“Wanted to? You’re not making much sense.”
I got an idea. “Let’s explore exactly what happened when you were beheaded. Maybe there are hints there.” I turned to the hen. “Start from the beginning. That is, from before the king’s thugs came for her. Was there any hint that she knew what was coming?”
Now Henrietta concentrated. “Yes. She called aside her younger sister, Selle, a sweet girl. The two of them were always close. Selle has magic ability herself, but knew to keep it completely hidden. Sydelle gave her something to keep safe. It was—a tooth.”
“Your missing tooth!” I said to Sydelle. “You took it out beforehand.”
“I—I did,” the sorceress agreed. “But not exactly.”
“Either you did or you didn’t,” I said. “And Henrietta says you did.”
The hen shook her head. “No. Now that I look more closely, I see that it looked like a tooth but was something else. I can’t tell what. There’s magic shrouding the memory.”
“The farther we go,” Harriet said, “the murkier this becomes.”
“Let’s get back to that later,” I said. I was still on the trail of my suspicion. “What happened next, Henrietta?”
The hen focused on the memory. “The king’s men came and hauled her away. They didn’t pause to rape her; they killed her immediately, and left the body lying in the dirt. There was not actually a lot of bleeding from the neck, oddly. Then her mother came to gather up the remains, using a small cart to transport the body and the detached head to the tomb. She cleaned off the blood and fitted the head back in place so that at least her daughter looked whole. Then, weeping, she departed, closing the tomb after her.”
“Now comes the resurrection,” Harriet said tensely. “Who did it?”
“No one did it,” the hen said. “The body lay there a while, then suddenly animated. It came back to life by itself.”
“But how could it?” Harriet asked. “It was dead!”
“I do not know how, only what,” the hen insisted.
I bore down. “You were studying life restoration, Sydelle. Then you were restored yourself. How did you do it? How did the tooth relate? Why did you want to forget?”
“Because I couldn’t let the king read it in my mind!” Sydelle flared. “Now I remember! My only safety was in forgetting.”
Progress at last. “Forgetting what?”
“That—that I had found a way to avoid death, by indirection. To make myself seem more dead than I was.”
“Indirection!” Harriet said. “But you didn’t avoid it!”
The sorceress concentrated, working it out as her memory returned. “I—I found a way to do it. It was like a kind of sleight of hand, where not everything is as it appears.”
“They cut off your head!” Harriet said.
“No, actually they didn’t. I did that myself.”
We all stared at her, speechless: man, woman, hen.
“That was the secret I had to hide, even from mind readers,” Sydelle continued slowly. “Using an intricate obscure formula I was able to remove a loose tooth, and make it resemble the rest of my head. I could even animate it by remote control with my thoughts. Then I removed my head—this was a very special spell—and made it resemble the tooth. Then I put the animated tooth on my neck in place of the head, and gave the miniaturized head to my little sister for safekeeping. It remains with her, guiding the pretend head I am wearing now.”
We gazed at that head. It certainly looked real.
“It is real,” Sydelle said. “It is of my body. But it is my tooth. Should anything happen to my real head, I would instantly die. My magic caused my blood to remain in my body; indeed, my body never died. Had my mother not quickly removed it, that soon would have become apparent.”
“Your mother suspected,” I said wisely.
“As does my sister,” she agreed. “But they both stifled the awareness, so as not to betray me.”
“Betrayal!” I exclaimed. “Your sister betrayed you! At least to that extent. Only because you told her to.”
“I had to go through the awful process,” Sydelle agreed. “We knew that.”
“And you can’t replace the missing tooth,” Harriet said, working it out, “because there’s no tooth to replace. It’s already there.”
“Yes. But if I can recover my real head, I could put it in place of my tooth, and then it would all be there. I need to do that before too long. Having my real head operating at a distance slows my reactions somewhat.”
“But to recover your real head,” I said, “You would need to get together with your sister. And you can’t do that without letting everyone know you’re not really dead.”
“Yes. I must remain officially dead, at least for now. My family will remain in mourning for me. But their grief is not total.”
I shook my head as if to clear it of debris. “You play a remarkable game, sorceress.”
“I have to. My alternative would have been to become the king’s plaything, and then likely as not get killed anyway. As it is, I’m no longer a concern to the king.”
“So now that we know the score,” I said, “Let’s get on with the project. You have other prospects for recruitment from the waking world?”
“Yes. The best is a man with multiple talents, potentially. But there’s a problem.”
“Isn’t there always,” Harriet said.
“He is in financial difficulty in that ugly realm beyond the Cloud. He is about to be imprisoned for fraud, unless he repays a fair sum of money. He is innocent; he was framed by the one who actually took the money. But he will not be able to exonerate himself from prison. He needs to repay the money from his own pocket, and of course he can’t. I can in time arrange for a regular income for him, but this crisis is immediate, and I don’t have the money now.”
“Henrietta’s eggs!” I said. “That gold should be enough.”
“It should,” Sydelle agreed, surprised. “I didn’t think of that.”
“We have them,” I said. “Harriet put them in her purse.”
“Yes, I have them right here,” Harriet said, delving into her purse. “Oh, no!”
“No?” I echoed, feeling a cold chill.
“There’s a hole in my purse. It must have gotten ripped somewhere along the way, and the pouch with the eggs dropped out. I don’t have it.”
“It could be anywhere in the forest,” Henrietta said. “Or found by a lout who won’t give it back.”
“Damn!” I said. “That means we’re bankrupt.”
“Bankrupt,” Harriet agreed, a tear in her eye.
“I can lay more,” Henrietta said. “In time.”
“I fear we don’t have that much time,” Sydelle said sadly.
The four of us exchanged a look of anguish. What could we do?
Chapter 12:
Joe
I snapped my fingers with what I had thought was a logical solution. “If he’s asleep when he comes here,” I said, “do we really need to worry about his financial situation? I mean, he could just as easily journey to the Cloud from his prison bunk as from his bed at home?”
Harriet reached over and patted my face. “It’s a good thing we don’t need you for your brain, Jack.”
“We need his fire, not his brains,” cackled the hen.
I was beginning to not like that hen, although it was certainly hard to hate anything that magically produced gold. Then it came to me, and I realized once again that I should have kept my mouth shut and thought it through first. I nodded. “Because he would be periodically awakened by the guards.”
“Or worse,” said Harriet, and I caught her not-so-subtle thought: Periodically awakened by inmates too.
Yikes!
“Although time here is not the same as on Earth—one week here is the equivalent of one earth hour—I do not need any of you to awaken before the tasks are done,” said Sydelle.
I did the math. One night’s sleep on earth would be the equivalent of...two mo
nths here in Giantland. I’d been here roughly two days...which would be only minutes back on earth. I hadn’t known about the time discrepancies between the two worlds. I chalked it up to Sydelle not operating at maximum efficiency, due to her head, in fact, being her tooth.
My life is weird, I thought.
Tell me about it, echoed Harriet. And her tooth is only simulating her head. Her real head is still being used, just from long distance.
That doesn’t make it any less weird, I thought.
“If you two are quite done,” cackled the hen, “we need to come up with a solution. I would do it myself, except I’m only a hen.”
“Although ornery,” said Sydelle, “the hen has a point. And real ideas will need to come from you two. My brain is sluggish at best, and it’s difficult to relay complicated concepts from a great distance. So, any ideas?”
I suggested that we needed more info, and Sydelle gave us further access to her thoughts. Within them, we caught sight of the man who would join our merry band of giant killers. Except, of course, he didn’t know it. Like me, he had no idea that Sydelle had designs for him. Like me, he was currently stressed about life back on earth. Unlike me, he lived in luxury, although I suspected not for long.
His name was Joe West, and he looked like a million bucks: nice penthouse suite, expensive clothes, perfect haircut, a beautiful young wife. But it was all just a charade. He was, in fact, a con man. Sydelle gave us glimpses of the man at work, bilking millions from unsuspecting retirees in a classic Ponzi scheme: paying returns to his investors with new money from other investors. No money was ever invested, and the scheme could only last as long as new investors were convinced to give up their savings. Or until the con artist was caught.
In this case, Joe West was about to be caught. But not yet. Sydelle gave us a glimpse of the man sweating it out in his office, running his fingers through his thinning hair, gold rings glistening.
“Let him go to jail,” said Harriet. “He stole millions, destroyed lives. He deserves to rot in jail.”
“I agree,” said Sydelle. “He is a criminal, but he’s also something else.”
I knew what she was getting at. “An evil genius.”
“Yes,” said Harriet. “We need his cunning mind to help take down the cunning king.”
“And he would help us?” I asked.
“He would,” said Sydelle, “or face jail time.”
“But he hasn’t been caught yet,” said Harriet.
“No,” said Sydelle. “But the authorities are closing in. He has but one way to escape capture and imminent jail time.”
Even I knew the answer to this: “Pay off all his investors.”
Sydelle nodded, although there was a slight lag to her response. I said, “Any idea how much he owes?”
Sydelle nodded again after a moment. “Ten billion earth dollars.”
My mouth dropped open. So did Harriet’s. The hen, not so much. She was, after all, a bird.
“So,” said Sydelle, “any ideas?”
I found myself looking at the hen who laid the gold eggs. “I have only one,” I said.
Henrietta squawked, flapping her wings. Feathers floated free and drifted in the air around us. “I can only lay a gold egg a week, at most. And even then, it’s dicey. Sometimes they come out quite normal.”
“We would need dozens of gold eggs to reach ten billion,” said Harriet. “That would be many, many months.”
“We don’t have many months,” said Sydelle. “The prophecy states that I would need to regain the throne in seven days.”
My head hurt. It literally hurt. Yes, I was not cut out for this. Truly, we needed a master schemer...and that master schemer was about to face jail time.
“Other than his cunning, what other trait does Joe West provide us?” I asked.
“He’s a shape-shifter,” said Sydelle. “Of course, he doesn’t know it yet.”
“And what does he shift into?”
“A dragon, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, and rubbed my temples. Then I had an idea. I looked again at the hen. “Who says that you can only turn eggs into gold?”
“No one, I suppose.”
“If you put your mind to it, could you transmute other objects into gold? Your talent, after all, is transmutation.”
I knew I was grasping at straws. I also knew this was a highly magical land, where talents expressed themselves in ways that many of us had yet to fully explore or realize.
“It’s worth a shot,” said Harriet.
Sydelle agreed, and set a wooden bowl next to the hen. “Try it on this?”
“Try what on this?” said the hen.
“Turning it into gold. Go on, try it.”
The hen did her equivalent of a sigh, puffing out her chest, and then turned her attention to the bowl. Nothing happened. It was still a wooden bowl.
“Try harder,” I said. “Or we eat well tonight.”
The hen clucked and flapped her wings. “Well, I never—”
“Go on,” I said. “Do it.”
She returned her attention to the wooden bowl...and then it happened. The wooden bowl was no longer wooden. It was gold. Pure gold.
I picked it up, or tried to. It was far too heavy for me to lift. “You did it!”
“Of course I did,” said the hen. “I didn’t want to end up inside the bowl, after all.”
After that, the hen proceeded to turn silverware and cups and mugs and even firewood into gold, all small enough for us to lift and carry back with us.
“So what’s next?” I asked.
“Now, you meet Joe West.”
Chapter 13:
Payoff
“Just like that?” I asked. “Will we have to go to the waking world?”
“Of course not,” Harriet said severely. She had changed somewhere along the way and now wore a petite blouse and skirt. I liked her outfit, but of course I would have liked anything she wore, or, for that matter, didn’t wear. “If we woke up, we’d be separate. We’d have to get together physically, then go to intercept the man. Assuming we did it efficiently, that’s he’s not flying to Singapore at the moment, and contacted him within a day, twenty four hours, that would be half a year on the Cloud and it would all be academic. It has to be in the dream.”
Sometimes I felt like a real dullard. “Yes, of course,” I agreed quickly. “In the dream.”
“He is sleeping at the moment,” Sydelle said. “I have reached his mind. That’s why he’s accessible. He just had a session with his young wife and slept. I am planting a beanstalk. The trick is to get him to climb it. He may not want to.”
“No problem,” I said. “We’ll slide down it, and meet him in his home. We’ll talk him into coming to the Cloud.”
“I’m not sure he will be easy to persuade. He’s no dummy; he’s an independent cuss, suspicious because he’s a swindler himself.”
I put my mind to work. “Okay: he’s a creature of money. He needs a lot of it right now. We can buy him by paying off his debt. Can we do that from the Cloud?”
“I hope so,” Sydelle said. “I am not conversant with the intricacies of the global financial system.”
“That’s no problem,” Henrietta said. “Ask Joe West. He’s the expert.”
And there it was. We could make the presentation, and if he signed up with us, we’d give him the gold to cash in. We’d be buying him, but let’s face it: he was for sale.
Sydelle nodded. “Yes, I think that can work. Now I’m too big to descend the beanstalk or fit in his suite, so you will have to do it.”
“You can’t make yourself seem small enough?” I asked her, dodging Harriet’s glare.
“Seeming is not sufficient for this. A house is not impressionable the way a man is. I would have to be small enough.”
Henrietta had another relevant question. “We will have sufficient gold. Where do we put it so that Joe West can fence it in the real world?”
“We can drop it b
eside the beanstalk to his place,” I said. “Once we make the deal.”
“Henrietta had better go with you,” Sydelle said. “So she can demonstrate her ability. Seeing may not be believing, for him, but I fear that nothing less will suffice.”
“Then let’s go,” I said. “Where is the beanstalk?”
“Here,” Sydelle said, indicating what I had taken to be a potted plant. The pot was a facade; the stem went down through a manhole in the floor.
“Look out below!” I cried, taking hold of the stalk, which rapidly thickened as it descended. It was like a firehouse pole with leaves. It was much easier going down than it had been climbing up; I simply used the leaves to guide and slow my descent.
Harriet came next. I looked up and saw her skirt flair out as she dropped, showing her marvelous legs to rare advantage. I decided to be a gentleman and not say a word, though not too much of a gentleman not to look. There were limits.
Then Henrietta flew down to perch on a leaf beside me. She looked up. “Do human women normally wear skirts to climb beanstalks? She’s showing a lot of leg.”
Damn. I hoped Harriet hadn’t heard. “Remember, she was nude when she played the harp,” I said.
“So I was,” Harriet said as she reached our level. “I just thought you could use a reminder, after the way you gawked at Sydelle.”
I didn’t answer, as that would only get me in more trouble. I dropped down another level.
In this manner we soon reached the lighted city below, orienting on the skyscraper, and on the fancy penthouse at its top. The stalk passed conveniently close to an open window, and we climbed inside.
And found ourselves face to face with a handsome middle-aged man and a lovely young woman, both in pajamas. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” the man demanded. “And what’s that beanstalk doing outside our window?”
This was part of their dream too? “Joe West, I presume?” I said.
“And his wife?” Harriet added.
“Yes and yes. Now answer my question.”
“I am Jack, formerly of Jutemill Industries. This is Harriet, and Henrietta. We have business to discuss with you.”
“Discuss it in the morning, in my office.”