Gleep dug happily in the marshes, scaring lizard-frogs and marsh slugs while he looked for something to eat. He emerged from one particularly nasty bog clutching a football-sized, grayshelled creature that had far too many spiky legs and eyes. I winced as he crunched on its carapace and slurped down eye stalks, all with relish. At least he never seemed to eat anything cute. Or if he did, I mused, I'd never seen it. I chose not to worry about the concept. He licked his moustache back to fluffy whiteness and trotted over to me with a pleased air.
"Come on," I urged, hooking my hand through his collar, though I stood about as much chance of keeping him next to me if he didn't want to be as I did harnessing a tornado. We stalked back to the pod-house, shedding mud as we went. The whole Kobold system seemed to be in harmony with cleanliness and order. By the time we stepped inside we were both as clean as if we had had baths. Gleep pranced up and collapsed next to Tananda to groom his scales with his long tongue. She sat in an easy chair with her feet up on the table, cleaning her nails with a long knife. Wensley paced back and forth. A groove in the silver-gray carpet proved he had been engaged in that activity for some time.
"Where have you been?" Wensley wailed, coming over to wring his hands at me. "What are we waiting for? Every minute, the Pervects could be digging their claws more deeply into our backs. Wuh is in danger, and we are sitting here."
"Just how much money do you owe them?" Tananda asked. "Couldn't you just work out a solution and pay them off?"
"We have nothing to pay them with," Wensley whined. "No liquid assets worth speaking of. We would prefer not to deed them the equivalent in land, and our people chafe at the notion of working off the fee as involuntary personal assistants."
Indentured servants, I translated. I gave a moment of thought to being personal valet to a Pervect, and the pictures that sprang to mind made me shiver.
"As it is, they control all our manufacturing. We have no tourism. 'Come and see our historical castle, currently under permanent occupation by an outside consulting firm.'"
"Listen, cutie," Tananda began, stopping her manicure to point the knife at him. 'The Great Skeeve is taking time away from his very important studies to help you. Do you want him to back out? I'm sure he'd be thrilled to go back to the work he was doing when you interrupted him."
"No!" Wensley exclaimed. He came over to wring my hand, his eyes wide with horror. "Forgive me, Skeeve. I wasn't thinking. Of course you must do what you think is right… I hope you still consider our problem worthy of your attention. Please, don't abandon us. What would we do?"
Why couldn't I come up with retorts like Tananda's? I wondered. I glanced over at her. She threw me a broad wink.
"Of course I'll help you," I confirmed. "It's just gotten more complicated than it started out being."
"I understand, I understand," Wensley babbled gratefully. "Forgive me for not comprehending the time involved in a comprehensive plan such as the one that I know you have formulated."
I wish I had his faith. I was saved from having to come up with one by a glad cry from outside.
"Results!" Zol announced, coming down the path waving his notebook. Bunny came in behind him, her eyes shining. "The very place! I am sure that this must be the solution to the enigma. The map matched the terrain within 89 percent plotted points of similarity, and the spectacles would fit the inhabitants." He flung open his book to show us the name. "Scamaroni!"
My eyebrows lifted. I should have realized when I had first examined the list of dimensions whose denizens met our criteria that the Pervects would have homed in on that one. Even in the Bazaar the name had become a byword for easy marks. To have been "Scammed" was to have fallen for a great selling job, such as the Deveels were masters of.
But plenty of other demons and merchants had made their way to Scamaroni over the centuries. Unlike the Wuhses, who realized they had gotten in over their heads and asked for help, the Scammies never seemed to learn. It sounded like the Pervect Ten had lit upon Scamaroni as the next link in their chain of conquest.
Just to make sure we landed in the right dimension, we diverted back through Wuh. As soon as the pigeon-bearing statue under the familiar gray-blue sky appeared Wensley bolted. Tananda, Bunny and I looked at one another.
"Gleep, fetch!" I shouted, pointing in the direction of the fleeing Wuhs. The ground thundered as my pet set off in pursuit. I ran after them, but Wensley outdistanced me, dodging around a corner in the middle of town. With an uneasy look over my shoulder at the castle looming over me, I sprinted down the narrow lane. The sounds of bleating and whimpering let me know which alleyway to turn into. Wensley lay on his back as Gleep dragged him by one leg back in the direction they had come.
"Oh, please, Master Skeeve!" he begged, as soon as he saw me. "Please, please don't make me come with you. I'm not good in fights. I'm not clever enough to figure out how to liberate a dimension." Gleep hauled him to my feet and let the leg drop. He sat up on his haunches and begged for a reward. I felt in my belt pouch for a packet of crisps and flipped it to him. He caught it and gulped it down, licking his chops. The Wuhs scrambled to his knees and tugged on my tunic hem. "Let me stay here. I'll gather information for you. I'll conduct interviews. I'll do analysis. I'll scrub lavatories. Just don't make me go with you." He burst into tears and blew his nose on my sleeve.
"I don't understand," I remarked, as Tananda, Zol and Bunny came running up behind us. "You didn't mind traveling by D-hopper to Klah or Deva."
'That was shopping," Wensley sobbed. "This might be confrontation."
"Please consider it, Master Skeeve," Zol suggested.
"Wuhses aren't very assertive. Pushing him into difficult circumstances won't help break him of his fears. He might collapse when you need him most."
That could be disastrous for us. I looked at the others, but Tananda and Bunny waited for me to make the final decision. I wished, not for the first time, that Aahz was here, either to pick the sorry Wuhs up by his shirt front and shake him or to let him crawl away and hide.
"All right," I agreed at last. 'Try and find out where the spectacles are being made, and if your friends know anything else. We'll be back as soon as we can." Wensley was blubberingly grateful.
"You are as wise as you are mighty," he gasped out. I stepped back and wrung out my soggy shirt. By the disgusted look on her face, Tananda wasn't going to snuggle up to him any time in the future.
"Very well," Zol stated. "We have the coordinates. Will you do the honors, or should I?"
"Allow me," I said, reaching into my belt pouch for a pinch of magikal flash powder to cover up the fact that I was going to use our D-hopper. Wensley clambered to his feet, staying far enough away that we would have had to lunge to get him into the sphere of the device's influence. He waved a brief farewell, then took to his heels again with the expression of a deermoose surprised by lightning. The light blazed up, imprinting an image on my retinas of the Wuhs with the expression of a deermoose surprised by lightning.
"Sad," Tananda tsked, as we gathered around the D-hopper. "I thought we were getting somewhere with him."
Bunny fondled Bytina, who now rode in a color-coordinated pouch on her belt. "Maybe he needs a computer."
"Maybe he needs a personality transplant," Tananda suggested, dryly.
"Those can have some nasty side-effects," Zol frowned. I looked from one to the other, wondering how one went about transplanting a personality. Would it be like possession? What if the new mind didn't like the body it was put into?
But I had no more time to speculate upon higher philosophical processes. At the press of the control stud we found ourselves on a main street in a prosperous-looking city under a blazing hot sun. People, dressed in dark colors in spite of the day's heat, crowded the wooden sidewalk that ran past the gray stone-fronted buildings, pushing by us without a word of courtesy. A huge Scammie in a coat that reached his knees rammed right into me and kept going. Caught off guard, I teetered for a moment on the curb, waving my arms
furiously for balance. With a cry I stumbled off into the path of a beast drawing a carriage, bearing down on me at a gallop. The animal, a six-legged, barrel-chested, long-tailed creature that looked like a cross between a rat and a horse, pawed the air with three-toed feet and let out a loud squeak of alarm. The driver hauled back on his reins, sniffed hard at the air, wrenched the animal to the side and kept going. He didn't say a thing. His expression remained unperturbed, as though he hadn't seen me, or even observed that his dray animal had nearly had an accident. I noticed that he was wearing dark glasses against the brightness of the day. Perhaps the Scammies had poor eyesight, and their psychometric talent or keen sense of smell allowed traffic to flow along as well as it did.
Tananda grabbed one of my arms and hauled me back onto the curb and up a flight of stone steps where Bunny and Zol had retreated to get out of the crush. We found ourselves on a hilltop overlooking a main street. Above us was a solid-looking government building of some kind, with prosperous Scammies coming and going through the molded bronze doors.
"I think it would help if we blended in," Zol noted.
I agreed. I stopped to study the Scammies. They tended to be taller than Klahds, with greeny-bronze faces and hands, all the flesh that was exposed by their garments, long-sleeved robes that swept the ground. The faces were inverted triangles. A round mouth down near the sharply pointed chin was nearly concealed by the most distinctive feature of the Scammie physiognomy: the nose. The average nose, ridged and glistening like a segmented worm, was longer than my hand, more like a junior trunk. The huge nostril, for there was only one, ran upward from just above the little mouth to right between the eyes. Those I could not see well, because nearly everyone on the street was wearing dark glasses.
'The spectacles!" I exclaimed, pointing.
"Disguise first," Zol cautioned me, as a uniformed Scammie, clearly an authority figure of some kind, turned his trunk in our direction. He started sniffing. Quickly, I formed a mental image of the five of us, then erased our features and superimposed Scammie mouths and noses, surmounting them with glasses to disguise our eyes. It helped that the natives, too, were upright creatures with their eyes on the front of their heads. I had little time to do more than clothe us all in identical robes before I bent down to take a good sniff of the nearest passerby. I wasn't that proficient at non-visual illusions, but if fitting in here meant disguising our natural aroma, I was certainly going to try. Their body odor was pleasant, like oranges with vanilla overtones. The police officer stopped sniffing. He tilted his triangular head with an air of confusion, then turned back to directing traffic.
"Mmm," Tananda smiled, lifting a wrist to her nose. "Nice. You can design a perfume for me any time, handsome."
Gleep stared at me with puzzlement in his round eyes. They were now black like the rat-horse's, with the rest of his form to match, because it was the only nonverbal creature I'd seen yet. He was troubled because not only did I not look like me, but I didn't smell right.
"It's okay, Gleep," I reassured him, petting him behind the ears. He looked dubious, but my voice was still familiar. I put my hand on his head and took a really good look around.
It had been only four days since we had lost track of the Pervect Ten, but they hadn't wasted a moment. It had not simply been the man in the carriage wearing dark glasses. Everybody we could see, in every direction, was wearing colored spectacles exactly like the pair I now had in my belt pouch. The reason the Scammies crowded one another so rudely on the sidewalks was that none of them was paying attention to where he or she was going. They bumped into vehicles, walls and one another, but no one seemed to get angry or upset. It was eerie. I had never seen traffic accidents resolved without swearing before.
"They all seem to be very happy," Bunny observed.
"They are under a spell," Zol confirmed, his voice rising with concern. "Their minds are under the control of the glasses. Tell them, Master Skeeve! Take your case to the common Scammie. Help them! Only the truth can save them now! Speak to them and set them free!"
His alarm galvanized me into action. I saw before me another world on the brink of falling under the influence of the Pervect Ten. We had been too slow to stop the infiltration, but those demons wouldn't keep the Scammies under their thumb, not if I could help it. I ran to the top of the stairs, spread out my arms and cried out to the people of Scamaroni.
"Take off your glasses!" I shouted. "They're part of a plot by a group of females from Perv who want to enslave your entire dimension. They're enchanting you! They are poisoning your minds!"
Chapter Thirteen
"Do you really want them eating off your hand?"
P. BENCHLEY
My voice died away. I looked around me for the thousands of eager, raised faces, grateful that someone had come to liberate them from their involuntary thralldom.
The trot-trot of rat-horse feet, the rumble of carriage wheels, the trudge-trudge-trudge of thousands of feet did not come to a halt. In fact, no one paused for a moment. I couldn't believe it. Nobody understood what kind of danger they were in! I gawked at the resounding wave of apathy that greeted my announcement. Didn't they care?
"Take the initiative, Master Skeeve," Zol urged me. "Use that Klahdish determination!"
That steeled my resolve. What I needed was an authority, an important citizen, to set an example by casting off the Pervect Ten's device. I cast around me.
There was the very person: coming out of the big building at the top of the peak was a stout, prosperous male with a heavily embroidered coat over his robe. He wore the glasses, too, but he was being led by the hands by a couple of muscular young Scammies whose eyes were uncovered. Their protuberant brown orbs turned toward me as I dashed up to the male they were escorting.
"He's being brainwashed!" I exclaimed. "Make him take off the glasses. He'll see reality, not fantasy."
"It's just jealous," the escort on the left sniffed to the other, pointing its trunk in my direction. "It hasn't got any."
"A have-not," snickered the escort on the right. "Sad, really. He'll never know how great they are."
"Probably not," agreed his companion. The male in the middle said nothing. His mouth gaped open, and drool collected in the corner.
I should have known Scammies would think that anything worth having was worth bragging about. I tried again. "Look at him. Help him. His mind is under its control. It could happen to you."
"I hope so," shrugged the escort on the right. "I've started saving up for my pair. Senior Domari says he loves them so much he's never taking them off."
They didn't understand. I would have to take matters into my own hands. I reached for the pair of pink-framed glasses perched on the male's snout. The escort on the left reached for my throat with a huge hand. The little round mouth bristled with sharp teeth. He lunged for me. I dodged back. If they were going to play rough, I was more than a match for them. At a safe distance, I used the reverse of my levitation spell to send him flying backwards. The other escort let go of his employer's arm and came hurtling at me, only to go hurtling in the opposite direction as I threw a chunk of power into his chest. With a flick of magik I snatched the glasses off the face of the portly Scammie. He let out a bellow, and clutched his eyes.
"Where did they go? Give them back!"
I swept my hand downward, and the spectacles dashed to the ground. The lenses splintered into a hundred pieces. "You're free!" I exclaimed. "Reclaim your mind!"
"What?" the stout male trumpeted, focusing his protrading eyes on me. "Those cost me twenty gold pieces! How dare you! This is an outrage!"
"No, it's liberation!" I explained. Twenty gold pieces! The Perverts were making the victims pay for their own conquest? That was a wrinkle even Aahz would have had trouble stomaching. "Your minds were being clouded by evil sorcery. You can all thank me later." I turned to the next person feeling her way blindly down the stairs while wearing Pervect Ten spectacles. With a spark of power I whisked the device off her nose
and hurled it down. She shrieked as she was set free, possibly for the first time in days. One after another I picked the Ten's malevolent glasses off their victims and destroyed them. The vacant looks on their faces changed to more normal expressions, such as surprise and enlightenment. Another three pairs went flying past me, off a slender female hauling a couple of youngsters by the hands. The children began to cry. I turned to offer a thumb's up to my companions, standing at the side of the stairs. Tananda grinned back at me. She and Zol were getting into the act, helping me break the people out of the demons' spell.
"Thank you?" demanded the first Scammie I had helped, his trunk rampant with fury. He held up his fists. "Thank you? You're mad! Guards! Guards! Arrest this… this fool!"
At the cry, the officer directing traffic turned his face up towards us. Throwing both hands up magnificently to halt the flow of vehicles, he stalked off his pedestal and started up the stairs in the direction of the shouting Scammie. It must take time until the brainwashing began to wear off. The portly male still carried on as if he was angry that the stream of nonsense the Perverts' device fed him had been halted. It looked as if we had better clear out of the immediate area until all of them were in their right minds again. I had been the target of mobs before. I knew I didn't want to have that experience again.
"Come on," I gestured to my friends. Gleep came charging through the crowd of Scammies converging on me, bowling half of them over and sending them rolling down the stairs. Tananda leaped down to help me clear a way for Zol and Bunny.
"Get us out of here, Gleep!" I yelled. I released the illusion masking his natural aroma. At the sudden wave of lung-constricting smell, Scammies threw themselves out of his path, cannoning into one another, shrieking in fear.
Myth Alliances Page 10
