Fantasy Gone Wrong

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  For all of the lore written down in its pages, the book could not think for itself. Since it held no power to enact transformations, or escape from the deeps of the Netherworld, it crept into a cranny and cowered while the imp’s horned master flew into a rage.

  Lest fur should fly, and impish heads roll, the djinn originally charged with the theft was called onto the devil’s carpet. There it squirmed and sweated through desperate excuses, until Taffire could be collected and collared in chain, and hauled from the cell in the dungeon.

  The djinn presented the runt wyvern to its overlord and bowed, its chinless jaw scraping the rug. “An invisible gift, Master, with a proven talent for finding the Wizard’s mislaid belongings. Taffire here can be made to recover that strayed book of spellcraft in no time.”

  “No chance of that!” Taffire denounced, tart. “I can’t find an earthly thing in this state. The book you’ve misplaced won’t see me, or hear me, or come when it’s called, as long as I’m witched into limbo.”

  The imp howled with laughter, caught a glare from its master, then snapped straight in poker-faced terror. It unbound its punitive spellcraft, then sneered, “Wretched, undersize spitfire! Cower at once and mind your new keeper.”

  Since the Lord of the Netherworld was massive and cruel, and more unfortunately, flameproof, Taffire clamped his teeth, curbed his rebellious spirit, and folded his wing vanes in studied reproof. “You’ve scared that book, badly. It might be days before it calms down! If you want me to find it, I must be alone to coax it to speak, or come out.”

  “Until midnight, then,” boomed the Prince of All Evil. “You’ll be granted that time, and no more. Have that errant book back in my hands, or be thrown into the pits for amusement. My ravening, tormented demons will relish the favor of tearing your carcass into a morsel!”

  With that, imp and djinn were whisked off with a bang, gone along with their horned master’s departing thunderclap. As promised, Taffire was left on his own to chase down the Wizard’s book.

  First things first: the runt wyvern inspected his glittering scales. When he found them undamaged, he snuffed out a candle and ate one of the skulls, as its manic grin suggested it might be spying. No other fare to be scrounged in hell’s dungeon suited a carnivore’s fancy. Taffire burped, settled back, and picked a splinter of bone from his teeth. Then, his golden eyes slitted, he snapped, “No games! Crawl out now, since I know where you’re hiding.”

  The book huffed from its nook, wedged under a gargoyle. “Fetch me out yourself.” The legs it had grown on the desktop were gone, since the Wizard’s spells of command always dissolved after sundown. “Then if you’re kind, you will burn me before letting my knowledge fall into bad hands.”

  “I won’t risk any flames,” Taffire said, miffed. The snack just consumed had not eased his pique. Neither did he wish to become the ripped meal for a horde of starved demons. A puckish runt wyvern with limited wits saw no pleasant way out of his fix. As fires made smoke and caused troublesome notice, Taffire seized on the easiest remedy. He decided to eat the book’s pages.

  “You can’t be serious!” the book squeaked.

  Its protest proved useless. Taffire stalked it, then hooked it out of its hidey-hole with small but needle-sharp talons. Confronted next by an agile forked tongue, still flicking crushed bits of bone from a gleaming array of white teeth, the book reasoned, “How can the Wizard recover his property if my pages are chewed into shreds and digested?”

  Taffire looked disgruntled. His busy tongue paused between polishing fangs. He didn’t relish the thought that a spell of recovery might be invoked to empty his stomach. The wyvern belched up the sour aftertaste of candle wax and skull; the very idea caused severe indigestion. After all, the book was a friend, sheltered under the Wizard’s protection.

  “Have you got any better suggestion?” the wyvern inquired at length.

  Since the book could not access the lore in its pages, it sighed. “I have not. But let’s limit the damage. Suppose you consume only the worst spells? Hide nothing more than the secrets that break the strictures of common sense.”

  Taffire snorted a tendril of steam. “I don’t know common sense from a skull with a smirk! I find lost things. It’s up to the wise to maintain their guard to defend them.”

  “What is wisdom?” the book asked, ruffling its pages. “Can such as we even fathom the concept?”

  Taffire blinked. He considered his tail. Wistfully apprehensive, he admired the shine on his scales that winked every color of the rainbow. As he was loathe to damage their shimmering beauty, he lamented, “Wisdom is knowing how not to cause hurt.” Case in point, he added, “It’s scarcely a guess that the Netherworld’s master won’t care. In this place, your rare pages will never be used to help anyone else escape suffering.” Far less, Taffire realized, a misfortunate runt wyvern about to be thrown to the desperate hunger that fed off itself in the pits.

  Morose, the book was inclined to agree. It feared for its own future prospects. Therefore it yielded its most perilous knowledge for Taffire to chew up and swallow.

  The wyvern ate the supreme spell for provoking ill fortune, and another for destroying self-confidence. Dauntless he downed a cantrip to wreak havoc, then another, to bring longstanding alliances to ruin. These were followed by dozens of recipes for subtle poisons. Then another page, blackened with fingerprints, and another, too worn with handling not to be suspect for its rows of uncanny blank lines. Taffire ripped through more passages scrawled in a tongue only scholars remembered. The text surely cataloged distress and harm; at least the torn parchment went down like cold wind. Its nasty bitterness coated his tongue like stranded frogs baked to glue in hot sunlight.

  The spell Taffire gobbled to chase that ugliness down was the same curse of invisibility the thieving imp had purloined to thwart him.

  Disaster was immediate. Taffire vanished. Since this time the page from the book was to blame, the spell’s countermeasure became lost into limbo along with the shreds in his belly.

  Taffire gagged. Choked cross-eyed, he blew smoke and retched until he hawked up a stuck shred of parchment. The enchantment relented, perhaps, just a fraction. The wyvern wrinkled his snout, appalled by the stink of enchantment left on his breath. Invisible he remained, but not quite in limbo: the repeat fumes from his unsavory meal formed a noxious cloud, which distressed the locked chain on his neck. The steel trembled, and then started writhing. Animate metal sprouted black scales. The cuff that circled Taffire’s throat transformed into a snake’s head, which spat out its mouthful of spiked wyvern ruff and hissed like an overwrought steam kettle. Its ruckus continued as the rest of the links succumbed to the strayed bit of sorcery. The indignant length unwound itself next, until a fully enchanted serpent slithered onto the carpet.

  “Oh dear,” moaned the book, left open and mangled and cowering on the desktop. “You’ve let a bad fragment of spellcraft escape. The backlash is bound to be dangerous.”

  Taffire did not answer. Or if he did, nothing else in the Netherworld heard him. Even the spying collection of skulls kept their changelessly toothful expressions.

  The snake flicked its tongue, gave a last, annoyed hiss, then meandered away and coiled itself up for a torpid rest in a cranny. There it subsided back into its original state: a dropped snarl of chain that no longer contained the botched form of the Wizard’s prized finder.

  “Taffire,” the book quavered. “Surely you’re still here? You’d better have a clever idea to rescue us from oblivion.”

  No sound from the wyvern. Nothing but look-alike leers from the skulls, whose candle flames guttered and smoked. The book languished, abandoned to hopeless dread, until a rattle arose from the door lock. The hapless tome flipped itself shut in a panic as the panel groaned on its hinges.

  “Taffire?” it whispered.

  Nothing answered. Instead the door blasted open to an ear splitting squeal of iron hinges. A djinn with a murderous glower stalked in and yelled with distempere
d impatience, “Where’s that slinking wyvern, and how did it manage to slip through my magical collar and chain?”

  As the book had no answer, the djinn began poking in corners. Its thick muscles bulged as it heaved aside the array of grotesquely carved furnishings. Varnish chips flew from rough handling. Dust billowed in clouds.

  The djinn’s steady curses almost obscured a reptilian sneeze from the shadows. The explosion was followed by a half-strangled belch and a whiff like the breeze off a compost heap.

  The djinn snarled, surprised, a stone vase and a lamp stand clamped in arrested clawed fists. “What in the Netherworld’s deeps is that smell?” It ditched the vase and swiped the lamp shade to and fro in a furious effort to disperse the creeping stench.

  The object grazed against something unseen. A wyvern scale shot out of thin air and fell, opalescently winking.

  “Wretched Wyrm!” The djinn pounced. Its punitive grip trapped something living and squeezed, but too late. The gaseous spell shred had energized.

  The hapless djinn became a fat frog that hopped about, whining for kisses.

  Its invisible quarry chose not to take pause. A sharp breeze whiffled past. The stunned book found itself snatched from the desk, then hauled off toward the gaping doorway.

  “Taffire!” it gasped, urgent, “you can’t think you’ll walk out of the devil’s own dungeon with nobody else being the wiser!”

  Already the rumble of pounding feet descended the stairwell beyond. Taffire chose to bolt upward, regardless. His invisible claws scrabbled over worn stone as he leaped the steps three at a stride. As the book did not share the masking spell’s cover, it subsided, resigned to its fate. The end, when it came, was not going to be pretty. Five djinns and two imps sprinted downward to take them, shoving and falling all over themselves to be first to recover the prisoners.

  No wyvern’s mad dash could slip through the legs of such vengeful brutes, sent to collar him. Except the disparate sorceries in the runt creature’s belly now curdled from the exertion. Taffire hiccupped. More ejected wisps of spellcraft emerged, recombined, and transposed to inflict random mayhem. The book recognized two clauses for ruin, then a forceful phrase to seed misdirection. The result made the masonry walls groan and twist with the rumbles that presaged an earthquake. Solid walls sprouted multiple spiraling corridors with the contorted dead-ends of a maze.

  Taffire ducked left, while the imps and the pack of bloodthirsty djinn scattered howling and got themselves lost.

  “This shouldn’t be happening,” the book said, distressed. “Such spells shouldn’t mix. Anything could go wrong! Terrible befoulments and distortions of nature, and we’re beyond reach of the Wizard’s knowledge of counter spells.”

  Taffire wheezed, breathless, and hiccupped again. Nausea twisted him double. The book pinched in his claws bemoaned its distress, while the indiscriminate stew of downed spells brewed up more griping havoc in the wyvern’s belly.

  “Dear me, perhaps we should have left out the recipes for subtle poisoning. Taffire, please! If you’re going to be sick, it would be for the best if you tried to heave your guts quietly.”

  The runt wyvern thumped the book down in the passage. Sparks of agony shot from his nostrils. His pitiful groans could not help but attract the next horde of spiteful enemies. Perhaps worse than the threat of the bottomless pit, the belches and burps of draconian indigestion unleashed still more dastardly chains of invention.

  The teeth-gnashing djinn, hand-picked for ferocity, broke off their snarling pursuit. Their gravel voices burst into a soulful lament, with a warbling counterpoint screeched by the imps quavering in two-part disharmony. The book winced. Apparently the embarrassing bits of a lover’s charm had entangled with an incantation aligned for ill fortune.

  “This isn’t funny,” it insisted, upset, while the maze bounced with echoes of mangling noise that were sure to have punitive consequences. “This is the Netherworld! Strict rules against singing are going to fetch the horned prince down here in a temper!”

  Taffire stirred. Grumbling under his fiery breath, he scooped up the book, spread his vaned wings, and tried flying.

  Invisible but for the petrified book, the runt wyvern sailed up the misshapen stairwell. He twisted and soared and shortly emerged through a vent in a volcanic mountain. Below spread a lake filled with boiling magma. The heat was oppressive. Taffire battled his dyspeptic vertigo. Wrenched by sharp winds and bedeviled by updrafts, he floundered, forced into an unbalanced landing. The book stayed unscathed, clutched tight as the wyvern tumbled, tail over snout, bundled up in his own furled wing leather.

  He uncurled, a bit scraped, for the most part undamaged, except for the bit of catastrophe spell shaken loose by the jolt upon impact. Taffire burped. A sealed conjury hissed between his gaped teeth. Shortly a tempest formed overhead. Icy gusts lashed the sulfurous airs of the Netherworld, then whipped up black clouds and a downpour. Steam and fog intermingled. The lava lake froze, and the balefires that harrowed the suffering damned extinguished to sopped ash and cinders.

  Which gift of mercy was not going to please the cruel streak of the Netherworld’s master. Through the pounding roar of the downpour, cheering and prayers soon replaced the unending chorus of screaming. The wild celebration of dancing and joy all but rivaled the paean that greeted the dawn of creation.

  “Run!” snapped the book. “If we don’t get away, or find someplace to hide, we’ll be destroyed, or else buried until we’re wiped out of remembered existence!”

  Taffire scrambled erect upon unsteady haunches. No longer invisible but tinged sickly green, he recovered the panicky book. Harried by a whipped blizzard of snowflakes, he gathered his stumbling balance to flee.

  Too late: the horned prince himself had arrived to redress his disrupted regime. He snatched for the book, tore it free of tight claws, then seized the cringing wyvern. “You!” he bellowed through glistening bared fangs. “Just look at the damage you’ve caused me! The work of eternity, wrecked in a day! Hell’s cooling off, and all my trapped souls are happy enough to find ecstasy! If they keep such good spirits, they’re bound to repent! Then a legion of angels will invade my domain to answer their pleas for forgiveness.”

  Taffire grunted, dangled by his scruff. His belly churned and a leaked snip of bane spell raised a pustule on the horny red fist that imprisoned him.

  “Damn you both to perdition!” The devil stared, incandescent with shock at the blemish that upset his vanity. He did not loose his grip, but hastened his promise to hurl the offenders into the bottomless pit.

  “We’re lost,” sniveled the book. “It’s all your fault, Taffire!” With all its dangerous pages torn out, it had no more worth than a commonplace herbal. “Spells that should be secret are unleashed in hell and our miserable lives will end in torment for the sake of your lamebrained misjudgment.”

  Taffire had no hopeful remedy to offer, beyond changing his form to a rat. Perhaps as a rodent afflicted with mange, he might spoil the appetite of the pit’s demons. Yet the strategy backfired, as his load of ingested pages could not fit in a tinier stomach. Poised at the cavernous lip of the pit, about to be cast to oblivion, he spewed. A shredded stew of parchment and bile splashed over the devil’s furred shins and cleft hooves.

  The Lord of the Netherworld absorbed the raw dregs of six dozen forms of ill practice. Bone, flesh, and muscle dissolved to raw slime, and dropped him at a loss on his fundament. His bellow of fury shattered rocks and cracked chains, and sprung the locks on tight barriers and fences. Djinn and wardens were bowled over, and in the stampede, more of the damned escaped. While the Master scrabbled back from the pit to evade the vicious teeth of his own demons, Taffire, the book, and the splashed detritus of puked spells were released in a heap on the brink.

  The jarring fall knocked the wind out of Taffire. Nauseous, rat-shaped, he coughed and disgorged the last spell morsel wedged in his gullet. A spitball of parchment, mottled with ink, shot into the bottomless pit. The slaverin
g creatures imprisoned below trampled to snap up the offering. They fought, piled up, and wrestled each other to be first to devour the gobbet. The encounter changed several of them into pixies. The rest were left at a glassy-eyed loss, grazing blooms off an outbreak of daisies.

  “Hellfire itself!” screamed the Prince of All Darkness. “Just look at this mess! You’ve despoiled my foul reputation!”

  While his imps sang hosannas, and his torturers grinned, transfixed by the sight of their navels, he dragged his footless frame up to the book and flipped through its mangled pages. “Counter spells, now!” he shouted, enraged. “You’ll restore my preferred state of chaos. Or else—”

  “Or else what?” said the book. “All your werewolves and beasts, your vampires and djinn have succumbed to abnormal behavior. As you see, the runt wyvern was most indiscriminate. He devoured the remedies along with the spells, and nobody else but the wise have the knowledge to unscramble the contents.”

  The Lord of the Netherworld blasphemed aloud. He ranted with impotent fury. Taffire watched, in the shape of a rat, while the book, in smug tones, decreed the best chance of recovery lay with the Wizard.

  “You’ll need his learned help,” it added, succinct, “before your lava lakes harden to granite and start sprouting mosses.”

  The Lord of the Netherworld howled in vain. He pounded his infected fist. The tantrum did nothing but burst the tight boil. Splashed by an eruption of baneful pus, he watched, dismayed, as the enchanted corruption spread an itching rash down to his crotch. Now fearful his crippled state could get worse, he shot out a hand and snagged the rat’s tail in clawed fingers.