Myth Alliances

"Well, look at that, a little pet dragon," the elder Pervect said, bending over to beckon Gleep to her. "Come here, little dragon-cutie-pie. What are you doing here?" "Dragons aren't native to this dimension," the little one warned her. "It's some kind of trick…!" But it was too late.

POOT!

"Aaaaugggh!"

The inevitable happened. The effects of processed carbohydrates hitting dragon digestive juices manifested itself strongly in the enclosed room. The air didn't actually turn green, but it smelled as though it should have. Gleep stood in the middle of the stone floor, looking very pleased with himself. Then he stuck out his long, forked tongue and blew a raspberry at the four Pervects. Flicking his tail playfully, he galloped out of the room. The Pervects let out a cry of fury, and went ru

"Hurry," Tananda urged me. "Phew!"

The gaggingly awful smell Gleep had left behind drove me to my knees, but I used a form of the "pushing" spell I knew to clear out the air.

"Look!" I cried joyfully, pointing to a clear glass globe on the table. "There he is!" A small figure was jumping up and down inside it. Wensley.

There was no time to free him now. I stuffed the sphere into my pouch. Tananda and I emptied our buckets into the center of the room and used brooms to push it over the surface of the floor in a big square.

"Do we have to get it everywhere?" she asked.

"Keep it more than an arm's length from the wall. I don't want it to take out the fire spell. I need that. Look! It's soaking right in." The disenchanting sand seemed to dissolve right into the substance of the floor.

"If it replicates itself," Tananda pointed out, "then eventually it will work its way outward and put out the fire."

"I hope we can get this done before that happens," I replied. But I was worried about that, too. Screaming and the sounds of breaking crockery allowed us to monitor Gleep's progress around the castle. I had instructed him to cause the maximum possible disruption, and it sounded as though he was taking my orders to heart. I hoped that the other Pervects would come ru

"Not yet, Gleep," I muttered desperately. We couldn't even become invisible. All magik within arm's length of the bespelled floor had been dampened. "We're not ready!"

It must have been a lucky gust of wind or a shift in the old building's foundation, but the door into the hallway swung shut just before Gleep thundered past it with the Pervects in hot pursuit. It was about time something went our way on this assignment.

I surveyed our handiwork. The anti-magik dust had soaked into the floor, leaving only a slight sheen to show where it lay. I tried throwing a fireball into the room, but my spell fizzled almost as soon as it left my hand. I gri

"Now, to get them all back in here," I declared.

"First thing we have to do," Tananda insisted, dropping her broom and shouldering a bag full of her own special equipment, "is to get their attention."

Loud clattering in the direction of the kitchen told us where Gleep had led them. I levitated the two of us past all the traps and spells that were supposed to prevent intruders and were now impeding the Pervects from intercepting the dragon who had made their room temporarily uninhabitable. Cursing, they had to dispell their own magikal obstacle course as they ran. Gleep let half the attacks roll off his tough hide, and blew out the other half of the defenses with blasts of flame.

He spotted me as we ducked into the long hallway that led to the butler's pantry, the laundry room and several other side passages. Wheeling almost on his tail, he bowled over his pursuers, and came charging towards us. I readied an illusion spell for the moment he crossed the threshold, transforming him into a mouse. The Pervects hammered past the doorway of the pantry, backpedaled and glanced in.

"Gleep?" squeaked the mouse.

"He must have gone down one of the other passages!" the elegant one shouted.

"We'll split up," the miniskirted one ordered.

"Call for reinforcements," the little one panted.

"I'll get the others back here," the elder one insisted. "You keep looking. I'll bet this Skeeve is here somewhere."

I gri

They all took off in different directions, but within minutes reassembled in the hall heading for the main stairs. Tananda vanished, heading to a point over the stairway where she had some little surprises ready. I could almost count backwards in my head, men…

"Eeeeeee!!!"

A plague of wood spiders came plummeting out of the air onto the heads of the Pervects. These weren't real arachnids, but an animate growth like an active moss Tanda had discovered while "camping out" in another dimension (well, that's what she had called it). The longlegged plants enveloped the Pervects with fibrous threads, wrapping them up like mummies. The females' feet got tangled up, just in time to slip on the spongy marbles scattered on the floor from another package in the Trollop's bag of tricks. Yelling, the four clutched at one another, dancing madly to stay upright. They ca

I had been counting on Bu

Into the midst of this mess, another Pervect appeared, the efficient one in the coveralls.

"Vergetta, what's going oooo-

The marbles claimed another victim. She catapulted down the stairs and landed on her fellows, who were just picking themselves up off the floor. They all fell down again. Another, the plump motherly one, blipped into the middle of the disarray.

"What is going on here?" she cried. "Who-oo-oooa!" And down.

Six. It was time to let myself be seen. Wearing the disguise that Aahz and I had worked up for my "audition" as court magician of Possiltum, I stalked out onto the landing and raised my arms. The main door slammed shut behind the last of the herdbeasts. The open windows banged closed, and the torches on the walls dimmed and flickered.

"There!" the elegant one shouted. "There he is!"

Bolts of fire and lightning flew at me, from not one, but two directions. I spun on my heel. The slim female in the long robe had reappeared on the landing. I glanced up. Tananda was gone. I threw up my hands, spreading out a ward. Her lightning bolt bounced off, and I "disappeared" in a cloud of smoke, courtesy of a bag of flash powder. The Pervect magician doubled over coughing. Before it cleared I was flying through the hall overhead, aiming toward my next vantage point. The object was to lure the Pervects, all ten of them, back into their chamber all at the same time. I had seven.

Gleep wasn't idle. I bounded up toward the ceiling in time to avoid being run over by my pet, who was being chased by two Pervects dressed in exactly opposite styles. One had on the most conservative two-piece suit I had ever seen, and the other was in a spiked leather bustier and stockings. It takes all kinds, I mused. Nine.

All we were missing was the grouchy one. I had presumed I was going to catch a few fish upstairs in the main headquarters as they popped back from the Wuhs riots, then found they couldn't pop out again. I hoped fervently that she was there. It was time to lure the rest of them back into the trap we had set.