Tara Duncan and the Forbidden Book (39 page)

Cal said nothing. He was too busy trying to get his breath back.

“Why me?” he finally moaned. “Life used to be so easy. Apprentice spellbinder, future licensed thief, settled nice and cozy at the castle. I worked a little, ate a lot, and drove Angelica out of her mind. The good life. But since meeting Tara, I've almost died a half-dozen times, the world is constantly on the brink of disaster, and I spend all my time trying to save it, along with my own skin!”

“That's true, isn't it?” said Robin, looking delighted. “You're never bored with her! I wouldn't miss this for all the immuta-creds in OtherWorld! Tara's the best thing that's ever happened to me. Thanks to her, I've acquired Lillandril's bow and earned the respect of elves. She's faithful, loyal, sensitive, funny, elegant, subtle, smart—”

Cal cut his lamentations short and gave his friend a sideways glance.

“And so pretty,” he added craftily. “She's really beautiful, with those lovely deep blue eyes in that pretty face.”

Robin jumped into Cal's trap with both feet.

“Oh, yes!” he agreed, an ecstatic smile on his face. “Even that white strand in her blond hair is the perfect beauty mark.”

Cal's suspicions were confirmed.

“I can't believe it” he chortled. “You're in love!”

The young elf reddened. “Who, me? Of course not!”

“Oh yes, you are,” Cal insisted. “I can tell. You're in love with Tara.”

For a moment, he thought that Robin would protest, but instead, he bent his head and his shoulders slumped.

“Is it that obvious?”

“About as plain as the nose on your face,” answered Cal, not at all kindly. “As for her . . .”

“She's too young,” sighed Robin. “Besides, we're her best friends. And—”

“And her birthday is in three days. She'll be thirteen.”

“Her birthday? I don't have a present for her!”

Robin stood up so quickly he rocked the howdah, and Cal clutched the rim in alarm.

“Heyyyy,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Stop jumping around like that!”

Robin's excitement collapsed as quickly as it had soared.

“Even thirteen's much too young,” he moaned. “At that age you're interested in dolls, not in some miserable half-elf.”

Man, this love stuff really turns your brains to mush, thought Cal.

“Tara? Tara and dolls, did you say?” he sneered sarcastically. “I dunno . . . the two just don't go together. Tara and swords, yeah, I can see that. Or Tara and battles, bruises, fistfights, murders . . . I can see that too. But Tara and dolls, nah, that definitely doesn't work.”

“She doesn't even know what I'm feeling,” lamented Robin, who hadn't heard a single word of his friend's speech.

“Well, just tell her,” said Cal, who didn't see what the problem was.

The elf stood up again, and Cal grabbed the rail, determined not to make any more friendly suggestions.

“Certainly not!” Robin declared. “I'm keeping my secret to myself. No one will ever know what I'm enduring. I'll wait. I'll wait until she notices me. And then, and only then, I'll tell Tara how much I—”

“I heard my name. Are you talking about me?” asked Tara with great interest.

She had bent her long dragon neck back and was giving them a wide, toothy grin. While flying full speed ahead.

Cal turned pale.

“Tara!” he screamed. “Look where you're going!”

“It's okay,” she answered calmly. “There's nothing in front of me, so I don't need to see what—”

“You may not think you do,” he interrupted, “but I sure do! Look in front of you and stop doing that weird thing with your neck, all right? I'm too young to die of a heart attack.”

Tara gave a deep sigh, but obeyed.

Cal watched her carefully for a few moments, then turned back to Robin.

“So, what were we talking about?”

“Oh, nothing important,” said the half-elf, feeling he'd revealed enough. “Let's discuss our plan to find the White Soul.”

“Hoo-hoo, he's in love! He's in love!” hooted Cal, determined not to let his friend off the hook. “And he's afraid to say so!”

But Robin knew how to put the little thief in his place. The formerly little thief, that is.

“If you keep on pestering me,” he said calmly, “I'll make this basket disappear.”

“No! You wouldn't really do that, would you?”

“In a heartbeat! I'm an elf, see? I'm not afraid of heights.”

Cal gulped. And gave in. “All right, this White Soul. Where do you think we'll find it?”

“What would you do if you were a Mud Eater?”

“I'd buy a razor and some deodorant.”

Robin rolled his eyes.

“I mean what would you do if you came across a thing like the White Soul?”

“As a Mud Eater? I'd hide it, so I'd have something to decorate my stinking hole with. Or else I'd show it to the other Eaters and tell them that it was the statue of a goddess and that I was her high priest. Then I'd create a new religion where I was the only person able to communicate with this so-called goddess. I'd make the others work for me and spend the rest of my days stuffing myself while gazing at my Mud Eater toes.”

Robin looked at him in dismay. “You know, I hope the Eaters don't have minds as twisted as yours.”

“I am not twisted,” corrected Cal, pleased with himself. “I'm lazy. There's a difference.”

“We're above the Swamps of Desolation,” Tara informed them, interrupting their conversation. “What should I do, land?”

“Go ahead,” said Cal, gritting his teeth. “We're ready.”

Once they'd gotten out of the mud, wiped off their clothes, bandaged their bruises, and gotten their breath back, they took a look at the long trench dug by Tara's landing. And agreed that, all things considered, it hadn't been that bad.

Gallant, who flew in just as Tara was landing, was caught between hearty laughter and a legitimate concern for the state of his mistress.

Tara was spattered with mud from claws to muzzle, and her ears were ringing from having clipped a tree growing by mischance at the end of her landing skid. She went looking for a lake big enough to wash herself. She scrubbed off her golden scales as best she could, helped by Gallant, who had trouble muffling a few sarcastic whinnies.

“Oh, can it!” Tara snapped. “I wasn't born with wings, so stop making fun of me. Cal?”

“Yeah, what?”

“I'm going to stay in my dragon shape for a while,” she announced, shaking the water off. “That way if the Mud Eaters attack, the way they did last time, I'll be able to defend us.”

Cal looked at her hesitantly. “Actually, I think you'll scare them so much they won't come out of their holes.”

“That's no problem,” said a chilly voice behind them. “We know how to get them out.”

Cal spun around, and Blondin gathered himself to leap.

Twenty huge black wolves had just stepped out of the bushes.

Tara was already filling her lungs to carbonize the new arrivals when she noticed that the wolves had red eyes. Vampyrs! Frying your allies wasn't such a good idea, so she held her breath. But that caused another problem. Not being a natural-born dragon, Tara didn't know how to get rid of the burning blast rising in her throat.

She raised a sharp-clawed arm to her muzzle and mumbled a strangled “Excuse me.” Then she quickly turned toward the lake and fired a long jet of flame.

The swimming glurps were distinctly unhappy at suddenly finding themselves in a steam bath. Screaming bloody murder, they erupted from the lake and raced up its banks, the ends of their tails bright red from the boiling water.

“Ah, that's better!” said a relieved Tara.

One of the vampyrs was looking at her suspiciously. His eyes went to the glurps in the mud desperately waving their legs, then came back to the enormous golden dragon awkwardly shifting from foot to foot.

“You sure she's one of our allies, chief?”

Master Dragosh sighed. “Yes, unfortunately. All right, you all know the drill. Locate the Mud Eaters and try to find out what happened to the White Soul.”

The first wolf practically snapped off a salute. “Yes, chief! All right guys, on the double. Let's go! Hut, hut, hut!” The vampyrs charged off enthusiastically.

Dragosh rolled his eyes and sighed again.

“They shouldn't let so many Earth movies be shown on OtherWorld,” he grumbled.

By unspoken assent, they avoided getting too close to the island. The Ravager's center of power was located in its heart, and they had to find the White Soul first.

With their incredibly acute sense of smell, the vampyr-wolves quickly located the first Mud Eaters. They tried to put up a fight, but weren't able to resist for long.

Tara had seen Mud Eaters up close—uncomfortably close, in fact—during their last battle, but without enough time to examine them in detail.

They were big balls of earth-colored hair with outsized jaws that allowed them to swallow mud, their main food. They used their curved, very sharp claws to dig and their webbed feet to swim. Tara knew they could speak, though that wasn't obvious at first glance.

When they caught sight of the great golden dragon, the Mud Eaters all crouched and intoned: “Nice dragon, handsome dragon, not eat Eaters, nice dragon, not roast Eaters. Eaters did nothing. Eaters quiet, nice.”

“I don't want to hurt you,” murmured Tara, lowering her voice so as not to frighten them further. “We just need some information. You know there is an evil entity on the island, right?”

The Mud Eaters didn't react.

She tried again: “On island Black Roses, not nice, nasty black cloud, yes?”

That did the trick. They immediately understood what she meant.

“Black cloud eat Mud Eaters,” they lamented. “Black cloud also want eat dwarf, but dwarf sing, so cloud not eat dwarf. Eat wizards instead.”

“Us kill black cloud,” she announced. “Us eat black cloud!”

The Mud Eaters lifted eyes full of hope to her. At least she supposed that's what they were doing, because with all their hair, she couldn't see their eyes.

“Dragon eat cloud?” they pleaded.

Tara didn't hesitate. “Yes. Dragon eat cloud.”

The Mud Eaters began to leap about. The news clearly made them happy.

“So they don't like the Ravager; that's helpful,” said Cal. “Hey, guys!”

The Mud Eaters stared at gorgeous Cal, dazzled by his magnificence.

“We need you to give us a hand, okay? Eaters help dragon, handsome dragon, all right? The weapon against the black cloud is a statuette. A shiny white thing about this high.” Cal held his hands about a foot apart. “It represents a human woman with her arms up. Seen anything like that?”

Great silence greeted his statement.

“All right,” he said with a sigh, “let's translate that into a language you can understand. Nice, pretty piece of white stone, us find, us take, us eat cloud. Got that?”

Re-silence. The Mud Eaters were actually so attentive and focused that they didn't move a hair—which was quite an accomplishment.

One of the vampyrs fixed his glowing red eyes on the Eaters. “Maybe our friends need a translation that's a little more . . . forceful.”

“Master Dragosh?” called Tara.

“Miss Duncan?”

“Would you explain to your hothead here that we need allies, and that torturing people doesn't cut it?”

Dragosh glared at his lieutenant, who had the grace to look embarrassed.

“Robin,” Tara continued, “you once told me that the Mud Eaters have a system of clans, right?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“If the members of this clan don't know where the White Soul is, maybe another clan will.”

“Good idea,” said Master Dragosh. “Let's put it into practice. These Eaters can spread the word. Were looking for the clan that knows where the White Soul is.”

Their search unfortunately took much longer than expected. Soon night fell and beasts of all sizes were angrily whining around Robin and Cal, frustrated at not being able to penetrate the insect-repellant barrier. And the tireless vampyrs kept bringing new Mud Eaters in. Well, not exactly new Eaters, because the balls of hair all looked alike.

By the time they had gotten rid of the same Eater four times in a row—a little more frightened each time—they decided they had to somehow identify the ones that had already been questioned. So they started magically putting a glowing circle on the Eaters' greasy fur. Strangely enough, this delighted them. So much so that very quickly a crowd of Mud Eaters arrived, not to help in the search for the White Soul, but to get their own glowing circles.

After some hours, the disgusted vampyrs decided to stop for the night. Cal and Robin used Tara's wing to make a comfortable tent and spent a warm, cozy night under it.

The next day the search continued. All day long, they kept repeating the same question in vain.

The third day, when Tara felt she would go crazy imagining Fabrice, Sparrow, Fafnir, and Manitou caught in the Ravager's grasp, she awoke to see a parcel floating in front of her.

“Happy birthday, Tara!” cried Robin, looking very pleased with himself. Cal sang “Happy birthday” with great enthusiasm, and way off key.

“Oh!” she breathed with delight. “I'd completely forgotten!”

“But we didn't,” said the boys. Clearly delighted with the impression they'd made, they shook hands, congratulating each other.

“You'll have to wait for the cake and candles until we get back to Lancovit, though,” said Cal.

Very delicately, Tara open the parcel with a claw, surrounded by the curious Mud Eaters and vampyrs. Together, Cal and Robin had worked to create a lovely piece of jewelry: a beautifully carved bracelet studded with dazzling jewels that Cal had sort of picked up here and there while he was with the gnomes.