What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon

by Henry Clark

  “Arrowshot!” snapped the head. “What’s going on there? My perceptor spells inform me somebody has a door open between Congroo and one of the Adjacent Worlds. If this is true, it must be closed immediately!”

  “Hemi-Semi-Demi-Director Oöm Lout.” Pre touched his forehead in something that might have been a salute. “Yes, there’s a door open—but it was opened from the World of Science by three powerful scientists who are here with me now. I’m hoping we can work with them to find a way to stop the magic from draining out of Congroo. This could mean our salvation.”

  The floating head expanded. Its tiny, puckered mouth looked like the tied-off part of a toy balloon, and its suddenly swollen cheeks suggested the balloon might be about to burst.

  “We have already settled this,” Oöm Lout hissed, letting a little air out of the balloon. His head contracted. “There is no ‘draining of magic,’ as you gullible fools call it. Only a rising and falling cycle of magical power that is now at its lowest point and will begin rising again within the next day or two. You have but to wait, and the magic will return. I’ve been saying this ever since you and that idiot Index brought in your ludicrous weather calculations. The man’s pie chart was half-baked!”

  Oöm Lout’s shaggy brows lowered, and his squint intensified.

  “Who’s that standing behind you?”

  “Those are the scientists I was telling you about.”

  “Is one of them some sort of high priest?”

  “Uh… not that I know of.”

  “Why is he wearing a bird on his head?”

  “It’s a hat. In the shape of a cooked turkey.”

  “Does it have scientifical powers?”

  “No,” Drew volunteered. “It’s just that I have a cold head.”

  “Hemi-Semi-Demi-Director Oöm Lout”—Pre put himself between Drew and the director—“Master Index has been taken!”

  Oöm Lout drew back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Three Quieters were here. They took Master Index with them when they left, and they also took our remaining supply of flyer-fries. I think they would have taken me, too, but I hid. Phlogiston will be dead within two days if we don’t get more dragon feed.”

  Oöm Lout gave Pre a calculating look.

  “This is a serious accusation, Apprentice Arrowshot. Quieters don’t behave the way you describe—”

  “They may have been impostors.”

  “I will make inquiries,” Oöm Lout purred in a distinct change from the way he had begun the conversation. “I’m sure if Master Index has been detained, it was the result of a simple misunderstanding. In all probability, your head librarian will be returned to you by the end of the day. In the meantime, I will arrange to have some of the flyer-fries from Alkahest’s labyrinth in Bleek transferred to you. It would be a tragedy if either of Congroo’s two remaining dragons was to die.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir!” Pre sounded genuinely relieved. “I had no idea what I was going to do. This will give the scientists and me time to come up with a plan.”

  “Yes, about that.” Oöm Lout looked as if he was putting some effort into smiling. “I would very much like to meet these scientists personally. Several of my staff and I can be there within the hour. In the meantime, make your guests comfortable. Discuss whatever you wish with them. Just don’t leave the library. I would hate to have gone on a fool’s errand because the four of you decided to go out for lunch.”

  “All the local lunch places have gone out of business,” Pre reported.

  “Wonderful. I’ll see you shortly.”

  Oöm Lout’s head disappeared. Pre dropped the pendant down the front of his robe.

  “Who’d like some tea?” he asked brightly.

  CHAPTER 13

  ADJACENT WORLDS

  It turned out, Preffy could heat a teapot with his bare hands. Modesty could, too, as she was quick to point out, but when she did it, the teapot warmed only to the temperature of her hands. When Pre did it, steam immediately came out of the teapot’s spout, and the tea inside was ready to drink. He did this little trick after we had returned to the library. The teapot was in the shape of a dragon, its tail the handle and its snout the spout.

  We were sitting at a circular oak table in front of a fireplace on the second floor. Pre had passed around mugs. His mug had lettering on the side that declared CONGROO’S GREATEST LIBRARIAN. My mug said OUR LIBRARY’S ROCK! Which, once I thought about it, was perfectly true.

  “Drew and I both saw a jar of flyer-fries yesterday,” I informed Pre. “It was in the hands of a zombie who popped out of the door to a porta potty in our corn maze. The zombie had gray hair, a mustache, and was dragging one leg behind him.”

  “Was the leg his or somebody else’s?” inquired Pre.

  “His. Attached to his hip.”

  “It sounds like you saw a vision of Master Index. He’s been limping lately, ever since his bursitis started acting up. He went out to feed Phlogiston yesterday shortly after midday.”

  “That was right around when it happened,” Drew confirmed.

  “As I say, under the right conditions, people in one Adjacent World can briefly become aware of things in another. They usually dismiss what they’ve seen as a dream or hallucination. The door your zombie came out of is probably in a location similar to the location of our dragon-feed bin. What’s a porta potty?”

  “It’s a bathroom,” said Drew.

  “You take a bath in it?”

  “No. Of course not.” Drew made a face. “It’s a restroom.”

  “It’s for napping?”

  “A comfort station?” I suggested.

  “You go there for sympathy?”

  “N-no,” sputtered Modesty. “It’s where you—well—you know!”

  Pre stared at us blankly.

  “You can’t possibly mean…” He blinked several times in rapid succession. “Oh. That is what you mean. Well. We don’t do that.”

  “What do you mean, we don’t do that?” Modesty asked.

  “We haven’t done it in, oh…” Pre looked up at the ceiling. “Eight hundred years.”

  “You must be awfully uncomfortable,” said Drew.

  “Eight hundred years ago, our ancestors evolved the magical ability for Intestinal Teleportation and Bladder Remote Broadcasting: IT and BRB. Essential parts of day-to-day life.” Pre spoke matter-of-factly, as if he were talking about the weather. “Since then, it’s an instinct we’re all born with. It requires even less magic than heating a teapot. And it’s a real time-saver.”

  “You teleport your…” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Pre finished it for me.

  “We call it euphemera, from the word euphemism, which means ‘an acceptable word used in place of an unacceptable word.’ We teleport our euphemera to another place before it has a chance to… leave on its own.”

  “Where does it go?” squawked Modesty.

  “Jupiter.”

  “What? The planet Jupiter?”

  “Yes. Do you have a planet Jupiter in the World of Science?”

  “Yes,” said Drew. “It’s what our scientists call a gas giant.”

  “That definitely sounds like Jupiter.”

  “So… you’re not cutting down your forests to make toilet paper,” said Modesty thoughtfully, “and you don’t have diapers, because babies already know how to get rid of their… euphemera. This is all very good for the environment.”

  “So… there are no bathrooms in this building,” I said.

  “There are no bathrooms in this world,” Pre informed us. “Except in the Museum of Plumbing, where the exhibit always makes the smaller children giggle.”

  “Then… we won’t be staying long,” Modesty said decisively. “I had a big breakfast. We should get this meeting started.”

  “Any reason that fireplace isn’t lit?” asked Drew. The grate was piled high with logs and kindling, but it could have been a Jenga stack for all the heat it gave off.

  “To Ig
nite a Fire utilizes many more ERGs—Enchantment Resource Granules—of magic than To Warm a Teapot,” Pre said in apology. “I’m trying not to be too wasteful of our dwindling resources.”

  “I can understand that,” said Modesty as she got up from her chair and bent down over the hearth. Within moments, tongues of flame were licking through the wood.

  “How did you do that?” asked Pre, awestruck.

  Modesty tossed him the lighter she had used. He caught it, then held it between two fingers as though it might explode.

  “You carry a lighter?” I asked Modesty.

  “I’m always taking them away from Prudence. We live in a wooden house.”

  “Is this a scientifical fire starter?” Pre asked.

  “I’m pretty sure scientifical isn’t a word,” said Drew.

  “If magical is a word, why wouldn’t scientifical be?”

  “I have no idea.” Drew shrugged. “I’m sure there’s a scientifical reason.”

  Modesty took back the lighter, flicked it, then waved the flame in front of Pre’s face. She released the catch and returned it to him. He fumbled with it, figured out the trick, and a flame shot up.

  “I just did science!” he declared, as if it was the most wonderful thing ever. “Being a scientist must be so great! Ouch!” He dropped the lighter and shook his fingers to cool them.

  “That’s the downside,” Drew pointed out.

  “But it’s science.” Pre’s enthusiasm was undiminished. “The things you scientists do are the sort of things only our writers of fantasy would ever dream of. Flying through the air in metal tubes. Putting bread in a box to turn it into toast. Sawing a volunteer from the audience in half and then putting them back together again.”

  “That last one is magic,” said Drew.

  “No, it isn’t. We can’t do it. Not without making a mess.”

  “How is it you know so much about our world?” I asked, since we knew absolutely nothing about his.

  “We have a few gifted seers who get glimpses of the World of Science from time to time. They’re encouraged to write down what they see. And what they hear. Which I’m pretty sure isn’t all that accurate, but we take what we can get.”

  The fire started giving off some heat. Modesty, Drew, and I jostled our chairs around the table so our backs were closer to the warmth. Pre stayed where he was, facing us from the other side, possibly out of guilt from not wanting to start the fire in the first place.

  “Master Index and I were the first to figure out Congroo was getting cooler,” he said, staring down into his mug. “This was three, maybe three and a half years ago. And actually, I was the one who figured it out. I used to go up on the roof of the tower each day and take temperature measurements.”

  “I suppose there’s a spell To Gauge the Air’s Temperature or something equally exciting,” said Modesty a bit sarcastically.

  “No, there isn’t,” Pre surprised us by saying. “When I was eight years old, I made a little doodad, a skinny glass tube with some quicksilver inside it, and put markings along the tube—I called the markings ‘increments’—and it seemed to reflect how hot or cold the air was by how high or low the quicksilver was. I noticed the temperatures were getting progressively lower at a time when they should have been growing warmer. That could only mean something was wrong with our environmental-control enchantments. And that implied our magic might be thinning out. Master Index agreed with me, and we made a special trip to present my findings to the Weegee Board.”

  “You went to see these people when you were only eight?” I asked. When I was eight, I was afraid to raise my hand in class, even on the rare occasions when I knew the answer.

  “By that time a year had passed and I was nine, and Master Index pretended the discovery was his—they would never have listened to a kid—but I helped with the presentation, and I answered most of the questions. We used bar graphs and a pie chart made from an actual pie, because we knew the board members were more easily swayed by visual aids that also doubled as refreshments, and we did our best to prove to them that Congroo had sprung a leak and that our precious magical power was draining away into one of the Adjacent Worlds.”

  “Adjacent Worlds?” said Drew.

  “Your World of Science is an Adjacent World, and you’re practically next door, so we told the board your world was the most likely place our magic was draining away to. The board members laughed at us. Oöm Lout was there, and he laughed the loudest. He asked us what could we, as lowly librarians, possibly know about the mechanics of environmental magic? According to him, the cooling was only temporary; it was being caused by a massive pod of space whales passing between us and the sun, and temperatures would return to normal once the pod had passed. As if a few space whales could account for the fluctuations in my temperature measurements. We were thrown out of the boardroom, and”—Pre rapped his mug on the tabletop—“they kept the pie!”

  He got out of his chair and started pacing back and forth.

  “A year later, when it became obvious to everybody that the world was getting colder, it was too late. Had they listened to us, there still would have been enough magic left to create barriers to stop the leak. But now, our magic reserves are down to only eight percent. I’ve been writing angry letters to the Dire Inklings, our local paper, pointing out how shortsighted the council has been. Master Index signed the letters, since, again, nobody’s going to listen to a kid.”

  “You think someone from our world is draining the magic out of yours?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you been listening? Yes. Is it you? Are you engaged in some research project that’s using a tremendous amount of magical energy?”

  “I turned my sister’s bedroom fuchsia,” said Modesty.

  “You made it smell funny?” asked Pre.

  “Fuchsia is a color!”

  “Changing the color of a room uses almost zero magic,” Pre said. “Some of our research magicians theorize it could even be done with some sort of liquid pigment and a fuzzy roller on a stick, using no magic whatsoever. No. The amount of magic that’s been drained from our world would be obvious when it showed up in yours. For instance, has anybody in your world recently built an invisible city?”

  “How would we know?” asked Drew.

  “You’d see people walking around in the middle of the air.”

  “No.”

  “Brought to life an army of forty-foot-tall statues made out of clay?”

  “No.”

  “Sent an ocean liner to the moon?”

  “No.”

  “Rearranged mountains so they’re in alphabetical order?”

  “No.”

  “Changed lead into gold?”

  “Nooo… wait.” We had been alternating saying “no,” and it was my turn. But something occurred to me. “Did you say you started losing magic three years ago?”

  “Three years, four months, ten days ago. According to my temperature charts.”

  I looked at Modesty and Drew.

  “Isn’t that…” I said hesitantly, “about the time they started selling DavyTrons?”

  “You think turning tomato juice into asparagus is the same as turning lead into gold?” Drew made a face.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is.” Pre’s eyes went wide. “It’s what we call ‘transmutation.’ It requires more energy than any other kind of magic. I mean, it’s messing with the fundamental structure of the universe. Have you really been turning tomato juice into asparagus?”

  “Not us personally,” said Modesty. “We have machines that do it for us. Doesn’t that make it science?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Pre. “Are your people especially fond of asparagus?”

  “It’s not just asparagus,” I said.

  “Rutabagas?” Pre looked horrified.

  “Mainly lettuce, carrots, and potatoes,” I said.

  “And precarved pumpkins,” Drew reminded me.

  “That’s it.” Pre stopped pacing
and gripped the back of his chair. “That’s where our magic’s been going. You’re killing us off… so you can have salad!”

  CHAPTER 14

  THE GIRL FROM STITCHEN

  It’s not like we’re doing it intentionally,” Modesty protested. “I hate salad.”

  “It’s actually being done by a company called Davy’s Digital Vegetables,” I said. “A guy named Elwood Davy started the company around three years ago, and now it’s this big international corporation. But its headquarters are in Disarray.”

  “It’s poorly managed?”

  “Disarray is the name of our town,” said Modesty. “Our founder named it after his wife.”

  “He had a wife named Disarray?”

  “Désirée. But neither of them could spell. The original Désirée was an ancestor of mine,” Modesty said proudly.

  “Davy’s Digital Vegetables makes these machines called DavyTrons,” I said. “There are, like, millions of them. They’re putting farm stands out of business. The DavyTrons turn tomato juice into practically any vegetable you want.”

  “Then the solution is obvious,” said Pre. “You must go to this Elwood Davy and tell him to stop.”

  “He’s… not an easy person to see,” I said.

  “Invisibility? In addition to transmutation? No wonder our magic is draining,” Pre muttered.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said, pulling off my stocking cap as the room grew warmer. “Elwood Davy’s a busy man. He’s not somebody who’s going to meet up with a bunch of twelve-year-olds.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Modesty chimed in, pushing her chair back and getting to her feet. “I’ve seen photos of him with kids. They usually have food they’ve made with his digital veggies, and they’re presenting him with a sample. Last week it was a brother and sister giving him a broccoli soufflé.”

  “You really think we could see him? And somehow talk him out of making DavyTrons?” I couldn’t help the hopeful tone of my voice. We could save Congroo. And no more DavyTrons would mean people buying vegetables that were grown in the ground again.