Piers Anthony - Robot Adept

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Robot Adept

The Apprentice Adept - Book 5

by Piers Anthony

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Phaze

Chapter 2 Proton

Chapter 3 Agape

Chapter 4 Fleta

Chapter 5 Spy

Chapter 6 Amoeba

Chapter 7 Troll

Chapter 8 Tourney

Chapter 9 Masquerade

Chapter 10 Filly?

Chapter 11 Magic

Chapter 12 Oracle

Chapter 13 Pole

Chapter 14 Chase

Chapter 15 Table

Chapter 16 Decision

Chapter 1 Phaze

^ »

Suchevane stood in the canoe. She was obviously fatigued to the point of collapse, and in a misery of mixed emotion, but she remained such a stunningly beautiful figure of a woman that the rest hardly mattered. “I must needs fly home,” she said. “I may not, I think, associate with ye folk longer.”

“I understand, vampire maiden,” Mach replied, looking up from his place at the rear of the canoe. “I thank you for your great service, and hope that we may at least remain friends.”

“Mayhap,” Suchevane agreed. “I did it mostly for thee, Fleta, and glad I am that thy life be safe and thy love secure. Would I had such love myself.” She gazed for a moment at the fading brightness around them. “Would that any man evoke such splash for me!”

The woman in Mach’s arms lifted her head, gazing at her friend through tear-blurred eyes. “Wouldst thou had such love thyself,” Fleta agreed. “Fare thee well, dearest friend!”

Then Suchevane lifted her arms like wings, and with effortless elegance even in her fatigue became a lovely bat, and flew into the haze. Exhaustion made her flight ragged, but she would get where she was going.

The watery bubble floating beside the canoe bobbed gently. “I be not partial to vamps,” the face of the Translucent Adept said within it. “But that one might almost tempt an Adept.” The bubble spun, so that the face reoriented on the canoe. “I will, an thou wishest, provide thy craft a tow to my Demesnes.”

“Accepted, Adept,” Mach replied. Then he lowered his face again to Fleta’s face, and lost himself in her.

The watery bubble moved, and from it stretched a watery line that touched the prow of the canoe. Bubble and canoe floated through the air, gaining speed, traveling through the closing night.

Mach and Fleta, victims of forbidden love, were on their way into the power of the Adverse Adepts.

Mach woke to the sound of lapping water. He looked, and sure enough, their canoe was on the surface of a large lake or small sea. “How strange!” he exclaimed.

Fleta woke. “Art well, my love?” she asked, concerned.

“We’re on water,” he explained.

She laughed. “It be strange to see a boat on water? Mayhap in thy frame, rovot, but not in mine!”

He smiled ruefully. “I enchanted this canoe to float in air, that’s all. I was surprised.”

The watery bubble ahead of them rotated so that the face in it faced back. “Willst be yet more surprised, youngster, in a moment.”

Fleta stretched, arms bent, her breasts moving against him. “Must needs I call on nature,” she said. “Let me change.” She drew away from him.

“Don’t leave me!” he protested, abruptly wary. “The last time you did that, I almost lost you forever!”

She abruptly sobered. “I thought only to spare thee evil, then,” she said. “Fear not, I shall return to thee very shortly.” Then she leaned into him and kissed him with such passion that his burgeoning doubt was sublimated into joy.

While he sat half-stunned by the delight of her, she stood much as Suchevane had, and abruptly became the hummingbird. The bird was glossy black, with golden little legs and beak; it darted forward to muss his hair with its wings, then shot away.

Mach shook his head, half in rue; he was a bit jealous of her instant shape-changing ability, and wished he could simply change and fly like that.

That gave him pause for thought. He was a novice Adept, wasn’t he? He had managed to perform magic on occasion. What were his limits? The real Adepts could do amazing things; could he do likewise, if he only mastered the magic?

The more he considered, the better he liked the notion. He had conjured this air-floating canoe that had given him such good service; that was by any reckoning competent magic. He had nullified the suicide spell on Fleta by the force of his declaration of love: the triple Thee. While that was not an ordinary type of magic, neither had the spell on her been ordinary. She had asked the Red Adept to give her an amulet that would cause her to lose her ability to change forms, so that when she dived off the mountain she would be unable to save herself by changing to hummingbird form and flying away. The Red Adept, reluctantly, had granted her this. Mach had reversed Adept magic! Surely shapechanging himself would be a comparatively minor enchantment. All he had to do was work out the appropriate spells.

Fleta returned, humming up to perch on the canoe’s front seat, then shifting to girlform. She had evidently completed her business. That was another advantage of shape-changing: the nectar of just a few flowers could feed her, and she remained fed when she shifted to a far more massive form. Similarly, one bird dropping could clean out her system, for the human form as well. Magic took little note of scale.

“Going down,” the Translucent Adept’s voice came from ahead. Then his bubble dipped under the surface—and the canoe followed. In a moment they were sinking through the greenish water, but breathing normally; the water seemed like air.

Fleta moved back to take his hand. “Adept magic spooks me,” she confided. “I wish—”

He silenced her with a kiss. He knew what she wished: that they could be together without the intercession of the Adept. But it seemed that this could not be, for their union was opposed by her kind and his, so they were constrained to accept Translucent’s hospitality.

They continued down. Fish swam by, gazing with moderate curiosity at the canoe; apparently they had seen things like this before. Then the bottom came into view, and it seemed again as if they were floating through air, with the rocks and seaweed and sea moss like the terrain of some jungle land.

Now that land turned strange. Orange and blue-green sponges spread across it, and corals reached up like skeletons, and peculiar flowerlike, tentacled things waved on yellow stalks. At first these were small, but as the canoe progressed they grew larger.

Mach looked down below the canoe as they passed a long log. No, it was a pipe, with a spiral band wrapping it, getting larger in diameter as they traveled along it. Then they came to its end—and there was a big round eye gazing up at him. The thing was a living creature!

“A giant nautiloid,” the Translucent Adept exclaimed from ahead. “Creature o’ the Ordovician period o’ Earth. I have a certain interest in the paleontology o’ the seas.”

Beyond the eye were about eight tentacles, which reached for the canoe but stopped short of touching it. Mach was just as glad. “It looks like an octopus in a long shell,” he remarked.