Castle Roogna (32 page)

       Dor hadn't thought of that. "Maybe they themselves just keep changing. With magic-"

       "Come, join me!" a cute naiad cried, wiggling her delicately scaled hips dexterously. "I regret-" Jumper began.

       "I meant Dor!" she cried, laughing. Dor noted what these laughs and screams did to the nymphs' chest area; was that why they did such exhalations so often? "Take off those silly clothes, and-" She gave a little foot-kick.

       "Uh, I-" Dor said, finding himself strongly tempted despite all his private reservations. After all, if the nymph were willing-

       But it would be the first step in joining this colony, and he just wasn't sure that was smart. An easy life, filled with fun-yet what was the future in it? Was fun the ultimate destiny of Man? Until he was sure, he had better wait.

       "At least you should try it once," she said, as if reading his mind. Probably such mind reading was not difficult; there was only one channel a man's mind would be in, at this stage.

       There was an ear-rending roar. A torrent of dark bodies burst upon the party. It was a goblin horde!

       "Press gang! Press gang!" the goblin leader cried, making a gap-toothed grin of joyous malice. "Anybody we catch is hereby impressed into the goblin army!" And he grabbed a dryfaun by the arm. The faun was substantially larger than the goblin, but, paralyzed by fear, seemed unable to defend himself.

       The nymphs screamed and dived for water, trees, and mountain. So did the fauns. None thought to stand up, close ranks, and oppose the raiders. Dor saw that there were only about eight goblins, compared to a hundred or more fauns and nymphs. What was the problem? Was it that goblins inspired terror by their very appearance?

       Dor's hand went for his sword. Goblins did not inspire terror in him! "Wait, friend," Jumper chittered. "This is not our affair."

       "We can't just sit here and let them take our friends!"

       "There is much we do not know about this situation," the spider chittered.

       Ill at ease but respecting Jumper's judgment, Dor suffered himself to be restrained. The goblins quickly ran down five of the healthiest fauns, threw them to the ground, and bound them with vine-ropes. The goblins were capturing, not slaying; they wanted men fit for their army. So Jumper had been correct in his caution, as usual; Dor would have gained nothing by laying about him with his blade. Not anything worth gaining, anyway.

       Yet still his mind was nagged: what sort of creatures were these fauns who welcomed strangers yet refused to assist each other in an emergency? If they did not fight for their own-

       "That's five," the goblin sergeant said. "One more good one, we need." His darkly roving eye fell on Dor, who stood unmoving. "Kill the bug; take the man."

       The goblins closed on the pair. "I think it has just become our affair." Dor said grimly.

       "It seems you are correct. Perhaps you should attempt to parlay."

       "Parlay!" Dor exclaimed indignantly. "They mean to kill you and impress me into their army!"

       "We are more civilized than they, are we not?"

       Dor sighed. He faced the goblin sergeant. "Please desist. We are not involved in your war. We do not wish to-"

       "Grab him!" the goblin ordered. Evidently these goblins did not realize that Dor was not merely a larger faun: a creature who could be expected to match five goblins in combat. The seven others dived for Dor.

       Jumper bounded over their heads while Dor's sword flashed in its vicious arc. That was one thing this sword was very good at. Two goblins fell, blood oozing and turning black. Then Jumper's silk caught the sergeant, and the spider trussed him up with the efficiency of eight trained legs.

       "Look to your leader!" Dor cried, smashing another goblin down.

       The remaining four looked. The sergeant was virtually cocooned in silk and helpless. "Get me out of this!" he bawled.

       The others rushed to him. They had not been eager to fight Dor anyway, once the ratio dropped from seven to one down to four to one. Now they knew they had a fight on their dirty little hands.

       Then, from the sky, shapes dived: harpies. "Fresh meat!" the harpy sergeant screamed. Dor knew that was her rank, because the filthy grease on her wings was striped. "Haul it away!"

       The dirty birds clutched the bodies available: five fauns, three wounded goblins, and the cocooned goblin sergeant. Great ugly wings beat fiercely, stirring up dust. "Not the fauns!" Dor bellowed-for one of them was the orefaun who had befriended him. He grabbed for the orefaun's dangling hooves, yanking him down to the ground. Startled at this vigorous resistance, the harpies let go.

       Jumper threw up a noose, catching a dryfaun and hauling him down similarly. But the remaining three, together with the four goblins, disappeared into the sky. The other goblins ran away.

       Had Jumper been right to chitter restraint? Dor wasn't sure. He didn't care about the goblins, but he was very sorry about the three lost fauns. Could he have saved them if he had attacked before? Or would he merely have gotten himself trussed up and abducted? There was no way to be sure. Certainly Jumper, once he acted, had done so most effectively; he had nullified the leader, instead of mindlessly battling the troops, as Dor had done. Jumper had taken the most sensible course, the one with the least risk. Following this course, they had taken losses, but had not lost the battle.

       The nymphs and fauns returned, now that the action was over. They were chastened by the double horror of goblin and harpy raids. Three of their comrades were gone. Obviously their illusion of security had been shattered.

       The party was, of course, over. They doused the bonfire and retreated to their various habitats. Dor and Jumper hung from a branch of a large tree; it belonged to no one, since these creatures were not yet at the one-creature-one-tree stage. Night sank gloomily upon them.

       In the morning Dor and Jumper were sober-but they had a surprise. The first nymph to spy Jumper screamed and dived into the lake-where she almost drowned, for she was an oread, not a naiad. The fauns clustered around aggressively. Dor had to introduce himself and Jumper, for no one remembered them.

       They went through the bit about the jumping again, and quickly befriended the whole community-again. They did not mention the goblin press-gang raid; those lost fauns had been forgotten, literally, and the ore-faun Dor had rescued obviously was not aware of his narrow escape. The whole community knew that monsters never came here.

       For this was part of the secret of eternal youth: the fauns and nymphs could not afford to be burdened by the harsh realities of prior experience. They were forever young, and necessarily innocent. Experience aged people. As it was aging Dor.

       "At least the goblins won't do much successful recruiting here," Dor murmured as they left the colony behind and continued west. "You can't depend on troops who have to be taught again each day."

       "The harpies won't have that problem," Jumper chittered.

       The harpies had been foraging for fresh meat. They had found it.

       "Nevertheless, the effect may wear off after a few days, when individuals are removed from the locale," Jumper continued. "Had we remained several days, we would have felt the spell's effect, and remained forever; those who are forcibly removed probably revert slowly to their original states."

       "Makes sense," Dor agreed. "Stay a short time, trying it out, having a good time-" He thought of the naiad who had tempted him, and of the other naiads in the water with their floating breasts. "Then get caught by the spell, and not remember what else you have to do." He shuddered, partly from the horror of it, and partly from the appeal of it.

       They continued on into the larger bushes, leaving their trail of markers. The fauns and nymphs would not tamper with the markers; they would not remember what they were for. Within a day or so the zombie army should pass this region. Dor judged that they had now marked over half the distance from the Zombie Master's castle to Castle Roogna. The worst was surely over, and by nightfall he and Jumper would be with the King with the good news.

       "These plants disturb me," Jumper chittered.

       "Me too. But they seem harmless, just strange."

       Jumper looked about, as he could do without moving his head or eyes. The direction of his vision was merely a matter of awareness, and Dor had become sensitive to the spider's mannerisms that signaled it. "There seems to be no better channel than this. The ground is level and clear, and there are no hostile creatures. Yet I distrust it."

       "The most promising paths are often the most dangerous. We should distrust this one because there are no hostile creatures," Dor pointed out.

       "Let me survey from another vantage, while you continue as if innocent," Jumper chittered. He jumped over a bush and disappeared.

       Dor walked on. He hardly had to pretend innocence! It was a good system they had. The spider was more agile and could not be caught by sudden drops, thanks to his dragline, while Dor had the solidity of his big Mundane body and the power of his sword. He would distract potential enemies while Jumper observed them from concealment. Any who attacked Dor might find themselves looped and hoisted on a line of silk.

       The bushes now rose taller than his head and seemed to crowd about, though they did not move. The true walking plants seemed not to have evolved in Xanth yet. Dor checked that carefully, however, since there were other ways to move than walking. Tangle trees, for example, snatching prey that passed; predaceous vines that wrapped around anyone foolish enough to touch them, or plants that simply uprooted themselves periodically to find better locations. But these particular plants were definitely stationary; it was his forward progress into their thickening midst that made them seem to swell and crowd closer. They were all so similar that it would be easy to get lost among them-but since he was leaving magic markers, he would not mislay his way, and could always retreat. And of course Jumper was watching.

       What would his venture have been like without Jumper? Dor shuddered to think of it. He was sure the big spider's presence was accidental, not planned or anticipated by Good Magician Humfrey when he arranged this quest. But without that coincidence, could Dor have survived even his first encounter with the goblins? Had he died here in the tapestry, what would have happened to his body back home? Maybe Humfrey had some way to rend the tapestry and reweave it, so that Dor's death would be eliminated and he could return safely-but even so, that would have been a humiliating failure. Far better to survive on his own-and Jumper had enabled him to do that. So far.

       Even more important was the maturity of perspective brought by the big arachnid. Dor was learning constantly from that. The juveniles of any species tended to be happy but careless, like the fauns and nymphs; it was easy to contemplate being locked into such innocence indefinitely. But the longer prospects showed this to be a nightmare. Dor was, as it were, emerging from faun stage to Jumper stage.

       He laughed, finding the mixed image funny. He imagined himself starting with little horns and hooves, then growing four more limbs and six more eyes to resemble the spider. Before this adventure he would not have understood such imagery at all!

       In the midst of his laugh, something chilling happened, causing him to choke it off. He looked around, but saw nothing. Only the plants, which were now half again as tall as he. What had happened to disturb him so? He hadn't quite caught it.

       He shrugged and walked on. After a moment, to demonstrate better his unconcern, and incidentally to make sure his exact location was known to Jumper-just in case!-he began to whistle. He was not a good whistler, but he could carry a fair tune.

       And the subtle thing happened again. Dor stopped in his footprints and looked again. Had he seen Jumper from the corner of his eye? No, he would have recognized his friend without even trying. How he wished for several extra eyes now! But to hell with caution; he had seen something, and he wanted to know what.

       There was nothing. The tall bushes merely sat there, basically mundane, their leaves rippling periodically in the breeze. At the base they were full, their foliage so dense that their trunks could hardly be seen. At the top they thinned, their leaves sparser and smaller, until at the apex they were bare. Some had the central stem projecting straight up for several feet, with several bare cross branches. A strange design, for a plant, but not a threatening one. Maybe they were sensors for the sun or wind, conveying information to the plant's main body. Many plants liked to know what was going on, for small changes in the weather could spell great changes in vegetable welfare.

       Dor gave it up. There was simply nothing here he could detect. He could ask one of the sticks that lay on the ground, of course. But again he balked at that. Something about the naivete of the fauns and nymphs made him resist that device. The fauns and nymphs depended foolishly on their ignorance, their mountain, trees, and lake-instead of on their own intelligence, alertness, and initiative. If he depended on his magic instead of his powers of observation and reasoning, he would never become the man he should be. He recalled how little King Trent used his transforming power; now that made some sense to him. Magic was always there as a last resort; it was the other qualities of existence that needed to be strengthened. So he held off, avoiding the easy way, determined to solve this one himself.

       Maybe what he sought was invisible. In his own day there were said to be invisible giants, though no one had ever seen one. How could they? He chuckled.

       Again it happened, as if triggered by his noise. And this time he caught it. The top of one of the plants had moved! Not swaying in the wind; it had moved. It had turned deliberately, rotating on its trunk-axle to orient on him.