So it was a female Adept who made the amulets! This was a valuable confirmation. “Once an amulet attacked me,” he said. “Now must I take them secondhand.”
“Attacked thee?” She chortled. “Surely served thee right! Very well—if thou dost perform amusingly, I will reward thee appropriately.”
“I thank thee,” Stile said humbly. He was fully aware that she had made no significant commitment. That was not what he needed. Once she showed the form of her magic—
“Get on with it, clown,” White snapped, her mouth set-ting into solidified sourness. “Make me laugh.” Stile went into his act. He had developed a joker-ritual as part of his Proton-Game expertise, and he had considerable manual dexterity. He put on his “stupid midget” pantomime, trying to eat a potato that kept wriggling out of his hands, looking for a comfortable place to sleep, finding none, and getting tangled up in his own limbs, drawing scarves out of his ears, taking spills, and in general making a funny fool of himself. He was good at it, using no real magic, only stage magic, before a person who well knew the difference. Though the White Adept tried to maintain a sour face, slowly it weathered and cracked. She evidently did not like peasants, and had deep satisfaction seeing one so aptly parodied. Also she, like many people, thought there was something excruciatingly funny about mishaps happening to a midget. In the end she was laughing whole-heartedly.
Stile completed his show. White sobered quickly. “I like thee, fool. I believe I shall keep thee here for future entertainments.”
“Honored Adept, I cannot stay,” Stile said quickly, though he had expected something like this. “All I want is mine amulet recharged.”
She frowned. “Very well, fool. Give it here.” She was up to something. Stile passed over the medal, braced for action.
The White Adept laid the medal on the floor. She brought out a long-handled charcoal marker and drew a mystic symbol around it. When the figure was complete, she tapped it five times: tap-tap. Tap-tap, TAP. The medal exploded into a dozen huge shapes. Ice monsters, translucent, with snowy fur and icicle teeth and blank iceball eyeballs. The small fragments of metal seemed to adhere only to their formidable claws: nails that were literal nails.
“Cool this arrogant peasant in the cooler, coolies,” she ordered, pointing at Stile.
The monsters advanced on him. Stile tried to run out of the courtyard, but they leaped out to encircle him. Grinning coldly, they drew their noose tight. There would be no gentle handling here.
Suddenly Neysa flew out and changed to her unicorn-form. She charged forward, spearing a monster on her horn, lifting her head, and hurling the thing away to the side. It crashed into its neighbor, and both went down in a tangle of shattering ice.
“Ho! A unicorn!” White screamed, outraged. “Think ye to ‘scape my power in mine own Demesnes, animal?” She started to draw another symbol on the floor. That meant trouble. Obviously she could conjure anything with the right symbol. Stile launched himself at the White Adept—and was caught in a polar-bear hug by an intervening ice monster and lifted from the floor. Fool! he chided himself. He should have sung a spell. But no—White did not yet know his identity, apparently not con-necting the unicorn directly to him. He preferred to keep it secret if he could. He would try to handle this without magic.
He had better! The monster had a frigid hand over Stile’s mouth, half suffocating him and preventing him from speaking.
Stile tried to get his hand on the Platinum Flute. That would become a suitable weapon! But, jammed up against the freezing demon, he could not reach the Flute. He elbowed the monster. Ouch! That ice was hard! He kicked, but the monster seemed to have no feeling in its body. Stile could not throw the creature, because he had no footing. Meanwhile, that terrible cold was penetrating his flesh.
Neysa was busy routing the other monsters. One monster might be too much for Stile to handle, but one unicorn was too much for the whole horde of them. She bucked, her hind hooves flinging out to shatter two monsters; she plunged forward to impale another on her horn. With every motion she demolished a monster. Stile could have had no better ally.
But Stile was held silent, and the White Adept was completing her new symbol figure. This surely meant mischief. Stile bit the hand over his mouth. This helped; the icy fingers crunched under his teeth. The monster might feel no pain, but it couldn’t gag Stile with no fingers. Stile chewed and chewed, breaking off and spitting out the huge hand piecemeal.
