161. Defensive Tattoos

Contest winner: Joe

After successfully picking the locks to seven doors in a row, Merlin felt himself struggling with the eighth and knew that another dose of liquid skill had worn off. He shrugged, looked meaningfully at Miss Pucey, and knocked instead.

The door opened by itself. Cautiously, the wizard and witch squeezed through the narrow gap. Then the door slammed so suddenly that Miss Pucey scarcely had time to jerk the hem of her robes out of the way.

Merlin was surprised to find a working laboratory in this deep dungeon. Retorts bubbled. Cauldrons stirred themselves. Liquids, glowing in the oddest colors, chased each other through coils of glass tubing. Candles smoked and flickered as they drifted through the air.

"They seem to be from home," Miss Pucey sniffed, inspecting her dusty finger after stroking the handle of a blue ceramic teapot. "No one has had tea here for at least a week."

"Maybe they prefer firewhisky," Merlin suggested. He made a sweeping gesture that gathered in all the simmering potions and distilling fumes. "These would have boiled dry by now if - "

His reasoning was interrupted when a disembodied voice shrieked, "Petrificus totalis!"

Merlin turned his head toward the voice. He saw no one in the direction from which the spell came. He flinched as it hit him. Then he completely failed to fall over paralyzed.

"That old gimmick won't work on us," Merlin sneered into the tangle of tubes and beakers from which the curse had emerged. He knew, though his assailant didn't, that his immunity to the body-bind curse owed itself to the one-time-only effect of a defensive tattoo. Since he wasn't naked, he couldn't see how the tattoo had actually leaped off his skin and absorbed the curse before it touched him. But he didn't need to know how it worked. He was just glad that it did. Under his breath he said a word of thanks to his old friend Anatoly.

Two more jets of light leaped at him through gaps in the forest of glassware, pewter and brass. Merlin wondered not what curses were flying at him, but how his enemy had managed to aim them through so many distracting and distorting surfaces. Both curses passed through his robes. Neither quite touched his skin.

"Nor those either," said Merlin, sidling toward the source of the spells. With a glance and a jerk of his head he told Miss Pucey to keep behind him. "You don't know who you're dealing with," he added menacingly.

"You have no call to come here," squeaked a shrill, desperate voice.

"Ah! How can we resist such a warm welcome?" Merlin taunted. "I don't know. Since you're so keen on chasing us off, I have to think you're doing something wrong. And then maybe we do have a call..."

"Imperio," muttered a voice unexpectedly close to Merlin's left shoulder. He instinctively dodged backward, bumping into Miss Pucey and upsetting a mortar full of glittering purple dust.

For a moment, even Merlin was surprised that the curse had no effect on him. Yes, that accounted for another of Anatoly's tattoos. Which ones were left, he wondered anxiously. Meanwhile he turned a thin smile toward his attacker.

At first it seemed no one was there. Then he spotted the thick, wiry eyebrows that almost grew together; the round, blue-tinted eyeglasses; the bruised, gnawed fingernails floating in space around a quivering wand; and the scuffed left boot standing by itself where the invisible wizard's foot should be.

Merlin shook his head sadly. "You're not all there, are you?"

"Shut up," said the nearly-invisible stranger. "There must be spells you aren't immune to. With my methods, it won't take me long to find them. So tell me sharpish: Who sent you?"

"I don't have to tell you anything," said Merlin.

"Legilimens!" screamed the voice under the eyebrows.

"Nope," said Merlin.

The eyebrows twitched. "Obliviate!"

"Uh-uh."

"Imperio!"

"Now we're beginning to repeat ourselves," said Merlin, mentally congratulating himself for having correctly guessed which curses he needed defense against.

Fortunately, the fight went out of Doctor Eyebrows right then. The wand lowered. "What are you?" whispered the see-through wizard.

"You're being naughty again, aren't you?" Miss Pucey improvised. She stepped around Merlin, in spite of his attempt to make a stile of his arm, and plucked the wand out from between the hovering fingernails. The latter fidgeted amongst themselves.

"If Robertus Magnus finds out," said the sad, slightly visible wizard, "he'll take all this away. And then I'll have nothing but stone walls to look at, and I'll run mad. Please..."

"You have nothing to fear from us," said Miss Pucey, "as long as..."

"All right!" screamed the one-booted miscreant. "It's a fair cop! Yes, all right, I was working on a way to make it rain up. But only for a good cause, you know? Only to move a bit of rain from a really wet area, to water the desert. I mean, all right, there was an interested party who would have paid me rather well..."

"Aha!" Merlin barked. Eyebrows clinked backwards into a tray of stoppered tubes. "A financial interest! And how do you know your client won't use your upside-down rain as a weapon? Who knows how much damage..."

While Merlin continued his withering tirade, Miss Pucey slipped unnoticed through the racks of beakers, whirring apparatus, and porcelain pots. She gave a low whistle when she found the door at the opposite end of the dungeon.

"...ever again!" Merlin finished, punctuating his words with a well-rehearsed jab that would leave Eyebrows unconscious for a few minutes. Provided, that is, Merlin had correctly guessed what he was aiming at.

He and Miss Pucey closed the door behind them and found themselves at the bottom of a set of worn stone steps. The staircase twisted out of sight, smelling faintly damp and smoky.

"I think this is it," said Merlin, shaking a bit more light out of his wand tip. He turned toward Miss Pucey and waited until she nodded. Then he began to climb.

+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #163 +++

You can help decide what happens next in The Magic Quill! Simply leave a brief comment (up to 150 words) answering the following Survey and Contest. The survey answer with the most votes, and the contest answer that Robbie likes best, will turn up in the chapter after next.

SURVEY: What has Rigel been up to since Chapter 156? (A) Infiltrating Il Comte's compound in disguise. (B) Organizing a ghost riot as a diversion. (C) Battling wereyaks. (D) All of the above.

CONTEST: Suggest a product that Jude the Insecure might sell at his "From Out of This World Outfitters" shop.

160. Furrier Destructions

Contest winner: Sir Read-a-Lot
Runner-up: greyniffler

Sadie charged into Endora's laboratory, shouting strings of consonants that sounded indecent without vowels to clothe them. A crystal finger stuck out of her right ear. She didn't seem able to hear or understand the protests of the receptionist, the watchman, and the laboratory assistant who ran in after her.

Endora looked up from the mortar and pestle, with which she was crunching numbers. "What's all this?" she asked, in a tone of voice that Sadie understood to mean, "Calm down!" even before she unplugged her right ear.

"Have you resleeved any massages by Floo?" Sadie demanded, her words still a bit jumbled but at least recognizable.

"Yes, we all have," said Sadie. She gestured toward a sealed roll of parchment on the edge of her workbench. "Been rather busy, though," she added. "Someone spiked a shipment of Chanel No 5 with a magical algorithm that makes it shift through a succession of surreal numbers. There's no telling what effect the scent might have on the general public..."

"Then you haven't bean enclaved to that gist with the ring?" Sadie grinned with relief. "Whatever you dough, doughnut read it. Have everybody bun -- brown -- bird -- ballots! Tell your lost to incinerate their coupés immoderately."

"You heard her," Endora said, nodding toward her three co-workers as she tossed the roll of parchment onto a gas ring and ignited it. "Spread the word."

The guard, secretary, and lab assistant reluctantly left the room. "Now what is this about?" Endora asked, as Sadie threw herself on a stool and slumped across a paper-strewn stretch of bench.

Sadie's reply was muffled by the sleeves of her robes. "Are you sugar you aren't in leek with this Lee Shorts villain?"

"Sure as my nose is two and three-quarters inches long."

Sadie raised her head and squinted appraisingly at Endora's nose. Then she buried her face again. "They've ghost Joe and Ilex, pretty muck everyone in Hawksmeade. The whole whirl will go necks. We've ghost to dough something."

Endora took a moment to translate all this, then nodded and said: "What can I do?"

"Fist, you've goat to blink-fold your-shelf," said Sadie, her grasp of language struggling more and more as she grew more excited. "That wax, Lee Spore can't beguilt you with the rotten word."

Endora nodded dubiously, but kept smiling.

"Thin," Sadie went on, "we nix a couple of booms, and your note -- your snow -- your gnus" -- she gave a little scream of frustration -- "your olfactory ogre will lead us to wherever Lex Horse is hiving, and we'll tack him down toboggan. I mean, together."

Endora kept nodding while she processed this. Then she shook her head. "How am I supposed to track this bloke? I've never seen him. More to the point, I've never sniffed him..."

"Sniffle this," Sadie said, whipping a thick wad of parchment, tied in red tape, out of her robes. "I necked this from the Mastery. It's a repot on some fainter who supposedly brick the Statue of Secrecy. Vee Sore chased me thorough it. That's wen he punched the rung off me..."

Sadie stopped talking. Endora had snatched the report from her. Tearing the ribbon off, she spread it out across her workbench and began sniffing it, from side to side, from top to bottom. She occasionally muttered a few words, which sounded to Sadie like: "Mustard, sausage drippings... tobacco, Ficus Brothers... felt, sweat, fermented Brylcream; somebody needs to have his hat blocked... Oi! I know this nutter, obliviator obviously, complete putz, couldn't charm his way out of a twist of newspaper... Hmm. Bit of oil-based paint, dab of scented lotion, ladies' brand and not very old ladies' either; our Lysippus has been a naughty boy... dust, mildew... Aha! No, wait, that's just you... There it is -- no -- yes..."

Endora looked up, her eyes fixed and shining, her nostrils flaring. For a moment her expression frightened Sadie. Then she grinned, looked Sadie's veil in the eye, and said: "Now I believe I can find him blindfolded."

"Is he fair away?"

"Oh, yes," said Endora, pulling a sleep mask out of her hat (where she kept it, seemingly, to be prepared for an all-nighter in the laboratory). "Why don't you go and nick those brooms for us, eh? I'll close up here, circulate the word about not opening any mail, and..."

Sadie was already gone. Twelve minutes later she appeared again with a broom over each shoulder. "You'll never belie where I founded this Cleanswipe 6," she chirped. "Some burger was swapping the stairs with it!"

"Language," Endora said absently as she pinned a hat with a motor-veil into her hair. With her the veil was not so much for disguise, as to protect her valuable scent organ. "I'm ready to go. In fact, while you were out, I had time to dig something useful out of my research on this algorithm problem."

"Wait's that?" Sadie asked as Endora led her upstairs toward the roof.

"Just an idea Ernest the Inscrutable left in his notes."

"Eh?" Sadie shook her head. "Wasn't he that gizzard who went gogo over the member 42?"

"Oh, no. He proved that 42 has magical properties. Only, he never found out what they were."

"And wasp," Sadie asked as they emerged onto the roof, "are you going to dupe with a broody number?"

"I'm going to use it to tie up Mr. Shore in red tape," said Endora, brandishing the Ministry report. "Only this time, he won't get out. Not once we use his seal -- "

"Impala's seal," Sadie corrected.

"-- Ilona's seal," Endora agreed, "over instructions not to open the report until the 42nd of May."

Sadie winced.

"What?"

"Remind me," she said, "newer to get up your knob. Er, news..."

"Olfactory organ," Endora hinted.

Sadie nodded grimly, but her gesture went unnoticed because Endora had already donned her sleep mask and leapt off the rooftop. Charming her broom to stay close to Endora's, Sadie followed her into the swift, rushing air.

+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGES FOR TMQ #161 & 162 +++

You can help decide what happens next in The Magic Quill! Simply leave a brief comment answering the following Surveys and Contests. The survey answers with the most votes, and the contest answers that Robbie likes best, will turn up in the next two chapters!

SURVEY FOR TMQ #161: What gift from way back in Chapter 141 should Merlin use next? (A) Karl's survival satchel. (B) Some of Anatoly's defensive tattoos. (C) Another dose of Endora's Liquid Skill. (D) Subito's Turbo Gum. (E) Boccachiusa's Peekaboo Kit.

CONTEST FOR TMQ #161: Suggest an experiment a wizard might do, toward bending a particular law of nature.

SURVEY FOR TMQ #162: Funny thing about Ilona... In Chapter 155, she was hypnotized by Lee Shore. But then she turns up in Chapter 159, right as rain. How would you explain this? (A) Ilona-155 is an imposter. (B) Ilona-159 is an imposter. (C) The events of Chapter 159 take place some time after Endora & Sadie (presumably) save the world from Lee Shore. (D) Somehow, by magic, Ilona has managed to be in two different places at one time. (E) Other suggestions welcome.

CONTEXT FOR TMQ #162: Describe a special step or move that a well-trained wizard might use in hand-to-hand combat.