Esrever Doom (Xanth) (12 page)

“Support of such missions would be a decent thing,” Yukay said. “The kind of thing to put a soul at rest.”

Zap considered for a long moment, almost a moment and a half.
YES

Kody wondered whether the griffin was being practical. That soul probably gave her fits when she ran afoul of its confusing strictures. Traveling with souled folk was bound to make that aspect easier. “Then it’s agreed,” he said.

Zap moved her tail.
BUT I HAVE
Then after a moment she wiped her side clear and started over.
NOTHING TO
She waited, giving them time to read it, then wiped it clear again.
CONTRIBUTE

“You saved me from the dread Blog!” Yukay said. “Isn’t that enough?”

NO

Kody stepped in. “You feel you are accepting the benefit of our company and Quest and don’t want to be a drag. You want to contribute your share.”

YES

Yukay glanced at him with sidelong respect. “You are sensitive to her feelings.”

Kody shrugged. “I have had my own experiences with exclusion and inclusion.”

“Haven’t we all,” Zosi said with feeling. Zombies were considered the lowest of the low, and Kody was sure they were normally excluded from polite society.

Yukay nodded. “Very well. Let’s see what Zap has to offer.” She faced the griffin. “Do you have any special abilities, apart from those natural to your kind, like flying?”

NO

Yukay did not give up. “Is there anything you’re good at, even if it seems irrelevant?”

PUNS
Zap wrote, embarrassed.

“You emit puns?” Yukay asked, wrinkling her nose.

NO

“You merely recognize them?”

YES

There was a silence.

Zosi came to the rescue. “It is the nature of Quests for Companions to be assembled seemingly randomly, but to turn out to have relevant abilities when the need arises. The abilities don’t need to be grandiose, merely right for the occasion. It may be that there will come a time when quick pun recognition makes a difference.”

“There may be a job for her at Caprice Castle,” Kody said. “They are collecting puns there, trying to make Xanth safe for normal folk.”

“Squawk,” Zap said appreciatively.

“We could encounter Caprice,” Kody said. “It travels wherever puns are found. I understand that pun duty is considered hard labor, and they have trouble holding on to workers.”

I CAN DO IT

That seemed to suffice. The griffin now felt comfortable joining the Quest.

So now they were four. It was time to get moving.

“So where are we going?” Yukay inquired brightly.

“I … am still pondering that,” Kody said, not caring to admit he had no idea. “Any suggestions?”

“Weren’t we about to try the cheese board?” Zosi asked.

“Good idea.” He brought it out. It had, it seemed, neatly folded itself and returned to his pocket when they heard Yukay’s scream. “This is a dual purpose device. We can play games on it, like check hers and cheese. We can also travel by it. The key is to see the images, then touch the one that shows where we want to go.”

Yukay and Zap looked blank.

“I haven’t seen the images yet,” Zosi said. “So we can all try together.”

Kody set the board down on the ground and they all got down and pored over it. “You see the cheese pieces?”

“Squawk.” That sounded affirmative.

“Yes,” Yukay agreed. “After I saw the naughty check hers figures.”

“Now fuzz your gaze somewhat. Try to look through it, at an object some distance beyond it, crazy as that sounds. You’ll know it when you see it.”

They all refocused, not seeing it.

“Like this,” Kody said, doing it himself. The images leaped into focus.

There was a three-way exclamation. Suddenly they all were seeing it. It seemed that his focusing made it work for anyone else looking at the same time. Sixty-four little images.

“There’s Castle Roogna!” Zosi said excitedly, pointing at a square with a picture of a fancy castle.

“Why, so it is,” Yukay agreed. “I can even see the flags blowing in the wind.”

“I’d like to stop at the Castle Roogna zombie graveyard, to let my friends know I’m working on it,” Zosi said. “They’ll be concerned.”

That had not been a high priority for Kody. “Zombies get concerned?”

“Oh, yes, those with enough brains left. They guide the others whose brains have rotted out entirely. Now that I’m alive, my brain is much better.”

“Um—”

She gave him a soulful look. “Please.”

What could he do? “If it’s okay with the others.”

Zap was doubtful, but Yukay stroked her wing feathers. “You and I don’t have to get close to them,” she said reassuringly. “This is Zosi’s business.”

“Squawk,” Zap agreed reluctantly.

“We can’t all touch the picture simultaneously,” Kody said. “But I think if we are all in contact with each other it should consider us as a group. We don’t want anyone to get separated.”

They crowded together, Kody holding hands with each of the women, and both of them firmly touching the griffin. “Now,” Kody said to Zap, and she pecked the relevant square with her beak.

And they were there before Castle Roogna. It was massive, far larger than the Good Magician’s Castle or Caprice Castle. Before them was the drawbridge leading over the moat. To one side was the orchard, with many luxurious trees.

“Well, now!”

Suddenly there were three infernally pretty princesses standing before them, in brown, green, and red dresses. All of them wore cute little crowns. “Harmony!” Kody exclaimed, recognizing the one in brown.

“Kody,” she answered. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m on my Quest to save Xanth from the Curse. These are my Companions Zosi Zombie, the Maiden Yukay, and Zap Griffin.”

“Zosi!” the green-dressed one said. Her hair was greenish blond, her eyes blue. “I hardly recognized you out of the graveyard. You’re looking so healthy!”

“Princess Melody, I’m not healthy, I’m alive. I’m on a Quest to restore the zombie population of Xanth.”

“Oh, that’s good. We’re almost out of zombies.”

“And I know you, Yukay,” the third princess said. Her green eyes contrasted with her red dress and hair.

“Yes, Princess Rhythm,” Yukay agreed. “I decided to be a Companion.”

“But we came here only so I could reassure my friends that I was on the Quest,” Zosi said.

“I’m sure they are eager to hear your news. They are being called to action now. Bye.”

All three were gone as suddenly as they had appeared. Zosi smiled. “Sometimes I think the princesses dismay visitors more than the zombies do. Still, the zombies have their ways. Once when they were annoyed, they staged a sit-down strike, leaving rotting pieces by the front gate.”

Kody noted that now Zosi was speaking of the zombies in the third person. That suggested that she was getting used to being alive.

“They surely made their point,” Yukay said, amused. “But what’s this about being called to action?”

“We are about to find out,” Kody said.

“I know better, but the Curse still affects me,” Yukay said. “I know the three princesses are pretty, but to me they looked like young hags, and they must have seen me the same way.”

“They, and you, all look pretty to me,” Kody said. Then he was struck by a stray thought that happened to be passing. “How did they look to you, Zap?”

UGLY

“So the Curse affects you too, though you are not human. That’s interesting.”

“It affects our perception of the animals too,” Yukay said. “How does Zap look to you, Kody?”

“Gorgeous. She’s a magnificent creature.”

“Squawk,” Zap said, amused.

“To me she looks gnarled and blotchy.”

UGLY
Zap agreed, understanding perfectly.

“We really need to get this fixed,” Zosi said.

“I don’t want to be offensive,” Kody said. “But there’s something about zombies I don’t understand. Do they really eat human brains, and if so, why?”

Zosi looked at him with horror. “You thought I wanted to eat your brain?”

“Not you, specifically,” he said quickly. “You’re alive. But can we trust your friends?”

“We don’t eat brains!” Zosi said indignantly. “In fact we don’t eat anything. That’s why we’re fading away.”

“That’s a relief. Maybe what I heard was wrong.”

“There are other fantasy lands,” Yukay said. “Maybe their zombies eat brains. Xanth zombies just drag about sloughing off pieces of themselves.”

“That must be it,” Kody said.

“I wouldn’t eat you even if I were in zombie mode,” Zosi said.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

They walked to the graveyard in back. There was activity there. “Oh, no,” Zosi said. “They are fighting off an attack, and there aren’t enough of us to succeed.”

The scene was strange. Half a dozen zombies were busy trying to move some sort of chain away from the castle, but there weren’t enough of them to move all of it at once. Wherever they were not pushing, it was advancing. Progress was slow, but it was evident that in several more days it would cross the graveyard and encroach on the castle proper.

Kody focused, but could not clarify exactly what the chain was made of. First it seemed to be formed of mundane cigarettes, which didn’t make much sense here. The zombies tried to push them away, but they emitted clouds of smoke that set the zombies to coughing. It seemed their lungs were not in good condition. One of them got a tattered if not actually rotten fan and used it to blow the smoke back. When it cleared the scene, there was something else looping across, flapping in the wind but not giving way because each piece was linked securely to the next. They looked like envelopes for letters. Another zombie fetched a big pair of rusty scissors and cut a link, and the letters blew away. Only to be replaced by what seemed to be loops of food. The zombies started getting hit by pies in their faces. But it all seemed to be part of the same general phenomenon. “Exactly what
is
that thing?” he asked.

A zombie overhead him. “Czhainzz!” it said.

“Chains?”

“Yezz.”

Then Yukay caught on. “Chains,” she agreed. “Chain smoking. Chain letters. Food chain.”

“And when they balk one chain, another takes its place,” Zosi said.

“Squawk.”

They looked at Zap. On her side was the word
YUKAY.

“But I have no idea,” Yukay protested.

“Maybe I do,” Kody said. “These are puns.”

“Zombies are not good at puns,” Zosi said. “It takes brains to handle them.”

“And sometimes a cast-iron stomach,” Yukay agreed. “I kept that hanky-panky mainly because I refuse to let it get the better of me.”

“But Zap
is
good at puns,” Kody said. “So we are armed, as it were.”

Sure enough, Zap’s side said
FOOD CHAIN.
She had caught on before Yukay did.

Meanwhile the zombies were still struggling ineffectively with the chains. When they tried to eat the food, not only did it do them no good, the chain changed to a group of prisoners chained together as they hacked weeds. The zombies couldn’t get near without risking getting hacked themselves.

CHAIN GANG

But soon a new zombie roused from its grave: a zombie dragon. It reared up on two or three of its hind legs and breathed out a blast of blue fire.

The prisoners retreated. “Just as well,” Zosi said. “Old Dragtail’s fire has long since gone cold. That’s why it’s blue. They were lucky.”

Now something else happened. The prisoners crashed into a tree loaded with pans. It was of course a pan-pipe tree, as Zap printed, but here near the zombie graveyard its pans were deformed. A pan dropped onto a row of zzz’s that came from a sleeping man, waking him. The zzz’s veered wildly, crossing out a section of the landscape before fading out. The man staggered onto a shiny new floor he had made, because he was a floor-ist, making footprints in the floor before it properly set. Now the zzz’s were replaced by @#$%&!! and worse as he swore villainous bleeps at the damage. The ferocious interjections collided with a pile of window frames, and windows popped up, filled with salesmen who eagerly yammered their sales pitches. “Buy our Micro-Wave; its tiny puffs of air will blow bugs away!” one shouted. “And if that doesn’t do it, our Mega-Wave will blow your whole house away!” “Do your robots have a bad case of corrosion?” another yelled. “Buy our anti-oxidant!”

Then a window banged into a sleeping animal, and it woke with a growl. It was a Bear Minimum, a small creature from Ursa Minor, and it was not pleased to be disturbed. It leaped at the window, smashing it into splinters and shards.

“What are we seeing?” Kody asked, amazed.

“I think it’s another chain,” Yukay said. “A Chain of Events.”

Kody glanced at Zap, where those words were printed. He should have looked before asking. He groaned. “We have to get rid of it.”

The zombies charged at the Bear. The Bear seemed fearless, but when it saw the oncoming rot it hurriedly retreated. Kody realized that this was the real advantage of the zombies: even savage animals and fearless warriors feared them, because of the rot. Zombies didn’t have to eat brains to be frightful.

Then there appeared a line of men. They seemed to be officers in an army, with the lead one a lowly enlisted man and those following being of increasing rank right up to a six-star general.

“It’s a Chain of Command,” Kody murmured, seeing Zap’s words.

Yukay stepped up to an officer about halfway along. “Hello, sir,” she said brightly. “I wonder if you—oops!” She had brought out the hanky, and it had tugged away from her hand and blown away on the wind.

Immediately the officer leaped out of the line and chased the hanky. Officers were by definition gentlemen, and could not let a lady be embarrassed. But it avoided him almost teasingly, dancing in the air before flying on. Soon both of them were out of sight.

Yukay faced the line. “One link of the Chain of Command has broken ranks and is lost,” she said. “The chain is broken.”

The other officers looked bewildered. Then they faded like dissipating demons. All the chains were broken.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Yukay said. “I wasn’t even thinking.”