The Source of Magic (14 page)

“Oh, no—they’re winged fruits!” Bink exclaimed. “We should have sneaked up on them. Why didn’t you warn us, Crombie?”

“You didn’t ask, fathead,” the golem retorted.

“Catch them!” Chester cried, jumping and reaching high to snatch an apple out of the air. Bink, half-dislodged, hastily dismounted.

A ripe peach hovered for a moment, getting its bearings. Bink leaped at it, catching it in one hand. The wings fluttered frantically as it tried to escape, then gave up. They were leaves, green and ordinary, adapted to this special purpose. He stripped them off ruthlessly so his food could not escape, and went after the next.

He tripped over something and fell flat, missing a bobbing pomegranate. Angrily he looked at the obstacle that had thwarted him. It was another of the ubiquitous mounds of fresh earth. This lime he got up and stomped it absolutely flat. Then he dashed on after more fruit.

Soon he had a small collection of fruits: apple, peach, plum, two pears (of course), several grapes, and one banana. The last, flying on monstrous vulture-like wing-leaves, had given him a terrible struggle, but it was delicious. Bink did not feel entirely easy about consuming such fruit, because it seemed too much like living creatures, but he knew the wings were merely a magic adaptation to enable the plants to spread their seeds more widely. Fruit was supposed to be eaten; it wasn’t really conscious or feeling. Or was it?

Bink put that thought from his mind and looked about. They were on the verge of a forest of standing deadwood. Humfrey came awake. “I suffer misgivings,” he volunteered. “I don’t want to have to waste my magic ferreting out what killed those trees. We’d better go around.”

“What’s the good of being a Magician if you don’t use your magic?” Chester demanded testily.

“I must conserve my magic rigorously for emergency use,” Humfrey said. “These are mere nuisances we have faced so far, not worthy of my talent.”

“You tell ’em, twerp,” the golem agreed.

Chester looked unconvinced, but retained too much respect for the Magician to make further issue of it. “It’s getting on in the afternoon,” he remarked. “Where’s a good place to spend the night?”

Crombie stopped and whirled so vigorously he almost dislodged his riders. “Hmph!” Humfrey exclaimed, and the golem dutifully translated: “You blundering aviary feline! Get your catty feet on the ground!”

The griffin’s head rotated entirely around until the deadly eyes and beak pointed back. “Squawk!” Crombie said with authority. The golem did not translate, but seemed cowed. Crombie completed his maneuver and pointed a slightly new direction.

“That’s not far off the track; we’ll go there,” Chester decided, and no one contradicted him.

Their route skirted the dead forest, and this was fortuitous because there were few other hazards here. Whatever had killed the forest had also wiped out most of the magic associated with it, good and evil. Yet Bink developed a mounting curiosity about the huge trees they spied to the side. There were no marks upon them, and the grass beneath was luxuriant because of the new light let down. This suggested that the soil had not been poisoned by any monster. Indeed, a few new young shoots were rising, beginning the long task of restoring the forest. Something had struck and killed and departed without other trace of its presence.

To distract himself from the annoyance of the unanswerable riddle, Bink addressed the golem. “Grundy, if you care to relate it—what was your Question to the Magician?”

“Me?” the golem asked, amazed. “You have interest in
me
?”

“Of course I do,” Bink said. “You’re a—” He had been about to say “person” but remembered that the golem was technically not a person. “An entity,” he finished somewhat lamely. “You have consciousness, feelings—”

“No, no feelings,” Grundy said. “I am just a construct of string and clay and wood, animated by magic. I perform as directed, without interest or emotion.”

Without interest or emotion? That hardly seemed true. “You seemed to experience a personal involvement just now, when I expressed interest in you.”

“Did I? It must have been a routine emulation of human reaction. I have to perform such emulations in the course of my translation service.”

Bink was not convinced, but did not challenge this. “If you have no personal interest in human affairs, why did you come to the Good Magician? What did you ask him?”

“I asked him how I could become real,” the golem said.

“But you
are
real! You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Take away the spell that made me, and I’d be nothing but a minor pile of junk. I want to be real the way you are real. Real without magic.”

Real without magic. It made sense after all. Bink remembered how he himself had suffered, as a youth, thinking he had no magic talent. This was the other face of the problem: the creature who had no reality
apart
from magic. “And what was the Answer?”

“Care.”

“What?”

“Care, dumbbell.”

“Care?”

“Care.”

“That’s all?”

“All.”

“All the Answer?”

“All the Answer, stupid.”

“And for that you serve a year’s labor?”

“You think you have a monopoly on stupidity?”

Bink turned to the Good Magician, who seemed to have caught up on his sleep but remained blithely silent. “How can you justify charging such a fee for such an Answer?”

“I don’t have to,” Humfrey said. “No one is required to come to the grasping old gnome for information.”

“But anyone who pays a fee is entitled to a decent Answer,” Bink said, troubled.

“The golem has a decent Answer. He doesn’t have a decent comprehension.”

“Well, neither do I!” Bink said. “Nobody could make sense of that Answer!”

The Magician shrugged. “Maybe he asked the wrong Question.”

Bink turned to Chester’s human portion. “Do you call that a fair Answer?”

“Yes,” the centaur said.

“I mean that one word ‘care’? Nothing else, for a whole year’s service?”

“Yes.”

“You think it’s worth it?” Bink was having trouble getting through.

“Yes.”

“You’d be satisfied with that Answer for your Question?”

Chester considered. “I don’t think that Answer relates.”

“So you
wouldn’t
be satisfied!”

“No, I’d be satisfied if that were my Answer. I just don’t believe it is. I am not a golem, you see.”

Bink shook his head in wonder. “I guess I’m part golem, then. I don’t think it’s enough.”

“You’re no golem,” Grundy said. “You aren’t smart enough.”

Some diplomacy! But Bink tried again. “Chester, can you explain that Answer to us?”

“No, I don’t understand it either.”

“But you said—”

“I said I thought it was a fair Answer. Were I a golem, I would surely appreciate its reference. Its relevance. This is certainly more likely than the notion that the Good Magician would fail to deliver in full measure.”

Bink remembered how Humfrey had told the manticora that he had a soul—in such a manner that the creature was satisfied emotionally as well as intellectually. It was a convincing argument. There must be some reason for the obscurity of the Answer for the golem.

But oh, what frustration until that reason became clear!

Near dusk they spied a house. Crombie’s talent indicated that this was their residence for the night.

The only problem was the size of it. The door was ten feet tall.

“That is the domicile of a giant—or an ogre,” Humfrey said, frowning.

“An ogre!” Bink repeated. “We can’t stay there!”

“He’d have us all in his pot in a moment, and the fire high,” Chester agreed. “Ogres consider human flesh a delicacy.”

Crombie squawked. “The idiot claims his fool talent is never mistaken,” Grundy reported.

“Yes, but remember what his talent doesn’t cover!” Bink said. “We asked for a good place to spend the night; we didn’t specify that it had to be safe.”

“I daresay a big pot of hot water is as comfortable a place to relax as any,” Chester agreed. “Until it becomes too hot. Then the bath becomes—”

“I suppose I’ll have to expend some of my valuable magic,” Humfrey complained. “It’s too late to go wandering through the woods in search of alternate lodging.” He brought out yet another little stoppered bottle and pulled out the cork. It was an ornery cork, as corks tended to be, and gave way only grudgingly, so that the process took some time.

“Uh, isn’t that a demon container?” Bink asked, thinking he recognized the style. Some bottles were solider than others, and more carefully crafted, with magical symbols inscribed. “Shouldn’t you—?”

The Magician paused. “Umph.”

“He says he was just about to, nitwit,” the golem said. “Believe it if you will.”

The Magician scraped a pentacle in the dirt, sat the bottle in it, and uttered an indecipherable incantation. The cork popped out and the smoky demon issued, coalescing into the bespectacled entity Bink recognized as Beauregard.

The educated demon didn’t even wait for the question. “You routed me out for this, old man? Of course it’s safe; that ogre’s a vegetarian. It’s your mission that’s unsafe.”

“I didn’t ask you about the mission!” Humfrey snapped. “I
know
it’s unsafe! That’s why I’m along.”

“It is not like you to indulge in such foolishness, especially at the expense of your personal comfort,” Beauregard continued, pushing his spectacles back along his nose with one finger. “Are you losing your marbles at last? Getting senile? Or merely attempting to go out in a blaze of ignominy?”

“Begone, infernal spirit! I will summon you when I need your useless conjectures.”

Beauregard shook his head sadly, then dissipated back into the bottle.

“That’s another feeling spirit,” Bink said, uneasy. “Do you have to coop him up like that, in such a little bottle?”

“No one can coop a demon,” the Magician said shortly. “Besides, his term of service is not yet up.”

At times it was hard to follow the man’s logic! “But you had him when I first met you, more than a year ago.”

“He had a complex Question.”

“A demon of information, who answers the questions you get paid fees for, has to pay you for Answers?”

Humfrey did not respond. Bink heard a faint booming laughter, and realized after a moment that it was coming from the demon’s bottle. Something was certainly funny here, but not humorous.

“We’d better move in before it gets dark,” Chester said, eyeing the ogre’s door somewhat dubiously.

Bink would have liked to explore the matter of the demon further, but the centaur had a point.

They stepped up to the door. It was a massive portal formed of whole tree trunks of hewn ironwood, scraped clean of bark and bound together by several severed predator vines. Bink marveled at this; unrusted ironwood could be harvested only from freshly felled trees, and not even a magic axe could cut those very well. And what monster could blithely appropriate the deadly vines for this purpose? The vines normally used their constrictive power to crush their prey, and they were killingly strong.

Chester knocked resoundingly. There was a pause while
the metallic echoes faded. Then slow thuds approached from inside. The door wrenched open with such violence that the ironwood hinges grew hot and the suction of air drew the centaur forward a pace. Light burst out blindingly, and the ogre stood there in terrible silhouette. It stood twice Bink’s height, dwarfing even the monstrous door, and its body was thick in proportion. The limbs carried knots of muscles like the gnarly boles of trees. “Ungh!” it boomed.

“He says what the hell is this bad smell?” the golem translated.

“Bad smell!” Chester cried. “He’s the one who smells!”

It was true. The ogre seemed not to believe in washing or in cleansing magic. Dirt was caked on his flesh, and he reeked of rotting vegetation. “But we don’t want to spend the night outside,” Bink cautioned.

Crombie squawked. “Birdbeak says let’s get on with it, slowpokes.”

“Birdbeak would,” Chester grumbled.

The ogre grunted. “Stoneface says that’s what he’s sniffin’, a putrid griffin.”

The griffin stood tall and angry, half-spreading his brilliant wings as he squawked. “How’d you like that problem corrected by amputation of your schnozzle?” Grundy translated.

The ogre swelled up even more massively than before. He growled. “Me grind you head to make me bread,” the golem said.

Then there was a medley of squawks and growls, with the golem happily carrying both parts of the dialogue.

“Come outside and repeat that, numbskull!”

“Come into me house, you beaked mouse. Me break you bone upon me dome.”

“You’d break your dome just trying to think!” Crombie squawked.

“Do all ogres speak in rhyming couplets?” Bink asked when there was a pause to replenish the reservoirs of invective. “Or is that just the golem’s invention?”

“That little twit not have wit,” the golem said, then reacted angrily. “Who’s a twit, you frog-faced sh—”

“Ogres vary, as do other creatures,” Humfrey cut in smoothly. “This one does seem friendly.”

“Friendly!” Bink exclaimed.

“For an ogre. We’d better go on in.”

“Me test you mettle in me kettle!” the ogre growled via the golem. But the griffin nudged on in, and the ogre gave grudging way.

The interior was close and gloomy, as befitted the abode of a monster. The blinding light that had manifested when the door first opened was gone; evidently the proprietor had charged up a new torch for the occasion, and it had already burned out. Dank straw was matted on the floor, stocked cord-wood lined the walls, and a cauldron bubbled like volcanic mud over a fire blazing in a pit in the center of the room. There seemed to be, however, no piles of bones. That, at least, was encouraging. Bink had never before heard of a vegetarian ogre, but the demon Beauregard surely knew his business.

Bink, realizing that the constant threats were mostly bluffs, found himself embarrassed to be imposing on the good-natured (for an ogre) monster. “What is your name?” he inquired.

“You lunch; me crunch.”

Apparently the brute had not understood. “My name’s Bink; what’s your name?”