The Complete Compleat Enchanter

by L. Sprague deCamp

  The girls sidled delicately toward their customers, bowed together with the precision of Rockettes, and flopped among the cushions at the feet of the four.

  “You can’t bribe me,” growled Pete the cop. “This only gets you smart guys another charge. Indecent theatrical performance.”

  Keeping time to the music, each of the girls whipped the lid from her jar, stuck her finger into it, withdrew it covered with something yellow and gooey, and thrust it into her customer’s face. Shea opened his mouth and got a fingerful of honey. He heard Bayard gag and cry, “No!” and turned in time to see him try to avoid the finger. Pete the cop was dabbing at a honey-smeared face with his handkerchief, while his houri seemed determined to apply the stuff internally or externally.

  “Better take it,” advised Shea. “They’re here to give it to us.”

  “You can’t bribe me!” repeated Pete; and Walter said: “But I don’t likes sweets! I’d rather beer and pretzels.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Shea could see Polacek with one arm around his houri’s neck, while with the other hand he conveyed finger-doses of honey to her mouth in exchange for those he received. He caught on fast.

  Shea accepted another installment himself. “O moon of my delight,” implored the policeman’s girl, “is thy breast narrowed? Know that thou hast so infused my heart with love that I will rather drown in the ocean of my own tears than see my lord dismayed. What shall his unworthy handmaiden do?”

  “Ask her for something to drink,” said Bayard, tentatively touching his tongue to the finger that was being offered him, and shuddering over the taste.

  “Is this truly my lord’s desire? To hear is to obey.” She sat up and clapped her hands three times, then snuggled down against the shrinking policeman’s legs. He seemed past speech. The leader of the orchestra dropped his instrument and also clapped, and from among the pillars the dwarf who had brought the cushions came skipping forward again, this time with a big tray on which shone four elaborate silver flagons. Bayard raised himself to peer into the one set before him, then groaned.

  “Milk! It needed just that to top off this mess. Who the Hell wants to go to Heaven? Good Lord!”

  Shea, glancing across the head of his own houri, saw that if the liquid in the flagon was indeed milk, it was milk of a most peculiar kind, with small congealed lumps floating in it. Before he could experiment, Polacek shouted: “Holy smoke, you guys try this stuff! Best cocktail I ever tasted!”

  The resemblance to a cocktail might be incidental, but the flavor was delicious and the potency unlimited. As Shea took a long draft he could feel a wave of warmth running down his gullet. He handed the flagon to his girl. “What do you call this drink, little one?”

  She kissed the edge of the flagon where his lips had touched it and glanced at him archly. “O beloved youth, this is none other than the veritable Milk of Paradise.”

  Bayard had heard. “Paradise?” he cried. “Harold! Votsy! I’ll bet you anything I know where we’ve landed. Don’t you remember—

  “ ‘—For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.’?”

  “What you giving us?” demanded Pete the cop.

  “This is Xandadu, Coleridge’s Xanadu,” explained Bayard.

  “ ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree,

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran—’ ”

  “Alph! Alph!” The girls scrambled to their feet and bowed in the direction of the sound of running water.

  “There you are,” said Bayard. “Alph, supposedly based upon the legends about the river Alphaios in Greece—”

  “That’s it, all right,” said Shea. “Listen, officer, I’m not responsible for this, and I don’t know how we got here, but he’s right. Wait a minute, though, Walter. This is a jam. Remember, the poem was unfinished; as far as I know we’ve landed in an incomplete space-time continuum, one that’s fixed in a certain set of actions, like a phonograph needle stuck in one groove. This show is apt to keep right on going.”

  Bayard put both hands to his head, the policeman gibbered thickly, but Polacek waved an empty flagon. “Suits me,” he cried happily, reaching for his girl again. “We’ll do all right, won’t we, babe?”

  Just then the orchestra struck a strident note. The girl at whom Polacek had snatched dodged his arm, whipped up her tray with a smooth motion, and ran. Another group of seven dancing girls emerged from the pillars. One of them, apparently a soloist, carried a pair of short curved swords, which she began to brandish.

  “But look here, Harold,” said Bayard, “can’t you do something about this? You’ve been telling us how good you were at magic in cosmoi where it works. Can’t you get us off this goddam vaudeville circuit?”

  “Yeh,” said Pete the cop. “I’ll tell you, Shea, I’ll make a deal with you. Know a feller in the D.A.’s office, and I’ll get him to go eesh—easy with you on these here charges. Maybe, maybe, forget the indeshent performance one.” The Milk of Paradise seemed to have warmed him a little.

  “I can try,” said Shea. “I don’t know how it’ll work with all this racket.”

  The cop heaved himself up unsteadily. “I can fix tha’,” he said. In two bounds he was upon one of the astonished eunuchs, wrestling with him for his scimitar. The musicians stopped with a squeal and a murmur of voices; then one struck a gong, three times, ringingly. From among the pillars a whole parade of grim-looking janizaries advanced with long nasty spears in their hands, just as Shea wrested the scimitar from Pete. Bowing before the eunuch, Shea presented him his weapon, saying: “The humblest of your servants abases himself.” Then he turned on Pete, whom Bayard was, with a little difficulty, restraining.

  “You—utter—damned—jackass!” he said. “I don’t care if you’re the number one cop in Ohio; you can’t get away with that here. How’d you like to see your head paraded around on the point of one of those pikes?”

  Pete shook his head as if to clear it. “How—how could I see it if—”

  “Or spend the rest of your life in a specially refrigerated cell?” Shea addressed Bayard: “Remember the ‘beware, beware!’ and ‘caves of ice’ part? This paradise has got thorns in it; you take it the way they dish it out to you, or you’ll be sorry.”

  He led the way slowly back to the cushions. The janizaries had disappeared, and another file of dancers was coming out from among the pillars, this group specializing in bellybuttons. Pete the cop flung himself heavily into the cushions, and Walter Bayard sat down morosely.

  “All right, you guys,” said Shea, “try not to interrupt me while I give a whirl at a sorites. If there is something, c, such that the proposition phi concerning x is true when x is c but not otherwise, and c has the property ph, the term satisfying the proposition phi concerning—” His voice trailed off, and he sat with lips moving. Polacek watched him closely. Pete, head buried in his arms, murmured: “And me a married man!”

  However, Shea’s sorites were never completed. Through the domed building, far among the arches, rang the thunder of a cosmic voice—the kind of voice God might have used in telling the worshippers of the Golden Calf where to head in. It said: “Oh, goodness gracious, I do believe I’ve made a mistake!”

  The voice was that of Dr. Reed Chalmers.

  Shea and Polacek leaped to their feet. The musicians stopped; the dancers paused.

  Then musicians, dancing girls, pillared hall began to go round, faster and faster, until they dissolved into a rioting whirl of color. The color faded to foggy gray. The gray threw up whorls that condensed into other colors, and faded into the outlines of another room, a smaller room, bare and utilitarian.

  Shea and Polacek were facing a table. Behind it sat a short man and a pale, lovely, dark-haired girl. The man was Dr. Reed Chalmers. There were touches of black in the unruly gray hair that flowed from beneath the edges of a gaudy turban, and some of the lines were missing from his face.

  He said: “I am glad to
see you, Harold. I hoped—Oh, for goodness’ sake, did I get Vaclav too?”

  Two

  “Yeah, you got me,” said Polacek. “Right away from a swell party. Walter, too.”

  Shea looked around. “But where is Walter? He was on those cushions—holy dewberries, Doc! He must still be back there in Xanadu with that cop, watching cootch dancers and eating honeydew. And he hates both of them!”

  “Xanadu? Dear me, most unfortunate, most distressing.” Chalmers fingered the papers before him. “I desired merely to establish contact with you, Harold, and I assure you the association of the others was quite accidental. I really don’t know—”

  Shea smiled crookedly. “I really don’t know myself whether I ought to thank you or bawl you out, Doc. What have you done with Belphebe? You snatched her, too, didn’t you? At least I hope so. She just disappeared while we were out on a picnic together, and they were going to arrest me for murdering her or kidnapping her or something.”

  “Yes—uh—there are certain difficulties.” Chalmers’ fingers moved nervously. “I am afraid there was rather a—uh—grave error on my part. I find the attitude of the police shocking. Though I do not think you need have worried about the legal complications. It would be well-nigh impossible to establish a corpus delicti under the circumstances.”

  “That’s what you don’t know, Doc. Gertrude Mugler was on the picnic, and she was the one who hollered copper when we went off on a walk together and I came back without her, nearly out of my mind because I didn’t know whether some magician had hauled her back to Faerie. That woman could establish a corpus delicti or a society for boiling men in oil, and she would, too.”

  The pale girl made a small sousd.

  “Sorry,” said Shea. “Lady Florimel, I present Vaclav Polacek, known in our country as the Rubber Czech.”

  “Hail, fair squire,” said the girl. “The titles of your land are passing strange; yet not, methinks, stranger than that garb you bear.”

  Shea became conscious of a neat pin-stripe suit. “I might say the same thing about Sir Reed’s headgear. What are you doing in that rig, what did you get me here for, and where are we?”

  Chalmers said: “You display an unscientific tendency to confuse thought by the simultaneous consideration of different categories of information. Pray allow me to organize me thoughts and data . . . Ahem. I presume it was you who employed the spell against magicians on Dolon, and in so doing projected yourself to our—er—point of departure? I confess I do not understand how you also projected the young lady. . . .”

  “I had hold of her hand. We’re married.”

  “My sincerest congratulations. I trust the union will prove happy and—er—fruitful. Your departure, you will remember, was attended by the destruction of the Chapter of Enchanters, and as a result I found myself faced by a problem rather beyond my powers. Namely, the transformation into a real person of a human simularcrum made of snow.” He nodded in the direction of Florimel, who gazed at him adoringly. “I therefore—”

  “Doctor, you got a chair?” asked Polacek.

  “Vaclav, your interruptions are even more disturbing than Harold’s. Kindly seat yourself on the floor and permit me to continue. Where was I? Ah, upon examination of available data, I was gratified to discover that there existed in Faerie the mental pattern of a universe whose space-time vector arrangement made it possible of attainment from that place by the familiar methods of symbolic logic. To wit, that of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

  “Why should that be easy to reach?” inquired Shea.

  “Ahem. I was about to explain. Lodovico Ariosto was an Italian poet, who wrote the Orlando Furioso in what we should call the early sixteenth century. This work was considered the main source from which Spenser, a highly imitative writer, secured the ideas whence he produced The Faerie Queene. Since each of these universes contains the same basic mental pattern, it is easy to perceive how transference from one to the other would be a relatively light task, and I felt confident that I would find here a number of experienced practitioners of magic. Vaclav, I perceive you are not following me.”

  “No,” said Polacek from the floor, “and I don’t believe Miss—Lady Florimel is either.”

  “It’s not necessary that she should. For your benefit, however, I will explain that this similarity of basic mental pattern establishes, as it were, certain connective roads between the two universes, over which passage in our vehicle of symbolic logic can be achieved with a reasonable certainty of reaching the desired destination.”

  Polacek felt in his pockets. “Anybody got a cigarette? I believe you if you say so, Doctor, but I still don’t get why you had to send for Harold, and why we had to land in that cabaret.”

  Chalmers fussed again with the papers, uneasily. “The process was attended by—uh—certain inconveniences. I can only describe them by—taking things in order, if you will permit me to do so. To localize the matter, we are in the castle of the leading magician of the Furioso, Atlantès de Carena, in the Pyrenees, near the Franco-Spanish border. For your benefit, Vaclav, I should explain that these places are by no means the same as we should understand by the terms employed at—uh—let us say, the Garaden Institute.”

  “All right, but why jerk me back here?” asked Shea. “You might at least have asked me first.”

  “Surely, Harold, you realize that symbolic logic is not a thing that can be handled like a telephone. As a matter of fact, the inconveniences to which I referred had become so grave that there appeared to be no other course open to me. I may be mistaken. Working with Atlantès has been most interesting, more interesting. I have been granted the opportunity of correcting many of the principles of magic in view of the somewhat different laws that control it here.

  “However, I feel that I owe this young lady here a certain duty.” He indicated Florimel, and blushed as Polacek and Shea both snickered.

  “Ah—Atlantès has been most cooperative, but I hope I am less easily impressed by an enchanter’s affability than formerly. Not only has he been unable to accomplish anything for Florimel, but these people are also Mohammedans with somewhat—peculiar standards of morality. I have been led to the idea, amounting almost to an absolute conviction, that it would be necessary for me to provide additional protection for Florimel. As matters stand, or stood before I took the perhaps unwarranted liberty of—er—transporting you here, I was the only barrier between her and our, I fear, by no means well-disposed host.”

  “I don’t get all of it,” said Shea. “Why couldn’t you just take her somewhere else?”

  “But where, my dear Harold? That is the very nub of the difficulty. To return to our own universe would be to lose the young lady, since she is of magical origin, and there’s no provision for magic in the mental pattern. It must be regarded as impossible, at least until she has attained complete humanity. It would be possible, of course, to attain the world of Dante, but I am not sure that the atmosphere of the Inferno would be conducive to the health of a person made of snow. Moreover, Atlantès is an extremely competent magician, quite capable of either following her to another place or preventing her going.”

  “A most persistent, arrant lecher,” said Florimel.

  Chalmers patted her hand and beamed. “I feel I owe an apology to you, and to Vaclav. However, one of the functions of friendship is to permit occasional impositions in times of emergency. And I trust you will look upon me as a friend.”

  Polacek waved a hand. Shea said: “It’s all right, Doc, and I’ll be glad to help, especially since you brought Belphebe along, even if it did get me in trouble with the cops. Where is she, by the way?”

  Chalmers became more embarrassed than ever. “That is—uh—the difficulty over which I owe you my sincerest apologies. It was undoubtedly due to an error of selectivity. Er, I had not intended to transport her from our universe at all. If you are familiar with the Furioso, Harold, you will remember that among Spenser’s imitations from it was a character called Belphegor, the co
gnate of Belphebe. . . . When the young lady arrived, there was a certain amount of—uh—confusion of identity, as it were, with the result, the unfortunate result, that she had no memory of another name or a previous existence. At the present moment I really cannot say where she is, except that she is undoubtedly in this universe.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that my own wife doesn’t even know me?” yelped Shea.

  “I fear not. I cannot express—”

  “Don’t try.” Shea looked around the room gloomily. “I’ve got to find her. She may be in trouble.”

  “I don’t think you need be apprehensive, Harold. The young lady is quite competent.”

  “Aye, marry, that she is,” said Florimel. “She dealt Sir Roger such a buffet as will make his head spin for long when he would have let her from going without the castle but the now. Be comforted, Sir Harold.”

  “Who is this Sir Roger, anyway?” Shea glowered.

  “I think I had better introduce you to my—uh—your associates,” said Chalmers, and stepped around the desk to open the door behind Shea and Polacek. The air held an unmistakable faint odor of olive oil, and as they stepped across the threshold, their feet gave back a metallic ring from the floor.

  “Ah, yes,” said Chalmers. “Perhaps I omitted to mention the fact that this castle is constructed of iron. That also is attended by certain—uh—inconveniences. Will you come this way, gentlemen?”

  Another passage branched from that into which they had committed themselves, and led down a ramp towards a pair of double doors, with an oil lamp hanging from chains and throwing but little light. As they approached the doors, Shea heard the wailing sound of an instrument theoretically musical, like those in Xanadu. Polacek’s eye brightened as he ran his tongue between his lips. “Babes?” he asked.