Isle Of View Read Free

The early shock of the loss was wearing off and being replaced by the grim certainty that there would be no easy resolution. She still had no idea where Che had been taken.
    “We had better see how the others are doing,” Grundy said, sounding dispirited himself. “Che has to be somewhere.”
    He was trying to cheer her, and successfully failing. But it was good advice anyway. She was supposed to be the liaison between the teams.
    “Closest is the ogre,” Grundy announced. It seemed that he had a list of the assignments. “Checking the Goblinate of the Golden Horde.”
    “The Golden Horde!” Chex exclaimed, horrified. “Those terrible goblins!”
    “They're your closest evil neighbors to the west,” he pointed out.
    They certainly were! They liked to catch creatures and torture them before cooking them. They lived around a hate spring, which perhaps accounted for their extreme meanness. If Che had fallen into their grubby hands...
    It was good that the ogre was going there. An ogre knew how to handle goblins. It was said that goblins who attacked an ogre would find some of their number orbiting the moon—and those were the lucky ones. Still, if they had Che, the foal could get bashed right along with the goblins, because ogres were justifiably proud of their stupidity.
    She angled west. Soon she observed a path of trees being knocked down as the ogre traveled the only way he knew how—straight ahead, bashing any obstacles out of the way. The average tree didn't like the average ogre much, but didn't have much choice about contact if the ogre came its way. Some trees, however, did fight back, like the tanglers. It was said that an ogre-tangler battle was worth watching— from a distance.
    She flew on past the ogre to the goblin camp. The goblins spied her and shook their little fists at her. But there was no sign of Che. That was reassuring—
    “Unless they cooked him already,” Grundy remarked.
    Chex almost fell out of the sky. What a genius the golem had for the wrong thought!
    “But they don't have a pot going,” Grundy continued. “They couldn't have done it in this time.”
    Maybe it was the right thought after all! He was right: there was no smoke, no fire. So either Che had not been cooked or he wasn't here at all. She wasn't sure which to hope for.
    She flew back to the ogre. “They're right ahead,” she called. “Keep an eye out for the foal!”
    “Me goal save foal,” he agreed.
    Well, he had the right attitude. But she felt better now that it seemed unlikely that the foal was there.
    “Next group is human, checking the centaur village north of the Gap,” Grundy said.
    Chex knew why no centaurs were participating in the search: they did not accept her as one of them. Indeed, they considered her a monstrosity, a degenerate crossbreed. She had been welcomed by the winged monsters but not by her own kind. But she tried not to dwell on that; there was nothing to be gained by it. In time there might be an established species of winged centaurs, needing no affiliations with the ground-bound centaurs, just as the winged dragons survived nicely independent of the land dragons. But not if Che was lost!
    The human party consisted of three milkweed maids. They must have been given some kind of speed-up spell, because they could not have gotten this far this fast otherwise. They were crossing the invisible bridge, seeming to be in midair, and giggling as they teased each other about what monster below might be seeing up whose skirt. There was no monster below; the Gap Dragon had joined the search effort. But milkweed maids tended to be silly anyway; it was said to be one of the features that made them attractive to men. Chex did not quite understand that, but of course she wasn't human.
    She swooped low. “Have you seen anything?” she called.
    “Just trees!” one called. “But we haven't started looking yet, because our assignment is the centaur village. Someone else is checking the forest south