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Then he gripped the railing tightly and swore. Abruptly, the shimmering had ceased, and the sphinx had risen from its crouching position and was walking toward Erakna.
Just as it came within twenty feet of the North Witch and crouched again as if to spring, its black mouth opening and exposing long sharp black teeth, Erakna turned. Her mouth opened wide—she must be screaming—and she brought the umbrella up swiftly and pointed it at the sphinx. The stone thing sprang, a ball of lightning shooting ahead of it from its forehead. That met the fiery sphere hurled from the end of Erakna's umbrella, and the two merged, expanded, and exploded as if they were kegs of dynamite.
Smoke and a blinding light filled the room. The windows blew out. Hank recovered his sight just in time to see the shards, vitreous snowflakes, spi
The smoke, red, not black, billowed out of the broken windows.
Erakna was standing in the same position, the umbrella extended, seemingly untouched, by a violence that should have hurled and smashed her against the wall. The sphinx was shattered pieces of stone on the floor. Glinda stood in the midst of the fragments, and she too was untouched by the explosion. Somehow, the two women had thrown up barriers around themselves for the very small fraction of a second required.
The torches had been blown from their sconces and were burning on the floor. The huge glass bottles and retorts and the copper and silver tubing on the tables had been fragmented or twisted. Smoke rose from pools of acid eating away the floor.
Hank yelled as loudly as he could.
"Glinda! Behind you! Behind you!"
Thirty feet behind her, the air had quivered, boiled, red steam or smoke rising from the whirling, and then the air had gotten darker, the boiling and steam had suddenly ceased, and a great brown bear was there. It was a short-faced bear, a descendant of the monstrous creatures which had roamed the American southwest until ten thousand years ago and then had died out. This one was a third smaller than its ancestors, but it still was massive enough to take on a Siberian tiger.
Glinda must have heard him through the opened windows. She turned in a half-circle and, without hesitation, pointed one finger at Erakna and the other at the bear. The animal charged, its roar audible to Hank.
Another glowing globe was on its way from the end of Erakna's umbrella. It met an equally large sphere ejected from the end of Glinda's middle finger, but her sphere traveled only a few feet from her when it coalesced with the North Witch's and blew up. The fiery globe expelled from Glinda's left middle finger seemed to strike the bear on the nose, but the brightness blinded Hank again. He could not be sure of the sequence of action; it was too fast for him.
When the darkness slid away, he saw that the bear was slumped on the floor, its nose and lips burned away. It almost touched Glinda, who was lying on the floor. The impact of the charging beast, probably dead when it struck her, had knocked her down. She seemed to be unhurt, however, and she got to her feet just as Erakna shot from her umbrella a huge bubble which shimmered with colors like gasoline on water.
The bubble sprang toward Glinda but slowed in proportion to its nearness to her. She seemed to hold it away with the finger pointed at it. Her left-hand middle finger jabbed at the corner where the bed stood, and from the finger shot a whirling many-angled shining object. It struck the corner above the bed and banked—a magical billiards shot—toward Erakna's back.
Erakna half-turned and pointed the umbrella at the polygon. It bounced as if hitting an invisible wall and struck the wall of the room. At the same time, the glowing sphere sped on a straight line back toward Erakna. Her right hand rose, the thumb and all fingers except the middle finger clenched, and the sphere slowed, stopped, and hung rotating tiredly in the air. It emitted a screeching like an unlubricated bearing.
The shimmering polygon bounced off the wall and shot across the room and out a window.
All this happened so swiftly that Hank could barely follow the offensive and defensive moves. Now he had to quit watching the two because the sphere which had bounced through the window was curving upwards toward him. Though intensely concentrating on her battle with Glinda, the North Witch had seen him. And, now that Glinda had deflected the sphere from the room, Erakna was using it to get rid of him. He was certain that he was the target for the glowing ball.
But it was not swift. The North Witch could not put much energy or thought behind its projection. She had lost much energy when she had transported herself from her castle into Glinda's. She had lost more when she had moved the great mass of the bear from its forest into the room. And she was trying now to cancel the white queen's moves while simultaneously destroying him.
If Hank had had time to consider, he would have admired, however grudgingly, the powers of magic and mental control and nerve-coolness of the Uneatable. He did not have that time, though. He had to do something about the death sliding through the air toward the balcony.
He ran by the flaming mattress, plunged through the smoke carried by the wind, slammed the two doors behind him, stopped, turned, drew his sword, and waited. Sweat soaked his clothes and ran into his eyes. He wiped the stinging fluid away with his left sleeve. His heart beat like the tattoo of a drum just before the trapdoor was sprung by the hangman.
The front of the sphere bulged—oozed—through the door. Smoke roiled from the wood at its edges. Hank threw the sword point-first into the door and in the middle of the sphere. The blade quivered there while the sphere continued to move until it was almost free of the door. Flames burst from the wood around it, and the sword turned from gray to dull red. Hank could feel its heat.
He ran down the hallway to where another angled across it. When he whirled, he saw that the door was blazing and that the sword was bending, the weight bringing it down as the metal inside the sphere softened. Then the sword fell with a clang on the bare stone floor. Smoke from the fire-enlarged hole mingled with smoke from the fire on the i
The globe was gone, its energy dissipated by the sword.
He ran headlong down the hallway and down a spiralling staircase until he came to Glinda's floor. He ran until he came to the very tall but very narrow massive door to her laboratory. There he stood, panting, his brain also panting as it raced. What could he, weaponless, do to help Glinda? There would be swords and bows in the armory, but that was on the first floor, and he might not be able to get into it because the explosion of the dump may have blocked the armory entrance. If the armory door was unblocked, it still might be—probably was—locked. He did not have the key nor did he know where the keykeeper was.
He became aware that he was clutching the big housekey hanging from the chain.
The key! There had to be a key to this problem.
He pulled on the handle of the door. Unexpectedly, it swung out. Glinda had not locked it. Had she done so because she had anticipated his coming here? Or had she not locked it because she might have to try to escape through it? Or both?
Thick red smoke swirled out through the half-opened doorway, choking him and burning his eyes. He smelled acid and something else in the smoke. He coughed, but he doubted that he had warned Erakna with its sound. Something or some things bellowed like a bull in the room. That ceased but was succeeded by a series of poppings like firecrackers exploding.
He managed to suppress his coughing just as a six-inch tall creature spurted like catsup from a bottle through the door. He jumped back, crying out, as the thing brushed against his leg. The catsup simile was correct; it was covered with what would have been blood if the blood had been brighter and not so thick. It sped wailing down the hallway, its thin legs and huge webbed froglike feet a blur and a slapping, its thin arms pumping, its froggish saberteeth-armed mouth open, its eyes on top of its hairless and blood-spattered head bulging.