pneumatic bulb on it. “Take it up, Hugo.”

The carpet lurched into the air toward the wall. “No, out the window, idiot!” the Good Magician snapped, out of patience before he started. “Straighten out and fly right!”

“Wait!” Dor cried. “How can we spray and move—”

The carpet straightened out, wobbled, then sailed through the window. The Good Magician was gone.

“—a forget-whorl we can’t even see, hear, or feel?” Dor finished, frustrated.

The others exchanged glances. “So much for our business meeting,” Irene said. “We got the business.”

“The amnesia,” the Zombie Master said. “So it
is
from the Gap’s forget-spell! Mutated—I never thought of that! No wonder we couldn’t trace the source of the problem; the whorls would be undetectable and leave no trace except the wipeout of memory!”

“That was my question,” Dor said. “Invisible, silent, no smell—how will we know one is near, until it is too late?”

“That is indeed a problem,” Arnolde agreed. “It had not occurred to me that such a fragmentation would be so undisciplined, but I suppose that if the forget-spell now lacks its primary object—”

“Undisciplined,” Dor said, “That describes the Gap Dragon, too! The breakup of the spell must have enabled it to remember a way out of the Gap, and it doesn’t have any limit to its marauding, up here in regular Xanth.”

“But to follow it to its secret exit,” the Zombie Master said. “That will be dangerous. The Gap Dragon is one of the largest and most savage creatures we know, and no person in its vicinity is safe.”

“We shall have to plan a strategy of procedure,” Dor said. “We must deal with both the dragon and the forget-whorls, somehow.”

“At least now we know the cause of our problems,” Arnolde said. “Humfrey was not here long, but he did cover the essence. Perhaps we should proceed to the twins’ party before they become more restive, so that we are freed from that distraction. Then we can meet again and try to work out—”

He was interrupted by commotion and screaming from outside. Something dramatic was going on!

“I fear they are already restive,” the Zombie Master said wryly.

They hurried to the window the Good Magician had used. It offered a fair view of the moat and the surrounding countryside. Irene saw a cloud of smoke approaching through the forest. “I’m not sure the children are doing that,” she said.

No, it wasn’t smoke, exactly. It was steam, or condensing water. It was puffing from—

“The Gap Dragon!” Arnolde Centaur exclaimed. “It is raiding
here
!”

“And we’re not supposed to hurt it,” Dor said with disgust. “What does Humfrey expect us to do—tie a yellow ribbon on its tail and follow it home?”

“The children!” Irene exclaimed, appalled. “The children are outside!” She charged through the castle and out the front portal, oblivious to all else. Her vision, the dragon— “Ivy! Ivy!” she cried.

Lacuna was sitting by the edge of the moat, forming words, sentences, and paragraphs on the slimy surface of the water. That was her talent; she could cause print to form on anything and could change it at will. She was so engrossed in her composition that she was obviously unaware of the approaching menace. “Ivy’s all right, your Majesty. She’s enhancing the zombies. They like her.”

“The Gap Dragon’s here!” Irene cried. But even as she spoke, the monster appeared, a great cloud of steam enclosing it.

Irene tried to run along the moat bank to get at Ivy, but the child was on the other side. So was the Gap Dragon. It was bearing down on them.

Irene screamed. Ivy looked up and saw her. The child was facing away from the dragon.

Then one of the zombies saw the dragon. For a long moment it paused, a thought churning through its sloppy cranial matter, while the dragon steamed rapidly closer. The thought was lucky; it made it through to the zombie’s action-command center.

The zombie picked up the child and lumbered along the moat, out of the dragon’s path. It was an act of remarkable relevance for this type of creature.

The dragon steamed right up to the moat—and hunched its foresection across it. A large moat monster attacked, being too far gone to harbor either fear or common sense, but its teeth were mostly caries and could not make an impression on the steel-hard scales of the Gap Dragon. The dragon shook off the zombie and plowed into the outer wall of the castle, snoot-first. Such was its impact that the stone crumbled inward.

The dragon stalled at last, head buried in the wall. But it wasn’t trapped; it wrenched its head up, and a larger section of the wall crumbled out. Slimestone simply had not been designed to stand up to treatment like this!

Zombies rushed up to defend the castle, bearing rusty swords and rank clubs. They sliced and bashed ineffectively at the dragon’s side and back. Irritated by this nonsense, the dragon brought its head about and issued a blast of steam that entirely obscured the zombies.

When the cloud cleared, the zombies were in a sorry state. Portions of their decaying flesh had melted away, leaving steamed bones, and much of what remained was too cooked to function well. Zombies were generally immune to physical damage, other than being cut to pieces, but there were limits. These ones staggered and fell into the moat, annoying the other moat denizens but enriching it with their substance.

The dragon, having breached the castle defenses, seemed to lose interest. It turned toward Irene.

The Gap Dragon was low-slung, with a triple pair of legs, exactly as in her vision. Its metallic scales shone green in the shade and iridescent in the sunlight. One ear perked up; the other was merely a stub, evidently the casualty of one of its many battles. Indeed, there were scars all over its tree-trunk-thick torso. Its eyes were bright with the malevolent delight of the rampage.

Now Irene became aware of her own peril. She had been standing more or less transfixed by the action, oblivious to personal danger. The Gap Dragon was one of the most formidable monsters of Xanth. Ordinarily it was no threat to people outside the Gap Chasm. That hardly mattered now!

The dragon took a step toward her, as if deciding whether she was worth going after. It was time to act.

Irene brought out a pincushion seed. “Grow!” she directed it and tossed it in front of the dragon.

The plant sprouted immediately, forming a button that swelled into a cushion that sprouted a score of sharp pins, their points jutting sharply out.

The dragon paused to sniff at it. A pin stuck in its nose. The monster shot out a jet of steam, but the pins didn’t melt. The cushion continued to grow.

The pin in the nose tickled. The dragon sneezed. That sent pins and steam flying out from the cushion. The steam floated up into the sky, while the pins rained down into the moat, sticking the moat monsters. Pins didn’t bother zombies, but there was an angry squeal from the denuded cushion.

The Gap Dragon, of course, had not been hurt. It was armored against swords; pins were beneath its notice. It peered again at Irene, still trying to decide whether she was worth the trouble of gobbling. She did not wait any undue time for its decision. She reached for another seed.

The dragon decided to explore in the opposite direction. It turned about and moved off. Ironically, Irene found herself angry; wasn’t she good enough to eat?

More zombies rushed up, armed with pickled stink bombs. Evidently the Zombie Master was getting his defenses organized. The zombies lofted these bombs at the Gap Dragon, who snapped the first out of the air with easy contempt and crunched it into a foul mass.

Now the Gap Dragon made a sound that resembled its initials. It was not particularly intellectual, but there was nothing wrong with its perception of smell or taste. It could distinguish a foul stench quite as readily as could the next creature. It coughed out another cloud of steam, but the odor clung to its teeth.

Really irritated now, the Gap Dragon lunged and snapped up a zombie. But the rotten creature didn’t taste much better than the stink bomb. The Gap Dragon spat it out with another utterance of its initials.

At last, with poor grace, the dragon gave it up as a bad job and humped back across the moat and galumphed away into the jungle. The raid was over.

“You would have done better chomping me!” Irene called after the dragon snidely.
“I
don’t taste like a stink bomb!”

She breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless—then remembered Ivy.
She
was the object of the danger in the vision! Where had the zombie taken her?

Irene hurried across the drawbridge and around the outside of the moat, following the route she had seen the zombie take. She tuned out most of everything else, intent on this one thing. Along the way she saw the devastation left by the Gap Dragon, with broken trees and pieces of zombie, but not the thing she most sought: her darling daughter.
Where was Ivy?

In moments others joined her, searching the entire area. “Which zombie took her?” the Zombie Master asked. “I can question that one.”

“I don’t know one zombie from another!” Irene replied, the ugly clutch of apprehension tightening about her rib cage. That vision was becoming more real!

“Then I will question them all,” the Zombie Master decided. He brought out a battered horn and blew a blast that sounded like the final wail of a dying buzzard.

Immediately the zombies converged from the entire area, shuffling up so hurriedly that they left pieces of themselves all over the premises. It was amazing the number that appeared; soon there was a dense and grotesque crowd of the things. Irene knew that each one was a person who had died and been reanimated; a lot of people had died in the past few years!

And would one more die in the next day?
No!
she cried mentally. She could not even think of that!

“Which one of you carried Ivy?” the Zombie Master demanded of the motley throng.

There was no answer.

“Which one of you knows who carried Ivy?” he asked next. Three fetid hands hoisted.

“Tell me who carried Ivy,” the Zombie Master said, pointing to one of them. Irene realized that it took a special technique to question zombies; they reacted literally, like inanimate things.

“Zzussch,” the indicated zombie replied, losing part of its lip in the effort of speech.

“Zush, where are you?” the Zombie Master called.

Another zombie shuffled forward.