It was working. The ram towered closer, only twenty feet away, and he filled the world-but his outlines were wavering, and the curls of his wool were blurring together.
He covered ten feet with each stride, though.
Somehow, Frisson kept it soft and lulling.
The ram was a mountain, a McKinley, an Everest-but it faded off into the sunlight at the edges, and its body was growing translucent. And it yawned.
I added my two cents' worth.
Frisson and Gilbert joined me for a chorus:
The great hoof swung up for the last ten feet, growing thinner as it came. It lifted high over my head. I held fast with every thread of determination I had, frantically singing, petrified, rooted to the spot, staring up at the great dark circle that seemed to fill the sky. It poised, then slowly came lower - but I could see the clouds through it quite clearly, it faded to barely an outline as it dropped down, an outline that encircled our heads
And was gone.
And a vast, distant thunder echoed, fading away, half angry bellow, half yawn. it reverberated over the land for what seemed a thousand miles, and was gone.
I let out a very long and very shaky breath, then turned to Frisson.
"Fantastic job, Frisson!"
He was still gazing at the place where the ram had been. "It was, was it not? 'Twas truly my verses that effected this!"
"It sure was." I turned to Gilbert. "How bad is it?"
"Naught but a scratch." He looked very happy, eyes glowing with pride. "I have slain a dragon, Master Saul! A small one, but a dragon natheless! I have actually slain a dragon!"
"You sure did, and we're your witnesses," I affirmed. "You didn't hesitate for a second. If that doesn't prove your worth, what could?" I turned back to Frisson. "But where'd you ever learn that word, magma'?
"Why, the ram himself did say it," the poet answered, "did say he was a 'child of Magma.' Who is she, Wizard?"
Chapter Eleven
The day passed without any further incidents, thank Heaven, and we set up camp in a nice, wide open river meadow. The most menacing wildlife in sight was a convention of spiders, and I was getting used to them. They seemed to be more and more abundant the farther we went back into Allustria - sort of a comment on Suettay's housekeeping, I supposed. In fact, there was a web on every bush around the campsite, flickering with the reflections of our firelight. There were circular webs, triangular, strands of gossamer between branchesevery sort any arachnid architect ever thought of trying. Their builders ran the gamut, too, from humble little brown things, up through the medium-sized spotted ones, to the huge, wide-as-a-quarter specimens like the one that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. I glowered at them with transferred resentment, but I couldn't really blame them for what one of their mates had done. On the other hand, I didn't have to let them inside my guarding circle, either. I suddenly realized that I was beginning to regard them as good company and decided I had definitely been here too long. Not that I could do much about it. If this was an LSD trip, it wasn't wearing off-besides, I hadn't been dropping any lately-and if it was a dream, I couldn't figure out how to wake up. I had pretty much decided to take the pragmatic approach to the whole problem of being in a world that couldn't exist. Illusion, dream, hallucination, or altered state of consciousness coming from my maybe being hit by a car and lying in a coma-it didn't matter; I was going to have to treat it as if it were real. Magic might have been only another part of this dreamworld, but within the context of the illusion, it worked, and it could hurt me just as badly as a revolver in my own world. I was going to have to treat it as if it were real. Not that I was going to have to work any magic myself, of course. I didn't have to admit its existence that thoroughly-not as long as I had Frisson. Let him write up the spells, let him be the magician. So what if I was the one who read them aloud? That was just oral interpretation.
Hypocrite? Who, me? I was simply making an emotional adjustment necessary for psychological survival.
I took first watch, since I didn't feel much like sleeping with all that speculation going through my head. It didn't keep buzzing around very long, though, because Angelique was sitting there, unsleeping, just outside the range of the firelight, her form glowing in the night, her eyes glowing at me. I smiled in return, then closed my eyes, pretending to go to sleep.
I couldn't, of course. My favorite fantasy had come true; a beautiful young woman was head over heels in love with me, and I couldn't exactly be indifferent to that-couldn't just dismiss it and yawn, even if she wasn't anything more than a part of a very detailed hallucination-and even if she was just a ghost. Of course, pure love shouldn't care about bodies, but I'm afraid mine wasn't all that pure. It also wasn't love. At least, I wasn't in love with her-or so I was trying to persuade myself. At least, I knew it wasn't real, just the result of a slip of the tongue, so to speak, a rhyme snapped out without due forethought, in a place where verse had a far more potent effect than it had any right to. And I knew da-darn well that Angelique wouldn't have been in love with me if I hadn't accidentally come up with the wrong spell.
But what could I do? Tell her that to her face? I couldn't quite summon that much cruelty-besides which, she probably knew already, but was still in love with me; knowing it was just the result of a binding spell didn't make any difference to the way she felt. No, all I could do was to try to spare her the pain of a phony romance, by not letting her know how I felt-but that was definitely becoming harder, with Angelique sitting there watching me adoringly, looking almost mortal in the darkness.
Then all of a sudden, she wasn't.
I mean, she was still watching me-but she was coming apart at the seams. Then even the pieces were coming apart, shredding into a hundred tatters, and her eyes had glazed, no longer seeing, no longer aware.
It didn't take much to figure out what was happening. I sat bolt upright, calling, "Angelique! Baby! Pull yourself together!" Then I snarled at myself for losing my poise and forgetting to make it rhyme. I racked my brains for an integral verse, but all I could come up with was a variation on "Danny Boy": "But come ye back, all bits of ectoplasm!
Reintegrate, all shreds of lady fair!
Remain you here, in firelight and shadow, one integrated whole, with those who for you care!"
Okay, so it was doggerel. What do you expect, on the spur of the moment? But it helped-a little, at least. The tatters and shreds stopped moving. They hung suspended in midair, so that it seemed as if Angelique had just expanded to take in a bit more volume. I racked my brains again, trying to think of a verse that stressed reintegration and harmony of disparate elements-but a voice behind me called out,