Luck of the Draw (Xanth) Page 14

  Piper was privately amused, knowing that Bryce knew his nature. “Yes, I believe it was.”

  “Well, then,” Arsenal said grumpily, realizing that he had been managed, but not able to do much about it.

  “And you do have a point,” Bryce said. “If we want to reach that checkpoint today, we will need a shortcut.” He looked around. “How do the rest of you feel?”

  The remaining three Suitors exchanged a three-pronged glance. Then Anna shrugged. “I prefer to get through this as expeditiously as possible, regardless of the deadline. A shortcut will do, provided it’s safe.”

  “Sure,” Lucky agreed.

  “Right,” Pose said. “There will surely be plenty to challenge us, and getting there is bound to be the least of it. Let’s take our chances.”

  “Next question,” Piper said. “Do we have a suitable shortcut path to follow? I have seen signs along the way, but mainly for more popular destinations.”

  “I see a cluster of signs,” Lucky said. He was of course the one to be lucky in that respect.

  “What’s that you’re holding?” Anna asked. “You’re not wearing jewelry?”

  “It’s a charm the princess gave me,” Lucky said. “To focus my luck for better effect.”

  “A lucky charm?”

  “It charms luck. This is the first time I’ve tried it.”

  “That’s interesting,” Anna said. “She gave me a trinket too. A little magic purse.” She held up a postage-stamp-sized mini purse. “It holds more than you might think.” She inverted it, dumping out the contents, and a small torrent of items dropped out: a hairbrush, comb, makeup kit, a spare dress, shoes, and a wrapped sandwich. “It’s quite handy, really.” She picked up her items and packed them back inside.

  “She gave me a penknife,” Arsenal said. He brought out a small object, and opened it to reveal a small knife blade on one side, and a pen on the other. “It cuts or draws. I haven’t found much use for it yet, but I like it.”

  “She gave me a bottle,” Pose said, holding up an ornate little glass bottle. “I can dematerialize and enter it, and it’s a perfectly appointed room complete with bed and lamp so I can rest in complete private comfort.”

  “Unless someone puts a cork in it,” Lucky said.

  “It locks from the inside, not the outside,” Pose said, “I can’t be trapped. It’s very nice.” He put the bottle away.

  The others looked at Piper. “Yes, I too,” he said, producing a small musical pipe. “A magic piccolo with perfect tone and four keys.”

  “It looks like a toy,” Arsenal said.

  “It’s no toy.” Piper put it to his lips and played a brief and utterly lovely melody whose notes seemed to range far beyond what such a tiny instrument should be able to do. But of course it was magic, not limited as an ordinary instrument might be.

  They looked at Bryce. “She gave me a magic pen,” he said. “I can sketch objects and make them become physical.”

  “We are wasting time,” Arsenal said. “Better be on our way.”

  They went to the cluster of signs Lucky had spotted. Sure enough, there was one for Mount Rushmost.

  “But can we trust it?” Anna asked. “How do we know it wasn’t planted to lead folk like us into a trap?”

  “Good question,” Bryce said. “We could use some reassurance on that score.”

  “I agree,” Arsenal said, surprisingly. “Unenchanted paths are normally used by land dragons and other monsters for their own convenience; others use them at their own risk. I doubt anyone knew that we would take this particular path, so there is unlikely to be a trap. But we should use it with caution, with every person alert for danger and the women in the middle.”

  “Hey, I’ll pull my own weight,” Anna said. “I don’t need to be coddled.”

  “Two things,” Arsenal said. “There are trolls and goblins that delight in catching and eating delicate flesh, and human women are prime targets. You look good enough to eat, no offense. You could put us all at risk by being on the edge. And Mindy would surely appreciate the company in the center.”

  “I would,” Mindy agreed.

  “Oh. Yes,” Anna agreed, slightly disconcerted.

  Arsenal glanced at Pose. “And you might invoke your demonly talent to find us something useful, such as ripe pie trees so we can eat while traveling.”

  “Actually, I prefer to act human, with human limitations, because I’ll be courting the human princess and want to seem halfway suitable. She knows I’m a demon, of course; I clarified that when we met. But I assume it will be easier to win her trust and her interest if I at least seem human. So I won’t be puffing into smoke or popping instantly from place to place.”

  Arsenal considered that. Bryce had the impression that he didn’t much like the demon, but knew better than to challenge him in too obvious a manner. “Point made. We all want to impress the princess, apart from our offerings to her. But can you help us with the things we need along the way? Such as by popping off invisibly, locating food, and returning to let us know so we can find it ourselves?”

  “Can do,” Pose said. “I do have a certain demonly awareness that may be helpful.” He flickered briefly. “There is food at a nearby house: pie and cake plants growing profusely in the yard. We might ask.”

  “Exactly,” Arsenal agreed. “Let us know when we are in the vicinity of that house.”

  “I will murmur something,” Pose agreed. “Meanwhile I would appreciate it if the rest of you do not make anything of my nature to strangers. Let me pass as a man. It will be good practice for me.”

  “Readily done,” Arsenal said. “You look like an ordinary man to me.” His mouth formed a somewhat malignant smile. “Very ordinary.”

  The demon did not take offense. “Thank you.”

  Now Arsenal looked at Piper and Bryce. “Are we in agreement, on this and other matters?”

  “We are,” Piper said.

  The others nodded. They might have been nervous about traveling with a demon, but this was reassuring.

  Bryce saw that Arsenal really was an effective leader, at least as long as he got his own way. So it was easiest to let him lead. It might indeed get them to where they were going faster. “Yes.”

  “Then onward,” Arsenal said, and stepped off the enchanted path and onto the shortcut path. The others followed, with Pose second, Anna and Mindy next, then Lucky, Piper, and Bryce bringing up the rear.

  They followed the path through the forest as it gently curved here and there. Then it came to a tangle of alternate paths radiating out in all directions. There were eight of them, with no indication which one was correct.

  “Oh, no, it’s probably my fault,” Anna said. “An anomaly. They probably all go there, but some will be longer than others, and some may be dangerous.”

  “We don’t have time to dither,” Arsenal said. “We need to decide on one.”

  “But it has to be the right one,” Lucky said. “I used my luck finding the original path; I can’t be sure to be lucky again so soon.”

  “We can’t afford to gamble,” Pose said.

  There was a crash of thunder, and a fierce gust of wind blasted them. “Oh, bleep!” Mindy swore. “Fracto was just waiting for us to leave the enchanted path. Now we’ll get soaked.”

  “We can handle rain,” Arsenal said gruffly.

  “But we girls don’t care to get soaked,” Mindy said. “It messes up our hair and plasters our shirts and forces us to wring out our underwear.”

  A significant glance ricocheted around the five men, none of whom would really mind seeing women with plastered shirts wringing out their panties. But it wasn’t expedient to say that.

  Anna put up her hand, intercepting the look before it could make another loop and squeezing it into nothing. “You should try being a woman, before enjoying a woman’s humiliation,” she said.

  “We apologize,” Bryce said quickly.

  “I have a raincoat in my purse,” Anna said to Mindy. “But only o
ne, and it’s not big enough for both of us.”

  “So we’d just better avoid that storm,” Mindy said tightly.

  Meanwhile the swirling cloud was looming closer, menacingly dark in the center. The wind was blowing leaves from nearby trees. This would be a deluge.

  They pedaled on, but the storm was gaining on them.

  “I spy a house,” Lucky said.

  “And there’s something useful in it,” Pose said. “That is the house with the food.”

  They forged toward the house. It was a neat cottage surrounded by a tall hedge. There were a fair number of pie and cake plants growing within the enclosure. Obviously the occupant had plenty to eat.

  They stopped their trikes and got to their feet.

  “Let me ask,” Mindy said. “I may make a better impression.”

  “To be sure,” Arsenal agreed.

  Mindy went up to the door and knocked. The wind whipped her hair about and tugged at her clothing, doing a bit of plastering of its own, making her look appealingly wild. In a moment the door opened, showing an ordinary young man. “Yes?”

  “He’s the one,” Pose murmured. “He is what we need, one way or another.”

  Mindy considered hardly half a moment, absorbing that. Then she made her best effort. “Please, we are a traveling group of two women and five men, not looking for trouble,” she said with a nice smile. “We seek refuge from the storm and advice about our route. We are depending on your generosity. May we come in?”

  The man considered, gazing at her. She inhaled as a gust of wind threatened to untuck her shirt. His generous nature got the better of him. “Sure.”

  They hurried in just as the first fat drops of rain came down. Bryce was the last one in, and he pushed the door closed against the battering wind. Angry rain smashed against it, demonstrating the storm’s frustration at losing its quarry.

  “Thank you so much,” Mindy said. “You saved us from a drenching.” She tucked her shirt back in, but she was still breathing hard from her exertion. “You are so good to us. We really appreciate it.”

  “Well, sure,” the man agreed, his goodness prevailing in the face of her compliments, his eye on the heaving shirt. Bryce wondered whether she had played him, Bryce, similarly, when he was at Caprice Castle, and he hadn’t noticed. She was not the beauty that Dawn was, or even Anna, but she evidently knew how to impress a man when she wanted to. Most women did.

  Mindy quickly introduced the other members of the party. Prompted by this, the man introduced himself: he was Andrew, or more fully “Average Magician Andrew.”

  “You’re a Magician?” Mindy asked, breathlessly awed.

  “Well, not exactly,” he admitted with a bit of bashfulness. “My talent is to answer questions. If I could answer every one accurately, I’d be as good as the Good Magician. But I am right exactly fifty percent of the time. I don’t know when I’m right or wrong, just that half of my answers will be in each category. So my friends call me a Magician, but I’m not sure I’m even half of a Magician. If only I could always be right, or at least know when I was wrong, I’d be great. As it is, I’m not much.”

  “But you are surely just what we need,” Mindy gushed, still breathing hard. It seemed impossible that Andrew would not notice how she was overdoing it, but his gaze was caught somewhere between her face and her shirt. “You can tell us which path to take.”

  “I will be glad to help in any way I can,” Andrew said. “But the truth is that few folk find my answers useful. They would be, if they were guaranteed right or wrong, but they aren’t. I don’t offhand know which path is the right one for you, so I would have to use my talent, which may not help.”

  Bryce was interested. This just might be an intellectual puzzle he could solve. “You said your answers are right exactly half the time,” he said. “Do you mean that they average out in the course of time, so you could have five wrong answers followed by several right ones?”

  “No. They are always even. If one is wrong, the next will be right. But I don’t know which is which.”

  “Ah. But if you did know one, that would in effect fix the other, as in quantum mechanics.”

  “I am not familiar with that magic,” Andrew said.

  Bryce smiled. “Nobody is. Let me express it more plainly: if you absolutely knew your first answer was right, then the second one would have to be wrong, and vice versa.”

  “Yes. But of course there is no point in asking a question to which you already know the answer. I can answer only once for a given person. So you could not help yourself by asking more than one question; you have only one chance.”

  “Yes,” Bryce agreed. “But there are six of us with a common objective. We should be able to guarantee a true answer, if we cooperate.”

  “I’m not sure how,” Andrew said uncertainly.

  “First things first,” Bryce said. “What can we exchange for the use of your talent to help us? We are not beggars.”

  “Oh, I’d charge a year’s service, if I could guarantee my answers, the way the Good Magician does. But as it is, they are practically worthless.”

  “Nevertheless, we are in a hurry, you can help us, and we will pay.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Arsenal asked.

  “I am crafting an ethical solution to our problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “That we don’t know a safe shortcut.”

  “I told you, I can protect us from dragons.”

  “What about getting washed into the sea by a deluge, as is threatening now?” Bryce asked. “Carried away by a roc bird? Poisoned by bad pies? Abducted by a goblin horde too big to fight off? There are dangers galore, off the enchanted paths.” As he had discovered, thanks to his sponsoring Demon’s quick course of education.

  “He’s right,” Anna said. “We need reassurance. Otherwise we had better return to the enchanted path, regardless of the extra time it takes. We may have to pedal all night, but we’ll get there.” The others nodded agreement.

  “Point taken,” Arsenal said reluctantly, seeing rebellion in the ranks. “Get it done.” Thus making it his directive, preserving his leadership.

  “What do you need, that we might provide?” Mindy asked.

  Andrew made a gesture of acquiescence. “The fact is, I’m hungry.”

  “But you have pies growing all around your house,” Mindy said.

  “I do and I don’t. Those food plants are like my talent: you can’t trust them.”

  “They looked good to me,” Mindy said. “I’d eat them.”

  “Let me explain. Take the cake plants: some are angel’s food, and some are devil’s food. But they look alike.”

  “Either is bound to be tasty,” Mindy said.

  “Tasty, yes. But don’t eat them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The angel’s food cake makes you behave like a saint for as long as it takes to digest. You can’t lie, are easily offended by crude language, and go out of your way to do nice things for other creatures, even if it isn’t what you want to do. The devil’s food cake makes you the opposite; you will be foul-mouthed and evil for as long as it takes to digest. Neither state is comfortable. Believe me, I know, because when I get too hungry, I have to eat.”

  “And your last meal was angel’s food,” Mindy said.

  “How did you know?”

  “You are being very decent.”

  “Yes. Had I been normal, I would never have let strangers into my house, storm or not.”

  “Why don’t you simply stop eating when you feel the effect?” Anna asked. “Or take a bite of one, then of another, to counter it?”

  “Because it takes a while for the digestion to start, and the effect doesn’t show until then. The cakes are good; once I start one, I have to finish it.”

  “Well, I think I can solve your food problem,” Mindy said. “Suppose we trade that for your answering one question by each of the six others here?”

  “That’s mo
re than fair, considering.”

  “Here’s how,” Mindy said briskly. “Anna and I will harvest several cakes, enough to be sure of getting some of each kind, and mix them together into one composite cake. We’re women; we know how to do this sort of thing, in contrast to ignorant men. The effects of the different kinds should cancel out, and we can all have a good meal.” She turned to Bryce. “Meanwhile you can organize our questions to be sure of getting the answer we need: how to find a guaranteed safe shortcut path to Mount Rushmost.”

  “Can do,” Bryce said.

  “You’d better,” Arsenal muttered. “Or we’re wasting time here.”

  The girls went out to fetch cakes. Bryce focused on Andrew. “Six of us will each ask one question. You will use your talent to answer each. We will come at the truth soon enough.”

  “I told you, I can’t guarantee—”

  “That’s all right,” Bryce said. “Arsenal, can you organize our group so that each person asks only the question I suggest? No one must ask out of turn. This has to be done exactly right.”

  “Yes,” Arsenal said gruffly. “I’ll keep the discipline. I’ll ask the first. What is it?”

  “There are eight paths out there,” Bryce said carefully. “Let’s number them one to eight, beginning left of where the original path intersects them and proceeding until the last one is to the right of the original path. Do you understand?”

  “Of course I understand,” Arsenal said impatiently. “I’m not a dullard.”

  “Then here is your question. Is the best path for us, the one that is quick and safe throughout, one of the first four?”

  “This is pointless,” Arsenal muttered. But he girded his loins and faced Andrew. “I believe you heard the qualifications, and understand the context.”

  “Yes,” Andrew agreed.

  “Is the correct path one of the first four?”

  “No.”

  “But we don’t know whether that answer is correct,” Lucky said. “And even if it is, it still leaves us with several choices.”

  “And you may ask the second question,” Bryce said. “Which is, how many women are in our party?”