The Source of Magic (10 page)

“But that means we can only advance deeper into the crevice!” Bink said, appalled. “Or wait until dark.” Either course was disaster; in complete darkness the nickelpedes would be upon them in a mass, and gobble every part of their bodies in disk-chunks called nickels. What a horrible fate, to be nickeled to death!

The dragon’s flame would not last forever; the creature had to refuel. Which was what it had been trying to do at the outset, chasing them. The moment its fires gave out, the nickelpedes would swarm back in.

“The dragon can’t be saved,” Chester said. “Get on my back, Bink; I’ll gallop out of here, now that we’re past the obstruction. Crombie can leap from its back and fly.”

“No,” Bink said firmly. “That would violate our truce. We agreed to see the whole party safe outside.”

“We did not,” the centaur said, nettled. “We agreed not to attack it. We shall not attack it. We shall merely leave it.”

“And let the nickelpedes attack it instead?” Bink finished. “That was not my understanding. You go if you choose; I’m finishing my commitment, implied as well as literal.”

Chester shook his head. “You’re not only the bravest man I’ve seen, you’re the man-headedest.”

I.e., brave and stubborn. Bink wished it were true. Buoyed by his talent, he could take risks and honor pledges he might otherwise have reneged on. Crombie and Chester had genuine courage; they knew they could die. He felt guilty, again, knowing that he would get out of this somehow, while his friends had no such assurance. Yet he knew they would not desert him. So he was stuck: he had to place them in terrible peril—to
honor his truce with an enemy who had tried to kill them all. Where was the ethical course?

“If we can’t go back, we’ll just have to go forward,” Chester decided. “Tell your friend to get up steam.”

The irony was unsubtle—but Chester was not a subtle centaur. In fact, he was an argumentative brawler. But a loyal friend. Bink’s guilt remained. His only hope was that as long as they were all in this fix together, his talent might extricate them together. Might.

“Dragon, if you would—” Bink called. “Maybe there’s an exit ahead.”

“Maybe the moon isn’t made of green cheese,” Chester murmured. It was sarcasm, but it reminded Bink poignantly of the time in his childhood when there had been what the centaurs called an eclipse: the sun had banged into the moon and knocked a big chunk out of it, and a great wad of the cheese had fallen to the ground. The whole North Village had gorged on it before it spoiled. Green cheese was the best—but it only grew well in the sky. The best pies were in the sky, too.

The dragon lurched forward. Bink threw his arms about its ankle to keep from being dislodged; this was worse than riding a centaur! Crombie spread his wings partially for balance, and Chester, facing the rear, trotted backward, startled. What was a cautious pace for the dragon was a healthy clip for the others.

Bink was afraid the crevice would narrow, making progress impossible. Then he would really have a crisis of conscience! But it stabilized, extending interminably forward, curving back and forth so that no exit was visible. Periodically the dragon blasted out the path with a snort of flame. But Bink noticed the blasts were getting weaker. It took a lot of energy to shoot out fire, and the dragon was hungry and tiring. Before long it would no longer be able to brush back the nickelpedes. Did dragons like green cheese? Irrelevant thought! Even if cheese would restore the fire, there was no moon available right now, and if the moon were in the sky, how could they reach it?

Then the crevice branched. The dragon paused, perplexed. Which was the most promising route?

Crombie closed his griffin eyes and spun as well as he could
on the dragon’s back. But again his wing pointed erratically, sweeping past both choices and finally falling, defeated. Crombie’s spell was evidently in need of the spell doctor—at a most inopportune time.

“Trust the; bird-head to foul it up,” Chester muttered.

Crombie, whose bird hearing evidently remained in good order, reacted angrily. He squawked and walked along the dragon toward the centaur, the feathers of his neck lifting like the hackles of a werewolf.

“Relax!” Bink cried. “We’ll never get out if we quarrel among ourselves!”

Reluctantly, Crombie moved back to his station. It seemed to be up to Bink to decide on the route.

Was there a chance the two branches looped around and met each other? If so, this was a handy way to get the dragon turned about, so they all could get out of here. But that seemed unlikely. At any rate, if it were this way, either path would do. “Bear left.”

The dragon marched into the left one. The nickelpedes followed. It was getting harder to drive them off; not only was the shadow advancing, the oblique angle of the new passage made a narrower shaft for the sunlight.

Bink looked up into the sky—and discovered that things were even worse than they had seemed. Clouds were forming. Soon there would be no sunlight at all. Then the nickelpedes would be bold indeed.

The passage divided again. Oh, no! This was becoming a maze—a deadly serious one. If they got lost in it—

“Left again,” Bink said. This was awful; he was guessing, and it was getting them all deeper into trouble. If only Crombie’s talent were operative here! Strange how it had failed. It had seemed to be in good order until they entered the crevice. In fact, it had pointed them here. Why had it sent them into a region that blanked it out? And why had Bink’s own talent permitted this? Had it failed too?

Suddenly he was afraid. He had not realized how much he had come to depend on his talent. Without it he was vulnerable! He could be hurt or killed by magic.

No! He could not believe that. His magic had to remain—and Crombie’s too. He just had to figure out why they were malfunctioning at the moment.

Malfunctioning? How did he know they were? Maybe those talents were trying to do their jobs, but weren’t being interpreted correctly. Like the dragon, they were powerful but silent. Crombie merely had to ask the right question. If he asked “Which road leads out of the maze?” it was possible that any of them did—or none. What would his talent do then? If he demanded the specific direction of out, and the escape route curved, wouldn’t his pointing appendage have to curve about, too? There was no single direction, no single choice; escape was a labyrinth. So Crombie was baffled, thinking his talent had failed, when perhaps it had only quit in disgust.

Suppose Bink’s talent was aware of this. It would not worry; it would show him a way to make Crombie’s talent operate, in due course. But it would be better if Bink figured that way out himself, because then he could be sure that all of them escaped. That way, both friendship and honor would be preserved.

So now the test of his mettle was upon him. How could he solve the riddle of the balked talent? Obviously straight direction was not the answer to the question of out. Yet Crombie’s talent was directional. He asked where something was, and it showed the direction. If direction were not the answer in this case, what was—and how could Crombie identify it?

Maybe he could use Crombie’s talent to find out. “Crombie,” he called around the dragon’s body. “Where is something that will get us out of here?”

The griffin obligingly went through his routine, to no avail.

“It’s no good,” Chester grumbled. “His talent’s soured. Not that it ever was much good. Now if
I
had a talent—”

Crombie squawked, and the tone was such that it was obvious that the centaur had been treated to a rich discourse on prospective orifices available for shoving such a talent. Chester’s ears reddened.

“That’s what you’re along to find out,” Bink reminded him. “Right now, Crombie’s all we have. I think there’s a key, if I can only find it in time.” He paused to skewer another nickelpede.
The things died slowly, but they didn’t attack after skewering. They couldn’t; their companions gobbled them up immediately. Soon it would not be possible to concentrate on anything but nickelpedes! “Crombie, where is something that will show us how to get out of here?”

“You just asked that,” Chester grumbled.

“No, I modified the language slightly. Showing is not the same as—” He stopped to watch the griffin. For a moment it seemed Crombie’s talent was working, but then his wing wavered back and forth and gave up.

“Still, we must be getting warm,” Bink said with false hope. “Crombie, where is there something that will stop the nickelpedes?”

Crombie’s wing pointed straight up.

“Sure,” Chester said, disgusted. “The sun. But it’s going behind a cloud.”

“At least it proves his talent is working.”

They came to another fork. “Crombie, which fork will bring us fastest to something that will help us?” Bink asked.

The wing pointed firmly to the right. “Hey, it actually worked!” Chester exclaimed mockingly. “Unless he’s faking it.”

Crombie let out another vile-sounding squawk, almost enough in itself to scorch a few nickelpedes.

But now the cloud covered the sun, sinking the entire cleft in awful shadow. The nickelpedes moved in with a multiple clicking of satisfaction and anticipation and garden-variety greed. “Dragon, take the right fork!” Bink cried. “Blast it out ahead of you, and
run
. Use up your last reserves of fire if you have to. We’re on to something good.” He hoped.

The dragon responded by shooting out a searing bolt of flame that illuminated the passage far ahead. Again the nickelpedes squeeked as they died. The dragon galloped over their smoking corpses, carrying Bink and Chester and Crombie along. But it was tiring.

Something sparkled in the dim passage ahead. Bink inhaled hope—but quickly realized it was only a will-o’-the-wisp. No help there!

No help? Suddenly Bink remembered something. “That’s it!” he cried. “Dragon, follow that wisp!”

The dragon obeyed, despite Chester’s incredulous neigh. It snorted no more flame, for its furnace was almost exhausted, but it could still run at a respectable pace. The wisp dodged about, as wisps had always done, always just at the verge of perception. Wisps were born teases. The dragon lumbered through fork after fork, quite lost—and suddenly emerged into a dry riverbed.

“We’re out!” Bink cried, hardly believing it himself. But not yet safe; the nickelpedes were boiling out of the chasm.

Bink and Chester scrambled away from the dragon and up and out of the gully, and found themselves in the ashes of an old burn. Crombie spread his wings and launched into the sky with a squawk of pure relief. The nickelpedes did not follow even the dragon; they could not scuttle well through ashes, and might get caught by returning sunlight. The party was safe.

The dragon collapsed, panting, in a cloud of ashes. Bink walked around to its snout. “Dragon, we had a good fight, and you were winning. We fled, and you pursued, and we all got caught in the cleft. We made a truce to escape, and you honored it well and so did we. By working together we saved all our lives. Now I would rather have you as a friend than an enemy. Will you accept friendship with the three of us before we part?”

The dragon looked at him. Finally, slowly, it inclined its nose slightly forward in an affirmative nod.

“Until we meet again—good hunting,” Bink said. “Here, we can help you a little. Crombie, where is the nearest good dragon-prey—something even a tired dragon can nab?”

Crombie spun in the air and flung out a wing as he fell. It pointed north—and now they heard the thrashing of something large, probably caught in a noose-loop bush. Something fat and foolish, who would die a slow death in the loops if not dispatched more mercifully by the scorch of a dragon.

“Good hunting,” Bink repeated, patting the dragon on its lukewarm copper nose and turning away. The dragon started north.

“What was the point in that?” Chester asked in a low tone. “We have no need of a dragon’s friendship.”

“I wanted it amicable, here,” Bink said. “This is a very special place, where peace should exist among all creatures of Xanth.”

“Are you crazy? This is a burnout!”

“I’ll show you,” Bink said. “We’ll follow that wisp.”

The will-o’-the-wisp was still present, hovering not quite close enough to overtake. “Look, Bink,” Chester protested. “We lucked out on that wisp—but we dare not follow it any farther. It’ll lead us into destruction.”

“Not this one,” Bink said, following it. After a moment Chester shrugged, gave a what-can-you-do? kick with his hind hooves, and followed. Crombie glided down to join them.

Soon the wisp stopped at a glowstone marking a grave. As they approached, the stone lit up with the words
HERMAN THE HERMIT
.

“Uncle Herman!” Chester exclaimed. “You mean this is the place he—?”

“The place he saved Xanth from the wiggles,” Bink said. “By summoning many creatures with his wisps, then setting a salamander-fire to burn the wiggles out. He gave his noble life in that effort, and died a hero. I knew the wisp would lead us here, once I recognized the burnout, because you are his kind and kin and the wisps honor his memory. Crombie’s talent located the wisp, and the wisp—”

“Uncle Herman, hero,” Chester said, his face twisting into an unfamiliar expression. The belligerent centaur was unused to the gentle emotions of reverence and respect. Almost, it seemed there was a forlorn melody played by a flute, enhancing the mood.

Bink and Crombie withdrew, leaving Chester to his contemplation in privacy. Bink tripped over a pile of dirt that hadn’t been there a moment ago and almost fell headlong; that was the only sour note.

G
ood Magician Humfrey’s castle was the same as ever. It stood tall and slender, with stout outer ramparts and a high inner tower topped by embrasures and parapets and similar accouterments normal to castles. It was smaller than Bink remembered, but he knew it had not changed. Perhaps the problem was that his memory of the interior made it larger than his memory of the exterior. With magic, it was possible that the inside really was larger than the outside.

The magic access routes had been changed, however, and the hippocampus or water-horse was gone from the moat, its time of service expired. There was surely another creature standing guard inside, in lieu of the manticora Bink had known: the one at the Anniversary party. Even monsters had to give a year of their lives as fee for the Good Magician’s Answers, and they normally performed as guardians of the castle. Humfrey did not appreciate casual intrusions.