Up In A Heaval by Piers Anthony Page B

mind your esteemed position. All the zombies look to you for guidance and protection. If they have placed valuable objects with you for safekeeping, will said belongings be concealed from these humans?
    I realize you well know your business; you would not have attained your place of authority otherwise. However, from personal experience with “people” I must advise you to exercise extreme caution.
    With kind regards, Zombie.guard.inc
    Umlaut considered that. The letter was obviously well out of date; that snail was a terror in that respect. The Zombie Master had turned over the castle to Justin Tree and Breanna of the Black Wave a year ago. So it was way too late for him to exercise caution of any kind.
    Well, at least it seemed to be a harmless letter. Umlaut folded it and put it away. He would have no concern about delivering it.
    “Uh-oh,” the boatman said.
    Umlaut didn't like the sound of that. “What's wrong?”
    “We're coming to the Dire Straits. That's where everything goes wrong.”
    Umlaut saw that there was an ominous ripple in the water ahead, where the lake narrowed. “There isn't an alternate route?”
    “Not today. Usually the straits are elsewhere, but they must have moved in overnight. We'll have to chance them.”
    Umlaut wasn't easy about that but saw no alternative. In any event, the craft had already been caught up by the swift current of the straits. Maybe today would be the exception, when things didn't go wrong.
    “Oh, no!” Preston Black groaned.
    That did not sound unduly promising. “What is it?”
    “Scylla and Charybdis are on duty today.”
    “Silly and Charitable? They don't sound too bad.”
    Preston glanced at him as if he were the zombie. “I gather you don't know your mythology.”
    “I guess I don't,” Umlaut agreed.
    “Scylla was once a pretty nymph, but she annoyed a god, who turned her into a six-headed sea monster with a taste for live meat. She was a terror for passing ships because she would snatch six crewmen off their decks and eat them. So they learned to avoid her. Then she teamed up with Charybdis, who was a whirlpool that liked to swallow ships whole. When a ship tried to avoid Charybdis, it got too close to Scylla, so she still got her meal.”
    “But couldn't ships simply sail around them both?”
    “Not in narrow passages.”
    Umlaut was beginning to get a glimmer of the problem. “They're here? How did that happen?”
    “In the course of time they got old and died. They appealed to the Zombie Master, who zombied them on condition that they not bother regular Xanth folk. So they joined him here on Zombie World.”
    And now this boat faced zombie monsters. Things were certainly going wrong in the Dire Straits. It was too late to turn back; the current had a firm grip on the boat.
    Umlaut gazed ahead. There just to the right was a huge whirling depression in the ooze covering the water. That would be the zombie whirlpool. To the left were six snakelike heads projecting from the water. “Why, she's a serpent!”
    Sesame took an interest. She gave Umlaut a Leave this to me glance and slithered to the front of the boat, building an emulation as she went. Soon she seemed to have several ugly zombie sea monster heads. She was good!
    The boatman steered the boat left, as there was no point in feeding the whirlpool. Scylla's heads loomed close, ready to pounce, each more rotten than the others. But they were met by Sesame's heads. The two monsters held a brief twelve-headed dialogue. Then Scylla backed off and disappeared under the slime.
    “I never saw the like,” Preston said. “What did she do?”
    “I think she invoked professional courtesy,” Umlaut said. “One sea monster doesn't intrude on the domain of another.”
    “I could get to like a monster like that,” Preston said as Sesame dissolved the emulation, her heads coming together and merging into one. “She just saved us from a bad chomping and swallowing. Of course a zombie can't be killed,