The Practice Effect Part 33

Then he turned at a faint noise and saw an unfamiliar shape flying low down the canyon, chasing his men! From long experience, he knew that no glider could fly that way, ignoring the tricky little niceties of air rise and rate of fall. It screamed like a great, angry bird of prey, and around it s.h.i.+mmered the faint lambience of felthesh.

The troops that fled before it had clearly had enough of surprises this campaign. First those nasty, bobbing, floating "balloon"

monsters-and now this!

The warlord muttered angrily. As the thing approached, Kremer touched the b.u.t.t of the needler he wore on his hip. If only it would come close enough. If he could shoot it down, it might restore heart to his men!

But the monster did not cooperate. Its task apparently accomplished, it rose and turned about northward. Kremer had no doubt it was headed toward the battle in the northern pa.s.ses.

In his mind's eye he saw it all-the foreign wizard had done this, and there was no way to stop it.

He couldn't fight this new thing-not now, at least. His battle plan had relied too heavily on his gliders, and they were no match for the monster.

Of course, once news of this disaster reached the east, the great lords would flock to King Hymiel. Within days there would be armies heading west, competing for a price on his head.

Kremer turned to his aides. "Hurry to the semaph.o.r.e station.

Order a complete retreat, both here and in the north. Have my hillmen gather in the Valley of the Tall Trees, in our ancestral highlands of Flemmig. The ancient redoubts there are strong. There we shall not have anything to fear from either armies or the wizard's flying monsters."

"Your Majesty?" The officers stared at him in disbelief. One moment ago they were serving the clear and certain future ruler of all the lands from the mountains to the sea. Now he was telling them that they were to live as their grandfathers had, in the northern wilds!

Kremer understood that few men could see the lay of things as quickly and clearly as he. He couldn't blame them for being stunned.

But neither would he countenance slowness to obey.

"Move!" he shouted. He touched the bolstered needler at his side and saw them quail.

"I want word to go out at once. When that is done we shall message our garrison in Zuslik. They will strip the town of wealth and food. . .

.We will need it during the months and years ahead."

10 It was late, even for a Tatir summer day, when the miracle "dragon"

returned to the heartland of the L'Toff. The welcoming party on the ground had to follow in zigs and zags until both they and the pilot of the flying machine found a clearing large enough. By then, it seemed, half of the population- those not still harrying the retreating armies-had gathered to greet their saviors.

The craft swooped in low, a glistening shape that shone in the golden twilight. It touched down lightly and finally rolled, to a stop not far from a stand of tall oak trees.

The crowd virtually exploded in joy when they saw the slim form of their Princess stand from the body of the flying craft. They gathered around, cheering, and some even tried to lift her up and carry her off on their shoulders.

But she would have none of it. She motioned them all back and turned to help another person stand. A tall man for an outlander, he was dark-haired and bearded, and he looked very tired.

But the biggest surprise came when they saw the thing that sat upon the man's shoulder-a little creature with two green eyes s.h.i.+ning and an impish grin. The Krenegee purred as the people stepped back and fell into a hushed, reverent silence.

Then the L'Toff sighed, almost as one, as the foreign wizard took their Princess into his arms and kissed her for a very long time.

12 Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

1.

When Dennis finally awakened he felt a bit strange, as if a lot of time had pa.s.sed, as if he had dreamed a great deal. He sat up, rubbing his eyes.

Through a filmy curtain, sunlight streamed into the bright- canopied pavilion. He flung aside the silky bedspread and got up from the soft pallet on which he had slept. He found he was naked.

There were excited shouts coming from outside the gaudy tent, and the sound of galloping messengers coming and going. Dennis searched for something to wear and found a pair of soft buckskin breeches and a satiny green blouse laid out over a white-fringed chair.

Black leather boots lay nearby . . . his size. Dennis didn't bother with the underwear. He put the clothes on quickly and hurried outside.

Only a dozen meters away, Prince Linsee spoke animatedly with several of his officers. The lord of the L'Toff listened to a report from an out-of-breath messenger, then chuckled and clasped the courier on the shoulder in grat.i.tude.

Dennis relaxed a little when he heard the Prince's laughter.

Dennis's exhausted sleep had been disturbed by recurring guilty thoughts that he ought to be up and about, helping the L'Toff secure the victory he had brought them. Several times he had half awakened, intending to get busy devising new weapons, or to use his new aircraft to harry the enemy. But his exhausted body had refused to cooperate.

That wasn't to say his sleep had been disturbed all the time. At intervals he had dreamed of Linnora, and that had been nice.

"Dennizz!"

One of the L'Toff officers grinned as he saw Dennis. Dennis had to stare for a moment. He had been introduced to so many faces in the blurry twilight. . . . Had it been last night, or the night before?

"Dennizz! It's me. Gath!"

Dennis blinked. Why, so it was! The lad seemed to have grown in the past two months or so. Or perhaps it was the uniform.

"Gath! Has there been any word from Stivyung?"

The youth grinned. "We got a message only an hour ago. He's okay.

His balloon landed in a barony loyal to the crown, an' he's headed back with a column o' troops to help chase Kremer!"

"Then Kremer-"

Dennis stopped in the middle of his question, because the Prince had turned and was walking over. Linsee was a tall, slender man, with a gray goatee. He smiled and took Dennis's hand.

"Wizard Nuel. It is good to have you up at last. I trust you had a good rest?"

"Well, yes, your Highness. But I'm rather anxious to know about-"

"Yes," Linsee said, laughing. "My daughter, and your betrothed, by my warrant. Linnora is communing in a nearby grove. She will be sent for." At the Prince's nod a young page hurried off with the message.

Dennis was glad. He wanted very badly to see Linnora again. On the night of their landing he had felt as nervous as any young suitor when the Prince arrived and she introduced him. He was greatly relieved when Linsee delightedly consented to their betrothal.

Still, it was the progress of the war that concerned him at the moment. From the air, on that tumultuous evening of battle, he had seen the tyrant's gray-clad troops retreating on all fronts. Their multihued allies-the mercenaries and liege men of other barons- had melted away after the first pa.s.s of his flying machine, leaving the northmen to hurry their retreat, glancing up nervously over their shoulders.

But the retreating gray soldiers were not broken. In spite of their fear, they had pulled back in good order. They were excellent troops, who delayed the pursuing L'Toff fiercely so their fellows could escape.

When approaching darkness had forced him and Linnora finally to seek a landing in the L'Toff homeland, Dennis had worried that, come tomorrow, the enemy might reorganize and return.

"What about Kremer?" he asked.

"Not to worry," Linsee grinned. "Kremer's allies are all gone over to the King by now. And an army of volunteer militia is on its way from the populous east. Kremer has stripped Zuslik of everything movable and is even now on his way to his ancestral highlands.

"Sadly, I doubt even the armies of all the kingdom, aided by a flock of your buzzing and bobbing varieties of flying monsters, could pry him out of those craggy clefts."

Dennis felt relieved. He had no doubt Kremer would cause more trouble someday. A man as brilliant and ruthless as he would find ways to pursue his ambitions, and regard this as only a temporary setback.

Still, for now the crisis was over.

Dennis was glad to have helped Linnora's people. But most of all he was happy that no tyrant would force him to invent devices for which this world was simply unprepared.

He would have to watch that, in the future. Already he had unleashed on Tatir the wheel and lighter-than-air craft. And Gath had probably figured out the principle of the propeller by now, just by looking over the cart/airplane.

Dennis would have to see what the Practice Effect made of these innovations, once they were ma.s.s-produced, before unleas.h.i.+ng any more wizardries on these innocents.

A page hurried up to Prince Linsee. Linsee bent to hear the message.

"My daughter asks that you meet her in the meadow where you landed the night before last." He told Dennis. "She is there, by your miracle machine.

"No one has disturbed your craft since you arrived," the prince a.s.sured him. "I let it be known that anyone who touched the great growling dragon-thing would be gobbled up alive!"

Dennis noticed from Linsee's wry smile that he shared Linnora's sharp wit. No doubt while he had slept the Princess had filled her father in on everything that had happened since her capture.

"Uh, that's good, your Highness. Could you a.s.sign someone to show me the way?"

Linsee called forth a young girl page, who stepped forward and took Dennis's hand.

2 Linnora awaited Dennis in the open meadow by the gleaming aircraft. She sat cross-legged in L'Toff leather and hose before the nose of the plane, while three of her gowned ladies whispered together at the edge of the glade.

From overheard snippets as he approached among the trees, Dennis could tell that the maids didn't approve overmuch of their Princess dressing like a soldier, not to mention sitting on the turf in front of an alien machine.

The ladies gasped and turned quickly when Dennis said good morning. (Good afternoon, he corrected himself as he saw the lay of the sun.) The maids bowed and backed away. Their att.i.tude was respectful, but it also nervously conveyed that they thought he was just a little likely to grow fangs or walk on air. Clearly the run-of-the- mill L'Toff weren't all that much more sophisticated than the average Coylian.

That could change, though, Dennis reminded himself as he walked toward the plane.

Dennis frowned in puzzlement. Linnora was all scrunched over, her head poked under the front of the onetime cart. Although he admired the girl's limberness, to twist about in such a contortion, he wondered what in the world she was doing.

"Linnora," he called, "what are you-"

There was a sudden thud. "Ow!.. ." Her cry was m.u.f.fled by the airplane's undercarriage. Dennis blushed as there followed a quick chain of expletives Linnora could have learned from only one source.

The words certainly weren't in the Coylian dialect of the English language!

The Princess withdrew from under the craft and sat up rubbing her head. But her muttered invective stopped the instant she saw who it was. "Dennis!" she cried out. And then she was in his arms.

Finally, a bit breathless, he got a chance to ask her what she had been up to down there.

"Oh, that! Well, I hope it was all right. I mean, I hope I wasn't fooling around dangerously with things I don't understand well enough. But you were asleep for so long, and some busybody went and told Father I'd dressed for war, so he's had me watched ever since to make sure I didn't go ride off after Kremer's ears or something. I was starting to get bored, so bored that I decided I wanted to see-"

She was clearly excited about something. But it was all coming just a bit too fast for Dennis. "Uh, Linnora, your ladies seemed a bit shocked seeing you burrowing under there like that."

"Oh!" Linnora looked down at her muddy knees. She started trying to dust herself off, then stopped and shrugged. "Oh, well. They'll just have to get used to it, won't they? In addition to being your wife, I expect to be taught wizarding, you know. And that seems to be a dusty business, from what I've experienced so far."

The twinkle in her eye told him that there were certain things she would expect from her lord husband. Clearly, he wouldn't have to look far from home for an apprentice.

"Anyway," she went on, "I came down here and found everything just as we left it when we landed. Your Krenegee was here, too. But he seems to have gone off, now. Perhaps he's hunting. I've been under there a long time, and maybe I've lost track of time."

Dennis despaired of his beloved ever getting to the point. "But what were you doing under there?" he insisted.

Linnora stopped for a moment, her torrent of words cut off as she traced her train of thought.

"The robot!" she declared suddenly. "I was bored, so- I decided to talk to that wonderful creature-and-tool you brought from your world!"

"You were talking to..." It was Dennis's turn to blink. "Show me,"

he asked at last.

The L'Toff ladies were shocked even more when they saw the wizard and their Princess crawl down together into the gra.s.s and dirt.

The women made ready to turn modestly away if their worst fears proved true.

They gave out relieved sighs. Linnora hadn't been so debased down in the lowlands. But then what were they doing squirming under there like that?

The ladies realized, with regret that things would never be the same as they once were.

3 They had not really needed to crawl under the plane to examine the robot. Dennis realized later that he could have ordered the little automaton to drop the propeller, and its grip on the undercarriage, and come out. But by now it looked so much a part of the craft that it never even occurred to him at the time. The series of powerful practice trances, amplified by the magic of the Krenegee beast, had transformed the machine until it looked inseparable from the gleaming wooden flyer.

When Linnora said she had been "talking" to the robot, she meant that she had done the actual speaking. The 'bot had replied using its little display screen.

Dennis frowned as he looked at the rows of flowing Coylian script on the pearly rectangle. He couldn't read the alien tongue as quickly as it sped past. Besides, he wondered, how had the robot learned to. . .

Of course, he realized quickly. Since almost his first moment on Tatir, the machine had been gathering information on the inhabitants, at his command. Naturally, that included learning the writing they used here.

"Split screen," he commanded. "Coylian script on the left, Earth English translation on the right."

The text parted into two versions of the same report. He and Linnora had to crawl in a little farther to read, then, but that only brought them closer together, and he couldn't think of that as a disadvantage.

Immediately he noticed something interesting. Though Coylian letters were part of a syllabary, and English/Roman letters were a true alphabet, the two systems clearly shared a common style. The "th" sound in Coylian, for instance, looked like a mutated "t" and "h"

melded together.

Dennis recalled some of the calculations he had played with during his imprisonment. With a growing sense of excitement, he began to suspect that one of the theories he had come up with back then just might be true.