Dragon on a Pedestal (2 page)

Irene smiled to herself. Xanth custom prohibited any reigning Queen, but did not specifically bar a female King. That had been part of Arnolde’s insight, bless him.

After the polite greetings, Chet and Chem went out with the twins to tour the grounds, taking Ivy along, and the Zombie Master made his appearance. He remained as cadaverous as ever, but was neatly dressed in a black, mundane suit, and was actually fairly handsome in his fashion.

There was a pause. Dor turned to Irene. “The vision?” he inquired gently.

The vision! She had almost forgotten it! Now it came back in its horror. “It—it was a picture, or a still-life scene. A statue. Two statues. And danger.”

The Zombie Master’s head turned gravely. “Danger—here?”

“She suffered a vision as we approached the castle,” Dor explained. “I thought it better to wait for privacy before examining it, as sometimes these things are important.”

“Indeed they can be,” Arnolde agreed. “There are aspects of the magic of Xanth that remain obscure to us. The predictive visions are a prime example.”

“I don’t know that it’s predictive,” Irene said. “It may be just my foolishness.”

“This is the best possible occasion to find out,” Dor said. “If we can’t figure it out, Good Magician Humfrey surely will when he arrives.” He reached across and took her hand. “You saw statues?’

“One was Imbri the Day Mare—the statue we made after she saved Xanth from the Horseman.”

“Of course,” Dor agreed reassuringly. “We all honor Mare Imbrium.”

“The other—seemed to be a dragon. On a pedestal.”

Dor squeezed her hand. He could be very comforting when he tried. “And that frightened you?”

“No, not exactly. Not the statues. They were just stone.”

The Zombie Master’s thin lips quirked. “Perhaps the Gorgon is involved.”

“I don’t think so,” Irene said. “But between them—”

She paused, having difficulty formulating what she had seen. “The Void?”

Dor suggested helpfully. “Mare Imbri fell into it, and it remains a danger—”

“Not the Void. But something just as terrible. I don’t know what.”

Dor shrugged, not understanding. But now Arnolde stepped in, applying his fine centaur intellect to the problem. “Why would possible peril to two statues frighten you?”

“It wasn’t to the statues,” Irene said. “Or from them. They were just markers, I think.”

“So there is a specific locale—if we can but fathom it,” Arnolde said. “Not here at Castle Zombie?”

“Not here,” Irene agreed. “Not anywhere I know of. But definitely a place of danger.”

“Is there peril to any of us here?” the centaur asked, shifting to a new line of investigation.

“I don’t think so. Not directly.”

“To whom, then?”

“I’m not sure,” Irene said, feeling her face clouding up.

“I suspect you do know,” Arnolde persisted. “If not peril to us, or to yourself, perhaps to someone you love—”

“Ivy!” Dor exclaimed.

That was it. “Between the statues,” she agreed heavily.

“Your little daughter, between the statues,” Arnolde said. “Was she hurt?”

“No. Just there. She seemed almost happy. But it terrified me. I just knew something awful—that Ivy would—I don’t know. It was all in together, in that one scene.”

“Night mare, dragon, and child,” Arnolde said. “Together in danger. Perhaps that is sufficient warning to enable you to avoid that situation.”

“We’ll keep her away from statues,” Dor said reassuringly.

It all seemed foolish now. The vision didn’t necessarily mean anything, and if it did, it wasn’t the statues that were responsible. They were just there. Mare Imbri would never bring harm to Ivy, not even a bad dream, and the dragon—that one resembled the Gap Dragon, for it had six legs, but seemed smaller. Such a dragon would be dangerous, for
any
dragon was dangerous—but how could a dragon statue harm anyone? And why would anyone make a statue of a dragon? It made no sense!

Irene relaxed. Now four Magicians were present, and they could settle down to the business of planning the party for the twins’ debut.

Which business they promptly ignored. Millie had worked out the plans privately and in an hour would stage a splendid display, buttressed by such props as talking objects and fantastic plants, courtesy of the talents of Dor and Irene.

“Wasn’t Humfrey supposed to join us by this time?” Dor inquired, his tone showing mild annoyance.

“Definitely,” the Zombie Master agreed. “I can’t think what’s keeping him.”

“Hugo,” Irene said succinctly. Hugo was the retarded son of the Magician Humfrey and the Gorgon, his name a combination of theirs: HUmfrey and GOrgon. Well, Irene corrected her thought, maybe “retarded” was too strong a term for Hugo. Certainly the boy was slow, and his magic virtually useless, and Humfrey kept him largely confined to the castle—but perhaps he would improve with age. Humfrey was, after all, well over a century old and so might have had difficulty fathering a completely healthy child, unkind as it might be to think of it that way. Or perhaps Hugo was merely a slow developer; who could tell what he might be when he was eighty or ninety years old?

“Things do tend to go wrong when Hugo is along,” Dor remarked. “The boy is a born bungler. Humfrey did mention that he planned to bring Hugo so he could meet the other children here. The Gorgon will be in charge of Humfrey’s castle for the day.”

“The other children?” Irene asked, lifting an eyebrow. Her brows were modestly green, like her hair, and she had cultivated just the right arch to
make the expression effective. Volumes could be conveyed by the small motion of an eyebrow, if one had the talent. “The twins are sixteen, and Ivy is three. Hugo is eight. With whom does he play?”

“We asked Humfrey to bring the boy,” the Zombie Master said. “They very kindly shared their castle with us for a decade, but when Hugo arrived, it was time for us to make room. They bore with our children; we can bear with theirs.”

“For a few hours,” Millie said, smiling from the doorway. Irene had forgotten she was present; Millie still had a certain ghostlike quietness at times!

“We can proceed without him,” Dor decided. He was, after all, the King; he could not afford to twiddle his thumbs indefinitely. “Humfrey will know all the details when he arrives. He has already advanced some advice, though we are not sure what it means.”

“Which is typical of his advice,” Irene murmured. “It’s about as clear as a vision is.”

“Good enough,” the Zombie Master agreed. “The situation is this: a dragon—”

“A dragon!” Irene exclaimed, sitting bolt upright.

“—seems to have moved into this general region and is terrorizing the populace. We have set out the usual warners, and my zombies are currently patrolling, but this is a singularly ornery creature that refuses to be bound by normal conventions. Therefore, stronger measures are in order.”

Irene relaxed again. This did not seem to be the dragon of her vision.

“We do have strong spells in the Castle Roogna arsenal,” Dor said. “But the Good Magician sent word not to bring any weapon-grade enchantments. That’s what mystifies us. Why not use something effective against a rogue dragon?”

“I could conjecture—” Arnolde began.

They were interrupted by a terrible roar that stiffened Irene again. It resounded throughout the castle, making the very stone shake.

Millie the Ghost jumped up. “Oh, I told the children not to tease the monster under the bed!” she exclaimed, almost floating out in her haste to attend to the matter.

“Teasing a monster?” Irene inquired, raising another fine green eyebrow. That roar had really given her a start!

The Zombie Master grimaced apologetically. “There are monsters under every child’s bed, but ours is more sensitive than most. The poor thing gets quite upset. The children like to dangle their feet down barely within its range, then yank them up just as its hairy mitt grabs for them. Or they squirt perfume at it. That sort of thing. It really isn’t nice to do that. We want them to treat magic creatures with the respect they deserve.”

Irene suppressed an illicit smirk. She had always been afraid of the monster under the bed and, in childhood, had tended to leap into bed, not from any joy of sleeping, but to avoid the ankle-grabbing mitt. The monster had disappeared when she grew up, and she came to doubt that it had ever existed, but recently Ivy had claimed to have seen it. When Irene had checked, there had been nothing there, so she knew Ivy was imagining it. Probably the monster had died of old age. The strangest thing was that, though her monster had definitely been real when Irene herself was small, her own parents had pretended not to see it. Why had adults refused to see her genuine monster, while now her child pretended to see it when it wasn’t there? Regardless, she had no sympathy for the thing. Monsters under the bed were a species of creature, like dragons and nickelpedes, that she felt Xanth would be happier without.

“Can’t it reach to the top of the bed?” Arnolde asked, interested. “Centaurs do not use beds, so I am not conversant with this particular monster.”

“That is not the nature of bed monsters,” the Zombie Master explained. “They can not depart their lair. It is too bright above, you see. Their domain terminates where the shadow does. They have to travel at night, but only the gravest emergency will lure a bed monster from its lair even then. They just don’t feel secure in the open.”

Irene could appreciate why. If she ever caught such a monster in the open, she would take a broom to it! “You were about to conjecture about Humfrey’s motive,” Irene reminded Arnolde.

“Ah, yes,” the centaur Magician agreed. “The Good Magician always has excellent reason for his actions or inactions. If there were some special quality about this particular dragon, it would be unwise simply to slay it. We might thereby do irreparable harm to Xanth.”

“By eliminating a rogue dragon?” Irene asked incredulously. “Dragons are common in Xanth!”

“But there are different types of dragons,” the centaur pointed out. “Just as there are different types of humanoids, ranging from the giants to the elves. Some dragons are intelligent.”

“Not this one,” the Zombie Master said. “Or if it is, it doesn’t care to show it. It just blunders along, rampaging randomly.”

“Strange,” the centaur said. “I suppose we shall just have to wait for the Good Magician to enlighten us. Is it usual for him to be so late to a meeting?”

“Nothing is unusual for Humfrey,” Dor said with a smile. “He does things his own way and can neglect or forget routine details.”

“Such as meeting with other Magicians of Xanth to work out a program to deal with a crisis,” Irene said wryly. “A crisis that has been exacerbated by his refusal to let us use effective measures.”

“I understand he had some errands to attend to on the way,” the Zombie Master said mildly. “Some magic potions he can harvest in this vicinity. He is always collecting magic artifacts.”

“Well, he ought to know where they are,” Irene said. “He
is
the Magician of Information.”

Dor twiddled his fingers against his knee, obviously impatient with the delay. “Should we make our decision without him? We can’t wait too long, or the children will—”

There was a crash, followed by horrendous mixed noise. “Speak of the devils!” the Zombie Master said. “Now they’re playing their music box.”

“That’s music?” Irene inquired, both brows-raised.

“It’s some sort of Mundane device called a jerk box,” he explained. “Teenagers associate with it.”

“Juke box,” Arnolde corrected him gently. “My friend Ichabod the Mundane arranged to import it, and Humfrey found a spell to make it operate here. I am not certain they exercised good judgment in this instance.”

“If that’s Mundane music, I’m glad I live in Xanth,” Irene muttered.

“Wasn’t there another problem?” Dor inquired of the Zombie Master.

The dour man nodded. “Yes. People have been turning up at the castle with amnesia.”

“Amnesia?”

“They have forgotten who they are and where they’re going,” the Zombie Master explained. “It is as if they have just been born—but they possess all their faculties. We can’t send them home, because we don’t know where they belong. Animals, too—they just wander aimlessly.”

“That sounds like a forget-spell,” Arnolde said.

“Like the one on the Gap Chasm?” Dor asked.

“No,” the Zombie Master said. “That spell makes people forget that the Gap exists, once they depart from it. It doesn’t make them forget who they are themselves.”

“It hardly makes them forget the Gap itself, these days,” Irene put in. “We are all able to remember the Gap now.”

“Still, this could be a spell,” Arnolde said. “It is unfortunate the affected people are unable to remember what happened to them.”

“Did anyone follow their tracks back?” Irene asked.

“Yes, of course,” the Zombie Master said. “We have several excellent zombie hounds. We traced the tracks some distance through the forest—but there seemed to be nothing of significance. The tracks just wandered randomly. We did trace a couple back to their origins; one came from the South Village, and his wife recognized him—but he neither remembered her nor was able to say what had happened to him. There was no evidence of misplay anywhere along his route. It seemed he had gone out to fetch a
pine needle for his wife to sew with and never returned. We retraced his route several times, narrowing down the region where his progress became aimless, but there was nothing. No one else was affected, and there was no sign of the passage of any unusual animal or plant.”

“At least he was able to rejoin his family,” Irene said.

The Zombie Master smiled briefly. “Fortunately, she is an attractive woman, or he might not have chosen to exercise that option.” He waved a thin hand in a gesture of negation. “But a number of other cases remain unsolved, and in any event, we don’t want this complaint to spread. Especially not while a dragon is rampaging.”

“Good Magician Humfrey will have the Answers,” King Dor said. “He always does.”

“Take care he doesn’t charge us each a year’s service for it,” Arnolde said with a faint smile. Humfrey normally did not charge other Magicians, as a matter of propriety or caution, but the Good Magician was often absent-minded. All the other Magicians of the senior generation had retired, but Humfrey seemed eternal. Irene wondered what his secret was. She also wondered if they had not become too dependent on him for Answers. How would they manage if the Good Magician were no longer around to give advice? That was not a pleasant thought, but it would be foolish not to prepare.