Wizard at Large by Terry Brooks Page B

the character, the stronger the demon.”Questor sighed. “Fillip and Sot are not really bad creatures. The strength the Darkling can draw from them should exhaust itself quickly.”
    “I feel sorry for them, Ben,”Willow said quietly. “For Fillip and Sot.”
    He looked at her in surprise, then nodded wearily. “I suppose I do, too. I don't imagine they even know what's happened to them.”He turned. “Parsnip, bring the horses!”
    The kobold hurried away. Ben glanced skyward momentarily, thinking. The rain was ending, the day edging quickly toward dusk. There wasn't enough time left to accomplish much of anything before nightfall.
    “What do we do now, High Lord?” Questor asked him. The others crowded close.
    Ben's jaw tightened. “I'll tell you what we do, Questor.We wait until morning. Then we go after Fillip and Sot. We hunt for them until we find them, and when we find them we get the bottle back and shut the Darkling away once and for all!”
    He glanced over at a grinning Bunion. “And next time we'll be ready for the little monster!”

Abernathy spent his first full day in Ben's world shut away in Elizabeth's room, discovering how much trouble he was really in. Elizabeth had considered the possibility of staying home sick from school in order to be with him, but had discarded the idea when she realized being sick would bring the housekeeper on a determined crusade of mercy and Abernathy would likely be discovered in the process. Besides, she hadn't come up with a plan to sneak him out of Graum Wythe yet, so she needed the day to think the matter over.
    So off she went to school while Abernathy stayed hidden in her room, reading old magazines and newspapers. He asked her for the reading material, and she brought it to him from her father's study before she left. Abernathy was Court Historian as well as Court Scribe in Landover and he knew something of the histories of other worlds as well as his own. He had made it a point to study the history of Ben's world when Meeks moved over there and began recruitingmen willing to pay for Landover's throne. It had been pretty frightening stuff. Most of what Abernathy remembered had to do with machines and sciences and any number of wars. Since he was wearing the medallion, he could read and speak the language of any world he was in, so learning what Ben's world was like wouldn't be difficult. But it would be necessary if he was to find a way back to his own.
    So he picked through the stack of magazines and newspapers, propped up on Elizabeth's bed amid stuffed animals and dolls, a scattering of pillows at his back, and tried to figure out how things worked. Most of his reading was superfluous. There were an abnormally large number of stories about wars and killing, most the result of politics and economics, many having no rational purpose. There were a number of stories having to do with investigations of one sort or another as well. Abernathy read a few and gave up, concluding that he was trapped in a world full of crooks and thieves. Some of the magazines offered stories of romance and adventure, but Abernathy skipped those. He read more closely the advertisements—that's what they were called, he discovered—and learned most of what was useful from them.
    The advertisements told him what was for sale in the way of goods and services, and that let him discover several things. It let him discover that no one traveled by horse or carriage; everyone rode or even flew in machines developed by the world's sciences. It let him discover that in order to use these machines, he had to pay for the privilege with money or something called credit, and he, of course, had neither. Finally, it let him discover—forgetting for the moment the fact that he was a talking dog—that no one dressed anything like the way he did, talked anything like the way he did, or shared much of anything else in the way of a common social, economic, or cultural background. Once beyond the walls