Part 30 (1/2)

”Oh, goody!” She relaxed.

”But the disorientation effect is localized. There seems to be a region through which the fruits can not safely pa.s.s. And the nature of that region, judging from other small hints we have had, must be--a forget-whorl, of the kind my father described before he regressed to infancy.”

”Is that bad?” Ivy asked, impressed.

”Yes and no. It is bad for us, for we must avoid it. Had we blundered into it, we should have suffered immediate amnesia.” He knew about the whorls because he had been along when Good Magician Humfrey had told King Dor about them, back in Castle Zombie. With his present genius, he grasped their nature thoroughly. ”However, we should now be able to use this whorl for our purpose, since it should have the same effect on the wiggles that it does on the fruits. This is not a certainty, but is a high probability. All we need to do is move that whorl over to the wiggle nest, and it will cause the worms to forget their purpose and perhaps forget even how to move. Then their menace will likely abate.”

”Wonderful!” Ivy agreed. ”Let's move it!”

”We can't even see it!” Hugo pointed out, now experiencing the necessary caution of a smart person. ”And the thing is dangerous. It can wipe us out, too, as surely as if it had giant teeth. How can we move it?”

”You can figure out a way!” she said encouragingly. Hugo sighed. Somehow he had known she would say that.

He concentrated again. ”It seems there are a number of whorls, drifting generally southward from the weakening forget-spell on the Gap Chasm. They seem to have changed their nature, causing total forgetting instead of just Gap Chasm forgetting. I could probably work out a rationale for that effect--”

”Stick to business,” Ivy said firmly.

Hugo sighed again. ”These whorls seem to a.s.sociate loosely with the Gap Dragon, or his rejuvenated state, perhaps because his exits from the Gap are through a convenient channel--convenient for the whorls as well as for the Dragon. Presumably the Dragon is at least partially immune to the effect of the forget-spell, having spent all his life within it. So it may be no coincidence that there is a whorl in this vicinity. But this suggests two things--that the whorls are to some extent affected by the prevailing winds and the lay of the land, and that Stanley may have more influence over them than other creatures do. If we a.s.sume this is true, Stanley should be able to move a whirl by fanning it with his wings and blowing along natural channels in the terrain.”

Ivy clapped her hands. ”I just knew you could do it, Hugo!” she cried joyously. ”Now tell me what you said.”

Hugo translated. ”We can blow the whorl to the wiggle nest.”

”Oh, goody! Let's do it.”

They did it, after some further discussion and organization. Hugo explained that they should be safe from the on-zapping wiggles if they kept the whorl between them and the nest, for the wiggles would forget their purpose--a.s.suming his conjectures were correct--when they entered the whorl and would be of no further threat. The three of them would have to stay together, not venturing out to destroy individual wiggles, as it would not be safe anywhere but behind the whorl. And Ivy and Hugo had to stay behind Stanley because, while the whorl might not hurt the dragon, it would erase the two of them if it touched them. This was a rather tricky, dangerous business.

But Ivy was not a creature of caution. She knew the wiggle nest had to be nullified, so she was bound to do it. Her mother would have had another vision, worse than the first, had she known what was contemplated here.

They proceeded. Stanley was in the lead, using his wings to fan the whorl. He could not fly, but he could generate a gentle, steady breeze that made the whorl slowly drift away. It did seem to respond to his breeze more than to the incidental pa.s.sing natural breezes. Hugo was at the rear, conjuring bunches of flying cherries that he sent around and into the invisible whorl. The cherries that spun out of control showed where the whorl was; that was the only way it could be spotted. Ivy stayed between Stanley and Hugo, enhancing both their powers. It might have looked to an outsider as if she were doing nothing, but without her, Hugo a.s.sured her, neither he nor Stanley would have been able to perform. Both dragon and boy had enhanced intelligence and powers in her presence. The pedestal and the s.h.i.+ny Armor needed constant tending now.

Hugo continued to triangulate the location of the nest by listening to the zaps of pa.s.sing wiggles and performing rapid mental calculations. The zaps became more prevalent as progress was made. But it was not possible to approach the nest in a straight line, for there were trees and boulders in the way, and a hill that the whorl tended to slide away from, and a pond too deep for them to wade through. So they had to travel the contour, which meant moving the whorl sidewise on occasion.

This was a challenge. Stanley could blow the whorl directly forward, but sidewise travel meant he couldn't do that. The wiggles were zapping thickly out from the nest, preventing Stanley from moving to the side. He might be immune to the effect of the whorl, but he wasn't proof against the wiggles.

They were stuck.

Ivy, of course, had the answer. ”Figure it out, Hugo!” she cried, cowering as the zapping of wiggles became close and loud. Zzapp! Zzapp! Zzapp! ”How can Stanley blow around a corner?”

Hugo cudgeled his brain yet again. Blow around a corner?

Ridiculous! Only if he had a baffle--and he had no way to get one. There were half a dozen close zaps every minute now; he would be holed in short order if he ventured from the shelter of the whorl. As it was, he had to watch his flying fruits carefully, because a number were getting shot down by the wiggles. If he misread the position of the whorl by confusing holed fruit with forgetted fruit, disaster could follow! Then it came to him. ”Vectors!” he cried.

”Another menace?” Ivy asked, alarmed.

”No. Vectors are lines of force,” he explained. ”My father the baby was reading about them in a Mundane text once, while he was baby-sitting me before he got infanted himself.” Hugo paused, smiling. ”Now I can baby-sit him! If I ever get home.” Then he returned to his concept. ”Vectors are one of the types of magic that work in Mundania. Stanley's breeze represents one vector--pus.h.i.+ng the whorl straight forward toward the next. The slope of the hill is another vector, pus.h.i.+ng the whorl back. The vectors oppose, and therefore we can't make progress. But the slope isn't straight back; it's a little sidewise. So if we blow forward, and the hill pushes a little to the side, the net resulting force will be to the side.”

”I'm glad you're smart,” Ivy said dubiously. ”It doesn't make any sense to me.”

”I'll show you. Stanley, blow forward, steadily.” The little dragon flapped his wings, blowing forward at the whorl. The whorl moved a little, as shown by the falling cherries, then nudged to the right. As the blowing continued, the whorl moved faster rightward.

”It's sliding to the side!” Ivy exclaimed, surprised. ”Precisely,” Hugo agreed. ”This is slow but effective. As we make progress around the hill, the vectors will change, and we'll make better progress. We shall reach the nest--in due course.”

It happened as he had foreseen. The curve of the hill made progress gradually easier. In addition, they discovered that by angling Stanley's breeze slightly, they could cause the whorl to roll or spin some, affecting its progress. They were getting better at this.

But the extent of the wiggle menace became evident as they rounded the hill and cut across the depression beyond it. Ivy looked back and saw the entire hill riddled by wiggle holes. Trees were tattered, and a few had fallen, their trunks so badly holed they collapsed. What an appalling number of wiggles!

Hugo glanced back, too. ”Good thing we didn't try to fly,” he remarked.

”Why?”

”Because now I see that a number of wiggles do, after all, travel upward,” he said. ”The holes do not form a perfectly horizontal plane; most holes are in a level line, but some are above and below. Some wiggles are angling upward or downward, and probably a few go straight up. If Stanley had tried to fly over the nest, he would probably have been holed so many times before he reached it that he never would have made it.”

”Oooh, awful!” Ivy agreed with a shudder. Zzapp! Zzapp! Zzapp! Now she was even more conscious of the concentration of wiggles. They were everywhere except right here, and the landscape of Xanth was devastated by their pa.s.sage. She could see dead animals and birds, holed by wiggles. Even the ground was chewed up by frequent holing. The wilderness was becoming a wasteland.

But now at last the nest itself was in sight. It was a dark globe as tall as a grown man, perched on the ground beyond a ravine. There was a haze around it, which Ivy realized was actually the ma.s.s of wiggles hovering in the region, before zapping on outward. Most of them did hang in a plane parallel to the ground, making the nest resemble the planet Saturn--but of course this was much larger than Saturn, which as everyone knew was only a tiny mote in the night sky that never dared show itself by day.

Overall, the thing was awesome and horrible. How unfortunate no one had seen it while it was growing and destroyed it before the swarming started.! But this was in the deepest depths of Unknown Xanth, where no one who was anyone ever went. So the nest had grown and grown, unmolested, perhaps over the course of thirty years. Now Xanth was paying for it!

It had taken time to skirt the hill and guide the forget-whorl this far. They were tired, for all three of them were children, and the day was fading. Still, there should be time to reach the nest, except-- ”Hold up!” Hugo cried. ”We can't go there!”

Ivy saw what he meant. The ravine was no minor cleft; it was an abrupt, deep fissure in the earth, extending down into darkness. It was too broad for any of them to jump across and too deep to climb through. To the sides it leveled out somewhat, at the near edge; but the far edge remained an almost vertical cleft as far as they could see. They could certainly roll the whorl into this ravine--but if it sank to the bottom, they could never get it out again.

They halted, afraid to go farther, lest the whorl fall in. ”What are we to do now?” Ivy asked dispiritedly. She was a creature of optimism and she believed in her friends, but the blank far wall of the ravine was a mighty pessimistic thing.

”Let me think,” Hugo said.

While Hugo thought. Ivy's tired attention wandered. She wished she were home at Castle Roogna, watching the historical tapestry with its perpetually changing pictures. She could almost picture herself there, happily absorbing the yarns of the tapestry.

Suddenly she spotted a faint horse-outline. She recognized it. ”The day mare!” she exclaimed. ”I see you, Mare Imbri! You're such a pretty black, just like a shadow!”

And, as tended to happen in Ivy's presence, the object of her attention became more so. Imbri the Day Mare, who had brought Ivy's daydream, became clearer and blacker and prettier. She was now more perceptible than she had been.

”Hey, she can take a message to our folks!” Hugo said, his intelligence still operating. ”We need advice about what to do now.”

But the mare shook her head sadly, her shadow-mane flaring. She projected her thought into a dream figure of a nymph, and Ivy heard the nymph's voice faintly in her head, like a distant memory. ”Night is nigh, and I can no longer carry dreams by night. I can not carry messages from one person to another; I can only bring thoughts of each other. I will have time only to hint to your folks where you are.” And Imbri was off, racing against the suddenly looming night.

Ivy shook her head. They were still stuck! They wouldn't be able to see the flying cherries in the dark, and so the whorl would drift away, and then the wiggles would come through- What were they to do? Their gallant effort was about to collapse into disaster. They didn't even have time to retreat or any way to bring the protective whorl with them if they did withdraw.

Chapter 17: Community Effort.

They found the Cyclops' cave in late afternoon. The monster was asleep inside, with the bones of a recent carca.s.s piled in the entrance. Irene would have felt dread for the fate of her daughter, but the ivy plant she carried still grew in health.

Ivy remained well--somewhere.

”Be ready,” Irene warned Chem. ”I'm going to broach the monster.”