Vale of the Vole Read online

  “I didn’t know there was a midget roc bird!” Esk remarked.

  “You’re not the Good Magician,” Chex reminded him.

  “Obviouvly he was juvt finding hiv plave,” Volney said. “He wav about to revearch the propertiev of ventaur wingv.”

  Chex and Esk stared at him. “That must be right!” Esk said. “To Answer your Question!”

  Chex looked stricken. “But why did he go, then? I need that answer!”

  “That veemv to be our challenge to divcover.”

  It was the same situation throughout the castle: everywhere there were evidences of recent and normal activity, but nowhere did any person or creature remain. All servants, if there had been any, had departed; all creatures had been released, in the same manner as the little smokers at the moat. Indeed, they now realized that the moat itself was empty; the moat monsters were gone. That was almost unheard of for a castle. Yet there was no sign of violence; it was as if the Good Magician and his family had simply stepped out for a moment—and not returned. What could account for this?

  One region remained to be checked: the dungeon. That was said to be the region of major activity for some castles. Could they have gone down to check something there, and somehow gotten trapped below?

  But the stair down was not blocked, and no door was locked. It could not have been any simple entrapment.

  “If something happened down there,” Chex said nervously, “it could remain dangerous. If, for example, he had a demon there—”

  That sent a chill down Esk’s back. “A demon could account for it,” he agreed. “Some of them are just nuisances, like the one I encountered, but I understand that some are truly terrible. If he meant to keep it confined, but it got out—”

  “Then it could have rampaged through the castle and smashed everything and everyone in it,” Chex finished.

  “Exvept there wav no rampage,” Volney pointed out. “No vign of violenve.”

  “Not all demons are violent,” Chex said. “Some are merely mischievous. They assume other forms, and tempt mortal folk into trouble. If the demon became a damsel in distress, right outside the castle, they all might have hurried out to help, and—”

  “The Good Magician should never have been fooled by a demon,” Esk protested. “He’s the Magician of Information. He knows everything!”

  She sighed. “I agree; it’s a weak hypothesis. Let’s gird ourselves and see what’s down there.”

  They descended the stone stair. There was no sign of disturbance on the nether level either, and no sign of anything intended to confine a demon. Small vials crowded the shelves of storage chambers, all of them carefully stoppered; any severe activity should have shaken some vials so that they fell to the floor. This level was the same as the others: normal for its nature.

  Except for one small chamber behind a closed door. Chex peered through the tiny barred window. “Activity,” she murmured tersely.

  Esk felt that cold shiver again. “What is it?”

  “It seems to be a—an experiment of some sort,” she said. “It’s hard to make it out properly. There’s a container on a hearth, and it’s boiling, and the vapors are overflowing across the floor.”

  “He must have been cooking up a potion,” Esk said, “and forgot to turn it off when he left.”

  “Then we had better turn it off,” she said. “There is no sense letting it boil away to nothing.”

  Volney sniffed the air. “Beware,” he said. “That vmellv like …”

  When he did not continue, Chex prompted him. “Like what?”

  “What?” the vole asked in return.

  “What does it smell like?”

  “What doev what vmell like?”

  “That potion!” she said impatiently.

  “Povion?”

  “The one you just smelled!” she said. “How could you have forgotten it already?”

  “I—forget,” Volney said, seeming confused. “What am I doing here?”

  “What are you—!” she repeated indignantly. “Volney, this is no time for games!”

  “For what?”

  Suddenly Esk caught on. “An amnesia ambrosia!” he exclaimed. “Volney’s nose is more sensitive than ours, and he’s closer to the floor. Those fumes must be spreading out and leaking under the door, so he got the first dose!”

  “Amnesia!” she cried, alarmed. “We must get away from here!”

  “Come on, Volney,” Esk said. “We’re going back upstairs!”

  “Where?” the vole asked.

  “Up! Up! To get out of the fumes, before they get us all!”

  The vole balked. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “He’s forgetting everything!” Chex said. “We’ve got to get him out!”

  “We’re friends!” Esk said. “We must talk—upstairs! come with us!”

  The vole hesitated, but remembered nothing contrary, so followed them up. They slammed every door behind them, and wedged strips of cloth from the sewing room under the last, to halt the creep of the vapor.

  “Now I think we know what happened to the Magician and his family,” Chex said. “That concoction got out of hand, and they forgot what they were doing!”

  “But the magician was upstairs,” Esk said. “Those vapors sink; how could they have reached him there? They haven’t even left the dungeon yet, and would have been less extensive a day ago.”

  She nodded. “True, true. I was thinking carelessly. Those fumes are a consequence of his departure, not a cause, probably. But we had better turn that pot off!”

  They were agreed on that. But how were they to do it? “Maybe there’s a counterpotion,” Esk said. “Something we can mix up and pour into the dungeon that will neutralize it. The Book of Answers might list it.”

  They hurried up and checked the book. “What would it be listed under?” Esk asked, turning the ancient pages.

  “M for memory, perhaps,” Chex said.

  He found the Ms. “Magic,” he read. “What a lot there is on that subject!” He turned more pages. “Ah, here: Memory.” But he frowned as he tried to read the detail. “I can’t understand this! It’s so technical!”

  “Technical?” Chex asked.

  “Yes. What does ‘mnemonic enhancement enchantment’ mean?”

  She pursed her lips. “It’s technical, all right,” she agreed. “Probably only the Good Magician can interpret it; that’s why he is the Magician.”

  “We don’t have time,” he said. “We need something we can understand right now.”

  “We need a sudden bright idea,” she agreed.

  “I know little about magic,” Volney said, evidently recovering from his whiff of amnesia. “But ivn’t there a kind of wood that changev the magic polev?”

  “Magic poles?” Esk asked blankly.

  “Vo that whatever it iv, it iv not, and vive verva.”

  “Whatever it is, it is not,” Chex said, piecing it out.

  “And vice versa,” Esk concluded. “I don’t know—”

  “I think it’v called reverve wood.”

  “Reverse wood!” Esk and Chex exclaimed together. “That’s it!” one or the other added.

  They hurried downstairs, checking shelves. “Found it!” Esk called, as he opened a kitchen cupboard. “The Gorgon must have used it for cooking, so that everything she looked at wouldn’t be stoned.” He fetched down the chip of wood.

  “But are you sure it’s the right kind?” Chex asked.

  “We can test it,” he said. “Come toward me. If it reverses my magic—”

  “I understand.” She strode toward him.

  He held up the chip. “No,” he said as she drew close.

  She leaped at him. Suddenly her rather soft front was pinning him against the wall.

  “Oops,” she said, backing off. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “I told you ‘no’ on your advance,” he gasped. “But you accelerated it.”

  “So it is reverse wood!” she said.

 
“I hope it’s enough.” He looked at the chip, thinking of the chamberful of amnesia fumes below.

  “It will have to be,” she said firmly.

  They took it down to the sealed door, unsealed the door, and hesitated. “We need to get it in the pot, I think,” she said. “But if we get close, we’ll forget.”

  “Not vo,” Volney said. “Who holdv the wood—”

  “Will reverse the amnesia!” Esk exclaimed. “I’ll do it!” He hurried down the steps, holding the chip ahead of him. When he reached the bottom, he strode to the closed chamber, wrenched open the door, waded through the pooling vapors, and dumped the chip of wood in the boiling pot.

  The effect was dramatic. Not only did the amnesia reverse, as he could tell by his abruptly sharpened memory; the pot halted its boiling and froze.

  He returned to the residential floor. “Mission accomplished,” he announced.

  “Except that we still don’t know what happened to the Good Magician,” Chex reminded him. “So we still don’t have the Answers we came for.”

  “Maybe a magic mirror can tell us where he went,” Esk suggested.

  They located a mirror. But as they approached, it flickered. “Castle Roogna calling Magician Humfrey,” it said. “Come in, Humfrey. Over.”

  “He’s not here,” Esk said to the mirror.

  “Castle Roogna calling Magician Humfrey,” it repeated. “Come in, Humfrey. Over.”

  “How do I turn this thing on to answer?” Esk asked.

  The mirror formed an eye and eyed him. “You can’t, ogre-snoot,” it said. “I respond only to authorized personnel. Tell the Good Magician to get his dinky posterior down here and answer the King.”

  “But the Good Magician’s not here!” Chex exclaimed.

  “I didn’t ask for excuses, nymph-noodle,” the mirror retorted. “Just get him here.”

  “Listen, glassface!” Esk said, raising a fist.

  “Uh-uh, mundane-brain,” it said. “I’m worth a lot more than you are. It’s a capital offense to break a mirror.”

  “Just put the King through to us, and we’ll tell him what’s happening here,” Chex said angrily.

  “Sorry, you don’t have proper clearance, ponytail.” And the mirror went blank.

  “I can see why mirrors get broken,” Esk muttered.

  “It’s just the perversity of the inanimate,” Chex said. “I greatly fear we’ll just have to go on to Castle Roogna ourselves, and tell them what we have found here, and see what they can do about it.”

  “Cavtle Roogna?” Volney asked.

  “It may be the only way we can make any progress toward the solutions to our problems,” she said.

  So indeed it seemed.

  Chapter 5. Ivy

  They spent the night in the Magician’s castle, and headed out for Castle Roogna in the morning. They brought along a ladder they found in a storage shed; Chex hauled it along by holding one end under an arm and resting the other end on her rump. The ladder interfered somewhat with her tail, so that the biting flies were more of a nuisance than usual, but the distance was not far.

  They forged into the mountain of illusion, Volney leading the way. When he announced the chasm, Chex unshipped the ladder and pushed it out over the void. Then she secured one end, while Esk walked across it on hands and feet. At the other end, he sat and held it while Volney crossed. Finally they hauled the ladder the rest of the way across, and Chex made a running leap and hurdled the chasm as before. The whole business was accomplished much more swiftly and comfortably than their prior crossing.

  They walked on out the north side and resumed the path. “You know, I wonder how those little smokers got across,” Esk remarked. “Could they hurdle that distance?”

  “They’re pretty active,” Chex said. “I suspect they could. Perhaps they charged forward blindly, and some made it while some did not. We don’t know how many were in that cage.”

  He nodded. Her surmise seemed reasonable enough. Perhaps they had been lucky that only a fraction of the dragons had surmounted the hurdle.

  Then they came to the lake. “And how did they cross this?” Esk asked. “Do dragons swim, and if they do, does the water monster let them pass?”

  Chex glanced at the open water, where the monster waited, then at the side, where the carnivorous reeds waited. “They must have had some other way.”

  Volney sniffed the end of the path at the waterline. “If the mountain wav illuvion, could thiv be illuvion too?” he asked. “Or could it be another avpect?”

  “Another aspect of illusion?” Chex asked, puzzled.

  The vole walked out across the water.

  Esk and Chex stared. “It’s real!” Esk cried.

  Chex slapped her own flank resoundingly. “A one-way causeway!” she exclaimed.

  “I think not,” Volney said.

  But they were already racing for the path. Both stepped on it—and both sank through it and into the muck.

  Yet Volney remained above the water. “How—?” Esk demanded, somewhat miffed.

  “I keep my eyev cloved,” the vole explained.

  “Eyes closed?” Chex asked blankly as she hauled herself out.

  “If what we vee iv not volid,” Volney said, “then vometimev what we do not vee iv volid.”

  “What we do not see is solid,” Esk repeated thoughtfully.

  Chex nodded. “Another reversal. The Good Magician seems very fond of that sort of thing.”

  “Very fond,” Esk agreed, in no better mood than she. Had they realized this before, they could have saved themselves an enormous amount of difficulty.

  “But if the lake monster should encroach—” she said.

  “It iv an enchanted path, iv it not?” the vole asked, proceeding forward.

  She nodded. “True—it should be secure. The dragons were on it because they were travelers; the Good Magician let them go home early, for a reason we do not yet grasp. Other monsters should still be barred—and indeed, we have encountered no others on it. So the water monster should be barred.” She shivered. “Yet I begin to feel claustrophobic again. I am by no means eager to trust myself on that path blindly, though I hardly relish the mucky trip around the lake.”

  Esk pondered. “Suppose you carried me, as you did before—and I kept my eyes open? Would the path become illusory because of me, or remain solid because of you?”

  She smiled. “Let’s find out! I wouldn’t do this with just anyone, but I trust you, Esk.”

  Esk found himself flustered by the compliment. Centaurs were notoriously distrustful of the judgment of others.

  Chex closed her eyes while Esk mounted. Then he. directed her toward the path. “Straight ahead—no, slightly to your right,” he said.

  “That’s too clumsy,” she said. “Just gesture with your knees.”

  “My knees?”

  “Press with the one on the side you wish me to turn from. That’s much more efficient.”

  “Oh.” He tried it, and sure enough, she moved quickly in response. In a moment he was directing her wordlessly.

  He guided her onto the path, and the path held. It was, indeed, the walker’s vision that determined it; as long as she kept her eyes closed, her footing was firm. When she drifted toward one side or the other, he kneed her gently, and she moved immediately back to the center. The lake monster eyed them, but did not approach; the path was indeed enchanted. The trip across was surprisingly easy.

  “Well,” Chex said as they arrived at the far side. “That is indeed a relief.”

  Esk dismounted, and they walked on along the path, their spirits restored. Perhaps at Castle Roogna they would discover the answer to the Good Magician’s strange disappearance.

  But as they drew closer to the castle, Chex became increasingly nervous. “Is something wrong?” Esk finally inquired.

  She sighed. “I’m not sure. It is a personal matter.”

  “Oh. Not my business, then.”

  “Perhaps it is your business, because
it may affect your reception, and Volney’s.”

  The vole’s little ears perked up. “There iv trouble at Roogna?”

  “In a way. I shall have to rehearse some history to make it clear.”

  Esk shrugged. “We’ll listen.” He was more curious than he cared to admit; what could bother a creature who was completely open about natural functions?

  “I am, as you have noted, a crossbreed,” she said.

  “So am I,” Esk reminded her. “We might even have a common human ancestor somewhere way back.”

  She smiled briefly. “We might. But the centaur species, whatever its origin, considers itself a pure stock, and does not look kindly on adulteration.”

  “Oho! So they may not like you much!”

  “Some may not,” she agreed wanly. “Unfortunately, the ones who may look least kindly on my mixed ancestry are my grandsire and grandam on the centaur side.”

  “Your grandparents don’t know?” Esk asked, surprised.

  “My dam, Chem Centaur, did not find a mate of her own species. Centaurs are not common beyond Centaur Isle, so this problem can arise. She—associated with a hippogryph. This is why I have wings. But because she was aware that such a liaison might not be approved, she did not inform her sire and dam of the matter. Only her brother, Chet, with whom she was closer. Thus, to the indiscretion of the liaison was added that of deceiving her sire and dam. Such things are not necessarily light matters, with centaurs.”

  “But it really was her own business, wasn’t it?” Esk asked. “I mean, she wasn’t under any obligation to report to her parents, was she?”

  “That was Chem’s conclusion,” Chex agreed. “It is possible that other centaurs might disagree.”

  “And your—grandparents—are at Castle Roogna,” Esk concluded, getting the picture.

  “I believe that they are.”

  “And when they see you, with your wings—”

  “I am uncertain of the nature of their reaction.”

  “Maybe you can wait in the forest, while Volney and I go on in.”

  She sighed. “No, thank you, Esk. I believe it is time to face the melody.”

  “If that is the way you want it.”

  “I believe it is the way it must be. I do not like deception, and to the extent that my very existence represents a deception, I owe it to myself to eliminate it.”