Tara Duncan and the Forbidden Book (13 page)

“No . . . you cannot,” said the gnome, gasping. “T'sil only occurs deep in the Salterens desert. There is a Transfer Portal at Sala, the capital of Salterens, but none in the remote desert, and it takes at least three days to reach the salt mines. Besides us, the Salterian mine owners are the only ones who have the antidote. They use t'sil to control the slaves they kidnap from other races. You would never have enough time to go into the desert, bargain with them, and take the antidote. Besides, you might become their slave. You have no choice but to follow us.”

Cal was still enraged, but he understood that he had no choice. He released the gnome, who fell to his knees, rubbing his throat.

“So, show me this blasted spellbinder of yours! I'll find his blasted hidden portal, and you and your people can go fry your little blue butts in Limbo hell.”

The gnome made a protective sign against Cal's curse, then handed him a sticky brown mass.

“What in the world is that thing?” he growled suspiciously.

“It is an oxygenator,” Buglul explained. “We gnomes do not need to breathe when we are digging because our bodies absorb oxygen directly from the soil. But you and your fox would suffocate. The oxygenator can synthesize any gas or liquid. Give it some of your blood, and it will supply you oxygen and recycle your carbon dioxide.”

“Some of my blood?
What do you mean, some of my blood? Let's be clear on what you mean by ‘some' for this vampire-thingy of yours. If we're talking a couple of quarts, forget it!”

“Just a few drops, no more than if you scraped your knee. Put the device on your face and breathe deeply.”

Glaring at the gnome, Cal did so. He gingerly put the sticky creature to his face, and it quickly spread and covered it. He felt a small twinge behind his ears, proof that the beast was feeding. Cautiously, he took a breath and was relieved to find that it worked perfectly, though the air was slightly musty. The mask also covered his eyes to protect them, but he could see quite well through the brown membrane.

Blondin, on the other hand, wasn't in the least cooperative. When the gnomes tried to put a mask over his muzzle, he backed into a corner and snarled. The fox was almost as big as the gnomes, so they prudently handed the oxygenator to Cal. Ignoring Blondin's teeth snapping inches from his fingers, he slapped the sticky thing over his muzzle.

“You'll have to crawl for quite some distance,” warned the gnome. “Our nearest main gallery is more than a mile away.”

Cal shrugged, uninterested in Buglul's explanations. Blondin didn't mind, since he was already on all fours, and he even gave a sarcastic little yip at the look on his companion's face. Once beyond the statuette's influence, Cal cast a double Interpretus spell, so he could communicate with the gnomes even when they were out of range of the Imperial Palace's general spell.

The trip was long, arduous, and extremely painful. Within a few hundred yards, Cal could no longer feel his hands, and his knees were killing him. They felt scraped raw. Behind him, two gnomes were filling the tunnel in as they went along.

Cal was curious at first, and he watched the gnomes at work. But the process was so revolting he soon looked away.

Dwarves tunnel by laying their hands on rocks and making them soft and easy to dig. If a layer is too hard, they disassociate the molecules of their bodies and flow into the rock until they reach easier going. But gnomes dig very differently. They open gigantic mouths, easily two or three times their size, and swallow earth at incredible speed. Their saliva sticks the soil together so their tunnels don't collapse.

When they left Cal's cell, the gnomes first replaced the stones in the wall. (The saliva, he noticed, made excellent mortar.) Then their enormous mouths started vomiting up the tons of rock and earth, filling the tunnel. A few minutes of this, and it would be impossible to imagine that Cal had dug his way out, especially since the gnomes carefully cleaned the cell by licking up all the dust.

As he crawled along, Cal suddenly remembered a device he'd seen on Earth: a skate-something. Those things had wheels! And the tunnel floor was perfectly level. Under his breath he chanted: “By Creatus, I want that wheeled doohickey, so I can move ahead more quickly.”

From then on, things went much more easily. Lying on his board, Cal had only to push along the tunnel with his hands to move, and the gnomes could pick up the pace. Buglul examined the device with interest and admired how smoothly it rolled, but not to the point of wanting to get on board with Cal.

But things got sticky when the tunnel began to slope downward. Buglul heard a shout behind him and barely had time to leap aside before Cal went tearing by. The boy had obviously forgotten a small detail: his device didn't have any brakes.

When the anxious gnomes finally caught up with him, he lay in a crumpled heap, shaking. Sure that he'd been badly injured, they gently rolled him over and were startled when they saw his face, which was still covered by the thin membrane mask.

Cal wasn't hurt; he was laughing his head off.

“Wow! That was terrific!” came his slightly muffled voice. “Are there any more slopes around here?”

Buglul raised his eyes to heaven—to the tunnel roof, anyway. “No, none,” he said dryly. “And even if there were, we would appreciate your not using that contraption of yours. You might hurt yourself. And us too.”

To their great relief, they reached the main gallery without further problems, and Cal made his rolling board vanish. He was amazed to see a series of immense galleries, the highest of which disappeared in the shadows. Their walls were decorated with images of flowers, trees, and animals, and decorated with ocher, lapis-lazuli, malachite, gold, and silver. Globes of luminous water lit everything up. Everywhere, gnomes were busily hurrying around. With a shudder, Cal realized they were riding giant ants, termites, spalenditals, and arachnes; some were even mounted on enormous geometer moths and dragonflies. All this menagerie was swarming, stridulating, gurgling, and whistling. Insects are so small that Cal had never realized they could be so noisy!

He didn't see any women or children anywhere, which confirmed what Glul Buglul had told him.

“You can take off the oxygenator,” said the gnome. “The air is breathable here.”

Cal peeled the mask from his face and stuffed it in his pocket, noting that it had turned a vaguely reddish color.

“We are far from the Imperial Palace,” continued Buglul. “We have nothing to worry about.”

“Okay, so what do we do now?” asked Cal, struggling with his intense urge to throttle the blue gnome.

“We will ask the Truth Tellers to locate your friends Duncan, M'angil, Daavil, Brandaud, and Besois-Giron, and we will bring them here.”

“My friends? What do they have to do with anything? I don't need them to take care of your problem. In fact, the fewer of us there are, the easier it will be.”

The gnome shook his head stubbornly. “Your university file says you were able to defeat Magister as a group, all together. For the sake of our wives' and children's lives, we must take every possible precaution. Your friends will be coming here. That is not open for discussion.”

Cal opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. After all, he had no idea what he would be facing, and Tara's extra-powerful magic could well come in handy. He smiled at the irony. Poor Tara! She hated magic, yet spent all her time being forced to use it!

“As soon as we are sure that the wizard is occupied elsewhere, we will lead you to his castle,” continued the gnome. “There, you will have to locate the Transfer Portal he uses to go to wherever he has imprisoned our wives and children, and where he keeps his artifactum. Once you have liberated our people, and if possible shattered the artifactum that holds his power, you will be free. Wait for me here. You will be brought something to eat and drink.”

Cal was hoping for a nice steak, so he was a little disappointed when the gnomes handed him a basket of raw fruits and vegetables.

“Hey! I'm not a cruditor!” he protested. “Don't you have anything else?”

The gnomes bowed without replying and left Cal in communion with his carrots.
Well, I wasn't that hungry anyway,
he thought. He put the basket aside and settled down to wait.

Soon enough the gnomes returned to lead him to a very pretty bedroom. Obviously unaccustomed to having guests of his size, they had pushed several beds together so he could sleep comfortably. In the bathroom, showerheads floated in midair, ready to wash him down. But as Cal tried to scrub off the dirt from the tunnel, he realized that the shower heads—clearly set for someone much shorter—stubbornly refused to move higher than his belly button. He tried lying down, but that only made things worse, as the showerheads now blasted his face. Blinded and choking, he decided maybe he would skip showers for a while.

As Cal was being energetically rubbed dry by the towels, he suddenly imagined he felt something suspicious moving under the skin of his left arm. It was probably purely in his mind, but he thought he felt a kind of
swarming
in his veins. Petrified, he checked himself all over, looking for the slightest abnormal twitch.

While Cal was examining himself from stem to stern—and periodically checking his accreditation card's countdown of the hours and minutes he had left to live—the gnomes brought him one of their suits of clothes. Though clearly borrowed from the tallest of them, the mudcolored outfit still left most of the young thief's arms and legs bare.

Cal grimaced, and recited: “By Transformus, turn this outfit blue, and kindly make it fit me, too.” The doublet and pants immediately lengthened, turning a handsome navy blue. So far, so good. Now all Cal had to do was to rid himself of the deadly t'sil worms and get his friends, his freedom, and his honor back, and all would be for the best in the best of all possible OtherWorlds.

When the gnomes returned with a basket of roots and fruits at the next meal, however, Cal lost some of his good humor. He sighed. It was going to be a long wait.

W
hen she realized that Cal was gone, Tara's heart sank.
Only one wizard can make people disappear like that: Magister!
The anxiety she read in her friends' eyes confirmed that they were thinking the same thing.

Suddenly, something snatched at Tara's robe, and she found herself dangling in midair. The infuriated guard captain had grabbed each young spellbinder in one of his hands and was shaking them like rag dolls.

Gallant, Manitou, Barune, and Sheeba were about to rush to help, but the thicket of spears raised by the guards deterred them.

“Where is Caliban Dal Salan?” screamed Xandiar. “Where've you hidden him? Tell me, or I'll—”

“Stop it!” cried Tara. “We haven't done anything!”

“Haven't done anything? You tried to knock my guards out and the prisoner escaped!” Xandiar was spitting mad and shook them harder. “Tell me where the thief is, or I'll rip your head off!”

If there was one thing Sparrow hated, it was being picked up by the scruff of the neck like a puppy.
Magic doesn't work here. All right, fine. Let's see if the beast curse can do its number . . . Yessss!
She felt her muzzle lengthening and her claws sprouting. In seconds her huge paws had reached the ground. Now the guard captain found himself nose to muzzle with a highly irritated beast.

“Let my friends go!” rumbled Sparrow, seizing Xandiar by the throat and lifting
him
in the air. “We didn't have anything to do with Cal's escape.”

The other guards reacted instantly: scimitars, knives, swords, and other weapons, flew from their scabbards with a menacing hiss.

“Nobody move!” croaked Xandiar, who was enjoying a close-up view of Sparrow's enormous fangs. “I have the situation . . . under control.”

He released Fabrice, Tara, and Robin. Little Barune, who didn't realize that his companion had been dangling overhead, peered around frantically, looking for him. When Xandiar set Fabrice down, the mammoth happily wrapped his trunk around the boy's leg.

“You should tell Barune to let go of you from time to time,” whispered Robin, his eyes on the guards. “You'd have a hard time running away with him hanging on like that.”

“Put me down,” Xandiar ordered Sparrow with a strangled voice. “I won't touch you again, at least not for now.”

The moment Sparrow loosened her grip, the guard captain drew his scimitars like lightning and pointed them right at her heart.

“Don't ever threaten me again!” he hissed, jaws clenched with fury.

“And don't
you
threaten
me,”
Sparrow answered coldly.

Tara, Fabrice, and Robin all held their breath. The air was so tense, you could cut it with a knife.

Suddenly, a strident trumpeting jolted them all, and Sparrow nearly got skewered. Barely mastering his surprise, Xandiar put up his swords. Barune, who was tired of waiting and wanted a red banana, had just created a noisy distraction.

Fabrice, who had practically hit the ceiling in surprise, stroked his small blue familiar, and the tension eased. The guards sheathed their razor-sharp implements, and Xandiar elected to be reasonable, if not polite.

Despite their protests, he had them all locked in cells, including Manitou, who vainly pointed out his high wizard status. An expert in subtle torture, Xandiar first let them go to sleep, then woke them up in the middle of the night. They were sleepy, tired, and anxious, but persisted in what he called their lies: they simply didn't know where Caliban Dal Salan was.

At that point, Xandiar no longer had a choice. He went and delivered his report to the empress.

To his astonishment, not to say anger, Empress Lisbeth'tylanhnem greeted this startling news quite casually.