Read Geis of the Gargoyle for Free Online Page B

but he suspected that a human man would find her attractive.   "Or one year, depending how you count it; I haven't gone out on my own as Metria's alter ego all that long."
     
    That seemed like a fair dual answer.   "So this ninetythree-year-old ancient old woman, youthened to her twenties, is assigned to help me on my mission," Gary said, somewhat dispiritedly.   "I suppose I had better get on with it."
     
    "That's what I was up to.   I can pop to the pool just like that, but you can't.   You need a physical conveyance.   Can you sing?"
     
    That must be her craziness showing again.   "No."
     
    'Too bad.   We could have had you ride a diggle.   They carry folk through rock for a song." She pondered, her body fuzzing out as she lost focus.   "Maybe a figgle."
     
    "A what?"
     
    "That's another subspecies of vole.   All it wants is a fig.   So you don't give a fig."
     
    More craziness! "You don't give it what it wants?"
     
    "Yes.   Because when it gets its fig, it eats it and goes home to snooze."
     
    "So why not promise it a fig after it has helped you?"
     
    "It doesn't work that way.   Piggies don't plan for the future.   They want to know now."
     
    "But you can't give it the fig now."
     
    She smiled.   "You are catching on, stoneface."
     
    "So we can't use a figgle."
     
    "Yes we can."
     
    He knew she was teasing him, but he was stuck for it, so he asked the obvious question: "How?"
     
    "By telling it what we aren't giving it."
     
    "I don't understand."
     
    "Well, you're only a stone animal.   Now I'll summon a figgle for us to ride."
     
    She was crazy, all right! But what else was there?
     
    Mentia put two fingers to her mouth, inhaled to just short of bursting, and blew a piercing whistle that made his stone ears craze.   There followed a rumbling in the ground, and in two moments and half an instant the wormlike snout of a huge nether creature poked from the soil.   "Ffiigg?" the sloppy mouth inquired.
     
    "Well, we're not giving you a shoe," Mentia retorted.   "But if you take us to the Brain Coral's Pool, who knows what we might give you?"
     
    The figgle cogitated in vermicular fashion, its thoughts evidently twisting deviously.   "Ffiigg?" it repeated.
     
    Gary was starting to begin to think about catching on.   "We're not giving you a castle," he said.
     
    Mentia stepped onto the creature's broadly rounded back, her solidly fleshed thighs straddling it.   Gary did the same, as well as he could, straddling it with four legs.   The creature was so solid that this did not feel as precarious as it looked.
     
    "Go poool," the creature said.   "Then ffigg?" "We're not giving you a parasol," Mentia said.   The creature's snout angled down and plunged into the earth as if it were water.   The body followed sinuously.   Gary wondered whether he should be alarmed, but before he could come to a conclusion they were descending through the ground.   There was only the faintest sensation, as of dirty fog sliding by.   But after most of a moment the fog thickened, becoming more like sludge.   "Get your mouth in gear," Mentia said.   "And don't repeat anything; that confuses it."
     
    Oh.   "We're not giving you a purple rock," Gary said, and the sludge thinned around them.   He did not care to discover what happened when the figgle got confused deep in the ground.
     
    "Or a green pair of socks," Mentia added.   Gary warmed to this.   "We're not giving you the talent of conjuring things from the Void," he said when the ground around them began to solidify again.
     
    "Or Stanley Steamer's birthday, which happens to be Dismember two-four," Mentia said.
     
    So it went.   The figgle seemed to be satisfied as long as they reassured it that they weren't giving it something other than a fig; that suggested by implication that they might give it a fig.   The fact that there was an almost infinite number of things that weren't figs didn't seem to matter; the figgle's strength was