Vale of the Vole Part 31

Esk stared, horrified. "It burned her up!" he whispered.

The centaur-flame turned and made a beckoning motion.

"No-that is her," the skull said. "She has become flame. Throw me in next."

Esk's hand was shaking, but he heaved the bone staff through the hoop. It converted into a flame the shape of a skeleton.

"It muvt be true," Volney said. "The path iv vuppoved to be vafe, remember. Heave me up nekvt."

Esk leaned down and locked his hands together. The vole put a hind foot in, then heaved as Esk heaved, and managed to flop into the circle. He too disappeared in flame.

Now it was Esk's turn. He contemplated the ring of fire, and quailed. Was it really safe to pa.s.s through that hoop, or had the others been burned up and mocking flame-images subst.i.tuted? How could he be sure? Chex had conquered her claustrophobia and entered Earth; could he conquer his fear of being burned and trust his body to Fire?

He hesitated, unable to take the plunge. The three fire folk beckoned him from beyond. But fire demons would do that, too; it was no proof that his friends were all right.

Then he thought about how he might escape, if he did not enter the flame. The path that had brought them here could not be traveled the other way; there were too many barriers, blank walls, one-way pictures and such. He could not return alone; he had to be with someone who had the pathfinder spell that could ferret out a new path. So he was lost, by himself. He might as well perish in the flame.

That gave him the doubtful confidence to take the plunge. He took a breath, held it, and jumped into the hoop.

There was a flare of vertigo. Then he landed on a jet of fuel, and it buoyed him and sustained him.

"Welcome aboard," Chex said. "For a moment I thought you weren't going to rejoin us!"

Esk looked down at himself. He was fas.h.i.+oned of flame!

"Be careful not to stray from a source of fuel," Volney cautioned. "You can fade quickly if careless."

Esk did a double take. "You're not lisping!" he exclaimed, his body flaring brightly with his surprise.

"I never lisped!" the fire-vole said indignantly. "It is you who has corrected his hissing."

Esk decided not to argue the case. He quickly verified the fuel situation; if he stepped off his jet, his body became anemic and threatened to flare out. There were many jets here, so there was no problem; he simply had to step from one to another.

He looked at Chex. She was changing shape!

"Flame is malleable," she said, observing his look. He wasn't sure how any of them saw or heard or spoke, but they did. "I have trouble keeping my posterior hot, so I am experimenting with a shape that is more efficient for this purpose." She continued to change, until she lost all semblance of centaurhood and most resembled the flame on a big candle. Then she extended a pseudopod of fire to an adjacent jet, and flared up there, and let her prior self die out.

Esk tried it. He merged his two feet into one base, and felt better; more of the fuel was pouring into his being. He reached for the next jet, and saw that it was an extension of flame rather than an arm; why take the trouble to shape a useless arm, when all he needed was the connection?

Soon all of them looked like candle flames, even Marrow. They commenced their trip across the realm of Fire. The path showed in the form of a pattern of fuels, whether comprised of just gas, or flowing liquid, or st.u.r.dy solids. They could endure on any of it, though then- color and heat varied as the fuels did. The flavors of the fuels varied, and their reliability. Gas was green and flickering, while coal was blue and even, and wood was yellow and sputtering. They became connoisseurs of fuels, for these were the stuff of life. To be without fuel was to perish: a horrible thought.

They crossed the field of fire, and came to a sharp boundary: water. A seemingly endless lake stretched across the plain, terminating the fuel and therefore the fire. It seemed bleak indeed. But the path continued into it.

"We thank you for your hospitality, Fire," Esk said. "Now we must move on through Water."

A flame face appeared. "I don't envy you," it said, and flamed out.

"Oh, Element of Water," Esk said, addressing the lake. "We are four travelers who must pa.s.s through your territory. May we do so in safety and comfort?"

A face formed on the surface of the lake, with eyes like whirlpools. "Dive in," it mouthed wetly.

"But at the moment we are in the form of flames," Esk said. "We fear being abruptly quenched."

The water mouth simply opened into a widening ripple ring. There was no other answer.

"I will try it," Marrow said. "I have no life to lose."

The skeleton-flame leaped into the water, hissed hugely, and flickered out. "Oops," Volney said.

Then a bone-white fish poked its snout out of the water. It spouted a stream of water toward them, then turned tail.

Esk looked at Chex. "Marrow?"

"So it would seem," she said.

"Then I'll follow." Esk dived into the water.

He felt the shock of the cutoff of his flame. But at the same time he felt the pleasant pressure of the cool water. He inhaled-and felt the water surge through his gills. He was now a fish.

There was another splash, and a new fish appeared. This one had brown scales and a large body with white fins above that fluttered like wings. "h.e.l.lo, Chex," he said in fishtalk.

"This is very like flying!" she replied, pleased.

"This is very like living," the bone-white fish said, wiggling its bony fins.

There was one more splash, and a squat fish with short fins appeared. "This is very like tunneling," it said, also pleased.

They swam across the Element of Water, following the glowing trail of bubbles that marked their path. They pa.s.sed waving seaweed plants, and bubbling underwater springs, and regions where the sunlight speckled the upper surface, and shallows where white sand lay like a desert with dunes, and deeps where the seafloor was lost in the gloom of the unfathomable unknown.

It was, indeed, like flying. Chex fairly danced, her upper fins stroking like wings, moving up toward the surface and down toward the floor. Esk had never longed to fly, but now he understood how it was with her; there was a unique freedom in this mode that made landbound travel seem oppressively dull.

Other fish came to watch them pa.s.s, but these did not intrude on the marked path. Some were large and looked hungry, but the path was evidently enchanted to keep them off.

In due course they reached the far side of the Element of Water, gourd annex. The path lead through a translucent vertical wall, and there seemed to be no special challenge to pa.s.sing through it, except for their fishly status.

"O Void," Esk spoke, "we are four travelers, needing to pa.s.s through your territory on a quest. Will you-"

He broke off, horrified. "What am I saying? That's the Void! No one escapes from it!"

"Except the night mares," Chex agreed, equally horrified. "My dam was here once, and had to be carried out by night mares. She had to pay a fee of half her soul for that!"

"And my dam-my mother too!" Esk said. "And my father-they were left with no more than one full soul between them. We can't go there!"

"You forget," Marrow said. "This is not the true Void we face, but merely its annex. This is the dream of the Void, which horrifies sleepers, even as you are being horrified now. It is no more binding on you than the gourd itself."

Chex nodded, which was a nice accomplishment in her fishly form. "I suppose we can risk it then, since the path leads into it, and the path is supposed to be safe." She sounded extremely uncertain.

"We either trust it or we don't," Esk said. "Since we must pa.s.s through it to reach the containment spell, that is what we must do." He hoped he sounded more a.s.sured than he felt. His knees felt weak, which was alarming because he didn't have any knees at the moment.

Esk repeated his ritual address to the Void, but there was no response. They discussed this, and concluded reluctantly that if they could swim through the barrier, it was probably safe to do so, and they would a.s.sume appropriate forms in the next Element. Perhaps even their own.

This time, mutually nervous, they linked hands (fins), and swam forward into the barrier together.

They found themselves floating in the air above a featureless plain. The water was gone, but they remained fish.

"I thought I might revert to my own form," Chex said, surprised.

As she spoke, she did so, becoming a centaur, floating in the air without flying. "And be tied to the ground," she added, startled again. Whereupon she dropped to the ground, her hooves striking with clunks.

"Then why aren't the rest of us reverting?" Esk asked.

The rest of them reverted similarly. Marrow was in his a.s.sembled form, the complete skeleton.

"I think I would have settled for a fleshly state," he said wistfully. And become a living man, fully fleshed, naked.

"I think we have a special situation here," Chex said, with a certain centaurish understatement.

"Very special," Volney agreed, a.s.suming the form of another man.

"This is like the Fire realm," Chex said. "There we could shape our forms, and Volney spoke as we do; but here it is more so."

"I had noted your amelioration of speech," Volney agreed. "I always wondered what it would be like to walk upright, as human folk do."

"Or to be fleshed, as living folk are," Marrow added, a.s.suming the form of a male centaur.

"Or to be masculine," Chex said, turning male.

"Um, we may be in danger of getting distracted from our mission," Esk warned.

The others immediately reverted to their natural forms.

"I will be relieved when we finally reach the containment spell," Chex said. "We could be distracted for eternity in a place like this, and the danger of that might be similar to that of the gourd via the peephole, not to mention the risk to the Vale of the Vole."

"All too true," Volney agreed. "There are dangers other than physical."

They followed the path, which wound generally downward. At first the scenery was blank, but gradually trees and fields and bushes developed.

Chex paused. "At the risk of distraction, let me pose a question," she said. "Is it possible that there is no scenery, and that we are imagining it? If so, things may not be what they seem."

"Easy to test," Esk said. "Let's all concentrate on there being no scenery, and see if it disappears."

They concentrated, and it disappeared.

"My next question," Chex said slowly, "is, are we also imagining the path?"

Esk whistled. "We'd better find out!"

They concentrated, but the path remained.

"That, at least, is genuine," Chex said, relieved. "We can imagine any scenery we want, just so long as we don't lose the path."

They proceeded, and the scenery formed again, this time more elaborately and less credibly. It seemed to be a joint effort, with voles and winged centaurs flying in the distance, and trees growing in the manner of bones and bearing skulls for fruit, and bra.s.s girls peeking from behind translucent metal curtains that showed their bronzed legs.

Then the path led into a loop. There was no question about this; they circled the loop several times, verifying that it went nowhere.

"I think we have come to the end," Esk said. "But where is the containment spell?"

"Abolish the scenery," Marrow suggested.

They concentrated, and their surroundings became blank again. Now they saw that the path's loop enclosed a deep hole. The terrain simply curved down until lost in a blackness so deep that it seemed to suck them in; they had to yank their gazes away.

"But what is it?" Volney asked.

"I suspect it is the center of the Void," Marrow said. "The black hole from which nothing returns."

"But if the spell is down there, how can we bring it out?" Esk asked.

"You forget again," Marrow said. "This is the Void annex, not the Void itself. This is a representation of the center. We might indeed be able to fetch something from it."

"But the path does not go into it, just around it," Volney said. "That suggests that the spell is not in it, but-"

"But is it!" Chex exclaimed.

"The containment spell is the Void?" Esk asked, confused.

"I think I see the logic," Chex said. "What contains a wiggle swarm?"

"Nothing," Esk said. "You have to catch and kill every one, or there will be another swarm later."

"Not so," Volney protested.

"Point taken," Chex said quickly. "But we agree that there is no wall that will bar swarming wiggle larvae; they zap through everything until they run out of energy or find their particular type of rock or get killed."

'True," Volney agreed.

"So the notion of a containment spell is a strange one," she continued. "It claims to contain the uncontainable. However, there is one thing that contains anything inside it, without exceptions, and that is-"

"The Void!" Esk and Volney chorused.

"The Void," she agreed. "My dam and Esk's parents escaped the outer region of the Void only through the intercession of the night mares, who alone can range such regions freely. So that outer wall of the Void should contain the wiggles too, not hurting them, just preventing them from escaping it, until they run out of energy and expire. They would die happy, imagining that they are in their favorite rock, but they would not reach beyond it. In due course all of them would be gone, except those who drilled down and actually found their type of rock within the enclosed region. The Void is indeed the containment spell."

Her logic was compelling. "But how can we take the-the Void with us to the Vale?" Esk asked.

"Obviously we can't," she said. "But perhaps we can take this representation of it, and it will do the job."

"Imagination won't stop a wiggle swarm!" Esk protested. "A wiggle larva has very little imagination; it is single-minded."

"True. But I suspect that this gourd Void operates like the peephole. If we take it to the Vale and set it up, it will lock the wiggles into the real Void, which is a region just like this only more permanent, and the effect will be the same. Then all we shall have to do is return it to the gourd, and-"