Contest co-winners: Dragonic and greyniffler
Spanky, Ilona, and Lionel Niblet marched in single file with their hands tied behind their backs. Behind them walked Minimilian, Hugo, Allie O'Modo, and a considerable following of henchwitches and -wizards, all abristle with wands and under orders to curse the prisoners at the first sign of resistance. Behind and below them lay the wooded valley with the mercenary camp and its outlying magical orchards. Above and ahead, the trees thinned toward a bare ridge that hid the gnome proving ground on its far side.
"It was very clever of you," pontificated Allie O'Modo, "to turn the tables on us so. Too bad for you, we turned them back . And when you turned the tables on us a second time, we turned them back again. It only shows that the side with the better preparedness has a right..."
"Seeds away!" cackled a voice from above. Captors and captives alike ducked as a broom rushed close overhead. The flyover was followed by a hailstorm of hard little seeds that instantly took root, even on this rocky slope, and began to shoot up at an eye-boggling rate.
While Allie O'Modo struggled to free her feet from the roots of a rapidly-growing yew seedling, Minimilian frantically searched the skies. "Drubbins! Goonsworth! Stop the prisoners getting away! Everyone else, bring down that broom!"
His instructions were too late to stop their attacker's second, shrieking pass. More seeds rained down, pinching and biting any flesh they encountered before reaching the ground. Minimilian howled with red-faced fury, looking more than ever like a spoiled child.
"Patience, love," Allie murmured after finally wrenching her boot free of the plant's roots. Already their party was surrounded by the walls of a waist-high yew maze. Several of their co-conspirators were getting tangled in the branches as they tried to wade through to their escaping prisoners. "Grimly, go with Drubbins and Goonsworth. Track our guests through the maze. Keep a wall to your right hand at all times. Don't get split up. The rest of you" - her speech was interrupted by another low sweep by their yipping assailant - "keep your eye on that broom!"
This time the overflight was followed by a rain of broken glass. Everyone cowered under their robes to avoid getting a faceful of jagged slivers. By the time they looked up, O'Modo's people had lost visual contact with their broom-mounted attacker.
"I never," Hugo breathed, as he observed what happened to the glass shards that reached the ground. For they, too, had started to spring up like plants, at a speed only magic could induce. The rising stalks were surrounded by a spiral staircase of leaves, thin and delicate to the point of translucency, and variegated like little stained-glass windows. As the stalks grew higher they wove themselves into the mesh of yew branches that, by now, formed a continuous shoulder-high hedge within and around the maze. Tiny buds swelled on the stained-glass vines, burst open, and unfurled shiny flowers whose clear, glassy gloss was backed by a silvery sheen. Mirror blossoms! "I absolutely never," said Hugo.
"You'd better start, then," snapped Allie O'Modo. "Hasn't anyone spotted that broom yet?"
It became harder to track the trajectory of broom flyover as the yew hedge passed the height of their heads; harder still when the next two passes came, in short succession, from quite different directions, suggesting that they had at least two aerial enemies to aim at; hardest of all when each broom sprayed them with a green, glittery gas, leaving them sneezing and waving the fog out of their faces.
"We have to get out of this maze," Minimilian shouted.
"Nonsense," said Allie. "It's cover, isn't it? Out in the open, they could hit us with anything!"
"Out in the open," snarled Minimilian, "we might be able to hit them."
"All right, then," Allie O'Modo relented. "You take Mugwump, Skink, and McCurdle and try to find a way out. The others will stay with me and try to shoot them down from in here. Oh, yes - and I would suggest that you all put on your safety-pins..."
"Right you are," said Hugo, pulling an ugly brooch out of his pocket (decorated with the skull of a small snake) and pinning it to his robes. The other members of Allie's squad did the same. "Now let's see those blighters try to curse us," Hugo added.
They saw the very thing Hugo wished for soon afterward, when Sir Lionel darted out of an unguarded gap in the hedge and aimed a jinx at Allie O'Modo's head. He immediately cried out and dropped his wand, or rather Drubbins's wand (but that's a long story), clutched his arm, and fell back out of range of the answering volley of curses.
"Crumple-horned snorkacks!" Sir Lionel swore, chafing his wand arm. Luckily Ilona, just behind him, had retrieved his wand with a quick summoning spell. "Spanky, old chap, don't jinx them! They've done something to make spells rebound!"
Spanky adjusted his tactics by aiming his spells at one of the mirror blossoms, in which he could see a reflection of one of Allie's henchwizards around the corner. Whatever spell he was firing at the wizard, it missed the first two times. Then he got the refraction angle just right... and the mirror shattered.
"Blimey," said Spanky.
"I think we should fall back," said Lionel.
They were all thinking the same thing. They could do nothing, at present, to resist their enemy's counterattack. Without another word they scrambled through the twisting and turning maze.
Now and then Ilona cut a blaze in the yew hedge, whose growth had stopped at a height of fourteen feet. Most of the time she did this as a reminder of where they had been in the tricky maze. Sometimes, however, she paused a beat longer - gauging the available time by the sounds of pursuit behind them - to create a booby trap. The pursuers, after all, were bound to stay on their trail, for the blazes would help them as well. Ilona smirked when, now and then, a dismayed yell indicated that a henchwizard had run into a snare, a concealed pit, or a barrier of fallen limbs and clutching vines.
Screams came, from time to time, from another direction. Spanky's party headed toward them, wondering whether they were running to rescue or more danger. He would have grinned if he had known that some of the screams resulted from a pot of very aggressive snapdragons, bred by Miles O'Roughage and borrowed for the occasion by his friend Sadie. In another case, the screams came from a witch who had failed to catch an eggshell full of Tickle Tonic thrown at her by Endora as her broom swooped low overhead.
"Their safety-pins must be running low on charge," Spanky speculated as the shouts and cries multiplied from both directions.
"We must be running out of maze," Sir Lionel added.
Instead, as they rounded the next corner, they came to a dead end.
"This can't be right," Ilona whispered.
"Oh, yes," said a tight, stiff-jawed voice behind them.
The three escaped prisoners turned as one and faced Allie O'Modo, who stood in the middle of their only way out of this bottleneck. Her chest heaved. Her face was disfigured, as much by fury as by the whiplash-marks left by one of Ilona's booby traps. She raised her wand.
Spanky's right hand was faster. "Expelliarmus!" he barked. But the spell rebounded in a flash of light, and the wand dropped out of his numb fingers.
"I've got enough safety-pins to block a few more curses," Allie laughed bitterly. Indeed, her robes sparkled with a multitude of tiny green gems, each individually hooked through the wool. She raised her wand again. "It's time for you to say your last words."
"Ow," Spanky said, massaging his elbow.
"It's not much to remember you by," said Allie O'Modo with an insane grin, "but I'll take it."
"Expelliarmus!" Spanky yelled.
Ilona couldn't believe he would try that again. Her head whipped around in time to see that he had aimed the jinx at himself, with his left wand held out at arm's length. The wand shot straight out of his hand and jabbed Allie in the eye.
"Ow!" she screamed - taking Spanky's last words, as promised.
Before she could recover from her stumbling, face-clutching agony, Ilona brought her facedown with her hands hiked up between her shoulderblades.
"Ow, ow, ow," Allie O'Modo insisted feebly.
"I believe you," said Ilona, kneeling on Allie's thighs.
Sir Lionel clapped Spanky on the back and crowed, "Well shot, my lad!" Meanwhile, two brooms darkened the sun for a moment, before their riders dropped into the maze beyond Ilona and her prisoner.
Spanky stared with joy at one witch with a veil covering half of her face, and another wearing a fake nose and glasses (complete with a curly mustache). "I can hardly imagine two faces I would be happier to see," he said.
"Well, you'll be happier to see this," said Endora. She held up her left hand, where the signet ring of Count Matthias shared a finger with her wedding ring.
Ilona gasped. "Where did you...!"
"The bad news," said Sadie, "is that Lee Shore, Il Comte, and Aunt or Uncle Leslie have all put spells on this ring. Endora can't get it off her hand. Since she used the ring to undo what Lee Shore was using it for, they know exactly where she is. I reckon we'll have some company in about..." Sadie checked a pocket watch she had nicked on her way out of the Ministry of Magic. "Right now, actually."
Another flight of brooms threw its shadow over them. Three pairs of feet touched down in the blind alley behind Sir Lionel and Spanky.
They all turned to face the latest arrivals.
"You were half right," said their old friend Harvey.
"It was only the names you got wrong," added Harvey's identical twin.
"I'll have that ring now, if you please," said their third visitor, smiling as Spanky's jaw dropped.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #164 +++
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: Who is the third member of Harvey 1 & Harvey 2's party? (A) Harvey 3. (B) Robertus Magnus. (C) The real Sir Lionel Niblet. (D) Joe Albuquerque. (E) Orion Oldmanson. (F) Tip, formerly of Nasal Drip. (G) _____ [write-in candidate].
CONTEST: Chose a kind of animal and describe something silly that it could be trained to do, with the aid of magic.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, July 3, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
159. Minimilian Returns
Contest winner: Linda Carrig
As Sir Lionel crept through the mysterious compound, he discovered that it was much larger than he had spotted at first. Clearly, the wizards here were caught up in more than one sinister plan.
Beyond the ring of huts he found a grove of walnut trees playing cricket with their own fallen fruit. Getting through it without being hit by a leathery, walnut-cored ball was quite tricky. Then there was the thicket of ash and yew trees that he found practicing archery, using bows and arrows made out of their own branches; Sir Lionel had to be very careful to avoid becoming a target. He edged nervously around a copse of whomping willows that he found sparring with each other, raining splinters and twigs from every collision of their powerful limbs. At the brink of a stream he encountered another variety of willows whose long, supple branches, trailing in the water, snatched up passing fish now and again. He wondered what they were called, and was trying to decide between "reaping rillows" and "wringing whompers" when he felt a wand-tip touch the back of his neck.
"Hands up slowly," said the wizard behind him. Sir Lionel obeyed, feeling the wand snatched out of his right hand as he did so.
"Turn around." Sir Lionel turned around. He ended up facing the same direction. The other man clicked his tongue with exasperation and said, "This time turn half-way around." This gave them the ability to look at each other. Sir Lionel wasn't much to look at after weeks of survival in the bush. The other man wasn't much prettier. Short, stocky, squash-nosed and lantern-jawed, he had hardly any neck and, by way of compensation, one enormous eyebrow. The eyes beneath it bulged suspiciously. "Keep it shut," he growled. "Wouldn't want to warn whoever is with you."
"No one is..."
"Who sent you?" the ugly wizard barked.
"Sent me?" Sir Lionel was on the point of telling the truth -- that he was there by pure chance, that his broom had elected to crash on the way to somewhere else -- when he realized that he needed a bargaining chip. Someone who would be coming after him if he didn't report. So he used his hesitation to look shifty and inventive when he replied, "No one sent me. My broom just crashed over that ridge..."
"Very likely," sneered the other. "Only question is, are you one of them RMB blokes, or did the competition send you? Eh?"
"I'd rather not say," was all Sir Lionel dared to improvise.
"Oh! It's like that, is it?" The stocky wizard brandished his wand threateningly. "We'll soon have the whole truth out of you, won't we? Now, turn around and march!" A moment later: "Oof! I meant turn half-way around!"
As his captor barked instructions from behind, Sir Lionel began to wonder how he could possibly get out of this tight spot. Then another voice hissed: "Stop! Hands up!"
"I already have my hands up," Sir Lionel sang over his shoulder.
"I meant the other one," the new voice said gruffly. "Now shut it, both of you, and turn slowly to face me..."
Since his former captor was looking the other way, he did not happen to see Sir Lionel's momentary look of joyful recognition. The tall figure holding them both at wand point was cloaked from head to foot, his face in shadow, his physique hidden by the loose fit of his dark cloak. He held two wands in each hand, all of them pointed at the man in the middle. He could be no one, Sir Lionel realized, but Spanky Spankison.
"Just try it," Spanky growled with all the menace of an approaching tempest. The other man left off trying to dig a throwing-knife out of an ankle sheath with his foot. The thick shoulders bunched and writhed. Sir Lionel was privately glad he didn't have to look at those enormous jaws grinding and gnashing.
"How many wands defend this place?" Spanky demanded. "Speak quickly!"
"I've got nothing to say," said the other wizard.
"Don't make me use these," said Spanky, waving the wands in his left hand threateningly.
"If you're RMB," said lantern-jaw, "there are rules. You can't torture me."
"That's a big if," said Spanky. Then he loosed a spell at his prisoner's right foot.
The man howled, more in terror than in pain, then looked down and howled again. "Yow-how-how-how dare you!"
Sir Lionel, who by now had joined Spanky and retrieved his wand, saw that their prisoner was suddenly mincing up and down in open-toed high heels, with painted toenails and all. The effect wasn't very lovely, given the man's hairy legs and the coarseness of his feet.
"Answer my questions," said Spanky, "or you'll be wearing a dress that goes with those shoes."
The prisoner stopped fidgeting and said, with a sudden coolness that chilled Sir Lionel's blood, "All right, ask away."
"Behind us," Spanky hissed out of the side of his mouth.
Sir Lionel wheeled around to look, but not fast enough to stop the disarming spell that blasted the wand out of his grip.
"Er, sorry, old boy," said Sir Lionel, addressing Spanky, though he was facing another short man he had never seen before. This one, however, was as sleek and handsome as their former prisoner was not.
"Give me their wands, Hugo," the genteel captor said in an almost beautiful voice. He shot a saintly smile at Sir Lionel, a smile that seemed to say that everyone was mistaken about who were the bad guys and who the good. "Ah! As I live and breathe, Mr. Spankison! I never dreamed of meeting you again."
"Nor I you," said Spanky, turning himself around. "Still got all your limbs, Minimilian? I was sure that hag would have eaten at least part of you. Well! It's an imperfect world!"
"We're in agreement to that extent," smiled Minimilian.
"What miserable scheme are you nursing now?" Spanky jerked his head toward the compound.
"Just business," said Minimilian, as cheerfully as ever. "Now, gentlemen, about face and march!"
For a few moments, they marched in silence through orchards of dodge-ball apple trees and groves of lemon trees that kept trying to squirt lemon juice at them. The only sound other than the rustle of leaves and the thump of hard apples against tree trunks was Minimilian's whistling. Sir Lionel recognized the tune: "Hex today goodbye, Portkey to tomorrow..."
"Business!" Spanky snorted, interrupting the tune. "Selling weaponized, magical creatures and plants? You must be hoarding the money for some big gesture, some..."
"Surely you don't expect me to confide in you?" Minimilian's laugh was like the jingling of little bells. "You seem to have me confused with an evil genius. You know the type, always explaining their dastardly plans, so that the hero can escape and put a stop to them. I'm not as clever as that. I'm just a reasonably shrewd businessman, and I'll keep my plans to myself, thank you."
"No: thank you," said another unexpected voice from behind Minimilian.
They all stopped marching.
"Hugo," said Minimilian, with a barely detectible edge of irritation in his voice, "I was hoping you might have covered our backs."
"Don't blame Hugo," said the female voice. "He's tied up, stunned, and gagged a couple orchards back."
"Is it finally my pleasure to meet the elusive Ilona Ilonera?" Minimilian turned around slowly, his hands up and disarmed. "Ah! As lovely as I had imagined!"
"I would prefer," said Ilona, aiming her wand steadily at the spot between Minimilian's wide, innocent eyes, "that you would just shut up."
"As you wish," he murmured sweetly.
Spanky rolled his eyes, though under the hood of his cloak they could not be seen. "Shall we tie him up and carry him?"
"I don't know," said Ilona. "I think I saw a colony of red ants on the way here. Perhaps we could just stake him down beside it..."
Hearing this, Minimilian beamed with satisfaction. He seemed to take it as a personal success when his enemies turned as evil as himself.
"...but I reckon we'd better just portkey him to the nearest RMB field-office for booking."
"It's up to you, dear," said Spanky.
Ilona sighed, then with her free hand began to rummage in the pockets of her robes. She finally brought out a greasy bicycle chain, which she placed around Minimilian's neck.
"I say," the little cherub squeaked uncomfortably. "I'll be sending you my cleaning bill."
"Do," said Ilona, with an equally angelic simper. "And now: three... two... "
"Hold that thought," snapped another feminine voice.
Ilona threw down all the wands in her hand with a strangled roar. Spanky and Sir Lionel put their hands up again as half a dozen figures emerged from the shadows of the juggling oaks, which immediately resumed playing a noisy game of hackey-sack with hundreds of acorns. The woman leading this squad of guards approached Minimilian with an air of disgusted authority. Minimilian, looking as innocent as ever, lowered his eyes before her -- not in embarrassment, but in deference.
"You really must stop letting these people get the best of you," the woman said with a voice like the crack of a whip. Her red-black hair swayed down her back in a thick, tight braid. Her dark eyes flashed under upswept brows.
"I led them here, didn't I?" Minimilian shrugged. "I knew you would take control again."
Spanky and Ilona exchanged confused looks. Or rather, Ilona exchanged one with the shadows under Spanky's hood. Sir Lionel, reading her expression, knew they had expected Minimilian to be the man in charge.
The woman tied the three prisoners together and walked around them several times, eyeing them appraisingly. She didn't seem to need a wand, with seven -- make that eight, as Hugo emerged from the trees rubbing his head -- henchmen holding her prisoners at bay. Finally she said, "It's a pity we can't just kill them and throw their bodies to Audrey Four. But you know they'll have filed a mission plan with the RMB. Someone is sure to come looking for them. So what shall we do?"
"Hold them for ransom," suggested Hugo.
"Wipe their memories," suggested Minimilian.
The woman looked disgusted at the first suggestion, intrigued by the second. But she shook her head. "I'm leaning toward killing them anyway," she said. "Only, we can lay a false trail to the crash site in the next valley. Maybe scatter a few gnawed bones, make it look as though they died of crash-related injuries..."
"There will be a letter in the Daily Prophet about this," Sir Lionel blurted. "Take that woman's name, son."
"The name," said the woman, fixing Sir Lionel with a defiant stare, "which won't be any use to you, is O'Modo. Allie O'Modo. Now tell me, how can you write a letter when you're already dead?"
"The question you should ask," said Spanky, "is: How can you kill us so that it doesn't look like foul play?"
"How kind of you to redirect my thinking," said Allie O'Modo. "That's easy enough, though. I've been meaning to turn my pet garden-gnomes out into the next valley... for some exercise..."
Hugo laughed and clapped his hands. "At last," he said. "A live test!"
+++ SURVEY FOR TMQ #161 +++
Participation in The Magic Quill has gone down dramatically in the past several months. What do you think we should do? (A) Keep it going for at least ___ more chapters, and see if more readers contribute to the comments. (B) Tie up as many loose ends as possible within the next 4-5 chapters, and then bring it to an end. (C) Leave the loose ends hanging, and end it now because it's already too far gone.
Leave your response to this survey in the Comments. If you haven't left a comment before, please take the time and effort to do so -- especially if you would like to see TMQ continue. A little encouragement may fuel Robbie's creativity for a long time. And nothing would be more encouraging than knowing that the Magic Quill matters to more than 5 or 6 people!
As Sir Lionel crept through the mysterious compound, he discovered that it was much larger than he had spotted at first. Clearly, the wizards here were caught up in more than one sinister plan.
Beyond the ring of huts he found a grove of walnut trees playing cricket with their own fallen fruit. Getting through it without being hit by a leathery, walnut-cored ball was quite tricky. Then there was the thicket of ash and yew trees that he found practicing archery, using bows and arrows made out of their own branches; Sir Lionel had to be very careful to avoid becoming a target. He edged nervously around a copse of whomping willows that he found sparring with each other, raining splinters and twigs from every collision of their powerful limbs. At the brink of a stream he encountered another variety of willows whose long, supple branches, trailing in the water, snatched up passing fish now and again. He wondered what they were called, and was trying to decide between "reaping rillows" and "wringing whompers" when he felt a wand-tip touch the back of his neck.
"Hands up slowly," said the wizard behind him. Sir Lionel obeyed, feeling the wand snatched out of his right hand as he did so.
"Turn around." Sir Lionel turned around. He ended up facing the same direction. The other man clicked his tongue with exasperation and said, "This time turn half-way around." This gave them the ability to look at each other. Sir Lionel wasn't much to look at after weeks of survival in the bush. The other man wasn't much prettier. Short, stocky, squash-nosed and lantern-jawed, he had hardly any neck and, by way of compensation, one enormous eyebrow. The eyes beneath it bulged suspiciously. "Keep it shut," he growled. "Wouldn't want to warn whoever is with you."
"No one is..."
"Who sent you?" the ugly wizard barked.
"Sent me?" Sir Lionel was on the point of telling the truth -- that he was there by pure chance, that his broom had elected to crash on the way to somewhere else -- when he realized that he needed a bargaining chip. Someone who would be coming after him if he didn't report. So he used his hesitation to look shifty and inventive when he replied, "No one sent me. My broom just crashed over that ridge..."
"Very likely," sneered the other. "Only question is, are you one of them RMB blokes, or did the competition send you? Eh?"
"I'd rather not say," was all Sir Lionel dared to improvise.
"Oh! It's like that, is it?" The stocky wizard brandished his wand threateningly. "We'll soon have the whole truth out of you, won't we? Now, turn around and march!" A moment later: "Oof! I meant turn half-way around!"
As his captor barked instructions from behind, Sir Lionel began to wonder how he could possibly get out of this tight spot. Then another voice hissed: "Stop! Hands up!"
"I already have my hands up," Sir Lionel sang over his shoulder.
"I meant the other one," the new voice said gruffly. "Now shut it, both of you, and turn slowly to face me..."
Since his former captor was looking the other way, he did not happen to see Sir Lionel's momentary look of joyful recognition. The tall figure holding them both at wand point was cloaked from head to foot, his face in shadow, his physique hidden by the loose fit of his dark cloak. He held two wands in each hand, all of them pointed at the man in the middle. He could be no one, Sir Lionel realized, but Spanky Spankison.
"Just try it," Spanky growled with all the menace of an approaching tempest. The other man left off trying to dig a throwing-knife out of an ankle sheath with his foot. The thick shoulders bunched and writhed. Sir Lionel was privately glad he didn't have to look at those enormous jaws grinding and gnashing.
"How many wands defend this place?" Spanky demanded. "Speak quickly!"
"I've got nothing to say," said the other wizard.
"Don't make me use these," said Spanky, waving the wands in his left hand threateningly.
"If you're RMB," said lantern-jaw, "there are rules. You can't torture me."
"That's a big if," said Spanky. Then he loosed a spell at his prisoner's right foot.
The man howled, more in terror than in pain, then looked down and howled again. "Yow-how-how-how dare you!"
Sir Lionel, who by now had joined Spanky and retrieved his wand, saw that their prisoner was suddenly mincing up and down in open-toed high heels, with painted toenails and all. The effect wasn't very lovely, given the man's hairy legs and the coarseness of his feet.
"Answer my questions," said Spanky, "or you'll be wearing a dress that goes with those shoes."
The prisoner stopped fidgeting and said, with a sudden coolness that chilled Sir Lionel's blood, "All right, ask away."
"Behind us," Spanky hissed out of the side of his mouth.
Sir Lionel wheeled around to look, but not fast enough to stop the disarming spell that blasted the wand out of his grip.
"Er, sorry, old boy," said Sir Lionel, addressing Spanky, though he was facing another short man he had never seen before. This one, however, was as sleek and handsome as their former prisoner was not.
"Give me their wands, Hugo," the genteel captor said in an almost beautiful voice. He shot a saintly smile at Sir Lionel, a smile that seemed to say that everyone was mistaken about who were the bad guys and who the good. "Ah! As I live and breathe, Mr. Spankison! I never dreamed of meeting you again."
"Nor I you," said Spanky, turning himself around. "Still got all your limbs, Minimilian? I was sure that hag would have eaten at least part of you. Well! It's an imperfect world!"
"We're in agreement to that extent," smiled Minimilian.
"What miserable scheme are you nursing now?" Spanky jerked his head toward the compound.
"Just business," said Minimilian, as cheerfully as ever. "Now, gentlemen, about face and march!"
For a few moments, they marched in silence through orchards of dodge-ball apple trees and groves of lemon trees that kept trying to squirt lemon juice at them. The only sound other than the rustle of leaves and the thump of hard apples against tree trunks was Minimilian's whistling. Sir Lionel recognized the tune: "Hex today goodbye, Portkey to tomorrow..."
"Business!" Spanky snorted, interrupting the tune. "Selling weaponized, magical creatures and plants? You must be hoarding the money for some big gesture, some..."
"Surely you don't expect me to confide in you?" Minimilian's laugh was like the jingling of little bells. "You seem to have me confused with an evil genius. You know the type, always explaining their dastardly plans, so that the hero can escape and put a stop to them. I'm not as clever as that. I'm just a reasonably shrewd businessman, and I'll keep my plans to myself, thank you."
"No: thank you," said another unexpected voice from behind Minimilian.
They all stopped marching.
"Hugo," said Minimilian, with a barely detectible edge of irritation in his voice, "I was hoping you might have covered our backs."
"Don't blame Hugo," said the female voice. "He's tied up, stunned, and gagged a couple orchards back."
"Is it finally my pleasure to meet the elusive Ilona Ilonera?" Minimilian turned around slowly, his hands up and disarmed. "Ah! As lovely as I had imagined!"
"I would prefer," said Ilona, aiming her wand steadily at the spot between Minimilian's wide, innocent eyes, "that you would just shut up."
"As you wish," he murmured sweetly.
Spanky rolled his eyes, though under the hood of his cloak they could not be seen. "Shall we tie him up and carry him?"
"I don't know," said Ilona. "I think I saw a colony of red ants on the way here. Perhaps we could just stake him down beside it..."
Hearing this, Minimilian beamed with satisfaction. He seemed to take it as a personal success when his enemies turned as evil as himself.
"...but I reckon we'd better just portkey him to the nearest RMB field-office for booking."
"It's up to you, dear," said Spanky.
Ilona sighed, then with her free hand began to rummage in the pockets of her robes. She finally brought out a greasy bicycle chain, which she placed around Minimilian's neck.
"I say," the little cherub squeaked uncomfortably. "I'll be sending you my cleaning bill."
"Do," said Ilona, with an equally angelic simper. "And now: three... two... "
"Hold that thought," snapped another feminine voice.
Ilona threw down all the wands in her hand with a strangled roar. Spanky and Sir Lionel put their hands up again as half a dozen figures emerged from the shadows of the juggling oaks, which immediately resumed playing a noisy game of hackey-sack with hundreds of acorns. The woman leading this squad of guards approached Minimilian with an air of disgusted authority. Minimilian, looking as innocent as ever, lowered his eyes before her -- not in embarrassment, but in deference.
"You really must stop letting these people get the best of you," the woman said with a voice like the crack of a whip. Her red-black hair swayed down her back in a thick, tight braid. Her dark eyes flashed under upswept brows.
"I led them here, didn't I?" Minimilian shrugged. "I knew you would take control again."
Spanky and Ilona exchanged confused looks. Or rather, Ilona exchanged one with the shadows under Spanky's hood. Sir Lionel, reading her expression, knew they had expected Minimilian to be the man in charge.
The woman tied the three prisoners together and walked around them several times, eyeing them appraisingly. She didn't seem to need a wand, with seven -- make that eight, as Hugo emerged from the trees rubbing his head -- henchmen holding her prisoners at bay. Finally she said, "It's a pity we can't just kill them and throw their bodies to Audrey Four. But you know they'll have filed a mission plan with the RMB. Someone is sure to come looking for them. So what shall we do?"
"Hold them for ransom," suggested Hugo.
"Wipe their memories," suggested Minimilian.
The woman looked disgusted at the first suggestion, intrigued by the second. But she shook her head. "I'm leaning toward killing them anyway," she said. "Only, we can lay a false trail to the crash site in the next valley. Maybe scatter a few gnawed bones, make it look as though they died of crash-related injuries..."
"There will be a letter in the Daily Prophet about this," Sir Lionel blurted. "Take that woman's name, son."
"The name," said the woman, fixing Sir Lionel with a defiant stare, "which won't be any use to you, is O'Modo. Allie O'Modo. Now tell me, how can you write a letter when you're already dead?"
"The question you should ask," said Spanky, "is: How can you kill us so that it doesn't look like foul play?"
"How kind of you to redirect my thinking," said Allie O'Modo. "That's easy enough, though. I've been meaning to turn my pet garden-gnomes out into the next valley... for some exercise..."
Hugo laughed and clapped his hands. "At last," he said. "A live test!"
+++ SURVEY FOR TMQ #161 +++
Participation in The Magic Quill has gone down dramatically in the past several months. What do you think we should do? (A) Keep it going for at least ___ more chapters, and see if more readers contribute to the comments. (B) Tie up as many loose ends as possible within the next 4-5 chapters, and then bring it to an end. (C) Leave the loose ends hanging, and end it now because it's already too far gone.
Leave your response to this survey in the Comments. If you haven't left a comment before, please take the time and effort to do so -- especially if you would like to see TMQ continue. A little encouragement may fuel Robbie's creativity for a long time. And nothing would be more encouraging than knowing that the Magic Quill matters to more than 5 or 6 people!
Thursday, June 4, 2009
158. History of Magic
Contest winner: Dragonic
Runners-up: greyniffler, Linda, Rehannah, TWZRD, & Evensong
with apologies to Pamela Dean and Roald Dahl
In a hut of mud-caulked timber, in a compound full of similar huts, in a remote valley, a door opened and closed as if by itself. As a school lesson was going on in that hut, the teacher halted her lecture on magical inventions to look round at the door, but she saw nothing to explain the event. She looked narrowly at the children before her, studying them for signs that one of them was playing a joke with, say, a wand under the desk. Seven young faces looked up at her, as surprised and alarmed as she was.
"Never mind," she shrugged. She resumed pacing up and down in front of her students. "Let's check what you've learned now. Patrick, who do you think was the greatest wizard inventor?"
The youngest of the three boys flashed a crooked smile and said, "I'm after sayin' it were Bertrand the Bibulous."
The teacher composed her face to a long-suffering expression and asked, "And how did Wizard Bertrand make our world better?"
"Why, by inventing the cure for hangover, sure."
The other children fell over each other laughing. Patrick gazed steadily into the teacher's face with a look of absolute sincerity, while the latter turned her eyes toward heaven. For a few moments, no one was looking at the teacher's desk. And so no one saw a bruised, dirty hand reach up from behind the desk and pinch the shiny apple that stood there.
"I wonder if that invention really made the world a better place," the teacher said primly, as soon as the room was quiet enough.
"It does for me da," Patrick blurted, to the great delight of his friends.
"And how brave of Bertrand, to keep experimenting on himself until he hit upon the right spell," added one of the older boys. "He must have endured a lot of rough mornings..."
The children's roar of laughter just covered the muffled munching sounds behind the teacher's desk.
"Since Edward is so eager to give us his thoughts," the teacher trilled, as the class came to order again, "the next question will go to him. Who invented Floo Powder, and how was it originally used?"
Edward stammered for a few moments. Casting around for anything to say, he caught the eye of a girl on the other side of the room, who made an odd gesture with one finger pointing upward behind her head. His eyes brightened. Before the teacher could look round to see who was helping him, Edward recited: "A Lakota medicine wizard named Red Smoke is said to have compounded the first recipe for Floo Powder. Originally it was meant to make smoke signals secure from enemy spies. You would throw the powder into the flames and say someone's name. Then, until the spell ended, your smoke signals would appear in that person's fire. The idea of sending anything but smoke didn't come until the Lakota shared their secrets with a white wizard called Gorse."
"Excellent work, Edward," said the teacher, who had been too engrossed in the young man's performance to notice the soft thump her coffee mug made when the strange hand returned it, empty, to the top of her desk. "Now, Ruth, perhaps you can tell me who wrote the first witches' cookbook, and how useful it is."
The tallest girl, who happened to have signaled to Edward before, gave a pained smile. "The witch was known as Cauldron Kate, and the trouble with her book is that she doesn't quite separate the magical potions from the spells to cook food. Many of her recipes have magical side effects, like when her cabbage rolls make you grow asses' ears."
The children tittered. Ruth looked embarrassed. She seemed to resent being asked questions about domestic arts, when she cared rather more about Red Smoke and his type of wizards. The teacher took no more notice of this than of the quill and inkwell disappearing off her desk.
"Ellen," the teacher said, starling a much younger girl out of a daydream, "tell us about the witch or wizard who invented Veritaserum."
"Her name was Samirah al Haqq," said Ellen, stifling a yawn. "She was the first female Court Wizard, or rather Court Witch, of the Sultan of, er..."
"The correct pronunciation is Ur," the teacher hinted.
"Exactly," Ellen said cheerfully. "She was also the court historian, treasurer, and royal torturer. The Sultan of Ur was a bit of a cheapskate, so he liked to combine different jobs like that."
"Ellen," the teacher growled warningly as the other children giggled. The mysterious hand behind the desk took advantage of this disturbance to nick a roll of parchment.
The girl rolled her eyes. "No one would talk to her because she was a woman," she added. "It didn't look like she was going to last long in her job as royal historian, so she messed around with potion ingredients until she came up with Veritaserum, and that saved her. It also..."
"That's fine," said the teacher. "Let's move on. Laura - "
A girl about Ellen's age started nervously, knocking her inkwell off her desk. The teacher, used to this sort of thing, saved it from smashing on the floor with a levitation spell and charmed it back onto the desk. Suppressing a sigh, she continued: "Laura, what became of Gertrude the Grotesque?"
In an almost inaudible voice, Laura reported that Gertrude had invented a variety of potions and glamors to keep herself looking young and beautiful long past the usual best-by date; but that, in a moment of rare clumsiness, she had accidentally turned herself so ugly that anyone who saw her went mad. The Wizengamot had sent three blind wizards who used their exceptional senses of smell, hearing, and irony to discover Gertrude's hiding place. Once captured, she was imprisoned in a hall of mirrors, where her screams, or the screams of her ghost, could be heard from that day to this.
Laura shivered at the end of this tale. For a moment, the whole school room was so still that the stranger's hand froze in place above a pot of Floo Powder on the teacher's desk. Then a weak, nervous laugh spread through the room like ripples in a puddle, and with a quick dusty snatch the hand disappeared again.
"Matilda," the teacher barked at a small girl who was concentrating on levitating a newt out of its aquarium, using neither a wand nor a spoken spell. The girl sat up straighter and gave the teacher a look of perfect innocence. "Tell us," said the teacher, "how the modern wand was invented."
"Wizards had always used forked sticks, greenwood rods, unicorn tailhairs, and so on," said Matilda. "By themselves, they didn't really do much. The first real wand, with a dragon-heartstring core, was made by Po the Polisher, a wizard in the army of the first Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. His wand made him so deadly in battle that all the other army wizards soon wanted them. Po ended up making wands full-time, and his experiments led him to discover nine of the eleven fundamental charms of wandmaking."
"Excellent as usual, Matilda. And that leaves..." The teacher squinted up and down the row of children facing her, then snapped her fingers and said: "George!"
A boy with a dirty nose and stained fingers said, "What?" without looking up from the picture he was drawing on a loose piece of parchment.
Failing to stifle her sigh this time, the teacher gave up on getting George's undivided attention and simply said, "Tell us about an inventor, will you?"
"Tylenenkhamen," said George, without looking up.
"What about him?"
"Invented wizard medicine," George grunted. Meanwhile, he continued to scribble.
"And?"
"And his potion to cure headaches wasn't used for four thousand years because it was mixed up with a recipe for embalming fluid," the boy added. "Preserving the dead was a much bigger business in ancient Egypt than curing headaches. Healing magic had to be re-invented several times before it caught on, thanks to Healer Koscrates of Hippo. But my Great-Uncle Ambrosiaster, who was a curse-breaker for Gringotts, found Tylenenkhamen's recipe and tried it."
"How did it work?" said Edward.
"He died," shrugged George. "But you can't expect success on the first go, can you? His ancient Egyptian was lousy anyway. Recipe probably would have worked if he'd read it right..."
By this point the class had erupted in its loudest disturbance yet, groans of disgust mingling with screams of laughter. The teacher banged a petrified egg on her desk in a vain attempt to call them back to order. In all this commotion, no one noticed the door opening again and a crouched figure darting out into the compound.
Sir Lionel Niblet kept his head down and scurried from hut to hut, pausing only to make sure the coast was clear before crossing each open space. He finally reached what appeared to be a barrel of burning garbage. Opening a door set in the side of the barrel, he tossed in a handful of Floo Powder, whispering "Spanky Spankison," and thrust a tight roll of parchment after it. The letter vanished in a burst of green flames. Now, Sir Lionel thought as he ducked and weaved toward the treeline, he would just have to wait...
His progress was abruptly halted by an unexpected obstacle. He had run directly into the legs of a tall, heavy-shouldered wizard whose robes had, at first glance, blended into the foliage on the edge of the clearing.
"Here's a juicy surprise," said the man, grabbing Sir Lionel's throat in a steely grip.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #160 +++
Are you still there after Robbie inexplicably took a month off from writing "The Magic Quill"? If so, let him know & send him a word of encouragement. Robbie has been working a lot on "The Book Trolley" lately. You may see the results soon if you keep watching MuggleNet for updates. But "The Magic Quill" has a lot of life left in it, too. So, don't just lurk and read! 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. Also, introduce a friend to "The Magic Quill," and get him or her to drop a comment too! [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: How many inches long is Endora's nose?
CONTEST: Describe a number (real or imaginary) that has magical significance.
Runners-up: greyniffler, Linda, Rehannah, TWZRD, & Evensong
with apologies to Pamela Dean and Roald Dahl
In a hut of mud-caulked timber, in a compound full of similar huts, in a remote valley, a door opened and closed as if by itself. As a school lesson was going on in that hut, the teacher halted her lecture on magical inventions to look round at the door, but she saw nothing to explain the event. She looked narrowly at the children before her, studying them for signs that one of them was playing a joke with, say, a wand under the desk. Seven young faces looked up at her, as surprised and alarmed as she was.
"Never mind," she shrugged. She resumed pacing up and down in front of her students. "Let's check what you've learned now. Patrick, who do you think was the greatest wizard inventor?"
The youngest of the three boys flashed a crooked smile and said, "I'm after sayin' it were Bertrand the Bibulous."
The teacher composed her face to a long-suffering expression and asked, "And how did Wizard Bertrand make our world better?"
"Why, by inventing the cure for hangover, sure."
The other children fell over each other laughing. Patrick gazed steadily into the teacher's face with a look of absolute sincerity, while the latter turned her eyes toward heaven. For a few moments, no one was looking at the teacher's desk. And so no one saw a bruised, dirty hand reach up from behind the desk and pinch the shiny apple that stood there.
"I wonder if that invention really made the world a better place," the teacher said primly, as soon as the room was quiet enough.
"It does for me da," Patrick blurted, to the great delight of his friends.
"And how brave of Bertrand, to keep experimenting on himself until he hit upon the right spell," added one of the older boys. "He must have endured a lot of rough mornings..."
The children's roar of laughter just covered the muffled munching sounds behind the teacher's desk.
"Since Edward is so eager to give us his thoughts," the teacher trilled, as the class came to order again, "the next question will go to him. Who invented Floo Powder, and how was it originally used?"
Edward stammered for a few moments. Casting around for anything to say, he caught the eye of a girl on the other side of the room, who made an odd gesture with one finger pointing upward behind her head. His eyes brightened. Before the teacher could look round to see who was helping him, Edward recited: "A Lakota medicine wizard named Red Smoke is said to have compounded the first recipe for Floo Powder. Originally it was meant to make smoke signals secure from enemy spies. You would throw the powder into the flames and say someone's name. Then, until the spell ended, your smoke signals would appear in that person's fire. The idea of sending anything but smoke didn't come until the Lakota shared their secrets with a white wizard called Gorse."
"Excellent work, Edward," said the teacher, who had been too engrossed in the young man's performance to notice the soft thump her coffee mug made when the strange hand returned it, empty, to the top of her desk. "Now, Ruth, perhaps you can tell me who wrote the first witches' cookbook, and how useful it is."
The tallest girl, who happened to have signaled to Edward before, gave a pained smile. "The witch was known as Cauldron Kate, and the trouble with her book is that she doesn't quite separate the magical potions from the spells to cook food. Many of her recipes have magical side effects, like when her cabbage rolls make you grow asses' ears."
The children tittered. Ruth looked embarrassed. She seemed to resent being asked questions about domestic arts, when she cared rather more about Red Smoke and his type of wizards. The teacher took no more notice of this than of the quill and inkwell disappearing off her desk.
"Ellen," the teacher said, starling a much younger girl out of a daydream, "tell us about the witch or wizard who invented Veritaserum."
"Her name was Samirah al Haqq," said Ellen, stifling a yawn. "She was the first female Court Wizard, or rather Court Witch, of the Sultan of, er..."
"The correct pronunciation is Ur," the teacher hinted.
"Exactly," Ellen said cheerfully. "She was also the court historian, treasurer, and royal torturer. The Sultan of Ur was a bit of a cheapskate, so he liked to combine different jobs like that."
"Ellen," the teacher growled warningly as the other children giggled. The mysterious hand behind the desk took advantage of this disturbance to nick a roll of parchment.
The girl rolled her eyes. "No one would talk to her because she was a woman," she added. "It didn't look like she was going to last long in her job as royal historian, so she messed around with potion ingredients until she came up with Veritaserum, and that saved her. It also..."
"That's fine," said the teacher. "Let's move on. Laura - "
A girl about Ellen's age started nervously, knocking her inkwell off her desk. The teacher, used to this sort of thing, saved it from smashing on the floor with a levitation spell and charmed it back onto the desk. Suppressing a sigh, she continued: "Laura, what became of Gertrude the Grotesque?"
In an almost inaudible voice, Laura reported that Gertrude had invented a variety of potions and glamors to keep herself looking young and beautiful long past the usual best-by date; but that, in a moment of rare clumsiness, she had accidentally turned herself so ugly that anyone who saw her went mad. The Wizengamot had sent three blind wizards who used their exceptional senses of smell, hearing, and irony to discover Gertrude's hiding place. Once captured, she was imprisoned in a hall of mirrors, where her screams, or the screams of her ghost, could be heard from that day to this.
Laura shivered at the end of this tale. For a moment, the whole school room was so still that the stranger's hand froze in place above a pot of Floo Powder on the teacher's desk. Then a weak, nervous laugh spread through the room like ripples in a puddle, and with a quick dusty snatch the hand disappeared again.
"Matilda," the teacher barked at a small girl who was concentrating on levitating a newt out of its aquarium, using neither a wand nor a spoken spell. The girl sat up straighter and gave the teacher a look of perfect innocence. "Tell us," said the teacher, "how the modern wand was invented."
"Wizards had always used forked sticks, greenwood rods, unicorn tailhairs, and so on," said Matilda. "By themselves, they didn't really do much. The first real wand, with a dragon-heartstring core, was made by Po the Polisher, a wizard in the army of the first Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. His wand made him so deadly in battle that all the other army wizards soon wanted them. Po ended up making wands full-time, and his experiments led him to discover nine of the eleven fundamental charms of wandmaking."
"Excellent as usual, Matilda. And that leaves..." The teacher squinted up and down the row of children facing her, then snapped her fingers and said: "George!"
A boy with a dirty nose and stained fingers said, "What?" without looking up from the picture he was drawing on a loose piece of parchment.
Failing to stifle her sigh this time, the teacher gave up on getting George's undivided attention and simply said, "Tell us about an inventor, will you?"
"Tylenenkhamen," said George, without looking up.
"What about him?"
"Invented wizard medicine," George grunted. Meanwhile, he continued to scribble.
"And?"
"And his potion to cure headaches wasn't used for four thousand years because it was mixed up with a recipe for embalming fluid," the boy added. "Preserving the dead was a much bigger business in ancient Egypt than curing headaches. Healing magic had to be re-invented several times before it caught on, thanks to Healer Koscrates of Hippo. But my Great-Uncle Ambrosiaster, who was a curse-breaker for Gringotts, found Tylenenkhamen's recipe and tried it."
"How did it work?" said Edward.
"He died," shrugged George. "But you can't expect success on the first go, can you? His ancient Egyptian was lousy anyway. Recipe probably would have worked if he'd read it right..."
By this point the class had erupted in its loudest disturbance yet, groans of disgust mingling with screams of laughter. The teacher banged a petrified egg on her desk in a vain attempt to call them back to order. In all this commotion, no one noticed the door opening again and a crouched figure darting out into the compound.
Sir Lionel Niblet kept his head down and scurried from hut to hut, pausing only to make sure the coast was clear before crossing each open space. He finally reached what appeared to be a barrel of burning garbage. Opening a door set in the side of the barrel, he tossed in a handful of Floo Powder, whispering "Spanky Spankison," and thrust a tight roll of parchment after it. The letter vanished in a burst of green flames. Now, Sir Lionel thought as he ducked and weaved toward the treeline, he would just have to wait...
His progress was abruptly halted by an unexpected obstacle. He had run directly into the legs of a tall, heavy-shouldered wizard whose robes had, at first glance, blended into the foliage on the edge of the clearing.
"Here's a juicy surprise," said the man, grabbing Sir Lionel's throat in a steely grip.
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #160 +++
Are you still there after Robbie inexplicably took a month off from writing "The Magic Quill"? If so, let him know & send him a word of encouragement. Robbie has been working a lot on "The Book Trolley" lately. You may see the results soon if you keep watching MuggleNet for updates. But "The Magic Quill" has a lot of life left in it, too. So, don't just lurk and read! 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. Also, introduce a friend to "The Magic Quill," and get him or her to drop a comment too! [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: How many inches long is Endora's nose?
CONTEST: Describe a number (real or imaginary) that has magical significance.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
157. Dungeon Brownies
Contest winner: Rehannah
Runner-up: TWZRD
The light at the tips of their wands revealed a grim sight to Merlin and Miss Pucey. Ahead of them, a flagstoned passage receded into darkness. Along each side ran an endless series of heavy doors with barred windows in them at eye level. When they looked through the windows, they saw heaps of bones, some more or less held together by remnants of sinew and tattered clothes. The bones of humans mingled with those of the rats who had starved with them - or, at least, shortly after them.
Miss Pucey shuddered. Merlin growled at the back of his throat, sounding fiercer than he felt.
The dungeon continued straight ahead, damp and cold and still and heavy with despair and death. It seemed they had been walking through it for hours, yet the cell doors marched onward in unbroken formation. Now and again Merlin checked to see if a cell had been occupied, and each time he came away from the window with the same bitter growl.
Then, for the first time since passing the Joke Knocker, they saw something different. It appeared so suddenly, in fact, that the duo only noticed it when Merlin tripped over it. They stopped to look around, Miss Pucey hiking her skirts up over her ankles.
"It's a shoe," said Merlin, pointing his wandlight at it.
"A shoe in remarkably good condition, compared to what's left of the inmates' footwear," said Miss Pucey, measuring it roughly against her own shoe. "Men's size ten, give or take."
Merlin didn't say it aloud, but the thought came to him unbidden: "That's my size." But it wasn't his shoe. His shoes weren't in top condition like this one. They had, for example, gotten soaked in the waters of the Venetian lagoon and dried out in the dank air of the merhags' larder. He could do with a new pair, and this one looked pretty good.
"How did it get here?" he wondered aloud. "There was nothing ahead of us. We would have seen it. And then I just tripped over it."
Miss Pucey sucked her breath through clenched teeth when Merlin picked up the shoe. He turned it over in his hand, suffering no ill effects. It didn't seem to be poisoned or cursed. Not yet, at least.
"I wouldn't wear that if I were you," said Miss Pucey. "Haven't you heard what happens to witches or wizards who put on shoes when they don't know where they came from? You could end up dancing yourself to death."
"I'm not putting it on, am I?" Merlin stuffed the shoe into a pocket in his robes. "We might need it to get out of here."
After following the dungeon walk another length of a football field, the pair found another shoe, the mate of the first. Merlin pocketed it as well. Shortly after that a sturdy, sensible calfskin shoe, seemingly tailored to Miss Pucey's right foot, appeared. Then another for the left.
"This is starting to feel ominous," Miss Pucey noted as Merlin pocketed the second woman's shoe. "I mean, what comes next? Kid gloves? Stockings with garters?"
What came next was a commotion in the darkness ahead. Merlin rummaged in his satchel and brought out the portable wall Harvey had given him. He tugged a cord at one end of it, and in moments it grew to fill the passage ahead of them. From their side of it, it looked like a layer of thin gauze stretched over a rickety frame. Through it they could see the length of corridor ahead of them, still lit by their wandlights, but Merlin knew that from the other side it would appear to be a section of dungeon wall advancing down the corridor.
"It's funny," whispered Miss Pucey, as they began walking toward the noise ahead, "but I don't feel very well-protected."
Merlin silenced her with the look on his face.
As they approached one of the cells, seemingly identical to all the others, they heard whispering voices from within. Someone seemed to be saying: "What's that light?" Another: "They're coming." Other words and voices were stifled by a general shushing sound.
Peering through the portable wall, Merlin saw the inside of the cell by wandlight. No one seemed to be there except the last occupant of the cell, now no more than a pile of desiccated bones. "Hello?" Merlin called gently. Other than a feeling of frozen fear and waiting, no one seemed to be home.
Merlin looked more closely at the bones on the dungeon floor. There seemed to be more than bones there. A tattered piece of cloth or skin lay spread on the floor with several items arranged on it. Tools. Merlin peered harder, wishing he had a free hand to scratch his head. Then it came to him. The spade-like lasts arranged according to size; the pointy awls, sharp leather-cutting tools, heavy needles, fine instruments for pinching and gripping and hammering... These were the tools of a cobbler. But what could a cobbler have done to provoke the wrath of one of the counts of Bestemmia?
Merlin jumped at a loud noise farther along the corridor. Something had landed against the flagstones with a metallic clang.
"Oh, this place!" Miss Pucey moaned, her hands fluttering about her.
"This way," said Merlin, pushing the inflatable wall ahead of them.
"Are you sure?" she murmured.
"There's no other way out but forward," he said.
"Are you sure?" she repeated.
He rolled his eyes. "Aren't you curious about what's going on here?"
"Curiosity killed the cat," said Miss Pucey. "You wouldn't have a cat in that bag of yours? You know, to scout ahead?"
"Sorry," Merlin grinned, "we'll just have to risk it."
They risked it, and soon enough they found out what had made the clanging noise. It was a horseshoe.
Miss Pucey darted a look behind them, holding her wand above her head.
"What?" cried Merlin.
She sighed. "Nothing. I just had to check to see whether a horse was following us. Or maybe a thestral. Could you see a thestral if one was there?"
"There's no thestral behind us," Merlin said confidently. "Whoever has been dropping footwear ahead of us has apparently noticed that we've run out of feet."
Another clang up ahead made both of them jump again.
"Maybe there will be horses to go with these shoes," Miss Pucey suggested, "when we get to wherever this corridor leads."
They collected a total of eight horseshoes before the corridor led anywhere but past more dungeon cells full of grisly remains. Once more they followed a sound of whispering to a cell door where, as soon as Merlin looked through the window, the whispering stopped. This time the victim's corpse was surrounded by other tools - anvil, forge, hammers, tongs - suggesting that a farrier had met a fate similar to that of the cobbler.
"This Maledicto person," Miss Pucey said, pronouncing the name as if it brought the taste of bile to her lips, "seems to have it in for honest tradesmen."
"I think," said Merlin, "he's just greedy. He wants the best of everything, and then he destroys the artist who made it so that no one else can enjoy the same quality. Or perhaps he kills them so that he needn't pay for their services."
"How very like a spoilt child," Miss Pucey sneered. "People ought to have their children brought up better."
Torn between making a pointed observation on how she had phrased her last assertion and asking how much credit she took for the way Rigel had turned out, Merlin bit his tongue.
They continued forward for only another quarter-mile or so. Then, quite suddenly, the dungeon ended. The flagstoned floor plunged into space as a deep chasm opened before them, so deep that their wandlight could not reach bottom. The opposite side was only a stone's throw away. Directly across from them stood another heavy wooden door. There was just enough flagstoned floor before the door for one or two people to stand upon, and a thick metal rod jutted out of the stone wall beside the door, angled upwards.
Merlin groaned. There seemed to be no way across this canyon. There was no path around the edge. There was no bridge over it. It was too far to jump. "All right," he said. "Let me try something."
Miss Pucey stood back a few paces while Merlin attempted to levitate the portable wall across the gap. As it hovered in midair about halfway across, an updraft caught it and smashed it against the vaulted stone ceiling. The wall crumpled and disintegrated before their eyes, raining fragments into the dark depths.
"This isn't good," Merlin noted.
"Look!" Miss Pucey gasped and pointed.
Merlin squinted in the direction she was pointing, but ultimately had to ask: "Look at what?"
"There's a kind of path running straight up the face of the cliff!"
It was true. Similar to the flagstoned floor they stood on, a smooth path ascended the opposite side of the ravine, as if designed for a human fly to walk upon. Looking over the edge before him, Merlin confirmed that a length of even flagstones descended the near side as well, terminating well above the edge of their circle of light.
Miss Pucey spoke through her fingers, which she had pressed to her lips as if to hold her excitement within: "Do you suppose the shoes we found will allow us to walk down the wall and up again?"
"Maybe," said Merlin. "The trouble is, we can only find out by trying. And if they don't work that way, we won't get a chance to try a different theory."
"All right," she suggested in a sensible tone, "how about that lever over there? Perhaps if we pull it down, the path will rise up off the sides of the cliff and form a bridge."
"That's also possible," Merlin admitted. "But how can we pull the lever from over here?"
Something went clang directly behind them. In their surprise, they nearly jumped off the cliff. When Merlin looked down, he spotted a ninth horseshoe lying on the stone floor just behind his heel. He also caught a glimpse of something moving close to the wall, but when he looked in that direction, nothing was there.
"I've seen some weird things," said Miss Pucey. "I mean, my young man is Life Commissioner of the League of Head Quidditch, Ghost Rugby Union, and Spectral Sports. I've been formally introduced to everything that goes bump in the night. But this is starting to give me the creeps."
"I fully understand," said Merlin. But he looked awfully calm about it.
"Do you?" said Miss Pucey. "I've had the screaming heebie-jeebies over for ice cream. I coached the winning team in a djinn sand volleyball tournament. I've played pachesi against three 15th-century Persian moguls on a board the size of Leicester Square, with the ghosts of sixteen fat eunuchs acting as gamepieces. I once spent an entire cruise on the Flying Dutchman listening to Marie Antoinette giving beauty tips to Lucrezia Borgia. I can deal with that. But right now, right here, I am this close to having a full-on panic attack. Can you understand that?"
Merlin shook his head. "I meant, I understand what's going on now. You remember that poor cobbler? And the farrier too?"
"Of course I remember them! I'll remember them until the day I die, which won't be long now unless we get across this hole in the ground..."
"Can you think of something cobblers and farriers always have around them?"
Miss Pucey shook her head. "Tools? But we saw their tools..."
"No," said Merlin. "Not tools. Creatures."
The lightbulb went on in Miss Pucey's face. "Ah! Not..."
"Yes," said Merlin. "Brownies. They've spent who knows how long preparing the best possible shoes, using whatever materials were on hand, just for us."
"And horseshoes," Miss Pucey pointed out, looking around but still seeing no horses nearby.
"And horse-..." Merlin's eyes went blank. He turned around and looked at the lever on the far wall of the chasm. "Oh," he added. "I see it now. We're to play horseshoes..."
The first two horseshoes missed the far wall entirely, falling silent into the void below. The third horseshoe struck sparks from the stone above and to the right of the lever. It wasn't until the sixth throw that Merlin made a ringer. The shoe hung its weight on the uptilted lever, but nothing changed.
He threw the seventh horseshoe. By now his aim was spot-on. By the eighth throw, he had three horseshoes hanging on the lever. Only one remained in his hand.
"Make this one count," he told himself.
Miss Pucey covered her face with both hands.
Merlin's heart almost stopped when the shoe struck the wall above the lever. But then, miraculously, it dropped straight down onto the lever. Before clattering off into nothingness, the last iron shoe lent its weight to the three that already hung there, and suddenly the lever tilted downward. All the shoes rattled off and sailed into the darkness. But already something was happening, and it evidently couldn't be stopped by anything as mundane as three horseshoes falling off an iron rod.
The lengths of path running down both sides of the chasm rose up and joined in the middle, forming a narrow bridge. Quickly, Merlin and Miss Pucey crossed it in single file, he reaching back to hold her hand. The bridge stayed where it was behind them while they stood considering the door on the opposite side.
"Locked," Merlin observed.
"Shall we knock?" Miss Pucey suggested.
"No," said Merlin, thinking back to the Joke Knocker with an inward shiver. "I have a better idea...."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #159 +++
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. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Whatever happened to Minimilian? (A) Madrigal the hag caught and ate him. (B) He escaped and reformed his ways. (C) He escaped and began planning his revenge against Spanky and Ilona. (D) He was rescued by another villain, who means to use him for his/her own evil plan.
CONTEST: Write a magical parody of the lyrics of a popular song. One stanza and a chorus will do.
Runner-up: TWZRD
The light at the tips of their wands revealed a grim sight to Merlin and Miss Pucey. Ahead of them, a flagstoned passage receded into darkness. Along each side ran an endless series of heavy doors with barred windows in them at eye level. When they looked through the windows, they saw heaps of bones, some more or less held together by remnants of sinew and tattered clothes. The bones of humans mingled with those of the rats who had starved with them - or, at least, shortly after them.
Miss Pucey shuddered. Merlin growled at the back of his throat, sounding fiercer than he felt.
The dungeon continued straight ahead, damp and cold and still and heavy with despair and death. It seemed they had been walking through it for hours, yet the cell doors marched onward in unbroken formation. Now and again Merlin checked to see if a cell had been occupied, and each time he came away from the window with the same bitter growl.
Then, for the first time since passing the Joke Knocker, they saw something different. It appeared so suddenly, in fact, that the duo only noticed it when Merlin tripped over it. They stopped to look around, Miss Pucey hiking her skirts up over her ankles.
"It's a shoe," said Merlin, pointing his wandlight at it.
"A shoe in remarkably good condition, compared to what's left of the inmates' footwear," said Miss Pucey, measuring it roughly against her own shoe. "Men's size ten, give or take."
Merlin didn't say it aloud, but the thought came to him unbidden: "That's my size." But it wasn't his shoe. His shoes weren't in top condition like this one. They had, for example, gotten soaked in the waters of the Venetian lagoon and dried out in the dank air of the merhags' larder. He could do with a new pair, and this one looked pretty good.
"How did it get here?" he wondered aloud. "There was nothing ahead of us. We would have seen it. And then I just tripped over it."
Miss Pucey sucked her breath through clenched teeth when Merlin picked up the shoe. He turned it over in his hand, suffering no ill effects. It didn't seem to be poisoned or cursed. Not yet, at least.
"I wouldn't wear that if I were you," said Miss Pucey. "Haven't you heard what happens to witches or wizards who put on shoes when they don't know where they came from? You could end up dancing yourself to death."
"I'm not putting it on, am I?" Merlin stuffed the shoe into a pocket in his robes. "We might need it to get out of here."
After following the dungeon walk another length of a football field, the pair found another shoe, the mate of the first. Merlin pocketed it as well. Shortly after that a sturdy, sensible calfskin shoe, seemingly tailored to Miss Pucey's right foot, appeared. Then another for the left.
"This is starting to feel ominous," Miss Pucey noted as Merlin pocketed the second woman's shoe. "I mean, what comes next? Kid gloves? Stockings with garters?"
What came next was a commotion in the darkness ahead. Merlin rummaged in his satchel and brought out the portable wall Harvey had given him. He tugged a cord at one end of it, and in moments it grew to fill the passage ahead of them. From their side of it, it looked like a layer of thin gauze stretched over a rickety frame. Through it they could see the length of corridor ahead of them, still lit by their wandlights, but Merlin knew that from the other side it would appear to be a section of dungeon wall advancing down the corridor.
"It's funny," whispered Miss Pucey, as they began walking toward the noise ahead, "but I don't feel very well-protected."
Merlin silenced her with the look on his face.
As they approached one of the cells, seemingly identical to all the others, they heard whispering voices from within. Someone seemed to be saying: "What's that light?" Another: "They're coming." Other words and voices were stifled by a general shushing sound.
Peering through the portable wall, Merlin saw the inside of the cell by wandlight. No one seemed to be there except the last occupant of the cell, now no more than a pile of desiccated bones. "Hello?" Merlin called gently. Other than a feeling of frozen fear and waiting, no one seemed to be home.
Merlin looked more closely at the bones on the dungeon floor. There seemed to be more than bones there. A tattered piece of cloth or skin lay spread on the floor with several items arranged on it. Tools. Merlin peered harder, wishing he had a free hand to scratch his head. Then it came to him. The spade-like lasts arranged according to size; the pointy awls, sharp leather-cutting tools, heavy needles, fine instruments for pinching and gripping and hammering... These were the tools of a cobbler. But what could a cobbler have done to provoke the wrath of one of the counts of Bestemmia?
Merlin jumped at a loud noise farther along the corridor. Something had landed against the flagstones with a metallic clang.
"Oh, this place!" Miss Pucey moaned, her hands fluttering about her.
"This way," said Merlin, pushing the inflatable wall ahead of them.
"Are you sure?" she murmured.
"There's no other way out but forward," he said.
"Are you sure?" she repeated.
He rolled his eyes. "Aren't you curious about what's going on here?"
"Curiosity killed the cat," said Miss Pucey. "You wouldn't have a cat in that bag of yours? You know, to scout ahead?"
"Sorry," Merlin grinned, "we'll just have to risk it."
They risked it, and soon enough they found out what had made the clanging noise. It was a horseshoe.
Miss Pucey darted a look behind them, holding her wand above her head.
"What?" cried Merlin.
She sighed. "Nothing. I just had to check to see whether a horse was following us. Or maybe a thestral. Could you see a thestral if one was there?"
"There's no thestral behind us," Merlin said confidently. "Whoever has been dropping footwear ahead of us has apparently noticed that we've run out of feet."
Another clang up ahead made both of them jump again.
"Maybe there will be horses to go with these shoes," Miss Pucey suggested, "when we get to wherever this corridor leads."
They collected a total of eight horseshoes before the corridor led anywhere but past more dungeon cells full of grisly remains. Once more they followed a sound of whispering to a cell door where, as soon as Merlin looked through the window, the whispering stopped. This time the victim's corpse was surrounded by other tools - anvil, forge, hammers, tongs - suggesting that a farrier had met a fate similar to that of the cobbler.
"This Maledicto person," Miss Pucey said, pronouncing the name as if it brought the taste of bile to her lips, "seems to have it in for honest tradesmen."
"I think," said Merlin, "he's just greedy. He wants the best of everything, and then he destroys the artist who made it so that no one else can enjoy the same quality. Or perhaps he kills them so that he needn't pay for their services."
"How very like a spoilt child," Miss Pucey sneered. "People ought to have their children brought up better."
Torn between making a pointed observation on how she had phrased her last assertion and asking how much credit she took for the way Rigel had turned out, Merlin bit his tongue.
They continued forward for only another quarter-mile or so. Then, quite suddenly, the dungeon ended. The flagstoned floor plunged into space as a deep chasm opened before them, so deep that their wandlight could not reach bottom. The opposite side was only a stone's throw away. Directly across from them stood another heavy wooden door. There was just enough flagstoned floor before the door for one or two people to stand upon, and a thick metal rod jutted out of the stone wall beside the door, angled upwards.
Merlin groaned. There seemed to be no way across this canyon. There was no path around the edge. There was no bridge over it. It was too far to jump. "All right," he said. "Let me try something."
Miss Pucey stood back a few paces while Merlin attempted to levitate the portable wall across the gap. As it hovered in midair about halfway across, an updraft caught it and smashed it against the vaulted stone ceiling. The wall crumpled and disintegrated before their eyes, raining fragments into the dark depths.
"This isn't good," Merlin noted.
"Look!" Miss Pucey gasped and pointed.
Merlin squinted in the direction she was pointing, but ultimately had to ask: "Look at what?"
"There's a kind of path running straight up the face of the cliff!"
It was true. Similar to the flagstoned floor they stood on, a smooth path ascended the opposite side of the ravine, as if designed for a human fly to walk upon. Looking over the edge before him, Merlin confirmed that a length of even flagstones descended the near side as well, terminating well above the edge of their circle of light.
Miss Pucey spoke through her fingers, which she had pressed to her lips as if to hold her excitement within: "Do you suppose the shoes we found will allow us to walk down the wall and up again?"
"Maybe," said Merlin. "The trouble is, we can only find out by trying. And if they don't work that way, we won't get a chance to try a different theory."
"All right," she suggested in a sensible tone, "how about that lever over there? Perhaps if we pull it down, the path will rise up off the sides of the cliff and form a bridge."
"That's also possible," Merlin admitted. "But how can we pull the lever from over here?"
Something went clang directly behind them. In their surprise, they nearly jumped off the cliff. When Merlin looked down, he spotted a ninth horseshoe lying on the stone floor just behind his heel. He also caught a glimpse of something moving close to the wall, but when he looked in that direction, nothing was there.
"I've seen some weird things," said Miss Pucey. "I mean, my young man is Life Commissioner of the League of Head Quidditch, Ghost Rugby Union, and Spectral Sports. I've been formally introduced to everything that goes bump in the night. But this is starting to give me the creeps."
"I fully understand," said Merlin. But he looked awfully calm about it.
"Do you?" said Miss Pucey. "I've had the screaming heebie-jeebies over for ice cream. I coached the winning team in a djinn sand volleyball tournament. I've played pachesi against three 15th-century Persian moguls on a board the size of Leicester Square, with the ghosts of sixteen fat eunuchs acting as gamepieces. I once spent an entire cruise on the Flying Dutchman listening to Marie Antoinette giving beauty tips to Lucrezia Borgia. I can deal with that. But right now, right here, I am this close to having a full-on panic attack. Can you understand that?"
Merlin shook his head. "I meant, I understand what's going on now. You remember that poor cobbler? And the farrier too?"
"Of course I remember them! I'll remember them until the day I die, which won't be long now unless we get across this hole in the ground..."
"Can you think of something cobblers and farriers always have around them?"
Miss Pucey shook her head. "Tools? But we saw their tools..."
"No," said Merlin. "Not tools. Creatures."
The lightbulb went on in Miss Pucey's face. "Ah! Not..."
"Yes," said Merlin. "Brownies. They've spent who knows how long preparing the best possible shoes, using whatever materials were on hand, just for us."
"And horseshoes," Miss Pucey pointed out, looking around but still seeing no horses nearby.
"And horse-..." Merlin's eyes went blank. He turned around and looked at the lever on the far wall of the chasm. "Oh," he added. "I see it now. We're to play horseshoes..."
The first two horseshoes missed the far wall entirely, falling silent into the void below. The third horseshoe struck sparks from the stone above and to the right of the lever. It wasn't until the sixth throw that Merlin made a ringer. The shoe hung its weight on the uptilted lever, but nothing changed.
He threw the seventh horseshoe. By now his aim was spot-on. By the eighth throw, he had three horseshoes hanging on the lever. Only one remained in his hand.
"Make this one count," he told himself.
Miss Pucey covered her face with both hands.
Merlin's heart almost stopped when the shoe struck the wall above the lever. But then, miraculously, it dropped straight down onto the lever. Before clattering off into nothingness, the last iron shoe lent its weight to the three that already hung there, and suddenly the lever tilted downward. All the shoes rattled off and sailed into the darkness. But already something was happening, and it evidently couldn't be stopped by anything as mundane as three horseshoes falling off an iron rod.
The lengths of path running down both sides of the chasm rose up and joined in the middle, forming a narrow bridge. Quickly, Merlin and Miss Pucey crossed it in single file, he reaching back to hold her hand. The bridge stayed where it was behind them while they stood considering the door on the opposite side.
"Locked," Merlin observed.
"Shall we knock?" Miss Pucey suggested.
"No," said Merlin, thinking back to the Joke Knocker with an inward shiver. "I have a better idea...."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #159 +++
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. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Whatever happened to Minimilian? (A) Madrigal the hag caught and ate him. (B) He escaped and reformed his ways. (C) He escaped and began planning his revenge against Spanky and Ilona. (D) He was rescued by another villain, who means to use him for his/her own evil plan.
CONTEST: Write a magical parody of the lyrics of a popular song. One stanza and a chorus will do.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
156. In for a Sickle...
Contest winner: Linda Carrig
Runner-up: Dragonic
A canal in Venice. A moonlit night. The sound of a guitar playing behind some open window. A dog pauses while chasing a rat across a bridge, looks down and sees a head emerging from the water, then resumes pursuit.
Wisely, Rigel doesn't dismiss the Bubble-Head charm until he is well on dry land. He heaves himself wearily up a short flight of stone steps and collapses on the stone quay. Looking down, he sees a clutch of hideous women looking up at him from just below the water's surface. They favor him with rude gestures; he returns the favor. They linger, as if hoping he will come back down into the water, until he catches his breath enough to walk away.
Rigel's legs feel like pieces of cooked spaghetti as he trudges, dripping, through a narrow alley. He looks around carefully, trying to get his bearings and hoping he can get to his hotel without having to cross water. He absent-mindedly rubs the stoneskin ring that hangs around his neck on a leather thong. He owes his survival to its protection from the merhags' piercing fangs. On the other hand, the ring hasn't prevented the merhags from developing a taste for his skin. He shudders to remember the feeling of his arms, chest, and back being licked by dozens of slimy, black tongues.
A strange sound rouses him from his reverie. He peers ahead through the gloom. The sound comes again: a deep snuffling noise, like a very large creature stifling a sneeze. It seems to come from an angle in the passage ahead. The moonlight isn't much help in this narrow alley. Rigel edges forward cautiously, preparing to flee back to the canal. Then his breath catches in his throat as a dark shape moves out into the alley ahead. A huge, dark shape. How, he wonders, could he not have noticed that smell?
As he thinks this thought, Rigel turns on his heel... and stops. Another figure is coming up behind him. A human figure. "Go back," Rigel hisses in a stage-whisper. He says it again in Italian, but the figure keeps walking toward him at the same pace. He glances over his shoulder. The great beast behind him is just standing there, filling the alley. He looks ahead again, just in time to see the shadowy man transform into another hulking animal shape. Another hulking, stinky, menacing, animal shape.
"Cripes," Rigel squeaks. But the wonderful thing about Rigel is that he never freezes under pressure. Even while all this is happening - from the moment he has spotted the first wereyak, in fact - his fingers have been picking at the stitches tacking a slender strip of silk piping to the seams of his damp trousers.
The creatures have begun to close in, but slowly - cautiously. Rigel curses himself silently for leaving his wand tied to his arm by a shoelace. He must choose between escaping and defending himself; and since his first instinct was to pick his silken ladder free, escape is now his only option. If only he could use his wand for defense, he might be able to buy himself a bit more time to escape. As it is, the only spell he can count on (with his wand where it is) is Lumos.
He tries it. Light flares out of the tip of his wand, showing him every humped, shaggy, slobbery detail of the figure in front of him. The creature stops moving forward, wincing into the brightness. But the snuffling, shuffling noises from behind continue to draw nearer.
I don't know who these people are, Rigel tells himself, or why they all turn into yaks, but I have a feeling I should avoid them like Dragonpox...
"Nox," he says, putting out the wandlight. Then he throws the silken ladder upward with an expert snap of the arm. A moment later, a long thread hangs above his head, reaching vertically into the pale darkness above the cobbled alley. Rigel jumps for the end of the thread and shins up it. When he reaches the top, hanging in space, he looks down and sees two yaks directly below him, looking up.
A moment later, two dark human shapes have taken their place, one of them crouching to spring toward the bottom of the silken ladder. Quickly, Rigel swings the lower end of the thread around so that it hangs above him, and continues his climb. The next time he looks down, the alley is deserted.
When he finally reaches the roof of one of the nearby buildings, Rigel collapses against the stone tiles with a grunt of exhaustion. Bracing his legs against a lead gutter, he spools up the silken ladder and stuffs it into a trouser pocket. Then he rubs his cramped hands, wriggling for a more comfortable position as the roof tiles seem determined to dig into the sore muscles of his shoulders.
A passing breeze makes him shiver. Or maybe it wasn't the breeze. Rigel wrenches his neck painfully, looking around to see who or what might be on the roof with him. No one is there. He sighs, flops on his back, and almost chokes when a hand reaches up from the alley and grips the edge of the gutter, just between his feet.
This time Rigel has nowhere to escape to. His only choice is to fight. Clawing at the waterlogged shoelace tying his wand to his forearm, he racks his brains for a spell he can use in this situation. The first thing that comes to him is the disillusionment charm, which he casts on himself with a soundless movement of the lips, as soon as his wand comes free. He does it just in time, too. The owner of the hands pulls himself over the gutter a second later, seeing nothing but a loose shoelace dangling over the gutter.
Rigel balances dangerously on the gutter itself, scarcely out of the reach of the man's arms. He owes his silent tread to his shoes having been left behind in the merhag larder.
The other man picks up the shoelace, sniffs it, then raises his nose to the moonlit sky and sniffs again. He turns his head slowly, eyes closed, then stops and opens them. He is looking directly at Rigel.
Rigel looks down at himself: still disillusioned! Can he see me? he wonders. Who are these people?
The wereyak's intent gaze is suddenly distracted by a clatter of stone on stone. His head whips around to look at a small avalanche of pepples on the adjacent rooftop. It appears that someone invisible is attempting to run away in that direction. Glancing back in Rigel's direction with a snort of disappointment, the man follows in a stooped scramble, keeping his hands close to the sloping stone tiles beneath him.
Rigel waits until his pursuer is out of sight before padding as quietly as possible in the opposite direction. He clambers over the peak of one roof and up the slope of another, easily hurdling a narrow alley, little caring that he has lost his way in one of the world's most confusing cities. After covering some distance without seeing any sign of pursuit, he climbs down a drainpipe and staggers wearily toward the nearest canal.
He spots a vaparetto tied to a stanchion and instantly, though with a twinge of remorse, decides to steal it. It takes but one flick of the wand to part the rope securing it to the pavement, and a brief twirl to get the propeller turning without the noise, smell, and bother of starting the engine. Within moments, he has rounded a point and found his bearings in a familiar canal.
By now dawn is not far away, its light already paling the eastern horizon. Rigel has never wanted anything as badly as the hot bath and soft robes that would await him at the Gritti Palace... but he does not steer in that direction. Biting his lip, he sets a course for the island of Il Comte di Bestemmia. He can think of no one else with the motives or resources to send two wereyaks after him. Il Comte must know he is working with Merlin to despoil him -- or, at least, to expose his treachery. And if Il Comte knows that much, he will know where Rigel lodges. His hotel will not be safe. Nowhere in this city will be safe, indeed, until they bring Il Comte down.
Although Rigel hasn't intended to get involved, he sighs and mutters to himself: "In for a sickle, in for a galleon..."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #158 +++
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. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Whose storyline will be featured in Chapter 158? (A) Spanky. (B) Sadie. (C) Sir Lionel Niblet. (D) Harvey. (E) Endora.
CONTEST: Invent a whimsical name for a witch or wizard of historical importance. Also briefly describe what he/she did to become famous.
Runner-up: Dragonic
A canal in Venice. A moonlit night. The sound of a guitar playing behind some open window. A dog pauses while chasing a rat across a bridge, looks down and sees a head emerging from the water, then resumes pursuit.
Wisely, Rigel doesn't dismiss the Bubble-Head charm until he is well on dry land. He heaves himself wearily up a short flight of stone steps and collapses on the stone quay. Looking down, he sees a clutch of hideous women looking up at him from just below the water's surface. They favor him with rude gestures; he returns the favor. They linger, as if hoping he will come back down into the water, until he catches his breath enough to walk away.
Rigel's legs feel like pieces of cooked spaghetti as he trudges, dripping, through a narrow alley. He looks around carefully, trying to get his bearings and hoping he can get to his hotel without having to cross water. He absent-mindedly rubs the stoneskin ring that hangs around his neck on a leather thong. He owes his survival to its protection from the merhags' piercing fangs. On the other hand, the ring hasn't prevented the merhags from developing a taste for his skin. He shudders to remember the feeling of his arms, chest, and back being licked by dozens of slimy, black tongues.
A strange sound rouses him from his reverie. He peers ahead through the gloom. The sound comes again: a deep snuffling noise, like a very large creature stifling a sneeze. It seems to come from an angle in the passage ahead. The moonlight isn't much help in this narrow alley. Rigel edges forward cautiously, preparing to flee back to the canal. Then his breath catches in his throat as a dark shape moves out into the alley ahead. A huge, dark shape. How, he wonders, could he not have noticed that smell?
As he thinks this thought, Rigel turns on his heel... and stops. Another figure is coming up behind him. A human figure. "Go back," Rigel hisses in a stage-whisper. He says it again in Italian, but the figure keeps walking toward him at the same pace. He glances over his shoulder. The great beast behind him is just standing there, filling the alley. He looks ahead again, just in time to see the shadowy man transform into another hulking animal shape. Another hulking, stinky, menacing, animal shape.
"Cripes," Rigel squeaks. But the wonderful thing about Rigel is that he never freezes under pressure. Even while all this is happening - from the moment he has spotted the first wereyak, in fact - his fingers have been picking at the stitches tacking a slender strip of silk piping to the seams of his damp trousers.
The creatures have begun to close in, but slowly - cautiously. Rigel curses himself silently for leaving his wand tied to his arm by a shoelace. He must choose between escaping and defending himself; and since his first instinct was to pick his silken ladder free, escape is now his only option. If only he could use his wand for defense, he might be able to buy himself a bit more time to escape. As it is, the only spell he can count on (with his wand where it is) is Lumos.
He tries it. Light flares out of the tip of his wand, showing him every humped, shaggy, slobbery detail of the figure in front of him. The creature stops moving forward, wincing into the brightness. But the snuffling, shuffling noises from behind continue to draw nearer.
I don't know who these people are, Rigel tells himself, or why they all turn into yaks, but I have a feeling I should avoid them like Dragonpox...
"Nox," he says, putting out the wandlight. Then he throws the silken ladder upward with an expert snap of the arm. A moment later, a long thread hangs above his head, reaching vertically into the pale darkness above the cobbled alley. Rigel jumps for the end of the thread and shins up it. When he reaches the top, hanging in space, he looks down and sees two yaks directly below him, looking up.
A moment later, two dark human shapes have taken their place, one of them crouching to spring toward the bottom of the silken ladder. Quickly, Rigel swings the lower end of the thread around so that it hangs above him, and continues his climb. The next time he looks down, the alley is deserted.
When he finally reaches the roof of one of the nearby buildings, Rigel collapses against the stone tiles with a grunt of exhaustion. Bracing his legs against a lead gutter, he spools up the silken ladder and stuffs it into a trouser pocket. Then he rubs his cramped hands, wriggling for a more comfortable position as the roof tiles seem determined to dig into the sore muscles of his shoulders.
A passing breeze makes him shiver. Or maybe it wasn't the breeze. Rigel wrenches his neck painfully, looking around to see who or what might be on the roof with him. No one is there. He sighs, flops on his back, and almost chokes when a hand reaches up from the alley and grips the edge of the gutter, just between his feet.
This time Rigel has nowhere to escape to. His only choice is to fight. Clawing at the waterlogged shoelace tying his wand to his forearm, he racks his brains for a spell he can use in this situation. The first thing that comes to him is the disillusionment charm, which he casts on himself with a soundless movement of the lips, as soon as his wand comes free. He does it just in time, too. The owner of the hands pulls himself over the gutter a second later, seeing nothing but a loose shoelace dangling over the gutter.
Rigel balances dangerously on the gutter itself, scarcely out of the reach of the man's arms. He owes his silent tread to his shoes having been left behind in the merhag larder.
The other man picks up the shoelace, sniffs it, then raises his nose to the moonlit sky and sniffs again. He turns his head slowly, eyes closed, then stops and opens them. He is looking directly at Rigel.
Rigel looks down at himself: still disillusioned! Can he see me? he wonders. Who are these people?
The wereyak's intent gaze is suddenly distracted by a clatter of stone on stone. His head whips around to look at a small avalanche of pepples on the adjacent rooftop. It appears that someone invisible is attempting to run away in that direction. Glancing back in Rigel's direction with a snort of disappointment, the man follows in a stooped scramble, keeping his hands close to the sloping stone tiles beneath him.
Rigel waits until his pursuer is out of sight before padding as quietly as possible in the opposite direction. He clambers over the peak of one roof and up the slope of another, easily hurdling a narrow alley, little caring that he has lost his way in one of the world's most confusing cities. After covering some distance without seeing any sign of pursuit, he climbs down a drainpipe and staggers wearily toward the nearest canal.
He spots a vaparetto tied to a stanchion and instantly, though with a twinge of remorse, decides to steal it. It takes but one flick of the wand to part the rope securing it to the pavement, and a brief twirl to get the propeller turning without the noise, smell, and bother of starting the engine. Within moments, he has rounded a point and found his bearings in a familiar canal.
By now dawn is not far away, its light already paling the eastern horizon. Rigel has never wanted anything as badly as the hot bath and soft robes that would await him at the Gritti Palace... but he does not steer in that direction. Biting his lip, he sets a course for the island of Il Comte di Bestemmia. He can think of no one else with the motives or resources to send two wereyaks after him. Il Comte must know he is working with Merlin to despoil him -- or, at least, to expose his treachery. And if Il Comte knows that much, he will know where Rigel lodges. His hotel will not be safe. Nowhere in this city will be safe, indeed, until they bring Il Comte down.
Although Rigel hasn't intended to get involved, he sighs and mutters to himself: "In for a sickle, in for a galleon..."
+++ DOUBLE CHALLENGE FOR TMQ #158 +++
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. [EDIT: This discussion is now closed.]
SURVEY: Whose storyline will be featured in Chapter 158? (A) Spanky. (B) Sadie. (C) Sir Lionel Niblet. (D) Harvey. (E) Endora.
CONTEST: Invent a whimsical name for a witch or wizard of historical importance. Also briefly describe what he/she did to become famous.
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