Roc And A Hard Place (20 page)

“If my new talent can be useful—“ Kim said.

Metria laughed.  “It was your talent that saved us!  It can surely help again.”

“But without Arnolde's aisle of magic, I couldn't have used it,” Kim said.

“And I couldn't have existed,” Metria added.

“There is enough credit to go around,” Arnolde said.  “I think it is fair to say that we have come to respect each other, by profiting from the abilities each brought to the mission.

Ichabod provided the house, truck, and knowledge of Mundania, without which the effort would have foundered.  Dug and Jenny explored for the most expeditious route and provided most of the hauling strength.  Each person's contribution was vital at some point.”

The others passed a glance around.  The centaur did have a point.  Suddenly they all felt better about themselves.

“Then let's travel,” Kim said briskly.

Dug shook his head.  “You're a bit hyper, know that?  All the rest of us are tired from physical exertion, or wrung out from a siege of low magic.  And you are too, if you had the wit to know it.  We need to rest, or we'll blunder into real mischief.  Xanth isn't all that safe for distracted or dull folk.

Tomorrow we can find an enchanted path and travel well. Today we'd better just recover.”

Another glance circulated.  It was another valid point.

“I'm sorry,” Kim said.  “I'm being pushy again.  Yes, I'm tired too, and sort of dazed about being back in Xanth.  I never thought I'd get here outside of the game.  But it's great. I'll shut up.”

“That's the way I like my women,” Dug said.  “Quiet and submissive.” He dodged her first kick.  “And beautiful.”

That stalled her second kick in midair.  She lost her balance and fell into him, so he kissed her soundly.  Actually Kim wasn't beautiful in the standard sense, but it seemed that Dug knew a bit about girlfriend management too.

“I'd better check on Veleno,” Metria said, remembering her husband for some irrelevant reason.  “Will you folk be okay here for a while?”

“We should be,” Arnolde said.  “This close to the edge of magic, there shouldn't be any bad monsters.”

“And we can simply step back through the Interface if there are,” Jenny said.  “We can go where they can't.”

So Metria popped off home, where Veleno was just beginning to run out of delirious happiness.  It had been, after all, more than a day.  She bustled him back to the bedroom and dosed him with another day's worth.  She would have liked to stay longer, but she had an obligation to the traveling group to see it safely to its destinations.  Her new conscience was a strict mistress, but she didn't mind.

When she returned, the group was relaxing under a weeping willow tree, cheering it by their company.  Arnolde was discoursing on some of the problems of archivism.  “Old documents are invaluable,” he was saying.  “Even those deemed to be of little worth by their perpetrators.  A scribbled note to stay out of the honey pot informs us that they did have honey pots in those days, and that they had writing.

Unfortunately some key documents have been lost to history.

As a centaur, I naturally know the list of the human Kings of Xanth, but there are some distressing lacunae.”

“Lacuna,” Metria said.  “She's still around.  She was retroactively married, and—” She paused, seeing their stares.

“Did I say something stupid?”

Arnolde smiled.  “No, of course not, my dear.  I was merely using the word in its linguistic capacity, meaning a gap or omission.  Perhaps we expected you to say, 'A distressing what?' and we could then have had the dubious pleasure of redefining the term.”

“Oh.  Whatever.” She still felt out of sons.

“At any rate, I was going on too long,” Arnolde said.  “I wish there were some forgotten tome listing all the missing Kings, felicitously turning up.  But of course.  Good Magician Humfrey would have found it already if any such existed.”

“Unless it got lost during his distraction of wives,” Ichabod said.  “Then he might have overlooked it.”

“Say,” Dug said.  “I wonder if Sammy could find such a tome.”

The cat had been snoozing beside Bubbles, but suddenly woke and set off running.  Jenny Elf scrambled after him.

“Wait for me!”

“Now look what you've done, idiot!” Kim told Dug.

“I'll track him!” Metria said, glad for something to do to make up for her conversational gaffe.  She floated rapidly after the cat.

It turned out to be no long chase.  Sammy ran up to a small structure bearing a plaque with the words BOOK STORE.  Metria lifted its lid and peered in.  It turned out to be a solidly constructed box wherein books were stored.  The top one was a tome titled BOOK OF KINGS.  So she took that out, set the lid back in place, and opened it.  She was holding it backward, so she saw the last page first.  There was a crude scrawled entry:  STOLN BY TH OGRE ACHEVER, OGRE AN OGRE AGIN.

She considered.  That did look like the writing of an ogre.

Ogres were justifiably proud of their stupidity.  But how could any ogre have stolen such a (presumably) important book once, let alone over and over again?  Even an overachiever among ogres would have trouble stealing a book, few ogres even knew what a book was.

Still, this one obviously did.  He was actually a literate ogre, perhaps the only such in the mottled history of ogredom.  So he had evidently done it, and was proud enough of his achievement to record it in the very book he had stolen.

She turned back another page.  This one listed Magician Aeolus, the Storm King, assuming the throne in the year 971.  

That was all.  The rest of the page was blank.  No other Kings were listed.

Since there had indeed been Kings thereafter—she could think of Magician Trent the Transformer, Magician Dor who talked with the inanimate, and about eight brief others in between—she knew that this book had been stolen during the Storm King's reign.  That wasn't surprising, since the Storm King had become rather dim in his declining years, able to blow up hardly more than a breath of wind, and not much stronger intellectually.  He had probably lost or forgotten the book, and the ogre achiever had found it, and given himself credit for stealing it.  Thus all that it contained had been lost to Xanth history.

Assuming that it contained anything much.  So she turned some more pages, and saw that more Kings were indeed listed.  In fact, they went right back to the beginning of Xanth Kings.  This book must have been passed down from King to King over the centuries, each one filling in the end date for his predecessor and his own year of ascension.

Good enough.  She closed the book and carried it back to the waiting group.  “I think this is it,” she said, presenting the tome to Arnolde.

“Why, so it may be,” the centaur said, amazed.  He opened the book and read its title page.  “Human Magician Kings of Xanth.” He looked up.  “Astonishing!  Where did Sammy find this?”

“In a book store.”

“A book store—in Xanth?” Kim asked.  “Did you have to buy it?”

“No, it's just a box where books are stored.”

“There are other books?” Ichabod asked alertly.  “If they are of similar rarity and quality, that may be an informational fortune!  We must examine them.”

“Sure,” Metria said.  “Right this way.”

But when she returned to the place she had found the box, there was nothing there.  There did not seem ever to have been anything there, either; it was just an undisturbed rocky region in the forest.

“Maybe Sammy—?” Dug said.

But this time the cat was indifferent.  “I don't think there's anything to find,” Jenny said.  “He can find anything but home, except when there isn't anything.  Then he just ignores it.”

“But there was a box!” Metria protested.

Ichabod cogitated.  “Perhaps it moved—and the cat is unable to find a given object a second time, that being, as it were, a home base, something already found.  I think we shall have to relinquish any notion of finding those other books.”

“Oh, fudge!” Metria swore.  “I did it again!  I should have grabbed them all.”

“You are not a scholar,” Ichabod said, excusing her.  But a cloud of disappointment hovered near him.

The ogre achiever had stolen it over and over again, she remembered.  Did that mean that each time the book store disappeared, he hunted it down again?  Or that he had finally hidden it in this foolishly obvious place, and it had turned out to be a better hiding place than it seemed?  If so, they had caught the book store just at the right time, before it moved.  That made her feel a smidgen less worse.

They returned to Arnolde, who was engrossed in the Book of Kings.  “This is absolutely fascinating!” he exclaimed.  “I can vouch for its accuracy by the entries relating to what I already know.  But there are many more.  This is indeed an invaluable lost tome of information.”

“What's so exciting about a list of Kings?” Kim asked.

“I mean, that's what makes British history so absolutely, totally, completely boring, not to mention dull.”

 “Well, there are also the dates of the Kings,” Ichabod said, looking over his friend's shoulder.

“Maybe I didn't make myself quite clear,” Kim said grimly.  “If there's one thing worse than lists of names, it's lists of dates.  Not only are they boring and dull, they're impossible to remember, and you flunk if you make a simple little mistake, like putting the wrong name with the right dates.”

“Yeah,” Dug agreed.  “I remember when I listed Henry the Eighth for 1909 to '47.  You'd have thought the sky was falling!”

“You were precisely four centuries off!” Ichabod exclaimed, shocked.

“So what's four centuries between friends?” Kim asked.

“I certainly wouldn't want to bore anyone with unwanted lists of names and dates and talents,” Arnolde said.  “I shall be happy to commit this volume silently to memory.” He pored over the book with much the same intensity that Magician Humfrey did with his own tomes.  “Oh, my!  The Sorceress Tapis was once married?  That explains so much!  And the Zombie Master was actually the son of a King, but alienated because of the nature of his talent.  I never suspected! This will revolutionize Xanth history.”

“Or at least the current rendering of it,” Ichabod agreed.

“It does seem that there were some dark secrets in those early days.”

“Exceedingly dark,” Arnolde agreed.

“Actually, I'm curious,” Metria said.  “Maybe I knew some of those Kings.” Dug and Kim started to laugh, then stopped as they saw that neither Metria nor Arnolde was.

“That's right,” Dug said.  “Demons live forever, or as close as makes no nevermind.  Maybe she did know some Kings.”

“I did,” Metria agreed.  “But I got close to only two, Gromden and Humfrey.  The others didn't interest me.”

“That's right,” Kim said.  “Humfrey was King once.  You tried to distract him from his studies at the Demon University.  But what's this about you and King Gromden?”

“I seduced him.  But it got complicated.”

Kim reconsidered.  “Maybe I am interested in some of those Kings.  If they were real living people, I mean, not just dates.”

“Gromden must have been a hot date,” Dug said.

She ignored him.  “Let's hear about some Xanth Kings. You've got my curiosity going.”

“And she's dangerous when she's curious,” Dug said, dodging another kick.

So they settled back and listened to Arnold's recital of Kings, old and new, as augmented by the Book of Kings.

“The uninterrupted human population of Xanth began with the First Wave, its arrival defined as the year 0.  For the first two centuries there were no Kings.  The savagery of the early years may have prevented the human folk from achieving sufficient unity.  Then King Merlin, whose talent was Knowledge, became the first in the year two-oh-four, just in time to try to help organize the women to kill their rapist husbands of the Third Wave and bring in better men, the so called Fourth Wave.”

As he spoke.  Jenny Elf settled by his flank with Sammy and Bubbles and hummed a little tune.  Metria, interested in information about the old Kings that she hadn't paid much attention to at the time, listened with complete attention.  She realized that her half soul was giving her a new perspective, so that now the events had meaning.  She remembered the brutal Third Wave largely exterminating what had been the brutal Second Wave.  But the Fourth Wave had been something else, and that one had built the foundation on which the human kingdom became significant.

Then she saw old King Merlin vacating his throne, separating from his wife, the Sorceress Tapis, and going to Mundania on some kind of business only he could understand.

Tapis was so annoyed, she never remarried, and never spoke of Merlin again.  She did tolerate her daughter the Princess, but neither spoke of their connection because both had written the memory of the King out of their lives.

“Well, Merlin did have business in Mundania,” Ichabod remarked.  He was standing beside her, watching King Merlin depart Xanth.  “There was a lad named Arthur he had to educate to be King.”

“That was more important than governing Xanth?” Jenny asked.  She was standing on Ichabod's other side.

The old Mundane shrugged.  “There are those who thought so.”

“Hey, here comes Roogna,” Kim said from Metria's other side.  “But this is starting to get cluttered with dates.”

Then in 228 Magician Roogna, whose talent was Adaptation, assumed the throne.  Eight years later the Princess suffered a change of plans and married him, with her mother's blessing, because he really was a decent man.  He built Castle Roogna, with the help of centaurs.

“Naturally, the centaurs,” Arnolde said.  “No other species had the expertise.”

King Roogna died fighting the Sixth Wave.  It was an ugly scene, because the invading Mundanes were so brutal and ignorant of magic.  Ichabod, Kim, and Dug winced in unison, ashamed of their heritage.  Roogna's place was taken by Xanth's first female King, the Sorceress Rana, whose talent was Creation, in 286.  When she died in 325, Magician Reitas, whose talent was Solving Problems, took over.  Unfortunately he seemed to generate almost as many problems as he, solved, because there were always unintended complications.  When one of those complications killed him in 350, ending Reitas' reign, Rana's son Magician Rune became King.  His talent was Evocation.  “Too many dates,” Kim muttered.