Robert Asprin: Myth-Fortunes

"Come on, partner, let's fly!" Aahz said. He held out his arms as if he was lifting off. I scooped him up with a hank of magik and dove to join him.

"Hey, wait for me!" Samwise pleaded. He flapped his arms as he ran to catch up.

I didn't have time to look behind us. The stone slab of the ceiling was just knee height from the floor. If we misjudged our speed, it could chop our legs off. I didn't want to start off in Ghordon two feet shorter. I threw out a hook of power and wedged it into the doorway at the far end of the shrinking room, tied the other end around Aahz and me, and pulled.

The magikal cord contracted faster than a Deveel's good will. Aahz and I not only reached the door, but catapulted through it. I hit the sand-dusted flagstones outside Waycross's tomb and rolled to a halt twenty feet beyond. I blinked up at the hot yellow sun. Aahz struck just behind me, bounced and ended up landing across my legs.

A shadow cut off the blinding sunlight. A face surrounded by a draped cloth headdress peered down at me. The face had the long nose and floppy ears of a hound, but the bare chest and arms of a Klahd. It extended a normal-looking hand to me. I took it, and he helped me to my feet. A lion-faced Klahd

helped Aahz up.

"Welcome to Ghordon, wayfarers," the dog-faced man said. He and his lion-headed companion wore pleated white skirts and sandals, but nothing else except their headdresses. "Receive the eight greetings of the Pharaoh Suzal, the eternal hospitality of her people, and the warm regard of the land of the Ghords be always upon . . . oh, no, not you again!"

I frowned at the unfriendly tone, then relaxed.

It was not addressed to me or Aahz, but rather to Samwise. The Imp crawled out of the porticoed door through which we had just been propelled.

The Imp dusted off his loud suit and stumped over to slap the two males on the back. "Hey, Fisal and Chopri, good to see you!" They accepted the gesture with resignation and returned to the posts they had occupied beside the doorway. He turned to us. "I told you I get along great with everybody here."

Ghordon's climate was similar to Deva's, a dry desert with a hot sun and wispy breezes that did nothing but stir up the dust, but there was something subtly different. At first I couldn't put my finger on it. Then I realized that there was little more noise outside Waycross's tomb than there had been inside it. The sprawling Bazaar at Deva, which covered much of its dimension, was never quiet. During the day, it was filled with the shouts, cries, bellows, and ululations of the Deveel traders who liked to argue at the top of their voices. Adding to the din were street performers, friends and soon-to-be-friends greeting each other, musicians, the entourages of important visitors announcing the name and business of the person they were escorting, the roar of dragons and other beasts for sale, and just the endless audible tumult of thousands of beings all talking at the same time. By extreme contrast, Ghordon was almost silent. I could hear the wind. It reminded me of the bucolic isolation of my parents' farm on Klah. It was unnerving. I felt like singing or shouting just to remind myself what noise sounded like.

My footsteps made a hushed, shushing noise as I trudged along in the drifting sand behind Samwise and Aahz.

"Come on, we'll catch a Camel," Samwise said.

"As long as we don't have to walk a mile for one," Aahz said, and waited for applause. None was forthcoming, since I didn't know what he was talking about.

Ahead, I spotted long, oval heads bobbing on narrow necks. I couldn't tell what they were, but the humped shapes behind the heads suggested gigantic serpents.

"What are they?" I asked as we got closer. The heads turned toward us, and large brown eyes with long lashes fluttered at me. They didn't look like snakes, but the necks connected to a lumpy body that lay flat on the desert.

"Camel, sir, Camel?" the first one, a creature with dark brown fur, inquired in a loud, hoarse voice. "Take you sightseeing around the grand pyramid, Hobokis, the city of Suzal, may she live forever, the Pharoah Isles, or the terrific shopping in the Khazbah? Your choice, reasonable rates! I will give you a most mild ride. You will think you are sailing a sheep."

"Ship?" I asked, curiously.

"Sheep," the Camel said. "I am not a boat, I am a living being. Come with me, come, hurry!"

"I saw them first," exclaimed a pale tan Camel, trying to bump the first one out of the way. "I will convey you safely and well, O tourists . . . oh, Samwise." The Camels' enthusiasm petered out.

I was beginning to realize that our potential employer, if not actually disliked, had worn out his welcome with the people of Ghordon.

"We'll walk," Aahz said.

"You'd never make it," Samwise said. "The quicksands will drag you down in no time. The slowsands are even more dangerous because they have a firmer grip."

"We could just fly."

"Er, I prefer to patronize the local businesses," Samwise said hastily.

"Hmmph!" The local businesspeople—all right, Camels— didn't seem that grateful for his custom. I suspected he wasn't good at keeping up with his bills.

"It's okay," I said, jingling my belt pouch to show that one of us had money. "My name's Skeeve. Will you take us to . . . ?" I looked at Samwise.

"To the And Company main office," the Imp said.

"And Company?" I asked.

"Well, everyone knows me," the Imp said. We stepped gingerly onto the humps behind the Camel's head and settled in between them. There was barely room for the three of us. I got wedged between Samwise and the rear hump. "But I have partners in some of my projects, so I named the enterprise after them. That way they get the credit they deserve, too."

Once I was on the Camel's back, I realized that it wasn't a snake or serpent. The beast had limbs at the four corners of its body, but they were submerged beneath the surface of the sand. Instead of running, it swam, gliding as smoothly as a water bird. I looked behind us. Our passage left a V-shaped wake that swirled and settled again into gentle peaks.

"The hump keeps them afloat in the quicksand," Samwise explained.

"Hold on, please. No jumping up and down, no music, no photographs," the Camel said, as he swam away from the stand. "Spitting is allowed." As if to demonstrate, he let go of a gob of brown goo that plopped onto the surface of the sand and sank. I felt my stomach turn. "I am Dromad, your driver for today."

He paddled a distance out from Waycross's tomb and began to circle around to the right. No matter what criticism Samwise had for the ancient architect, I admired the monument's construction and how well it fit into its setting. It looked as if it had just risen out of the desert at the beginning of time and would be there forever. The admonitions and curses I had seen inside continued on around the building in endless rows.

Waycross sure had a lot of rules.

As we cleared the massive square edifice, I goggled in wonder at a new, marvelous structure ahead of us.

"You didn't tell us that you'd already built one pyramid," Aahz said.

And an impressive sight it was, too. I had never seen anything like it outside of the storybook or history books in my mother's study. A perfect, smooth triangle of pearlescent white, it loomed above the wide desert floor like a mathematical absolute. It didn't look so large from a distance, but as we glided toward it, I realized what I thought were insects walking on the stones were people my size and larger. As we paddled closer, I studied them. Their bodies were similar to denizens of my dimension, Klah, but their heads and feet resembled those of animals.