Esrever Doom Read online

  “I’m not exactly a girl.”

  Now he paused. “I don’t want to be offensive, but to me you look exactly like a girl.”

  “It’s— I shouldn’t have said— It’s supposed to be secret— Oh, bloop!”

  This was getting curious. So he focused on the least of it. “Bloop?”

  “I mean bleep. I’m not used to swearing. I’m all flustered.”

  “Zosi, chances are we’ll never meet again. If something’s secret, I promise I’ll never tell.”

  “I don’t know. I was afraid I would mess up, and I’m doing it already.” She wiped her face. “Now I’m crying.”

  What could he do? Kody got up and crossed to her, putting a hand on her shaking shoulder. “Would it help if I told you how messed up I am?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated miserably.

  “I’m from Mundania. If I understand it correctly, I’m asleep there while my body recovers from some bad accident, and this is all a dream. That is, it may be real to you, but not to me.”

  “You don’t mind touching me?”

  He was surprised yet again, then realized that might be the effect of the Curse, making a pretty girl ugly. “I see you as you are, a pretty girl. I don’t mind touching you.”

  “Oh!” she wailed, putting her face against his hip.

  “I’m here to find out how to reverse the Curse of perception, so that Xanth can revert to normal.”

  “Oh, I want to revert!” she said.

  He found himself sitting beside her, one arm around her shoulders, comfortingly. “With luck, it will happen.”

  “Not that.”

  She was just one surprise after another. “I don’t think I understand.”

  “I’ve got to tell you, though you’ll hate me.”

  “I won’t—”

  “I’m a zombie.”

  He must have misheard. “A what?”

  “A zombie. The living dead, with rotten pieces constantly falling off. Nobody can stand to be near us.”

  Kody shook his head. “But you’re warm and firm and soft. No rot.”

  “Not now. But usually. When I revert to my true nature.”

  A dim light was beginning to show. “You are normally a zombie? Changed for this occasion?”

  “Yes. I haven’t been fleshly long, only a few hours, and I’m not used to it. I hate having to eat and peep and all.”

  He was about to ask about “peep” but then realized that it must be another accidental vowel substitution, like “bloop” for “bleep.” “Living folk do.”

  She shuddered. “Yes.” She took a deep breath. “So now you can recoil away from me. No one wants to touch a zombie.”

  It was a sentiment he understood in a rather different context. “But you’re not a zombie now.”

  “Oh, I am, inside. A zombie in living human form.”

  That might be, but he repressed his urge to cast her abruptly loose. It would not be kind. “If I may ask, what prompted you to change state and come to see the Good Magician?”

  “Xanth is running low on zombies, and needs more.”

  The surprises just would not stop coming. “I should think Xanth would want to be rid of zombies.”

  “No, Xanth needs zombies. We do important things, like serving in bad dreams, and of course we guard Castle Roogna from harm.”

  “Castle Roogna,” he repeated. He had heard that name before.

  She took it as a question. “That’s the capital of human Xanth, where the king lives. It has to be protected, so we zombies do it. If there’s a bad threat to Castle Roogna, we will rise out of the ground and deal with it. No living army wants to fight us.”

  Kody appreciated why. “I’m sure you are effective.”

  “We are. But we don’t last forever. We wear out and fade out. So there needs to be fresh zombies to take our places. But since the Zombie Master retired there have been no new zombies made. So we are getting thin. So to speak.”

  “Now I see the problem.”

  “So we drew rotten straws, and I got the short one, and had to take the treatment to become alive for a month or so, so I can go among living folk and find a way to replenish the zombie stock. That’s why I’m here. But if anyone knows I’m really a zombie, they won’t help. That’s why it’s supposed to be secret.”

  “I will keep your secret,” he repeated gallantly.

  “Oh, thank you!” she said. Then, impulsively, she kissed him.

  And recoiled. “Oh, I didn’t mean to do that! I’m so sorry! You must be sickened.”

  He had made it a point not to flinch. Actually the kiss, sincere and fleeting as it was, had been nice. “Not at all. You’re fleshly now.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

  Dara returned with the refreshments. “I see you two have gotten to know each other.”

  Kody and Zori quickly disengaged. “We have been talking, yes,” Kody said.

  “More than that, I think. No matter. I brought tsoda pop fresh from Lake Tsoda Popka, and hot cross buns.”

  Kody picked up a bun. It was quite hot, and the expression on its surface was indeed cross verging on angry. Maybe it didn’t like to be eaten.

  Zosi hesitated. He realized what her problem was: she hadn’t eaten before, in the living state, and was wary of the digestive complications. “Take small, ladylike bites,” he suggested. “Chew carefully and swallow. It takes several hours for it to, um, reappear.”

  “You’re telling her how to eat?” Dara asked. “What presumption!” Obviously she did not know the girl’s origin.

  “Oh, no, he’s right,” Zosi said quickly. “I had a—a complication, and feared making a mess.”

  “A complication? In my day they called it flirtation.”

  To forestall further questions, Kody asked Dara one. “How is it the Good Magician came to marry a demoness?”

  “Oh, that goes way back over a hundred and sixty years. I was his very first wife, if not his first love.” She continued with the story, as he had hoped, and asked no further questions of them. Zosi squeezed his hand appreciatively, understanding what he had done.

  Then Wira reappeared, interrupting the romantic narrative. “It seems the scheduling was not a mistake,” she said. “The Good Magician wants to see you both at the same time. I apologize for the delay.”

  “That’s all right,” Kody and Zosi said almost together. Both of them were glad they had had a chance to get to know each other, whatever Dara might think.

  But why did he want to see them together? They had quite different missions.

  They followed Wira up the winding stairway, Kody bringing up the rear. Zosi stumbled and he quickly put his hands to her narrow waist, steadying her. He realized that zombies wouldn’t much care if they stumbled, as their substance was already well beyond damage, so she might not yet have the reflexes.

  They were ushered into a dingy little study filled mostly by a giant open tome on a desk, with a very old little gnome of a man perched almost over it. “Here are the querents, Father,” Wira said.

  Querents? Kody decided not to ask. There was something about that word he didn’t much like.

  The sour countenance quirked into what for want of a better description might have been taken as a smile. “Thank you, Wira.” Then his grumpy gaze fixed on the intruders. “The two of you have complementary qualities,” the Good Magician said. “You will enable each other to complete your separate missions, each of which is important. Your Services will consist of assisting each other. You, Kody, are unaffected by the Curse, so see people and things as they are. That is your asset. You, Zosi, are familiar with the general layout and history of Xanth. You are also affected by the Curse. Those are your assets. Work together to achieve both your objectives.”

  “I don’t get it,” Kody said. “She has to find more zombies. I have to reverse a Curse. Those are two quite different things.”

  “Different things whose solutions may nevertheless be found in one particular a
rea. Your main challenge will be to locate that area.”

  “How can we do that?”

  “The effect of the Curse intensifies near its origin, which is the Mood Reverse Bomb that someone discovered by accident, an ancient or foreign artifact, invoked and left on, heedless of the mischief.”

  “How is that possible?” Kody demanded. “The effects seem to be highly noticeable to everyone except me.”

  The Magician’s ancient eyes oriented on Kody with a disturbing intensity. “In much the same manner as a careless camper in Mundania may fail to put his fire out completely, leaving it to smolder into activity that then burns an enormous area. The camper may mean no actual mischief, but his carelessness wreaks a havoc that affects many others.”

  Kody nodded. “Now I understand that aspect. But how can my immunity to the Curse enable me to locate it?”

  “You are immune. Zosi is not. The effect is increasingly intense in inverse relation to the distance from the Bomb. The closer you come to it, the greater the effect. Therefore the contrast between your two views will increase. That is what will provide you with the direction.”

  “And Zosi’s replacement zombies are in the same area?”

  “Not exactly. You try my patience,” the Magician grumped. “Begone.”

  “But—”

  “Please don’t linger after you have been dismissed,” Wira said hastily. “That will only annoy him.” She urged them both out of the chamber.

  “You’re right,” Kody said. “He is grumpy, and not very communicative.”

  “That’s the way he is,” Zosi said. “But his answers are always accurate.”

  “It seems to me he could have said more.”

  “There’s always a reason.”

  He thought of the way the Good Magician had not told the child Ione her magic talent. There had indeed been a reason. “Well, I hope so.”

  “I am sorry you must travel with me,” Zosi said. “I did not know he would require this.”

  “Oh, I don’t object to you,” Kody said quickly. “You’re a nice girl. I just wish we could set out on our missions with more assurance that we can succeed in achieving them. This is extremely thin.”

  “You can succeed,” Wira reassured them. “The Good Magician knows.”

  “At least we’ll proceed on that assumption,” he agreed wryly.

  They returned to the night room, where Dara and the refreshments remained. “Now you have your marching orders, as it were,” she said briskly. “It’s my job to see that you proceed competently and don’t suffer any avoidable mishap.”

  “Mishap?” Zosi asked.

  “Like getting toasted and eaten by a dragon.”

  “But dragons don’t toast zom—” She cut herself off. “Oh, I forget I’m alive now.”

  “You are indeed, dear,” Dara said. “Any dragon worth its fire would consider you delectable.”

  “I can help there,” Kody said. “My talent is to conjure chips of reverse wood. They can have a peculiar effect on dragons.”

  “Such as reversing their fire,” Dara agreed, laughing. “Neverthenonetheless, it is better to avoid them when possible.”

  Neverthenonetheless? But this was Xanth, where words had their own domains. “We will try to avoid dragons,” Kody agreed.

  “And what is your talent, Zosi?” Dara asked.

  “That’s right, I did have one when I lived,” Zosi agreed, surprised. “I never had much use for it as a zombie. It is conjuring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

  “Well, at least you won’t go hungry,” Dara said. “But I’m not sure how that talent would protect you from a dragon. Could you make a big one? So big it would block the dragon like a boulder?”

  “No, only regular size. It’s nothing special as a talent. I was nothing special as a person.”

  “If I may ask,” Kody said, “how did you become a zombie?”

  “That’s a long and dull story.”

  “Not dull to me.”

  “It may be necessary background,” Dara said. “If the two of you are to work together, it should help to know each other reasonably well.”

  Thus encouraged, Zosi plunged into the narrative. “I was delivered to a nice family in the South-South-West Village and grew up as a normal village girl. But just as I came of age to marry, the trolls raided the village. A troll snatched me up and carried me away. I screamed, of course, but he stuffed a wad of leaves in my mouth, and anyway I probably couldn’t be heard in the confusion of the raid. He took me to a dark cave, where he ripped my clothing off. I knew he was going to eat me, or something. But then a gob of goblins raided the cave, and started to carry me off. I knew this would be even worse than what the troll planned on, and I fought them, but their horny hands grabbed on to me every which way, especially my chest and bottom, and dragged me away. The troll fought them savagely, but there were too many of them. They took me to their goblin mound, which looked like a giant anthill. I knew the moment I entered that I was doomed. But then an ogre appeared, attracted by the commotion, and pounded his great hollow chest with a loud booming sound and said, ‘Give mee bare shee!’ I didn’t understand the words the goblins replied, but they set the nearby brush on fire. I think they referred to something impossible the ogre was supposed to do with his anatomy. That made the ogre mad. He picked some goblins up and flung them into orbit around the moon, and rammed the heads of some through hardwood knotholes, and stomped some into paper-thin pancakes, and the rest were less fortunate. Meanwhile in the distraction I fled again, but in the darkness stumbled into a pit full of nickelpedes. Their awful pincers started gouging out nickel-sized chunks of flesh, five times as bad as the little stings of the centipedes, and I screamed and fought my way out. Scrambling blindly, I smashed into the trunk of a tree, and died, because it was a Mortali-tree. The troll, goblin, ogre, and nickelpedes couldn’t touch me because any contact with the tree would have killed them too. Then the Zombie Master came, and reanimated me, and I became a zombie without pain and served at the Castle Roogna graveyard ever since, for I don’t know how many years. It didn’t seem all that long, because mostly I slept, not rousing unless there was a threat to the castle. Until we held a meeting to discuss our dwindling numbers, and I drew the short rotten straw and had to invoke the spell of reanimation and go to ask the Good Magician what to do about it. So here I am.”

  Kody exchanged a glance with Dara. That was quite a story! Was it true?

  “We are so sorry you had to go through that,” Dara said sympathetically. Obviously she accepted it, and she surely was better informed about such things than Kody was. “We know that reanimation is a terrible fate for a zombie.”

  “It’s awful!” Zosi said. “I’m away from all my zombie friends. When I stumble I feel pain! When I don’t eat I get hungry! And now that I’ve eaten, before long I’ll have to—to expel the refuse.” She burst into tears of revulsion.

  Kody had never viewed the living process in quite that manner. So it was the living state that Zosi detested, not the zombie state.

  “It’s not something we demons properly understand, as we don’t have to eat either,” Dara said. “But look at it this way: your companion is subject to the same messy processes. You won’t be alone in your misery.”

  This was not precisely the type of encouragement Kody had been thinking of. But it seemed it helped.

  “Yes, if he can stand it, maybe I can too,” Zosi said. “At least long enough to complete my mission.”

  “Very good,” Dara said. “Now let’s go to the courtyard and practice dragon repulsion.”

  “I would also appreciate a clarification of the process by which we will locate this Bomb,” Kody said. “The fact that there is contrast between our two appreciations doesn’t mean we’ll know where the thing is.”

  “That, too,” Dara agreed. “It will be simple enough in practice. The greater the contrast, the closer you are. So you must keep traveling until the contrast is intense.”

  “
Ah, a form of triangulation,” Kody said.

  Dara glanced at him. “You know that magic?”

  “We don’t consider it magic, in Mundania.”

  She shrugged. “Perhaps you wouldn’t. I have heard that Mundanes don’t consider perspective to be magic either.”

  “We don’t,” he agreed. “What’s magic about it?”

  “Isn’t it true that when you move rapidly, the things close by allow themselves to be left behind, but the more distant things race to keep up?”

  “That effect is more apparent than real. It looks that way only because—”

  “Of the magic of perspective,” she concluded. “And you probably doubt the rainbow is magic, too, though it can be seen only from one side and moves or vanishes when you try to see it from the other side, like a one-way path.”

  “Well, the refraction of the sun’s rays by water droplets—” He saw the blank stares of both women. He was trying to talk Science to folk who did not believe in it. He surrendered. “Magic.”

  “Now assume I’m a dragon about to toast Zosi,” Dara said, puffing into smoke and forming the outline of a small dragon.

  Kody lifted his hand, conjuring a chip of reverse wood. He flipped it at the dragon.

  “Ooof!” it exclaimed, collapsing back into Dara, the chip on her head. With one change: she was now male.

  “It reversed your gender!” Kody said, amazed.

  Dara caught the chip in his hand and hurled it away. He reverted immediately to female. “I’ve never suffered that transformation before,” she said, evidently shaken, because her outline was fuzzy and her halter was across her hips. That was an interesting sight in more than one sense. In a moment she firmed and was fully herself again.

  “But I guess it would stop a dragon,” Zosi said, repressing a smile.

  “When I reversed a dragon before,” Kody said, “it went from fire to ice.”

  “Reverse wood is unpredictable,” Dara said. “There are many different types of reversals. But Zosi is right: that would stop a dragon.”

  “But what about when he’s not watching?” Zosi asked. “I’m not used to being careful about my body.”

  “True,” Dara said. “You need to sit with your knees together, and try not to bang into things.”