Heaven Cent (28 page)

They made it into the continuously hurrying throng, and were carried into the building. The blue man followed, screaming obscurities. None of the hurrying folk paid any attention.

Dolph knew that he had to get his party hidden, because otherwise the mean blue man would catch them and prevent them from reaching the cent. He looked for some place to hide.

“This way!” he cried as he spied a side passage. He caught Grace’l by one eerily fleshed wrist and hauled her out of the rushing throng. Marrow followed. They scooted around a narrow corner. Had the blue man seen them?

He had. “Halta Mire!” his brutish voice came, and the plodding of his big flat feet was loud on the tiles.

They fled. But they came up against a door. The word SERVICE was printed on it. Dolph didn't hesitate; he grabbed the knob, turned it, and yanked the door open.

Beyond it was a set of metal steps, and they weren't moving. Good. He jumped down them, and the skeletons followed. Marrow shut the door behind.

They were in some kind of open shed, with strange equipment all around. Beyond it was a huge plain, like the one they had seen from the window. Dolph didn't like that at all; there could be dragons here!

The door burst open behind them. “Nowi gotcha!” the blue man cried, and the buttons on his clothing glinted menacingly.

They ran. In a moment they were out of the shed, and in two moments they were dashing across the plain, and in three moments they were among odd parked birds like the one they had seen before, only smaller. Each had wings that stuck straight out instead of being folded, and the strangest beak imaginable: split into two or three parts that stuck out side wise, as if someone had smashed it to pieces. Maybe that had taught these things a lesson, because not one of them made any threatening move.

“Comebackere yoofelons!” the blue man panted, still pursuing. “Resistinga rest! Fleeing scena crime! Judge'll sendyata bighouse!”

It remained gibberish, but Dolph had no urge to discover what it meant by letting the blue man catch them. He dodged around a big bird.

There was an open door in the thing's side. Dolph remembered how the folk were in the moving boxes. Maybe they could hide in this one!

He scrambled up, and the skeletons did the same. Marrow had the wit to pull the oblong little door shut just as the blue man charged up.

But the man pounded on the panel with his mean fists. “Grandtheft airplane!” he shouted. “Nevergetoutatank!”

It sounded bad. Soon the blue man might break in, and they would be trapped. What could they do?

Dolph looked around. The bird had several seats in its belly, and two more up in its hollow nose. Suddenly he had a weird idea. Was it possible that this thing could move the way the boxes on the road did?

He sat down in the left front seat. Before him was a big front window that showed the whole wide plain ahead. Below it was a set of buttons with bright printed labels: START, POWER, and others he couldn't read. He pressed the first.

Abruptly the splayed nose of the bird started turning. The parts of it whirled around faster and faster, until they disappeared. Amazing!

He touched the second button. The noise at the nose increased, and the bird moved forward.

Well, now! Dolph grabbed the stick he found in front of him, for support. It tilted to the side. The bird skewed to the same side. Dolph moved the stick back, and the bird responded by straightening out. Well, again!

“I think I've found out how to move on the road,” Dolph said. “Maybe I can get away from the blue man.”

“You already are,” Marrow said, peering out a rear window.

“Good.” Dolph experimented with the stick. The bird moved whichever direction the stick was tilted. He touched another button. The bird accelerated. Soon it was moving so fast it was scary. Dolph couldn't find the button to make it slow, so he just hung on to the stick and guided the bird across the plain.

He found a long narrow road that led from the plain. Good; he wanted to get away from here, and maybe that would take him there. The bird was still speeding up; the air was roaring past it. Dolph hoped the road would continue long enough to give him time to find the right button to slow the bird.

“Look!” Marrow cried, pointing ahead.

Dolph looked. The road abruptly ended. Bushes and trees grew beyond. He would crash into them!

Desperately, he hauled back on the stick, hoping it would make the bird stop. Instead, the bird's nose tilted up, and suddenly the bird was flying. The trees passed just beneath its wheeled legs.

“Nicely done,” Marrow said.

“It was an accident!” Dolph gasped.

“Oh.” The skeleton seemed nonplussed.

Dolph pushed the stick forward. The bird responded by nosing down toward the trees. Dolph hastily pulled it back again.

“You THERE!” a voice exploded from a patch on the panel. “SMALL AIRPLANE—WHAT ARE YOU DOING TAKING OFF WITHOUT CLEARANCE?!”

Evidently the patch was talking to him. “I'm going to find the Heaven Cent,” Dolph responded.

"TURN AROUND AND LAND IMMEDIATELY!!” the patch commanded, sounding very like Ivy in one of her bossier moments.

“I don't know how," Dolph said reasonably. That was generally the best way to respond to such a tone, because it made the speaker mad without actually giving cause.

The patch said something Dolph couldn't understand, but he guessed its nature, because a wisp of smoke curled up from it. Yes, his approach was working!

“Perhaps I can help,” Marrow said. There followed a dialogue between him and the patch that soon got technical, so Dolph lost interest.

Meanwhile, the bird was climbing higher. It rose until it was up among the clouds, and men above them. Dolph gazed at them, fascinated.

The clouds were spaced at intervals, each one a big puff of whiteness like a fluffy pillow, with some escaping feathers of mist scattered between. Their bases were dark gray, their tops bright white in the sunlight. Dolph stared, trying to see what held them up, for it was obvious that they were too substantial to float in air. But of course this needed no explanation other than magic. He maneuvered his bird, so as not to bang into any cloud.

He peered down between the clouds. There was the ground, laid out like a tapestry. The roads looked like ruler-drawn lines, somewhat sloppily laid out. The buildings looked like dominoes. That made sense, for dominoes was a game imported from Mundania; for the first time he understood the origin of the shape of the little blocks. He saw dark circles that he realized were lakes, and solid green regions that were forests, and curvaceous contours that marked a river, complete with yellow scuff marks on the inner sides of the bends. Some parts of it were convoluted so deeply they resembled intestines, with the folds almost bumping into each other. There was a mosaic of green, yellow, and red-brown fields, with channels of slippage between. In fact, he recognized this region as the terrain around Castle Roogna, because he had studied it so often in the Tapestry.

But this was Mundania. Instead of the nice little magic paths, there were the ugly straight roads, and instead of the little roofs of the cottages there were the great square buildings. The road lines were drawn between big mundane developments, looking like spider webs in the crotches of trees, complete with dew like sparkles of the glass in their windows. It was pretty, in its ugly way. Dolph was increasingly nervous about something, and finally realized what it was: he was expecting the monstrous spider to appear. One of his father's best friends had been a spider, but there were good spiders and bad spiders, and surely in Mundania they were bad.

He pulled back the stick and set the bird to climbing higher, out of the reach of any such spider. The clouds were filling in below, so that the ground was now more like the bottom of an ocean, with the clouds floating on the surface. Maybe that really was what held them up: a sea of air! Now he noticed their vertical architecture. From below they had always seemed like round blobs, but from above he saw that they were sculptured columns, far more interesting than before.

His ears were uncomfortable. He tried to scratch, but the pressure was inside. Then he yawned, and pain crackled through his ears, but they felt better. Obviously he was passing through a zone of hostile magic.

He looked down again. Clouds had filled in solidly below, so that the ground was lost. There was a second layer of clouds above the first, and the higher ones cast shadows on the lower ones. But that was the least of it. Now that the upper surfaces of the clouds could no longer be seen from below, they were free to show their true colors. Instead of drab gray, they had borrowed colors from the rainbow: red, green, blue, yellow, and striped, as well as white and black and checkerboard.

More clouds were filling in overhead. They could climb higher than he could! He found himself flying through an enormous gallery, with a quiltlike floor and curtainlike canopy. The more distant parts of the cloudscape moved by more slowly than the near parts, demonstrating that clouds, like land objects, had mastered the magic of perspective. The farther away something was, the less need it felt to move just because someone was watching, and the most distant things were so lazy they hardly moved at all. Dolph was impressed; he had thought that the inanimate near Mundania was not that smart. Mushroom clouds sprouted from the bottom level, forming little goblin faces that looked curiously up; evidently they had never before seen a stiff-winged metal bud.

Suddenly a huge bank loomed ahead; he had been so busy sightseeing he bad forgotten to pay attention to where he was going. It was too late to avoid it; he had to go through it. He held his breath, closed his eyes, and braced himself for the crash. But all that happened was a slight dragging on the wings; the cloud was after all only vapor, too soft to wreck the bird. What a relief!

He emerged into a new and even lovelier vista. Elegantly hued clouds rose massively up, forming anvils whose points pointed toward blue sky beyond. Soon be would be out into open sky again, able to see everything.

“Oops,” Marrow said.

Dolph looked at him. He had almost forgotten he had company! “What's the matter?”

“That looks like Fracto.”

Now Dolph saw it. A small gray cloud was pursuing them. It had ugly boils on it, and a mean cast to its surface, and certainly seemed to be up to no good. That was the way of Cumulo Fracto Nimbus, the worst of clouds. “How did he get here? I mean, this is Mundania!”

“Fracto honors no decent limits,” Marrow said grimly. “He probably makes just as much trouble for the Mundanes as he does for us.”

“He can get pretty bad when he tries,” Dolph said, remembering how the evil cloud had tried to dampen Chex's wedding. “We'd better get out of the sky.”

“I have ascertained how a landing may be accomplished,” Marrow said. “Perhaps we should travel to our destination and land there.”

“Destination?” Then Dolph remembered. “Oh, yes, the Heaven Cent!” He looked at the watch. The eye was looking almost straight back. He had been flying away from it!

But Fracto was behind them. How could he turn back without getting caught by the evil cloud?

Dolph decided that he had no choice. He would have to try to surprise Fracto by turning around and flying right through him. If it worked, he would leave Fracto demoralized or even in fragments. If it didn't work—

Dolph suppressed that thought. He reminded himself that he was in the gourd, where reality was different; probably he couldn't really be killed here. But if he crashed, he might never get to the cent, and would foil in his Quest. He was determined not to let that happen!

He pushed the stick right. The bird moved in that direction. He pushed the stick farther, and the bird made a tightening circle. Soon it completed a U-turn. and was headed back the way it had come.

Fracto was there. The evil cloud had grown hugely in the last few minutes, and now had both a gray-black bottom and an anvil top. Sheets of lightning played about his fringes, making his face flicker malevolently. He had a giant bulbous gray nose, and glowing foggy eyes, and a mouth like the darkest of tunnels. A drizzly gust of air blew out, coating the bird with spittle. No one in his right mind would fly toward such a thing!

But Dolph clamped down on his terror and flew the bird right at Fracto. The cloud's watery eyes blinked, and his tunnel mouth gaped wider in amazement. The prey was coming right to him! There was a rumble of confusion.

Then the bird plunged into the mouth. The world turned dark, and the noises of Fracto's tumultuous digestion were loud all around. Lightning flickered inside as well as outside. Dolph had the sickly fear that he had made a bad mistake.

The awful fog closed in tightly. There was an immediate drag on the bird, and drool spattered on the front window, making the view even more dreary. Dolph felt a sinking sensation. He drew back on the stick, and the sinking stopped, but still the bird was slowing, held by the cloying slush. How long could the bird survive the digestive juices of the cloud?

There was a sudden downdraft that hauled the bird violently under. Then there was an updraft that flung it aloft as if thrown from a giant hand. Dolph felt a groaning in the wings; this was severe punishment! Fracto's gizzard was doing its best to break up the bird so that its fragments could be more readily consumed.

Then the bird shot out of the cloud's posterior. They had made it through! There were only the colorful, innocent, friendly little clouds ahead, and now the bird was heading right for the cent.

But Fracto wasn't finished. Dolph glanced back, and saw the cloud boiling madly, reorganizing for the pursuit. Tentacles of vapor were reaching out, thickening, forming new material to either side of the bird. Soon Fracto would envelop them again, and this time there would be no escape through surprise.

Maybe he could hide. Dolph pushed the stick forward. The bird dropped. It came to the nether cloudbank, then plunged through it. There was some slowing and slewing as the vapors caught at the wings; then they popped out the bottom. The disreputable landscape of Mundania was below.