Chorus Skating (23 page)

Pivver stepped angrily to the railing. “You've been sniffing gas from that bloated bag you ride upon. None of us is going anywhere with you.”

“and i thought you were an honest merchant,” a disappointed Quiquell whispered.

“'Tis honest I am. Honest to a fault.” Silimbar made a neat stack of the papers. “You should have read more closely what you signed. You are now indentured to me, all of you, for a period of not less than three nor more than ten years, your persons to be employed at my whim and direction.”

Paw clasped tightly to his sword, a grim-faced Naike pushed between the princesses. “Merchant, I suggest you be on your way.”

“This Silimbar is not what he seems,” Jon-Tom was murmuring.

“Oi, now there's a blindin' revelation.” Mudge was bending to pick up his bow. “Wot gave 'im away to you, mate?”

Silimbar's entire form was now suffused with the unhealthy white glow. Like ghost tears it had leaked from his eyes to engulf his whole body, dripping like aerated latex from the tips of his fingers, from his ears, from his scimitar-like mustache.

Gesturing skyward with a shaky hand, he raised his true voice. “These are valid contracts. By all the instruments and magics included herein, by all the appendices and appurtenances, I call on them now!” A shaft of sickly white light rose from his hand to spiral into the sky.

Strong-willed as any mongoose, Aleaukauna wavered. Then she took a step forward. Naike hastened to interpose himself between her and the merchant's gaseous craft.

“No, Your Highness!” Her eyes, he saw, were glazing over. Glazing with a faint white phosphorescence.

“Don't… want. But… must.” She started to push past him and he grabbed her by the left arm. Increasingly zombified, the other princesses began shuffling forward.

“Ansibette!” Moving to intercept the pride of Borobos, Jon-Tom was shocked to see refulgent white foam bubbling from her lips. Her eyes were already fogged, the bright blue masked by cataracts of pure phosphorescence.

Try as he would, he couldn't hold her. With unnatural strength born of a signed contract, she shoved past him.

Naike drew his sword. “Free them, or I'll cut you as cleanly as I'll shred those accursed papers!”

Silimbar glared imperiously down at the Lieutenant. “I warn you not to interfere. I have no quarrel with you; I wish only to claim that which is now rightfully due me.”

As soon as the first of the princesses had boarded his craft, he gestured expansively. A wall of white mist coalesced between the wagon and the flatbottom. When Heke tried to jump through it, something unseen knocked him back and he fell hard to the bottom of the boat.

Karaukul stabbed at the cloying curtain. His blade passed through it cleanly, but when he tried to follow, he suffered the same fate as his companion. It was as if they were dueling with fog, Jon-Tom saw. There was more than the power of contract at work here, and it would take more than mere words to defeat it. Certainly more than sword or halberd.

“Do somethin', mate!” Mudge had a death grip on Pivver's right wrist as she dragged him toward the mist wall.

As he struggled with the duar, Jon-Tom reflected that he knew many songs that dealt with smoke and fog. He also knew he'd better get it right the first time. Quiquell had joined Aleaukauna aboard the wagon-mass and their sisters were not far behind. Hissing in harness, the salamanders were stirring as if they sensed that they were soon to be on their way.

“Let 'em go, ya bloody kidnapper!” Mudge barked at the top of his lungs. “You 'aven't the right!”

Trying to restrain Seshenshe, Pauko found himself hauled right over the railing. There was a loud splash as he landed tail-first in the water. Sputtering to the surface, he thrashed his way back to the boat.

“These give me all the right I need!” Roaring with laughter, Silimbar rattled the papers and their damning seals. “The right and the power!”

“Forgive me, Your Sleekness, this ain't wot you think!” So saying, Mudge threw his arms around Pivver's neck and tried to use his weight to hold her back. Empowered by the spell which now gripped her, she bore him easily as she stepped up onto the railing.

Edgy harmonies filled the air as Jon-Tom began to play. High up on the mast, the wandering chords tightened around the wood like bands of amethyst.

Silimbar's delight oozed from behind the pale glow of his mustache. “How charming! A musical send-off. Serenade them all you wish, minstrel. Neither plaintive threnody nor words of longing can alter the thrust of these contracts!”

“You know,” Jon-Tom shouted up to the tamarin, “long ago, long before I took up the mantle of spellsinger, before I even came to this place, I was a pretty good student of law!” Some things from school, he mused seriously as he began to sing, stay with you always.

“Don't speak to me of contracts!

Don't talk to me of courts

I'd rather that you freed them

Than bury you with torts!

I'm not afraid of paper

I'm not afraid of seals

If you don't cage your sorcery

I'll squeeze it till it squeals!”

About to take Silimbar's hand, Ansibette hesitated. “Come, come! What uncertainty is this? You are bound and must comply!” The tamarin waved the sheaf of IOUs in her face as if they were the swinging pocket watch of some cheap hypnotist.

Lifting his voice, Jon-Tom sang as loud as he could. He ought to be able to break the spell. He
knew
he could. It was only based in simple IOUs. It wasn't as if he were confronting something truly formidable and inherently malign, such as the impenetrable, incomprehensible, soul-stifling contracts utilized by movie companies.

A pale lavender luminescence spilled from the duar and began to infuse the flatbottom with its glow. What was happening? It seemed irrelevant to the confrontation at hand. Not knowing what else to do, not imagining what else to do, he continued to sing of freedom and escape on behalf of the wavering princesses.

He heard Naike curse in wonder and Heke suck in his breath. Beneath their feet, the simple flatbottom was being transformed.

“That's it, mate, that's it!” Mudge urged his friend to greater efforts.

“Strong magic!” Resigned to the futility of his efforts, Naike was not even trying to hold Umagi back.

The hull of their craft did not change, but the railings vanished. Even as he sang, Jon-Tom wondered just what it was that he was conjuring. A small warship, perhaps, with which to overawe Silimbar. A sharp-prowed ram with which to break through his bulwark of sickly pale. Perhaps even a craft like the merchant's own, only larger and more powerful.

A great roaring sounded in his ears. He smiled to himself, expecting to see salamanders larger and stronger than Silimbar's own materialize out of the mist. Instead, out of the swirling storm of lavender and white emerged… a swirling storm. Of a sort.

It was round, and restrained by a large wire basket, and though he had never been to the part of the world from whence it came, he recognized it nonetheless. The four-thousand-horsepower Pratt and Whitney stank of leaky gaskets and gungy oil, but it drove the big props with angry energy. A sign, hand-lettered in red on wood buried beneath a thousand aging coats of yellow enamel the consistency of microwaved silly putty, was affixed with frayed electrical tape and rusting bolts to the top of the wire cage which contained the prop-storm.

MAMA LEROY'S EVERGLADES TOURS

HALF DAY $20

ALL DAY $35

SEE! SEE! SEE!

MAN-EATING GATORS! KILLER SNAKES!

GIANT LEECHES!

COFFEE AND SANDWICHES PROVIDED

Feeling the now shuddering deck start to shift beneath him, Jon-Tom made a dive for the controls attached to the six-foot-high pilot's chair and somehow got his hands on the control stick. Shocked out of their stupor, the princesses variously screamed, jumped for the boat, or covered their ears. Above the hiccupping thunder of the old aircraft engine, which even in neutral threatened to tear both itself and the boat apart, Silimbar could be heard raging.

With a blast of air that bent double the sawgrass and rushes around the boat, the transposed swamp buggy leaped forward, spinning in a tight circle. Utterly panicked, the heretofore docile salamanders reared and lurched. An outraged Silimbar was thrown from his seat, fighting to hang on to the all-important reins. The wagon and its cloud of supportive swamp gas pitched wildly in the swamp buggy's backwash as Jon-Tom struggled for control.

Umagi flopped down hard on her backside. It was worse for Naike, who was pinned between said simian buttocks of steel and the unyielding wooden deck. Restored to her senses, Pivver leaped for the flatbottom, landed aboard, and in the same motion rolled to her feet in a typical display of otterish agility. Aleaukauna nearly matched the feat, while the less agile Quiquell, Seshenshe, and Ansibette were variously dumped overboard or voluntarily leaped into the water.

Despite Jon-Tom's frantic efforts, the madly gyrating swamp buggy clipped the rear of the tamarin's craft. There was a soft ripping sound as the edge of the prop caught the back of the gas bag. Held under tremendous pressure, the suddenly freed swamp gas bolted for freedom with an explosive
whoosh
!

In accordance with the applicable laws of physics, this unexpected reaction provoked an equal and opposite reaction, propelling a bouncing mass of wagon, salamanders, and screeching Silimbar north by northwest at a velocity of approximately six agitated invectives per second. Jon-Tom was convinced he could still hear the merchant-magician howling in fury even after both he and his craft had gone skipping like a stone across the water and out of sight. What would happen when the formerly pressurized and now punctured container of swamp gas finally exhausted itself, he could only imagine. Most probably the whole outrageous contraption would simply sink slowly and irrevocably into the marsh muck.

Well, good,
he thought.

Cloak flapping around him, he made sure the duar was secured safely against his upper back as he dragged himself into the pilot's chair. With his eyes still full of delta water and sweat, he couldn't estimate the swamp buggy's speed, but he knew it was considerable. Leaning on the stick and throttling down the engine, he brought the craft back around in a tight circle to where several sodden princesses anxiously treaded water.

Mudge and Pivver promptly dove in to offer help, while the soldiers divided their time between providing assistance and gazing in a mixture of awe and terror at the deafening tempest which seemed to be permanently affixed to the back of the boat.

“Stuff that up your arse, ya rancid sack o' face fuzz!” Mudge howled in the direction taken by the departed Silimbar. He knew the tamarin couldn't possibly hear him, but he didn't care. “Try an' defeat a
real
sorcerer with a few bleed-in' magicked scraps o' paper, will ya?” Turning to his friend, he winked and added quietly, “Nice bit o' songsterin', mate. I don't mind sayin' that for a minim there you 'ad me a mite worried. This 'ere wonder boat were a stroke o' sheer genius.”

“Thanks.” Jon-Tom was acutely conscious of the fact that he had been trying to spellsing up something else entirely, but under the circumstances he saw no need to elaborate.

“That's the way to break a contract fixed under false pretensions,” the otter rambled on. “That's the way to—” He let out a yelping bark as his feet went out from under him, the swamp buggy skewing wildly.

It took Jon-Tom a while to familiarize himself with the craft's eccentricities. By no means could it be said that he mastered it. Rather, there was achieved something of a man-machine understanding. He didn't ask too much of the boat, and in return it no longer did its best to pitch him into the nearest clump of trees.

Only when he was positive that the threat presented by Silimbar had passed did he reach down to twist the key protruding from the ignition and switch the damn thing off. The bellowing motor coughed and quiesced, the props slowing to a halt as he beached the bow on a low hummock of reeds and spongy earth. A family of small, brightly colored flying lizards erupted from the grass and scattered across the water.

Standing in the pilot's chair and looking back over the top of the prop cage, it was clear to Jon-Tom that Silimbar was not now nor would be in the immediate future likely to present any sort of a threat. All that remained of his dire presence was a faint odor of rotten swamp gas, rapidly dissipating.

Those princesses who had ended up in the water were doing their best to dry themselves off. Several marveled at the clean, straight lines of the transformed flatbottom. Battered steel and aluminum had replaced the woodwork. Even the deck was smooth and cool underfoot. Mast and sail had vanished, while the wooden benches had been replaced by metal seats topped with thick cushions. These unfortunately reeked not of incense and perfume but of Tabasco and stale beer.

No one complained, however.

“What manner of marvels is this?” Umagi was doing her best to straighten her attire.

Jon-Tom had climbed down from the pilot's chair to inspect the smelly, exposed engine. “The words were my own, but I didn't have enough time to think of a tune. So I used one of Jimmy Buffett's.”

“Buffett?” Mudge looked baffled. Then he smiled. “Oh, I gets it. As in givin' that rotter Silimbar a good buffetin'.”

Jon-Tom blinked. “Actually that connection hadn't occurred to me, but as you know sometimes my spellsinging works better than I intend. Not to mention differently.” He nodded at the engine. “Back where I come from, he does some very mild spellsinging of his own. This type of water craft hails from the region where he spends much of his time. Until now I've only seen them in pictures.”

“Wot?” Mudge assumed a look of mock astonishment. “You mean you ain't experienced at drivin' one? Why, I never would o' guessed that, mate.”