the call. They zoomed in toward the tangler. Chet lassoed one as it passed him; the dragon turned ferociously on him, biting into his shoulder, then went on to the plant. Three wyverns swooped at the tangler, jetting their fires at it. There was a loud hissing; foul-smelling steam expanded outward. But a tentacle caught a second dragon and drew it in. No one tangled with a tangler without risk!
“We’d better get out of here,” Irene said. “Whoever wins this battle will be after us next.”
Dor agreed. He called to Grundy and Smash, and they went to join Chet.
The centaur was in trouble. Bright red blood streamed down his left side, and his arm hung uselessly. “Leave me,” he said. “I am now a liability.”
“We’re all liabilities,” Dor said. “Irene, grow some more healing plants.”
“I don’t have any,” she said. “We have to get down to ground and find one; then I can make it grow.”
“We can’t get down,” Chet said. “Not until night, when perhaps fog will form in the lower reaches, and we can walk down that.”
“You’ll bleed to death by night!” Dor protested. He took off his shirt, the new one Irene had made for him. “I’ll try to bandage your wound. Then-we’ll see.”
“Here, I’ll do it,” Irene said. “You men aren’t any good at this sort of thing. Dor, you question the cloud about a fast way down.”
Dor agreed. While she worked on the centaur, he interrogated the cloud they stood on. “Where are we, in relation to the land of Xanth?”
“We have drifted south of the land,” the cloud reported.
“South of the land! What about Centaur Isle?”
“South of that, too,” the cloud said smugly.
“We’ve got to get back there!”
“Sorry, I’m going on south. You should have disembarked an hour ago. You must talk to the wind; if it changed-“
Dor knew it was useless to talk to the wind; he had tried that as a child. The wind always went where it wanted and did what it pleased without much regard for the preferences of others. “How can we get down to earth in a hurry?”
“Jump off me. I’m tired of your weight anyway. You’ll make a big splash when you get there.”
“I mean safely!” It was pointless to get mad at the inanimate, but Dor was doing it.
“What do you need for safely?”
“A tilting ramp of clouds, going to solid land.”
“No, none of that here. Closest we have is a storm working up to the east. Its turbulence reaches down to the water.”
Dor looked east and saw a looming thunderhead. It looked familiar. He was about to have his third brush with that particular storm.
“That will have to do.”
“You’ll be sor-ree!” the cloud sang. “Those T-heads are mean ones, and that one has a grudge against you. I’m a cumulus humius myself, the most humble of fleecy clouds, but that one-“
“Enough,” Dor said shortly. He was already nervous enough about their situation. The storm had evidently exercised and worked up new vaporous muscle for this occasion. This would be bad-but what choice did they have? They had to get Chet down to land-and to Centaur Isle-quickly.
The party hurried across the cloud surface toward the storm. The thunderhead loomed larger and uglier as they approached; its huge damp vortex eyes glared at them, and its nose dangled downward in the form of a whirling cone. New muscle indeed! But the slanting sunlight caught the fringe, turning it bright silver on the near side.
“A silver lining!” Irene exclaimed. “I’d like to have some of that!”
“Maybe you can catch some on the way down,” Dor said gruffly.
She had criticized him for saving the gold, after all; now she wanted silver.
A wyvern detached itself from the battle with the tangler and winged toward them. “Look out behind; enemy at six o’clock!” Grundy cried.
Dor turned, wearily drawing his sword. But this dragon was no longer looking for trouble. It was flying weakly, seeming dazed. Before it reached them it sank down under the cloud surface and disappeared. “The tangler must have squeezed it,” Grundy said.
“The tangler looks none too healthy itself,” Irene pointed out. She was probably the only person in Xanth who would have sympathy for such a growth. Dor looked back; sure enough, the tentacles were wilting. “That was quite a fight!” she concluded.
“But if the tangler is on its last roots,” Dor asked, “why did the wyvern fly away from it? It’s not like any dragon to quit a fight unfinished.”
They had no answer. Then, ahead of them, the wyvern pumped itself above the cloud again, struggling to clear the thunderstorm ahead. But it failed; it could not attain sufficient elevation. It blundered on into the storm.
The storm grabbed the dragon, tossed it about, and caught it in the whirling cone. The wyvern rotated around and around, scales flying out, and got sucked into the impenetrable center of the cloud.
“I hate to see a storm feeding,” Grundy muttered.
“That thing’s worse than the tangler!” Irene breathed. “It gobbled that dragon just like that!”
“We must try to avoid that cone,” Dor said. “There’s a lot of vapor outside it; if we can climb down that, near the silver lining-“
“My hooves are sinking in the cloud,” Chet said, alarmed.
Now they found that the same was happening to all their feet. The formerly bouncy surface had become mucky. “What’s happening?” Irene demanded, her tone rising warningly toward hysteria.
“What’s happening?” Dor asked the cloud.
“Your salve is losing its effect, dolt,” the thunderhead gusted, sounding bluffed.
The salve did have a time limit of a day or so. Quickly they applied more. That helped-but still the cloud surface was tacky. “I don’t like this,” Grundy said. “Maybe our old salve was wearing off, but the new application isn’t much better. I wonder if there’s any connection with the wilting tangler and the fleeing wyvern?”
“That’s it!” Chet exclaimed, wincing as his own animation shot pain through his shoulder. “We’re drifting out of the ambience of magic! That’s why magic things are in trouble!”
“That has to be it!” Dor agreed, dismayed. “The clouds are south of Xanth-and beyond Xanth the magic fades. We’re on the verge of Mundania!”
For a moment they were silent, shocked. The worst had befallen them.
“We’ll fall through the cloud!” Irene cried. “We’ll fall into the sea! The horrible Mundane sea!”
“Let’s run north,” Grundy urged. “Back into magic!”
“We’ll only come to the edge of the cloud and fall off,” Irene wailed. “Dor, do something!”
How he hated to be put on the spot like that! But he already knew his course. “The storm,” he said. “We’ve got to go through it, getting down, before we’re out of magic.”
“But that storm hates us!”
“That storm will have problems of its own as the magic fades,” Dor said.
They ran toward the thunderhead, who glared at them and tried to organize for a devastating strike. But it was indeed losing cohesion as the magic diminished, and could not concentrate properly on them.
As they stepped onto its swirling satellite vapors, their feet sank right through, as if the surface were slush. The magic was certainly fading, and very little time remained before they lost all support and plummeted.
Yet as they encountered the silver lining, Dor realized there was an unanticipated benefit here. This slow sinking caused by the loss of effect of the salve was allowing them to descend in moderate fashion, and just might bring them safely to ground. They didn’t have to depend on the ambience of the storm.
They caught hold of each other’s hands, so that no one would be lost as the thickening winds buffeted them. Smash put one arm around Chet’s barrel, holding him firm despite the centaur’s useless arm. They sank into the swirling fog, feeling it about them like stew.
Dor was afraid he would be smothered, but found he could breathe well enough. There was no salve on his mouth; cloud was mere vapor to his head.
