Well-Tempered Clavicle (23 page)

“But why here?” Fanchon asked alertly.

“Granola’s talent is to find things in the next-to-last place she looks,” Dawn said. “This is one place. We can’t have a next to last before we have a last, so we have to search in more than one place. It gets tricky.”

“I can imagine,” Fanchon said. “What made her select this place?”

“I just have a feeling,” Granola said.

“Because this is the place we came to solve our problem,” Fanchon said. “I doubt that it is coincidence that you came here too, at the same time, so that we could meet. Your feeling must relate somewhat in the manner Bink’s talent does.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Granola said.

“Otherwise it would be an astonishing coincidence. I am not a believer in such coincidence, where magic is involved. Our destinies are somehow linked.”

Picka saw that the women’s intelligence was functioning. She was right: there had to be magical guidance. This should have been a routine stop, and it seemed it wasn’t.

“Maybe we should explore this further,” Dawn said. “To search for some hint why we met here.”

“We were told to come here,” Bink said, “but we were delayed a day by a misadventure.”

“We would not have made it here yesterday,” Dawn said, “so that delay must have been for a reason.”

“Indeed,” Fanchon said.

“Tell us about it,” Dawn said.

“Wynne suffered a revelation,” Fanchon said, her mouth twitching eloquently. Obviously she had not valued it. “Bink decided to follow up on it. So we borrowed a large flying carpet from the Castle Roogna closet and set off for Mount Rushmost.”

Picka pictured the scene as she spoke, having become accustomed to that from the Caprice Castle History book.

*   *   *

The three of them were sitting on the carpet, Wynne in the lead, then Fanchon, and Bink third. They sailed up, circled Castle Roogna, and headed south. All went well for a while.

But soon a floating menace spied them: Cumulo Fracto Nimbus, the worst of clouds, who liked to rain on parades. This was not exactly a parade, but with a pretty girl leading it, it was equivalent in a minor way. Fracto was not the only entity who liked to see a pretty girl get soaked. Bink could not be harmed by magic, but his talent did not regard wetness as harm, so he could get rained on.

They veered to the side, trying to avoid the storm, but Fracto chased them. So they glided down to a rest stop on an enchanted path. They got under cover just before the storm struck. They rolled up the carpet and parked it beside the door.

There was a girl there, another refugee from the storm. She was compact and cute, with naturally curly hair. “Hello,” Bink said, his attention caught in the male fashion. “I am Bink, and these are my, um, friends Fanchon and Wynne. We are traveling south, hoping to solve a problem.”

“I am Eunice. My talent is toe change words by adding a silent E. For example, if there were a cub here, I could change it to a cube. But the effect lasts only while I am touching it.”

“That is interesting,” Fanchon said. She was interested in everything. “You could make a tub into a tube, or a can into a cane.”

“Yes. Or a dam into a dame, and a gam into a game.” She touched her leg, which abruptly became far more interesting.

“I do that,” Wynne said. “Men notice.”

“I cane imagine,” Eunice agreed wryly. Fortunately her spoken “can” did not become a literal “cane.”

“What we’d like to do is change this storm into a sunny day,” Bink said. “So we can resume our flight.”

“I cane try,” Eunice said. “Could we think of the water coming down as being like an open faucet? I might convert that long enough fore you toe get safely away.”

“I am not following this,” Fanchon said, irritated about encountering anything she couldn’t follow.

“I can’t say the exact word until I’m ready toe change it,” Eunice said, “because it happens automatically. But let me try it.”

Perplexed, they followed her to the door. She stepped out into the pouring rain, getting instantly soaked. “Tap!” she said loudly.

The water sluicing down on her changed into colored streamers. They piled up around her.

“Tap became tape,” Fanchon said. “But only the water that actually touches you. The rest of the storm remains.”

“I was afraid of that,” Eunice said, coming back inside. She was dripping wet. “Oh! I’m shivering!”

Bink grabbed a towel from the rack. “Take off your clothes. I’ll dry you.”

“
We
will dry her,” Fanchon said, taking the towel from him. “You go face away.”

“The only bare girls you can see are us,” Wynne said. She was not bright, but she did have a grasp of the fundamentals, and did not want him ogling Eunice’s fundament.

Bink knew better than to argue. When it came to him and any other woman, Fanchon and Wynne were of a single mind: No Way. He took another towel, lay on his back, and laid the towel over his face. As it turned out, the towel was slightly porous, and he was able to see vaguely through it.

The two stripped Eunice and rubbed her dry. Bink saw her bare body, but the filter of the towel blurred the details enough so that he didn’t freak out. He was partly sorry; he had noticed young women ever since his rejuvenation. He loved Chameleon, but still liked looking. Ah, well.

They garbed Eunice in bra, panties, and a dress available in the closet. The panties made his eyeballs heat, but not a lot. “Now you can look,” Fanchon said.

He lifted the towel off. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help,” he said.

Fanchon took the towel. “This is porous!”

“Is it?” he asked innocently.

“And his eyeballs are warm,” Wynne said.

“That’s too bad,” Eunice said. But she did not seem annoyed, for some reason. She sat delicately on the bed he vacated.

“Well, we’re stuck with her till the storm abates,” Fanchon said.

“’Til it goes,” Eunice agreed. “Oops.”

For when she said “’til” it converted to “tile”—or more correctly, it converted the material of the bed she was sitting on. Since it was a textual word, the bedspread become a big tile covered with text: textile. A messed-up conversion.

The three of them gathered around the text tile, intrigued, trying to read the tight print. It was microscopically small, line after line, as if a larger text had been condensed to a small one. They lifted up the edges, peering close.

“I’m so sorry,” Eunice said, rising. “I messed up the material. Let me get away from it and it will revert.”

“No, this is interesting,” Fanchon demurred.

But Eunice was already stepping away. The text abruptly drew together, as though passing through a funnel, returning wherever it had come from.

They, holding onto it, were drawn along. They found themselves in limbo, the world swirling around them, with only the text tile remaining stable. It was carrying them along, wherever it was going.

“It can’t be harmful,” Bink said, “because—”

“We know,” Fanchon said. “You can’t be harmed by magic. But what about us?”

“Stay close,” he said.

The tile landed on ground covered in text. In fact, it settled into a square depression, completing an interrupted pattern.

“It must have been ripped out of the ground here,” Fanchon said, “when the spell went wrong.”

They looked around. Not only was the land seemingly made of text, so were the trees, from trunks to leaves. Everything seemed to have been shaped from Mundane newspapers, with the text remaining prominent.

A man approached, walking along a text path. He too seemed to be formed of wadded text. He wore a wide-brimmed hat folded from newspaper, and had a big star-shaped belt buckle. “You ask him,” Fanchon murmured to Wynne. Bink knew why: no man ever ignored Wynne.

“Excuse me, sir,” Wynne called. “Can you tell us where we are, please?”

He glanced at her, and paused, exactly as any man would. “This is Text Us, of course.”

“What is Text Us?” she asked stupidly.

But the man was not annoyed by her dullness. No man ever was. “This is the world of written text hidden behind written words, of course. Every word ever written exists here.”

“Oh, that’s so impressive,” Wynne said fawningly. “What do you do here?”

“We all have related talents,” the man said proudly. It was easy to be proud when Wynne was admiring a person. “Correcting, erasing, locating, altering words. There is constant work for we Textans to do, and we do it very well.”

“That’s wonderful!” Wynne enthused, breathing deeply. She might not be head-smart, but she was body-smart.

“Ask him how we can get out of Text Us,” Fanchon whispered.

“How—”

“Who would ever want to leave Text Us?” the man demanded. “It’s the greatest state in the universe!”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” Wynne agreed, swinging her long hair enticingly. “You are so smart!”

Bink almost smiled, seeing the Textan’s eyes following that hair, and his ears soaking up her admiration. It was of course an act, but Bink himself always fell for it. Wynne’s nymphly qualities were compelling.

“Of course it is,” he agreed gruffly. “I’m just an ordinary Textan; we’re all smarter than average.”

“Thank you,” Fanchon said crisply, stepping in front of Wynne. The man immediately lost interest in the dialogue, and departed. It was a system the two had worked out, and it worked well enough.

“There must be a way out of here,” Bink said, “but it seems the natives don’t see the need. We’ll just have to find it ourselves.”

They explored the great state of Text Us. Everything was made of compacted text, as they had seen. The natives were busily working on text rocks, using sharp text tools to inscribe obscure changes. They were remodeling text houses, correcting errors in the walls and windows. Obviously there was a lot of work involved in maintaining the text archives.

“But this is not doing us any good,” Fanchon fussed. “There has to be an exit.”

“We got here via a ’til becoming a tile, touching textile,” Bink said. “Is there a tile becoming a ’til to reverse the process?”

“Backwards,” Wynne said. “Text Us backwards is Sutxet.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Fanchon snorted.

But suddenly they were swirling amidst textual fragments that swept them up into chaos. They grabbed on to one another to stay together as the realm sundered around them.

And they were abruptly back in the cabin they had left, landing in a tangle on the bed.

“It worked!” Wynne squealed.

“So it did,” Fanchon muttered. “Out of the mouths of babes and idiots…”

“Well, it did!”

“Don’t start,” Bink said quickly. “Let’s just bid farewell to Eunice and be on our way.”

“Where is Eunice?” Fanchon asked, looking around.

“And where is the carpet?” Wynne asked.

There, where the rolled carpet had been, was a note. Bink fetched it and read it.

I HAV GON FOR HELP, LEAVING THIS NOT OF EXPLANATION. EUNIC.

“Her written words delete the silent E,” Fanchon said.

“So we’ll just have to wait until she returns,” Bink said. “Bringing back our carpet.”

“But we are supposed to be on Mount Rushmost today,” Fanchon protested. “We can’t wait.”

“It’s awful wet out there,” Wynne said, peering out. Then: “What’s this?”

Bink looked. There was a line of streamers where Eunice had flown away on the carpet, getting rained on. “Tap equals tape,” he said.

“But the tape should have reverted to water after she stopped touching it,” Fanchon said.

They considered that. “It got waterlogged,” Wynne said.

“That is so stupid!” Fanchon said. “Yet apparently also true. They were too wet to change. They’ll revert to water when they dry, ironically.”

“We’ll have to walk,” Bink said.

“And how will we climb the sheer cliff to the mesa?” Fanchon demanded. “That is the winged monster retreat for a reason: only winged creatures can reach it.”

They mulled it over, and decided they would just have to wait for Eunice’s return, hoping they could then make it to Mount Rushmost in time.

“If she returns,” Fanchon said.

“But she left a note,” Wynne said.

Fanchon considered, and decided not to make a logical issue that could only aggravate things. “So we’ll wait.”

They waited, but Eunice didn’t return. Disconsolate, they slept in the shelter, as the rain continued. Bink would have liked to embrace Wynne, but Fanchon’s presence nixed that. It wasn’t that Fanchon wouldn’t understand; it was that she
would.

In the morning the storm had finally given up. And Eunice returned, with another passenger.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “The rain made me lose my way. But I brought help. Note that you seem toe need it any more. You made it back one your own.” She was still adding E’s to words that could take them.

“But not in time,” Fanchon said sharply. “We have missed our rendezvous.”

Eunice nodded. “Maybe my friend cane help with that.”

They looked at the other person. He was a grossly corpulent man. “Hello, folks,” he wheezed. “I’m fat.”

“We can see that,” Fanchon said sharply. “Who are you?”

He smiled. “I get that a lot. That is my name as well as my condition. But Eunice rescued me from a fate worse than fat, as it were.”

All three of them were perplexed. “You still look fat,” Wynne said indelicately.

“Like this,” Eunice said. She opened her shirt to reveal her nice bosom. The other women, caught by surprise, did not have time to prevent it, so Bink got an eyeful that came delightfully close to freaking him out. “I tempted Fate.” She stepped into Fat.

And Fat became Fate, a gaunt hooded man who was plainly much taken with her. He kissed her ear.

“Wait tile we’re alone,” she murmured.

“As Fate, I can guarantee that your delay will not interfere with your mission,” Fate told them. “You may proceed on it now.”

“Ludicrous,” Fanchon muttered. Then she reconsidered. “Still, crazy as it may seem…”

They took the carpet and soon were in flight, leaving the lovers in the shelter. It seemed their tryst was fated.

*   *   *

“But we didn’t complete our mission,” Bink concluded. “We arrived a day late, and there was nothing.”