The Source of Magic (6 page)

The ghost smiled. “Don’t be long,” she said, and drifted off, her feet not touching the floor.

Bink spotted Crombie and joined him. “I begin to comprehend your view,” he said.

“Yes, I noticed her working you over,” Crombie agreed. “She’s had her secret eye on you for some time. A man hardly has a chance when one of those vixens starts in on him.”

“She believes I can locate her bones first—and now I have to try. Really try, not just dawdle.”

“Child’s play,” Crombie remarked. “They’re that way.” He closed his eyes and pointed upward at an angle.

“I didn’t ask for your help!” Bink snapped.

“Oops, sorry. Forget where I pointed.”

“I can’t. Now I’ll have to look there, and sure as hell her bones will be there. Millie must have known I’d consult you. Maybe that’s her talent: knowing things ahead of time.”

“Why didn’t she skip out before she was murdered, then?”

Good question. “Maybe she was asleep, when—”

“Well, you’re not asleep.
You
could skip out. Someone else will find her, especially if I give him the hint.”

“Why don’t you find the bones?” Bink demanded. “You could follow your finger and do it in an instant.”

“Can’t. I’m on duty.” Crombie smiled smugly. “I have woman problems enough already, thanks to you.”

Oh. Bink had introduced the woman-hater to his former fiancée, Sabrina, a talented and beautiful girl Bink had discovered he didn’t love. Apparently that introduction had led to an involvement. Now Crombie was having his revenge.

Bink set his shoulders and followed the direction indicated. The bones had to be somewhere upstairs. But maybe they still would not be obvious. If he did his honest best but could not locate them—

Yet would it be so bad, that date with Millie? All that she had said was true; this was a very bad time for Chameleon, and she seemed fit only to be left alone. Until she phased into her beautiful, sweet aspect, and had the baby.

No, there lay ruin. He had known what Chameleon was when he married her, and that there would be good times and bad. He had only to tide through the bad time, knowing it would pass. He had done it before. When there was some difficult chore or problem, her smart phase was an invaluable asset; sometimes they saved up problems for her to work on in that phase. He could not afford to dally with Millie or any other female.

He oriented on the room that lay on the fine Crombie had pointed. It was the Royal Library, where the lore of centuries was stored. The ghostly skeleton was there?

Bink entered—and there sat the King. “Oh, sorry, Your Majesty. I didn’t realize—”

“Come in, Bink,” King Trent said, fashioning a warm smile. He looked every bit the monarch, even when half slumped over the table, as now. “I was meditating on a personal problem, and perhaps you have been sent to provide the answer.”

“I lack the answer to my own dilemma,” Bink said, somewhat diffidently. “I am ill-equipped to comment on yours.”

“Your problem?”

“Chameleon is difficult, and I am restless, and someone is trying to kill me, and Millie the ghost wishes to make love to me.”

King Trent laughed—then stopped. “Suddenly I perceive that was not a joke,” he said. “Chameleon will improve and your
restlessness should abate. But the others—who seeks your life? I assure you there is no royal sanction for that.”

Bink described the episode with the sword. Now the King was thoughtful. “You and I know that only a Magician could actually harm you by such means, Bink—and there are only three people of that class in Xanth, none of whom wishes you ill and none of whom possesses the talent of animating swords. So you are not really in danger. But I agree, this could be very annoying. I shall investigate. Since you made the sword captive, we should be able to trace down the root of its imperative. If someone has co-opted one of the weapons of my arsenal—”

“Uh, I think that is where it came from,” Bink said. “But Chester Centaur spotted it and took it—”

“Oh. Well, let’s let that aspect drop, then; the alliance of the centaurs is important to me, as it has been to every King of Xanth throughout history. Chester can keep the sword, though I believe we shall turn off its self-motivating property. But it occurs to me that there is a certain similarity here to your own magic: whatever opposes you is hidden, using other magic than its own to attack you. The sword is not your enemy; it was merely the instrument of the hostile power.”

“Magic like my own …” Bink repeated. “I suppose that could be. It would not be identical, since magic never repeats in Xanth, but similar—” He looked at the King, alarmed. “That means I can expect trouble anywhere, from anything, all seeming coincidental!”

“From a zombie, or a sword, or moat-monsters, or a ghost,” the King agreed. “There may be a pattern here.” He paused, considering. “Yet how could a ghost—?”

“She is to be restored, once I find her skeleton—and that may be in this room. What bothers me most is that I find myself tempted.”

“Millie is a very fetching figure of a slip of a woman,” King Trent said. “I can well understand the temptation. I suffer temptation myself; that is the subject of my present meditation.”

“Surely the Queen can fulfill any, uh, temptation,” Bink said cautiously, unwilling to betray how freely palace speculation
had dwelt on this very subject. The King’s private life should be private. “She can make herself resemble any—”

“Precisely. I have not touched the Queen or any other woman, since my wife died.” To King Trent, the word “wife” meant only the woman he had married in Mundania. “Yet there is pressure on me to provide an heir to the throne of Xanth, by birth or adoption, in case there should be no suitable Magician available when that time comes. I sincerely hope there
is
a Magician! I feel obliged to make the attempt, nevertheless, since this was one of the implied stipulations I agreed to when assuming the crown. Ethically this must involve the Queen. So I shall do it, though I do not love her and never shall. The question is, what form shall I have her assume for the occasion?”

This was a more personal problem than Bink felt prepared to cope with. “Any form that pleases you, I should think.” One big advantage the Queen had was the ability to assume a new form instantly. If Chameleon had been able to do that—

“But I do not wish to be pleased. I want to accomplish only what is necessary.”

“Why not combine them? Let the Queen assume her most provocative illusion-form, or transform her to it yourself. When there is an heir, change her back. There is no wrong in enjoying your duty, is there?”

The King shook his head. “Ordinarily, this would be true. But mine is a special case. I am not sure I would be potent with a beautiful woman, or
any
woman—other than one who closely resembled my wife.”

“Then let the Queen resemble your wife,” Bink said without thinking.

“My concern is that this would degrade the memory I cherish.”

“Oh, I see. You mean if she was too much like your wife, she might seem to replace her, and—”

“Approximately.”

That was an impasse. If the King could only be potent with his dead wife, and could not abide any other woman resembling her physically, what could he do? This was the hidden aspect of the King that Millie had shown Bink, way back when:
his continuing devotion to his prior family. It had been hard, after that, to think of such a man as evil; and indeed, King Trent was not evil. He was the finest Magician and perhaps the finest man in Xanth. Bink would be the last to wish to disrupt that aspect of King Trent’s being.

Yet the problem of an heir was a real one. No one wanted a repetition of the shambles resulting from lack of a well-defined royal line. There had to be an heir to serve until a suitable Magician appeared, lending continuity to the government.

“We seem to have a similar dilemma, Your Majesty,” Bink said. He tried to maintain the proper attitude of respect, because of the way he had known Trent before he was King. He had to set a good example. “We each prefer to remain loyal to our original wives, yet find it difficult. My problem will pass, but yours—” He paused, struck by dubious inspiration. “Millie is to be restored by having her skeleton dipped in healing water. Suppose you were to recover your wife’s bones, bring them to Xanth—”

“If that worked, I would be a bigamist,” King Trent pointed out. But he looked shaken. “Still, if my wife could live again—”

“You could check how well the procedure works, as they try it on Millie,” Bink said.

“Millie is a ghost—not quite dead. A special case, like that of a shade. It happens when there is pressing unfinished business for that spirit to attend to. My wife is no ghost; she never left anything unfinished, except her life. To reanimate her body without her soul—”

Bink was beginning to be sorry he had thought of the notion. What horrors might be loosed on Xanth if all bones were renovated indiscriminately? “She might be a zombie,” he said.

“There are serious risks,” the King decided. “Still, you have provided me food for thought. Perhaps there is hope for me yet! Meanwhile, I certainly shall not have the Queen assume the likeness of my wife. Perhaps I shall only embarrass myself by trying and failing, but—”

“Too bad you can’t transform yourself,” Bink said. “Then you could test your potency without anyone knowing.”

“The Queen would know. And to fail with her would be to show weakness that I can hardly afford. She would feel superior to me, knowing that what she has taken to be iron control is in fact impotence. There would be much mischief in that knowledge.”

Bink, knowing the Queen, could well appreciate that. Only her respect for, and fear of, the King’s personality and magic power held her in check. His transforming talent would remain—but the respect she held for his personality would inevitably erode. She could become extremely difficult to manage, and that would not be good for the Land of Xanth. “Could you, er, experiment with some other woman first? That way, if you failed—”

“No,” the King said firmly. “The Queen is not my love, but she is my legal spouse. I will not cheat her—or any other member of my kingdom, in this or any other respect.”

And there was the essence of his nobility! Yet the Queen might cheat
him
, if she saw her opportunity, and knew him to be impotent. Bink didn’t like that notion. He had seen King Trent’s reign as the onset of a Golden Age; how fraught it was with liabilities, from this vantage!

Then Bink had another inspiration. “Your memory of your wife—it isn’t just your memory of her you are preserving, it is your memory of yourself. Yourself when you were happy. You can’t make love to another woman, or let another woman look like her. But if two other people made love—I mean, the Queen and a man who did not resemble you—no memories would be defiled. So if the Queen changed your appearance—”

“Ridiculous!” the King snapped.

“I suppose so,” Bink said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“I’ll try it.”

“Sorry I bothered you. I—” Bink broke off. “You will?”

“Objectively I know that my continuing attachment to my dead wife and son is not reasonable,” the King said. “It is hampering me in the performance of my office. Perhaps an unreasonable subterfuge will compensate. I will have Iris make me into the likeness of another man, and herself another woman,
and as strangers we shall make the attempt. Do you just indulge in the courtesy of maintaining the secret, Bink.”

“Yes, of course, by all means,” Bink said, feeling awkward. He would have preferred to have the King devoid of human fallibilities, while paradoxically respecting him
for
those weaknesses. But he knew this was a side of the King no other person saw. Bink was a confidant, uncomfortable as the position might be at times.

“I—uh, I’m supposed to locate Millie’s bones. They should be somewhere in this library.”

“By all means. Continue your pursuit; I shall seek out the Queen.” And the King rose abruptly and departed.

Just like that! Bink was amazed again at the alacrity with which the man acted, once he had come to a decision. But that was one of the qualities that made him fit to rule, in contrast to Bink himself.

Bink looked at the books. And suddenly realized: Millie’s skeleton could have been transformed into a book; that would account for its neglect over the centuries, and for Millie’s frequent presence here. She hovered often by the south wall. The question was, which book?

He walked along the packed shelves, reading titles from the spines of the tomes. This was an excellent library, with hundreds of texts; how could he choose among them? And if he found the proper one, somehow, how could it be restored? It would have to be transformed first back into the skeleton—and that was Magician-class magic. He kept running into this: too much magic was involved here! No inanimate transformer was alive today, as far as he knew. So Millie’s quest looked hopeless after all. Yet why, then, had the Good Magician told her to use mere healing elixir? It made no sense!

Still, he had promised to try, though it complicated his personal situation. First he had to find the book; then he could worry about the next step.

The search took some time. Some texts he could eliminate immediately, such as
The Anatomy of Purple Dragons or Hailstones: Magic vs. Mundane
. But others were problematical, like
The Status of Spirits in Royal Abodes or Tales for Ghosts
.
He had to take these out and turn over the pages, looking for he knew not what.

More time passed. He was not getting anywhere. No one else came here; apparently he was the only one following this particular lead. His guess about the books must have been wrong. There was another room above this one, in a turret, and Crombie’s line intersected it too. Maybe there—

Then he spotted it.
The Skeleton in the Closet
. That had to be it!

He took down the book. It was strangely heavy. The cover was of variegated leather, subtly horrible. He opened it, and a strange, unpleasant odor wafted up, as of the flesh of a zombie too long in the sun. There was no print on the first page, only a mélange of color and wash suggestive of the remains of a flattened bug.