The Practice Effect (38 page)

But the retreating gray soldiers were not broken. In spite of their fear, they had pulled back in good order. They were excellent troops, who delayed the pursuing L’Toff fiercely so their fellows could escape.

When approaching darkness had forced him and Linnora finally to seek a landing in the L’Toff homeland, Dennis had worried that, come tomorrow, the enemy might reorganize and return.

“What about Kremer?” he asked.

“Not to worry,” Linsee grinned. “Kremer’s allies are all gone over to the King by now. And an army of volunteer militia is on its way from the populous east. Kremer has stripped Zuslik of everything movable and is even now on his way to his ancestral highlands.

“Sadly, I doubt even the armies of all the kingdom, aided by a flock of your buzzing and bobbing varieties of flying monsters, could pry him out of those craggy clefts.”

Dennis felt relieved. He had no doubt Kremer would cause more trouble someday. A man as brilliant and ruthless as he would find ways to pursue his ambitions, and regard this as only a temporary setback.

Still, for now the crisis was over.

Dennis was glad to have helped Linnora’s people. But most of all he was happy that no tyrant would force him to invent devices for which this world was simply unprepared.

He would have to watch that, in the future. Already he had unleashed on Tatir the wheel and lighter-than-air craft. And Gath had probably figured out the principle of the propeller by now, just by looking over the cart/airplane.

Dennis would have to see what the Practice Effect made of these innovations, once they were mass-produced, before unleashing any more wizardries on these innocents.

A page hurried up to Prince Linsee. Linsee bent to hear the message.

“My daughter asks that you meet her in the meadow where you landed the night before last.” He told Dennis. “She is there, by your miracle machine.

“No one has disturbed your craft since you arrived,” the prince assured him. “I let it be known that anyone who touched the great growling dragon-thing would be gobbled up alive!”

Dennis noticed from Linsee’s wry smile that he shared Linnora’s sharp wit. No doubt while he had slept the Princess had filled her father in on everything that had happened since her capture.

“Uh, that’s good, your Highness. Could you assign someone to show me the way?”

Linsee called forth a young girl page, who stepped forward and took Dennis’s hand.

Linnora awaited Dennis in the open meadow by the gleaming aircraft. She sat cross-legged in L’Toff leather and hose before the nose of the plane, while three of her gowned ladies whispered together at the edge of the glade.

From overheard snippets as he approached among the trees, Dennis could tell that the maids didn’t approve overmuch of their Princess dressing like a soldier, not to mention sitting on the turf in front of an alien machine.

The ladies gasped and turned quickly when Dennis said good morning. (Good
afternoon
, he corrected himself as he saw the lay of the sun.) The maids bowed and backed away. Their attitude was respectful, but it also nervously conveyed that they thought he was just a little likely to grow fangs or walk on air. Clearly the run-of-the-mill L’Toff weren’t all that much more sophisticated than the average Coylian.

That could change, though, Dennis reminded himself as he walked toward the plane.

Dennis frowned in puzzlement. Linnora was all scrunched over, her head poked under the front of the onetime cart. Although he admired the girl’s limberness, to twist about in such a contortion, he wondered what in the world she was doing.

“Linnora,” he called, “what are you—”

There was a sudden thud. “Ow!…” Her cry was muffled by the airplane’s undercarriage. Dennis blushed as there followed a quick chain of expletives Linnora could have learned from only one source. The words certainly weren’t in the Coylian dialect of the English language!

The Princess withdrew from under the craft and sat up rubbing her head. But her muttered invective stopped the instant she saw who it was. “Dennis!” she cried out. And then she was in his arms.

Finally, a bit breathless, he got a chance to ask her what she had been up to down there.

“Oh, that! Well, I hope it was all right. I mean, I hope I wasn’t fooling around dangerously with things I don’t understand well enough. But you were asleep for
so
long, and some busybody went and told Father I’d dressed for war, so he’s had me watched ever since to make sure I didn’t go ride off after Kremer’s ears or something. I was starting to get
bored
, so bored that I decided I wanted to see—”

She was clearly excited about something. But it was all coming just a bit too fast for Dennis. “Uh, Linnora, your ladies seemed a bit shocked seeing you burrowing under there like that.”

“Oh!” Linnora looked down at her muddy knees. She started trying to dust herself off, then stopped and shrugged. “Oh, well. They’ll just have to get used to it, won’t they? In addition to being your wife, I expect to be taught wizarding, you know. And that seems to be a dusty business, from what I’ve experienced so far.”

The twinkle in her eye told him that there were certain things she would expect from her lord husband. Clearly, he wouldn’t have to look far from home for an apprentice.

“Anyway,” she went on, “I came down here and found everything just as we left it when we landed. Your Krenegee was here, too. But he seems to have gone off, now. Perhaps he’s hunting. I’ve been under there a long time, and maybe I’ve lost track of time.”

Dennis despaired of his beloved ever getting to the point. “But what were you
doing
under there?” he insisted.

Linnora stopped for a moment, her torrent of words cut off as she traced her train of thought.

“The robot!” she declared suddenly. “I was bored, so I decided to talk to that wonderful creature-and-tool you brought from your world!”

“You were
talking
to …” It was Dennis’s turn to blink. “Show me,” he asked at last.

The L’Toff ladies were shocked even more when they saw
the wizard and their Princess crawl down together into the grass and dirt. The women made ready to turn modestly away if their worst fears proved true.

They gave out relieved sighs. Linnora hadn’t been
so
debased down in the lowlands. But then what were they
doing
squirming under there like that?

The ladies realized, with regret that things would never be the same as they once were.

They had not really needed to crawl under the plane to examine the robot. Dennis realized later that he could have ordered the little automaton to drop the propeller, and its grip on the undercarriage, and come out. But by now it looked so much a
part
of the craft that it never even occurred to him at the time. The series of powerful practice trances, amplified by the magic of the Krenegee beast, had transformed the machine until it looked inseparable from the gleaming wooden flyer.

When Linnora said she had been “talking” to the robot, she meant that she had done the actual speaking. The ’bot had replied using its little display screen.

Dennis frowned as he looked at the rows of flowing Coylian script on the pearly rectangle. He couldn’t read the alien tongue as quickly as it sped past. Besides, he wondered, how had the robot learned to …

Of course, he realized quickly. Since almost his first moment on Tatir, the machine had been gathering information on the inhabitants, at his command. Naturally, that included learning the writing they used here.

“Split screen,” he commanded. “Coylian script on the left, Earth English translation on the right.”

The text parted into two versions of the same report. He and Linnora had to crawl in a little farther to read, then, but that only brought them closer together, and he couldn’t think of that as a disadvantage.

Immediately he noticed something interesting. Though Coylian letters were part of a syllabary, and English/Roman
letters were a true alphabet, the two systems clearly shared a common style. The “th” sound in Coylian, for instance, looked like a mutated “t” and “h” melded together.

Dennis recalled some of the calculations he had played with during his imprisonment. With a growing sense of excitement, he began to suspect that one of the theories he had come up with back then just might be true.

He read the text for a while. It was a summary of early Coylian history, found on some ancient scrolls the ’bot had pilfered temporarily from a temple in Zuslik. The scrolls had referred specifically to the Old Belief, once followed widely on Tatir, but now adhered to only by the L’Toff and a few others. It seemed to consist mostly of apparent myth and legend, but interspersed through the gaudy stories, Dennis thought he saw a pattern.

Dennis asked the robot to skim back to earlier entries, then ahead again. Linnora watched, fascinated, and from time to time suggested passages she had read earlier. Occasionally she stopped to explain a meaning he had not come across before.

They spent a long time together under the cart, reading the correlated history of a world.

Dennis was starting to get a crick in his neck when he finally felt he had enough data. The conclusion seemed incontrovertible.

“This isn’t
only
another planet!” he declared. “It’s also the future!”

Linnora rolled over and looked at him.

“Yes, for you it is, my wizard from the past. Does this change things? Would you still marry with one who might be your distant descendant?”

Dennis moved closer and kissed her. “I had no strong ties to my time,” he told her. “And you can’t be my descendant. I never had any kids.”

Linnora sighed. “Well, that, too, can be remedied.”

Dennis was about to kiss her again, and the ladies at the edge of the grove might have been shocked even more. But there came a sudden shout from somewhere directly overhead.

“
Dennizz! Princess
!”

This time there were two thumps and two series of muttered
oaths. Both Linnora and Dennis emerged rubbing their heads. But they grinned when they saw who awaited them.

“Arth!”

It was, indeed, the diminutive thief. A crowd of L’Toff had gathered, and they watched in hushed admiration from the edge of the glade, for a Krenegee sat on Arth’s shoulder, purring.

Dennis clasped his friend. “So Proll’s men were able to find you! I was afraid our description of that plateau wouldn’t be good enough and we’d have to go after you in the plane. We were worried about you!”

Arth scratched the purring pixolet under the chin. “Oh, I was okay,” he said nonchalantly. “I spent th’ time bangin’ sticks together to
make
another flyin’ cart. Woulda tried it out, too, but th’ L’Toff an’ Demsen’s scouts came for me.”

Dennis shuddered at the thought. He would have to have a good talk with the fellow—and with Linnora and Gath and anyone else who suffered under the illusion that Earth technology could just be
banged together
. Practice Effect or no, some things had to work right the first time!

“Well, just as long as you’re all right.”

“Sure, I’m fine. Sent a message to Maggin with Demsen’s troops. Asked th’ little lady to come out here from Zuslik to join me here for a vacation—with your Highness’s permission, o’ course.” He bowed to Linnora. Linnora only laughed and hugged the little thief.

“Oh, by th’ way,” Arth went on, “I don’t know if you both have heard, but I guess you’d be interested. It seems Demsen’s boys caught up with a company of Kremer’s men out near North Pass. And guess who was with ’em? None other than our old friend Hoss’k!”

“Hoss’k!”

“Yeah. Th’ deacon got away, worse luck. But th’ Scouts did capture a strange fellow who was
with
Hoss’k. A prisoner, it seems. They got him back at Linsee’s tent now.

“Funny thing, though. You know he talks a lot like you, Dennizz? All funny an’ open in th’ back of the throat, with that strange accent o’ yours.

“An’ some of th’ captured hillmen said he was another wizard!”

Dennis and Linnora looked at each other. “I think we had better look into this,” the Princess said.

“Well, Brady. So Flaster chose you to come after me. He sure took his time about it.”

The sandy-haired fellow sitting gloomily in the camp chair turned quickly about and stared.

“Nuel! It’s you! Oh, lord, it’s good to see a fellow Earthman!”

Bernald Brady looked harried and exhausted. He had a bruise on his forehead, and his typical snide expression had been replaced by apparently genuine delight and relief at the sight of Dennis.

Linnora and Arth followed Dennis into the tent. Brady’s eyes widened on seeing the creature riding Arth’s shoulder, and he backed away.

The pixolet apparently remembered Brady, too. It hissed unappreciatively and bared its teeth. Finally Arth had to take it outside.

When they were gone, Brady turned imploringly to Dennis. “Nuel, please! Can you tell me what is going on here? This place is crazy! First I find the zievatron in pieces, and your weird note. Then all my equipment shows signs of acting funny. Finally, I get conked on the head by some big slob who acts like Minister Calumny himself and has a bunch of thugs strip me of all my gear.…”

“They took your weapons? I was afraid of that.” Dennis grimaced. Kremer already had his needler, and there was no telling what other arms the ever-cautious Brady had brought along. No doubt Brady had not stinted quality in outfitting
himself
. With all that stuff, Kremer could still turn out to be a big pain down the road.

“They stole everything!” Brady groaned. “From my campstove right down to my wedding ring!”

“You’re married, now?” Dennis’s eyebrows rose. “To whom? Anybody I know?”

Brady suddenly looked anxious. Clearly he did not want to offend Dennis. “Uh, well, when you didn’t come back—”

Dennis stared. “You mean you and
Gabbie
?”

“Uh, yes. I mean, you were gone so long. And we discovered we had so much in common—well, you know.” He looked up sheepishly.