by E. Archer
“I can make sparkles,” Prestidigitator offered.
Cecil unrolled a map that had been silk-screened on a fairy wing. The fairies blanched, but Cecil blithely pointed to various locations printed on the veined membrane. “Now, here’s the capital, where the river divides. I’ll be approaching by the most direct route, along the path that skirts the Water-Warlocks’ cave.”
Ralph nodded sagely. “Try the grog.”
Cecil gestured to a distant point on the wing-map, at the crest of one of the fairy sinews. “Now, I need you and Prestidigitator to go here. It’s the largest fairy farm in the realm. Tens of thousands of them. If you can find some way to release the poor souls and lead them to us, we have a decent chance of taking the capital. Now, I see you still have a watch. Does it work?”
Ralph looked down at his calculator watch, a birthday present from his mother (he had already lost his second watch, which he had kept set to random time zones for the learning opportunity). Shockingly, the LCDs were still displaying. He nodded.
“Okay, good. I’ve got one, too.”
Gasps from the fairies. This was indeed a divine turn of events.
“Chessie addresses the people at noon every fourth morning in front of her castle balcony. Which means that we need to have everything in place by tomorrow at eleven.”
The fairies cheered. As there were only five of them, it was a sad, squeaky business.
Ralph thought for a moment. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have it all in place five mornings from now?” he proposed. “Then I’d have more time to get my part of the mission done.”
The fairies’ cheering stopped. They stared balefully at Ralph. Lame.
Cecil grimaced, stood, and addressed him. “As we have seen this afternoon, the perilous path we walk is not without peril. But that peril comes with great value. When the lives of an entire people have been devalued, only great loss of life can return that value. In summary, danger is not easy.”
Ralph, trying to tie together the pieces of Cecil’s speech, found the high-pitched fairy cheer was over long before he thought to join in. He watched Cecil as he prattled on. What fascinated Ralph was not that Cecil had matured much, but that he had managed to maintain his hipness in a fantastic land. His five different sweatshirts had been switched for five different doublets, a V-neck wool jerkin, and a leather shirt. His warrior sandals were carefully worn and frayed. His multiple silver necklaces had been replaced by an equal quantity of rawhide lengths. The crossbow and quiver on his back had brand names emblazoned on them. As the fairies cheered him and reached out to caress the fringes of his leather pants, he looked like he had finally become a reality show star. Even so, his weeks without drugstores and showers hadn’t done wonders for his skin — his face was covered in acne of an almost volcanic intensity.
Cecil finished his speech on a suitably rousing note, climaxing with “Tomorrow, the capital!” When the fairies leaped into the air to cheer, Ralph leaped convincingly along with them. Then Cecil and his crew bid their farewells, with Fuchsia leaving to tend to the fairylings. Prestidigitator stood at Ralph’s side, waiting for him to herald the commencement of the Great Fairy Rebellion.
“Um,” Ralph said, his voice cracking, “gee. Okay!”
CHAPTER XXI
As she had noted, Prestidigitator’s greatest gift was for sparkling. Her array was more ferocious than what six-year-olds produce on Independence Day, but only slightly so.
As Ralph and Prestidigitator had to travel through the night to get to the fairy farm, her gift was more helpful than one might first imagine. Ralph held on to her ankles and brandished her like a torch, sparkles emerging from the roots of her teased hair. They passed out of the Chumpy Forest, through the Forty Streams, and around the circumference of the Cast-Iron Tower Jungle. At each segment, Prestidigitator’s pyrotechnics cast a thin sphere of illumination over the near landscape.
Fairies make journeying very easy for their traveling companions. Prestidigitator was an adept scout, consumed no food, made an amiable (if dim-witted) conversation partner, and attracted all predatory attention away from Ralph. Indeed, she found herself very sought-after by the monsters they passed during the night.
Within a few paces of their starting out, she lost a toe to the chomp of a carnivorous fern. Then it was on to the onslaught of the Forty Streams, whose spherical, conical, and ellipsoid blasts of water regularly extinguished Prestidigitator and left them sputtering in the dark. The Cast-Iron Tower Jungle would have been a respite if it weren’t for the abnormally large (even by magical wish standards) bats roosting in the eaves. Prestidigitator lost a necklace and a good deal of self-respect within one of their slurpy mouths before Ralph could extract her. Regardless of the danger, she insisted on continuing to serve as torch.
By dawn they had reached the Arcadian Fields, which are famously serene, if one overlooks the mass subjugation of fairies occurring within. Ralph checked his watch as he and Prestidigitator approached: six o’clock. Since, per Cecil’s advice, it would take at least four hours to reach the capital, that left one hour to free a few thousand fairies.
Once, when Ralph was much younger, a wanderlusting miniature schnauzer had jumped into his arms in a mall parking lot. Immediately, he had begged his parents to get him a dog. Mary had said “we’ll see” in that tone she always took on when she had already made up her mind in the affirmative, and Steve had checked out an armful of pet care books from the library, bookmarked the pages about the pitfalls of dog ownership, and left them on Ralph’s bed.
The next Sunday morning they piled into the family station wagon to visit one of the biggest breeders in the country, out on Long Island. Mrs. Shirley Wilbefore operated Schnauzer Ranch, an estate they approached along a winding road shaded by rows of manicured maples. After they got out of the car, Ralph rode his dad’s shoulders to the white picket fence of the ranch’s border. Fenced into its rolling meadows were hundreds of schnauzers. They were of all sizes, from the equine giant schnauzers to the rodent-class mini-minis. A dog sergeant barked, and twenty puppies leaped a hurdle in unison. Another pack of puppies growled and chewed one another’s ears, closely tended by Shirley Wilbefore herself, who sported a crew cut and a nanny uniform.
The fairy farm was much the same way — except, of course, that there were no dogs, only fairies. And instead of cavorting merrily, they were penned up, one atop the other, in cages stacked thirty feet high and topped by spurts of black fire.
“It’s terrible,” Prestidigitator squeaked from their hiding place behind a bluff. “Look at them — they’ve gone mad! They’re chewing each other’s wings.”
“Really? You can see that far?”
“Yes. Oh, Ralph! They’re all gray and limp. It’s like they’re only half-alive.”
“Maybe this batch is destined to be used as roofing tiles,” Ralph suggested.
Prestidigitator nodded glumly.
“How many do you think there are?” Ralph asked.
Prestidigitator took a moment to count. “Forty thousand, two hundred.”
“Presti! That’s phenomenal.”
She looked at him and blinked. “Not really. I meant that there’s either forty thousand or two hundred. I can’t tell.”
“Oh,” Ralph said. “Let’s hope for forty thousand, then.”
“Yes,” Prestidigitator agreed solemnly. “Forty thousand freed fairies are better than two hundred freed fairies.”
“Any guards?” Ralph asked.
“Hmm … there are some fairy guards. They’ve got yellow tartan wings, which makes them Acolytes of the Dokapi. That clan’s always been infamous turncoats … if they turned on their own kind once, they should turn back without too much convincing. Give me a moment with them, and I can get them to come back to our side. Otherwise there’s not much in the way of defenses. Except for the Hellacious Hellhounds.”
“Are those very dangerous?”
“They’re fine.” Prestidigitator smiled unconvincingly.
“Well, they’re no bother as long as they don’t eat you. And as long as you don’t look at them. Well, specifically, if you don’t look at the pentagram of silver fur on their backs. Because if you do, you’re transported to a random layer of the Abyss.”
“So let me get this straight: You can face their front and be eaten, or face their back and be sent to the Abyss?”
“Yep.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Two. Well, at least I think there’s two. It’s hard to tell, because they’re generally invisible.”
Ralph gulped. “Anything else I should know?”
“Nope. Just don’t get eaten, and don’t look at them.”
Ralph shifted in the mud. He and Prestidigitator were in the positions of those green plastic soldiers he never knew quite what to do with when he was little, the ones that can’t stand up because they’re on their bellies with their arms propped up in front. Mud was seeping into the front of the designer doublet he had borrowed from Cecil, and Ralph was aware he wasn’t likely to come across a fresh one any time in the near future. “We need to get started,” he said. “We only have an hour left.”
Prestidigitator nodded solemnly. “So what’s the plan?”
“Well, first we have to get over the fence.”
“That’s easy. We’ll fly.”
“I don’t have wings.”
“Then I’ll fly.”
“But that means I won’t be there.”
“Right.”
They lay in silence.
“Can you zip over and open the gate?” Ralph asked.
“There doesn’t seem to be a gate.”
“Oh.”
“What if you open a gate and then I fly over?” Prestidigitator proposed.
Ralph stared at her. Then she spoke again: “Scratch that. I think I see a blue-green wingspan on a clear body. Which means we’ve got a Quencher Fairy in one of the cages. I’ve got it! I’ll fly over, convince the Dokapi Acolyte guards to turn coat, somehow free the Quencher, then get him to extinguish a piece of the fence-flame so you can climb over. That’s when we’ll free the rest.”
Ralph envisioned snoozing under his comforter back home, reading a novel about an Orc King while hugging a pillow to his chest and sniffing to determine what his father was making for breakfast. Then he shook his head and nodded at the same time. “Sounds like the best plan we have.”
“All you have to do,” Prestidigitator concluded, “is distract the Hellacious Hellhounds while I fly over.”
“Okay,” Ralph said bravely. “I can do that.”
“If they’re interested in eating you, they’ll yap at the fence. If they’re not hungry, they’ll be sensible enough to turn around, and you’ll go to the Abyss. We have to pray that they’re hungry.”
“Okay,” Ralph said.
“Let’s do this!” Presti said. “Are you ready?”
Which is when Ralph slumped over, dead.
CHAPTER XXII
You see, the distempus shamblis Ralph contracted when he first appeared in Cecil’s wish had finally run its course. Shambling Mound Distemper isn’t an unpleasant way to go, actually. The infection blooms first in the colon, and once it ruptures (a symptom Ralph would have noticed far earlier had he bothered to eat anything recently), the microbe scampers up and down the digestive tract, leaving little piles of mystical messiness until one is so clogged that one has no option but to expire. The supernatural microbe executes all of this with administration of localized anesthesia, which allows for an oblivion of bodily functions. As I said, it’s a most pleasant way to die, if, of course, one must die at all.
Prestidigitator had already raced into the sky by the time Ralph died. Looking down, she was dismayed to observe that Ralph had decided to nap right in the middle of their plan. She returned, saw the greenness of Ralph’s corpse, and immediately figured out what had happened. She may not have been overly intelligent, but she had far more experience with Shambling Mound Distemper than you or I.
She considered carrying on with the plan. A dead Ralph would distract the Hellacious Hellhounds just as well as a live one. And though she was tenderhearted, she would have done whatever it took to free thousands of her brethren. But what stopped her was that she realized her role in the operation hinged on Ralph’s being alive — what was the point of quenching a flaming fence, if there was no Ralph to climb over it? So she returned to Ralph’s side, doing her best to blot out the infernal barking of the hounds.
At this point Prestidigitator’s limited capacity for planning had run its limits. She was distraught: Ralph was dead, she was miserable to see so many of her kind in cages, and she was finding it very taxing to ignore the baying of the hounds. So she cried. Her sobbing formed a great fountain of tears and sparkles, a mixed deluge that alternately singed and bathed Ralph’s still face.
Prestidigitator cried and cried, until finally one especially large and dramatic tear slid down her face and dropped onto the crease of Ralph’s lips, the very spot where a sparkle from her flaming mane soon fell.
He remained dead.
She kept on crying.
Until something remarkable happened. You will be amazed to know that Ralph came back to life.
Seeing Ralph sit up and embrace Prestidigitator, we could be tempted to speculate that her compassion, her genuine sorrow at the loss of her new friend, brought him back to life. But this would be overly sentimental and beneath us. As my friend the pudding-maker often says, the proof is in the narration.
“I’m not dead? What, do people not die here?” Ralph asked Prestidigitator, after coughing up a small mound of refuse.
“Only by magic,” the fairy remembered.
And that was the truth. In a wish, when one is pursuing one’s greatest desires, one isn’t killed by microbes. One is killed by monsters. That’s what makes it so great.
CHAPTER XXIII
Ralph’s rapid death and rebirth seemed an occasion for tears and introspection. The monsters at the fence, however, allowed for no such luxury.
Seeing him stand, the Hellhounds increased their baying. Their ferocious howling brought all the Dokapi Acolyte guards to the fence, where they chattered angry words at one another and trained their fairy blowguns on Ralph and Prestidigitator.
“I’m going to admit we’ve lost the element of surprise,” Ralph observed as he and Prestidigitator sat in the mud and watched the evil forces lift the Quencher and break him in half right before their eyes.
“Yup,” she said.
“You’d think whoever built this farm would have put in a gate, so that in a case like this the guards could come destroy us.”
“Oh, Hellacious Hellhounds can pass through physical objects. And the Acolytes of the Dokapi are great high-fliers.”
“So why aren’t they coming after us?”
“I suspect we’re not important enough,” Prestidigitator said.
“That hurts more than dying did,” Ralph said.
They rejoined Cecil’s party on the highway that approached the capital. Cecil’s gleeful reaction on seeing them crest a nearby ridge quickly fell into despairing fury once he realized the limited extent of their Army of Liberation.
“What happened?” he barked.
“We weren’t able to free the fairies,” Ralph said. “But we did find these.” He held out a family of bunnies he and Prestidigitator had been transporting in a picnic basket.
“You’re not serious.”
“They burp fire,” Prestidigitator said indignantly.
“Fantastic.”
“What have you got?” Ralph asked.
“You wanna see ‘what I got'?” Cecil asked. He led Ralph to a rise and gestured at a horde of fairies neatly grouped into battalions. “Meanwhile, you’ve left thousands of fairies imprisoned and tortured, and suggested that we burp on our oppressors.”
“Okay, fine, you did better that we did. Is that what you want to hear
?”
“He had more help,” Prestidigitator consoled, stroking one of Ralph’s fingers with her little hands.
“These peasants look up to me as their hero, Ralph. How can I be their savior if I’ve left a whole bunch of them stuck in tiny cages?”
“Sorry,” Ralph said.
“You’re making me look so bad.”
“Look! I said I was sorry. We only have an hour left. Let’s get going!”
“There’s no point. We’ve got an army of hundreds, not thousands. There’s not going to be a glorious procession to take the capital anymore. Even with your stupid fire-burping bunnies.”
“So you’re going to send them all home?” Ralph asked.
“No, of course not. We’ll see this through to the tragic end.”
And so the greatest fairy army ever assembled continued its final march to the capital. For the greatest-ever fairy army, it wasn’t extraordinarily impressive; they barely turned the heads of a herd of goats they passed. It would have been a much greater army, Ralph was very aware, if he had done his job right. He cursed himself as he and Prestidigitator took up rear guard positions.
Much like chickens, fairies can burst into flight for short stretches but don’t make for very good long-haul aircraft. Cecil therefore ordered them to walk, but as they found it hard to restrain their exuberance they hopped into flight every few yards. The fairy march was, therefore, quite a sight. At any given moment, a handful of troops were popping into the air, a column of kernels marching across a hot stove top.
The capital, fortunately, wasn’t far off. Cecil dropped back to Ralph’s position to confer as they approached. “So,” he said gloomily, never quite meeting Ralph’s eyes, “the Oppressor speaks at noon, in the main square. She’ll then slink back to her mansion. We’ll wait until she’s done with her address and then attack. We don’t stand a chance of getting at her directly when all of her guards are around, but if we surprise her we can force her to retreat inside. You and me’ll follow her into the mansion and lock her in. That’s where we’ll stop her once and for all.”