The Paths of the Perambulator: A Spellsinger Adventure (Book Five)

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Swell, guv. You a’ old rockback ’ere ’ave a stroll on in, untie the object o’ your pity, a’ announce to that angelic choir that you’re sorry but the party’s over and you’re all leavi’ together. I’m certain they’ll understand. They’ll be delighted—that they ’ave three carcasses for the smoker.”

  “Much as my curiosity—and my sense of justice, of course—draws me toward that poor unfortunate,” Clothahump said, “the water rat does have a point. We have a much greater responsibility. I do not see how we can risk everything to rescue this one individual.”

  Jon-Tom considered a long moment before replying. “You’re right, sir. So is Mudge.”

  The otter looked surprised but pleased. “About time you started showi’ some o’ the sense I’ve spent a year poundi’ into you, mate.”

  “We can free him without risking a thing.” He started to unlimber his duar.

  It did not take a wizard to divine Jon-Tom’s intentions. “Axe you sure you want to try this, my boy? While it is true that this will not expose us to retaliation at first, it will not take long for those forest-dwellers below to locate us if you fail.”

  “Don’t worry, sir. This one’s going to be a cinch.” He started tuning the instrument immediately. “I’ve got it all figured out. Most of the problems I have with my spellsinging come from my usually being rushed to come up with an appropriate song and then having to perform it before I’m completely ready. But I’ve had a chance to listen to these people and to observe them. I know just what I’m going to do, and I don’t see how I can fail.”

  “Your confidence is reassuring and, I hope, not misplaced. Why are you so sure of yourself, my boy?”

  Jon-Tom grinned at him. “Because I’m going to use their own music against them. I’ve got the basic rhythm of that chanting down pat. I’m going to do a rock version of their own hymn and add my own words.” He let his fingers fall across the familiar strings. “It’s pretty much all two-four time. I can play riffs off that in my sleep.”

  “A fine idea, lad,” said Mudge. “I’ll just meet the lot o’ you back in camp, wot?” He turned and started back the way they’d come.

  “Don’t mind him,” Dormas said, smiling at Jon-Tom. “I have confidence in you. Go on—blow the furry little shitheads back into the trees.”

  “Well, I hope the results aren’t that severe.” He cleared his throat. He wanted only to free the prisoner, not perpetrate a massacre. He launched into his own interpretation of the mass chanting below, utilizing the duar at maximum volume and trying to sing the improvised song with as much grace and clarity as an Ozzy Osbourne.

  The reaction was instantaneous. Sticks froze in the air halfway to drums. The hooting of flutes and the rattle of tambourines ceased. The chanting stopped as every eye in the valley below turned to stare up at the twisting, gyrating figure atop the ridge.

  Jon-Tom had hoped that his version of the chant would paralyze the heavily armed warriors below. It did nothing of the kind. But while the tribefolk were not mesmerized by the heavy metal chords emanating from Jon-Tom’s instrument, neither did they come charging up the hill brandishing their spears and clubs.

  Instead they started running. Not toward the singer but away from him. In every direction. As they ran they cast aside what weapons they held. The females joined them, kicking over cookpots and piles of laboriously gathered food.

  Even the cubs scampered off in full retreat. Their wailing and crying was pitiful to hear. The warriors threw away their weapons because they needed their hands—to clasp over their ears or to fold them flat against the tops of their heads. Within a very short time the last inhabitant of the village had vanished among the trees. That was when a new voice rose above the silence below.

  “For sanity’s sake stop that horrible noise and come and untie me! Or else put a spear through my heart and put me out of my suffering now!” The koala tried to add something more but broke down in a fit of coughing. The fire beneath him was still smoldering.

  Abashed, Jon-Tom halted in mid-phrase and turned to regard his companions. Apparently the prisoner was not alone in his agony. Mudge had fallen against a tree and was only now removing his paws from his ears. Sorbl still had the tips of his wings pressed to his, while poor Dormas was gritting her teeth in pain. Somehow she had managed to fold the ends of her own ears in on themselves. Clothahump had retreated completely into the relative safety of his shell.

  Now he emerged, popping legs and arms out first and his head last of all. His glasses hung askew from his beak. He straightened them as he walked up to Jon-Tom and put a hand on the spellsinger’s arm. The fingers were shaking slightly.

  “Do as he says, my boy.”

  Jon-Tom looked out into the fog. “What if they’re trying to sneak around behind us?”

  “I do not believe they wish to remain anywhere in the immediate vicinity.”

  “Then my spellsinging worked?”

  The wizard cleared his throat delicately. “Let us just say that they did not find your interpretation of their ancient ceremonial to their liking.”

  “Oh.” He paused thoughtfully, then added, “Neither did the rest of you, huh?”

  “It held our attention. Let us leave it at that.”

  “Aye,” said Mudge loudly, “like ’avi’ an anvil dropped on your ’ead.”

  “The combination of an extremely primitive rhythmic line combined with what you refer to as your variety of contemporary music as rendered on the duar apparently possesses unexpected strengths.”

  “Are you saying, sir, that no magic was involved? That it was my singing alone that made them want to flee?”

  “No, mate. What ’Is Sorcererness is sayi’ is that your singi’ o’ that old music and your new music made ’em a’ the rest of us as well want to run screami’ a’ puki’ through the bloody forest.”

  “I see.” He shrugged, took a deep breath. “Well, anyway, it worked.”

  “Are you up there going to untie me or not?” The koala’s voice was surprisingly deep and resonant. It made him sound much more massive than he was.

  “Bleedi’ impatient sort o’ chap, ain’t ’e?” Mudge and Sorbl started down the hill. Jon-Tom waited until Mudge was out of earshot before turning to Clothahump again.

  “What you’re really trying to say, sir, is that my singing hasn’t improved any.”

  “I suppose it would not be terribly undiplomatic of me to admit that I do not think it has kept pace with your playing, my boy. There is, sadly, a quality, a timbre if you will, which renders your voice somewhat less than sweet-sounding to a sensitive ear. The native chant was not exactly melodious to begin with. Your singing backed by the playing of the duar did not exactly enhance what slight harmonious overtones it possessed.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “I believe that for once the otter did not exaggerate in his description. Do not look so downcast. It is the results that matter. You are a spellsinger, not a bard.”

  “I know, but I want to be a bard! I can’t help it if I don’t sound like Lionel Richie or Daltrey.”

  “I am sorry, my boy, but it appears that you may have to settle for being a spellsinger.”

  He ought to be pleased, he told himself as they waited for Mudge and Sorbl to return with the freed prisoner. He could do things no other musician could do. He could send his enemies fleeing in panic, could conjure up wonders, could move small mountains. The trouble was, what he wanted more than anything else was to be able to sing.

  And he tried so hard to sound like a McCartney or Waite, only to end up producing a noise that must have resembled a cross between AC/DC’s Angus McKie and a sex-starved moose. Come to think of it, McKie and the moose didn’t sound all that different from one another.

  He kept his eyes on the forest and fog enclosing them, his hands on the duar. Despite Clothahump’s reassurances, he wanted to be ready in the event that some brave warrior did try to slip in behind them.

  Before he sang that chant again
, though, he’d have to remember to warn his companions.

  VIII

  MUDGE’S KNIFE MADE short work of the ropes that secured the prisoner to the pole, while Sorbl used his beak on the smaller bonds that bound the koala’s wrists. Mudge had to catch him once he was freed, so cramped had his muscles become from disuse and the severe restraints. While the otter helped him up the slope, Sorbl plucked his knapsack from the corner platform post and flew back toward his master.

  Eventually otter and koala reached the top of the ridge. The former prisoner was still coughing, though neither as violently nor as frequently as when he’d been tied to the post. It would take awhile before his lungs were completely cleared. His eyes were badly bloodshot and he wiped at them repeatedly. Mudge eased him over to a fallen log and gently sat him down.

  He sat silently for a while, catching his breath and letting his lungs clear, only his large furry ears moving. The black nose was wet and running from having inhaled too much soot. Eventually he looked up at them and spoke again in that unexpectedly profound, deep voice.

  “Thanks, friends. Not everyone would go out of their way like that to save a stranger, though I had a pretty good idea something like this was going to happen. Darned if I wasn’t starting to get a little worried, though. I’m obliged.”

  “What do you mean you ‘had an idea something like this was going to happen’?” Jon-Tom said.

  “We can talk about it later. Right now we’re still a mite too close to that fire for my comfort. Let’s walk the walk and I’ll talk the talk.” He rose, tilted his head back to gaze up at Jon-Tom. “You’re a prime specimen, aren’t you? Thanks for your musical aid. You won’t be insulted if I don’t ask for an encore.”

  “If my music doesn’t please you, you can always go back down there and talk over your problems with your friends.” He smiled to show the koala that he was only responding in kind.

  Their new acquaintance grinned back up at him. “No friends of mine down there. Heathens and barbarians, the cowardly sons of lizards. Hope they run off the end of the world. My name’s Colin. You can introduce yourselves later.” He took a step, stumbled. Mudge hastened to lend him a shoulder, but the koala waved him off.

  “’Preciate the offer, otter, but I’ll make it on my own. You’ve risked enough on my behalf already. I’ll not be a burden to you.” He retrieved his knapsack and saber from Sorbl, shouldered the pack after sliding the saber into a special scabbard sewn to its back. Despite his short, thick arms he managed to slide the blade straight in without looking over his shoulder. Whoever this Colin was, Jon-Tom decided, he was no stranger to weaponry. If Jon-Tom had tried the same trick, he would have sliced himself from neck to coccyx.

  Mudge led them back toward the campsite. “You know more about your ’appy companions than we do,” he said to the koala. “Think they’ll try a’ follow us? The wizard ’imself ’ere says no.”

  “Wizard, huh?” Colin gave Clothahump a perfunctory nod, polite but in no way condescending, respectful without being obsequious. “I think he’s right. Heck, it’ll take the bravest among them half a day just to decide to slow down.” Everyone laughed but Jon-Tom. He managed a weak smile.

  They were halfway back to the camp when Colin called a halt. “We’ll take a minute here to make sure they don’t follow us.” He turned his back to Jon-Tom. “Upper compartment, left side. A small green bottle. Take care. They threw my kit around quite a bit, and I don’t know what’s broke and what’s intact.”

  An uncertain Jon-Tom unsnapped the pack, located the bottle in question, and handed it to its owner. The stopper was loose but still in place. Colin held it up to the fog-diffused light, examined it critically for a moment, then grunted and began searching the ground around them.

  “We need some good-sized branches with the needles still on them.” Jon-Tom bristled at being ordered around by someone they’d just had to rescue, but he kept silent as he helped the koala and Mudge collect several healthy evergreen boughs.

  “Now what? They’re hardly big enough to hide behind,” he snapped.

  There was a jauntiness to the koala’s manner and a twinkle in his eye that defused any real anger on Jon-Tom’s part. “That’s what you think, man.”

  After sprinkling a few drops of the colorless liquid on each branch, he had Jon-Tom replace it in his knapsack. The powerful odor made Jon-Tom’s nostrils flare, even at a distance.

  “Do like so,” Colin instructed them. Jon-Tom and Dormas brought up the rear, the three of them sweeping up their footsteps with the branches. Eventually they tossed the boughs aside.

  Mudge’s sensitive nose was running, and he wiped at it continuously. “Blimey, mate, wot were in that bottle, anyway?”

  “Intensely concentrated oil of eucalyptus,” Colin informed him. “If they do try to track us, they’ll sniff up a nice healthy whiff of that stuff and spend the rest of the day sneezing themselves silly.” He grinned first at Mudge, then up at Jon-Tom.

  An interesting character, and that was an understatement, Jon-Tom told himself as he considered their stocky new companion. Not gruff exactly but not given to small talk, either. Straightforward and no-nonsense. He’d be able to find his own way back to civilization without much trouble.

  As it turned out, however, that parting of the ways was not to take place for some time yet. As they paused in the shelter of a rake tree later that day, they discovered that they shared something in common with the koala besides a dislike of barbaric hospitality.

  He was sitting against the thick, deeply scarred bole, chatting with Sorbl and Dormas. Clothahump was off by himself, meditating within his shell, visiting that sorcerous never-never land that only he could enter. It reminded Jon-Tom of hibernation. The wizard called it taking a metaphysical sighting. He was, he had explained on more than one such occasion, checking their position by judging his relationship to certain stars. When Jon-Tom had protested that it was absurd to imagine one small individual having a personal relationship with several incredibly distant suns, Clothahump had informed him that it depended upon the mental size of the individual in question, not his physical stature. As a result, Jon-Tom was half convinced that the turtle was bluffing him. But it did not make him feel any bigger.

  He was sitting slightly away from the tree, using the usually concealed blade of his ramwood staff to whittle at a chunk of dead pine. Wood and grain fascinated him. Maybe he ought to give up the idea of being either a lawyer or a rock guitarist and settle for a contemplative life of carving. Not a very practical vocation to try to make a living at where he came from, he reflected. If he’d lived in greater Los Angeles, Gepetto would doubtless have been forced to go on welfare.

  Footsteps sounded nearby. He looked up to see Mudge approaching. The otter wore his usual expression of concern.

  “Wot say you, mate?”

  Jon-Tom glanced skyward. They had long since climbed out of the fog, and the sky overhead was a brilliant, pristine blue. “Everything seems to be going pretty good, Mudge. We’re not being followed, we’ve managed to rescue a fellow traveler in need, and we haven’t suffered a perturbation in days.”

  “Aye, seems as though our luck ’as changed, wot? That’s just wot I were wonderi’ about.” As he spoke he kept glancing back toward the tree, to where Colin was laughing and joking with Sorbl and Dormas. “’Asn’t the coincidence struck you?”

  “To what coincidence do you refer?” He sighed. The otter’s capacity for paranoia was exceeded only by his capacity for drinking, eating, and wenching.

  “You just think on it a minute, mate. I’ll spell it out for you. Don’t want you to think I’m jumpi’ to conclusions or nothin’.”

  “What, you, jump to conclusions? Why would I ever think that?”

  “Try a’ stifle the sarcasm a moment and look at this thing objectively, mate. ’Ere we are trippi’ merrily along, looki’ like ourselves for a change instead o’ a bunch o’ purple bugs or somethin’, when we ’ear this chanti’ and follow it to fin
d this Colin chap all bound up a’ in the process o’ bei’ smoked for a holiday roast by a bunch o’ savages. Wot does that suggest to you?”

  “That we did our good deed for the day and that I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re getting at.”

  “I’ll try a’ be more specific. We’ve no way of knowi’ for ’ow long this Colin was a prisoner. Might’ve been for an hour, might maybe ’ave been for a day. But just suppose ’e’d been stuck down there for several days. ’Tis been several days exactly since the last bad perturbation. Maybe whoever or wotever ’as imprisoned this ’ere perambulator can’t use it on us anymore. Maybe we’re too close to ’ome or somethin’. So wot might ’e do, especially if ’e’s getti’ worried about us? Mightn’t ’e look for some other, subtler way o’ stoppi’ us? Maybe by getti’ us off our guard first?”

  It didn’t take a two-hundred-year-old wizard to see what the otter was hinting at. “You’re reaching, Mudge. In the first place, there was no guarantee that we would have taken the risk of rescuing Colin. In the second, distance has no effect on the perambulator’s perturbing effects. You can’t be too close to be affected, and you can’t get far enough away to escape it. And lastly, Colin just doesn’t seem the type an insane sorcerer would choose for a servant. He’s too independent. That’s not a put-on. It’s the soul of his personality.”

  “Then it don’t strike you as suspicious that in this dangerous and cold northern land where we ain’t encountered so much as a decent restaurant for days, we suddenly ’ave a run-in with someone whose species prefers much warmer country? Not to mention that ’e’s runni’ around ’ere all by ’is lonesome.”

  “Of course, I’m curious as to what he’s doing up here. He’s probably just as curious about us.”

  “Then why ain’t ’e asked about it? And why ain’t he told us what ’e’s doi’ ’ere?”

  “Maybe,” Jon-Tom suggested, “it’s none of our business.”

  “Cor, don’t ’and me that one, mate! We saved ’im from the cook fire, if ’e is as independent as you think. ’E owes us an explanation.”