M.Y.T.H.-Interpretations: The Worlds of Robert Asprin Page 7

  “Huh?” I goggled, taken aback. How could he have spotted it so readily? “No. I’m a master magician. I am…the Great Skeeve.”

  The man stuck out a huge hand and clenched my fingers. I withdrew them and counted them carefully to make sure none had broken off in his solid grip. “Pleased to meet you. Name’s Alder. I’m a backwoodsman. I live around these parts. I only ask because illusion’s a major art form around here. You’re pretty good.”

  “Thanks,” I said dejectedly. An illusion was no good if it was obvious. I let it drop. “I only use it because I don’t look very impressive in person.”

  Alder tutted and waved a hand. “It don’t matter what you look like. It’s only your personality anybody pays attention to. Things change around here so often.” He lifted his old face, sniffed and squinted one eye. He raised a crooked finger. “Like now, for example.”

  Alder was right. While I watched, his leathery skin smoothed out a little and grew paler. Instead of resembling a gnarled old oak he looked like a silver-haired birch instead. I was alarmed to discover the transformation was happening to me, too. Some force curled around my legs, winding its way up my body. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant, but I couldn’t escape from it. I didn’t struggle, but something was happening to my body, my face.

  “Gleep!” exclaimed my dragon. I glanced over at him. Instead of a green dragon with vestigal wings, a large, brown fluffy dog sat looking at me with huge blue eyes. Once I got past the shock I realized the transformation really rather suited him. I pulled a knife out of my pocket and looked at my reflection in the shiny blade. The face looking back at me was tawny skinned with topaz-yellow eyes like a snake and a crest of bright red hair. I shuddered.

  “What if I don’t like the changes?” I asked Alder.

  Meditatively he peeled a strip of bark off the back of one arm and began to shred it between his fingers. “Well, there are those who can’t do anything about it, but I’m betting you can, friend. Seeing as how you have a lot of influence.”

  “Who with?” I demanded. “What’s the name of this dimension? I’ve never been here before.”

  “It ain’t a dimension. This is the Dreamland. It’s common to all people in all dimensions. Every mind in the Waking World comes here, every time they go to sleep. You don’t recognize it consciously, but you already know how to behave here. It’s instinctive for you. You’re bending dreamstuff, exerting influence, just as if you lived here all the time. You must have pretty vivid dreams.”

  “This is a dream? But it all seems so real.”

  “It don’t mean it ain’t real, sonny,” Alder whistled through his teeth. “Look, there’s rules. The smarter you are, the more focused, the better you get on in this world. Lots of people are subject to the whims of others, particularly of the Sleepers themselves, but the better you know your own mind, the more control over your own destiny you’ve got. Me, I know what I like and what I don’t. I like it out in the wilderness. Whenever the space I’m in turns into a city, I just move on until I find me a space where there ain’t no people. Pretty soon it quiets down and have things my own way again. Now, if I didn’t know what I wanted, I’d be stuck in a big Frustration dream all the time.”

  “I just had a Frustration Dream,” I said, staring off in the general direction in which Aahz had disappeared. “How is it that if I have so much power here I couldn’t catch up with my friend?”

  “He’s gone off on a toot,” Alder said, knowingly. “It happens a lot to you Waking Worlders. You get here and you go a little crazy. He got a taste of what he wants, and he’s gone after more of it.”

  “He doesn’t need anything,” I insisted. “He’s got everything back at home.” But I paused.

  “There’s got to be something,” Alder smiled. “Everyone wants one thing they can’t get at home. So what does your friend want?”

  That was easy: Aahz had told me himself. “Respect.”

  Alder shook his head. “Respect, eh? Well, I don’t have a lot of respect for someone who abandons his partner like he did.”

  I leaped immediately to Aahz’s defense. “He didn’t abandon me on purpose.”

  “You call a fifty-mile bridge an accident?”

  I tried to explain. “He was excited. I mean, who wouldn’t be? He had his powers back. It was like…magik.”

  “Been without influence a long time, has he?” Alder asked, with squint-eyed sympathy.

  “Well, not exactly. He’s very powerful where we come from,” I insisted, wondering why I was unburdening myself to a strange old coot in the wilderness, but it was either that or talk to myself. “But he hasn’t been able to do magik in years. Not since my old mentor, er, put a curse on him. But I guess that doesn’t apply here.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Alder assured me, grinning. “Your friend seems to have a strong personality, and that’s what matters. So we’re likely to find your friend in a place he’d get what he wanted. Come on. We’ll find him.”

  “Thanks,” I said dubiously. “I’m sure I’ll be able to find him. I know him pretty well. Thanks.”

  “Don’t you want me to come along?”

  I didn’t want him to know how helpless I felt. Aahz and I had been in worse situations than this. Besides, I had Gleep, my trusty…dog…with me. “No, thanks,” I said, brightly. “I’m such a powerful wizard I don’t really need your help.”

  “Okay, friend, whatever you want,” Alder said. He stood up and turned around. Suddenly, I was alone, completely surrounded by trees. I couldn’t even see the sky.

  “Hey!” I yelled. I sought about vainly. Not only couldn’t I see the backwoodsman, but I’d lost sight of the cliffside path, the hillside, and even what remained of the sky. I gave in. “Well, maybe I need a little help,” I admitted sheepishly. A clearing appeared around me, and Alder stood beside me with a big grin on his face. “Come on, then, youngster. We’ve got a trail to pick up.”

  Alder talked all the way through the woods. Normally the hum of sound would have helped me to focus my mind on the problem at hand, but I just could not concentrate. I’m happiest in the middle of a town, not out in the wilderness. Back when I was an apprentice magician and opportunistic but largely unsuccessful thief, the bigger the population into which I could disappear after grabbing the valuables out of someone’s bedroom, the better to escape detection. Alder’s rural accent reminded me of my parents’ farm that I had run away from to work for Garkin. I hated it. I forced myself to remember he was a nice guy who was helping us find Aahz.

  “Now, looky-look here,” he said, glancing down as we came to a place where six or seven paths crossed in a knot of confusion. I couldn’t tell which one Aahz and his moving bridge had taken, but I was about to bolt down the nearest turning, just out of sheer frustration. “Isn’t this the most interesting thing?…What’s the matter?” he asked, noticing the dumb suffering on my face. “I’m talking too much, am I?”

  “Sorry,” I said, hiding my expression too late. “I’m worrying about my partner. He was so excited about getting his powers back that he didn’t notice he was getting carried away? literally. I’m concerned that when he notices he’s going to try to come back and find me.”

  “If what you say is true it’s going to take him a little time to get used to wielding influence again,” Alder said. I started to correct him, but if this was the way the locals referred to magik, I wouldn’t argue. “Right now we’re on the trail of that bridge. Something that big doesn’t pass through without leaving its marks, and it didn’t. He lifted a handful of chocolate colored pebbles from the convergence, and went on lecturing me.

  “Now, this here trail mix is a clear blind. Those jokers must have strewn it to try and confuse us, but I’m too old a hand for that. I’m guessing that bridge is on its way to the capital, but I’d rather trust following the signs than my guesses. We have to hurry to see them before the winds of change blow through and mess up the tracks. I don’t have enough strength myself to keep them back.”

/>   “Can I help?” I asked. “I’m pretty good at ma — I mean influence. And if my partner packs a kick here, I should, too.”

  Alder’s branchlike eyebrows rose. “Maybe you could, at that. Let’s give it a try!”

  Let’s just say I wasn’t an unqualified success to start. Dreamish influence behaved like magik in that one concentrated hard picturing what one wanted to achieve, used the force lines to shape it, then hoped the committee running the place let one’s plans pass. Like any committee they made some changes, the eventual result resembling but not being completely like my original intention, but close enough. Over the several days it took us to walk out of the forest, I attained a certain amount of mastery over my surroundings, but never enough to pop us to the capital city of Celestia or locate Aahz. I did learn to tell when the winds of change were coming through. They felt like the gentle alteration that had hit me and Gleep the first day, but far stronger. They were difficult to resist, and I had to protect the entire path we were walking following. This I did by picturing it, even the parts we couldn’t see, as a long rope stretched out in front of us. It could have knots in it, but we didn’t want it breaking off unexpectedly. I might never find Aahz if we lost this trail. I did other little tasks around the campground, just to learn the skill of doing two things at once. Alder was a great help. He was a gentler teacher than either Garkin or Aahz. For someone who had little influence of his own, he sure knew how to bring out the best in other magicians.

  “Control’s the most important thing,” he said, as I struggled to contain a thicket fire I had started by accident when I tried to make a campfire one night. “Consider yourself at a distance from the action, and think smaller. What you can do with just a suggestion is more than most people can with their best whole efforts. Pull back and concentrate on getting the job done. A little effort sometimes pays off better than a whole parade with a brass band.”

  I chuckled. “You sound like Aahz.”

  “What?” Alder shouted.

  “I said…” but my words were drowned out by deafening noise. The trees around us were suddenly thrust apart by hordes of men in colorful uniforms. I shouldn’t say ‘horde,’ though they were dressed in red, black and gold, because they marched in orderly ranks, shoving me and Alder a dozen yards apart. Each of them carried a musical instrument from which blared music the likes of which I hadn’t heard since halftime at the Big Game on the world of Jahk.

  I picked myself up off the ground. “What,” I asked as soon as my hearing returned, “was that?”

  “That was a nuisance,” Alder said, getting to his feet and brushing confetti off his clothes.

  “No kidding,” I agreed, “but what was it?”

  “A nuisance,” Alder repeated. “That’s what it’s called. It’s one of the perils of the Dreamland. Oh, they’re not really dangerous. They’re mostly harmless, but they waste your time. They’re a big pain in the sitter. Sometimes I think the Sleepers send them to get us to let go of ourselves so they can change us the way they want. Other people just plain attract them, especially those they most irk.”

  I frowned. “I don’t want to run into any more of them myself,” I said. “They could slow us down finding Aahz.”

  Alder pointed a finger directly at my nose. “That’s exactly what they might do. Stick with me, friend, and I’ll see you around the worst of them, or I won’t call myself the finest backwoodsman in the Dreamland.”

  ***

  Using the virtually infinite reservoir of power available to me, I concentrated on keeping the trail intact so that Alder could find it. I found that the less influence I used, the fewer nuisances troubled us. So long as I kept my power consumption low, we had pretty easy going. It would have been a pleasant journey if I hadn’t been concerned.

  It was taking so long to locate Aahz that I began to worry about him. What if the contracted bridge had trapped him somewhere? What if he had the same problems I did with influence? He might have trouble finding enough food, or even enough air! He wasn’t as

  fortunate as I had been, to locate a friendly native guide like Alder. Visions of Aahz in dire straits began to haunt my dreams, and drew my attention away from admiring the handsome though sometimes bizarre landscape. Gleep, knowing my moods, tried to cheer me up by romping along and cutting foolish capers, but I could tell that even he was worried.

  One day Alder stopped short in the middle of a huge forest glade, causing me and Gleep to pile up against the trees growing out of his back.

  “Ow!” I said, rubbing my bruises.

  “Gleep!” declared my dragon.

  “We’re here,” Alder said. He plucked a handful of grass from the ground and held it out to me. It didn’t look any different from the grass we’d been trudging over for the last three days. “We’re in Celestia.”

  “Are you sure?” I demanded.

  “Sure as the sun coming up in the morning, sonny,” Alder said.

  “All this forest in the midst of the capital city?”

  “This is the Dreamland. Things change a lot. Why not a capital made of trees?”

  I glanced around. I had to admit the trees themselves were more magnificent than I’d seen anywhere else, and more densely placed. The paths were regular in shape, meeting at square intersections. Elegant, slender trees with light coming out of the top must be the streetlights. Alder was right: it looked like a city, but all made of trees!

  “Now, this is my kind of place,” Alder said, pleased, rubbing his hands together. “Can’t wait to see the palace. I bet the whole thing’s one big treehouse.”

  Within a few hundred paces he pointed it out to me. What a structure! At least a thousand paces long, it was put together out of boards and balanced like a top on the single stem of one enormous oak tree. The vast door was accessible only by way of a rope ladder hung from the gate. A crudely-painted sign on the door was readable from the path: “Klubhse? Everywun welcm. The King.” In spite of its rough-hewn appearance there was still something regal about it.

  “No matter what shape it takes, it’s still a palace,” Alder said. “You ought to meet the king. Nice guy, they tell me. He’d like to know an influential man like you. Your friend has to be close by. I can feel it.”

  A powerful gale of changes prickled at the edge of my magikal sense. I fought with all my might to hold it back as Alder knelt and sniffed at the path.

  “This way,” he said, not troubling to rise. Unable to help himself, he became an enormous, rangy, blood-red dog that kept its nose to the path. Overjoyed to have a new friend, Gleep romped around Alder, then helped him followed the tracks. The scent led them directly to two vast tree-trunks in the middle of a very crowded copse. Alder rose to his feet, transforming back into a man as he did.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  “But these are a couple of trees!” I exclaimed. Then I began to examine them more closely. The bark, though arrayed in long vertical folds, was smooth, almost as smooth as cloth. Then I spotted the roots peeking out from the ground. They were green. Scaly green. Like Aahz’s feet. I looked up.

  “Yup,” said Alder with satisfaction. “We’ve found your buddy, all right.”

  A vast statue of Aahz scratched the sky. Standing with hands on its hips, the statue had a huge smile that beamed out over the landscape, Aahz’s array of knife-sharp teeth looking more terrifying than ever in twenty-times scale. I was so surprised I let go of the control I was holding over the winds of change. A whirlwind, more a state of mind than an actual wind, came rushing through. Trees melted away, leaving a smooth black road under my feet. White pathways appeared on each side of the pavement. People rushing back and forth on foot and in vehicles. Across the way the palace was now undisputedly a white marble building of exquisite beauty. But the statue of Aahz remained, looming over the landscape, grinning. I realized to my surprise that it was an office building. The eyes were windows.

  With Alder’s help I located a door in the leg and entered. People bustled busily ar
ound, Unlike the rest of the Dreamland where I had seen mostly Klahds, here there were also Deveels, Imps, Gremlins and others, burdened down with file folders and boxes or worried expressions. Just as I had thought, given infinite resources Aahz would have a sophisticated setup with half of everybody working for him, and the other half bringing him problems to solve. And as for riches, the walls were polished mahogany and ivory, inlaid with gold and precious stones. Not flashy? definitely stylish and screaming very loudly of money. I’d always wondered what Aahz could do with infinite resources, and now I was seeing it. A small cubicle at one end of the foot corridor swept me up all the way to the floor marked “Head-quarters.”

  A shapely woman who could have been Tananda’s twin with pink skin sat at a curved wooden desk near the cubicle door. She spoke into a curved black stick poking out of her ear. She poked buttons as buzzers sounded. “Aahz Unlimited. May I help you? I’m sorry. Can you hold? Aahz Unlimited. May I help you? I’m sorry. Can you hold?”

  I gazed into the room, at the fanciest office suite I could imagine. I knew Aahz was a snazzy dresser, but I never realized what good taste he had in furniture. Every item was meant to impress. The beautifully paneled walls were full of framed letters and testimonials, and every object looked as though it cost a very quiet fortune. All kinds of people hurried back and forth among the small rooms. I found a woman in a trim suit-dress who looked like she knew what she was doing and asked to see Aahz.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Skeeve,” she said, peering at me over her pince-nez eyeglasses. “You are expected.”

  “Gleep?” added my dragon, interrogatively.

  “Yes, Mr. Gleep,” the woman smiled. “You, too.”