“I say!” Chumley protested, looking down protectively at his coat. “Perhaps I should go home to Deva for the duration.”
“Not a chance,” Tananda said. “I’ll look after you, Big Brother.”
“Thank you, Little Sis. We shall be a team, what?”
“I’ll come with you, Skeeve,” Markie said. “She’ll think you’re running the race with your baby sister.”
“Gleep!” my dragon said, leaning his head against my leg.
“Thanks, buddy,” I said. “No, thanks, Markie. I’ll take Gleep. The rest of you go ahead. We’ll be fine.”
“Why don’t you team up with me, pretty lady?” Haroon asked Bunny. “I can’t help you find items, but I can show you around.”
“Thanks,” Bunny said. “Want to come along, Aahz?”
“No. I’ll make better time on my own.”
“Me, too,” said Markie. “I do better alone.”
Tananda rolled the list tightly into a solid rod, then waved a hand over it. When she unrolled it again, it had increased from one sheet of parchment to five, each with just a few of the mysterious items on it, though all the lists included the Loving Cup. Tananda handed one to me with a kiss.
“See you later!” she said. The group split up, following hordes of other teams all running and shouting to one another.
Aahz’s assessment made sense. The girl was on the trail of the Loving Cup, the same as we were. I guessed that she must be one of Looie’s other agents. If only I could speak to her, I was sure we could come to some kind of equitable arrangement!
“If only she doesn’t try to have me killed again,” I said, glumly.
“Gleep!” my dragon exclaimed, slurping my face.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Missed it by that much!”
—SISYPHUS
With the beach just steps away, I had no trouble obtaining two ounces of pink sand. Just to keep in practice, I sealed it into another force bubble like the one Aahz had just taught me to make. A check mark appeared on the list in my hand beside that entry. I read down below it.
“But where do we find blue air?” I wondered aloud, as we threaded through the narrow lanes filled with shops.
My partners never believed me when I told them how smart Gleep was. He lollopped around behind me and put his head in the small of my back.
“Gleep!” he exclaimed happily, and pushed me forward.
“Where are we going, boy?” I asked. Guided by nudges from behind, I walked around the corner and into a side street. Three doors down, my dragon stopped pushing me. He snaked his long neck around and slurped me in the face.
“Ughhh!” I protested. His stinking breath almost distracted me from my errand. But I understood. It meant that we had arrived. I looked up at the sign swinging above us. We were in front of the Rusty Hinge. “Good dragon!” I said, grabbing his head and scratching vigorously between his ears. No one ever believed me when I said how smart he was.
“Gleep!” my dragon said, with a blissful expression. He shook loose from my grasp and bounded forward. He bumped the neatly painted doors open with his head and glanced back at me. I followed. All I had to do was wait for the inevitable: someone having an attack of bad language.
I didn’t have long to wait.
Part of a table swooshed past my nose as I entered. It looked for a moment that the person swearing might be me. It crashed into the nearest wall. I threw up a handful of force to protect me and Gleep from flying splinters.
“You cheat, I beat!”
A Troll brandishing a leg of that table faced a couple of Imps and a female Deveel. Scattered cards told me what must have ensued just before my arrival.
“It wasn’t us!” the Imps insisted, almost in unison. “It was her!”
The Deveel woman had evidently dealt with Trolls before. She sidled up to him and ran her long claws up and down his hairy arm.
“You’re not going to believe Imps over me, are you?” she asked, in a wheedling tone.
“All foul, no fair! I rend and tear!” the Troll bellowed. He flexed his muscles, throwing her halfway across the room.
“Why, you molting rug!” she shrieked, catching herself in midair. She came at him, her fingernails aiming for his eyes. “How dare you accuse me of foul play!”
The Troll batted at her again, knocking her squarely into the two Imps. They had been trying to make a quiet escape. The Deveel landed on top of them. All of them fell into a Kobold who had just crossed the threshold.
“#%#=?>!” he declared, symbols spewing from his mouth and circling around his bulbous gray head. They were tinted an unmistakable blue!
“Good boy!” I praised my dragon. My newly learned spell at the ready, I jumped forward to capture some of the Kobold’s symbols. They dodged me all over the front room of the inn, but I pursued them with determination. At last I trapped a puff of the blue air between my open bubble and a pane of window glass. I felt triumphant as I closed the spell. The symbols danced and shuddered within their magikal prison. The Kobold, still prone on the floor, looked abashed at his attack of invective.
“,” he said, his gray skin darkening to charcoal.
“It’s nothing personal,” I assured him, helping him to his feet. “I would have said worse if they’d landed on me.”
“Mind your own business, Klahd!” the Deveel screamed, shaking a fist in my direction. Gleep jumped in between us and snarled at her. She backed away. Without a control rod, no Deveel ever challenged a dragon. I noticed that he was careful not to breathe fire in her direction. Who knew if she was a contestant or not?
I hadn’t been in the Rusty Hinge since our first day in Winslow. The Loving Cup could not have been there then, or Looie would have spotted it. It had certainly been in that hotel room for a time, but I guessed that it had been removed by the time we caught the girl magician searching for it. So where could it have gone?
Since it had become a clue in the Scavenger Hunt, my guess was that it was hidden in plain sight. An inn was the ideal location. If you wanted to hide a cup, where would you put it? In the midst of hundreds of other cups.
All I had to do was find it.
Admittedly, it wouldn’t be easy, or one of the other teams would find it first. It had to be so cleverly concealed that only someone willing to look at things in a different way would spot it.
Still, my friends and I knew more about the cup than anybody else participating in the hunt. We knew what it looked like and had an idea of some of its properties. We also knew that it was very magikal.
All throughout the inn, steins, mugs, cups, and all manner of things to drink from stood on shelves or hung on the walls on pegs, hooks, nails, and dabs of pure magik. Some might have been purely for decoration, but I saw the bartender and his assistants reach up to take cups down to serve their customers. The rest were fully functional. But that didn’t mean the Loving Cup might not be used to serve liquor.
“Stay here, boy,” I commanded Gleep. He settled down in an empty inglenook beside the massive stone fireplace and put his head on his front paws.
I strolled idly through the public rooms of the inn. If the cup was part of a game, it couldn’t be hidden in any of the private rooms upstairs. Most likely, it was right there in front of my eyes. I scanned the drinking vessels being used by the customers, looking for the familiar shape and jeweled handles.
The usual bar brawl was under way. The temperamental Troll had resumed his seat at a new poker table and pounded his fist on its top. The Imps and Deveel that he had been fighting with had left. Instead, a fast-talking Landshark, a Werewolf, two Djinn, and a Gnome took their places, and the broken furniture disappeared as if it had never existed. The Gnome shuffled the cards, letting the Werewolf cut.
The Troll was a sore loser, though. He started a fight with the Werewolf almost immediately over the way he stacke
d the cards. Like the rest of his kind, the Werewolf was impatient and took offense easily. Both of them reached for cups and trenchers to throw at each other. I ducked a flying jug. It shattered on the wall over my head. I sputtered angrily as beer splattered me and everybody in a four-table radius.
“Hey!” yelped a tall, muscular Whelf in a tight yellow tunic sitting on a nearby bar stool. His conversation with a fetching Fairy in a low-cut pink gown had been interrupted by the rain of ale. He stood up, towering over me, and leveled a fist at my nose. “What do you think you’re doing? My coat is soaked!”
I shoved his hand out of the way.
“I didn’t splash you. Look at me! I got wet, too!”
“Who did it?” he demanded.
I pointed. The Whelf’s eyes followed my finger. The combatants were grabbing bottles off nearby shelves and heaving them at each other. The Troll flexed his enormous muscles and let out a bellow that shook the rafters.
“They did.”
“They did?” The Whelf’s voice rose to a squeak. “Well, I’m sure they didn’t mean to do it.” He turned back to the Fairy, who rolled her big green eyes.
“You’re kidding me, right?” she said, scornfully. “You’re afraid of a drunken Troll?”
“You bet I am, sister,” the Whelf exclaimed.
“He’s smart,” said an Imp female in a low-cut blouse. She sidled up to the Whelf and wound her arms around his elbow. “Anybody with any sense wouldn’t get near a wrecking ball like that!” The Whelf looked down at the bright-pink girl in bemusement but beamed at his stroke of luck. The Fairy gaped in outrage.
“You get your hands off him! I saw him first!”
The Imp turned up her nose.
“Looks like you were about to abandon your claim, honey. Better luck next time.”
“You won’t have a next time! You’re going to have to find your nose in some other dimension!” The Fairy leaped into the air, her wings buzzing. She brought up her feet and kicked the Imp backward. The Whelf, having more sense than to get in the middle of their brawl, ducked behind me. This time, I rolled my eyes. Then I, too, edged away.
I walked around the Rusty Hinge several times. Although a few of the drinkers had two-handled cups in front of them, none of them was the one I was looking for. But would the magician who placed it here have left its appearance unchanged? I wouldn’t have, and I was by no means the most devious person I knew.
So it was likely disguised. All I had to do was look for a cup giving off a magik aura and dispel the glamour concealing it. I was pretty good at that simple cantrip. I glanced around for groups carrying the list and bag that declared them my opponents in the Scavenger Hunt. I didn’t want to give them any ideas.
It was better to go through the bar in a methodical fashion. At the very back of the inn were several small tables divided by low walls. A few of them were occupied by couples holding hands and looking at one another intently. All along the top of the low walls were lines of steins and tankards. A blue-enameled stein with an ornamental pewter lid gave off a visible glow of magik. I pointed a fingertip at it, sending a filament of magik into it. If the stein was disguised, that would remove the concealment.
Nothing happened. It remained a stein. I guessed that the spell it possessed had nothing to do with shape-shifting. Deva, the dimension in which M.Y.T.H., Inc., did business, had lots of cups bespelled to keep the beer from poisoning the drinker. Considering the underhanded behavior that was typical of Deveels, that was just a simple precaution. I tipped up the tankard to see the bottom. Yes, as I guessed, it bore the mark of a Deveelish potter.
I went down the wall, checking each magikal beaker in turn. A few of them were disguised. One particularly gaudy figured goblet with gold leaf rim and foot, and a handle in the shape of a curvaceous Trollop, turned out to be a plain wooden tankard, although there was a naughty picture of the same Trollop in the base.
I glanced at the nearest sconce. The candle in it had been at least an inch higher when I started looking around. I was wasting time. I couldn’t look at just one mug at a time. I needed to do several at once.
The irregular yellow force line that ran above the inn yielded enough magik for me to fill up my inner reservoir. In order not to attract attention, I focused my aim on just the twenty or so cups balanced on the next section of wall. Three mugs changed shape. I paid attention only long enough to realize none of them was the Loving Cup. I gathered more magik and threw another dispel charm at the next row of cups. Nothing.
“Hey!” an outraged male voice bellowed. “You told me you were a college girl!”
“But I am!” a female voice replied. “I’m just nineteen!”
“Nineteen hundred, more likely!”
I peeped around the corner of the booth. A Pervect stood glaring at a twisted, wizened, wrinkled creature. It was a Hag. She had on a trim white blouse and a flared plaid skirt with a big, perky bow that stood upright in her stringy, orange hair. I gulped. She spotted me as I tried to duck behind a nearby chair.
“You!” the Hag shrieked, pointing a wrinkled finger at me. “You did that! You ruined my date!”
“It was an accident!” I said. She crossed her forefingers. A ball of red-hot energy gathered in their junction. With a roaring crackle, it hurtled toward me. I dodged just in time. It just singed my ear before blasting a shelf full of knickknacks into shards. She threw another one that exploded the chair I had ducked behind for cover.
“Hey, baby,” the Pervect said, his eyes lighting up. “I didn’t know you could do that!”
Surprised, the Hag stopped throwing fire at me. She wound her way into the Pervect’s arms and looked up into his yellow eyes.
“I can do a lot of things, even better than that.”
“Oh, yeah?” the Pervect asked, with avid interest.
“Oh, yeah. Come on back to my room, and I’ll show you.”
I was completely forgotten. I wiped my forehead with relief as they disappeared.
With disappointment, I surveyed the debris on the floor. Among the broken pieces were many that shimmered with magik. Not knowing whether the Loving Cup could be destroyed, I removed any glamour I could. No luck. All the pieces belonged to very ordinary drinking vessels.
The same held true for the next hundred or so I examined. I was running out of magik and time.
I moved up into the gallery that looked down on the main bar area. Over my head, a thousand more tankards hung on hooks. Dozens of them radiated with magik. No one was nearby to catch an accidental backsplash of my spell, so I gathered up as much power as I could and threw it at the ceiling. Several of them dropped their original appearance, but one in particular twinkled with light. To my delight, a dusty old tankard changed from gray to golden and sprouted a second handle across from the single one holding it on its hook. The bowl of the cup even seemed to be the right shape. Could it be the Loving Cup? Could I really have found it this time?
I kicked off from the railing and flew up to look at it.
Before I could reach my goal, something closed around my ankle and pulled downward. Helplessly, I fought to regain some magik, any magik, to save me. I swam upward against the air. I almost got free, when my captor yanked hard on my foot. I plummeted to the floor and landed with an audible thud. As I lay moaning, I looked up at two moon-shaped eyes and a purple-furred face.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I’ve been thrown out of better places than this.”
—ADAM
“Klahd play nice! Cards, not dice.”
It was the gambling Troll. He showed all his teeth in a fierce scowl. I scuttled backward on all fours.
“No, I can’t play cards right now,” I said. “I’m on the Scavenger Hunt.” I retrieved my copy of the list and my bag from the floor. “See? I can’t stay.”
“Never mind what you find,” the Troll said. “Play with me. La
ter see.”
“But, I . . .” I almost pointed upward, and then I realized that other teams might be among the patrons crowding the bar counter. I didn’t dare look up in case anyone followed my eyes. I could almost see the golden cup beckoning to me. It was just overhead. If I could just distract the Troll for a moment . . .
He picked me up by one arm and slammed me down into an empty chair at his table.
“You play or I slay!”
I glanced at the other players. A resentful-looking Deveel with a scrawny beard sat to my left with his arms folded. To my right, a Vampire woman in a low-cut black dress, dark sunglasses, and high-heeled shoes filed her black-painted nails. On her other side a miserable little wormlike being in a tasteless flowered shirt hunched nervously. The Troll wasn’t going to let any of us go without playing at least one hand.
“All right,” I said. I exchanged a few silver coins for a small stack of blue chips. I could afford to lose that much. Then I hoped the Troll would let me go back to my quarry. I hoped no one would notice the cup in the meantime. It took every bit of self-control I had not to look up toward the ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw people walking up into the gallery. Were they carrying white sacks with them? My fingers twitched nervously.
The Troll slammed a deck of green-backed cards down in front of me. I shuffled it. I had had plenty of experience playing Dragon Poker with my friends in the Even Odds casino in Deva.6 I had picked up a few tricks over time, none of which had to do with accumulating winning hands. The rules were too complicated for me to follow, especially the daily, even hourly rule changes, not to mention the specific regulations depending on which seat you occupied or the color of the deck. I enjoyed the game, but to me the greatest pleasure was the camaraderie with my fellow players. If I wasn’t good at winning, I could at least amuse the other players.
I flipped half of the deck, cascading the cards down in a showy stream. Once it had rejoined the other half, I ruffled the two together, pulling my hands higher and higher until the cards were bouncing off the table. The Deveel grinned, showing his sharpened teeth, and the wormlike fellow applauded openly. Even the Troll was amused. He laughed and slapped the Deveel on the back.
Robert Asprin's Myth-Fits Page 13
