"I believe," Gubbeen began, "that the risk assessment is favorable to our continued comfort. All in favor of assisting Master Skeeve ... ?"
"Yah. Ya-a-aaah. Yaaaah," the others bleated in agreement.
"Opposed."
They all looked at one another. That was the biggest reason I had not approached each Wuhs privately. In public, they had to hang together, or face peer pressure to accede. I was right.
"Sheep," Tananda muttered.
I rubbed my hands together. "Good. Now, here's what I want you to do. One week from today ..."
I now had to undertake the most intense course of study in my life, more difficult even than when I was trying to learn Dragon Poker in a week. Montgomery lent me a small, unused root cellar as my study, since we didn't want an inkling of what I was doing to circulate. The Wuhses were terrified of the Pervects, but they loved to talk among themselves. A secret which they crossed their hearts and hoped to die before telling was open knowledge before the next round of drinks was on the table. I watched it happen over and over again. Therefore, Gubbeen and the others were on a need-to-know basis only, as far as the specific details of our upcoming attack were concerned.
It was easy for me to say I could break down the components of die anti-magik spell and figure out how it worked, but since it did dampen any magikal probe that I threw at it, it made it harder to figure out what made it tick. Zol offered me his assistance. "We can employ statistical analysis and field emissions to discover what sets it off," the Kobold stated, setting up his computer at the far end of the table. We discovered that inside a certain range the stone prevented either his notebook or Bytina from operating in this dimension. Bunny kept her little PDA at a protective distance from the sample.
"What puzzles me is what our source told Tananda," Zol reminded me. " 'It makes more of itself.' What can that mean?"
"I don't know." I peered at the rock more closely. I had had plenty of time to study the walls during my incarceration, but I had not seen the bricks reproducing. "Maybe we have to give it something to reproduce with."
We tried soaking the stone in water, wine, oil, and several less savory fluids. We fed it sugar, plant food, even people food, but it continued to sit there. I went back to Klah for the grimoires Garkin had left me. Everything in his books was oriented toward channeling power, not getting rid of it.
"Maybe it's like yeast," I suggested. We broke it up into little pieces. We mixed it with dirt, then gravel, then chunks of rock. We heated it in fire, cooled it in ice, added practically every ingredient I could think of. I surrounded it in a field of magikal energy, then let it dissipate. Nothing happened until we mixed the wall parts with sand. The chunks of rock started making a hissing noise. A lather began to gather on top. I reached out a finger to touch it, but Zol yanked my hand back.
"Don't touch it!" he cautioned me. The sizzling noise got louder. "I believe it's working!"
"But why sand?" I asked, watching as the foam covered the mass and enveloped it in a seething, heaving, glowing lump. Heat blasted outward from it, singeing our eyebrows. We retreated to the far end of the cellar. "Why would that work when rock like the original piece wouldn't?"
"Because of its relative translucency," Zol explained. "I believe that what you have just witnessed is a textbook example of near-clear fizzin'."
I was too fascinated by the process to ask for a clarification. It was working.
It took a few days to produce a couple of buckets full of the anti-magik material. Tananda provided security on the cellar, making sure that no one came down to see what we were doing, although my yell of "Yee-hah!" probably raised a few eyebrows. I emerged from our laboratory, frizzled hair and all.
"Are we ready?" Bunny asked.
"We are," I announced, triumphantly. "The coup will proceed on schedule."
TWENTY-SEVEN
"But that trick never works!"
? SQUIRREL
Niki shouldered into her coverall and gulped down the rest of her coffee.
"Almost whistle time," she told the others, who were in various stages of trying to wake up.
Oshleen peered up from her ledger full of red ink with gold lines showing in the yellows of her eyes. Vergetta threw aside her copy of the Perv News, their sole link with civilization in the dreary Wuhs backwater.
"The new line is running like a top. No trouble from the Wuhses. They went right from Pervomatics to personal reminder pixies. The hypno chamber is really good. Even I almost forget what we're doing when I leave there."
"Should patent it," Caitlin stated, tapping away at her keyboard. "Look at the potential applications for secret installations. There might be government contracts in a device like that."
"Oh, great, that's all we'd need," Charilor groaned. "The government already forgets half the stuff it's doing. Do you really want to add deliberate black holes to that?"
"I guess not," the little Pervect shrugged, not looking up from her screen. "Should patent it anyhow. Won't keep the Deveels from copying it, but at least we'll have a legal reason for ripping their lungs out if we catch them."
"I can't believe that there's been no heroic attempt to rescue you, little guy," Vergetta told the paperweight in the middle of the table. "Nobody throwing themselves on the ramparts, no one scaling the walls, nobody battering down the door. Looks like all your friends are a bunch of Wuhses, eh?" She laughed heartily at her own joke. The Wuhs didn't join in.
"There was a retraction in the Ronko Gazette from the Great Skeeve," Paldine announced. "I saw it when I went to pick up our stock. What I can't figure out is why."
Vergetta looked dubious. "Why which one? Why he got in our way, or why he apologized?"
"The apology is the weird part."
"Looks to me like he backed out of his contract with Shorty over there," Tenobia declared, aiming a manicured thumb at the Wuhs on the table. "Nothing's happened for a week. He probably went back to his batcave with a big fat zero. Probably just figured out he's as likely to get paid as we are."
The can hanging from the wall jangled. Niki frowned at it, then went over to pick it up. She listened, the scowl growing deeper.
"Something's wrong at Factory #9," she told the others as she let the cylinder drop. "The Wuhses are refusing to sign in." The can clattered again. She snatched it up and shouted into it. "I'm coming! What?" She threw it down. "Factory #2. They're protesting for better parking spaces."
"I'll go," Tenobia volunteered. "I'll give them parking spaces!"
"Don't all of them walk to work?" Nedira inquired. "It's probably a notion one of them picked up on another dimension," Tenobia snarled. "Ironic, isn't it? They found something for free that's still a pain in the rump!" She vanished.
The can jangled again. And again. The Pervects grabbed for it, another rushing off to handle each fresh situation.
"Hold on!" Vergetta shouted, as Charilor was about to blip out to handle a riot at Factory #3 about microwave popcorn privileges. "This is too fishy. Someone's trying to get us all going in a dozen directions at once."
"Skeeve," Oshleen sniffed. "He's back! But where?"
A shout from Caitlin made the remaining four turn around.
"We got him," the smallest Pervect announced smugly. "He's trying to read our computer again!"
Her hands danced over the keyboard. Vergetta smiled her admiration as a ball of blue lightning built up in the air around Caitlin's head. As the little Pervect hit ENTER, the surge dove back into the computer and down the line. She crossed her arms. "That'll fix him."
I jumped to catch Zol as a jagged ball of power leaped out of his notebook, knocking him flat. We were in a room of the castle on the same floor as the Pervects' headquarters waiting until the room was empty. Gleep sat in a corner happily crunching up more Kobold treats than I had ever let him have before.