Land of Unreason by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt

kobolds."
     
                "Why not?"
     
                "You're outnumbered,
one to a thousand. Yet there's a better reason, however high your heart run;
these wights are of such nature that they be held under certain bonds against
passing to open violence. But if it be first used on them, they are released
and can reply in overweening measure. No striking, then; sheer skill."
     
                "But," cried
Barber, "you want me to stop them from making swords, but I can't use
force. You won't tell me what to do or how to use even the wand."
     
                "You named yourself
diplomat, not we. Sure, you're a poor stick in the profession an you have not
met such tasks before ... Ha, here's the wand."
     
                He took it from Gosh and
handed it to Barber. It did not look in the least as it had when Titania used
it on Sneckett the evening before, but like an ivory walking stick. The handle
end came round in a crook with a carved snake's-head terminal.
     
                "Watch it well,"
warned Titania. "This wand has an enchantment in it; if it be lost, all
concerned including your sweet self will come on some misadventured piteous
overthrow. Go, then, and good luck with you."
     
    -
     

CHAPTER
V
     
                Nothing was easy. The park,
with its fantastic potted trees and eight-foot blossoms, stretched farther from
the tower than Barber had imagined; and his mind ran round and round the idea
Imponens had thrown out, as though at once seeking some escape and happy at not
finding it. In midnight arguments that flowered over the third Scotch-and-soda
he was used to describing himself as a rational materialist. Like many
intelligent people for whom the gospel of St. Einstein had replaced that
according to St. John, he read the newspaper science columns and suspected even
Jeans and Millikan of transcendentalism. Evidence that could be perceived by
the physical senses—everything depended on that. Extrapolation from such
evidence was dangerous. It resulted in theory which demanded experimental
proof.
     
                It was like reassembling a
clock and having it run perfectly with six cogwheels left out to find the
evidence on which he had always relied supporting the theory he had always
despised. Every physical sense assured him that he was not insane. So did
experimental proof, so far as he had been able to make it. And—final piece of conviction!—insane
people never considered the possibility that their senses were playing them
false.
     
                Yet Fred Barber's senses
were assuring him in the most decided fashion that he had been born—that was
the only word for it—into another world. Imponens had made the only and obvious
deduction ... as he strode along, the picture of that brownie philosopher
turning cartwheels came to him and he smiled. It was the last sight he had seen
as he left the palace, Imponens cartwheeling through the trees.
     
                His logic cartwheeled too,
but always about that only possible deduction. Other worlds stretched beyond
this one into the personal future of Fred Barber, which he would enter when he
had accomplished his unknown task. But if the future, then the past—he must have
come into his own world, the "real" world, from some other still,
with a wiping out of memory during the process. Or would memory be wiped out?
Barber tried to recall something from the past that might lie behind his
conscious past. Was there not something vaguely familiar about the court and
its ceremonial?
     
                Hold hard. This was
reincarnation. Buddhism. Bahai. Theosophy, and goofy cults presided over by fat
ladies with faint mustaches. Barber looked round and found that the tower of
the royal palace, which he had been using as a point of departure, was no
longer visible. Nobody there had been able to give him any sensible directions
to the Kobold Hills. "Take