"Maybe she's out of that spell," Kelvin said. It was an illogical hope and he knew it, but somehow he had to try.
"And maybe you're out of sense! You see how strong her magic is. It's going to take everything we have to contain it."
"But I want to do something! All this equipment, and I can't do a thing!"
"Wait for Horace."
I don't want to wait for Horace, he thought, but knew better than to say it. Helbah was testy enough normally, and now with her hands full she was worse. He thought about stepping out with his boots and right onto Zady. Unfortunately he didn't know where Zady was and Helbah and the others couldn't locate her. For that matter each of them would have wanted the witch pinpointed so that they could attack her instead of her minions. But Zady was keeping concealed. She might be anywhere wearing an invisibility cloak. She could even be among the benign, though Kelvin trusted in benign defensive magic better than to suppose she was.
"Damn!" Kelvin said, using one of his father-in-law's minor expressions. "Can't you tell me to do anything?"
Helbah gestured offhandedly and he suddenly found his lips were sealed. She'd shut him up, in her fashion. That was what she had for him to do! And him a hero!
"Witch Helbah! Witch Helbah!" The boyish-faced, chubby young warlock was at her elbow. "Now, Witch Helbah?"
"Now, Ebbernog. Kelvin, get ready with that sting—this may be a onetime chance."
"Ready," Kelvin wanted to say, but Helbah had his mouth shut. His hands were on the sting in bolting position. He hadn't the slightest idea what Ebbernog was going to try.
Ebbernog rolled his boyish brown eyes back into his head until only the whites were showing. He placed his fingers against his forehead and the color in his cheeks gradually vanished. Suddenly the young man's eyes rolled down to where the pupils showed, now much smaller than they had been. The eyes glowed, stabbed out across the battlefield.
Very impressive, Kelvin thought, but I could have gotten something done with my boots and sword while you're—
The floating shields above the enemy shot skywards, traveled a way through the air, and dropped.
"Now, Kelvin! Now!" Helbah ordered.
Kelvin shot his bolt. The witches and warlocks he hit flamed and sizzled, and some were reduced first to skeletons and then piles of ash. It was like his taking of Zoanna all over again. Almost he could imagine Zoanna and the wicked impostor king resurrected here in order to again die.
"Keep it up, Kelvin! Keep it up!"
Bolt after bolt sizzled. He got witches, warlocks, wizards, and ordinary mercenary fighting men. The flung-away disks crashed down onto catapults and onto enemy soldiers, inflicting more casualties.
Helbah was rapidly giving orders. She and her colleagues were throwing fireballs at a faster and faster pace.
"OOHHHH!" Ebbernog dropped over, landing on his face. Kelvin hadn't seen what hit him, but something must have.
Helbah swiveled, her eyes darting left and right.
"So, Helbah, you would fight me, would you?" The voice was close. Helbah flailed her arms and got red in the face. She made a choking sound, clawing at her throat.
"Your protective spells aren't as good as you thought, are they, dearie!" Definitely it was Zady's taunting voice. Kelvin could see finger marks on Helbah's neck and knew that she was being throttled. A moment more and there would be no Helbah to defend them, for once she dropped unconscious Zady would surely use witch's fire to destroy her. In this situation Kelvin felt worse than worthless. He wanted to help Helbah, but this was in the midst of battle and to drop the sting now might prove to be equally disastrous.
His boots and gauntlets acted simultaneously without his help. The gauntlets used his hands and muscles to wrench the sting from the ground, held it out, and swung it like a flail. The boots carried him forward.
The sting struck something invisible that emitted a shriek. Before his eyes the bare seat of a woman's anatomy appeared with a red, lurid line scratched across it.
Kelvin gasped. He wasn't used to such sights, and it had been a long, long time since he had attended a convention. Now the gauntlets grasped the sting at its middle and base and started a fast, upward drive.
Kelvin closed his eyes. He didn't want to see what would happen when Zady got what would have to be the severest sting of her witch's life. Mentally he braced himself for the geyser of blood. Zady would not only get the point, she'd be impaled on it!
The sting struck nothing. Kelvin snapped open his eyes to see a serpent wriggling on the ground and to feel his body being pulled by his gauntlets as they took a different hold and used the sting as a spear. The sting darted, but the snake was suddenly a bird flying in midair. The gauntlets, not waiting for him to think of it himself, swung the butt down and made contact with the earth. The gauntlets moved up the shaft, positioning the tip to point at the wildly flying bird.
Kelvin waited. His gauntlets tingled, a signal that usually meant danger.
Helbah made croaking sounds, her eyes bugging at him. Her finger pointed sternly at the bird.
Oh! He had to think! He had to send the bolt out himself with his own mind. The gauntlets could control his hands and the boots his feet, but his mental impulse was needed to send the bolt.
Kelvin wished up the bolt, but by then the bird, achieving a remarkable flight speed, was out over the benign human army. If he released it now, his father or Lester or someone he knew might be struck. The bird was swooping low, deliberately, keeping out of reach of thrust-up spears and swords, but too near to present a safe target. Kelvin did not dare to take the risk.
"Hurry! Hurry! She's getting away!" Helbah shrieked at him.
The bird was now darting down and then climbing up—momentarily concealed behind a horse, and then right in line with a horse's rider. Kelvin held his fire.
The bird dipped down, then darted behind the shell of a burned-out house. Kelvin waited. Now he'd get her! He'd blast her the moment she came out.
"Shoot, Kelvin! What are you waiting for?"
Of course she was really beautiful, he thought regretfully, and willed the bolt to destroy what was left of the house. The bolt shot outward with a terrific crack, as of pent-up anger and hatred directed at a proper enemy. The house exploded in a fiery flash. Balls of witch fire scorched the grass immediately after.
Helbah made a quick sign and released Kelvin's lips.
"Did we get her?" Kelvin gasped.
Helbah glared at him. "Thanks to your delaying, no. She had her cloak and she had the instant she needed to become a woman and don it. You waited too long!"
"I'm sorry," Kelvin said. "I didn't want to harm the men, and then I didn't think of blasting the house—I was waiting to see her."
"And then you'd probably have held your fire because she'd have been naked!" Helbah said accusingly.
Kelvin, try as he might, could not deny Helbah's charge. Still, he wanted Zady destroyed—the safety of his children and his home and all their lives depended on it.
"EEEEEK!"
Helbah's head snapped around at the younger witch's cry. A trembling Zally was pointing at something that appeared to be an army of grayish ants. The ant army was well within camp, and behind and to either side of it lay the bodies of men in green uniforms.
Helbah drew a glass globe from beneath her voluminous gray skirt and threw it. The ball exploded on the ground, covering the ants with smoke. As the smoke cleared, villainous full-sized soldiers were revealed, coughing to clear the smoke from their lungs.
"You," Helbah said, "mercenaries and fools! I can destroy you now or I can send you home. You choose!"
The officer with a houcat's face said hastily, "We surrender! Send us home! Send us home!"
Helbah indicated a small box that had held some magical goods. "Get in there, then. All of you!"
"What—?"
Helbah drew a sign with her fingers and tossed another transparent globe. More smoke, and the mercenaries emerged from under it again the size of a
nts. She pointed to the box and the antmen marched in. She sealed the box with a gesture and motioned to a warlock Kelvin had seen but did not know.
"Parcel for the king of Throod. Deliver it."
The warlock changed immediately into a large eagawk. It landed on the box, sank its talons into its sides, and took off with it. In a moment the bird was high in the sky, and then a cluster of fireballs came sailing across the sky from the enemy side. It was what was called a shotgun emission and was designed to stop messengers and fleeing foes. Kelvin shot a bolt at the cluster and half of the small fireballs vanished as the others spread out. Additional fireballs flew from benigns and one by one the attacking fireballs were stopped. Only one fireball had not been quickly targeted.
One was enough. It engulfed the startled warlock before he knew it was there, and warlock and box of Zady's army burst into tattered red sheets of flame.
"Poor Yorick," Helbah said, watching floating feathers turn to ash. "He was a good warlock. I should have seen that coming. Zady had her sniper waiting. She probably thought he was going for reinforcements. I wish we had reinforcements—we don't. What we need is some intelligence!"
"You mean spies?" Kelvin asked, and then he was thinking—his children were telepaths, and who could possibly be better as spies? Perhaps they should be here instead of waiting for Horace? No, no, he would never forgive himself if they got hurt.
But Helbah had read his expression. "Of course! Merlain, Charles, and Glint! Bring them here, Kelvin, and we've got our intelligence!"
When, Kelvin wondered, would he remember not to think?
CHAPTER 16
Reconnaissance
"Well! What are you waiting for—for me to turn you into a bird?"
"No, Helbah. I'm leaving right away."
Kelvin loved Helbah as he would his old witch granny, but the sharpness of her tongue cut harder than he thought she realized. He concentrated on the twin palaces and the spot by the swimming pool, and stepped.
Behind him he heard sizzling fireballs and several popping sounds, and felt a blush of heat on his back. Then he was stepping down, down, down, into the courtyard and to the side of the pool. Merlain and Charles were there, having just stepped from the water without a stitch. They would have made a perfect couple, were they not brother and sister; he was a handsome young man and she an attractive young woman. But their matching copper hair gave them away: they were siblings, as similar as they could be, in body and attitude. Glint seemed nowhere about.
"Oh, Daddy!" Merlain exclaimed annoyedly, grabbing a towel and wrapping it around her hips. Though not without modesty, neither twin had ever shown hesitancy about changing clothes or lying nude in the presence of the other. Their concern was for the thoughts of people other than themselves, which could only be because for years they had mind-peeked. Kelvin knew that Merlain had no concern about him seeing her body, but she must have mind-peeked enough to know that he thought it inappropriate, particularly since the witch's curse had enhanced his awareness of just such bodies, so she was expressing the appropriate aversion.
Kelvin shifted his weight from foot to foot, adjusting to his surroundings. He still saw no one but Charles and Merlain, now both putting on soft blue robes Helbah had provided for them. He had somehow expected to see Heln and Jon and her brood, as well as Glint. Helbah had cast many protective spells over the palaces and their grounds and had deemed this the safest place.
"Where is everyone?"
"Glint's gone to find Horace," Merlain said.
"What! You know Helbah asked him to stay!"
"He'll be back," Charles said confidently. "The dragons aren't the only ones on their sunnymoon."
That was right: they were married now. How could that have slipped his mind? "Come to think of it, young man, where's your wife?"
Charles shrugged, as might a man long accustomed to matrimony. "She's on the grounds. Probably with Mom and Grandma. We stayed here waiting for Glint and Horace."
"Grandma has never really seen the palaces," Merlain explained. "Then the royal pains were with her too, and you know how well Charles and I get on with the pains."
How well he knew it, Kelvin thought. All their lives they and the two kinglets had seemingly been natural sparring partners, despite the adventuring they had shared. Would that his children were normal and fought with each other the way he and their aunt Jon always had. As far as he knew Merlain and Charles never even had words.
"The pains never miss a chance to show off!" Charles opined. "They can't do magic or read minds, so they make a big thing of pretending to know more about Helbah's business. They'll be showing Mom and Grandma all her books and her paraphernalia for casting spells. All they've ever had to do with magic was getting born."
"That's all any of you should have had to do with it," Kelvin reminded him. Since their long-ago magic-filled adventure they had, as far as he knew, left spells to the experts. But secretly it made him a little proud to remember how well his six-year-olds had used bad magic to eventual good ends. After Glow's disenchantment, performed by Charles with proddings from Helbah, he had feared they might dabble. "And come to think of it, they did help you with your spells and drank the Alice Water to become giants."
"Only because we let them," Charles said. "We had to work together—there was no other way."
"There may not be any other way today, either. Where's Jon and her children?" He hoped his own children had not mind-peeked about his recent impressions of Kathy Jon.
"They'll get here eventually, Dad."
"You mean they're not here yet? Haven't you been searching for them?"
"Helbah told us not to leave."
"With your minds! Haven't you tried to reach them?"
"Well, gee, Dad, we can't reach all the way out to their farm. You know how stubborn Aunt Jon is—she probably didn't want to come."
Kelvin felt like tearing out handfuls of his newly regrown hair. Sometimes it depressed him that for all their smarts and special abilities his offspring demonstrated no more responsibility than had he and Jon. He had worried about them using their telepathy too much, and instead they had used it too little.
Jon paused after handing the heavy travel sack up to Alvin. The boy sat in his father's place on the front seat of the buggy as if he were already a man. Only the bickering going on between Teddy and Joey and big sister Kathy Jon made her mindful that they were still her children. She looked back at the house, wondering what she had left undone.
"I have to go back inside. I've forgotten something."
Their carriage horse, Old Hobbin, chose that moment to defecate, saying in effect what Jon's favorite and only husband would have said. Always impatient when younger, Lester was becoming more unmanageable every year. Their having had the children late in the marriage might account for some of it. Not that their children weren't darlings, but as Kelvin's father-in-law had said, they did try the patience of a saint. Many they encountered were not close to being saints, which made it that much worse.
Jon walked back to their cottage, unlocked the door—children weren't as trustworthy these days as they had been when she and Kelvin were brats—and went back inside for the second time. She could imagine Lester fuming at her, and she wouldn't have blamed him. She tried all the windows and found she had remembered to lock all of them. What was it that had compelled her like an aching tooth to come back inside?
"Hello, dearie, remember me?" The voice came from nowhere.
Jon flinched, but there was a vial of something under her nose, a fist hitting her in the stomach, and an ugly floating head with a lot of warts.
Zady! Zady with her invisibility cloak! I mustn't breathe. But then she did, for she was gasping.
"Well now, dearie, we're just going to change into birds and fly away from here. Won't that be fun?"
Bluish powder rained on her from midair and something rounded touched her cheek. A window she had just checked unlocked itself and raised. She tried but couldn't stop fluffing her fe
athers, then springing out the window and flapping her wings. Beside her flew an unusually ugly, dark swoosh. She was flying with Zady, not willing it herself but powerless to prevent it. Down below was the carriage and Hobbin and the children. Neither horse nor children looked up. Zady dropped a wad of excrement, and the dark stain appearing on the newly washed buggy top showed where it had landed.
As they flew across fields and farms only one thought sustained her: Zady, perhaps remembering how Jon had escaped her at the convention, had chosen her and not her daughter on whom to enact first vengeance.
Glint looked down at the greenery beneath his feet and manipulated the control on the belt with practiced fingers. Kelvin had shown him how to use the belt only yesterday and sworn him to secrecy before leaving it with him as a precaution. Helbah would have disapproved, he knew, but Helbah wasn't telepathic and what the old witch didn't know could surely not hurt him. It had taken him all morning to reach dragon territory and then get up into the upper highlands. He landed now on a tall mountain and projected his thought: H... O... R... A... C... E!!!
The answer came, but the thought was irritated rather than glad. Glint! Busy! Go away!
Horace. You have to take me home again. Into that swimming pool at the palaces.
Go away, Glint! We're having our sunnymoon.
He addressed his dragon sister. Ember, you don't have to take all day and night every day and night! What's gotten into you?
Horace has, Glint.
Her literal nature would have amused him at another time. I know, I know, but I need him.
You've got Merlain! Horace thinks she smells nice for a human.
I need him to take me home to her! I need him now, Ember.
Ember need him now too.
And Merlain needs me! Horace will come back to you. He won't mount any girl dragons on the way home.
He'd better not! Ember would scale him!
Why was he arguing with her? Obviously dragon passion, when not solely for procreation, was awesome. They must have been at it continuously these past days, and both acted as if he had interrupted them during preliminaries. Truly there were things he hadn't learned about dragons. And to think that without his aid Ember would have been a spinster!
Mouvar's Magic Page 17