Would he have to find his way out as deviously as he had found his way in? And then search for the people he needed? It was all so confused.
“You look extremely perplexed,” someone said behind him. “I love that in a creature.”
Gary didn't bother to look, because he recognized the voice. “Shape up or ship out, Mentia,” he said gruffly.
A small ragged brown cloud drifted into his field of vision. “How did you know I was out of shape?” the demoness asked, disgruntled.
“I don't care about your physical shape,” he said. “I just mean that if you're not here to help, I don't want to bother with you. I have enough problems already, thanks to your interference.”
“My interference!” the cloud said, forming into a huge smoky exclamation point. “Is this the thanks I get for trying to help you?”
“You want thanks? Here it is. Thank you for not smoking in my presence.”
The smoke solidified into the demoness' supposedly natural human aspect. “Are you really annoyed with me?” she asked, looking woebegone.
Gary knew it was an act, but fell for it anyway. “I guess not. I know you thought you were trying to help me. But now I'm stuck not knowing where to go, and not only am I far from my river, I owe the Good Magician a Service. I wish I'd never met you.”
Mentia sighed. “I guess it was sort of crazy to think you'd be grateful. But I'm a crazy creature. Maybe I should help you some more.”
“No!” he cried, alarmed.
“Not even if I showed you how to find Magician Trent?”
“Not even—” He paused. “You'd do that?”
“And the Sorceress Iris too,” she said sweetly. “If that would make you feel good about me.”
“Why should you care how I feel about you?”
“I shouldn't. But I'm a bit crazy, as you know. I'm not a bad creature, and you're an interesting one. So maybe I'll get you clear of your confusion.”
Gary didn't trust this, but seemed to have no viable alternative. “Agreed, then. Show me how to find Trent.”
She paused to consider, her feet not quite touching the ground. “The old folk are down in the Brain Coral's Pool, waiting for you. So we'll have to go there.”
“What kind of pool?”
“Oh, you don't know about that? I thought you gargoyles knew all about water.”
“We purify running water,” he said, slightly aggrieved. “We ignore pools.”
“This pool is not to be ignored. The Brain Coral is a weird inanimate entity who likes to collect things, such as living creatures, which it keeps in suspended animation in its deep subterranean pool. Once every decade or so it lets a creature out, if there's really good reason, and that creature is exactly the same age as it was when it went in, even if it's been there for several centuries. Of course in the Time of No Magic, back in the year ten-forty-three, fifty-one years ago, everything got messed up and some captives escaped; it was decades before the Brain Coral completed its inventory and knew exactly who was gone.”
Mentia shrugged in sections, like a moving caterpillar, her head, shoulders, breasts, midsection, pelvis, thighs, legs, and feet taking their turns. The effect would have been interesting, had Gary been a human male. “By then it was a bit too late, of course. But there's still good stuff in those dark waters, and right now Magician Trent and Sorceress Iris are there.”
“They are in the pool? In suspended animation?”
“Of course. Do you think they want to wait in the regular realm, getting older every moment? Iris already has too much of a problem in that respect.”
“She does? What's wrong with getting older? Doesn't everyone do it?”
“Every non-demon, I suppose.” This time Mentia's right side shrugged in one direction, and her left side in the other direction. Gary did find that interesting, especially when her eyes passed each other on the return trip, overshooting the mark. “But Iris is ninety-three years old. That's ancient and doddering, for the average human being.”
“But Magician Trent must be old too, so they're even.”
“Ninety-seven, technically. But he was youthened to about twenty-five last year, and is now one handsome hunk of human. Why should he mess with a woman of great-grandmotherly physical age?”
“That makes a difference?”
“To a human, yes. The man can be as old as he wants, but the woman has to be young, or she's a waste. That's the way it is, with human folk. So she'll take a youth potion to knock about seventy years off her physical age; that's her reward for helping you. After that, who knows what she may be up to. She's a long-suppressed woman.”
Mentia's clothing turned transparent for an instant, showing a flash of her considerably curved outer contours.
Gary shook his head. “You claim to be a little bit crazy, Mentia, but you don't seem any worse than regular humans are.”
The demoness, caught by surprise by the compliment, flushed. The contents of her head melted into red fluid and drained down the pipes of her neck, leaving a hollow translucent shell. The fluid gurgled through her body, and pooled in her feet, which swelled voluminously. Then, gradually, her head filled again, the fluid rising from the bottom to the top, until it was complete and she resumed normal activity. “Thank you,” she said when her lips were full again.
Gary realized that for all Mentia's disclaimers, she did care at least a little what other creatures thought of her.
That didn't seem to be too much of a fault. “How old are you, Mentia?”
“A hundred and ninety-three, but who's counting? It doesn't matter for demons.” She inhaled, and her bosom became magnificent and burst out of its halter. Gary was no judge of such things, of course, but he suspected that a human man would find her attractive. “Or one year, depending how you count it; I haven't gone out on my own as Metria's alter ego all that long.”
That seemed like a fair dual answer. “So this ninetythree-year-old ancient old woman, youthened to her twenties, is assigned to help me on my mission,” Gary said, somewhat dispiritedly. “I suppose I had better get on with it.”
“That's what I was up to. I can pop to the pool just like that, but you can't. You need a physical conveyance. Can you sing?”
That must be her craziness showing again. “No.”
“Too bad. We could have had you ride a diggle. They carry folk through rock for a song.” She pondered, her body fuzzing out as she lost focus. “Maybe a figgle.”
“A what?”
“That's another subspecies of vole. All it wants is a fig. So you don't give a fig.”
More craziness! “You don't give it what it wants?”
“Yes. Because when it gets its fig, it eats it and goes home to snooze.”
“So why not promise it a fig after it has helped you?”
“It doesn't work that way. Figgles don't plan for the future. They want to know now.”
“But you can't give it the fig now.”
She smiled. “You are catching on, stoneface.”
“So we can't use a figgle.”
“Yes we can.”
He knew she was teasing him, but he was stuck for it, so he asked the obvious question: “How?”
“By telling it what we aren't giving it.”
“I don't understand.”
“Well, you're only a stone animal. Now I'll summon a figgle for us to ride.”
She was crazy, all right! But what else was there?
Mentia put two fingers to her mouth, inhaled to just short of bursting, and blew a piercing whistle that made his stone ears craze. There followed a rumbling in the ground, and in two moments and half an instant the wormlike snout of a huge nether creature poked from the soil.
“Ffiigg?” the sloppy mouth inquired.
“Well, we're not giving you a shoe,” Mentia retorted.
“But if you take us to the Brain Coral's Pool, who knows what we might give you?”
The figgle cogitated in vermicular fashion, its thoughts evidently twisting
deviously. “Ffiigg?” it repeated.
Gary was starting to begin to think about catching on.
“We're not giving you a castle,” he said.
Mentia stepped onto the creature's broadly rounded back, her solidly fleshed thighs straddling it. Gary did the same, as well as he could, straddling it with four legs. The creature was so solid that this did not feel as precarious as it looked.
“Go poool,” the creature said. “Then ffigg?”
“We're not giving you a parasol,” Mentia said.
The creature's snout angled down and plunged into the earth as if it were water. The body followed sinuously.
Gary wondered whether he should be alarmed, but before he could come to a conclusion they were descending through the ground. There was only the faintest sensation, as of dirty fog sliding by. But after most of a moment the fog thickened, becoming more like sludge. “Get your mouth in gear,” Mentia said. “And don't repeat anything, that confuses it.”
Oh. “We're not giving you a purple rock,” Gary said, and the sludge thinned around them. He did not care to discover what happened when the figgle got confused deep in the ground.
“Or a green pair of socks,” Mentia added.
Gary warmed to this. “We're not giving you the talent of conjuring things from the Void,” he said when the ground around them began to solidify again.
“Or Stanley Steamer's birthday, which happens to be Dismember two-four,” Mentia said.
So it went. The figgle seemed to be satisfied as long as they reassured it that they weren't giving it something other than a fig; that suggested by implication that they might give it a fig. The fact that there was an almost infinite number of things that weren't figs didn't seem to matter; the figgle's strength was not intelligence. So they mentioned shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings, and apples and ideas, as well as acorns and mountains and pictures of things best left undescribed.
Through it all, the figgle plowed on down through earth, rock, and whatever.
Well before they had run out of things not to give the figgle, they arrived at the Brain Coral's Pool. They were sliding through layers of rock when the environment abruptly became thin, and Gary realized with a start that this was because it was air. There was a flat cave floor, and beyond it a deep dark cave pool fed by a slow lazy river. The walls and water glowed faintly, so that there was no problem seeing. It was a rather pretty region, though of course to a gargoyle any place with plenty of flowing water was appealing.
“Now we have to give our steed the whatever,” Mentia announced.
“Yes, it's time,” Gary agreed. “Give it the fig.”
“Ffigg!” the figgle exclaimed, coiling with eagerness.
The demoness writhed, emulating the figgle. “Me? I don't have a fig. Don't you have one?”
“Ffigg!” the creature said hungrily.
“Of course I don't! How could I have known I would need a fig?”
“FFIGG!” The very rock shuddered with the urgency of it, and the surface of the pool rippled nervously.
“Well, you had better find one quickly,” Mentia remarked in a rare flash of sanity, “because a figgle's patience grows short when payoff time is delayed.”
So it appeared. “What happens if the figgle doesn't get a—whatever?”
“Oh, I wouldn't recommend finding out.” Indeed, the creature was thrashing around with increasing force, and since part of it was anchored in the rock, the whole cave was shaking. Gary had heard of earthquakes, and was catching a glimmer of what caused them.
But what could they do? They had no fig.
A chunk of stone fell from the ceiling and splashed into the water. Cracks were opening in the stone floor. The walls were blurry, not because of any problem with Gary's vision, but because they were vibrating so violently.
Then desperation gave Gary wit. “Mentia—you're a demoness!” he exclaimed.
Her mouth drew down into a pout that became so large it made her face pear-shaped. “You noticed.”
“You can assume any form you wish,” he continued.
“I thought that had become evident.” Her head expanded until it was like a watermelon, and the rest of her body shrank so that only little arms and legs projected from the giant fruit.
“And you can't be hurt by mortals.”
“Not physically,” she agreed. “Or mentally, now that I think of it. However, a mortal can hurt a demon emotionally, if she's stupid enough to get half a soul.”
“So become a fig!” he said.
The watermelon's eyes expanded in surprise. Then the entire big juicy fruit shrank into a little dried fruit.
Gary reached out with a forepaw and picked it up.
“Here is your fig,” he said to the writhing figgle. “I'm giving you a fig.”
The creature snapped up the fig and dived into the wall so quickly that anything as long as an instant would have been lost in the shuffle. Suddenly Gary stood alone in a quiet cave. And he knew that one thing he would never say hereafter was “I don't give a fig.” He had learned the consequence.
Now he had to find Magician Trent and Sorceress Iris.
That should not be difficult, as he understood that both were human beings. He walked along the ledge beside the pool. No person, whether of animal or human shape, seemed to be in the vicinity.
Then he remembered that the things were stored in the pool, in suspended animation. That explained why it was so quiet here outside the pool. He would have to go down into it to find the folk he needed.
He found a shallow place and stepped carefully into the water. The pool was neither cold nor hot; it seemed to be perfectly neutral. Of course it didn't matter to him, because he was made of stone, but it probably made a difference for those stored within it. They wouldn't want to be shivering with cold for hundreds of years.
He continued down until the water was over his head.
That didn't matter either; he didn't need to breathe. He wondered how the flesh creatures managed, though.
Now he saw something. It seemed to be a wooden structure. Maybe it was an office. But as he came to it he saw that it was just a collection of boards piled somewhat haphazardly together. Gary was no neatness freak, but it did seem that these would take up less space if carefully piled, so he might as well do that before moving on.
He took hold of a board. “Hey!” the board protested.
Startled, Gary paused. “Did you talk to me?” he asked.
“Do you see any other ugly stone monster idiots in the vicinity?” the board demanded in a warped tone. “What do you think you're doing?”
“I was just going to pile you more neatly, so you wouldn't be scattered around,” Gary explained.
“Well, I'll thank you knot to interfere with our board meeting,” it said. “We want to get our business done before we season, you know.”
“Sorry,” Gary said, and quickly moved on. He had not realized that boards talked, or that they had meetings, and was a bit embarrassed for his ignorance.
He came to a man reading a book. Maybe he would know where Magician Trent was. “I say, may I interrupt you a moment?” Gary inquired cautiously.
“I wish you would,” the man said without raising his face. His voice was somewhat muffled.
“I am looking for Magician Trent, who I understand is in this pool somewhere. Could you direct me to his location?”
“Love to. But I can't.”
“Can't?”
The man lifted his face. The book came up with it, covering his eyes. “My nose is stuck in this book, and I can't see around it.”
That did seem to be a predicament. “Can I help you remove it?” Gary inquired solicitously.
“No. My nose would come off my face if you pulled the book away. Unless you know where there's some solvent?”
“I don't know, but I'll see if I can find some.” Gary looked around, and saw a tree deeper in the water, growing as if on land. There were many signs of activity ar
ound it, though at the moment nothing was actually moving. So he approached it. “Do you happen to have any solvent?” he inquired.
“Of course I have solvent,” the tree retorted. “I'm an industree. It's one of the things needed in construction and manufacture.”
Soon Gary had plucked a can of solvent from one of the industree's twigs. He put a drop on the book attached to the man's nose, and it came free. “Oh, thank you, stranger,” the man said. “It has been a bore, not being able to turn the page.” He reburied his face in the book so firmly that Gary realized that it wouldn't be long before his nose got stuck again. The man hadn't even noticed that Gary was not a human being.
He returned to the industree. “Can you tell me where—”
“The first sample was free,” the tree told him severely.
“You will have to pay the going rate for anything more. Do you think I'm in business for my health?”
Gary hadn't realized that the industree was in business at all. Embarrassed again, he retreated. This was certainly a strange region! Apparently not all the things in it were suspended, because he had had no trouble talking with several, even if they hadn't proved to be very helpful.
Gary walked on. He heard music, so he went toward the source. It turned out to be a harpy with very stiff erect tailfeathers; she was reaching back and plinking them with her claws so as to generate a nice tune.
It occurred to Gary that if a human man hadn't helped him, and an inanimate board hadn't, and a tree hadn't, maybe an animal type of creature would. But he knew that harpies were perverse, so this might require some finesse.
He approached the harpy. “That's awful music,” he told her gruffly.
“Why thank you!” she screeched, flattered. “I'm a harpychord, and I love to annoy folk.”
“You are surely succeeding. And I know you'll never tell me where Magician Trent is.”
“Yes, I'll never tell you to look twenty paces to your left,” she screeched, plinking a few more notes.
“A curse on you, you miserable creature,” he said, and turned to his left. The harpy really had appreciated his comment on her music, so had answered his question in the only way she could, without soiling her reputation: negatively.