“So what?” interrupted Manitou dryly.
“So if Magister hasn’t been alerted by Tara’s magical action, it would be stupid to recreate a Portal. We have to take everyone with us. The Mud Eaters could return and attack them again.”
“Put the children on pegasi behind the elf warriors, and take them somewhere safe.”
“No, that would deprive me of six fighters, and I need all the elves I’ve got to attack the Fortress.”
“I completely disagree,” said the dog. “You’re going to put them in danger!”
“Manitou, this is war! Magister kidnapped those children and was willing to pervert them with demonic magic. I’m not going to use them to conquer the Fortress. I just want them to accompany us. They can stay a mile away, guarded by a couple of elves, and won’t join in the fighting. Does that suit you?”
“Don’t ask me, ask them!”
“What?”
“Stop thinking that the humans are only here for your little games, Chem. Ask them their opinion. And if they say no, it’ll be no. Period.”
The high wizard looked at him angrily, then shrugged.
“So be it . . . Tara!”
“Master?” replied the strange lilting voice.
“Your great-grandfather just reminded me that humans also have free will. What would you like to do? Come with us to the Bloodgrave Fortress or take cover somewhere while waiting for the fighting to be over?”
“Our mother is imprisoned in that Fortress, Master. We must come with you to free her.”
“You see, Manitou,” began the old wizard, “she—”
He suddenly interrupted himself.
“Your mother? But I thought she—”
“—was dead. So did we. But that’s not the case. She is under a deadly spell that prevents her from leaving the Fortress. You are the only one who can release her from it. So of course we are going to come with you.”
“Where Tara goes, we go,” said Fabrice firmly, and the others concurred.
Master Dragosh came over to them.
“We’re going to have a problem then,” he said. “Who is going to transport the children?”
“I have an idea about that. But first I need the elves to go on ahead. Their pegasi can’t fly as fast as we dragons can. And they should take Gallant with them.”
He turned to Tara.
“Ask your familiar to go with the elves when they leave. Can you tell us where the Fortress is?”
“Yes, it’s right here,” she said, pulling out the map. By Detailus, show my location please, so I can travel at my ease.”
The map obligingly opened up, but couldn’t help making a few remarks.
“Oh my, dragons!” said the chatty chart as it displayed the route they had just taken. “Scads of dragons! Kindly hold your breath, I’m extremely flammable. So you want to know the way to the Fortress? Well, it won’t take you more than two hours as the crow flies— forgive me, the dragon.”
“That’s perfect,” said Chem, raising an eyebrow. “May I borrow this . . . map, Tara?”
“Of course, Master.”
Chem turned to the Lancovit secret services chief, whose arm was still affectionately draped around his son Robin’s shoulders.
“Master T’andilus?”
“Yes, High Wizard?”
“Here is a map of Gandis. The route is easy to follow. Leave now and be careful. It’s essential that the Bloodgraves not notice your presence. Land nearby, but keep out of sight. Here, for example.” He pointed to a spot on the map. “We’ll join you there. Ah, just a second!”
“High Wizard?”
“I’m going to darken the coats of your pegasi.” A startled Gallant neighed in protest, but the wizard ignored him. “They’re much too visible the way they are.”
He was right. When the pegasi had been turned black, they became shadows that melted into the night and disappeared in a great flight of feathers—led by an extremely grumpy Gallant.
The old wizard rubbed his hands.
“All right, it’s our turn. Tara, have you ever shape-shifted before? I mean, ever taken some other form?”
“No, Master.”
The strange lilting voice betrayed no surprise, and also no interest, as if Tara’s emotions were submerged by something else.
“I want you to change into a dragon. I will ex—”
She gave him no time to finish his sentence.
“Very well, Master.”
Tara began to swell and swell like a balloon. Chem stepped back in surprise. With a
“—plain,” finished the wizard, thunderstruck. “Oh, I see you’ve already got the knack. That’s good, very good. A little unnerving, but very impressive. Now, will you agree to carry your friends, so we can go faster? I will carry Angelica, Manitou, Master Dragosh, Robin, and Fabrice. You will have to take Cal, Fafnir, Sparrow, and Sheeba. My fellow dragons are too snobby to let anybody climb on their backs.”
The other dragons hissed in annoyance and took off.
“Very well,” Tara agreed. “Let our friends climb on our back. We are ready.”
“Wait!” yelped Angelica. “What about me?”
The high wizard blinked.
“What’s the matter, little Angelica?”
“The matter is that I want to go home. I don’t want to wind up in the middle of the fight between spellbinders. Send me back!”
“No.”
Tara’s lilting voice had answered for the wizard.
“What do you mean, no?”
Angelica spun around, ready to slap her, until she realized that Tara was now fifty feet long—longer than a brontosaurus!
She turned imploringly to Master Dragosh.
“Don’t you agree with me, Master?”
But the vampyr had already climbed onto the dragon’s back.
“Angelica, the Master of Bloodgraves is extremely powerful,” Tara said in her odd, lilting voice. “If we open another Transfer Portal he might discover our presence, and we would lose the element of surprise. Climb onto Master Chem’s back. As soon as we’re finished with these monsters, you’ll be able to go home.”
“But . . . ”
“If you keep arguing, we will leave you here with the Mud Eaters. Obey!”
Angelica turned to Master Chem, but he indicated there was nothing he could do. Shaking with her hatred of Tara, Angelica climbed onto his back, trampling the old dragon’s scales. To give people more room, Chem changed his shape until he was as big as Tara.
They took off, and soon the island, the strange voice that had whispered in the darkness, and the black rosebushes were nothing but a speck in the distance.
CHAPTER 18
AERIAL ACROBATICS
Tara was peacefully cruising along when the living stone released itself from their fantastic symbiosis, restoring Tara’s consciousness to her. For a moment, she watched as the ground raced by . . . then suddenly realized she was six hundred feet above it! In a complete panic, she started pedaling in the air and stopped beating her wings—and immediately went into a steep dive.
“Heyyy!” yelled Cal. “Stop that! Pull up! Pull up!”
The ground was rushing up at them dangerously, and Tara suddenly understood that her wings were what kept them aloft. She desperately flapped them and barely avoided a collision with a huge tree . . . by flying underneath it. She leveled off with her muzzle skimming the branches rushing toward her, but couldn’t help clipping a top branch with her wing.
Knocked off balance, she lost some more altitude and pulled in her wings to pass beneath another giant tree. Then, by pushing off from an enormous trunk, she leaped upward through a providential opening in the
dense forest, and with a desperate effort managed to climb back into the air.
“You lunatic!” screamed an enraged Fafnir. “What are you doing? Are you trying to kill us?”
“I’m . . . I’m flying!” cried Tara, flabbergasted. “I’m a dragon and I’m flying!”
“Good Lord, you’ve been a dragon for the last half hour, and it’s only now that you’re realizing it?” yelled Cal furiously. “I would have done better to climb aboard Master Chem. He’s known he’s been a dragon for hundreds of years.”
“But how is it that I’m flying?” stammered Tara.
“By flapping your wings,” cried Sparrow, who was being knocked around by her chaotic flight. “In fact, if you could flap them both together, it would be a lot better!”
“What’s going on here?” cried Master Chem, who’d been watching Tara’s aerial acrobatics with great surprise.
“What’s going on is that I want to get down!” roared the terrified dwarf. “Get me down before she kills us all!”
The old dragon ignored her.
“Stop thrashing your legs around like that,” he ordered Tara, who was doing more swimming in the air than flying, “and tell me what’s going on with you.”
“I don’t know,” answered Tara, trying to beat her wings smoothly. “We were on the Island of Black Roses waiting for you, the Mud Eaters attacked, and then after that there was this big void, like a black hole. Next thing I knew, I was hundreds of feet above the ground, I got dizzy, and I fell.”
“Yeah, and we fell with her,” Cal confirmed.
“I understand!” said Chem. “Your magic and the living stone’s magic entered into a symbiosis, and it must have created a shock. You weren’t aware of what you were doing. All right now, to fly smoothly, do what I’m doing: spread your wings wide, then bring them down as if you were bending your elbow inward. Our wings aren’t like birds’ wings; we have an extra joint. Don’t fight the air; let it carry you. And look for updrafts; they’ll help you soar.”
Despite the semi-hysterical dwarf ’s thrashing around on her back, Tara very gradually managed to master her flight, and then to enjoy it. She lost her balance once or twice, which didn’t improve the humor of her passengers, but managed to fly more or less straight without running into anything.
They soon caught up with the elves and landed behind a hill that hid them from the Gray Fortress.
The landing was difficult. When Tara touched down, she forgot she was still moving fast, and tried to climb back up. But she no longer had enough speed, so she galloped furiously to keep from falling, tripped, lurched into the air, and wound up crashing nose first into the dirt, digging a thirty-foot-long trench in the ground.
Before they came in for a landing, Sparrow had a hunch that things wouldn’t go well and cast a Fixus spell to help everyone stay on Tara’s back. To look at them now, they couldn’t believe they were still alive.
The dust had hardly begun to settle when Fafnir jumped down and, half weeping in spite of her dwarfish pride, fell to her knees to thank the dwarf gods for sparing her life, and swore never again to ever climb onto the back of anything that flew.
Cal, Sparrow, and Sheeba came staggering down after her.
The old dragon, by contrast, made an elegant landing.
“All right,” he said, “now that we’re all together, we have a Fortress to attack . . . No, Tara! Be careful! Nooooooo!”
Exhausted, Tara was yawning. She was surprised by Master Chem’s shout and turned her head to him with her mouth still open, but it was too late.
A jet of flame shot from her throat and hit the dragon wizard, who yelled, scattering the elves and the pegasi, and causing indescribable chaos.
The old wizard was hopping this way and that, trying to put out his burning dragon mane, while everyone else cautiously backed away from Tara. The elves rushed over to smother the flames with their capes before the smoke alerted the Gray Fortress Bloodgraves.
“Oh my!” cried Tara. “What happened to me?”
“When dragons yawn, they spit fire,” yelled Master Chem. “When they have the hiccups too, for that matter.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, we noticed,” said Cal. “All right, now that I’ve almost been flattened like a pancake and roasted like a chicken, I’d appreciate it if you would shape-shift back before we have another catastrophe.”
“Absolutely,” approved the old dragon, who explained to Tara how to restore her human body.
But without the help of the living stone, it wasn’t that simple.
Using the power of her mind, Tara ordered her entire body to shrink, but only her wings obeyed, and she wound up with ridiculous little pigeon wings on the body of a dragon. Then she nearly fell over when one of her legs became human again, unable to support her several tons of weight. Her legs began to grow, but her tail shrank. She was able to regain her human head, but with a dragon’s crest. Arms appeared and disappeared, her body shrank and became human—but with fifty-foot wings. These began to flap, raising a cloud of dust and lifting her many feet into the air before she was able to come back down, in a panic. The spectacle was so strange that even the elf T’andilus, the hardened head of the Lancovit secret services, forgot about his battle plan and gaped.
The dragons watching weren’t openly laughing, but you could feel they were restraining themselves.
And Cal, Sparrow, Fabrice, and Fafnir looked extremely concerned.
Eventually, Tara managed to get rid of her giant wings and recovered her normal human body. After anxiously feeling herself all over for several minutes, she grinned at her friends, who were hugely relieved to have her whole again.
“Our battle plan is fairly simple,” announced Master T’andilus, still shaking his head incredulously. “We can’t attack the Gray Fortress until we know how it’s defended. So I’m going to try to get in first and neutralize their defenses while you wait outside. At my signal, you’ll all storm the Fortress. By making as little noise as possible we should be able to get to the heart of the complex before the Bloodgraves realize they’re under attack. We’ll approach under cover of the forest, following the path the young people took on their way out. Any questions?”
“Yeah, I have one,” cried Cal, frowning. “We licensed thieves don’t much like the unexpected. Why don’t we use the bat instead?”
The startled vampyr turned to him as Master T’andilus asked, “What bat?”
“Master Dragosh can change shape,” explained Cal, “but it’s not like the dragons, it’s more like part of his nature. He’s in the habit of going out at night as a bat and flying around Travia Castle. I noticed that our spells didn’t detect him, and neither did the anti-mosquito ones.”
“I didn’t realize I was being spied on,” snapped Dragosh, glaring at Cal. “But the boy is right. I could try to slip into the Fortress in my bat shape. What would you like me to do?”
“Hm, I hadn’t thought of that,” said the old wizard. “Are you sure you want to take the chance?”
“I don’t really have much choice,” replied the vampyr stiffly.
“Very well,” said Master T’andilus. “Basically, you have to get rid of the human sentinels and try to find the Spells Hall. Be especially careful because they could have wild demons defending it, who might be a little aggressive.”
“Great!” said the vampyr with a grimace. “Putting what you just said in plain English, I’m supposed to blindly enter enemy territory without using magic, knock out anybody I run into, and find the defensive apparatus, while incidentally neutralizing any demons who might annihilate me.”
Dragosh gave a hiss of annoyance. Then with a
“Wait,” said Master Chem. “Take my crystal ball and call Master T’andilus once you’re inside. You have his number?”
The bat nodded, took the crystal ball in a hand, and waited attentively.
“While you�
��re flying to the Fortress, we’ll begin our advance,” said the elf. “See you later!”
The vampyr nodded, then fluttered into the darkness.
Tara and Cal climbed onto Gallant, who was relieved to find his human companion in her more normal shape, and they flew off into the night. It only took them a few minutes to reach the edge of the forest. There, the dragons entrusted the young spellbinders to two elves, who would guard them.
“You’ll stay here for the time being,” explained Master Chem. “If we don’t come back for you, it means that we have lost. In that case you’ll have to flee and try to get to the nearest country, which is Hymlia. Warn of OtherWorld that the demons have declared war on humans and dragons by infecting the Bloodgraves. The whole planet must fight this terrifying menace, otherwise all the free worlds will be lost!”
“We’ll do it,” Robin gravely agreed. “Fafnir will alert the dwarves, I’ll warn my fellow elves, and the other peoples will all rise against this menace.”
“Perfect,” said the old wizard with a smile. “Tara, lend me your living stone so that I can communicate with everyone. Oh, and warn her that she will be changing owners temporarily. I don’t want any bad surprises.”
Tara addressed the living stone mentally. “You have to retransmit all communications to Master Chem. It’s important, not to say vital!”
“Why?” asked the stone, which had trouble seizing the human concepts of “important” and “vital.”
“Because there are many beings held against their will in the Fortress, and we need your help to free them.”
“You mean to free them the way you freed me from the black roses?” asked the living stone. “You want to polish them so that they become as beautiful as me? In that case, I agree. Even though I don’t like being away from you, I will transmit the calls from the other crystal balls—who aren’t particularly intelligent,” she added smugly.
Tara smiled and handed the living stone to the old wizard.
“She agrees, Master Chem.”
“Thank you,” he said, cautiously taking the fragile crystal ball. “And don’t too concerned. I have no intention of losing to those gray-shirted runts. We’ll see each other soon.”
Tara Duncan and the Spellbinders Page 36
