Yon Ill Wind (6 page)

In due course, not one moment overdue, they went to stand at the bank of the moat.  The castle was lovely in the early morning, too.  The moat was calm, and seemed to be without a moat monster.  There was a drawbridge, but it was raised; no way to cross by foot.  However, there was a boat tied to a stake in the bank.

She saw something lying in the grass at her feet, and stooped to pick it up.  It was a marking pen, the kind that she had used in the past to mark children's names on clothing.  There was no sense wasting it, so she put it in her purse.

“Well, let's get to it.  Nimby,” she said briskly.  “It's my challenge, so you just follow along as I work things out.  I'm sure you know how to handle each challenge, but I think it wouldn't count if you gave me any hints.  Besides, I should enjoy the thrill of it.  I want to put this good mind of mine to the test.”

She stepped toward the boat—and a large ferocious bat appeared from nowhere.  It flew straight at her, then banked and veered away at the last half instant.  She saw the word COM on its underside as it did.

Chlorine was taken aback.  In fact, she almost sat down as she was taken back too far and lost her footing.  Fortunately she recovered her feet before going down.  When she had been a plain nothing girl it wouldn't have mattered if she'd sprawled turvy-topsy and showed her panties to the sky, but now she was a luscious creature, and the humiliation would have been awful.

 “That's no ordinary bat,” she said.  “That's a com-bat! I'll never be able to pass it.”

Nimby, behind her, shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.  He was being neutral.  That made her suspicious, not of his motive, which was surely amicable, but that there was a way, and he was trying not to give it away.

And of course, there was a way, because otherwise it wouldn't be a legitimate Good Magician challenge.

She pondered a moment, and cogitated an instant, and thought a while, knowing that this would not be easy unless she found the right approach.  It wouldn't do to try to get around the bat, or to fight it.  She had to outsmart it, or at least figure out the proper way to denature it.  There had to be something obscure that would be obvious the moment she thought of it.  Because that was the way everyone knew the Good Magician's challenges were.  He didn't want just anybody barging in to pester him with Questions, so he made it difficult to reach him, but he did play fair, by his definition.  By anyone else's definition he was a grouchy gnome, of course, but nobody else's definition counted for much here.  So what was there?  Her fine new mind focused, exploring possibilities and bypaths at a rapid rate.  What was obscure but obvious?  There wasn't anything special in the landscape; no evidence of doors to underground bypasses or such.  In fact, the only thing even a quarter way remarkable was the marking pen she had found.

Ha!  That was surely it!  Things did not just lie around the Good Magician's premises everything was here for a reason.  So this had to be the key.

She brought out the pen.  It was just a garden-variety marker, somewhat used but still serviceable.  How could this ever help her?

Her good mind focused on the problem.  Assuming that this was the key, how would it operate?  It was a pen, a marker, a—a Magic Marker?  To mark the com-bat?  That seemed unlikely, because the bat would destroy her lovely, beautiful but not phenomenally muscular or armored body before she got close enough to do that.  A pen was made mainly for writing—

For writing.  Suppose she wrote something with it something that would help her?  Like GO AWAY COM-BAT?

She fished in her purse and found a little notepad.  She took the cap off the marker pen and wrote GO AWAY COMBAT.  .

Nothing happened.  But of course, she hadn't tested it yet.  She took half a step toward the moat—and the bat zoomed up before her, threateningly.  She hastily canceled the rest of her step and retreated, and the bat zoomed away.

Obviously that wasn't it.  But maybe she just hadn't found the right way to use it.  How else would a magic marker work?  She couldn't think of anything much, despite her superior mind.

She glanced at Nimby, but he remained carefully neutral.  And she wasn't about to ask for his help anyway.

“Um, if you want to take a nap or something—” No, he didn't sleep, he claimed.  “Maybe play a mental game that entertains you?  I hate to bore you with my indecisions.”

Nimby nodded, and went into a state of repose.  She wondered what a donkey-headed dragon had to think about.  At some point she would ask him.  But now she had other business.

She crossed out her message—and there was a tiny shimmer around her.  She looked around, afraid that a quake monster might be approaching to shake her up, but all was normal.  So it must have been an indication of magic.  Crossing out the message had canceled it, and that had had magical effect.  If only she knew what it was.

She focused her mind once more.  Why was she having so much trouble with what should be a simple matter?

Somehow it seemed that even her old, dull self would have figured it out by now.

Then a dim bulb flashed over her head.  Maybe this challenge was geared to her regular self.  Maybe the Good Magician didn't realize that she was now much smarter.  Or maybe he realized, but didn't care.  So he had set her a simple challenge, and she was being too intellectual about it.

“So let's try it the dull old-fashioned way,” she said.

She turned a page on the pad and wrote COM-BAT.  Then she crossed out the c and wrote w.  And felt the trace tingle of magic.  Had it worked?

She stepped forward—and there was a small furry creature standing barely knee-high to her.  It was a wombat.  It tried to bar her way, but she simply stepped around it and proceeded.  She had done it!  She had used the magic marker to change the name, converting the deadly creature to a harmless one.  The key had been in naming it, and changing the name.  Obvious—to a nonintellectual person.

She came to the bank of the moat.  Now, where was that dock and boat she had seen?  She saw the boat, but now it was perched on muck, and between her and it was the biggest, hugest, hairiest, awfulest spider she could remember encountering.  It wasn't big enough to gobble her down in a single bite, but three or four bites would do it.  Actually spiders, as she remembered, didn't gobble prey down whole; they trussed them up in spiderwebs and sucked the juice out.  But she didn't want to be juiced, either, no matter how juicy her current luscious body was.

Chlorine was retreating as she pondered; it seemed to be the expedient thing to do.  The spider did not follow.  In fact, it had disappeared—and there was the dock she had seen before.  So she reversed course, trying to reach the dock before the spider returned—and the spider reappeared.  And the dock was gone.

Something was definitely odd.  The spider wasn't blocking her view of the dock; she could see handily around it.

There simply was no dock.  Was she up against illusion?

In which case, which was the illusion:  the spider or the dock?  It made a difference.

She retreated a step, this time watching the spider.  And the spider disappeared—and the dock reappeared.  They were changing into each other!  This was a dock spider.

Her fine mind began to take hold.  This was definitely a challenge, and she surely wouldn't be able to handle it by writing the word SPIDER on her pad and changing the SP to c.  Even if that worked, what good would it do her, since she didn't want cider, she wanted that dock so she could get in the boat without muddying her pretty little feet.  She needed to get to that dock without it changing into the spider.  How could she do that?

What was the stupidly simple answer?  Immediately it came to her:  bribe the spider.  But what would it want, aside from a long session sucking her succulence?  What else did she have that might appeal to it?

The magic marker!  She no longer needed it, but maybe the spider would like it.  If she made a good enough case for it, in spider terms.

She stepped toward the spider, though she was prepared to backpedal at a furious rate if she had to.  “Hey, handsome creature!” she called.  “How would you like something nice?”

The spider wiggled its mandibles, and a drop of slaver fell to the ground, where it smoked quietly as it digested an unfortunate little poul-tree that hadn't even yet grown its first chick, let alone the roc bird it might have made at maturity.  Chlorine felt sorry for it, but knew she couldn't help the tree.

“No, you can't have me,” she said quickly.  “Under this pretty exterior I'm just a plain and rather tasteless person anyway.  But I have something that may appeal to you more:  a magic marker.” She held it up.  “This marker can change things.  For example, you could use it to change a lug to a bug.  Here, I'll demonstrate.” She looked around and spied a lug, which was a kind of nut from a nuts-and-bolts tree.  She picked it up and set it in front of her.  Then she wrote LUG on her notepad, and crossed out the letter L and replaced it with the letter B.  And the lug became a bug.

“See—just the kind of magic you have always wanted,” she said enthusiastically.  “Think what you could do with a big lug!  You could turn it into Xanth's biggest juiciest bug.  And feast on it, snug as a lug in a rug.”

The spider slavered some more.  It liked the notion.

“And I will trade you this fine magic implement for one favor,” she continued persuasively.  “All you have to do is become the dock and let me get on board that boat.  Then you can have the magic marker and my pad of paper, so that you can—” She hesitated, paused by an awkward thought.  “You do know how to write?”

But the spider shook its head no.

This was a problem.  But her fine mind rose to meet it.

“Well; can you draw?  Let me see if this works with pictures.” She found another lug and set it before her.  She quickly sketched a crude picture of it, then crossed it out and drew an even cruder bug.

And the lug became a bug.  It did work pictographically.

Maybe the Good Magician had figured she was too stupid to read and write.  Which was actually a pretty accurate assessment; she had never gotten beyond the first year of Centaur School, so could handle words of only one or two syllables.  If she had had to write “quintessential,” she would have expired.

“So if you can draw, you can use this marker,” she concluded.  “I confess I don't know exactly how versatile it is, but since there are a number of lugs around here, at least you'll have all the bugs you want.  Is it a deal?”

The spider nodded yes.

But now she had just the slightest, wee-est little tinge of apprehension.  Was this spider honorable?  Suppose it grabbed her and the marker?  But then she concluded that it must be honorable, because Otherwise the Good Magician wouldn't use it in a challenge.  So she girded her loin—no, that would be unmaidenly.  She lifted her chin and walked into the spider's range.  If she had misjudged the situation, and the spider grabbed her and tried to suck her juice, she would turn its juices to poison and make it sorry.  But she hoped for the best.

The spider became the dock.  Chlorine set dainty foot on it and went to the boat.  She climbed in.  Then she set the magic marker on the dock, untied the boat's tether, picked up its paddle, and shoved off.  “Nice doing business with you,” she called cheerily.

The spider reappeared, holding the marker in its mandibles.  It waved at her with a long forelimb.  She had passed the second challenge.

Oops—-she had forgotten Nimby.  “Hey, Nimby!” she called.  “Can you join me?”

Nimby walked down to the dock as Chlorine returned.

The spider obligingly changed form, allowing Nimby to tread its planks and get into the boat.  Maybe it realized that Nimby was actually a dragon with impenetrable scales, so wasn't anyone to fool with.  Then they pushed off again.

She paddled across the moat without incident.  But she knew there would be a third challenge.  What would it be?

They were never the same, she understood.  Just so long as it wasn't a fierce moat monster, because she didn't know what she would do in that case.

She came to land at a garden within the moat outside the Good Magician's castle.  They climbed out of the boat.

The moment they did, the boat wended its own way back across, stranding them.  It was now too late to change her mind.

She gazed at the garden.  It was lovely, and loathsome.

The left side was overgrown with foul-looking and -smelling weeds and had statuary that was downright disgusting.

The right side had a multitude of pretty flowers, with attractive scents.  Naturally that was the side she wanted to step into.

But the path led into the foul side, so that was where she went.  It would have been impossible to go into the nice side without treading on flowers and ripping out beautiful vines, and she couldn't bear to do that.  But the path was overgrown with burrs, thorns, nettles, stinging vines, scratchpads, and even a stink horn she just missed stepping on.  That would have wiped out all her appeal in one swell foop, for nothing and nobody could stand the sound or stench of stink horn.

The farther she went, the worse it got, until it was plain that she could not get through this way.  This was one mean garden half.  And obviously a challenge.

She backed out and rejoined Nimby, who was innocently waiting.  Her nice dress was smirched with refuse colored yuck, and her arms and ankles were scratched.

What an awful section!

She considered the nice side again.  If only the path were there!  But it wasn't, and though the garden was beautiful, it was just as thickly woven as the ugly side was.  Not only would she do a horrible amount of damage- if she tried to forge through there, she probably wouldn't make it to the far side anyway.

There had to be a way through.  But where was it, if not the path?  Chlorine looked back and forth between the two garden halves, sure that she was missing something.

Now that she took the time to wake up and smell the flowers, as it were, she saw that the path was lined with purslane, which made sense for a lane, and trailing arbutus, which made sense for a trail.  There were also primroses, making it a primrose path, and at the very beginning, a trail blazer jacket.  So no one could be confused about where the path was.