Up In A Heaval by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

joined the girls and received some heavy petting.
    The girls turned out to be Mol and Kel. Mol's talent was creating; Kel's was molding. So Mol had created the mass of Stuff, and Kel had shaped it into the fence. Both were more than willing to do Umlaut a favor, now that they knew he was with Sammy.
    “Well, uh, if you can make us a bridge across the river, we'd appreciate that.”
    “We will,” Mol said, kissing him on the left ear.
    “Right away,” Kel added, kissing his right ear.
    “Uh, thanks.”
    They walked to the river. Mol made a huge mass of blue Stuff, and Kel shaped it into an arch that fell across the river. It was not Xanth's fanciest bridge, but it sufficed. They climbed carefully across it to the other side of the river. The girls followed, bending down to hang on to the arch with their hands, not awfully careful about how much of their legs showed. Umlaut tried not to look, without success.
    “Uh, thanks,” Umlaut said in his usual awkward fashion.
    “We can do more than that,” Mol said, kissing his left ear again.
    “Much more,” Kel agreed, kissing his right ear again.
    Umlaut sort of liked it but knew that he couldn't dally here. “We, uh, have to get on to the Good Magician's Castle.”
    “Too bad,” Mol said. “Maybe on the way back?”
    “Uh, maybe.” He wasn't sure exactly what they had in mind, but was mightily tempted.
    They moved on. Sesame glanced at him sidelong, and he knew why: He was awkward and clumsy and nothing special in his natural state, so why did girls like him? It was a mystery.
    They made it without further event to the real Good Magician's Castle, which looked exactly like the cardboard replica, except that the moat water was real and so, surely, was the stone in the walls.
    “Now all we have to do is enter the castle, ask for the Good Magician, and ask him what to do about that Red Spot,” Umlaut said. “How complicated can that be?”
    But Sammy Cat stirred restlessly, and Sesame Serpent looked doubtful. What was their problem?
    Then he saw that the way across the bridge was blocked by an enormous pile of large jigsaw puzzle pieces. Each piece was painted with black or white squares. Some of the white squares had letters of the alphabet on them, and some had numbers in their corners. “What's this mess?” he asked.
    Sammy Cat started to go into a series of motions and gestures indicating a complicated explanation, but Umlaut cut him off. “We don't have time for this. Let's just go around this rubble.”
    Still they were doubtful. Sammy was contemplating the puzzle pieces, and Sesame was staring at the moat. Now Umlaut looked at the moat too but saw nothing untoward. “We can swim across; there's no slime in that water.”
    But the moment he stepped toward the water, an array of swimming monsters appeared. He wasn't sure of their exact types, but they all seemed to have gleaming eyes, sharp fins, and big teeth. “Maybe it's too cool to swim.”
    He decided that he did have time after all to fathom what Sammy had to say. He questioned the cat and soon understood. “You mean this is a challenge? We can't get inside unless we handle three challenges? That's ridiculous!”
    Yet it seemed to be so. Sammy knew something about the Good Magician's little eccentricities. He did not like to be bothered by frivolous questions, so he put obstacles in the way of querents (it was a struggle to elicit that obscure term from the cat; it meant people who asked questions) and refused to talk to them unless they got past them. Apparently only a few had the stamina or wit to handle the challenges, so the Good Magician was not bothered too often. So here was a challenge, and they had either to handle it or give up and go away, which might satisfy the magician.
    For some reason he couldn't quite identify, that annoyed Umlaut.
    “Here we come to ask a question that may enable us to save Earth and Xanth from destruction or worse, and we have to go through this nonsense.” The