He brought the Flute to his mouth. It was festooned with gore. Stile’s gorge rose, and he decided to try his spell without playing on the instrument. “O monster fair,” he intoned with irony. “Convert to air.”
The segment before him shivered, resisting. Whether this was because of residual anti-magic in the dragon, or be-cause Stile had not summoned sufficient magic, he was not sure. Then it melted and evaporated into a truly noisome cloud. The spell was working!
Stile devised spells to abolish the two remaining segments, then another to clean the gore from himself, Neysa, and the tunnel. He had done the job, and earned the right to borrow the Flute. Yet he was not especially pleased with himself. Wasn’t there some better way to settle differences than hacking apart ancient magical creatures? How would he feel if he were old, having some fresh young midget chop him down to size?
Yet if he had not performed, the Lady Blue’s situation could have become quite difficult. And it could still become so, if Stile did not locate and deal with the murderer of the Blue Adept before that murderer caught up with Stile him-self.
Meanwhile, he wondered whether the Lady was winning her chess game with Pyreforge.
CHAPTER 5 - Riddles
Sheen was pleased. “You’re here for a full week this time?”
“Until the Unolympic,” Stile agreed. “Neysa and the Lady Blue are relaxing after the excursion among the Little People, and I have considerable business here in Proton-frame, as long as my enemy doesn’t strike.” He shrugged. “Of course I’ll be staying longer in Phaze-frame one of these times, to run down my enemy there and look for the Foreordained. If I wash out of the Tourney I’ll spend the rest of my life there.”
“What was it like, being among the Little People?” Sheen asked. They were in their apartment, engaging in their usual occupation. Sheen was an extremely amorous female, and Stile’s frequent absences and uncertainty of future increased her ardor. And, since he had a balked romantic situation in Phaze—
“Strange,” he answered. “I felt like a giant, and I wasn’t used to it. This must be the way Hulk feels. I really am more satisfied with my size than I used to be.” He changed the subject. “Where is Hulk? Did you help him?”
“I believe so. I put him in touch with my friends. I assumed you would not have sent him if he could not be trusted.”
“He can be trusted.”
“I’m sure my friends required him to take the same oath you took, if they revealed themselves to him at all. They may simply have issued him an address. I did not inquire after him, because that would only expose him and them to possible Citizen attention, and we don’t want that.”
“True,” Stile agreed. “If the Citizens knew that some robots are self-willed—“
“You have something against self-willed robots?” she asked archly.
“You know, at times I almost forget that you yourself are a robot. I don’t see how you could be much better in the flesh.”
“All the same, I wish I were in the flesh,” she said sadly. “You can never truly love me. Even if you were to win the Tourney and become a Citizen and stay here the rest of your life, even if you didn’t have the Lady Blue in the other frame, you would never really be mine.”
Stile did not like this line of conjecture. “There is very little chance of my winning the Tourney. I barely survived my first Game.”
“I know. I watched. You were lucky.”
“Luck is a fickle mistress.”
She turned on him abruptly. “Promise me that if you ever give this mistress up permanently, you’ll have me junked, put out of consciousness. I don’t mean just reprogramming or deactivating me; destroy my computer brain. You know how to do it. Don’t let me suffer alone.”
“Sheen,” he protested. “I would never junk you!”
“I like Neysa, and I’m resigned to the Lady Blue. I know you’re sliding into love with her, and in time she’ll love you, and there’s your true romance. But this is a different frame; she and I can never meet. Nothing you do there needs to affect what you do here—“
“I am of both frames now,” Stile said. “What affects me in one, affects me in the other. You know that if the Lady ever gives her love to me, I—we’ll still be friends, you and I, but—“ He halted, hating this, but not constituted to conceal the truth.
“But not lovers,” she finished. “Even that I can accept. Neysa accepted it. But if you ever find you can dispense with that remaining friendship—“
“Never!”
“Then you will junk me cleanly. Promise.”
Stile suffered a vision of himself hacking apart the living Worm. That had been unclean dispatching. How much better it would have been if he could have banished that Worm to nonexistence with a single, painless spell. Sheen deserved at least that much. “I promise,” he said. “But that time will never—“
“Now it’s time to get you back to the Tourney,” she said briskly.
