Dragon On A Pedestal Part 5

The familiar look of male bafflement and resignation pa.s.sed across his face. "Well, if you ride Chem, with Grundy along--"

It hadn't occurred to Irene to join forces more permanently with the centaur, and certainly not with the golem; but actually, that was not a bad idea, especially if it allayed Dor's hesitancy.

Irene glanced at Chem to see if she were amenable. She was. "Of course," Irene agreed, as if that had been the intent from the start.

"And take a zombie--"

"A zombie!"

"They know the area," he pointed out. "And you can send it back to the castle if you get in trouble. That is, if you should need to send a message back." He was correcting his slip; naturally, she would not be the one to get in trouble. "Then the Zombie Master will know where to send a.s.sistance."

"You're not objecting to my going?" Irene asked, just to make quite sure he knew he did not.

"Dear, I know you work best in your own way. I'll return to Castle Roogna and consult with Crombie and check the a.r.s.enal. There should be something that will help, in case you don't find Ivy soon. Meanwhile, with Humfrey out of business, I had better be available at home so you'll know where to get in touch with me. There is also the matter of the forget-whorls to handle."

This did make some sense, she had to concede. She had antic.i.p.ated more argument from him, but evidently he was learning the uselessness of that. He really would not be able to help locate Ivy from Castle Roogna, because, though Crombie the soldier's talent lay in pointing out the direction of anything, Crombie was now so old and frail that his talent was unreliable. But with Dor safely back at Castle Roogna, she would not have to worry about anything happening to him and could concentrate completely on the immediate mission. "I'll keep going until I find Ivy," she promised. "It shouldn't be long. She can't have wandered far."

"True," Dor agreed wanly. Suddenly Irene realized what his real motive was--he was half afraid Ivy was in deeper trouble than mere separation from her family and he wanted to locate some magic means to confirm or deny this without alarming Irene herself. He had an ivy plant of his own, so knew the child was healthy--but this disappearance was already more serious than it had first seemed. With the forget-whorls moving through the area, taking out people randomly...

Dor was letting her keep her hope as long as possible. She would let him keep his. Irene kissed him in silent thanks for what he hadn't said, then remounted Chem. "You," she said, pointing to the nearest zombie. "Come with us." Anything to satisfy her husband, who was trying so hard to do what he thought was right. The zombie would be a nuisance, but maybe she would find Ivy soon, so it wouldn't matter.

The centaur started walking. Irene waved good-bye, then turned her face forward, knowing Dor would be watching her as long as she remained in sight. The designated zombie shuffled along behind.

"Hey, you plants!" Grundy called. "Any of you see a little girl pa.s.s by this afternoon?" This was for the others' notice; actual plant language was largely inaudible and wholly incomprehensible to the human ear. The golem would repeat the message in the dialects of any plants and animals he saw.

After a pause, Grundy shook his head. "None here," he reported. "But I guess we already knew that. We'd better circle around the castle until we pick up Ivy's trail. It's got to be here somewhere."

"Let's see a map of the area," Irene told Chem. "We can pick the best route for circling the castle."

Chem projected her map. It formed in the air before her, a three-dimensional representation of Castle Zombie and the region around it. But portions were fuzzy. "What's wrong with your picture, horserump?" Grundy asked, his normal lack of diplomacy evident.

"I'm not familiar with this region," the centaur explained, unruffled. Centaur stallions, like human males, could have bad tempers, but the fillies were femininely stable. "I didn't have time to explore much of it before the Dragon came. I have to see it before I can map it."

"Then what good is your talent, marebrain?" Grundy demanded.

Irene felt a tinge of ire at his insolence but kept her mouth shut; Chem could take care of herself.

"I never get lost, ragbrain," Chem said evenly. Actually, the golem's original head had been wood, not rag, but it was a fair insult. Now, of course, Grundy was alive, with a living brain. "Once I've been to a place, I've got it on my map. So I can always find my way back."

The golem, realizing that insult would be met with insult, shut up and concentrated on his business. They circled Castle Zombie clockwise; three-quarters of the way around, Grundy picked up the trail. They had actually spiraled out somewhat and were now a fair distance from the castle.

"This armor-dillo plant saw her pa.s.s!" Grundy exclaimed.

He pointed east. "That way."

Irene controlled her thrill of joy. They hadn't completed the rescue yet.

"Odd direction to go," Chem remarked, "Didn't you say you saw the zombie carry her west, not east?"

"That's right!" Irene agreed, her gratification at finding the trail tempered by this surprise. "She couldn't have wandered all the way around the castle!"

"Ask the 'dillo how Ivy arrived," Chem told Grundy. The golem queried the plant, using a series of rustlings and creakings and pickle-crunching sounds. "She just toddled up from the direction of the castle," he reported. "She didn't look as if she'd walked far."

Irene hesitated, athwart a dilemma. She wanted to recover her lost child as soon as possible, but knew that in the Xanth wilderness it was best to take no mystery on faith. If she found out how Ivy had traveled this far, she might have an important clue to where she was going.

"We'd better check this," she decided, hoping she wasn't wasting critical time on something irrelevant. "Go back and trace how Ivy got here."

"You know it's late," Grundy reminded her. "If she's caught out here at night--"

"I know," Irene agreed. "I dread that. But this may be important. There's a mystery here that may have bearing. However she got from west of the castle to east of the castle, she may do it again to get somewhere else, while we are looking in the wrong place."

The golem shrugged his tiny shoulders. "It's her funeral."

Irene suppressed the urge to hurl the miniature man into the nearest tangle tree. "Just ask the plants," she said between her teeth.

Chem moved toward the castle. Grundy queried the vegetation along the way. "They haven't seen her here," he reported.

The group backtracked, checking more closely. The zombie, who had been dutifully trailing the centaur, did its best to help, peering into the bushes on either side.

Ivy's trail commenced near the armor-dillo. The plants there said she had walked from the west, but the plants to the west did not remember her.

"Something extremely peculiar here," Chem said. "She can't be traveling intermittently."

Irene spotted something in a nearby field. It was a large animal. For an instant her chest tightened; then she saw it was a grazing creature, not a carnivore. "Maybe that--whatever it is--saw Ivy," she said.

Chem looked. "That's a moose. A vanilla--no, a chocolate moose. Harmless."

They went over, and Grundy questioned the moose. The animal looked up warily. "It wants to know if we're ducks," Grundy said with disgust. "It doesn't like ducks who nibble."

"Tell it to stop ducking the question," Irene said.

After a moment, the golem reported that the moose had seen a child of the proper description, but not here; she had been some distance to the east, going the other way.

"Farther along," Irene said. "At least we know she was all right then. We'll go there soon; right now I want to know why her trail is intermittent here."

They resumed the backtrack. Grundy narrowed it down to two blades of gra.s.s. The east one remembered Ivy and said she had come from the west; the west blade denied it. Soon the two were in an argument, and then in a fight. One blade slashed at the other but was parried and countered. In moments the surrounding blades chose sides and joined the fray. The field became a battlefield.

"This is getting us nowhere!" Irene protested, dancing about to avoid getting slashed on the ankles. "One of those gay blades must be lying."

"No, gra.s.s is inferior," Grundy said. "It doesn't have the wit to lie. It just stands tall and defends its turf."

"But their stories directly contradict! They can't both be true!"

Now Chem's fine centaur mind came into play. She suffered less distraction from the blades because her hooves were invulnerable. "They could--if a forget-whorl pa.s.sed."

"A forget-whorl!" There was the answer, of course. It had blotted out the trail, for the plants it had affected had no memory of events preceding the pa.s.sage of the whorl. "But that means--"

"That it could have touched Ivy, too," Chem finished. "I had hoped that wouldn't be the case."

"But without memory--" The prospect was appalling, though Irene had also thought of it before. She just hadn't wanted to believe it. "Not even to remember the dangers--"

"But the whorl could have pa.s.sed after Ivy did," Chem pointed out. "So it didn't hurt her, just wiped out a section of her trail."

"Yes..." Irene agreed, relieved. "Or maybe it just grazed her, making her forget a little, such as how to get home, without really hurting her." That was stretching probability somewhat, but was a better theory than nothing. It was possible, Irene reminded herself fiercely.

"We shall trace her quickly," the centaur rea.s.sured Irene, cutting off the questionable speculations. They all knew how deadly the wilderness of Xanth could be, even when a person's memory was intact.

"Let me try one more thing," Grundy said. "That buckeye over there is to the east of the forget-line, and those bucks eye everything that pa.s.ses them, especially if it's in a skirt. Maybe it saw Ivy come in and wasn't in the path of the whorl."

"Good idea!" Chem agreed. "Ask it!"

The golem sent out a mooselike honk at the tree. In the distance, the chocolate moose looked up, startled, then realized this call was not for it. The tree's antlerlike branches twitched. Eyelike formations in the trunk blinked. It honked back.

Grundy became excited. He honked again. The tree responded with a considerable pa.s.sage of rustlings and wood noises.

The golem translated: "The buck says he eyed this region four hours ago and saw a magic carpet glide in, carrying a bag and a child."

"That's no way to refer to a woman!" Irene snapped.

"A bag of spells," Grundy clarified, and Irene blushed. She had waded into that one!

"A carpet!" Chem said. "That could only be--"

"Humfrey's carpet!" Irene exclaimed. "It escaped when the Gap Dragon attacked him!"

"It must have come down near Ivy," Chem said. "These carpets may spook, but they always return. They don't know what to do by themselves. But why didn't it return to Humfrey?"

"He was gone!" Irene said. "The Gorgon conjured him home. Hugo must have wandered away, so the carpet simply went looking for them. When it spied Ivy--"

"It dropped down to see if she was its owner," Chem finished. "And Ivy took a ride on it, just for fun."

"She would," Irene agreed grimly. "She has very little sense of danger when she gets interested by something. She inherits that from her father."

The centaur glanced askance at Irene, but did not comment.

"And she picked up a good-luck charm," Grundy added. "The buckeye saw that happen, too."

"Good-luck charm?" Irene asked. "Then how could she have gotten caught by the forget-whorl?"

"The tree didn't see that," Grundy said.

"Naturally not! The whorls are invisible!"

"But the whorl may have missed her," Chem pointed out. "We know only that it pa.s.sed here, perhaps soon after she did, not that it got Ivy. The good-luck charm could have fended it off, or at least diminished its effect, depending on how strong the charm was. If her continuing trail remains purposeful, we can a.s.sume that she wasn't really hurt by the whorl."

"I don't know," Irene said, worried. "Things don't always happen the way they should, here in Xanth. Dor's father Bink--" But that was another subject; Bink had always been amazingly lucky, needing no charm.

"We do know a whorl got the zombie who carried her from the path of the Gap Dragon," Chem said, glancing at the zombie who patiently followed them now. This was a different zombie; the patterns of rot were dissimilar, not that it mattered. One zombie was very much like another. "There must be a number of whorls around, striking randomly."

"Probably the whorls followed the dragon from the Gap," Irene agreed. "The dragon should be immune to them, having lived in the ambience of the original forget-spell for centuries. There could be an affinity because of that long a.s.sociation. Anyway, we seem to have solved the riddle of Ivy's departure; she flew the carpet to this side of the castle. But she's on foot now; the carpet evidently took off again when she got off it, and is lost. We need to catch up to her before--"

"Before nightfall," Chem supplied diplomatically.

They followed the trail more quickly now, the golem eliciting a report from a lady-fingers plant that used hand signals to describe a human child and a huge animal.

"Animal?" Irene asked, alarmed.

"Perhaps the chocolate moose," Chem suggested.

Grundy conversed further with the local plants, while the lady-fingers wrung their hands in distress at not being able to identify the creature. But another plant recognized the type. "A yak," the golem finally reported. "They like to talk. They're generally harmless, unless they talk your ear off. Stroke of luck her running into that particular animal."

"The good-luck charm," Chem said. "Obviously she had it with her, though she may not have recognized its significance. It brought her a fortunate wilderness companion."

"After fending off the forget-whorl, or most of it. But those charms only last a few hours when used," Irene said worriedly. "They only have so much power, and each intercession of good luck depletes their charge. Ivy must have needed a lot of luck out here, so the charm will be exhausted by nightfall."

The centaur glanced at the sky. "We have another hour yet. We can move faster than she could. We'll find her."

"Fat cha--" Grundy started to remark with his normal calculated insensitivity, but was interrupted by a coincidental cough from the centaur that almost dislodged him. "Uh, yes, sure."

They went on, tracing the trail along a footpath and past a centaur-game region. "If only the centaurs had realized Ivy was lost," Chem said. "I know they would have carried her right back to the Castle Zombie!"

"The lucky charm was fading," Irene said grimly.

There was a warning rumble of thunder. A storm was headed their way. They hurried.

They pa.s.sed a torment pine. Then, just beyond it, the trail stopped. No plant remembered anything.

"Another forget-whorl!" Irene exclaimed. "Or maybe the same one, rolling along. It blotted out everything's memory!"

"Those whorls don't seem to be large," Chem said. "We should be able to pick up the trail on the other side of it. I'm sorry we didn't think to bring along some of that whorl-nullifying potion Humfrey gave you."

"Haste always does make waste," Irene said.

The thunder rumbled again, louder. It sounded like the cloud Irene had disciplined with the watermelon seeds, and that could mean trouble. The inanimate wasn't very smart, but it was very ornery. The cloud must have rounded up reinforcements and returned to the fray.

Soon they found the trail--but it was only the yak. "Do yaks leave their companions?" Irene asked.

"Not while those companions are still able to listen," Chem said. "A yak will never voluntarily stop talking."

"Yeah, you have to know how to shut it up," Grundy put in.

"How do you do that?" Irene asked.

The golem shook his little head. "No one knows."

"Ivy surely didn't know--and even if she did, she wouldn't. She likes conversation." Irene frowned. "I only wish she were willing to talk more herself. She listens to me, but she doesn't say much. Sometimes I worry about her being r.e.t.a.r.ded, like--"

"Like Hugo?"