The Source of Magic (28 page)

The lord grabbed Bink by the shoulders. “Are you doing it?” he demanded, seeming about ready to choke.

Bink tore his attention from the flute. “I have no magic like that!” he said.

The lord hauled on Chester’s muscular arm. “You—it must be yours, then!”

Chester’s head turned to face him. “What?” he asked, as if coming out of a reverie. In that instant, flute and music faded.

“Chester!” Bink exclaimed. “Your talent! All the beauty in your nature, suppressed because it was linked to your magic, and as a centaur you couldn’t—”

“My talent!” Chester repeated, amazed. “It must be me! I never did dare to—who would have believed—”

“Play it again!” Bink urged. “Make beautiful music! Prove
you have magic, just as your hero-uncle Herman the Hermit did!”

“Yes,” Chester agreed. He concentrated. The flute reappeared. It began to play, haltingly at first, then with greater conviction and beauty. And strangely, the centaur’s rather homely face began to seem less so. Not so strange, Bink realized: much of Chester’s brutality of expression stemmed from his habitual snarl. That snarl had abated; he had no need of it any more.

“Now you don’t owe the Magician any service,” Bink pointed out. “You found your talent yourself.”

“What abominable mischief!” the lord cried. “You accepted our hospitality on the agreement that you would render service as an audience. You are not an audience—you are a performer. You have reneged on your agreement with us!”

Now a portion of Chester’s familiar arrogance reasserted itself. The flute blew a flat note. “Manfeathers!” the centaur snapped. “I was only playing along with your heroine’s song. Bring your play back; I’ll watch it, and accompany it.”

“Hardly” the lord said grimly. “We tolerate no non-guild performances in our midst. We maintain a monopoly.”

“What are you going to do?” Chester demanded. “Throw a fit? I mean, a curse?”

“Uh, I wouldn’t—” Bink cautioned his friend.

“I’ll not tolerate such arrogance from a mere half-man!” the lord said.

“Oh, yeah?” Chester retorted. With an easy and insulting gesture he caught the man’s shirtfront with one hand and lifted him off the floor.

“Chester, we’re their guests!” Bink protested.

“Not any more!” the lord gasped. “Get out of this castle before we destroy you for your insolence!”

“My insolence—for playing a magic flute?” Chester demanded incredulously. “How would you like that flute up your—”

“Chester!” Bink cried warningly, though he had considerable sympathy for the centaur’s position. He invoked the one name that had power to restrain Chester’s wrath: “Cherie wouldn’t like it if you—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do it to
her
!” Chester said. Then he reconsidered. “Not with a flute—”

All this time the centaur had been holding the lord suspended in air. Suddenly the man’s shirt ripped, and he fell ignominiously to the floor. More than ignominiously: he landed in a fresh pile of dirt.

Actually, this cushioned his impact, saving him from possible injury. But it multiplied his rage. “Dirt!” the lord cried. “This animal dumped me in dirt!”

“Well, that’s where you belong,” Chester said. “I really wouldn’t want to dirty my clean silver flute on you.” He glanced at Bink. “I’m glad it’s silver, and not some cheap metal. Shows quality, that flute.”

“Yes,” Bink agreed hastily. “Now if we can leave—”

“What’s dirt doing on my teak parquet?” the lord demanded. There was now a crowd of actors and servants about him, helping him up, brushing him off, fawning.

“The squiggle,” Bink said, dismayed. “It found us again.”

“Oh, so it’s a friend of yours!” the lord cried, proceeding dramatically from rage to rage. “I should have known! It shall be the first to be cursed!” And he pointed one finger, shaking with emotion, at the pile. “All together now. A-one, a-two, a-three!”

Everyone linked hands and concentrated. At the count of three the curse came forth, like a bolt of lightning from the lord’s finger. Ball lightning: it formed into a glowing mass the size of a fist, and drifted down to touch the dirt. At contact it exploded—or imploded. There was a flash of darkness and a momentary acrid odor; then the air cleared and there was nothing. No dirt, no squiggle, no flooring, in that region.

The lord glanced at the hole with satisfaction. “That’s one squiggle that will never bother us again,” he said. “Now for you, half-man.” He raised his terrible finger to point at Chester. “A-one, a-two—”

Bink dived across, knocking the man’s arm aside. The curse spun off and smashed into a column. There was another implosion of darkness, and a chunk of the column dissolved into nothingness.

“Now see what you’ve done!” the lord cried, becoming if possible even more angry than before. Bink could not protest; probably his talent had been responsible for the seemingly random shot. The curse had to destroy something, after all.

Bink himself would be immune—but not Chester. “Let’s get out of here!” Bink said. “Give me a ride out of range of those curses!”

Chester, about to draw his sword, reconsidered in mid-motion. “That’s right—I can take care of myself, but you’re just a man. Come on!”

Bink scrambled to straddle the centaur’s back, and they leaped away just as the lord was leveling another curse. Chester galloped down the hall, his feet oddly silent because of the hoofpads. The fiends set up a howl of pursuit.

“Which way is out?” Bink cried.

“How should I know? That’s birdbeak’s department. I’m only a former guest of the fiends.”

Good old Chester! All prickle and performance.

“We’re somewhere upstairs,” Bink said. “Except they don’t use stairs. We could break out a window and swim—” He reached into his pocket, feeling the bottle that contained Crombie, Grundy, and the Magician. He fumbled until he found the one containing the water-breathing-spell pills; couldn’t afford a mistake now! “We’d better take new pills; it’s been over two hours.”

They gulped their pills on the run. Now they were ready for the water—if they could find it. They had left the pursuit behind for the moment; no man on foot could match the speed of a centaur.

Bink had a second thought. “We don’t want to go out—we want to go down. Into the nether region, to the source of magic.”

“Where they tried to scare us away from,” Chester agreed. He spun about as neatly as he had when dodging exploding pineapples, his two front feet down so that fore and hind sections rotated about the axis. Then he cantered back the way they had come.

“Hold up!” Bink screamed. “This is suicidal! We don’t even know where the entrance to the vortex is!”

“The vortex has to be in the center of the castle; matter of architectural stability,” Chester said. “Besides which, I have a fair directional sense of my own; I know roughly where it is from here. I am prepared to make my own entrance.” Bink tended to forget that behind the brutal façade lay a fine centaur mind. Chester knew what he was doing.

They rounded a corner—and plowed into the charging fiends. People went tumbling every which way—but a massive curse rose up from the jumble and sailed after Chester.

Bink, glancing nervously back, spied it. “Chester—run!” he cried. “There’s a curse on your tail!”

“On my tail!” Chester cried indignantly, and leaped forward. He didn’t mind threats to his homely face, but his beautiful behind was sacred.

The curse, oriented on its target, pursued with determination. “This one we can’t avoid,” Bink said. “It’s locked onto us, as the other was locked onto the ogre.”

“Should we swear off crunching bones?”

“I never was much for human bones anyway!”

“I think the vortex is ahead,” Chester said. “Hang on—I’m going in!”

He leaped—directly at a blank wooden panel. The wood shattered under the impact of his forehooves, and the two of them crashed directly into the vortex.

Bink’s last thought as the awful swirl engulfed him, hauling him brutally around and around and down and down, providing one terrifying glimpse of its dark center shaft, was: what would happen to the curse that followed them? Then he spiraled into oblivion.

B
ink woke naked and battered, but not cold. He lay strewn on the edge of a warm, glowing lake. Hastily he dragged his feet out of the water, fearful of predators.

He heard a groan. A little farther along lay the centaur, limbs projecting in six directions. It had been an extremely violent descent; had they not had that water-breathing magic, they would surely have drowned. Bink scrambled to his feet and lumbered toward his friend. “Chester! Are you—?”

He paused. Midway between them he spied the sparkle of a star or jewel. Foolishly he paused to pick it up; he had no use for such a bauble. But it turned out to be only a shard of glass.

Chester groaned again, and lifted his head. “Takes more than a mere vortex to put away a centaur,” he said. “But maybe not
much
more …”

Bink completed the distance between them, and tried to help his friend rise. “Hey, are you trying to cut me?” Chester demanded.

“Oops, sorry. I picked up this fragment of—” Bink paused again, looking at it. “There’s something in it! That is—”

Chester got to his feet. “Let me see that.” He reached down to take the fragment. His eyes rounded in surprise. “That’s Humfrey!”

“What?” Bink thought he had misheard.

“It’s hard to see in this dim glow, but it’s him, all right. This must be a piece of the magic mirror, thrown ashore by coincidence. What happened to the Good Magician?”

“I lost the bottle!” Bink exclaimed with horror. “It was in my pocket—” His hand slapped his flesh where his pocket had been.

“He had the mirror with him. How did even one fragment of it get out of the bottle, unless—”

“Unless the bottle was smashed,” Bink finished. “In which case—”

“In which case they were released. But where—and in what condition? They didn’t have the water-breathing pills.”

“If they got out just when that curse caught up—”

Chester looked closely at the fragment of glass. “Humfrey seems to be well—and I see the griffin behind him. I think they’re still inside the bottle, though.”

Bink looked. “They are! I see the curving glass walls, and the upholstery. It has been shaken up some, but the bottle never broke.” He was relieved. A broken bottle might well have meant the end of his friends. “And they have another fragment of glass!” He raised his hand in a wave. “Hi, folks!”

Silently, Humfrey waved back. “He sees us in his fragment!” Chester exclaimed. “But that’s impossible, because the broken mirror is out here.”

“Anything is possible, with magic,” Bink said. It was a cliché truism, but right now he had his doubts.

“Look at the shambles in there,” Chester said. “That bottle must have been bounced against a wall.”

“And the mirror broke, and a piece of it flew out here,” Bink said uncertainly. “Right where we could find it. That’s quite a coincidence, even if we can believe the possibility.”

“What else can we believe?” Chester demanded.

Bink could not argue. His talent operated through seeming coincidence; it must have had a part in this. But wouldn’t it have been easier to have the Magician’s bottle itself float to shore here, instead of one piece of glass? “We can see them, but not hear them. Maybe if we print a message—” But they had nothing to do that with.

“If we can find the bottle, we can let them out,” Chester pointed out. He seemed to be feeling better, physically.

“Yes.” Bink held the fragment close to his face and mouthed elaborately “
Where are you?
”

Humfrey spread his hands. He pointed to the bottle wall. Outside it, turbulent water swirled, its phosphorescence making streaky line-patterns. The bottle was somewhere in a river, being carried along by the current—where?

“I guess that mirror isn’t much use,” Chester said. “Crombie could locate us—but can’t get to us. We might get to the bottle—but can’t find it.”

“We’ll have to follow the river down,” Bink said. “It must start at the vortex pool here in this lake, and dribble on to wherever it goes. Yet if we follow it—”

“We delay our quest for the source of magic,” Chester finished.

That made Bink pause. “The quest will have to wait,” he decided. “We have to save our friends.”

“I suppose so,” the centaur agreed. “Even that arrogant griffin.”

“Do you really dislike Crombie?”

“Well … he’s a scrapper, like me. Can’t blame him for that, I suppose. But I’d like to try his strength, once, just for the record.”

Male competition. Well, Bink understood that, for he experienced it himself at times.

But there were more important matters now. “I’m thirsty,” Bink said. He walked back to the lake shore.

“Have you noticed,” Chester remarked, “that there is no life in this lake? No fish, no monsters, no plants, no beach creatures …”

“No life,” Bink repeated. “But we’re all right, so—”

“We haven’t drunk from it yet. Or if we did, it was from the fresh water of the vortex, when we were on the pill.”

“That’s true,” Bink said uncomfortably.

“I wonder whether the cork loosened in Humfrey’s bottle, and he got a sample of this water, and hauled the cork back in place right after the mirror broke.”

“Could be,” Bink agreed. “We’d best not gamble. We’ll need
food soon, too. We’d better check around. We can’t rescue the Magician if we don’t take care of ourselves.”

“Right,” Chester agreed. “And the first thing to do is—”

“Is to find my clothes,” Bink finished.

They were farther along the shore, complete with Bink’s sword, as luck would have it. But as luck would also have it, the bottle was not with them. Chester had retained his weapons and rope, so was in good shape.

They moved on through the cavern passages, leaving the suspicious river behind, their eyes acclimatizing to the dimming subterranean reaches. Bink hoped they would not encounter nickelpedes here, but was careful not to voice this wish. No sense alarming Chester. They tried to mark their way by scratching
X
’s in the floor every so often, but Bink wasn’t sure how effective this would be. Time passed, and the way was interminable—especially since they did not know where they were going.