by Eric Flint
“No, silly. A wiloklisp is more like a puck, except they are posted as guards, used to delay enemies, or draw them into traps.”
“So if a wiloklisp got eaten, it wouldn’t have to be confirmed? It would merely be eaten?”
“It depends.” The brook was bright, a bit flighty, tumbling over rocks and dancing in the sunlight. “Most wiloklisp are owned by a lord of some sort. So if one gets eaten, then the eater should have the permission of the lord. Unless it has a protector of its own.”
About then, the change that took place when Chevalier Pucorl left was reversed. And a moment later, the brook said, “You need to go back to the garage. Pucorl wants to talk to you.”
“I don’t see why.” Leona yawned in indifference that was only partly feigned. She was, after all, a cat.
“These are Pucorl’s lands. Piss him off and you’re going to spend a lot of time getting rained on and getting burrs in your fur.”
“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it.”
✽ ✽ ✽
A few minutes later, Leona strolled onto the parking lot of Pucorl’s garage and Pucorl opened his side door. “Kitten is worried you got lost and Mrs. Grady . . .” Pucorl sighed heavily. “. . . insisted I come pick you up before the magic of my world drove you crazy.”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t doubt it, but let’s keep them happy. I’ll arrange for some smoked fish for dinner.”
Leona strolled over to the van and leapt in. The door closed and suddenly they were back in the mortal realm. Leaping up to the back of one of the seats, Leona saw that the humans were packing up. She watched as Wilber walked around the campsite, gathering little flicks of light as he went. “What’s he doing?”
“Picking up the wards he put out last night,” came Merlin’s voice. Then the door opened and Kitten climbed into the van. “Bad Leona,” she said in cat.
Leona looked back at the kitten and growled low in her throat. “You don’t own me, little kitten. Behave, or I’ll box your ears.”
“I’m sorry,” Kitten said meekly, “but I was worried.”
“It’s all right.” Leona forgave her and jumped down into Kitten’s lap to be petted.
The others climbed in and Pucorl drove off, following several horsemen.
For the rest of the morning they rode, taking a break every hour and traveling about twelve miles an hour the rest of the time. Around noon, they stopped and set up camp. They would spend the rest of the day and tonight here while the horses grazed and slept. That left plenty of time for Kitten and Paul to be educated in their school on the road. They practiced sword play with wooden swords under the tutelage of Bertrand du Guesclin’s guardsmen, reading and writing, math and physics, from Mrs. Grady and Jennifer Fairbanks, magic from Dr. Delaflote and Wilber, aided by Merlin and Archimedes, and that began the cycle. Mornings were spent traveling, afternoons studying, evenings and nights in Pucorl’s lands, while half the guards kept watch on the campsite within the wards that Wilber set.
Location: On the Road, France
Time: 9:37 AM, August 24, 1372
Wilber sat astride Meurtrier, the war horse that only allowed Wilber to ride him. He wore a saddle, but no bridle and Wilber wore riding boots, but no spurs. He mostly guided Meurtrier by voice, with an occasional movement of his knee. Roger McLean, on another war horse, rode up beside him.
“What’s up?” Wilber asked.
“I want to take the Danube across the Germanies and all the way to the Black Sea.”
“Why all the way? I can see following the Danube until we get to, say, Belgrade, but after that it starts going out of the way.”
“You don’t understand. I don’t want to ride along the banks. I want to buy boats and boat down the river.”
“You think they have river boats big enough for Pucorl? Or do you want him to drive along the banks while we ride boats?”
“If we can’t buy one that’s big enough, we have one built,” Roger said. “Look, boats aren’t faster than horses, but they travel all day and all night. We can stop when we need to pick up something from Pucorl’s lands, and spend the rest of the time traveling. Heck, Wilber—” By now they were all used to avoiding words that invoked the beings of the netherworld, so heck replaced hell and darn, damn. “—even traveling ten full hours a day at eight miles an hour would double the miles we cover in a day.”
Wilber took a moment to run the numbers in his head. Not that he doubted Roger, but the guy did get enthusiastic about things. His numbers were good, though, and since people and horses could rest on boats while the boats traveled, they would be better rested.
“We can use the birds, Archimedes, Carlos, and the rest to scout while we travel, so we don’t get ambushed.”
“Carlos, maybe. But Archimedes is Dr. Delaflote’s familiar spirit. He has better things to do than flap around trees. This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Fine. Archimedes can lecture Gabriel on the proper way to boil an eye of newt. By now half of Bertrand’s men at arms have some sort of familiar. Even Louis has that glider Jennifer made for him.”
The glider in question was bat-winged, made of sticks and lacquered cloth, and was halfway between a triangular kite from the twentieth century and a model of a bat. It would fly like a kite if you tied a string to it, but it was enchanted and could fly for hours after Louis tossed it into the air. It had three eyes, two looking forward and one looking down, a small speaker, and two bat’s ears, so it could even do echolocation. Louis had paid Wilber a goodly amount for enchanting it.
Wilber looked up. Ariel was flying right now. He could barely see it, because it was painted blue gray on the bottom. “We need to talk to Bertrand.”
“Right. I called him last night, but we didn’t get into it,” Roger agreed. “Whose phone is he using today?”
Bertrand didn’t own a phone. Only the twenty-firsters, the King of France, and God owned phones. But Bertrand usually borrowed someone’s phone so that he could be reached if anything came up. Annabelle’s or Wilber’s most often. After all, Annabelle was in Pucorl most of the time and Pucorl had his own phone. Roger pulled his phone from his pocket and said, “Clausewitz, find Bertrand would you, and see if he’s busy. Wilber and I want to talk to him.”
✽ ✽ ✽
As it happened, Bertrand was carrying Annabelle’s phone. Enzo said, “Phone call from Roger, General. You want to take it?”
Bertrand looked around. He was riding with the scouting element, ten horsemen who were riding a quarter mile ahead of the main party, scouting the trail as much for deadfalls and trees that would need to be cut to let Pucorl and the cardinal’s wagons through as for bandits.
They were in a grove of trees, but it was a small one and Bertrand could see the fields of a village ahead. “I’ll ride back, Enzo. Tell Roger I’ll be there in a minute.” He turned his horse and put it into a trot with a squeeze of his knees.
✽ ✽ ✽
By the time he got back to the main body, Roger, Wilber, and Jennifer Fairbanks were all riding next to Pucorl, with Mrs. Grady leaning out of the passenger side window.
“What brings about this conclave of twenty-firsters?” Bertrand asked.
“Noah, here,” Amelia Grady hooked a thumb at Roger, “wants to build an ark.”
After that, they explained the plan as they rode along the path. Bertrand had the same basic concern that Sun Tzu had. Bertrand was fond of Roger’s computer. It was teaching him Go and chess. Pucorl was in favor of the idea. He had a good bit of biodiesel stored in his garage, but didn’t like wasting it.
They spent the rest of the morning discussing the possibilities of enchanted river boats and what sort of demon would be best to enchant them.
Location: On the Road, France
Time: 2:14 PM, August 24, 1372
As they drove along, Pucorl was playing music over the stereo system. It was quiet music, and at first Annabelle didn’t notice. Then Paul started singing along.
Annabelle rolled her eyes. “This is hardly a yellow brick road, Pucorl. And we aren’t headed for Australia, anyway.”
“Besides,” Amelia Grady said, taking hold of Gabriel Delaflote’s arm, “We have the best wizard on Earth right here with us.”
“You want to play something a bit more grown-up?” Annabelle asked.
“Pucorl and grown-up don’t belong in the same sentence,” Paul announced. “That’s what Mom says.”
Pucorl sniffed loudly over the sound system. “I am most profoundly displeased.” Then he giggled.
Amelia’s phone Laurence said, in the voice of Laurence Olivier, “Well, we could be on a yellow brick road. At least in Pucorl’s lands.”
✽ ✽ ✽
And so it proved. For that night, when they returned to the netherworld, the blacktop road that led to Pucorl’s Garage had been replaced by a two-lane-wide yellow brick road.
Location: Pucorl’s Garage, Netherworld
Time: 9:37 PM, August 24, 1372
Roger stepped into the pentagram in a room off the mechanic’s bays in Pucorl’s garage. This was a special pentagram. It went from Pucorl’s lands to the land of Themis. He bowed and sat in the chair.
A moment later the titan Themis appeared in the pentagram, sitting on her throne. “Hello, Roger,” Themis said. “What can I do for you today?”
Themis was a friend. Normally mortals didn’t count titans as friends, in the same way that peasants didn’t normally think of kings as friends. Only more so. But this was a special case. Roger McLean had, for a short time, owned Themis and had freely given her to herself, freeing her from the bondage that Beslizoswian, a demon lord, had forced on her. It was partly that Roger gave her her freedom, but mostly that he did so not out of expectation of reward, but because it was the right thing to do. And Themis was the titan of right behavior. It was a bond between them.
Besides, as a titan and the parent of a god or two, Themis could be in as many places at once as she needed to.
“Mostly some advice, Themis. We were wondering who we should recruit to enchant a river boat.”
“That’s an interesting thought. You know I extend out to sea some way. Well, partially. My nephew Poseidon shares, ah, I guess you would say sovereignty of the coastal areas with me.” Themis was referring to the fact that she was both the queen of her lands and the land itself. Her body, as it were, was the entire land of Themis, which was roughly analogous to the Thrace of the ancient world, and included most of the remaining Byzantine Empire. And apparently she mixed with Poseidon on the coast.
“Before I was stolen from my place and forced into the sword, I had a lovely sea monster locked in the Bay of Athyra. It would have been a thousand years ago. When I was forced to enchant the dead for—” Her voice became as cold as a glacier on Pluto. “—that creature Philip, I used the more powerful, but not necessarily brighter, of my servants to enchant those who were to serve that creature personally. The kraken I am thinking about wasn’t all that thrilled to be locked in my bay in the first place, and it’s one of those who declined to return after you allowed me to free them. It’s residing in a rock at the bottom of a creek in France at the moment. I can ask it if it would like a change of residence.”
Which she certainly could, since she knew the creature’s full name to the last accent on the least syllable. Demonic kind were controlled mostly by the invoking of their name. The more of their name you knew, the more control you had over them. The kraken wasn’t in that rock only because it chose to be, but because Themis, who had learned to love freedom, allowed it to stay in that rock.
Location: Happytime Motel, Pucorl’s Lands, Netherworld
Time: 9:45 PM, August 24, 1372
There was a meow and the door to Wilber’s apartment in the Happytime opened enough to let Leona in.
“Pucorl, in the future, wait until I invite someone in, please.” It was Pucorl’s lands, and he could control things like doors at will.
“Why? You weren’t doing anything important. Reading your books.”
“Meow,” Leona said. It meant “I need to talk to you.” And Wilber decided that the discussion of manners with Pucorl could wait. It would be an utterly useless discussion anyway.
“What do you want to talk about, Leona?”
“Is the world going to end?” As she meowed, her body sank to the floor, ready to pounce or jump out of the way. Which was cat for “intensely concerned,” which made sense.
Wilber was intensely concerned himself. He sighed. No matter how important the issue, you couldn’t spend all your time waiting to pounce. “I don’t know. It could happen if the veils aren’t repaired. As long as they were in place, the netherworld slid right by the natural world with little interaction in either direction. But now it could be that as the netherworld moves, it will rip apart our world and vice versa. Honestly, I think that the vice versa is more likely, that the netherworld will be destroyed. But that doesn’t mean that the side effects won’t knock down mountains and shift Earth’s orbit so that we fall into the sun, or are thrown right out of the solar system. The planet will still be in basically one piece, but everyone will be dead.”
And because of Wilber’s magic, Leona understood every word. They talked into the night and Leona learned that the threat to the universe wasn’t that bad, or might be even worse. Time in the netherworld wasn’t the same as time in the natural. In the netherworld, it was cyclic. In the natural world, linear. So when this destruction would occur was hard to calculate. It might be a million years in the future or a million years in the past, but most likely would be right around the time when the veils were ripped. So, if they failed to fix the problem, they might well cease to exist.
“That makes no sense,” Leona meowed.
“I know. It’s because we aren’t sure how the two timelines will interact. But Themis is concerned, and her calculations add up. We have to stabilize things, and that means we have to figure out what caused the rifts in the first place.”
Location: On the Road, France
Time: 8:40 AM, August 25, 1372
Roger slid the black charger up alongside Bertrand’s huge gray and said, “I talked with Themis last night. She knows a kraken that might want to be a river boat.”
“We will need more than one.” Bertrand glanced at Roger, then went back to scanning the fields and hedges around them. “If we are going to enchant river boats with demons, we will need at least half a dozen. Nor am I convinced that a kraken is the best option.”
“Kraken are based on cephalopods, and aside from whales are the brightest things in the oceans,” Roger said. “Besides, one of their means of locomotion is their legs.”
“And what good does that do us if we are putting it into a boat? The last time I checked, boats didn’t have legs.”
“No, but river boats have poles to push against the land or oars to move through the water. Perhaps those can double as the kraken’s legs.”
Bertrand shrugged shoulders so wide as to make him seem almost dwarfish. “Talk to Annabelle.”
“I think better Jennifer,” Roger said. “Annabelle is more of a mechanic. I don’t know how much she knows about boats. Jennifer has a better background in physics.”
“Consult with both then, but consider whales if the netherworld has them.”
Roger turned his horse and headed back to the van.
✽ ✽ ✽
“How they bouncing?” Pucorl asked as Roger rode up.
Roger ignored the quip. Pucorl had been a puck for millennia before he got the van for a body. It was in his nature to be a smart ass. “Annabelle, you know anything about boats?”
“Not much,” Annabelle said, leaning out Pucorl’s driver’s side window. The van was only traveling about eight miles an hour. “And nothing at all about the ships of this time. Engine girl, here.”
“I was afraid of that.” He pulled out his phone “J
ennifer, you got a minute?”
“I guess. What’s up, Roger?”
Roger could see her bay gelding pull away from one of the priest’s wagons, and canter up to the van. “I need to know about boats.”
“What kind of boats?”
“Riverboats.” He explained about his plan to use the Danube to get them to Constantinople faster.
“Bertrand okay with that?”
“Yes, reasonably. Assuming we can find a riverboat big enough to hold Fatso here.” He hooked a thumb at the van, which was twice the size of the cardinal’s carriage, which was the second largest vehicle in their caravan.
“Not Fatso,” Pucorl insisted. “The Incredible Van. You know, like the Incredible Hulk.” The van, as it happened, was painted dark green. It was one of the standard colors that the van came in, and Pucorl’s body had started life as a school van. “And assuming you can find a river boat suited to my—” Pucorl honked a haughty sniff. “—grandeur. What are you going to do for the rest of the party? That’s a lot of riverboats and I ain’t dragging them all along behind me.”
“We hire some. Even if they don’t have anything big enough for you, they ought to have some that will hold horses and wagons.”
Chapter 3—Donauworth
Location: Field Outside Donauworth, Germany
Time: 2:25 PM, September 1, 1372
The mayor of Donauworth wasn’t thrilled to see them. After one look at Pucorl, he refused any of them entrance into the city, even the cardinal.
Bertrand looked at the city that Paris made into a small town. He looked over at Pucorl and his cavalry, and wondered if he could take this city. That would be an extremely bad idea, starting a war between France and the Holy Roman Empire, so he bit down on his irritation and agreed to camp outside town.
As they were setting up camp, he asked Monsignor Savona to see about negotiating with the city’s burghers for entrance into the city. Only during daylight hours, and only to arrange to buy boats, barges, and food, for which they would pay in good French silver.
