There was a horrified intake of breath from a gobliness who happened to be pa.s.sing by. Several cookies spoiled around the edges. The jaw of a male goblin dropped. Jenny Elf, who derived from a foreign culture, looked sickened.

It was to Gwenny's credit that she managed not to blush.

Che realized that she was probably so concerned about the threat to the children of the mountain that she wasn't really absorbing the disgusting nature of the word. He had never heard it before, but its degrading essence struck right through to his mind and lodged there forever. Only his recent entry into the Adult Conspiracy enabled him to hear it without freaking out, and he knew that the tender minds of young children would be hideously warped, and that they would grow up to be the worst goblins yet, if such an utterance came their way. There was no doubt about it: Gobble had learned the forbidden words.

"I ask you again," Gwenny said evenly. "Come with me, and do not utter any more such filth."

"Yeah? Make me!" Gobble took a breath. Then he yelled. Now the cookies around him sent up wisps of filthy smoke. The gobliness, who had just been recovering from the last word, reeled anew. The male goblin began to smile. He of course lacked the gumption to perform such a violation himself, but he was typical of his ilk in his vicarious appreciation of it. Che felt sick, and Jenny was turning a faint mottled green.

"That does it," Gwenny said. Che saw that her jaw was clenching involuntarily. Only raw nerve kept her stable. She brought the wand around and pointed it at the brat. He rose into the air, spilling crumbs.

"Hey!" he yelled, startled. "Where'd you get that?"

"From my mother, not yours," Gwenny said. She moved the wand carefully, and Gobble moved along just above the floor.

"You can't do this!" the boy screamed. "I'm going to be chief! You're just a dumb girl!"

"I'm the daughter of Chief Gouty and his wife, G.o.diva," Gwenny replied. "As such I am the leading candidate to be the next chief, and I rank you by half your parentage. No one else can stop you, and no one at all can stop me. Now you are coming with me, regardless."

"No I'm not! No I'm not!" he screamed. "Guards! Arrest this impostor! Lock her in a cell!"

But the goblins in the vicinity did not move. They knew that Gwenny was Gouty's legitimate child, and that they could not interfere with her.

Not openly. They liked the words, but at the same time knew that no child should be uttering them, so they didn't know quite what to do.

"####!" Gobble yelled. "++++!" But though those nearby blanched, they were all adults, so couldn't be freaked out, quite. The remaining cookies turned into steamy sludge, but the brat remained captive to the wand.

So he took a breath and spewed out his ultimate: Che's young mind reeled with the onslaught of those abominable words. He felt nauseated, but managed to keep his stomach down and his face straight. He saw Jenny doing likewise, though she was turning a deeper green around the gills. That was a good trick for someone who had no gills.

Gwenny concentrated on her wand, causing the brat to float through the chamber door. He quivered a little, because her control was not yet quite a.s.sured, but got through.

"Help me, somebody!" Gobble shouted. "She's kidnapping me! I'm your future chief! Stop her!"

"Stand clear," Gwenny said, and the goblins reluctantly did so. She lofted Gobble on down the tunnel. Che and Jenny followed.

As they pa.s.sed the nursery where the children were normally kept, Gobble managed to rip out one more word.

"

But there were no screams of freaked-out children. It seemed that G.o.diva had had them removed from the vicinity of the exit route.

Gobble's awful ploy had failed.

G.o.diva met them farther along. "Here are your packs. They have food and water for a two-day trip; I hope you can complete it within that time. If not, I hope you can forage." She gave them each one, and tossed one to Gobble where he hung in the air.

"I don't want this junk!" the brat complained.

"Go hungry, then," G.o.diva said. "It isn't as if anyone would miss you if you starved."

Gobble reconsidered, and put on the pack.

Gwenny and her party moved on out of Goblin Mountain and around to the side where there was a crevice between it and the next mountain. At the end of the crevice was a boulder wedged in a hole.

"Now you will have to hold Gobble for a moment," Gwenny said. She lofted the brat over to Che.

Che grabbed one arm, and Jenny grabbed the other.

Neither of them was a goblin, so Gobble had no authority over them.

"****" Gobble cried, struggling, but the word had less force because he had used it before. It seemed that he had learned only six of the seven forbidden words.

Certainly they would not tell him the seventh!

Gwenny oriented her wand on the boulder. It looked as if it had been in place about four hundred years, but now it floated out and came to rest a short distance away. Behind it was revealed a dark and dreadful cave.

"Hey, that's where the callicantzari hang out!" Gobble cried, fear ringing his voice. "You can't dump me in there!"

"We are all going in there," Gwenny said.

"Help! Kidnapping!" he screamed in desperation.

"We're all going to die in that hole."

But the goblins on the mountain just stood there helplessly. Gwenny Goblin was the only one they could not interfere with, even if she had a suicidal nature.

Gwenny aimed the wand at Gobble again, and he floated up, his arms and legs waving wildly. He tried to hold on to Che and Jenny, but they stepped out of the way the moment they released him. "Aaaargh!" he wailed as he was lofted into the cave, just as if the others weren't going in with him.

"We need a torch," Che said.

"Yes, it is very dark and dank in here," Jenny agreed, shuddering.

"That, and the fact that the callicantzari are afraid of fire, though I understand they use it to cook their meat.

That's part of their fouled-upness."

"No," Gwenny said. "A torch would advertise our presence. We must try to get through without alerting them. Mother said there is supposed to be fungus light when it gets deep enough."

"Hal" Gobble said. "Hey, callicantzari! Come and get them!"

"You will be the first one they eat," Gwenny told him.

That set him back. Then he tried to bluff it out. "How come? Everybody knows that girls taste better than boys. They'll eat you first, and I'll escape."

"No. They will do something else to us first," Gwenny said evenly. Che was impressed by the way she was able to speak of that Adult Conspiracy secret without blanching. "And they don't like horsemeat as well as goblin meat, so they'll leave Che too. But you will be just right for them to start with, because you're small and loud and dusted with cookie crumbs. Also, you smell bad, and they have terrible taste. They prefer tainted meat." She was showing qualities of leadership, goblin style.

Gobble decided to shut up. He evidently realized that she was probably right, even if he didn't know exactly what the monsters would do to the girls first. It would hardly make a difference to him, if he got eaten first.

They moved on down below the mountain, Gobble not evincing so much as a peep. After a while the fading light from the cave mouth was replaced by yellow, green, and blue glows. The fungus light was showing, in many colors. The farther they went, the more colors showed, until there was a full rainbow spectrum. It was eerily pretty. It showed the outline of the tunnel, because the fungus lined every surface. It wasn't very bright, but would do.

They came to a larger cavern, and then to branching pa.s.sages. Now it was time for the cat. "Sammy, find the River Lethe," Jenny said, setting him on the floor. "But don't run."

Naturally the cat bounded off at full velocity. That was because he was an animal who didn't truly understand human or centaur imperatives.

Jenny started to run after him, but Che held her back. "You'll crash into a stalagmite," he warned.

"But I'll lose Sammy!"

"No you won't. See, there are dark spots where his paws crushed the fungus. We can follow his trail."

He was right, of course. Centaurs always were. The cat's trail was reasonably clear. They could follow it at leisure.

They did so, leaving their own trail behind. But Che knew better than to trust to that for their return; the fungus might regrow and reglow before they came back, erasing their trail. Or other creatures might pa.s.s this way, obscuring it. So he made sure to fix the exact route in his memory, so that he could find their way without reference to the fungus.

Then they heard something. A sort of ugly shuffling and scuffling, as if something awful was doing something worse. That must be one of the callicantzari!

"Can we hurry?" Jenny whispered.

They hurried. But when they did, they made more noise-and so did the unseen thing. Now there was more than one ugly noise, as if several things, each more grotesque than the others, were closing clumsily in on them.

Then one of them showed up ahead. It was even worse than Che had feared. It seemed to have started on the frame of a man, but gone astray. It had a grotesque furry face with a bulbous nose and two dirty eye slits and a mouth obscured by twisted fangs. The body seemed to have bones in the wrong places, and the muscles attached backwards, exactly as represented in the centaur cla.s.ses.

If it tried to jump forward, it might lurch backward, though probably it had learned to try to jump backward when it wanted to go forward.

But that was not the worst of it. Its breath was such a foul stench that the fungus around it was turning bilious green. Che knew that they would all choke if they got too close to the monster. "We had better run," he suggested.

"But it's right where we have to go," Gwenny said.

"And we don't dare leave the trail; we might not find it again."

She had a point or two. But Jenny came to the rescue: "Use the wand on it!"

"But then Gobble will run away," Gwenny said.

I don't think so, because there's another monster behind us. Gobble's safer with us."

Gwenny set Gobble down, and sure enough, the brat did not run. She aimed the wand at the monster, and the callicantzari made a noisome moan, or maybe a moaning noise, and sailed away backwards.

Then the four of them charged forward down the tunnel.

The monster behind pursued, but it was so disjointed that it couldn't keep the pace. The one ahead kept floating backward, because of the magic of the wand.

The tunnel widened into a pa.s.sage, and the pa.s.sage into a hall, and the hall into a gallery. They had to dodge around the many supporting columns. Fortunately the glow fungus made each one stand out, so they could see it coming.

Suddenly they came to a great dark cleft in the floor.

There at the brink of it was a small furry shape, while the monster was suspended over the chasm. Che realized that this could be an extension of the great Gap Chasm, gone underground. If so, there was no hope of getting around it; they had to go over it.

"Sammy!" Jenny cried, swooping down on the small shape. Che realized that the cat had been stopped by the chasm, so had simply waited for them to catch up. That was just as well, because if Sammy had tried to hurdle the cleft, and missed-but obviously he had more sense than that.

Gwenny dumped the callicantzari on the other side, then aimed the wand at Che. "If the monster tries to get you, I think there's a knife in the pack," she said.

"I'll just make him light and throw him away," Che said more confidently than he felt.

Then he floated across the gulf, and landed on the other side. The callicantzari did come at him; he spun aside and flicked it with his tail. The monster, abruptly lightened, leaped into the air-and plunged into the chasm. Che was chagrined; he hadn't intended that. He watched the thing float slowly down. At least it wouldn't land hard.

Meanwhile, Gwenny was lofting Gobble across. Then she started on Jenny.

"But wait-how will you get across?" Jenny asked.

"oops-I hadn't thought of that," the goblin girl said, chagrined.

"There should be a rope," Che called, rummaging desperately in his pack.

In a moment he felt it. G.o.diva had indeed had the foresight to provide them with this most useful tool for cave delving. "Catch this, and I will haul you across." He knotted the end and hurled it across the chasm.

But Gwenny was now facing the other way. One of the callicantzari was lumbering at her. She lofted it up and back, so that it tumbled into the one behind, and they both became a writhing ma.s.s of limbs and torsos, each part worse than the rest.

Jenny caught the rope and tied it to a column. "But then the monsters may use it too," Che said. "And we won't be able to get it back."

"Yes, we will," Jenny said. "You don't want to try to hold her full weight; she might drag you both down. So tie your end to a column, too."

Che obeyed, anchoring his end firmly. "But-"

Jenny turned to Gwenny. "Now you climb across old that rope. Quickly!"

"But I haven't lofted you across yet!" Gwenny protested.

"Right. I'll go last. Move!"

Gwenny put away her wand and took hold of the rope.

She had strong goblin hands, and was able to hand herself across in short order. As soon as Gwenny completed her crossing, Jenny untied the rope at her end. It slid into the chasm, but Che hauled it up on his side.

But another monster was coming at her. "Look out!"' Che cried as the monster reached a twist-fingered hand for her.

Jenny scooted away, but the clumsy arm came down,, brushing her head. A backward finger caught the bow of her spectacles, and they were ripped off her face.

"Oh!" Jenny cried, suddenly blinded. She staggered forward, trying to see where she was going.

The callicantzari clung to the spectacles. It brought them to its face.

It was trying to eat them! Che and Gwenny watched in horror as it crunched them between its tusks.

Jenny staggered toward the chasm. "No!" Che and Gwenny cried together.

Then Jenny stepped over the brink. She screamed as she fell into the awful depth.

But in a moment her descent stopped. Jenny rose back to the top, and came toward them.