As the darkness closed, Dor reviewed the situation. “We’re going to sneak by that dragon in the night. Irene will harvest some forgetme flowers to discourage memory of our passage; that way the reactions of fish in the area will not betray us. But that won’t help us if the dragon sees us or hears us or smells us directly. We don’t have any sight- or sound-blanking plants; we didn’t anticipate this particular squeeze. So we must go extremely carefully.”
“I wish I were string and clay again,” Grundy said. “Then I couldn’t be killed.”
“Now we do have some other resources,” Dor said. “The magic sword will make any person expert the moment he takes it in his hand. It won’t help much against a pouncing dragon, but any lesser creature will be balked. If we get in serious trouble, we can climb through the escape hoop. The problem with that is that it leads to the permanent storage vat of the Brain Coral, deep under the earth, and the Coral doesn’t like to release creatures. It happens to be my friend, but I’d rather not strain that friendship unless absolutely necessary. And there is the flying carpet-but that can only take one person at a time, plus Grundy. I think it could support Smash, but not Chet, so that’s not ideal.”
“I wouldn’t fit through the hoop either,” Chet said.
“Yes. So you, Chet, are the most vulnerable one in this situation, because of your mass. So we need to plan for another defense.” Dor paused, for Irene was looking at him strangely. “What’s the matter?”
“You’re glowing,” she said.
Startled, Dor checked himself. Light was streaming from one of his pockets. “Oh-that’s the midnight sunstone Jewel gave me so I’ll always have light. I had forgotten about it.”
“We don’t want light at the moment,” she pointed out. “Wrap it up.” She handed him a piece of cloth.
Dor wrapped the gem carefully, until its glow was so muted as to be inconsequential, and put it back in his pocket. “Now,” he continued. “Irene has some seeds that will grow devastating plants-she really is Magician level, regardless of what the Elders say-but most of those plants would be as dangerous to us as to the enemy. We’d have to plant and run.”
“Any that would block off the water so the dragon couldn’t pursue?” Chet asked.
“Oh, yes,” Irene said, glowing at Dor’s compliment about her talent.
“The kraken weed-“
“I see what Dor means,” the centaur said quickly. “I don’t want to be swimming in the same ocean with a kraken!”
“Or I could start a stunflower on the island here, but it would be likely to stun us, too.” She considered. “Aha! I do have some popcorn. That’s harmless, but it makes an awful racket. That might distract the dragon for a while.”
“Grow me some of that,” Chet said. “I’ll throw it behind me if I have to swim.”
“Only one problem,” she said. “I can’t grow that at night. It’s a dayplant.”
“I could unwrap the sunstone,” Dor offered.
“That’s too small, I think. We’d need a lot of light, radiating all about, not gleaming from tiny facets.”
“What can you grow naturally at night?” Chet asked glumly.
“Well, hypno-gourds do well; they generate their own light, inside. But you wouldn’t want to look in the peephole, because-“
“Because I’d be instantly hypnotized,” Chet finished. “Grow me one anyway; it might help.”
“As you wish,” she agreed dubiously. She leaned over the side of the boat to drop a seed on the shore. “Grow,” she murmured.
“Now if there is trouble,” Dor said, “you, Irene, get on the flying carpet. You can drop a kraken seed near the dragon, while the rest of us use the hoop or swim for it. But we’ll do our best to escape the notice of the dragon. Then we can proceed south without further trouble.”
There was no objection. They waited until the hypno-gourd had fruited, producing one fine specimen. Chet wrapped it in cloth and tucked it in the boat. The craft started moving, nudging silently south toward the channel while the occupants hardly dared breathe. Chet guided it in an eastward curve, to intersect the main channel first, so that he could avoid the monster that was presumably waiting due south. In this silent darkness, they could not see it any more than it could see them.
But the dragon had outsmarted them. It had placed a sunfish in this channel, that operated on a similar principle to the sunstone, but it was thousands of times as large. When they came near, the fish suddenly glowed like the sun itself, blindingly. The rounded fin projected above the surface of the water, and its light turned night to day.
“Oh, no!” Dor cried. He had so carefully wrapped his sunstone and now this was infinitely worse.
There was a gleeful honk from the dragon. They saw its eyes glowing as it forged toward them. Water dragons did not have internal fire; the eyes were merely reflecting the blaze of the sunfish.
“Plant the kraken!” Dor cried.
“No!” Chet countered. “We can make it to the mainland shallows!”
Sure enough, the boat glided smoothly across the channel before the dragon arrived. The monster was silhouetted before the sunfish, writhing in frustration. It had planned so well, and just missed victory. It honked. “Curses!” Grundy translated. “Foiled again!”
“What about the sand dune?” Irene asked worriedly.
“They are usually quiescent by night,” Chet said.
“But this isn’t night any more,” she reminded him, her voice taking on a pink tinge of hysteria.
Indeed, the dark mound was rippling, sending a strand of itself toward the water. The sand had enough mass, and the water was so shallow, that it was possible for the dune to fill it in. The ravenous shoreline was coming toward them.
“If we retreat from the dune, we’ll come within reach of the dragon,” Chet said.
“Feed goon to dune,” Smash suggested.
“Goon? Do you mean the dragon?” Dor asked. The ogre nodded.
“Say, yes!” Irene said. “Talk to the dune, Dor. Tell it we’ll lure the dragon within its range if it lets us go.”
Dor considered. “I don’t know. I’d hate to send any creature to such a fate-and I’m not sure the dune can be trusted.”
“Well, string it out as long as you can. Once the dune tackles the dragon, it won’t have time to worry about small fry like us.”
Dor eyed the surging dune on one side, the chop-slurping dragon on the other, and noted how the region between them was diminishing. “Try reasoning with the dragon first,” he told Grundy.
The golem emitted a series of honks, grunts, whistles, and toothgnashings. It was amazing how versatile he was with sounds-but of course this was his magic. In a moment the dragon lunged forward, trying to catch the entire boat in its huge jaws, but falling short. The water washed up in a small tsunami. “I asked it if it wouldn’t like to let a nice group of people on the King’s business like us go on in peace,” Grundy said. “It replied-“
“We can see what it replied,” Dor said. “Very well; we’ll go the other route.” He faced the shore and called: “Hey, dune!”
Thus hailed, the dune was touched by Dor’s magic. “You calling me, tidbit?”
“I want to make a deal with you.”
“Ha! You’re going to be consumed anyway. What kind of deal can you offer?”
“This whole boatload is a small morsel for the likes of you. But we might arrange for you to get a real meal, if you let us go in peace.”
“I don’t eat, really,” the dune said. “I preserve. I clean and secure the bones of assorted creatures so that they can be admired millennia hence. My treasures are called fossils.”
So this monster, like so many of its ilk, thought itself a benefactor to Xanth. Was there any creature or thing, no matter how awful, that didn’t rationalize its existence and actions in similar fashion? But Dor wasn’t here to argue with it. “Wouldn’t you rather fossilize a dragon than a sniveling little collection of scraps like us?”