Knot Gneiss (27 page)

“What have you done to me?” he demanded.

“I thought that since yew like the female form so much, yew wood bee happy to have more of it.” She walked to the door. “I will leave yew to admire yourself.” She opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind her.

Now to rejoin Jumper. He had sent her a flash thought to let her know where he was. She hurried, knowing that there would soon be ugly chaos in the mound.

She rounded a corner—and saw Gauche carrying a frightened Meryl over his shoulder. Then she remembered: it was Jumper, emulating the chief, and Meryl was pretending fright. This was the rescue in progress.

Wenda stepped forward to join them. But a hulking goblin shape intercepted her. “What have we here?”

Oh, no! It was Gorilla Goblin.

Then a bulb went off over Wenda’s head. “Gorilla!” she said. “Go to the chief’s chamber immediately. He has a new female captive who needs breaking in. Dew knot listen to anything she says.”

“Huh? The chief’s right here.”

Jumper turned his head. “Get over there, poopface! I’m busy with my own captive.”

Gorilla went.

Wenda felt almost guilty. Yet she was sure the converted chief more than deserved what was about to happen to him.

They moved on out. Whenever a goblin guard thought to approach, Jumper glared him back. “Mine!” he said. “Both girls mine. Wait your turn.” That was clearly persuasive.

They forged on out of the mound. By then the goblins were developing more resistance, suspecting that the chief would not take the captives outside. But as they boiled out of the entrance, Hilarion caught them with spot forgetting. They milled about, uncertain what they had been about to do.

Jumper lifted Meryl off his shoulder. “Fly,” he said tersely. “We’ll make our own way back.”

Meryl flew up to join Angela, and the two headed out across the lake. Jumper, Wenda, and Hilarion strode rapidly on foot. They found the invisible air boat, jumped in, and rowed into the lake.

The goblins swarmed to the shore. Now they were remembering, and knew that it was not really Gauche. But it was too late for them to do much about it. Some went back for weapons, but it was too late for that too.

They had made the rescue.

11

T
OURISTS

They rejoined Ida on the island. “Oh, I’m so glad you are safe!” Ida exclaimed, hugging Meryl. “I’m glad too,” Meryl agreed. “I was really scared, and not because of the Knot.”

“Now we can rest,” Wenda said, relieved. “I wood knot care to go through that again.”

“I am not sure we should rest yet,” Ida said.

“It has been a really hard evening,” Jumper said. “If anything had gone wrong, we would have been in serious trouble. I don’t dare depend on my special powers anymore; I need to save them for emergency use.”

“Yes, of course,” Ida agreed. “But let me share my thoughts with you first.”

Wenda realized that there was something on Ida’s mind, and Ida’s ideas could be serious matters. She would not inconvenience them for no reason. “Yes, please bee candid.”

“While I was alone in the darkness I had time to think,” Ida said. “I wondered about the air boat. It was remarkably convenient, yet the goblins paid it no attention. If they have such craft, why did they not pile into others and pursue us across the water, firing their arrows?”

“Ida, you are making sense,” Hilarion said. “Not that you don’t always. It was almost as if that boat had been placed there for our use. The goblins would never do that, unless they thought it would spring a leak and dump us in the hate elixir. But the boat is sound. It is as if the goblins are unaware of it. Considering that this is their territory, that is remarkable.”

Ida’s voice had a smile in the darkness. “You have expressed my concern very well, Hilarion. Unexplained conveniences make me nervous; they may be like the pleasant paths leading to tangle trees. My other concern was why the goblins did not cross to the island by other means. They do have ordinary wooden boats; I saw them by the shore. Yet they made no effort to use them, despite the fact that they were eager to capture us.”

“And they tried to trick us into crossing back, so they could capture us all,” Hilarion said. “Jumper read in their minds about that. Why should they employ such a ruse when it would be easier simply to swarm across and grab us on the island? Subtlety is not their forte.”

“Again you have nicely amplified my concern,” Ida said. “What we have seen does not seem to make much sense. And that leaves me unsatisfied. I fear that there is something we do not understand that may be dangerous to our health.”

“I agree emphatically,” Hilarion said. “It was very intelligent of you to come up with these aspects the rest of us overlooked.”

“You are kind to say so.” Wenda suspected Ida was invisibly blushing.

“These are excellent points,” Jumper agreed. “It might make sense for us to depart this island now and find somewhere else to spend the night.”

“Readily accomplished with the air boat,” Hilarion said. “We can row away under cover of night, and be well away from the vicinity by morning.”

“We can’t,” Angela said. “I have been scouting around. The goblins are really angry about our escape, and maybe about what happened to Chief Gauche.” She paused, possibly for an un-angelic smile. The chief had gotten his just desserts, before managing to lose the chip of reverse wood, and they surely had not been pleasantly tasty. “They have surrounded the entire lake. You can see their hundred torches in the evening dews and damps.”

Wenda looked. There in a great circle was the glimmer of distant lights. The lake was indeed surrounded.

“Can Jumper become the roc bird and carry us away by air?” Meryl asked.

“No,” Jumper said. “I can’t safely take off by night; I need to see where I’m going. Also—” He hesitated.

“Also, we have learned that Jumper’s borrowed talents are limited,” Wenda said. “When he uses them up, they will no longer be available. So we feel he should save them for emergencies only. If we can possibly find another escape, we must do so.”

“Oh! I didn’t realize.”

“None of us did,” Wenda said. “We were letting him use them wastefully. We shall bee far more careful henceforth.”

“Which leaves us in a dill of a picklement,” Hilarion said. “We don’t want to stay here, but it seems we can’t conveniently depart. There is little to sustain us on the island; maybe the goblins expect to starve us out.”

“Angela and I can fly in supplies,” Meryl said.

“No,” Wenda said. “They will shoot yew down with arrows. Only Hilarion’s talent of making them forget us on a spot basis prevented them from dewing that before. That will knot work, now that they are fully alerted.”

“Then we shall simply have to find another way,” Ida said.

It was a long shot, but Wenda tried for it. “Meryl, yew have come up with good ideas before. Do yew have any now?”

“Not really,” the mermaid said. “Unless there is something special about this island that we have not realized.”

“Like maybe a secret passage that leads to somewhere safely far away,” Angela said. Wenda remembered that in Meryl’s absence, Angela had become their idea person.

“That might be the case,” Ida agreed.

They checked in the dark, canvassing the entire island, thumbing on the ground with their feet or tail. The island wasn’t large, and they were able to cover it. And found no hollow section, no portal into the ground.

“Yet there must be something,” Hilarion said, frustrated.

“We have two mysteries,” Meryl said. “The presence of the air boat, and the absence of anything on the island. Could they be connected?”

“They surely could,” Ida agreed.

“But how?” Hilarion demanded.

“An avoidance spell!” Angela said. “It keeps the goblins from finding the boat, even by accident. And it keeps them from the island. They don’t even know they’re avoiding these things; they just don’t go to them.”

“That makes sense,” Ida agreed. “Yet—”

“Yet we found it,” Angela said. “Probably because we are not goblins. The spell must have been oriented specifically on goblins. Who else would come here?”

Who, indeed!

“But why reserve a special boat to go to an empty island?” Hilarion asked.

“A way station!” Meryl said. “The boat goes to the island, where someone else rendezvous with them and takes them off. Like a troll bus stop or exchange station. They don’t want goblins messing with it, so they keep them away.”

“That too makes sense,” Ida agreed.

“It could be a landing field for rocs,” Jumper said. “At certain times.”

Angela dropped down to the boat; they could tell by her descending voice. “I’m thinking how we don’t even notice the trollway until we’re traveling on it,” she said. “Maybe this is similar.”

“We have used the boat,” Jumper said. “And noticed nothing special except its invisibility and sturdiness.”

“There’s something here,” Angela reported. “Knobs, like controls. They—oh!”

“What?” Wenda called, alarmed.

“There’s a lighted boulevard!”

“Knot that we can see,” Wenda said.

“Come into the boat!”

Wenda went there, found the boat by feel, and climbed in.

And saw the boulevard. It was a lighted highway touching the center of the island and rising over the water to either side. Where it touched ground, a side lane diverged, leading to the water where the boat was.

“We have found the bus stop,” Wenda reported breathlessly. “Yew can’t see it from outside.”

The others joined her, and became believers. The boat was magic in a way they had not suspected.

“How do we use the boulevard, when we can neither see nor touch it?” Hilarion asked.

“We use the boat!” Angela exclaimed. “That’s what it’s for!”

“That must be the case,” Ida agreed.

Hilarion settled into what seemed to be the driver’s seat and twiddled knobs, which now glowed in soft pastel colors. They did seem to be controls of some kind. One was a larger circle.

The boat lifted. Hilarion hastily reversed his turn of the knob, and it sank again. In a moment and a half he had it floating just above the ground.

He tried another knob. The boat nudged forward. He twisted the other way, and the boat slowed, paused, and moved backward.

“This is like a sophisticated magic carpet,” Hilarion said.

“And to think we rowed it across the lake,” Jumper said.

Then the boat sank to the ground. The knobs had ceased working.

“We’re off the boulevard,” Angela said. “We need to be on it.”

Wenda, Jumper, and Ida got off the boat, got behind it, and pushed it forward. When it came to the edge of the lighted section, it lifted. That was it: the boat was a magic highway craft, losing much of its magic elsewhere.

“I think we have our way off the island,” Ida said.

Wenda replaced the reverse-wood seeds in the net around the Knot. Then they rolled the wagon onto the ramp and onto the boat. They settled in around the Knot.

Hilarion moved the boat forward. He followed the access road, then used the wheel to steer it onto the main boulevard. He increased the speed. The boat floated up the rise over the water, traveling more swiftly.

“And the goblins can’t see us at all,” Meryl said, satisfied. “We can see out, but no one can see in.”

“This is remarkable magic,” Ida said. “But whoever can have set it up? It is surely a considerable project.”

“Not the trolls?” Jumper asked.

“This does not seem to be their type of trollway,” Ida said. “I suspect it was crafted by some other agency.”

“I dew knot want to be a wet blanket,” Wenda said, “but maybee we should find a safe landing and get off the boulevard before we find out who made it. Just in case.”

“Good idea,” Jumper agreed.

But the boulevard continued over the nocturnal terrain of Xanth, not dropping down. There was no ready exit.

“I think we’ll just have to pull over to the side, and sleep there,” Hilarion said.

“And hope for the best,” Ida agreed.

“Maybe there’s something ahead,” Hilarion said.

Wenda looked. There was a huge pattern in the sky, like a complicated ribbon bow. Each ribbon was outlined by lines of lights along its sides.

“I have heard of this sort of thing,” Ida said. “They have it in Mundania. It’s called a cloverleaf intersection.”

The boulevard divided. Hilarion took the right fork. This led up into the higher sky in a huge graceful loop. Wenda was afraid they would fall, but it was as though they remained level.

“Like the path down the Gap Chasm wall!” Meryl exclaimed.

So it seemed. They looped up and over the rest of the pattern, seeing other loops below, their lanes heading in different directions. Then they looped beneath the pattern, and came out on a lane traveling at right angles to the first one.

But still there was no landing place.

Angela looked back. “I think I see a ribbon leading to a place,” she said. “If we can find it.”

Wenda understood what she meant. There might be an avenue, but how could they select the right one amidst the complicated tangle of lanes?

They tried. When the lane divided again, Hilarion took the left one. This led into another loop that threaded the center of the giant flower, passing other ribbons to left and right, above and below, in a bewildering array of curves.

They saw another boat. It was sailing along another ribbon that passed close to their own without touching. “Maybe they can tell us how to find the correct route,” Meryl said, and waved.

Then they saw that the occupants of the other boat were not remotely human. They were masses of colored tentacles: land-going squid.

There was a little squid in front. It waved back with a pink tentacle. Then their boat was out of range.

“I think we’re not in Xanth anymore,” Ida murmured.

Then their ribbon emerged from the tangle and came to the rest stop they had wanted to reach. Hilarion steered into it and brought the boat to a halt. There was a glowing minipark with a pleasant pool, several comfortable moss beds, pie trees, boot rear roots, milkweed pods, and high bushes marked with silhouettes of a human man and human woman. Clear enough.