Air Apparent, Page 2

  “I will cogitate on that. Meanwhile we need to find some Clues.”

  “Some whats?”

  “Clues. Detectives always have some. We just have to figure out where to find them.”

  Wira laughed somewhat bitterly. “Maybe in the Book of Answers?”

  The Gorgon nodded. Wira could detect that too. “That is the obvious place to start. The murderer had to have left some fingerprints there.”

  “We don’t use fingerprints in Xanth. They’re too scientific.”

  “Oh, bother!” the Gorgon said crossly. “You’re right. But there has to be something. We merely need the wit to find it.”

  Wira had an idea. “If he scrambled the Book of Answers, he must have touched it, to turn the pages or something. Maybe he left stains that could be magically analyzed.”

  “Maybe he did,” the Gorgon agreed. “Let’s go look.”

  “But Humfrey won’t let us touch the Book!”

  “Correction, dear. He’ll let you touch it, if you charm him. He can’t say no to you.”

  Wira started to protest, but realized it was true. Humfrey never really said no to her. “I’ll try.”

  Humfrey was deep in the Book, using the flickering light of a feeble candle. “Dear, you’ll ruin your eyes that way,” the Gorgon said.

  “Don’t bother me, woman,” he grumped.

  “We need to look at the Book.”

  “No. Go away. I’m busy.”

  “Wira needs to look at the Book.”

  Humfrey paused. His head turned toward Wira. She smiled. He obviously did not want to leave the Book, but neither did he want to tell her no.

  “And we have unfinished business in the bedroom,” the Gorgon said.

  “Woman, don’t—”

  “Now,” she said firmly. “You know it supplements the youth elixir you use to keep your age at an even hundred.” She took him by the ear and tugged.

  Slowly, reluctantly, grumpily, he went. The Gorgon led him away. Only she could have done it. “It’s up to you, dear,” she said in passing to Wira. “I can give you half an hour, maybe a little more.”

  “But I hardly know—”

  “Now,” the Gorgon said, with what registered as about five eighths of a smile. Then they were gone.

  Wira sat on the Good Magician’s stool and oriented on the open Book of Answers. She couldn’t read it, of course, but she ran her hands across the pages. There was, of course, nothing. She had assumed that the Gorgon would read the entries or see the smudges or whatever. What could she do on her own?

  A cloud appeared; Wira felt its ambiance. “Whatever? I heard that thought.”

  Oh, no! “Demoness Metria, go away!” she snapped.

  “By no means. Humfrey’s distracted at the moment—I can’t think by what—” The cloud assumed the form of a truly evocative bare female torso with serpentine curves. Wira knew, because she knew the demoness’s nature. “So I took advantage to pop in while the magical repulsion is off. Is that the Book of Dissolvings?”

  “The Book of Whats?”

  “Solutions, Rejoinders, Responses, Retorts, Replies—”

  “Answers?”

  “Whatever,” the demoness agreed crossly. “There, I said it. Whatever are you up to?”

  “Please, Metria, I have only a little time. Let me work.”

  “Wira, you can’t even see it! What work could you possibly be doing?”

  It was not in Wira to prevaricate. “I’m looking for signs of whoever abducted Hugo.”

  “Hugo was stolen? That is a news flash! What girl lured him away?”

  “No girl,” Wira said grimly. She was trying not to let the demoness bother her, but of course Metria was succeeding anyway. “It was the murderer.”

  “A murderer! Whodunit?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Never mind. I can see I missed something interesting. So you’re looking in the Book to find your murderer. What’s keeping you?”

  “The entries are scrambled.”

  The demoness looked. “Why so they are! That must complicate things.”

  “Yes.” Wira ran her hands over the pages. There was nothing. She turned to open two new pages, then two more—and felt something. “Hugo!”

  “That’s not Hugo,” Metria said. “That’s just a fruit stain on the page.”

  “That’s the feel of Hugo! His talent is to summon fruit. He must have been here. Metria, will you help?”

  The demoness hesitated. “You want my help? Is this a trick?”

  Wira remembered how to handle this creature. “Of course it is! I’m pretending to need you so that you’ll go away just to spite me.” That was a half truth, or maybe a quarter truth, so was not a full-fledged prevarication; she could manage it in this emergency.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Read the entry I have identified.”

  “Well, I will. It’s about Cumulo Fracto Nimbus, the ornery cloud.”

  Wira was disappointed. “Not Hugo?”

  “No known connection to Hugo.”

  “Still, it must be a Clue.”

  “A What?”

  “Suggestion, lead, intuition, indication, intimation—”

  “Hint?”

  “Whatever,” Wira agreed crossly. “Something that will help me find Hugo, or the murderer, in some devious way.”

  “You must be tetched in the head, girl.”

  But Wira was turning more pages and running her hands across them. Soon she felt another trace. “This one.”

  “That’s about the pet peeve, the perpetually irascible bird. You think it stole your husband?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Maybe it’s irrelevant.”

  “Let’s turn some more pages. I think you’re making random selections to turn me off.”

  Wira wasn’t, but did not argue. The demoness actually was helping, so it was better to let her think she wasn’t.

  She turned more pages, finding more clue-spots. None of them were about Hugo, to her grief, but surely they were relevant in some way, or they wouldn’t be marked by his fruit essence. She remembered them all. She was good at remembering things, because she couldn’t make notes she could read.

  “Why don’t you use be-wail?” Metria inquired.

  “Use what?” Wira realized that she must have voiced part of her thought.

  “Dots, spots, marks, elevations, patterns—”

  “Braille?”

  “Whatever.”

  “It takes a special tool to write it. It’s easier just to remember.”

  “It would be easier yet just to see.”

  “I don’t miss it.”

  “Well, you should.”

  Before she made it to the end of the Book, she heard Humfrey and the Gorgon returning. She had excellent hearing, and generally knew what was going on in the castle without having to go there. The Gorgon had done her best, but there was only so much distraction the Good Magician would tolerate when he had a concern about the Book. Wira wished they could have stayed away longer; her list of clues was incomplete. “Darn.”

  “OoOo, what you said!”

  “It’s not a bad word.”

  “Yes it is. Roxanne Roc was convicted and sentenced for uttering it in the presence of the Simurgh’s egg. I know, because I was the swing member of the jury.”

  Wira might have argued further, but Humfrey was entering the study doorway. “I smell demoness,” he grumped. “Begone, strumpet!”

  “Bleep!” Metria swore and faded. This time there was a faint smell of brimstone.

  “Who has been interfering with my Book of Answers?” Humfrey demanded.

  “I was just turning the pages, looking for clues,” Wira said.

  He mellowed marginally. “First I need to restore proper order to the entries. Then I will be able to read the solution to the mystery.” The man climbed onto his stool and went back to the beginning of the Book.

  “Come dear, let’s go down and have some comite
a,” the Gorgon suggested. “We’ll leave Humfrey to his important work.” She kissed the Good Magician on the top of his head.

  They went downstairs to the kitchen. The comitea was very good, and did make Wira feel more civil despite her extreme concern about Hugo.

  “Did you fetch in anything useful?” the Gorgon inquired.

  “I don’t know. Hugo’s traces were definitely there, though I know he wouldn’t have touched the Book directly. But the spots I found seem random.”

  “This whole business is strange. Hugo wouldn’t have left you, as you pointed out, so I think it is fair to say he has no complicity. My guess is that he happened upon the murder scene before the murderer left, so the murderer had to get rid of him too, so as not to leave a witness. It must have happened very fast.”

  Wira was stricken. “Oh, Mother Gorgon! You don’t think Hugo was killed?”

  “Definitely not. I raided Humfrey’s spells long ago and put a no-death spell on Hugo, just on general principles. Don’t tell Humfrey.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t!” Wira said, her relief overflowing. “But then why isn’t Hugo here?”

  “That was a pretty basic, simple spell, and I put it on a long time ago, so it must have faded some. It would have kept him alive, but not stopped other mischief. He could have been enchanted into a mouse, or conjured to some distant spot. So it will still be a job to locate him. The scrambled Book stops us from using it to find Hugo as well as from identifying the murderer.”

  “But what magic could have scrambled it? That tome is counterspelled every which way.”

  The Gorgon nodded. “That bothers me. It’s Magician-caliber magic. If a man could enter this castle, kill someone, banish the one who spied him, scramble the Book of Magic, and get away unobserved, what else is he capable of? I thought we knew of all the Magicians and Sorceresses in Xanth. This smells of something else.”

  Fingers of dread closed about Wira’s heart. “What are you saying, Mother Gorgon?”

  “Could this be a Demon involvement? Capital D?”

  The Demons were to ordinary demons what sphinxes were to ants: immeasurably more powerful. The whole of the magic of the Land of Xanth stemmed from the mere radiation leaking from Demon Xanth as he rested deep below, or dallied in the Nameless Castle. Their ways were obscure but infinitely potent. If a Demon were involved, the case was hopeless. “It can’t be,” Wira said. She meant not that it was impossible, for nothing was impossible to a Demon, but that her whole world depended on it not being the case.

  “Then it must be something less,” the Gorgon agreed. “Someone or something with a special talent, maybe of conjuring himself places, and a handful of stolen spells. In which case the Book can identify him, when.”

  “I can’t wait for when! Hugo’s gone.”

  “I know, dear,” the Gorgon said sympathetically. “That’s why we shall have to solve it without the Book.” Then she paused. “Oops—I thought of something else. Who would have been in the cellar, to kill? It’s an odd place.”

  “Someone stealing some Rhed Whine?”

  “That would hardly be worth it, considering the difficulty of getting into this castle. The stuff’s not valuable.”

  “Could the—the murder have been done somewhere else, and the body conjured to the cellar?”

  “Then why abolish Hugo?” the Gorgon asked sensibly. “Why not leave him to discover the body, as you did soon after? No, the murderer had to be there in the cellar. Which puts us back to who was the victim.”

  “But it hardly makes sense! One person sneaking into the cellar, another sneaking in to murder him, then doing something to Hugo to conceal his identity.”

  “And bollixing the Book of Answers,” the Gorgon said. “Which suggests he knew where he was and what he was doing. I suspect we understand next to nothing at all.”

  “Next to nothing,” Wira agreed, hating it.

  “All the more reason to act. You got some clues.”

  “Just random names, like Cumulo Fracto Nimbus. He wouldn’t have done this; in fact he couldn’t have done this. He’s a cloud!”

  “Then you will have to go question him. Maybe he knows something about this. That’s what Clues are all about. Once you have run them all down, you’ll be able to assemble them and draw a Brilliant Conclusion.”

  “I’m not that smart,” Wira protested.

  “Nonsense. You’ll be as smart as you need to be. But just in case, you can take some Eye Queue elixir along.”

  “You forget. I’m blind.”

  The Gorgon considered. “Yes, we’ll have to deal with that. You’ll need a Companion.”

  “A what?”

  “Don’t play Demoness Metria with me, girl! Someone to travel with you, to be your eyes. You’ll need something to ride, too; walking all over Xanth would be too tedious.”

  “But I don’t know anyone outside the castle, and I have never ridden an animal.”

  “Details to be addressed. Meanwhile, there’s another problem: there’s a querent coming tomorrow. How is Humfrey going to answer her, with the Book bonked?”

  “We’ll have to send her away.”

  “We can’t. The Challenges are all set up, and if she makes it through, she’ll expect her Answer.”

  “We’ll have to go out to intercept her, to explain.”

  “By no means! If we do that, everyone will soon know of the fix we’re in. It would ruin the Good Magician’s reputation for inscrutable expertise. Also, if word gets around that we’re looking for a murderer, what do you think will happen to Hugo? We need the murderer to think that he’s gotten away with it, and no one is investigating.”

  That froze Wira. “We must keep it secret,” she agreed. “But how can I question people, then? That will quickly give it away.”

  A bulb flashed over the Gorgon’s head; Wira felt its brief heat. “You’re blind!”

  “That’s not exactly late news.”

  “But you must have been longing all your life for sight. To recover the vision you lost as a child.”

  “I haven’t been,” Wira protested. “I have a very good life here.”

  “Of course you have, dear. But others won’t know that. You must go on a Quest to find your Lost Vision. That way you can question people right, left, and center, and they won’t catch on to your real mission.”

  “But how can I ask about Hugo without giving it away?”

  “Consider it a challenge, dear. I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion.”

  She would have to. “You mentioned a Companion. But there’s no one.” Then a bulb flashed over her own head. “The querent!”

  “That’s it,” the Gorgon agreed. “We can tell her that the Good Magician requires her Service first, while he researches her Answer. That Service is to be your eyes.” She paused half a moment. “But she’s an ordinary girl. In fact she’s from Mundania. That means—”

  “She has no magic talent,” Wira said. “She won’t be much help at all. Unless—”

  A third bulb flashed. “Unless we change her to a more useful form,” the Gorgon said. “Like a flying centaur.”

  “But we can’t do that sort of magic.”

  “Yes we can. You forget that I was the one who first put all Humfrey’s collected spells in order. There’s a forgotten conversion spell on a back shelf, beyond the pun-gloves. It’s voluntary, which means she’ll have to agree to it, but of course we want her agreement. We can do this without disturbing Humfrey at all.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” Wira breathed.

  “I hope she’s a nice girl,” the Gorgon said.

  “That, too,” Wira agreed. She was beginning to have faint hope.

  2

  DEBRA

  Debra was not at all certain she was doing the right thing. But what else was there? Ever since she had arrived in Xanth she had been driven to distraction by her curse. Maybe the Good Magician could abolish it. So he charged a year’s Service or the equivalent for an Answer; it wasn’t as though she had a
nything better to do right now.

  She stood at the edge of the moat and gazed at her reflection. She looked like exactly what she was: a thirteen-year-old Mundane girl. The details didn’t matter. Only the curse mattered. She was half ashamed that it was not a big bold dangerous curse that threatened extinction to whole cities. It was small and personal, and aggravating as bleep.

  Bleep: now there was a good word, for all that it wasn’t really a word. People weren’t allowed to swear here, so when they tried it got bleeped out. She found that more entertaining than annoying. It was one of the things she liked about this magic land. Certainly it was better than dreary Mundania.

  Well, she was here. The Good Magician’s Castle stood before her, right across the moat. She knew the rule: she would have to get through three Challenges, and if she succeeded, serve her term. She was ready. Maybe.

  She contemplated the moat. In seeming answer, colored fins appeared in it. Debra shuddered; she knew those were loan sharks, ready to take an arm and a leg. She couldn’t try to swim across.

  Just to be sure, she experimented. She flipped a branching twig into the water. Sure enough, a huge white shark forged across and snapped up two of its branches. The arm and leg branches.

  Several people emerged from the castle and trooped across the drawbridge. They looked carefree. They reached the outside of the moat and followed a path toward Debra. She waited, knowing what was coming.

  They stopped when they saw her. “Hello,” the leading girl said. “Are you looking for the Good Magician? This is his castle.”

  “I am,” Debra agreed. “I have a question for him.”

  “Oh, you’re a querent.” Debra didn’t quite catch the word, but didn’t like it. “Well, I wish you luck. I had to go through it six months ago. I’m Steph.”

  Debra tried to stave off the inevitable. “You had a Question? But then why are you leaving the castle?”

  Steph laughed. “I’m serving my year. We all are. We came to ask our talents, and Magician Humfrey told us, and now we’re working it out. Mine’s the ability to freeze things in place, like a wiggle swarm or half a horde of goblins. This is Bev; her talent is Time: she knows when to start an action so that it will be successful or unsuccessful. And this is Timur, with the talent of cooling or heating water, to vapor or ice. We need to fetch some lethe elixir for the Good Magician.”