Anthony, Piers Xanth 14 Question Quest

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had to be the elixir from the bottle. "Hurry, Hugo!" I yelled. I was in excellent health for my age, but my
age was old.
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The boy finally fumbled the bottle out and the lid open. But in his haste he did not pour a few drops on
the dragon's tail; he held the bottle and made a throwing motion that sent an arc of elixir flying toward
the dragon and me.
"No!" I cried, too late. The elixir scored all too well. It wet down the dragon solidly, and some of it also
splattered against my skin.
Disaster! The dragon youthened rapidly, becoming smaller, with brighter green scales. But so did I. We
were both overdosed, and were losing a century or more of age. As it happened, we were both over a
century old; otherwise we might have dwindled all the way into pre-delivery. But it was bad enough.
The dragon became a baby dragon, and I became a baby man.
I saw us both changing rapidly, and I saw Hugo gaping at the sight. I tried to call out something to him,
but my youthening prevented me from making much sense, even to myself. Perhaps I was even speaking
backwards.
Hugo, dismayed and confused, began to cry. The baby dragon shook itself, then scooted away, evidently
as alarmed as I. But I could do nothing, for I was now too young to talk.
Then abruptly I was back at the castle. The Gorgon had evidently been watching us in the magic mirror,
seen the disaster, and used the emergency conjure spell to bring me home. Unfortunately it, like the
mirror, was tuned to me only, and she did not know how to retune them. That meant that Hugo remained
out in the wilderness, alone.
The following years are a bit vague for me. I aged at the normal rate, except when Zora Zombie, whose
talent was accelerated aging, came to baby-sit me. My wife managed somehow, and worked with Queen
Irene to keep things in order. But it was three-year-old Ivy who did the most. It seems that she, lost in
that region of the jungle, encountered the Gap Dragon and used her talent to tame it. Then she met
Hugo, and her talent made him a virtual knight in shiny armor, as she put it. The three had a great
adventure, and in the end even managed to help Glory Goblin, the youngest, prettiest, and sweetest of
Gorbage Goblin's daughters, unite with her lover Hardy Harpy, and also to defuse a wiggle swarming.
Then, when Ivy was five, she came to ask me a Question. She had, she felt, been Grounded, for no
reason at all. Actually she had gotten into such mischief that the entire chapter of that volume of the
Muse of History's record had been censored out. The missing chapter turned up years later in a Visual
Guide to Xanth, where no one would notice it. These things happen, in Xanth. All children got into
mischief, but Ivy could Enhance mischief to an excitingly new level. Now she was compounding it by
sneaking out to visit me.
I had managed to age rapidly, and was now about seven years old, physically, and the same actual size
as she was. Ivy had had considerable effect on me, because she Enhanced Zora's aging talent, enabling
me to age much faster than otherwise. However, I was now old enough to remember my principles, so I
made her go through the challenges.
Ivy used stepping stones to step across the moat. She used a dark lantern to get through a region of
intolerable brightness. She nullified a flying kitty hawk by intensifying its hawk and kitty aspects until
the two got into a fight with each other, and the fur and feathers really flew. Then she encountered a
headstone who sounded the alarm so that she would get the brush-off, and that huge flying brush really
terrified her. But she buried a dead moth by the headstone, so that it become silent like a moth, and
could not alert the brush. So she won through, as I had known she would. I couldn't turn her in, of
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course; that would have been in violation of the Juvenile Conspiracy, to which I technically belonged
until I got old enough to rejoin the Adult Conspiracy.
"Okay, okay, what's your Question?" I inquired graciously.
"I need something to clean up the Magic Tapestry so Jordan the Ghost can remember."
Another person might have had difficulty grasping this, but I was the Magician of Information. I knew
that she referred to a ghost of Castle Roogna who had died in the year 677, and been dead for 397 years,
approximately, and who was now trying to tell her the story of his life to alleviate her boredom while
she was Grounded. They were using the Tapestry to show pictures and refresh his memory, but the
Tapestry was somewhat dirty after 838 years, approximately, and its crewel stitchery needed cleaning by
caustic lye. So I gave her the recipe for the crewel lye, and she took it back to use the caustic on the
yarn. The Tapestry brightened immediately, and Jordan the Ghost was at last able to tell his sad tale of
an unkind untruth. It was replete with Swords and Sorceries and Goods and Evils and Treacheries and
Thud and Blunder, and Ivy of course loved it, even though some of the juicier parts got censored out.
After she heard it, Ivy managed to get Jordan restored to life, and then his girlfriend Threnody, who was
half demon (I knew the type). Everyone was happy, except maybe for Stanley Steamer, her pet little Gap
Dragon, who had gotten accidentally banished by a misinvoked spell.
So naturally that led to more mischief. Ivy was going to send her shape-changing little brother, Dolph,
out to find the dragon. But Dolph was only three years old when she decided this. To stave this off,
Grundy Golem did something unusually caring, and volunteered to go on this search himself. And of
course the first thing he did was come to me for an Answer.
I told him to ride the Monster under the Bed to the Ivory Tower. I had of course already researched it.
Little did he know, then, that the Ivory Tower contained the maiden Rapunzel, Ivy's pun pal, who was
the distant descendent of Jordan the Ghost back in his Barbarian years and Bluebell Elf, who had used
an accommodation spell to have a rather special tryst with him. As a result, Rapunzel could change
sizes, being of elf stature or human stature or anything between or around. But her magic was in her
hair, which was marvelously long. Rapunzel was to become the love of Grundy's life, as there were not
many suitable female golems, and anyway he was no longer a true golem, having been rendered real. I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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