The Source of Magic

"Slavering what?"

"Foaming insulation. It foams up, then hardens in place to keep things warm-or cold."

Bink shook his head. The Magician was mad all right

How could anything act to keep things hot or cold? It either had to be like fire, heating, or like ice, cooling. And why would anyone bother with such magic?

The dragon, however, was not taking it with equanimity. It flexed in midair, and shook its head violently from side to side, trying to rid itself of the clinging stuff. It chewed and gulped, seeking to eliminate the foam. "I wouldn't do that, if I were you," Humfrey told it.

The dragon ignored him. It roared. Then it huffed and puffed, working up a head of fire in its belly. It looped about, its flapping wings throwing off chunks of hardened foam. Then it oriented on the Magician and blasted out its terrible fire.

Only a thin jet of flame emerged. Then, surprisingly, the dragon's body began inflating. It swelled up like a balloon, until only the legs, tail, wing tips and snout projected from the ball.

"What-?" Bink asked, amazed.

"The insulation hardens in place immediately in the presence of heat," Humfrey explained. "Thus the dragon's own fire had solidified it. Unfortunately that particular type of insulation is also-"

The dragon exploded. Stars shot out in every direction, scorching the jungle foliage below, zooming by Bink to the side, and making a fine display above.

"-explosively flammable when ignited," Humfrey finished.

They watched the upward-flying stars rise to their heights, then explode in multicolored displays of sparks. The whole night sky became briefly brighter.

"I tried to warn that dragon," Humfrey said without sympathy. "One simply does not apply open flame to flammable insulation."

Bink, privately, hardly blamed the dragon for misunderstanding that caution. He would have made the same mistake as the dragon had. If his talent permitted it. But this did impress on him one thing: should he (perish the thought!) ever have a serious disagreement with the Good Magician, he would have to watch out for those magic bottles! There was no telling what might come out of them.

Now a monster found Bink. It was the hydra. It had no wings, and could not have used the stairs because they were blocked by the serpent The hydra seemed to have descended by hanging from a thread-but no such thread was visible.

Bink swung at the monster with his sword. He was in excellent form; he caught the nearest of the seven heads cleanly, just behind the horns, and it flew off. Gore spouted out of the neck with such force that the jet separated into two channels. If this was all it took to beat this monster, Bink would have no trouble!

The two jets coagulated in midair, forming into twin lumps still attached to the neck. As more gore emerged, it splashed over these lumps, hardening, enlarging them. Excrescences developed, and the color darkened, until-

The lumps became two new heads! Each was smaller than the original, but just as vicious. Bink had only succeeded in doubling the menace he faced.

This was a problem. If each head he cut off converted into two, the longer and better he fought, the worse off he would be! Yet if he did not fight well, he would soon be consumed in seven-no, eight chunks. "Catch, Bink!" Chester called, throwing something. Bink didn't appreciate the interruption to his concentration, but grabbed for it anyway. In the dark his sweeping fingers merely batted it aside. In the moment it touched him, his sanity returned. He saw himself on a branch of the tree, pointing his sword at-

But then the reverse-spell wood bounced out of range, and the madness resumed its grip on nun. He saw the chunk fly toward the hydra-and one of the heads reached out to gulp it down.

In that instant Bink suffered a rapid continuation of his prior line of thought. What would spell-reversal do inside an imaginary monster? If the hydra form were wholly a product of Bink's distorted perception-his madness, which he shared with his friends-it should be nullified-no, the wood had to be near him, to nullity the monsters he perceived. But since his friends saw the monsters too, and the wood could not be near them all at once-it had to be that the wood would not affect the monster, unless that monster had objective reality. Even then, the wood would not affect the form of the hydra, but only its talent-if the hydra had a talent. Most magical creatures did not have magic talents; their magic consisted of their very existence. So-nothing should happen.

The hydra screamed from all its eight mouths. Abruptly it dropped to the ground. It landed heavily and lay still, its stars fading out

Bink watched it, openmouthed. The hydra had not changed form-it had suffered destruction. What had happened?

Then he worked it out. The hydra had a magic talent after all: that of hanging by an invisible thread. The spell-reversal wood had nullified that magic, causing the monster to plummet forcefully down to its death. Its invisible thread had not disappeared; it had acted to draw the creature down as powerfully as it had drawn it up before. Disaster!

But now the wood was gone. How were they to escape the madness?

Bink looked up. The Good Magician's foaming agent had destroyed the dragon, and Chester's hooves and sword had beaten back the serpent. Crombie's fighting spirit had proved to be too much for the winged horse. So the individual battles had been won. But the war remained unpromising.

A number of constellations had remained in the sky. The centaur, giant, and whale had not been able to descend, because they lacked wings or flying magic, and the stairway had been pre-empted by the serpent. Now, seeing the fate of their companions, these three bellowed then raged from the safety of the nocturnal welkin. Novas and ringed planets and miniature lightning bolts and curly-tailed comets radiated from their mouths in confusing profusion and wonderful foulness, with the whale spouting obscene curlicues.

"Oh, yeah?" Chester bawled. "We'll come up there and do the same to you! You're the cowards who started it all!" And Crombie and Humfrey and Bink closed in about him as well as they were able.

"No, stop!" Grundy screamed from his flying fish, zooming in a circular holding pattern. "You've all seen the nature of your madness. Don't yield to it again! Pass the wood around, restore your perspectives, get your feet on the ground again! Don't let the spooks lure you to destruction!"

"He's right, you know," Humfrey muttered.

"But I dropped the wood!" Bink cried, "I dropped our sanity!"

"Then go down and fetch it!" the golem cried. "And you, horserear-you threw it to him. You go down and help him."

"Squawk!" Crombie exclaimed. "And birdbeak says he's going up alone to grab all the glory for himself."

"Oh no he doesn't!" Chester roared.

"Right!" the golem agreed. "You have to go together, to be fair about it. You real creatures place great store by fairness, don't you? Or is honor a foreign concept to you, birdbeak? You don't want horserear's competition, because you know he'd show you up if you didn't have a head start?"

"Squawk! Squawk!" Bink almost thought he saw a comet spew from Crombie's mouth.

"Right! So you prove you can match him anywhere, anytime-by getting down there and finding that wood before he does. And take the gnome with you. Horse-rear can take the washout with him."

Washout? That was what the golem had decided to call Bink? Bink's blood pressure started building. Just because his talent wasn't visible-

"All right, and may dung fall on you!" Chester said. "I'll fetch the stupid wood. Then on to glorious battle!" Thus, ingloriously, they descended the glassy stair. The monsters above exploded with derision. The sky lit up with their exclamations: exploding cherry bombs in many silent colors, glowing tornadoes, forest fires. The whale diverted the River Eridanus so that its water poured down in a scintillating cataract. The giant swung his huge club, bashing stars out of their sockets and sending them flying down. The centaur fired glowing arrows.

"Keep moving, slowpokes!" the golem yelled. "Keep walking away from their challenges. That makes them madder than anything else you can do!"

"Hey, yeah," Chester agreed. "You're pretty smart for a tangle of string and tar."

"I'm sane-because I have none of the foolish emotions of reality to interfere with my thought processes," Grundy said. "Sane-because I am string and tar."

"Therefore you are the only one qualified to lead us out of madness," the Magician said. "You are the only one who can perceive objective reality-because you have no subjective aspect."

"Yes, isn't it great?" But the golem hardly looked happy.

Bink understood, suddenly, that Grundy would gladly join them in madness, though he knew it led to disaster, if this could be the proof of his reality. Only the golem's unreality enabled Him to hang on to what life he had. What a paradoxical fate!

An arrow struck a catnip bush right beside him. The plant yowled and spat, nipping at the shaft, then batting it back and forth with its paw-buds.

"Oh, I want to stick an arrow right up under his tail!" Chester muttered. "That centaur's a disgrace to the species."

"First find the wood," Grundy cried.

One of the giant's batted stars whizzed over Bink's head and ignited a rubber tree. The plant stretched enormously, trying to get away from its own burning substance. The smell was horrible.

"We can't find anything here in the smoke," Chester complained, coughing.

"Then follow me!" Grundy cried, showing the way on his fish.

Choking, they followed the golem. The constellations raged above them, firing volleys of missiles, but could not score directly. Madness had no power over sane leadership.

Yet the madness tried! The whale took hold of the river again and yanked it brutally from its new channel. The water spilled across the starry field in a thinning, milky wash, forming a flood. Then it found a new channel, coursed along it, ripped out several stars growing there, and poured down toward the ground.

"Look out!" Bink cried. "We're at the foot of that waterfall!"

Indeed they were. The mass of water was descending at them like a globulous avalanche. They scrambled desperately-but it caught them, drenching them instantly in its milky fluid, crashing about them with a sound like thunder and foaming waist high. Crombie hunched, bedraggled, his feathers losing their luster; Chester wrapped his arms about his human torso as if to fend the liquid off; and the Magician-

The Good Magician was wrapped in a big, bright, once-fluffy beach towel. Soaked, it was worse than nothing. "Wrong vial," he explained sheepishly. "I wanted a raincoat."

They slogged out of the immediate waterfall and through the runoff. Bink found himself shivering; the water of the sky river was chill. The madness had been intriguing when the constellations first took on life, but now he wished he were home, warm and dry, with Chameleon.

Ah, Chameleon! He liked her especially in her "normal" stage, neither beautiful nor smart, but a pleasant middle range. It always seemed so fresh, that brief period when she was average, since she was always changing. But he loved her in any form and intellect-especially at times like now, when he was wet and cold and tired and afraid.

He swiped at a floating star, taking out some of his discomfort on it. The bright mote was probably as miserable as he, washed out of its place in the sky and become mere flotsam on earth.

The water here was too shallow for the whale, the only sky monster that might have been a real threat at this stage. The party wandered out of the slush. "In real life this must be a thunderstorm," Chester commented.

The walk became interminable. The golem kept urging them through the night. The wrath of the constellations pursued them some distance, then was lost as they plunged under the jungle canopy. The madness remained with them, however. The ground seemed to become a mass of peanut butter, roiling under their steps. The trees, dangerous in their own right, seemed to develop an alien menace: they turned purple, and hummed in chorus, and proffered sinister, oblong fruits. Bink knew that the madness, whether it seemed benign or malign, would destroy them all in moments if they yielded to it. His sense of self-preservation encouraged him to resist it, and his resistance became stronger with practice-but still he could not penetrate all the way to reality. In a way this resembled the Queen's illusion-but this affected emotion as well as perception, so was more treacherous.

He heard the golem squawking at Crombie in griffin-talk, then saw Grundy rest his flying-fish steed on Crombie's head. Apparently the fish was tired, and had to be relieved. "It deserves a reward," Bink said. "For its timely service."

"It does? Why?" Grundy asked. Bink started to answer, then realized the futility of it. The golem was not real; he did not care. Grundy did what he had to do, but human conscience and compassion were not part of his makeup. "Just take my word: the fish must be rewarded. What would it like?"

"This is a lot of trouble," Grundy muttered. But he swished and gurgled at the fish. "It wants a family."

"All he needs is a lady of his species," Bink pointed out. "Or a man, if he happens to be female. She. Whatever."

More fish-talk. "In the mad region he can't locate one," the golem explained.

"A little of that spell-reversal wood would solve that problem," Bink said. "In fact, we could all use some. We got mixed up by the madness and water and never thought of the obvious. Let's see if Crombie's talent can locate some more of that wood."

Crombie squawked with dismayed realization. He whirled and pointed-right at a quivering mound of jelly. "That's a bloodsucker tree," Grundy said. "We can't go there!"

"Why not?" Chester asked facetiously. "You don't have any blood."

"The wood must be beyond it," Bink said. "Crombie's talent is still working but we have to watch out for the incidental hazards along the way, now more than ever. In the night, and with the madness-only you can do it, Grundy."

"I've been doing it!" the golem said, aggrieved.

"We need light," Chester said, "Birdbe-uh, Crombie, where can we get safe light?"

The griffin pointed. There was a flock of long-legged, bubbly things with horrendously glowing eyes. Bink walked over cautiously, and discovered that these were plants, not animals; what had seemed like legs were actually stems. He picked one, and its eye emitted a beam that illuminated everything it touched. "What is it, really?" Bink asked.

"A torch-flower," Grundy said. "Watch you don't set fire to the forest."

The rain had stopped, but the foliage still dripped. "Not too much danger of that at the moment," Bink said.

Armed with their lights, they moved in the direction Crombie had pointed for the wood, meandering circuitously to avoid the hazards the golem perceived. It was obvious that they could not have survived the natural traps of the jungle without the guidance of the golem. It would have been bad enough in ordinary circumstances; the madness made it impossible.

Suddenly they arrived. A monstrous stump loomed out of the ground. It was as thick at the base as a man could span, but broke off at head-height in jagged ruin,

"What a tree that must have been!" Bink exclaimed.

"I wonder how it died?"

They closed about the stump-and suddenly were sane. The glowing eyes they held were revealed as the torch-flowers the golem had said they were, and the deep jungle showed its true magic instead of its mad-magic. In fact, Bink felt clearer-headed than ever before in his life. "The madness spell-it has been reversed to make us absolutely sane!" he exclaimed. "Like the golem!"

"Look at the path we came by!" Chester said. "We skirted poison thorns, carnivorous grass, oil-barrel trees-our torches could have exploded this whole region!"

"Don't I know it," Grundy agreed. "Why do you think I kept yelling at you? If I had nerves, they'd be frayed to the bone. Every time you wandered from the course I set-"

More things were coming clear to Bink. "Grundy, why did you bother to help us, instead of riding away on your fish? You went to extraordinary trouble-"

"The fish!" Grundy exclaimed. "I have to pay him off!" He pried a sliver of wood from the massive stump and affixed it to the fish's dorsal fin with a bit of his own string. "There you go, bubble-eye," he said with something that sounded suspiciously like affection. "As long as you carry that, you'll see everything as it is, in the madness region. So you can spot your lady fish. Once you have succeeded, ditch the wood; I understand it is not good to see a female too realistically."

Crombie made an emphatic squawk of agreement that needed no translation.

The fish took off, zooming into the sky with a powerful thrust of bubbles, banking neatly around branches. Relieved of the golem's weight, and spurred by the hope of mad romance, it was a speedy creature.

"Why did you do that?" Bink asked the golem.

"You short of memory? You told me to, nitnoggin!"

"I mean, why did you do it with such grace? You showed genuine feeling for that fish."

"I couldn't have," Grundy snapped.

"And why did you guide us all around the hazards? If we had perished, your service to the Good Magician would have been finished."

"What use would that have been to me?" Grundy demanded, kicking angrily at a tuft of grass with one motley foot.

"It would have freed you," Bink said. "Instead, you went to a great deal of trouble to herd us off that stair and to safety. You really didn't have to; your job is translation, not leadership."

"Listen, washout-I don't have to take this crap from you!"

"Think about it," Bink said evenly. "Why help a washout?"

Grundy thought about it "I must have been mad after all," he admitted.

"How could you be mad-when you weren't affected by the madness?"

"What are you up to?" Chester demanded. "Why hassle the golem? He did good work."

"Because the golem is a hypocrite," Bink said. "There was only one reason he helped us."

"Because I cared, you nitwit!" Grundy yelled. "Why do I have to justify saving your life?"

Bink was silent. Crombie and Chester and the Good Magician turned mutely to face the golem.

"What did I say?" Grundy demanded angrily. "Why are you freeloaders staring at me?"

Crombie squawked. "Birdbeak says-" The golem paused. "He says-I can't make out what he says! What's the matter with me?"

"The wood of this tree reverses spells," Humfrey said. "It has canceled out your talent."

"I'm not touching that wood!"

"Neither are we," Bink said. "But we are all quite sane at the moment, because the ambience of the stump is stronger than that of a single chip. That is why we are now able to perceive you as you are. Do you realize what you said?"

"So the wood messes up my talent, same as it does yours. We knew that already!"

"Because it changes our magic without changing us," Bink continued. "Because what is us is real"

"But that would mean I'm halfway real!"

"And you halfway care," Chester said.

"That was just a figure of speech! I have no emotion!"

"Move away from the tree," Bink said. "Get out of the range of the stump. Tell us what you see out there."

Grundy paced away and looked about "The jungle!" he cried! "It's changed! It's mad!"

"Care," Bink said. "The Good Magician's Answer. In your effort to save us, you brought yourself halfway to your own destination. You have begun to assume the liabilities of being real. You feel compassion, you feel anger, you suffer pleasure and frustration and uncertainty. You did what you did because conscience extends beyond logic. Is it worth it?"

Grundy looked at the distortions beyond the stump. "It's madness!" he exclaimed, and they all laughed.

Chapter 9

Vortex Fiends

At dawn they emerged from the madness region, each holding a piece of spell-reversal wood. They had traveled tediously, separating Crombie at intervals from his piece of wood, getting his indication of the best immediate route, then returning his chunk to him so that he could perceive threats accurately until the next orientation.

Once they were out, they located a reasonably secure roost in a stork-leg tree, setting their pieces of wood in a circle about its spindly trunks so that no hostile magic could approach them without getting reversed. That was not a perfect defense, but they were so tired they had to make do.

Several hours later Bink woke, stretched, and descended. The centaur remained lodged on a broad branch, his four hooves dangling down on either side; it seemed the tree-climbing experience during the madness had added a nonmagical talent to his repertoire. The Magician lay curled in a ball within a large nest he had conjured from one of his vials. Crombie, ever the good soldier, was already up, scouting the area, and the golem was with him.

"One thing I want to know…" Bink started, as he munched on slices of raisin bread from a loaf Crombie had plucked from a local breadfruit tree. It was a trifle overripe, but otherwise excellent.

Crombie squawked. "…is who destroyed that reverse-spell tree," Grundy finished.

"You're translating again!"

"I'm not touching any wood at the moment." The golem fidgeted. "But I don't think I'm as real as I was last night, during the madness."

"Still, there must be some feeling remaining," Bink said. "It can be like that, approaching a goal. Two steps forward, one back-but you must never give up."

Grundy showed more animation. "Say, that's a positive way of looking at it, mushmind!"

Bink was glad to have given encouragement, though the golem's unendearing little mannerisms remained evident. "How did you know what I was about to ask? About the destruction of-"

"You always come up with questions, Bink," the golem said. "So we pointed out the location of the subject of your next question, and it matched up with the tree stump. So we researched it. It was a challenge."

That was an intriguing ramification of Crombie's talent! Anticipating the answers to future questions! Magic kept coming up with surprises. "Only a real creature likes challenges," Bink said.

"I guess so. It's sort of fun, the challenge of becoming real. Now that I know that maybe it's possible. But I still have this ragtag body; no amount of caring can change that. It just means that now I fear the death that will surely come." He shrugged, dismissing it "Anyway, the tree was blasted by a curse from that direction." He pointed.

Bink looked. "All I see is a lake." Then, startled: "Didn't the ogre say something about-?"

"Fiends of the lake, who hurled a curse that blasted the whole forest," Grundy said. "We checked: that is the lake."

Humfrey descended from the tree. "I'd better bottle some of this wood, if I can get my magic to work on it," he said. "Never can tell when it might be useful."

"Cast a spell hurling it away from your bottle," Chester suggested from the tree. He, too, dropped to the ground, after some awkward maneuvering that put his handsome posterior in jeopardy. Centaurs really did not belong in trees.

The Magician set up his vial and wood and uttered an incantation. There was a flash, a puff of smoke, and a gradual clearing of the air.

There sat the vial, corked. There sat the wood. The Good Magician was gone.

"Where did he go?" Bink demanded.

Crombie whirled and pointed his wing. Directly toward the bottle.

"Oh, no!" Bink cried, horrified. "His spell reversed, all right! It banished him to the bottle!" He dashed over and picked it up, jerking out the cork. Vapor issued forth, expanding and swirling and coalescing and forming in due course into the Good Magician. There was a fried egg perched on his head. "I forgot I was keeping breakfast in that one," he said ruefully.

Grundy could hold back his newfound emotion no longer. He burst out laughing. He fell to the ground and rolled about, guffawing. "Oh, nobody gnomes the trouble he's seen!" the golem gasped, going into a further paroxysm.

"A sense of humor is part of being real," Chester said solemnly.

"Just so," Humfrey agreed somewhat shortly, "Good thing an enemy did not get hold of the bottle. The holder has power over the content."

The Magician tried again-and again. Eventually he found the proper aspect of reversal and managed to conjure the wood into the vial. Bink hoped the effort was worth it. At least he knew, now, how the Good Magician had assembled such an assortment of items. He simply bottled anything he thought he might need.

Then Bink encountered another pile of earth. "Hey, Magician!" he cried. "Time to investigate this thing. What is making these mounds? Are they all over Xanth, or just where we happen to be?"

Humfrey came over to contemplate the pile. "I suppose I'd better," he grumped. "There was one on the siren's isle, and another at our bone-camp." He brought out his magic mirror. "What thing is this?" he snapped at it.

The mirror clouded thoughtfully, then cleared. It produced the image of a wormlike creature.

"That's a wiggle!" Bink exclaimed, horrified. "Are the wiggles swarming again?"

"That's not a wiggle," Chester said. "Look at the scale. It's ten times too large." And in the mirror a measuring stick appeared beside the worm, showing it to be ten times the length of a wiggle. "Don't you know your taxonomy? That's a squiggle."

"A squiggle?" Bink asked blankly. He did not want to admit that he had never heard of that species. "It looks like an overgrown wiggle to me."

"They are cousins," Chester explained. "The squiggles are larger, slower, and do not swarm. They are solitary creatures, traveling under the ground. They are harmless."

"But the piles of dirt-"

"I had forgotten about that," Chester said. "I should have recognized the castings before. They eject the dirt from their tunnels behind them, and where they touch the surface it forms into a pile. As they tunnel on, the further castings plug up the hole, so there is nothing left except the pile."

"But what do they do?"

"They move about, make piles of earth. That's all."

"But why are they following me? I have nothing to do with squiggles."

"Could be coincidence," Humfrey said. He addressed the mirror. "Is it?"

The mirror's unhappy baby face showed.

"Someone or something is setting the squiggle to spy on us, then," Humfrey said, and the mirror smiled. "The question is, who?"

The mirror turned dark. "The same as the source of magic?" Humfrey demanded. The mirror denied it. "Bink's enemy, then?" And the smiling baby returned.

"Not the same as the fiends of the lake?" Bink asked.

The baby smiled.

"You mean it is the same?"

"Don't confuse the mirror with your illogic," the Magician snapped. "It agreed it was not the same!"

"Uh, yes," Bink said. "Still, if our route takes us past the fiends, we have a problem. With the enemy spying on us all the way, and throwing obstacles in our way, he's sure to excite the fiends into something dire."

"I believe you are correct," Humfrey said. "It may be time for me to expend some more of my magic."

"Glory be!" Chester exclaimed ironically.

"Quiet, horserear!" Humfrey snapped. "Now let me see. Do we have to pass the fiends of the lake to reach our destination?" The mirror smiled.

"And the fiends have curse-magic sufficient to blast forests?"

The mirror agreed.

"What's the most convenient way to pass without trouble?"

The mirror showed a picture of Bink watching a play.

Humfrey looked up. "Can any of you make sense of this?"

Crombie squawked. "Where am I?" Grundy translated.

"Let me rephrase that question," Humfrey said quickly. "Where is Crombie while Bink is watching the play?"

The mirror showed one of the Magician's vials. The griffin went into an angry medley of squawks. "Oh come off it, beakbrain!" the golem said. "You know I can't repeat words like that in public. Not if I want to become real."

"Beakbrain's concern is understandable," Chester said. "Why should he be banished to a bottle? He might never get out."

"I'm supposed to do the translations!" Grundy complained, forgetting his prior reluctance.

Humfrey put away the mirror. "If you won't pay attention to my advice," he informed Crombie, "then do it your own way."

"You temperamental real people are at it again," Grundy said. "The rational thing to do is listen to the advice, consider the alternatives, discuss them, and form a consensus."

"The little imp is making uncommon sense," Chester said.

"Which little imp?" Grundy demanded.

"I suspect," the Magician said grimly, "that the garrulous golem would be best off in a bottle."

"We're fighting again," Bink said. "If the mirror says we can pass the fiends most conveniently' by traveling in bottles, I'd rather gamble on that than on the sort of thing we've just been through."

"You don't have to gamble," Grundy pointed out. "You have to go watch a dumb play."

"I have faith in my mirror," Humfrey said, and the mirror blushed so brightly there was a faint glow through his jacket. "To prove it, I will submit to bottling myself. I believe the one Beauregard used is pleasantly upholstered and huge enough for two. Suppose Crombie and Grundy and I enter that bottle and give it to Bink to carry? Then he can ride Chester to the play."

"I'm willing," Bink said. He wondered privately whether the Good Magician would take all his other bottles with him into the bottle. That seemed a bit paradoxical, but no doubt was possible. "But I don't know exactly where the fiends are, and I'd rather not barge in on them unexpectedly. If we approach carefully, circumspectly, they may be less fiendish."

Crombie pointed to the lake.

"Yes, I know. But where at the lake? At the edge? On an island? I mean, before I innocently walk into a tree-blasting curse-"

Crombie squawked and spread his wings. His proud colors flashed as he flew up and made for the lake.

"Wait, featherbrain!" Chester cried. "They'll see you by air! That will give us all away!" But the griffin ignored him.

They watched Crombie wing handsomely out over the water, his plumage flexing red, blue, and white. "I have to admit the ornery cuss is a beautiful animal," Chester murmured.

Then the griffin folded his wings and plummeted toward the surface of the lake, spinning in the air. "A curse!" Bink cried. "They shot him down with a curse!"

But then the figure straightened out, regained altitude, and winged back. Crombie seemed to be all right.

"What happened?" Bink demanded as the griffin landed. "Was it a curse?"

"Squawk!" Crombie replied. Grundy translated: "What curse? I merely did my turnabout to get a closer fix on the fiends. They reside under the water."

"Under the water!" Bink cried. "How can we go there?"

Humfrey brought out another vial and handed it to Bink. "These pills will do the trick. Take one every two hours while submerged. It will-"

"There's a mound starting!" Chester cried. "A spy!"

Humfrey whipped out yet another vial, uncorked it, and aimed it at the upwelling dirt A jet of vapor shot out, striking the mound. Crystals of ice formed. The mound froze.

"Fire extinguisher," the Magician explained. "Very cold. That squiggle is frozen stiff in its tunnel."

"Let me kill it while I can catch it!" Chester said eagerly.

"Wait!" Bink said. "How long will the freeze last?"

"Only a couple of minutes," Humfrey said. "Then the squiggle will resume activity with no impairment"

"And no memory of the missing minutes?" Bink asked.

"It should not be aware of the lapse. Squiggles aren't very smart."

"Then don't kill it! Get out of its observation. It will be convinced this was a false alarm, that we were never here. It will so report to its master, throwing the enemy off the track."

The Magician's brow lifted. "Very intelligent, Bink. You are thinking more like a leader now. We shall hide in the bottle, and you and Chester can carry it with you. Quickly, before the freeze abates."

The griffin remained uncertain, but acquiesced. The Magician set the vial, performed his incantation, and man, griffin, and golem vanished.

"Grab the bottle, get on my back, hang on!" Chester cried. "Time's almost up!"

Bink snatched up the lone vial remaining, jumped on Chester's back, and hung on. The centaur took off. In a moment his hooves were splashing through the shallow water. "Gimme a pill!" Chester cried.

Bink fumbled out a pill from the bottle, praying he would not spill the works as he bounced around. He popped one into his mouth and handed the other forward to Chester's raised hand. "I hope these work!" he cried.

"That's all we need-another wrong bottle!" Chester exclaimed. "Gobble a foaming insulation pill…"

Bink wished the centaur hadn't thought of that. Insulation, or freezing extinguisher-ouch!

He glanced back. Was it his imagination, or was the dirt mound growing again? Had they gotten away in time? Suppose the squiggle saw their footprints?

Then Chester hit a drop-off, and they plunged underwater. Bink choked involuntarily as the liquid covered his mouth-but the water was just like air to his breathing. In fact, it was like air to his whole body, except for its color. They could breathe!

This experience reminded him of something. In a moment he had it: the Queen's anniversary party! That had been illusory underwater scenery, while this was genuine. Unfortunately, the Queen's version had been prettier. Here things were murky and dull.

Chester plodded on, picking his way carefully through the unfamiliar aquatic environment. Dusky clouds of sediment stirred up around his legs. Curious fish looked the pair over. Chester now held his bow in his hands, in case they should encounter a sea monster. Apart from the tension, it was soon rather dull going.

Bink drew out the bottle that held the Magician and put his eye to the side. Vaguely he made out the shapes of a tiny griffin and tinier man. They were in a carpeted room like that of a palace, and were looking at moving pictures in the magic mirror. It seemed very comfortable. Much nicer, in fact, than forging through the murk toward fiends.

Another ugly thought came. Suppose he had grabbed the wrong bottle himself, and popped the Magician into his mouth in lieu of a water-breathing pill? Such things were very scary right now.

Bink put the vial in his pocket, reassured that his friends were secure. He wondered what would happen if he shook the bottle violently, but resisted the urge to experiment. "Let's go visit the fiends," he said with false cheer.

Shortly they approached a splendid marine castle. It was formed from seashells-which meant it was probably magical, since few seashells formed in lakes without the aid of magic. Little whirlpools ascended from its turrets, apparently bringing air down to the inhabitants. Instead of a moat, the castle had a thick wall of seaweed, patrolled by vigilant swordfish.

"Well, let's hope the fiends are kind to travelers," Bink said. There were no bubbles as he spoke; the pill had fully acclimatized him.

"Let's hope the Magician's mirror knew its business," the centaur responded grimly. "And that the fiends don't connect the fool griffin with us, if they saw him."

They marched up to the main gate. A behemoth rose out of the muck, mostly mouth.

"Hooold!" the behemoth bellowed. "Whoo goooes there?" It was very proficient and resonant on the long O's; the sound reverberated across the reaches of the cavernous maw.

"Chester and Bink, travelers," Bink said with some trepidation. "We'd like lodging for the night."

"Soooo?" the monster inquired. "Then goooo!" Its month gaped even more horrendously.

"Go?" the centaur repeated aggressively. "We just came!"

"Soo gooo!" the behemoth reverberated, its orifice gaping so widely that the centaur could have ridden right into it without ducking his head.

Chester reached for his sword. "Uh, hooold-I mean hold," Bink murmured. "I remember-the gargoyle-I think it means to go inside. Inside the mouth."

The centaur peered into the monster's tunnel-like throat. "Damned if I'll cooperate in my own consumption!"

"But that's the entrance to the castle!" Bink explained. "The behemoth itself."

Chester stared. "Well I'll be gelded!" And without further hesitation he galloped in.

Sure enough, the throat continued on into the castle. Lights appeared at the end of the tunnel, and soon they emerged into a palatial receiving hall. Intricately woven tapestries covered the walls, and the floor was done in fancy wooden squares.

A handsome, almost pretty young man walked up to greet them. He had ornate curls about his ears and a neat mustache. His costume was a princely robe embroidered with brightly colored threads, and he wore soft slippers with pointed toes. "Welcome to Gateway Castle," he said. "May I inquire your identities and the purpose of this visit?"

"You may," Chester said.

There was a pause. "Well?" the man said, a bit nettled.

"Well, why don't you inquire?" Chester said. "I gave you permission."

Small muscles quirked about the man's mouth, making him less pretty. "I so inquire."

"I am Chester Centaur, and this is my companion Bink. He's human."

"So I noted. And your purpose?"

"We seek the source of magic," Bink said.

"You have lost your way. It is at the amazon village, some distance north. But the direct route is hazardous to your sanity."

"We have been there," Bink said. "That is not the ultimate source, but merely the upwelling of magic dust. What we seek lies below. According to our information, a more convenient route passes through this castle."

The man almost smiled. "Oh, you would not care for that route!"

"Try us and see."

"This is beyond my cognizance. You will have to talk with the lord of the manor."

"Good enough," Bink said. He wondered what sort of a fiend this lord would be, who had such a docile human servant.

"If you would be good enough to come this way."

"We're good enough," Chester said.

"But first we must do something about your hooves. The floor is teak parquet; we do not wish it scratched or dented."

"Why put it on the floor, then?" Chester demanded.

"We do not apply it to the floor of our stable," the man said. He produced several disks of felt pads "Apply these to your hooves; they will adhere, and muffle the impact."

"How about wearing one of these on your mouth?" Chester demanded.

"It's a small concession," Bink murmured. Chester's hooves were sound, since the healing elixir had eliminated all damage to the centaur's hind end, but they were hard enough to leave an imprint. "Humor the poor man. The fiends are probably very strict about such things, and punish their servants for violations."

With imperfect grace, Chester pressed his hooves one at a time onto the felt disks. The material clung to them, and it made the centaur's footfalls silent.

They moved through an elegant hall, descended carpeted steps, and entered a small chamber. There was barely room for Chester to stand. "If this is your main hall-" he began.

The man touched a button. The door slid closed. Then, abruptly, the room moved.

Bink flung out his hands, startled, and Chester kicked a hole in the rear wall.

"Easy, visitors," the man said with a small frown. "Haven't you ridden an elevator before? It is inanimate magic, a chamber that rises or sinks when occupied. Saves wear on stairs."

"Oh," Bink said, abashed. He preferred more conventional magic.

The magic lift stopped. The door slid open. They stepped out into another hall, and in due course came to the chambers of the lord of the manor.

He was, to Bink's surprise, a man, garbed richly in silver cloth and diamonds, but with the same foolish slippers his servant wore. "So you proffer service for a night's lodging," he said briskly.

"This is our custom," Bink said.

"And ours too!" the lord agreed heartily. "Have you any special talents?"

Bink couldn't tell his own, and didn't know Chester's. "Uh, not exactly. But we're strong, and can do work."

"Work? Oh my heavens no!" the lord exclaimed. "People do not work here!"

Oh? "How do you live, then?" Bink asked. "We organize, we direct-and we entertain," the lord said. "Have you any entertainment abilities?" Bink spread his hands. "I'm afraid not."

"Excellent! You will make an ideal audience."

"Audience?" Bink knew that Chester was as perplexed as he. The mirror had shown him watching a play-yet that could hardly be a service!

"We send our troupes out to entertain the masses, accepting payment in materials and services. It is a rewarding profession, esthetically and practically. But it is necessary to obtain advance audience ratings, so that we can gauge our reception precisely."

This innocuous employment hardly jibed with the local reputation! "To be an audience-to watch your shows-that's all you require? It hardly seems equitable! I'm afraid we would not be able to present an informed critical report-"

"No necessity! Our magic monitors will gauge your reactions, and point up our rough edges. You will have nothing to do but react, honestly."

"I suppose we could do that" Bink said dubiously. "If you really are satisfied."

"Something funny here," Chester said. "How come you have a reputation as fiends?"

"Uh, that's not diplomatic," Bink murmured, embarrassed.

"Fiends? Who called us fiends?" the lord demanded. "The ogre," Chester replied. "He said you blasted a whole forest with a curse."

The lord stroked his goatee. "The ogre survives?"

"Chester, shut up!" Bink hissed. But the centaur's unruly nature had taken control. "All he was doing was rescuing his lady ogre, and you couldn't stand to have him happy, so-"

"Ah, yes, that ogre. I suppose to an ogre's way of thinking, we would be fiends. To us, crunching human bones is fiendish. It is all in one's perspective."

Apparently the centaur had not antagonized the lord, though Bink judged that to be sheer luck. Unless the lord, like his troupe, was an actor-in which case there could be serious and subtle trouble. "This one is now a vegetarian," Bink said. "But I'm curious: do you really have such devastating curses, and why should you care what an ogre does? You really don't have cause to worry about ogres, here under the lake; they can't swim."

"We do really have such curses," the lord said. "They constitute group effort, the massing of all our magic. We have no individual talents, only individual contributions toward the whole."

Bink was amazed. Here was a whole society with duplicating talents! Magic did repeat itself!

"We do not employ our curses haphazardly, however. We went after the ogre as a professional matter. He was interfering with our monopoly."

Both Bink and Chester were blank. "Your what?"

"We handle all formal entertainments in southern Xanth. That bad actor blundered into one of our sets and kidnapped our leading lady. We do not tolerate such interference or competition."

"You used an ogress for a leading lady?" Bink asked.

"We used a transformed nymph-a consummate actress. All our players are consummate, as you shall see. In that role she resembled the most ogrelike ogress imaginable, absolutely horrible." He paused, considering. "In fact, with her artistic temperament, she was getting pretty ogrelike in life. Prima donna…"

"Then the ogre's error was understandable."

"Perhaps. But not tolerable. He had no business on that set. We had to scrub the whole production. It ruined our season."

Bink wondered what reception the ogre would encounter, as he rescued his ideal female. An actress in ogress guise, actually from the castle of the fiends!

"What about the reverse-spell tree?" Chester asked.

"People were taking its fruit and being entertained by the reversal effects. We did not appreciate the competition. So we eliminated it."

Chester glanced at Bink, but did not speak. Perhaps these people really were somewhat fiendish. To abolish all rival forms of entertainment-

"And where did you say you were traveling to?" the lord inquired.

"To the source of magic," Bink said. "We understand it is underground, and that the best route leads through this castle."

"I do not appreciate humor at my expense," the lord said, frowning. "If you do not wish to inform me of your mission, that is certainly your privilege. But do not taunt me with an obvious fabrication."

Bink had the impression that obviousness was a worse affront than fabrication, to this person.

"Listen, fiend!" Chester said, bridling in most obvious fashion. "Centaurs do not lie!"

"Uh, let me handle this," Bink said quickly. "There is surely some misunderstanding. We are on quest for the source of magic-but perhaps we have been misinformed as to its access."

The lord mellowed. "That must be the case. Below this castle lies only the vortex. Nothing that goes that route ever returns. We are the Gateway; we straddle the vortex, protecting innocent creatures from being drawn unwittingly into that horrible fate. Who informed you that the object of your quest lay in such a direction?"

"Well, a Magician-"

"Never trust a Magician! They are all up to mischief!"

"Uh, maybe so," Bink said uneasily, and Chester nodded thoughtfully. "He was very convincing."

"They tend to be," the lord said darkly. Abruptly he shifted the subject. "I will show you the vortex. This way, if you please." He led the way to an interior panel. It slid aside at his touch. There was a glistening wall of glassy substance. No, not glass; it was moving. Fleeting irregularities showed horizontally. Now Bink could see through it somewhat vaguely, making out the three-dimensional shape. It was a column, perhaps twice his armspan in diameter, with a hollow center. In fact it was water, coursing around in circles at high speed. Or in spirals, going down-

"A whirlpool!" Chester exclaimed. "We are looking at the nether column of a whirlpool!"

"Correct," the lord said with pride. "We have constructed our castle around it, containing it by magic. Substances may pass into it, but not out of it. Criminals and other untoward persons are fed into its maw, to disappear forever. This is a most salutary deterrent."

Surely so! The mass of moving fluid was awesome in its smooth power, and frightening. Yet it was also in its fashion luring, like the song of the siren, or the madness.

Bink yanked his gaze away. "But where does it go?"

"Who would presume to know?" the lord inquired in return, quirking an eyebrow expressively. He slid the panel across and the vision of the vortex was gone.

"Enough of this," the lord decided. "We shall wine and dine you fittingly, and then you will audience our play."

The meal was excellent, served by fetching young women in scant green outfits who paid flattering attention to the travelers, especially Chester. They seemed to admire both his muscular man-portion and his handsome equine portion. Bink wondered, as he had before, what it was girls saw in horses. The siren had been so eager to ride!

At last, stuffed, Bink and Chester were ushered to the theater. The stage was several times the size of the chamber for the audience. Apparently these people did not like to watch as much as they liked to perform.

The curtain lifted and it was on: a gaudily costumed affair replete with bold swordsmen and buxom women and funny jokers. The staged duels were impressive, but Bink wondered how proficient those men would be with their weapons in a real battle. There was a considerable difference between technical skill and combat nerve! The women were marvelously seductive-but would they be as shapely without the support of their special clothes, or as wittily suggestive minus the memorized lines?

"You do not find our production entertaining?" the lord inquired.

"I prefer life," Bink replied.

The lord made a note on his pad: MORE REALISM,

Then the play shifted to a scene of music. The heroine sang a lovely song of loss and longing, meditating on her faithless lover, and it was difficult to imagine how any lout, no matter how louty, could be faithless to such a desirable creature. Bink thought of Chameleon again, and longed for her again. Chester was standing raptly beside him, probably thinking of horsing around with Cherie Centaur, who was indeed a fetching filly.

Then the song was augmented by a hauntingly lovely accompaniment. A flute was playing, its notes of such absolute quality and clarity that the lady's voice was shamed. Bink looked toward that sound-and there it was, a gleaming silver flute hanging in the air beside the heroine, playing by itself. A magic flute! The lady ceased singing, surprised, but the flute played on. Indeed, freed of the limitations of her voice, it trilled on into an aria of phenomenal expertise and beauty. Now the entire cast of players stood listening, seeming to find it as novel as Bink did.

The lord jumped to his feet "Who is performing that magic?" he demanded.

No one answered. All were absorbed in the presentation.

"Clear that set!" the lord cried, red-faced. "Everybody out, out, out!"

Slowly they cleared, fading into the wings, looking back at the solo instrument The stage was empty-but still the flute played, performing a medley of melodies, each more lovely than the one preceding.

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. 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 then 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 facade 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.

Chapter 10

Precious Nymph

Bink 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 light. 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, a 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. Well 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.

Bink's thirst had been casual, at first, but now that he knew there was no water it became more pressing. How long could they go on, before-?

Abruptly they saw light-real light, not the mere passage glow. They hurried cautiously up to it-and discovered a magic lantern suspended from a jag of stone. Its soft effulgence was a welcome sight-but there was nothing else.

"People-or goblins?" Bink asked, nervous and hopeful.

Chester took it down and studied it. "Looks like fairy-work to me," he said. "Goblins don't really need light, and in any event this is too delicately wrought."

"Even fairies aren't necessarily friendly," Bink said, "Still, it seems a better risk than starving here alone."

They took the lamp and went on with slightly improved prospects. But nothing further developed. Apparently someone or something had lit a lamp, left it, and departed. Strange. Weary, dirty, hungry, and unpleasantly thirsty, they paused at last on a boulder. "We have to find food, or at least water," Bink said, trying to make it seem casual. "There doesn't seem to be any on this main passage, but-" He paused, listening. "Is that-?"

Chester cocked his head. "Yes, I think it is. Water dripping. You know, I haven't wanted to say anything, but my tongue has been drying up in my mouth. If we could-"

"Behind this wall, I think. Maybe if we-"

"Stand clear." The centaur faced about so that his better half addressed the wall in question. Then he kicked.

A section of the wall collapsed. Now the sound was louder: water flowing over stone. "Let me climb in there," Bink said. "If I can collect a cupful-"

"Just in case," Chester said, taking his coil of rope and looping it about Bink's waist. "We don't know what to expect in these dark chambers. If you fall in a hole, I'll haul you out"

"Yes," Bink agreed. "Let me take the magic lantern."

He scrambled into the hole. Once he got by the boulder, he found himself in a larger, irregular cavern whose floor slanted down into darkness. The sound of water was coming from that darkness.

He moved forward, careful of his footing, trailing the line behind him. The water sound became temptingly loud. Bink traced it to a crevice in the floor. He held his lantern over it. Now at last he saw the glint of a streamlet. He reached down with his fingers, and just as his shoulder nudged the crevice lip his fingers touched the water.

How could he draw any up? After a moment's thought he ripped a piece of cloth from his already tattered sleeve, and dangled that down into the water. He let it soak up what liquid it cared to, then brought it to the surface.

While he was doing this, he heard a distant singing. He stiffened with alarm. Were the lake fiends coming here? No, that seemed highly unlikely; they were water dwellers, not rock dwellers, and by the lord of the manor's own admission they knew nothing of this nether region. This had to be some creature of the caves. Perhaps the owner of the magic lantern.

By the time he brought the dripping rag to his mouth, the singing was quite close. There was the scent of fresh flowers. Bink put the dangling end of the rag in his mouth and squeezed. Cool, clear liquid dripped down. It was the best water he had ever tasted!

Then something strange happened. Bink experienced a surge of dizziness-not sickening, but wonderfully pleasant. He felt alive, vibrant, and full of the warmth of human spirit. That was good water indeed! He dipped his rag into the crevice again, soaking it for Chester. This was an inefficient way to drink, but a great deal better than nothing. While he lay there he heard the singing again. It was a nymph, of imperfect voice but sounding young and sweet and joyful. A pleasant shiver went through him.

Bink brought up the rag and laid it on the cave floor. He took up the light and moved toward the voice. It came from a section beyond the water, and soon Bink came to the end of his tether. He untied the rope, let it drop from his waist, and went on.

Now he spied a beam of light emanating from another crack. The singer was in the chamber beyond. Bink knelt and put his eye to the crack, silently.

She was sitting on a stool fashioned of silver, sorting through a barrel filled with precious stones. Their colors reflected brilliantly, decorating all the walls of the room. She was a typical nymph, long and bare of leg with a tiny skirt just about covering a pert derriere, slender of waist, full of bosom, and innocent and large-eyed of face. Her hair sparkled like the keg of jewels. He had seen nymphs like this many times; each had her association with tree or rock or stream or lake or mountain, yet they were all so uniform in face and feature that their beauty became commonplace. It was as if some Magician had established the ideal female-human aspect and scattered it about the Land of Xanth for decoration, attaching individual units to particular locales so that the distribution would be uniform. So she was nothing special. The precious stones, in contrast, were a phenomenal treasure.

Yet Bink glanced only passingly at the stones. His gaze became fixed on the nymph. She-he felt-it was rapt adoration.

What am I doing? he demanded of himself. With Chester waiting for a drink, Bink had no business here! And for answer, he only sighed longingly.

The nymph overheard. She glanced up alertly, breaking off her innocent melody, but could not see him. Perplexed, she shook her maiden tresses and returned to her work, evidently deciding that she had imagined it.

"No, I am here!" Bink cried, surprising himself. "Behind the wall!"

She screamed a cute little scream, jumped up, and fled. The keg overturned, dumping jewels across the floor.

"Wait! Don't run!" Bink cried. He smashed his fist into the wall with such force the stone cracked. He wrenched out more fragments, widening the hole, then jumped down into the room. He almost slipped on some pearls, but did a little dance and got his balance.

Now he stood still and listened. There was a strange smell, reminiscent of the breath of an attacking dragon, one just behind a person and gaining. Bink looked about nervously, but there was no dragon. All was silent. Why didn't he hear her still running?

In a moment he had it figured. She might flee in alarm, but she would hardly leave her treasure unguarded. Obviously she had dodged around a corner and now was watching him from hiding.

"Please, miss," Bink called. "I mean no harm to you. I only want to-"

To hug you, to kiss you, to-

Shocked, he halted his thoughts in mid-train. He was a married man! What was he doing chasing a strange nymph? He should get back to Chester, take the centaur his bagful of water-

Again he paused in his thoughts. Oh, no!

Yet he could hardly doubt his sudden emotion. He had imbibed from a spring, and become enamored of the first maiden he had seen thereafter. It must have been a love spring!

But why had his talent let him drink it?

The answer was distressingly obvious. He wished he hadn't thought of the question. His talent had no regard for his feelings, or those of others. It protected only his physical, personal welfare. It must have decided that his wife Chameleon represented some kind of threat to his welfare, so it was finding him another love. It had not been satisfied with separating him from Chameleon temporarily; now it intended to make that separation permanent.

"I will not have it!" he cried aloud. "I love Chameleon!"

And that was true. Love potions did not undo existing relations. But now he also loved this nymph-and she was a great deal more accessible.

Was he at war with his own talent? He had ethics it evidently did not; he was civilized while it was primitive. Who was to be the master, here?

He fought, but could not undo the effect of the love spring. Had he anticipated what his talent was leading him into, he might have balked it before he drank, but now he was the victim of a fait accompli. Well, he would settle with his talent when he found a better occasion.

All was fair in magic. "Nymph, come here and tell me your name, or I'll steal all your treasure!" he yelled.

When she did not respond, he righted the keg and began scooping up gems. There was an amazing assortment: diamonds, pearls, opals, emeralds, sapphires, and too many others to classify. How had the nymph come by such a fortune?

Now the nymph appeared, peeking around a curve in the tunnel. Coincidentally, Bink smelled the fleeting scent of woodland flowers. "But I need that treasure!" she protested.

Bink continued his work. The stones sailed into the barrel. "What is your name?" he demanded.

"What's yours?" There was an odor like that of a hesitant deerfly at the edge of a glade.

"I asked you first." All he wanted to do was keep her in conversation until he could catch her.

"But you're the stranger!" she pointed out with female logic.

Ah, well He liked her logic. He knew it was the effect of the potion, but he was captive to her mannerisms. "My name is Bink."

"I am Jewel," she said. "The Nymph of Jewels, if you insist on the whole definition. Now give me back my stones."

"I'll be glad to, Jewel. For a kiss."

"What kind of a nymph do you think I am?" she protested in typical nymphly fashion. Now there was the odor of pine-oil disinfectant.

"I hope to find out. Tell me about yourself."

She edged farther into the room, distrusting him. "I'm just a rock nymph. I see that all the precious stones get properly planted in the ground, so that goblins, dragons, men, and other voracious creatures can mine them." Bink smelled the mixed fumes of hard-laboring men and goblins. "It's all very important, because otherwise those creatures would be even wilder than they are. The mining gives them something to do."

So that was how the jewels got planted. Bink had always wondered about that, or would have wondered had he thought about it "But where do you get them to start with?"

"Oh, they just appear by magic, of course. The keg never empties."

"It doesn't?"

"See, it is already overflowing with the gems you are trying to put back. You aren't supposed to put them back."

Bink looked, surprised. It was so. He had assumed the keg was empty without really checking it, because his main attention had been on the nymph.

"How am I ever going to process all those extra stones?" she demanded with cute petulance. "Usually it takes an hour to place each one, and you have spilled hundreds." She stamped her sweet little foot, not knowing how to express her annoyance effectively. Nymphs had been designed for appearance, not emotion.

"Me? You spilled them when you ran!" Bink retorted. "I'm trying to pick them up."

"Well, it's your fault because you scared me. What were you doing behind the wall? No one's supposed to go there. That's why it's walled off. The water-" She paused with new alarm. "You didn't-?"

"I did," Bink said. "I was thirsty, and-"

She screamed again, and fled again. Nymphs by nature were flighty. Bink continued his gathering, arranging the surplus jewels in a pile beside the keg, knowing she would be back. He hated himself somewhat, knowing he should leave her alone, but found himself unable to stop himself. And he did owe it to her to clean up this mess as well as he could, though the pile was getting unwieldy.

Jewel peeked back around the corner. "If you'd just go away and let me catch up-"

"Not until I've finished cleaning up this overflow," Bink said. "As you pointed out, it is my fault" He placed a huge egg-shaped opal on top of his mound-and watched the whole thing subside, squirting out diamonds and things. He was getting nowhere.

She edged in closer. "No, you're right I spilled it. I'll catch up somehow. You just-just leave. Please." The sneezy tang of dust tickled his nose, as if a herd of centaurs had just charged along a dry road in midsummer.

"Your magic talent!" Bink exclaimed. "Smells!"

"Well, I never," she said, modestly affronted. Now the dust-odor was tinged by the fumes of burning oil.

"I mean you can make-you smell like what you feel."

"Oh, that." The oil merged into perfume. "Yes.

What's your talent?"

"I can't tell you."

"But I just told you mine! It's only fair-" She edged within range. Bink grabbed her. She screamed again most fetchingly, and struggled without much strength. That, too, was the way nymphs were: delightfully and ineffectively difficult. He drew her in for a firm kiss on the lips. She was a most pleasant armful, and her lips tasted like honey. At least they smelled like it.

"That wasn't very nice," she rebuked him when he ended the kiss, but she didn't seem very angry. Her odor was of freshly overturned earth.

"I love you," Bink said. "Come with me-"

"I can't go with you," she said, smelling of freshly cut grass. "I have my job to do."

"And I have mine," Bink said.

"What's your job?"

"I'm on a quest for the source of magic."

"But that's way down in the center of the world, or somewhere," she said. "You can't travel that way. There are dragons and goblins and rats-"

"We're used to them," Bink said.

"I'm not used to them! I'm afraid of the dark! I couldn't go there, even if-"

Even if she wanted to. Because of course she did not love him. She had not drunk the love-water.

Bink had a naughty idea. "Come and take a drink with me! Then we can-"

She struggled to disengage, and he let her go. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her! "No, I couldn't afford love. I must plant all these jewels."

"But what am I to do? From the moment I saw you-"

"You'll just have to take the antidote," she said, smelling of a newly lit candle. Bink recognized the connection: the candle symbolized her bright idea.

"There is an antidote?" He hadn't thought of that

There must be. For every spell there's an equal and opposite counterspell somewhere. All you have to do is find it"

I know who can find it," Bink said. "My friend Crombie."

"You have friends?" she asked, surprised, smelling of startled birds.

"Of course I have friends!"

"Down here, I meant I thought you were alone."

"No. I was looking for water for me and Chester. We-"

"Chester? I thought your friend was Crombie."

"Chester Centaur. Crombie is a griffin. And there's Magician Humfrey, and-"

"A Magician!" she exclaimed, impressed. "All to look for the source of magic?"

"Yes. The King wants to know."

"There's a King along too?"

"No," Bink said, momentarily exasperated. "The King assigned me to make the quest. But we had some trouble, and got separated, and-"

"I suppose I'd better show you where there's water," she decided. "And food-you must be hungry too."

"Yes," he said, reaching for her. "We'll be glad to do some service in return-"

"Oh, no!" she cried, skipping away with an enticing bounce of anatomy and the scent of hickory smoke. "Not until you drink the antidote!"

Just so. "I really must get back to Chester," Bink said. "He'll be worried."

She considered for a moment. "Bink, I'm sorry about what happened. Fetch your friends, and I'll see they get fed. Then you really must go."

"Yes." Bink walked slowly to the hole in the wall.

"Not that way!" she cried. "Go round by the regular passages!"

"But I don't know the way! I have no light. I have to follow the rope back."

"Definitely not!" She took her own magic lantern, a twin of the one Bink had found before, from the wall and grasped Bink's arm firmly. "I know all the halls around here. I'll find him for you."

Bink willingly suffered himself to be led. Even apart from the potion, he was discerning commendable traits in her. She was not one of the empty-headed nymphs like those associated with ocean foam or wild oats; she had a sense of purpose and fitness and decency. No doubt her responsible job of jewel-placing had matured her. Still, potion or not, he had no business with this creature! Once his friends were fed, he would have to leave her. He wondered how long it would take the potion to wear oft. Some spells were temporary, but others were lifelong.

They circled through intersecting passages. In a moment they came upon Chester, still waiting by the hole. "Here we are!" Bink called.

Chester jumped so that all four hooves were off the floor. "Bink!" he exclaimed as he landed. "What happened? Who is that nymph?"

"Chester, this is Jewel. Jewel-Chester," Bink introduced. "I-" He hesitated.

"He drank a love potion," Jewel said brightly.

The centaur made a motion as of tearing out two fistfuls of mane. "The secret enemy strikes again!"

Bink hadn't thought of that. Of course that was the most reasonable explanation! His talent hadn't betrayed him, but it hadn't protected him from this non-physical threat either. Thus his enemy had scored.

How could he pursue the source of magic, when his heart was tied up here?

But his heart was also tied up back home, with Chameleon. That was part of the reason he was on this quest So-he had better just get on with it. "If we can get back together with Crombie and the Magician, maybe Crombie can point out the location of the antidote," Bink said.

"Where are your friends?" Jewel asked.

"They're in a bottle," Bink explained. "But we can communicate with them through a fragment of magic mirror. Here, I'll introduce you to them." He fumbled in his pocket for the bit of glass.

His fingers found nothing. "Oh, no-I've lost the fragment!" He turned the pocket inside out. There was a hole in it, where the sharp edge of glass had sawed its way out

"Well, we'll find them somehow," Bink said numbly. "We won't give up until we do."

"That would seem best," Chester agreed gravely. However, we'll have to take the nymph along with us."

"Why?" Bink had mixed emotions.

"The object of the counterspell has to be present; that's the way these things work. You loved the first female you encountered after imbibing the potion; you must unlove her in the same fashion."

"I can't come with you!" Jewel protested, though she looked at Chester as if wishing for a ride on his back. "I have a lot of work to do!"

"How much will you get done if Bink stays here?" Chester inquired.

She threw up her hands in feminine exasperation.

"Come to my apartment, both of you. We'll discuss it later."

Jewel's apartment was as attractive as herself. She had a cluster of caves completely carpeted; the carpet-moss ran across the floor, up over the walls, and across the ceiling without a break except for the round doors. It was extremely cozy. She had no chairs, table, or bed; it seemed she sat or lay down anywhere, anytime, in perfect comfort.

"We'll have to do something about those clothes," she said to Bink.

Bink looked down at himself. His clothing had more or less dried on him, after its soaking in the vortex and lake; it glowed in uneven patches. "But these are all I have," he said regretfully.

"You can dry-clean them," she said. "Go into the lavatory and put them in the cleaner. It only takes a moment."

Bink entered the room she indicated and closed the curtain. He located the cleaner: an ovenlike alcove through which a warm current of air passed over his tunic and shorts. He set them within this, then moved over to the basin where a rivulet of water ran through. Above it was a polished rock surface: a mirror. The vanity of the distaff always required a mirror!

Seeing himself reflected was a shock: he was more bedraggled than his clothes. His hair was tangled and plastered over his forehead, and he had a beard just at the ugly starting stage. Cave-dirt was smeared over portions of his face and body, from his crawl through the wall. He looked like a juvenile ogre. No wonder the nymph had been afraid of him at first!

He used the keen blade of his sword to shave his face, since there was no magic shaving brush here to brush his whiskers away conveniently. Then he rinsed and combed his hair. He found his clothing dry and clean and pressed: obviously more than hot air was at work. His torn sleeve had been neatly hemmed so that the absence of cloth looked intentional. He wondered if some magic dust circulated in these caves, augmenting the function of such things as dry cleaners. The nymph seemed to have many magical conveniences, and quite a comfortable life-style. It would not be hard to adapt to such a style-

He shook his head. That was the love potion speaking, not his common sense! He had to be on guard against rationalization. He did not belong down here, and he would have to leave when his mission was done, though he leave part of his heart behind.

Nevertheless, he dressed himself neatly, even giving his boots a turn at the cleaner. Too bad the Magician's bottle couldn't have washed ashore instead of his footwear!

When he emerged from the lavatory, Jewel looked him over with surprised admiration. "You are a handsome man!"

Chester smiled wryly. "I suppose it was hard to tell, before. Would that I could wash my face and suffer a similar transformation!" They all laughed, somewhat ill at ease.

"We must pay for your hospitality-and for your help," Chester said when the laugh subsided fitfully.

"My hospitality I give freely; pay would demean it," Jewel said. "My help you seem to be co-opting. There is no pay for slave labor."

"No, Jewel!" Bink cried, cut to the heart of his emotion. "I would not force anything on you, or cause you grief!"

She softened. "I know it, Bink. You drank of the love-water; you would not hurt me. Yet since I must help you find your friends, so they can find the counterspell, and this takes me away from my work-"

"Then we must help you do your work!" Bink said.

"You can't. You don't know the first thing about sorting precious stones, or where they should be set. And if you did, the borer would not work for you."

"The borer?"

"My steed beast. He phases through the rock to reach where I must set the stones. I alone can control him-and then only when I sing. He works for a song, nothing else."

Bink exchanged glances with Chester. "After we eat, we will show you our music," Chester said.

Jewel's meal was strange but excellent. She served an assortment of mushrooms and fungus-things that grew magically, she explained, without the need of light. Some tasted like dragon steak, and some like potato chips chipped from a hot potato tree, and dessert was very like chocolate pie fresh from the brown cow, so round and soft and pungent it practically flowed off the plate. She also had a kind of chalky powder she mixed with the water to produce excellent milk.

"You know," Chester murmured aside to Bink, "you could have found a worse nymph to encounter after your draught."

Bink didn't answer. After the magic drink, he would have loved a harpy; it wouldn't have mattered how foul she was. The love potion was absolutely heedless of its consequence. Magic without conscience. Indeed, as he had learned to his horror, the history of Xanth had been influenced by just such love springs. The original, mundane species had intermated, producing crossbreeds like the chimeras, harpies, griffins-and centaurs. Who was to say this was wrong? Where would the Land of Xanth be now, without the noble centaurs? Yet Bink's own drink of this water was supremely inconvenient in a personal way. Rationally, he had to stay with his wife, Chameleon; but emotionally-

Chester finished his repast. He concentrated, and the silver flute appeared. It played rapturously. Jewel sat frozen, listening to the silvery melody. Then she began to sing in harmony with it. Her voice could not approach the purity of the flute, but it complemented the instrument nicely. Bink was entranced-and would have been, he told himself, regardless of the potion.

Something grotesque poked into the room. Chester's flute cut off in midnote, and his sword appeared in his hand.

"Stay your hand, centaur!" Jewel cried. "That is my borer!"

Chester did not attack, but his sword remained ready. "It looks like a giant worm!"

"Yes," she agreed. "He's related to the wiggles and squiggles, but he's much larger and slower. He's a diggle-not very bright, but invaluable for my work."

Chester decided it was all right. "I thought I had seen everything in the lexicon, but I missed this one. Let's see whether we can help you work. If he likes my music, and you have any stones to place near the river-"

"Are you kidding?" Jewel asked in her nymphly idiom. "With half the keg spilled, I have dozens of stones for the river. Might as well start there."

Under her direction, they boarded the diggle. Jewel bestrode the monster worm near its front end, a basket of precious stones held before her. Bink sat next, and Chester last, his four feet somewhat awkward in this situation. He was used to being ridden, not to riding, though he had done it before with the dragon.

"Now we make music," Jewel said. "He will work as long as he likes the sound, and he doesn't require much variation. After a few hours I get tired and nave to stop, but if the centaur's flute-"

The flute appeared. It played. The great worm crawled forward, carrying them along as if they were mere files. It did not scramble or flex, as the dragon did; it elongated and contracted its body in stages, so that the sections they rode were constantly changing in diameter. It was a strange mode of travel, but an effective one. This was a very large worm, and it traveled swiftly.

A flange flexed out from the diggle's front segment, and as he tunneled into the rock, the flange extended the diameter of the phase-tunnel so that the riders could fit through also. It occurred to Bink that this was a variant of the type of magic in the Good Magician's water-breathing pills. The rock, like the water, was not being tunneled through so much as it was being temporarily changed so that they could pass through it without making a hole. Chester had to duck his head to stay within the phase, and his flute was crowded, but it kept playing its captivating melodies. Bink was sure Chester was more than happy to have this pretext to practice his newly discovered talent, after a lifetime of suppression.

"I have to admit, this is a worthwhile service," the nymph said. "I always thought centaurs had no magic.,"

"The centaurs thought so too," Bink said, covertly admiring her form from behind. To hell with the love potion; she had a shape to conjure with. Then the worm lurched, striking a different type of rock, and Bink was thrown forward against the nymph. "Uh, sorry," he said, righting himself, though indeed he was not very sorry. "I, uh-"

"Yes, I know," Jewel said. "Maybe you'd better put your arms about my waist, to steady yourself. It does get bumpy on occasion."

"I…think I'd better not," Bink said.

"You're sort of noble, in your fashion," she observed. "A girl could get to like you."

"I-I'm married," Bink said miserably. "I-I need that antidote."

"Yes, of course," she agreed.

Suddenly the diggle emerged through a wall into a large chamber. "The river," Chester observed. When he spoke, his flute ceased its playing. The worm turned, his snout questing for the vanished music.

"Don't stop!" Jewel cried. "He quits when-"

The flute resumed. "We want to follow the river down," Bink said. "If we see a bottle floating in it-"

"First, I have to place some stones," he said firmly.

She guided the worm to a projecting formation, halted him, and held out a fat diamond. "Right inside there," she said. "It'll take a million years for the water to wash that into sight."

The diggle took the stone in his orifice and carried it into the rock. His head tapered into a virtual point, with a mouth smaller than a man's, so holding the jewel was no problem. When his snout emerged, the diamond was gone and the formation was whole. Bink was startled, then realized he shouldn't be; they had not left any tunnel behind them, either.

"One down," Jewel said briskly. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go."

But Bink's eyes were on the glowing river, looking for the bottle. Such as the power of the potion, he half-hoped he wouldn't find it. Once they found the magician, and then located the antidote, he would be out of love with Jewel-and that was difficult to contemplate. He knew what was right, but his heart wasn't in it.

Time passed. Jewel placed diamonds, opals, emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, jades, and many garnets in the rocks along the river, and sprinkled pearls in the water for the oysters to find. "Oysters just love pearls," she explained. "They just gobble them up." She sang as she worked, alternating with Chester's flute, while Bink's attention roved from her to the water and back again. He could, indeed, have encountered a worse subject for the potion to fix on!

Then the river opened out into another lake. "This is the abode of the demons, who are able to drink and use the tainted water," Jewel cautioned them. "The demons know me, but the two of you will have to obtain a permit to pass through their territory. They don't like trespassers."

Bink felt Chester's motion behind him, as of hand touching bow and sword. They had had trouble with fiends; they didn't need trouble with demons!

The cavern walls became carved to resemble stone buildings, with squared-off corners and alleys between: very like a city. Bink had never actually seen a city, except in pictures; the early settlers of Xanth had made cities, but with the decline in population these had disappeared.

Bink and Chester dismounted and walked beside the worm, here on the street. Soon a magic wagon rolled up. It resembled a monster-drawn coach, but lacked the monster. The wheels were fat bouncy donuts of rubber, and the body seemed to be metal. A purring emanated from the interior. There was probably a little monster inside, pedaling the wheels.

"Where's the fire?" the demon demanded from the coach. He was blue, and the top of his head was round and flat like a saucer.

"Right here, Blue Steel," Jewel said, clapping one hand to her bosom. "Will you issue a ticket for my friends? They're looking for the source of magic."

"The source of magic!" another voice exclaimed. There were, Bink now saw, two demons in the vehicle; the second was of coppery hue. "That's a matter for the Chief!"

"All right, Copper," Jewel agreed. She evidently knew these demons well enough to banter with them. Bink suffered a sharp green pang of jealousy.

Jewel guided them to a building marked PRECINCT STATION and parked the worm. "I must remain with the diggle to sing him a song," she said. "You go in and see the Chief; I will wait."

Now Bink was afraid she would not wait, that she would take this opportunity to leave them, to betray them to the demons. That way she would be safe from pursuit, either vengeful or romantic. But he had to trust her. After all, he loved her.

The demon inside sat at a broad desk, poring over a book. He glanced up as they entered. "Ah, yes-we were fated to meet again," he said.

"Beauregard!" Bink exclaimed, amazed. "I'll issue the permits, of course," the demon said. "You were the specific instrument of my release, according to the rules of the game, and I feel an undemonly obligation. But allow me to entertain you properly, as you entertained me at the ogre's domicile. There is much you must be advised of before you pursue your quest further."

"Uh, there's a nymph waiting outside-" Bink said. Beauregard shook his head. "You do seem to be jinxed, Bink. First you lose the bottle, then your heart But never fear, well include the nymph in the party. We shall entertain the diggle at our motor pool; he will enjoy the swim. We know Jewel well; in fact, you could hardly have been more fortunate in your misfortune." In due course Jewel joined them for supper. It was hard to believe that dawn had been at the fringe of the Region of Madness, in a tree, and breakfast had been at the lake castle of the fiends, lunch with the nymph, and supper here-all in the same day. Down here under the ground day had less meaning; still, it had been an eventful period.

The demon's meal was similar to the nymph's, only it was fashioned from minute magic creatures called yeast and bacteria. Bink wondered whether there were front-teria too, but didn't ask. Some of the food was like squash, which had been squashed only minutes before; some resembled roast haunch of medium-long pig. Dessert was the frozen eye of a scream bird. Genuine eye scream was a rare delicacy, and so was this yellow flavored imitation.

"I sampled the eye of a smilk once," Chester said. "But it was not as good as this."

"You have good taste," Beauregard said.

"On, no! Centaur eyes have inferior flavor," Chester said quickly.

"You are too modest" But the demon smiled reassuringly. "Screams have more fat than smilks, so their eyes provide more flavor, as you recognized."

After the repast they retired to Beauregard's den, where a tame firedrake blazed merrily. "Now we shall provide you excellent accommodations for the night," the demon said. "We shall not interfere in any way with your quest. However-"

"What is it you know, that we don't?" Bink asked anxiously.

"I know the nature of demons," Beauregard said.

"Oh, we don't plan to bother you here! We're going on to-"

"Bear with me, Bink." Beauregard brought out a fancy little bottle, uttered an obscure word, and made a mystic gesture. The cork popped out, vapor issued forth, and formed into-Good Magician Humfrey.

Amazed, Bink could only ask: "But where is Crombie?"

"Back in the bottle," Humfrey said shortly. "It would help if you recovered your fumble promptly."

"But if Beauregard can rescue you-"

"I have not rescued him," the demon said. "I have conjured him. He must now do my bidding."

"Just as you once did his bidding!" Bink said.

"Correct. It all depends on who is confined, and who possesses the controlling magic. The Magician has dabbled in demonology; he is now subject to our humanology."

"But does that mean-"

"No, I shall not abuse the situation. My interest is in research, not ironies. I merely make this demonstration to convince you that there is more to magic than you may have supposed, and that the possible consequences of your quest may be more extensive than you would care to risk."

"I already know something is trying to stop me," Bink said.

"Yes. It is some kind of demon-and that is the problem. Most demons have no more magic than most humans do, but the demons of the depths are something else. They are to ordinary demons like me as Magicians are to ordinary people like you. It is not wise to venture into their demesnes."

"You're a demon," Chester said suspiciously. "Why are you telling us this?"

"Because he's a good demon," Jewel said. "He helps people."

"Because I care about the welfare of Xanth," Beauregard said. "If I were convinced Xanth would be better off without people, I would work toward that end. But though I have had doubt on occasion, so far I believe the species of man is a net benefit." He looked at the Magician. "Even gnomes like him."

Humfrey merely stood there. "Why don't you set him free, then?" Bink asked, not wholly trusting the demon.

"I can not free him. Only the holder of his container can do that."

"But here he is! You summoned him from your bottle!"

"My magic has granted me a temporary lease on his service. I can only evoke him briefly, and can not keep him. If I had his bottle, then I could control him, since he was so foolish as to confine himself in that manner. That is why you must recover that bottle, before-"

"Before it breaks!" Bink said.

"It will never break. It is an enchanted bottle; I know, for I occupied it, and made sure it was secure. No, the danger is that your enemy will recover it first." Bink was appalled. "The enemy!"

"For then that enemy would control the Magician, and all Humfrey's power would be at the enemy's service. In that event, Humfrey's chances of surviving would be poor-almost as poor as yours."

"I must get that bottle!" Bink cried. "If only I knew where it is!"

"That is the service I require," Beauregard said. "Magician, inform Bink of your precise location, so he can rescue you."

"Latitude twenty-eight degrees northwest, longitude one hundred and-"

"Not that way, simpleton!" Beauregard interrupted. "Tell it so he can use it!"

"Er, yes," Humfrey agreed. "Perhaps we'd better put Crombie on."

"Do it," the demon snapped.

The griffin appeared beside the Magician. "Say, yes," Bink said eagerly. "If we have him point out your direction from here, I mean our direction from there, we can reverse it to reach you."

"Won't work," Beauregard said. But Crombie was already whirling. His wing came to rest pointing directly at Bink.

"Fine," Bink said. "We'll go that way."

"Try walking across the den." Beauregard said. "Griffin, hold that point."

Perplexed, Bink walked. Crombie didn't move, but his pointing wing continued aiming at Bink. "It's just a picture!" Bink explained. "No matter how you look at it, it looks right at you."

"Precisely," the demon agreed. 'This conjuration is in a certain respect an image. The same aspect appears regardless of the orientation of the viewer. To orient on the conjuration is useless; it is the original we require."

"Easily solved, demon," Humfrey snapped. "Crombie, point out the direction of our bottle as viewed from the locale of the conjuration."

How simple! The conjuration was here, so this would give the proper direction to there. But would it work?

The griffin whirled and pointed again. This time the wing aimed away from Bink, and downward.

"That is the way you must go," Beauregard said gravely. "Now before I banish the image, have you any other questions?"

"I do," Chester said, "About my talent-"

Beauregard smiled. "Very clever, centaur. I think you have the mind of a demon! It is indeed possible, in this situation, for you to obtain the information you seek without incurring the Magician's normal fee, if your ethics permit such exploitation."

"No," Chester said. "I'm not trying to cheat! Magician, I know my talent now. But I've already served part of the fee, and am stuck for the rest."

Humfrey smiled. "I never specified the Question I would Answer. Pick another Question for the fee. That was part of the agreement."

"Say, good," Chester said, like a colt with sudden access to the farthest and greenest pasture. He pondered briefly. "Cherie-I'd sure like to know her talent, if she has one. A magical one, I mean. Her and her less-magical-than-thou attitude-"

"She has a talent," Humfrey said. "Do you wish the Answer now?"

"No. I might figure it out myself, again."

The Magician spread his hands. "As you prefer. However, we are not insured against accidents of fate. If you don't solve it, and Bink doesn't find my bottle before the enemy does, I may be forced to renege. Do you care to take that risk?"

"What do you mean, before the enemy does?" Bink demanded. "How close is the enemy to-"

"That is what we were discussing before," Beauregard said. "It seems the Magician can not be protected from his own information-talent. He is correct: that bottle has been carried very close to the region your enemy inhabits, and it is very likely that the enemy is aware of that. Thus this is not a routine search for the bottle, but a race against active opposition."

"But what is the nature of the enemy?" Bink demanded.

"Begone, Magician," Beauregard said. Humfrey and Crombie converted into smoke and swirled into the bottle. "I can not answer that Question directly, other than to remind you that the enemy must be some sort of demon. Therefore I spare myself the embarrassment of confessing my ignorance in the presence of my human counterpart in research. Professional rivalry, you might say."

"I don't care about professional rivalry!" Bink retorted. "The Good Magician and Crombie are my friends. I've got to save them!"

"You're loyal," Jewel said admiringly.

"The thing you must understand," Beauregard continued, "is that as you approach the source of magic, the magic of the immediate environment becomes stronger, in a function resembling a logarithmic progression. Therefore-"

"I don't understand that," Bink said. "What have logs to do with it? Is the enemy a tree?"

"He means the magic gets stronger faster as you get closer," Chester explained. Centaurs had excellent mathematical comprehension.

"Precisely," the demon agreed. "Thus we demons, being more proximate to the source, tend to be more magical than you creatures at the fringe. But in the immediate vicinity of the source, the magic is far stronger than we can fathom. Therefore I can not identify your specific enemy or describe his magic-but it is likely that it is stronger magic than you have encountered before."

"I've met pretty strong magic," Bink said dubiously.

"Yes, I know. And you have extremely strong magic yourself. But this-well, though I have never been able to fathom the precise nature of your talent, therefore my prior remark about you being an ordinary individual, empirical data suggest that it relates to your personal welfare. But at the source-"

"Suddenly I understand," Bink said. "Where I'm going, the magic is stronger than mine."

"Just so. Thus you will be vulnerable in a manner you have not been before. Your own magic suffers enhancement as you proceed, but only in a geometric ratio. Therefore it can not-"

"He means the enemy magic gets stronger faster than our magic," Chester said. "So we're losing power proportionately."

"Precisely," the demon agreed. "The nature of the curves suggests that the differential will not become gross until you are extremely close to the source, so you may not be much inconvenienced by it, or even aware of it. Still-"

"So if I continue," Bink said slowly, "I come up against an enemy who is stronger than I am."

"Correct. Because the strength of the magic field of Xanth varies inversely with distance, on both an individual and environmental basis-"

"What about the magic dust?" Chester demanded.

"That does indeed enhance magic in its vicinity," Beauregard agreed. "But it is not the major avenue for the distribution of magic. The dust is basically convective, while most magic is conductive. Were that village to close down its operations, the magic of Xanth would continue only slightly abated."

"So they might as well relax," Bink said.

"To continue: because of the inverse ratio, the enemy was not able to harm you on the surface, though he tried with demonic persistence and cunning. (I distinguish between the terms 'demonic' and 'demoniac'; the latter has a pejorative connotation that is unwarranted.) Which is why I am convinced it is in fact a demon you face. But here in the nether region, the enemy can and will bring to bear overwhelming magic. Therefore it is foolish to pursue your quest further."

"I'm human," Bink said.

"Yes, unfortunately. A demon would be more rational. Since you are a foolish human of exactly the type my research paper describes, you will continue inevitably to your doom-for the sake of your ideals and friendships."

"I must be more human than demon," Jewel said. "I think he's noble."

"Don't flatter me," Bink warned her. "It only exaggerates the effect of the potion."

She looked startled, then prettily resolute. "I'm sorry the potion had to-I mean, you're such a nice, handsome, courageous, decent man, I-I can't say I'm sorry it happened. When we get back maybe I will take a drink myself."

"But one reason I need the Magician is to find the antidote," Bink pointed out. "Apart from my friendship for him, I mean. In fact, we should have asked Crombie to point out the locale of the antidote, so-"

"I could summon them again," Beauregard said. "But I would not advise it."

"Why not?" Bink asked.

"Because in the event the enemy is not yet aware of the precise location of their bottle, we do not wish to call further attention to it. We do not know what mechanisms the enemy has to observe you, now that its squiggle is gone, but we can not afford to assume they are negligible. It would be better to rescue your friends first, then attend to your more personal business."

"Yes, that is true," Bink said. He turned to the nymph. "Jewel, I regret having to inconvenience you further, but my loyalty to my friends comes first. I promise, as soon as we rescue them-"

"That's all right," she said, seeming not at all displeased.

"She could wait here," Chester said. "Or go about her normal business. Once we obtain the antidote, we can bring it back and-"

"No, only the diggle can take you there fast enough," Jewel said. "And only I can guide the diggle. There's lots of bad magic in the river channel, and very little in the solid rock. I'm coming along."

"I hoped you would say that," Bink said. "Of course my feeling doesn't count, since-"

Jewel stepped up and kissed him on the mouth. "I like your honesty, too," she said. "Let's get going."

Bink, momentarily stunned by the potency of this first voluntary kiss, forced his mind to focus on the mission. "Yes-we must hurry."

"The goblins are very bad in the deeper reaches," Beauregard said. "In recent years they have lost their savagery on the surface, but below they retain it. You have not encountered goblins like these."

"It is not a matter of choice," Bink said. "We have to go there."

"Then stay on well-lighted routes, when you're not phasing through actual rock. Like nickelpedes, they don't like light. They will face it if they have to, but generally they avoid it."

Bink turned to the nymph. "Is that why you're afraid of the dark? Can you keep us in the light?"

She nodded. "Yes…yes," she agreed to each question. Bink somehow had the impression that he could have asked somewhat more personal questions and had the same response. Or was that a flight of romantic fancy spawned by the potion?

"At least get a good night's rest," Beauregard urged. "We demons don't need sleep, as such, but you humans can get very irritable if-"

"No, we'd better move right along," Bink said. "A few hours could make the difference."

"So could fatigue," Beauregard pointed out "You will need all your faculties about you, when you face the big magic."

"Seems to me one demon's stalling," Chester said.

Beauregard spread his hands. "Perhaps I am, centaur. There is one thing I have not told you."

"If you plan to tell it, tell it now," Bink said. "Because we're leaving now."

"It is this," the demon said reluctantly. "I am not at all certain that your quest is proper."

"Not proper!" Bink exploded. "To rescue my friends?"

"To seek the source of the magic of Xanth."

"All I want is information! You, of all demons, should understand that!"

'Too well," Beauregard said. "Information can be the most dangerous thing there is. Consider the power of your Magician, who specializes in information. Suppose he were armed with full knowledge about the ultimate nature of magic? Where would be the limits of his power then?"

"Humfrey wouldn't hurt Xanth," Bink protested. "He's a good Magician!"

"But once knowledge of the nature of the source of magic were known, what would stop an evil Magician from obtaining it? With the strongest magic of all, he could rule Xanth-or destroy it"

Bink considered. He remembered how an Evil Magician had taken over the crown of Xanth-and had turned out not to be evil at all. But that had been a special situation. Suppose a truly evil man-or woman-obtained unconscionable power? "I see your point. I'll think about it. Maybe I won't go all the way to the source. But I must rescue the Magician, regardless."

"Yes of course," Beauregard agreed, seeming ill at ease for a demon.

They boarded the diggle and moved out, following the direction Crombie had indicated. "I don't know the deeper depths so well," Jewel said, "But there's a whole lot of solid rock here, since we're not following so close to the river. I'll tell the diggle to stay within the rock until we get there, and only to come out where there is light. I think you could sleep some while we travel, while I sing the worm along."

"You are beautiful," Bink said gratefully. He leaned his head against her back and was lulled to sleep by her singing, amplified and sweetened by his contact with her. And the worm ground on.

Chapter 11

Brain Coral

Bink woke with a start as the diggle halted. "I think we're here," Jewel murmured. Her voice was hoarse from hours of singing.

"You should have waked me before!" Bink said. "To take my turn singing the worm along. You've sung yourself out."

"Your head was so nice on my shoulder, I couldn't disturb you," she rasped. "Besides, you'll need all your strength. I can feel the magic intensifying as we move along."

Bink felt it too: a subtle prickle on his skin like that of the magic dust. For all he knew, the rock through which they traveled might be the magic-dust rock, before it welled to the surface. But the mystery remained: what was it that imbued that rock with magic? "Uh, thanks," he said awkwardly. "You're a sweet nymph."

"Well-" She turned her head, making it easy to kiss. She smelled of especially fine roses: this magic, too, was enhanced by the environment. Bink leaned forward, inhaling the delicious fragrance, bringing his lips close to-

They were interrupted by the sight of the bottle. It bobbled on the glowing surface of another lake. Something was attached to it, a bit of string or tar-

"Grundy!" Bink cried.

The golem looked up. "About time you got here! Fetch in this bottle, before-"

"Is it safe to swim in this lake?" Bink asked, wary of the glow. It might keep the goblins away, but that didn't make it safe for people.

"No," Jewel said. "The water is slowly poisonous to most forms of life. One drink won't hurt much, if you get out of it soon, up at the headwaters where it is diluted by the fresh flow from the surface. But down here, where it has absorbed much more horrible magic-"

"Right. No swimming," Bink said. "Chester, can you lasso it?"

"Out of range," the centaur said. "If the eddy currents carry it closer to shore I can snag it readily enough."

"Better hurry," Grundy called. "There's something under the lake, and it-"

"The fiends lived under a lake," Chester said. "Do you think the enemy-?"

Bink started stripping of! his clothing. "I think I'd better swim out and get that bottle right now. If the lake harms me, the Magician can give me a drop of his healing elixir. That should be more potent, too, here."

"Don't do that!" Jewel cried. "That lake-I don't think you'd ever reach the bottle. Here, I'll have the diggle phase through the water. Nothing hurts him when he's in phase."

At her direction, and hoarse singing, the worm slid into the water, erecting its circular flange to form a temporary tunnel through the liquid, as through rock. He moved very slowly, until Chester's flute appeared and played a brisk, beautiful marching tune. The flute seemed larger and brighter than it had before, and its sound was louder: more magical enhancement. The diggle speeded up, expanding and contracting in time to the music. He advanced purposefully toward the bottle. "Oh, thank you, centaur," Jewel whispered.

"Hurry! Hurry!" the golem called. "The coral is aware of the-is trying to-is-HELP! IT'S COMING UP TO GET ME!"

Then Grundy screamed horribly, as if in human pain. "I'm not real enough, yet," he gasped after the scream had torn its way out of his system. "I'm still just a golem, just a thing, string and gum. I can be controlled. I-"

He broke off, then screamed again, then resumed more quietly. "I'm gone."

Bink understood none of this, yet had the sinking feeling that he should somehow have tried to help the golem to fight off-what? Some encouragement, some reminder of the feelings Grundy evidently did have. Maybe the golem could have fought off his private personal horror, if-

Now the worm was almost at the bottle. Quickly Grundy wrapped his string-arms about the cork, braced his feet against the neck of the bottle, and heaved. "By the power of the brain coral, emerge!" he gasped.

The cork flew out. Smoke poured from the bottle, swirled into a whirlwind, ballooned, then coalesced into the figures of the Good Magician and the griffin. "Grundy rescued them!" Chester exclaimed as his flute faded out.

"Fly to shore!" Bink cried. "Don't touch the water!"

Humfrey caught hold of Crombie, who spread his wings and bore them both up. For a moment they tilted unsteadily, then righted and moved smoothly forward.

Bink ran up as they landed at the shore. "We were so worried about you, afraid the enemy would get you first!"

"The enemy did," Humfrey said, reaching for a vial as he let go of the griffin. "Turn about, Bink; desist your quest, and you will not be harmed."

"Desist my quest!" Bink cried, amazed. "Right when I'm so close to accomplishing it? You know I won't do that!"

"I serve a new master, but my scruples remain," Humfrey said. There was something sinister about him now; he remained a small, gnomish man, but now there was no humor in that characterization. His gaze was more like that of a basilisk than that of a man: a cold, deadly stare. "It is necessary that you understand. The bottle was opened by the agency of the entity that lies beneath this lake, a creature of tremendous intelligence and magic and conscience, but lacking the ability to move. This is the brain coral, who has to operate through other agencies to accomplish its noble purpose."

"The-enemy?" Bink asked, dismayed. "The one who sent the magic sword, and the dragon, and the squiggle-"

"And countless other obstructions, most of which your own magic foiled before they manifested. The coral can not control a conscious, intelligent, living entity; it must operate through thought suggestions that seem like the creature's own notions. That was why the dragon chased you, and the squiggle spied on you, and why the other seemingly coincidental complications occurred. But your talent brought you through almost unscathed. The siren lured you, but the gorgon did not enchant you into stone; the midas fly was diverted to another target, the curse of the fiends missed you. Now, at the heart of the coral's magic, you are finally balked. You must turn back, because-"

"But it can not control you!" Bink protested. "You are a man, an intelligent man, a Magician!"

"It assumed control of the golem, possible only because Grundy's reality was not complete and this is the region of the coral's greatest power. It caused the golem to open the bottle. Crombie and I are subject to the holder of the bottle. It does not matter that the bottle is now floating on the surface of the coral lake; the conjuration was done in the name of the brain coral, and it is binding."

"But-" Bink protested, unable to continue because he could not formulate his thought.

"That was the most savage engagement of this campaign," Humfrey continued. 'The struggle for possession of the bottle. The coral managed to dislodge it from your clothing, but your magic caused the cork to work loose, and we started to emerge. That was the impact of the fiends curse, aiding you by what seemed like an incredible coincidence. It shook the bottle within the vortex. But the coral used a strong eddy current to jam the stopper back, trapping Grundy outside. But your magic made the magic mirror get caught halfway, shattering it, with fragments inside and out, enabling us to establish communication of a sort. Then the coral's magic caused you to lose your fragment of glass. But your magic guided you to Beauregard, who re-established communication. You nearly reached the bottle in time, by turning the liability of your infatuation for the nymph into an asset-your talent outmaneuvered the coral neatly there!-but here the coral's magic is stronger than yours, and so it got the bottle first. Barely. In effect, your two talents have canceled out. But now the coral, through the power of the bottle, controls Crombie and me. All our powers are at its service, and you have lost"

Chester stood beside Bink. "So you have become the enemy," he said slowly.

"Not really. Now that we have access to the coral's perspective, we know that it is on the side of reason. Bink, your quest is dangerous, not merely for you, but for all the land of Xanth. You must desist, believe me!"

"I do not believe you," Bink said grimly. "Not now. Not now that you've changed sides."

"Same here," Chester said. "Conjure yourself back into the bottle, and let us rescue the bottle and release you in our power. Then if you can repeat that statement, I'll listen."

"No."

"That is what I thought," Chester said. "I undertook this mission as a service to you, Magician, but I have never collected my Answer from you. I can quit your service anytime I want. But I shall not renounce this quest merely because some hidden monster has scared you into changing your mind."

"Your position is comprehensible," Humfrey said with surprising mildness. "I do not, as you point out, have any present call on your service. But I am obliged to advise you both that if we can not prevail upon your reason, we must oppose you materially."

"You mean you would actually fight us?" Bink asked incredulously.

"We do not wish to resort to force," Humfrey said. "But it is imperative that you desist. Go now, give up your quest, and all will be well"

"And if we don't quit?" Chester demanded belligerently, eyeing Crombie. Obviously the centaur would not be entirely loath to match his prowess against that of the griffin. There had been a kind of rivalry between them all along.

"In that case we should have to nullify you," Humfrey said gravely. Small he was, but he remained a Magician, and his statement sent an ugly chill through Bink. Nobody could afford to take lightly the threat of a Magician.

Bink was torn between unkind alternatives. How could he fight his friends, the very ones he had struggled so hard to rescue? Yet if they were under the spell of the enemy, how could he afford to yield to their demand? If only he could get at the brain coral, the enemy, and destroy it, then his friends would be freed from its baleful influence. But the coral was deep under the poison water, unreachable. Unless-

"Jewel!" he cried. "Send the diggle down to make holes through the coral!"

"I can't, Bink," she said sadly. "The diggle never came back after we sent it after the bottle. I'm stuck here with my bucket of gems." She flipped a diamond angrily into the water. "I can't even plant them properly, now."

"The worm has been sent away," Humfrey said. "Only the completion of your quest can destroy the coral-along with all the Land of Xanth. Depart now, or suffer the consequence."

Bink glanced at Chester. "I don't want to hurt him. Maybe if I can knock him out, get him out of range of the coral-"

"While I take care of birdbeak," Chester said, nominally regretful.

"I don't want bloodshed!" Bink cried. "These are our friends, whom we must rescue."

"I suppose so," Chester agreed reluctantly, "I'll try to immobilize the griffin without hurting him too much. Maybe I'll just pull out a few of his feathers."

Bink realized that this was as much of a compromise as Chester was prepared to make. "Very well. But stop the moment he yields."

Now he faced Humfrey again. "I intend to pursue my quest. I ask you to depart, and to refrain from trying to interfere. It grieves me even to contemplate strife between us, but-"

Humfrey rummaged in his belt of vials. He brought one out. "Huh-uh!" Bink cried, striding across. Yet his out right horror at practicing any kind of violence against his friends held him back, and he got there too late. The cork came out and the vapor issued. It formed into…a green poncho, which flapped about in the air before settling to the floor.

"Wrong bottle," the Magician muttered, and uncorked another.

Bink, momentarily frozen, realized that he could not subdue the Magician until he separated the man from his arsenal of vials. Bink's talent might have helped Humfrey to confuse the bottles, but that sort of error could not be counted on after the first time. Bink drew his sword, intending to slice the belt from the Good Magician's waist-but realized that this seemed like a murderous attack. Again he hesitated-and was brought up short by the coalescing vapor. Suddenly thirteen black cats faced him, spitting viciously.

Bink had never seen a pure cat before, in the flesh. He regarded the cat as an extinct species. He just stood there and stared at this abrupt de-extinction, unable to formulate a durable opinion. If he killed these animals, would he be re-extincting the species?

Meanwhile, the centaur joined battle with the griffin. Their encounter was savage from the outset, despite Chester's promises. His bow was in his hands, and an arrow sizzled through the air. But Crombie, an experienced soldier, did not wait for it to arrive. He leaped and spread his wings, then closed them with a great backblast of air. He shot upward at an angle, the arrow passing beneath his tail feathers. Then he banked near the cavern ceiling and plummeted toward the centaur, screaming, claws outstretched.

Chester's bow was instantly replaced by his rope. He swung up a loop that closed about the griffin's torso, drawing the wings closed. He jerked, and Crombie was swung about in a quarter-circle. The centaur was about three times as massive as his opponent, so was able to control him this way.

A black cat leaped at Bink's face, forcing him to pay attention to his own battle. Reflexively he brought his sword around-and sliced the animal cleanly in half.

Bink froze again in horror. He had not meant to kill it! A rare creature like this-maybe these cats were all that remained in the whole Land of Xanth, being preserved only by the Magician's magic.

Then two things changed his attitude. First, the severed halves of the cat he had struck did not die; they metamorphosed into smaller cats. This was not a real cat, but a pseudo-cat, shaped from life-clay and given a feline imperative. Any part of it became another cat. Had a dog been shaped from the same material, it would have fractured into more dogs. So Bink hardly needed to worry about preservation of that species. Second, another cat was biting him on the ankle.

In a sudden fury of relief and ire, Bink laid about him with his blade. He sliced cats in halves, quarters, and eighths-and every segment became a smaller feline, attacking him with renewed ferocity. This was like fighting the hydra-only this time he had no spell-reversal wood to feed it, and there was no thread to make it drop. Soon he had a hundred tiny cats pouncing on him like rats, and then a thousand attacking like nickelpedes. The more he fought, the worse it got.

Was this magic related to that of the hydra? That monster had been typified by seven, while the cats were thirteen, but each doubled with each strike against a member. If there were some key, some counterspell to abolish doubling magic-

"Get smart, Bink!" Chester called, stomping on several cats that had wandered into his territory. "Sweep them all into the drink."

Of course! Bink stooped low and swung the flat of his sword sidewise, sweeping dozens of thumbnail-sized cats into the lake. They hissed as they splashed, like so many hot pebbles, and then thrashed to the bottom. Whether they were drowning or being poisoned he could not tell, but none emerged.

While he swept his way to victory, Bink absorbed the continuing centaur-griffin engagement. He could not observe everything, but was able to bridge the gaps well enough. He had to keep track, because if anything happened to Chester, Bink would have another enemy to face.

Crombie, initially incapacitated by the rope, bent his head down and sheared his bond cleanly with one crunch of his sharp beak. He spread his wings explosively, made a defiant squawk, and launched a three-point charge at Chester's head: beak, claw, and talon.

The centaur, thrown off balance by the abrupt slackening of the rope, staggered. He had better stability than a man, but he had been hauling hard. His equine shoulder thudded against a stalagmite and broke it off as the griffin made contact. Bink winced-but as it turned out, the stalagmite was more of a problem to Crombie than to Chester. The pointed top fell across the griffin's left wing, weighing it down, forcing Crombie to flap his other wing vigorously to right himself.

Chester rose up, one talon slash down the side of his face where the griffin's strike had missed his eye. But his two great hands now grasped the griffin's two front legs. "Got you now, birdie!" he cried. But in this position he could not use his sword, so he tried to bash the griffin against the broken base of the stalagmite.

Crombie squawked and brought his hind legs up for a double slash that would have disemboweled the centaur's human portion had it scored. Chester hastily let go, throwing Crombie violently away from him. Then he grabbed for his bow and arrow again. The griffin, however, spread his wings to brake his flight, looped about, and closed in again before the arrow could be brought to bear. Now it was hand-to-claw.

Bink had cleared his area of little cats-but the Good Magician had had time to organize his vials and open the next. This coalesced into a mound of bright-red cherry bombs. Oh, no! Bink had had experience with these violent little fruits before, as there was a tree of them on the palace grounds. In fact, these were probably from that same tree. If any of them scored on him-

He dived for Humfrey, catching the Magician's arm before he could throw. Humfrey struggled desperately against Bink's superior strength. Bink still held back, hating this violence though he saw no alternative to it. Both of them fell to the floor. The Magician's belt tore loose, and a collection of vials tumbled across the stone. Some of their corks popped out. The cherry bombs were dislodged; they rolled away and dunked into the lake, where they detonated with harmless thuds and clouds of steam. One rolled into Jewel's bucket of gems.

The explosion sent precious stones flying all over the cavern. Diamonds shot by Bink's ears; a huge pearl thunked into the Magician's chest; opals got under Chester's hooves. "Oh, no!" Jewel cried, horrified. "That's not the way it's supposed to be done! Each has to be planted in exactly the right place!"

Bink was sorry about the gems, but he had more pressing problems. The new bottles were spewing forth a bewildering variety of things.

The first was a pair of winged shoes. "So that's where I left them!" Humfrey exclaimed. But they flew out of reach before he could grab them. The second vial loosed a giant hour-glass whose sands were running out-also harmless in this instance. The next was a collection of exotic-looking seeds, some like huge flat fish eyes, others like salt-and-pepper mix, others like one-winged flies. They fluttered out and littered a wide patch, crunching underfoot, rolling like marbles, squishing and adhering like burrs. But they did not seem to be any direct threat.

Unfortunately, the other vials were also pouring out vapors. These produced a bucket of garbage (so that was how the Magician cleaned his castle: he swept it all into a vial!), a bag of supergrow fertilizer, a miniature thunderstorm, and a small nova star. Now the seeds had food, water, and light. Suddenly they were sprouting. Tendrils poked out, bodies swelled, pods popped, leaves burst forth. Roots gripped the rock and clasped items of garbage; stems shot up to form a dense and variegated carpet. Diverse species fought their own miniature battles over the best fertilizer territory. In moments Bink and the Magician were surrounded by an expanding little jungle. Vines clung to feet, branches poked at bodies, and leaves obscured vision. Soon the plants were flowering. Now their species were identifiable. Lady slippers produced footwear of a most delicate nature, causing Jewel to exclaim in delight and snatch off a pair for herself. Knotweeds formed the most intricate specialized knots: bow, granny, lanyard, clinch, hangman, and half-hitch. Bink had to step quickly to avoid getting tied up. That would cost him the victory right there!

Meanwhile, the Magician was trying to avoid the snapping jaws of dog-tooth violets and dandelions, while a hawkweed made little swoops at his head. Bink would have laughed-but had too many problems of his own. A goldenrod was trying to impale him on its metallic spire, and a sunflower was blinding him with its effulgence. The nova star was no longer needed; the cave was now as bright as day, and would remain so until the sunflower went to seed.

Bink ducked just in time to avoid a flight of glinting arrowheads-but his foot slipped on a buttercup, squirting butter out and making him sit down hard-ooomph-on the squishy head of a skunk cabbage. Suddenly he was steamed in the nauseating fragrance.

Well, what had he expected? He had very little protective talent now; the enemy brain coral had canceled out his magic. Bink was on his own, and had to make his own breaks. At least Humfrey was no better off; at the moment he was being given a hotfoot by a patch of fireweed. He snatched up a flower from a water lily and poured its water out to douse the fire. Meanwhile, several paintbrushes were decorating him with stripes of red, green, and blue. Stray diamonds from the nymph's collection were sticking to his clothes.

This was getting nowhere! Bink tore his way out of the miniature jungle, holding his breath and closing his eyes as a parcel of poppies popped loudly about his head. He felt something enclosing his hands, and had to look: it was a pair of foxgloves. A bluebell rang in his ear; then he was out of it. And there was the Magician's belt with its remaining vials. Suddenly he realized: if he controlled this, Humfrey would be helpless. All his magic was contained in these vials!

Bink stepped toward it-but at that moment the Magician emerged from the foliage, plastered with crowfeet. Humfrey brushed them off, and the feet scampered away. A lone primrose turned its flower away from this gaucherie. Humfrey dived for his magic belt, arriving just as Bink did.

Bink laid his hands on it. There was a tug-of-war. More vials spilled out. One puffed into a kettle of barley soup that spilled across the floor and was eagerly lapped up by the questing rootlets of the jungle. Another developed into a package of mixed nuts and bolts. Then Bink found a steaming rice pudding and heaved it at the Magician-but Humfrey scored first with a big mince pie. Minces flew out explosively, twenty-four of them, littering a yet wider area. Bink caught the brunt of it in his face. Minces were wriggling in his hair and down his neck and partially obscuring his vision. Bink fanned the air with his sword, trying to keep the Magician back while he cleared his vision. Oddly, he could perceive the neighboring battle of centaur and griffin better than his own, at this moment.

Chester's human torso was now streaked with blood from the vicious raking of the griffin's talons. But one of Crombie's forelegs was broken, and one of his wings half-stripped of feathers. That hand-to-claw combat had been savage!

Now the centaur was stalking his opponent with sword in hand, and the griffin was flying in ragged circles just out of reach, seeking an opening. Despite Bink's cautions, these two were deadly serious; they were out to kill each other. Yet how could Bink stop them?

The Magician found a vial and opened it. Bink advanced alertly-but it was another miscue. A huge bowl of yogurt manifested. It had, by the look and smell of it, been in the bottle too long; it had spoiled. It floated gently toward the lake; let the brain coral try a taste of that! But Humfrey already had another vial. These mistakes were not the result of Bink's talent so much as sheer, honest chance; Humfrey seemed to have a hundred things in his vials (he was reputed to have a hundred spells, after all), and few were readily adaptable to combat, and now they were all mixed up. The odds were against anything really dangerous appearing from any randomly chosen vial.

Yet the odds could be beaten. The vial produced a writhing vine from a kraken, which undulated aggressively toward Bink. But he sliced it into fragments with his sword, and advanced on the Magician again. Bink knew he could control the situation now; nothing in Humfrey's bottles could match the devastating presence of a capable sword.

Desperately Humfrey opened bottles, searching for something to further his cause. Three dancing fairies materialized, hovering on translucent, pastel-hued wings, but they were harmless and soon drifted over to consult with Jewel, who put them to work picking up stray gems. A package of cough drops formed and burst-but too close to the Magician, who went into paroxysms of coughing. But then a wyvern appeared.

Wyverns were basically small dragons-but even the tiniest of dragons were dangerous. Bink leaped at it, aiming for the monster's neck. He scored-but the wyvern's tough scales deflected the blade. It opened its mouth and fired a jet of hot steam at Bink's face. Bink danced back-then abruptly rammed his point directly into the cloud of vapor with all his force. The sword plunged into the creature's open mouth, through its palate, and out the top of its head. The wyvern gave a single cry of agony and expired as Bink yanked back his weapon.