Bink paused for a call of nature, not of magic—and spied a chunk of wood, so dark and moss-grown that it resembled a rock. Something like that could be useful, in case a monster attacked in the night. The wood seemed to have a nice heft, good for throwing. He squatted to pick it up—and paused, in case it should be enchanted. But his talent would protect him; if the piece were dangerous, he would be unable to touch it
He picked it up, observing the etched grain of it, brown and green and white and altogether intriguing. It was surprisingly hard and heavy, for wood; he wondered whether it would float or sink in water. He felt a tingle in his hand as he held the chunk. There was some quality about it, something magic, strange and potent. He felt his talent responding, taking nebulous hold, sizing up this thing, as it had once before when he drank from the spring of life. As before, his magic encompassed that of the other thing, and accepted it without penalty. Bink’s talent was of Magician stature; he seldom felt its action directly except when it encountered strong or complex opposing magic. Yet—a chunk of wood?
He carried the chunk back to their temporary camp. “I don’t know what this is, but it seems to be strongly magical. It may be useful.”
Chester took it “Wood, unusual, durable. This might have come from a very large, old tree. I don’t recognize the species, which makes it remarkable. Maybe you could find some of the bark—“
Crombie squawked. “Give it here, horseface. I’ve seen a lot of wood in my day.”
Chester stiffened only slightly. “By all means, bird-beak.”
Crombie held the chunk in one foreclaw and inspected it closely. “Squawk.”
“Something odd about this.”
“Yes,” Bink agreed. “Before you get too involved, will you point out the nearest food for us? We can eat while considering.”
Crombie obligingly whirled and pointed. Bink looked, and saw a large glowing fungus. “That must be it. I never ate glow before, but your talent’s never wrong.” He walked over and reached down to break off a section. The fungus was firm and dry, pale inside, and emitted a pleasant odor.
“Squawk!” Crombie protested to the centaur. “I’m not through with it.”
“You’ve had it long enough, buzzard-brain,” Chester said. “My turn now.”
Bink had to run to break up yet another quarrel. The trouble with fighting creatures was that they tended to fight! He couldn’t turn his back on them even to fetch food. “It’s the Magician’s turn!” he cried. “Maybe he can identify it.” He took back the wood and carried it to Humfrey. “Sir, if you care to classify this rare specimen—“
He had said the magic words. The Magician’s attention was attracted. He looked. He blinked. “That’s Blue Agony fungus! Get rid of it!”
Oops! Bink had put the wrong hand down, and shoved the fungus under Humfrey’s nose. “Sorry. I meant to show you this wood, not the—“ He paused. “The fungus is poisonous?”
“Its magic will turn your whole body blue, just before you melt into a blue puddle that kills all the vegetation in the ground where it soaks in,” Humfrey assured him.
“But Crombie pointed it out as safe to eat!”
“Ridiculous! It’s safe to touch, but the unsafest thing anyone could eat. They used to use it for executions, back in the bad old early Waves.”
Bink dropped the fungus. “Crombie, didn’t you—“ He broke off, reconsidering. “Crombie, would you point out the worst thing we could eat?”
The griffin shrugged and pointed. Right toward the fungus.
“You absolute idiot!” Chester exclaimed to the griffin. “Have the feathers in your brains rotted? You just a moment ago pointed it out as safe!”
Crombie squawked angrily. “Bink must have picked up the wrong item. My talent is never wrong.”
Humfrey was now examining the piece of wood. “Crombie’s talent is always wrong,” he remarked absently. “That’s why I never rely on it.”
Even Chester was surprised at this. “Magician, the soldier is no prize—even I am willing to concede that—but usually his talent is sound.”
Crombie squawked, outraged at this qualified endorsement
“Maybe so. I wouldn’t know.” The Magician squinted at a passing sweat gnat. “What is that creature?”
“You don’t recognize a common sweat gnat?” Bink asked, amazed. “A moment ago you were classifying the most obscure bugs, discovering new species!”
Humfrey’s brow furrowed. “Why should I do that? I know nothing about bugs.”
Man, griffin, and centaur exchanged glances. “First Crombie, then the Magician,” Chester murmured. “It must be the madness.”
“But wouldn’t that affect all of us?” Bink asked, worried. “This is more like a misfire of talents. Crombie pointed out the worst food instead of the best, and Humfrey switched from knowledge to ignorance—“
“Right when the chunk of wood switched hands!” Chester finished.
“We’d better get him away from that wood.”
“Yes,” Chester agreed, and stepped toward Humfrey.
“No, please—let me do it,” Bink said quickly, confident that his talent could handle the situation best. He approached Humfrey. “Excuse me, sir.” He lifted the chunk gently from the Magician’s grasp.
“Why doesn’t it affect you?” Chester asked. “Or me?”
“It affects you, centaur,” Humfrey said. “But since you don’t know your talent, you don’t see how it is reversed. As for Bink—he is a special case.”
So the Good Magician was back in form. “Then this wood...reverses spells?” Bink asked.
“More or less. At least it changes the thrust of active magic. I doubt it would restore the griffin cow or the stone men, if that’s what you’re contemplating. Those spells are now passive. Only a complete interruption of magic itself would nullify them.”
“Uh, yes,” Bink said uncertainly.
“What kind of a special case are you?” Chester demanded of Bink. “You don’t do any magic.”
“You might say I’m immune,” Bink said cautiously, wondering why his talent was no longer protecting itself from discovery. Then he looked down at the wood in his hand. Was he immune?
He dropped the wood. “Squawk!” Crombie said. “So that’s why my talent missed! That wood made me...pumf squawk screech—“
The golem had wandered near the wood, and his translation had disintegrated. Bink gently lifted Grundy away from it
“...of what I meant to,” the golem continued, blithely unaware of the change. “It’s dangerous!”
“It certainly is,” Bink agreed. He kicked the wood away.
Chester was not reassured. “That means this was an incidental foul-up. We have yet to face the madness.”
Crombie located the nearest safe food, successfully this tune. It was a lovely cookie bush growing from the rich soil beside the bones. They feasted on chocolate-chip cookies. A handy water-chestnut tree provided ample drink: all they had to do was pluck the fresh chestnuts and puncture them to extract the water.
As Bink chewed and drank, his eye fell on another earth mound. This tune he scraped it away carefully with a stick, but could find nothing except loose earth.
“I think these things are following me,” he said. “But what is the point? They don’t do anything, they just sit there.”
“I’ll take a look at one in the morning,” the Magician said, his curiosity moderately aroused.
They set up house within the gaunt cage of bones as darkness closed in. Bink lay back on the cushion of sponge moss beneath the skeleton—he had checked this out carefully to make sure it was harmless—and watched the stars emerge. Camping out was not so terrible!
At first the stars were mere points of light peeking between the bars of the bone-enclosure. But soon Bink perceived patterns in them: the constellations. He was not conversant with the stars, because Xanth was not safe at night; he had stayed inside, and when caught outside had hurried to shelter. Thus he found the landscape of the night sky intriguing. He had somehow thought, for no good reason, that the stars were of equivalent brightness, evenly dispersed. Instead, they were highly varied in both respects, ranging from piercing-bright to look-again dim, and from solitary splendor to clustered confusion. In fact they seemed to form patterns. In his mind he could draw lines between them, fashioning pictures. There was the head of a man, and a curving line like a snake, and a blob with tentacles like a tangle tree. As he concentrated, these things became more definite. The figures assumed greater definition and conviction, seeming almost real.
“Say, there’s a centaur!” Bink exclaimed.
“Naturally,” Chester said. “That’s one of the established constellations. Been there for centuries.”
“But it looks alive! I thought I saw it move.”
“No, the constellations don’t move. Not that way. They—“ Chester broke off.
“He did move!” Bink cried. “His arm, fetching an arrow from his bag—“
“His quiver,” Chester corrected him. “Something strange here. Must be atmospherics.”
“Or maybe the air moving,” Bink said. Chester snorted. They watched the centaur in the sky take out his arrow, fit it to his bow, and cast about for some target. There was a swan in view, but it was a very large, tame bird, not suitable for hunting. There was a fox, but it slid out of sight behind some herdsmen before the centaur could take proper aim, Then a great bear showed up. It was trying to catch a lion cub, but the adult lion was nearby, almost as large as the bear and in an ornery mood. The two big predators circled each other, while the pointing arrowhead of the centaur traced their movements; which one should be taken first?
“Take the lion, stupid,” Chester muttered. “Then the bear will take the cub, and leave yon alone.”
Bink was fascinated, both by this animation of the constellations, and by the strength and grace of the weird beasts. The centaur was a regular creature, of course—but only in mythology relating to Mundania did animals like bears and lions and swans exist Parts of them showed up in the form of sphinxes, chimerae, griffins, and inch, but that didn’t really count A Mundane lion could also be reckoned as the body of a griffin with the head of an ant lion, a composite deriving from the Xanth originals. Now with the shield down, animals could cross the boundary freely, and probably at the fringe all types mixed. Bink regretted, in retrospect, that he had not had the chance to see such creatures as bears in the flesh, when he had visited Mundania. But he had been glad enough to return to Xanth, then!
Almost under the centaur’s tail, another strange Mundane creature appeared: a wolf. It resembled a one-headed dog. Bink had seen werewolves in the flesh, but that might not count What a horror it must be in Mundania, where wolves were locked permanently in their animal form, unable to revert to men!
The sky-centaur whirled on the wolf, aiming his bow. But the wolf was already moving on, because a huge scorpion was following him. The scorpion was being chased by a man—no, it only thought the man was after it The man, a hugely muscled brute, was actually pursuing a serpent, trying to smash in its head with a club. Yet a dragon was hot after the man, and a really strange long-necked animal followed the dragon. In fact the whole sky was alive with oddities, making it seem like a much more interesting place than the Land of Xanth.
“What is that thing with the neck?” Bink asked.
“Mythological zoology is not my specialty,” Chester said. “But I believe it is a Mundane monster called a gaffe.” He paused. “No, that’s not quite it. A grraff. No, A—a giraffe! That’s it The long neck is to keep it clear of hostile ground magic, or something. Its strangest feature, as I understand it, is that despite that long neck it has no voice.”
“Strange magic indeed!” Bink agreed. “Strange unmagic, technically. The Land of Mundania could use a good, sensible shot of magic.”
The sky was now densely crowded with animals, as the remaining stars emerged. Farther along was a crab, and a wingless bull, and a genuine single-headed dog. Birds abounded—half-familiar ones like the phoenix and bird of paradise, and a host of strange ones, like the crane, toucan, eagle, peacock, dove, and crow. There were people too—men, children, and several fetching young women.
That reminded Bink again of Chameleon. The longer he was away from her, the more he missed her. So what if she had her ugly phase? She also had her lovely phase—
“Look—there is the River Eridanus,” Chester cried. Bink found it. The river flowed half across the sky, meandering from the feet of a giant all the way to— Bink couldn’t see where it finished. Where could a river in the sky go? All manner of fish were associated with it, and one— “What is that?” Bink cried.
“The fabulous Mundane whale,” Chester said. “I’m glad no such monster as that exists in our land!”
Bink agreed emphatically. He traced the river again, seeking its termination. It spread and thinned, becoming vague, eluding him. Then he spied a small lizard. “A chameleon!” he exclaimed.
As he spoke its name, the lizard changed, becoming the human Chameleon he knew and loved: his wife. She looked out at him from the deepest depths of the sky, and her mouth opened. Bink, Bink, she seemed to say. Come to me...
Bink was on his feet, nearly banging his head against a bone. “I’m coming!” he cried joyfully. Why had he ever left her?
But there was no way to reach her. He could not climb the air, or fly up there, and in any event he knew she was just a picture, not real. Just a transformed lizard, itself imaginary. Still, he wished— Now the constellation centaur shot his arrow. The missile blazed as it flew, forming a brilliant streak across the sky, growing brighter and yet brighter as it drew near. Suddenly it loomed frighteningly large and close, as if flying right out of the sky—and cracked into a nearby tree. It was a dogwood; it yelped with pain, then growled and bared its teethlike inner branches in canine fury, seeking its enemy. In a moment it had torn the arrow to shreds.
Bink looked across at Chester, but could not make out the centaur’s expression in the dark. That constellation arrow, no more than a shooting star, had struck a real tree close by! “Was that centaur shooting at us?”
“If he wasn’t, he was criminally careless,” Chester replied grimly. “If he was, he made a damn poor shot. That’s a bad example that reflects on the merits of all centaurs. I will forward him a reminder.” Now, visible against the sparkling night sky in silhouette, Chester stood tall and magnificent, a fine stallion of a man, and nocked one of his own arrows. He drew on the bow with all his formidable power and loosed the shaft upward.
Up, up it flew, somehow visible despite the night. Up, impossibly high, right to the verge of the nocturnal dome, right toward the centaur constellation.
Bink knew no physical arrow could strike a star or pattern of stars. After all, the constellations were merely imaginary lines drawn between those stars. Yet—
Chester’s arrow plunked into the flank of the constellation centaur. The creature leaped with pain. From his mouth issued two comets and a shooting star: a powerful exclamation!
“Yeah? Same to you, vacuumhead!” Chester retorted.
The constellation reached back and yanked at Chester’s arrow. A nova exploded from his mouth as he contemplated the damage. Several dim stars pulsed there, suggestive of the wound. He grabbed a handful of soft down feathers from the swan and rubbed them against the injury. Now it was the defeathered swan who cussed a bright streak of shooting stars, but the bird did not dare attack the centaur.
The sky-centaur snatched the extensible tube called the telescope and put it to his eye. The magic of this tube enabled him to see much farther than otherwise. “““!!” he exclaimed with really foul invective, looking for the originator of the objectionable arrow.
“Right here, hoofhead!” Chester bawled, and lofted another arrow into the sky. “Come down and fight like a centaur!”
“Uh, I wouldn’t—“ Bink cautioned.
The constellation seemed to hear the challenge. He swung his telescope around and oriented on the bone-camp. A vile ringed planet shot from his mouth.
“That’s right, dope!” Chester cried. “Come prove you’re worthy of the name!”
Worthy of the name “dope”? Bink didn’t like this at all, but was unable to stop it
The constellation nocked another arrow. So did Chester. For a time the two faced each other, bows drawn, as it were, daring each other to shoot first. Then, almost together, their arrows leaped forth.
Both shots were uncomfortably accurate. Bink saw the two arrows cross midway in the heavens and home in on their targets as if magically guided. Neither centaur moved: this was evidently a point of honor in such duels. The one who jumped clear would show weakness of nerve, and few centaurs were weak in that department
Both arrows missed—but not by much. Chester’s shot almost grazed the constellation’s forehead while the sky-centaur’s arrow thunked into the ground beside Chester’s left forehoof, which happened to be quite close to the Good Magician’s head.
Humfrey woke with a start “You equine menace!” he cried grumpily. “Watch what you’re doing!”
“I am watching,” Chester said. “That’s not my arrow. See, it has stardust on it.”
Humfrey drew the arrow from the dirt “Why, so it does.” He squinted up into the sky. “But stardust is not supposed to be down here. What’s going on?”
Now Crombie stirred. “Squawk!”
“You’re the Magician,” the golem said. “You’re supposed to know about things.”
“About stellar constellations coming to life? It’s been a long time since I reviewed that particular magic.”
Humfrey stared up into the sky. “However, it would be a worthwhile study. Crombie, where’s the most convenient access to that realm?”
Crombie pointed. Now Bink saw a pattern of stars resembling steps coming down to the horizon. They looked increasingly solid, and they seemed closer as he looked, descending almost to the rim of bones. Maybe it was possible after all to ascend!
He looked up into the stars again. They were even more brilliant than before, and the lines between them were stronger. The stick figures had assumed shadings that made them quite realistic. He saw Chameleon again, beckoning him. “I’m going up!”
“Squawk!” Crombie agreed. “I’m always ready for a good fight, and that comet-mouthed centaur needs a lesson.”
Chester was already on his way to the steps, but at this he paused.
“Don’t be a fool,” the Magician snapped, running after them. “Crombie refers to the centaur in the sky, not you. You are loudmouthed, not comet-mouthed.”
“Um, of course,” Chester agreed without complete enthusiasm. He made a visible effort to shake off the annoyance. “Charge!”
They charged for the steps.
“Are you fools crazy?” Grundy yelled. “There’s nothing up there for you!”
Chester glanced at him; Bink saw the change in the shape of the centaur’s head outlined against the massed constellations. “I didn’t hear Crombie squawk.”
“He didn’t squawk!” the golem yelled, “I’m speaking for myself this time. Don’t go into the sky! It’s madness!”
“It’s fascinating,” Humfrey said. “Firsthand study of animated constellations! There may never be a better opportunity.”
“I have to teach that centaur a lesson,” Chester said.
Bink’s eyes had returned to Chameleon. His need for her became as big as the sky. He continued forward.
“It’s the madness,” Grundy cried, yanking at the feathers of Crombie’s neck. “It doesn’t affect me. I see only the facts, because I’m not real. This is hostile magic. Don’t go!”
“You’re probably right, twerp,” Humfrey agreed. “But this offering is too compelling to be denied.”
“So was the siren! Don’t do it!” Grundy repeated. “Where is your quest, if you let the madness take you now?”
“What do you care?” Chester demanded. “You have no feelings.” He put his forehooves on the first step. It was firm, anchored at every comer by a pinpoint star. The lines were like threads, and the panels between them like glass. A translucent staircase, not quite invisible, going up into the sky.
Bink knew it was magic, and not to be trusted. But Chameleon was up there, waiting for him, and he had to go. His talent would not permit it if it were not safe, after all.
“Well, I’m not going!” Grundy screamed. He jumped from the griffin’s back, fell into the foliage of a flower-bug bush, and scared up a swarm of flowerbugs. In a moment he was lost in the night.
“Good riddance,” Chester muttered, mounting the steps. The surfaces bowed slightly under his weight, drawing the anchoring stars inward, but held. Crombie, impatient with this, spread his wings and flew around the centaur and came to rest higher on the stairway. Apparently the ascent was too steep for comfortable flying by a creature of this size, so he preferred to mount by foot. The Good Magician was third, and Bink last.
In a line they ascended. The stairway spiraled, so that soon Crombie was climbing directly above Bink. It was an interesting effect, but Bink was more intrigued by the view below. As he climbed above the level of the trees, the nocturnal landscape of the Xanth wilderness opened out below, impressive because of its special nature. Bink had once been transformed into a bird, and once had ridden a magic carpet, and once had flown in human form; magic had given him quite a varied experience. But this slow ascent up through the levels of the forest, with firm footing beneath him —this was different from the various forms of flight, and in a certain respect unique. He was highly aware than he could fall; the steps had no railing to hold him in, no barrier at the fringes of the steps. This seemed to put him right into the situation in a way that flight did not. To be above the ground, yet tied to it...
The night forest was beautiful. A number of trees glowed. Some reached bone-white tentacles up; others were balls of pastel hues. Some had giant flowers that resembled eyes, and these eyes seemed to be focusing on Bink. Other treetops formed into mazes of interlocking branches. As he watched, the whole forest assumed the shape of a single human face. DON’T GO! it mouthed.
Bink paused, momentarily disgruntled. Was the wilderness really trying to speak to him? Whose interest did it represent? It could be jealous of his escape to the sky. Hungry for his body. Or just mischievous.
Crombie had balked at the tangle tree. Chester had been fortuitously deafened in tune to save them from the siren’s call. His talent had been operating then. Why was it quiescent now?
He looked upward. The enormous panorama of the sky awaited him—animals, monsters, and people. They were all frozen in place at the moment, awaiting the arrival of Bink’s party. Up there lay adventure.
He resumed his climb. He had to hurry, because the others had continued moving, and were now several spirals ahead of him. He didn’t want to be late for the action!
As he caught up to the Magician, who was lagging behind the stout four-legged entities, something buzzed in from the darkness to the side. It sounded like a very large insect, one of the exotic bugs. Not another gold bug, he hoped! He waved his arms, hoping to scare it off.
“Bink!” a small voice cried.
What now? He was getting winded from his rapid climb, and had to watch carefully to be sure he didn’t make a misstep while absorbing the splendors of the immense canopy above and the broad disk below. He was in the very center of a phenomenal scene, and he wanted to experience every aspect of it with full intensity, and he didn’t need any bugs distracting him. “Go away!”
The bug flew near. There was light associated with it. It was a flying fish, propelling itself by a jet of bubbles from its fuselage, so that its rigid wings could provide sufficient lift. The gills were air-intakes, and assorted little fins provided stability and spot maneuverability. Flying fish were swift, Bink knew; they had to be, or they dropped to the ground. This one carried a light on its back like a miniature lantern, and—
“Bink! It’s Grundy!” And lo, it was indeed the golem, braced on the back of the fish, guiding it with little reins and a bit set in its mouth. Grundy’s free hand held the lamp, which seemed to be a tiny star, captive in a little net “I caught this fish by luring it with fish-talk; now it understands and is helping. I have the spell-reversal wood along.” He tapped his saddle with his rein-hand. It was the gnarly fragment that Bink had discarded.
“But how can the fish fly?” Bink demanded. ‘”How can you translate? The reversal—“
“It doesn’t affect the fish because the fish has no talent; the fish is magical,” Grundy explained with limited patience. “The wood only reverses exterior magic, not inherent magic.”
“That doesn’t make much sense to me,” Bink said.
“The wood reversed birdbeak’s talent, but did not change him back into a man,” the golem continued. “It fouled up the gnome’s information, but did not make him a regular man either. It didn’t affect you, because—“
The golem was not aware of Bink’s talent, but this remained a pertinent question: had Bink’s talent conquered the wood—or been reversed by it? The answer could be a matter of life and death! “What about you?” Bink demanded. “You’re still translating!”
“I’m not real,” Grundy said shortly. “Take away my magic and I'm nothing but string and mud. The wood is just wood, to me.”
“But the wood was affecting you before! You were speaking gibberish, until I got you away from it”
“Was I?” Grundy asked, startled. “I never realized. I guess translation is my talent, so...” He faded out, considering. “I know! I’m not translating now. I’m speaking for myself!”
And there was the answer. “Well, keep that wood away from me,” Bink said. “I don’t trust it.”
“No. I have to bring it close to you. Put your hand on it, Bink.”
“I will not!” Bink exclaimed.
Grundy jerked the reins to one side, kicked the flanks of the fish, and leaned forward. The fish swerved, reared, and accelerated right at Bink. “Hey!” he protested as it grazed his hand.
But at that moment his outlook changed. Abruptly the stars were mere stars, and the stairs—were the branches of a latticework tree. Above him the others were near its summit, about to step onto the thinning twigs that could not support their weight. Crombie was already supporting much of his mass by flapping his wings, and Chester—
Bink shook his head in amazement. A centaur , climbing a tree!
Then the fish buzzed out of range, and the madness returned. Bink was on the translucent stairway again, climbing toward the glowing constellations. “It’s crazy, I know!” he cried. “But I can’t help myself. I have to go on up!”
The golem guided his fish in close again, “You can’t throw it off even when you know it’s doom?”
“It’s mad!” Bink agreed, suffering a measure of sanity as the wood passed near again. “But true! But don’t worry about me—I’ll survive. Go get Chester off that branch before he kills himself!”
“Right!” Grundy agreed. He spurred his mount and buzzed upward. Bink resumed his climb, cursing himself for his foolishness.
The fish disappeared in the night. Only the caged star—that Bink now knew was nothing more than a glowberry—showed Grundy’s location. That light moved up near the centaur.
“Good grief, golem!” Chester exclaimed. “What the horsefeathers am I doing in a tree?”
Bink could not hear Grundy’s side of the conversation, but could guess its nature. After a moment Chester started backing down the stairway steps.
“Hey, oaf!” the Magician cried. “Get your ass’s rear out of my face!”
“Go down,” the centaur cried. “This is no stair, it’s a tree. We’re climbing to our doom.”
“It’s information. Let me by!”
“It’s madness! Grundy, take your wood to him.”
The light descended. “Great galloping gizzards!” Humfrey cried. “It is a tree! We’ve got to get down!”
But now the centaur was climbing again. “I haven’t finished my business with that constellation centaur,” he said.
“You equine fool!” Humfrey exclaimed. “Desist!”
The fish zoomed down toward Bink. “I can’t handle them both,” Grundy cried. “I’ve only got the single piece of wood, and there are four of you.”
“The griffin can fly; he’ll be all right for now,” Bink said. “The stair—I mean the tree—is narrow. Give Chester the wood; no one can pass him. Then you search for more wood.”
“I had already thought of that,” the golem said. The fish zoomed off. In a moment Chester reversed his course again. The Good Magician cursed in most un-Magicianlike vernacular, but was forced to retreat in the face of the centaur’s rear. Soon they were right above Bink—and he too cursed as his ascent was balked.
The constellations, seeing the retreat, exploded in rage. ““*!!” the sky centaur cried silently. At his summons, the other monsters of the heavens gathered: the dragon, the hydra, the serpent, the winged horse, the giant, and in the river the whale.
The madness remained upon him, but Bink no longer wanted to climb the stairway. The monsters were converging, clustering about the top of the stair-spiral. The serpent was starting down, its sinuous body coiling along the spiral, while the winged ones flew down. Bink was not certain whether they were real or illusion or something in between—but remembering the arrow-strike at the dogwood tree, he was disinclined to gamble. “We’ve got to get under cover!” he cried.
But Crombie, highest on the stair and unaffected by the spell-wood, flew up to do battle with the winged horse.
“Squawk!” he cried.
“Neigh!” the horse replied.
Grundy buzzed by on his steed. “Oooh, what they said!”
Wings spread, griffin and horse faced off, claws swiping, hooves striking. Contact was made, but Bink couldn’t tell from the whirling, flapping silhouettes which creature was prevailing.
Then the serpent arrived. Chester could not use his bow effectively, since no arrow would travel a spiral path, so waited with his sword. Bink wondered what the centaur saw, since he had the wood and so perceived reality—or something. Probably it was not a serpent, but an equivalent threat. Meanwhile Bink had to interpret it as he saw it.
As the huge snake-head came close, the centaur bellowed a warning and struck it across the nose. Blade met fang. The serpent’s teeth were large, reflecting starlight, and they gleamed with what might be poison. There were two projecting ones, and they moved with the precision of a fencer. Chester was compelled to retreat, since he had only one sword.
Then Chester took a cue from the winged horse, and used his front hooves. He bashed the serpent on the nose, one-two, one-two, while dazzling it with the sword. His front feet did not have the power of his rear ones, but his hooves had sharp fighting edges and a cumulative impact that could splinter bark from a tree, or scales from a serpent.
What would happen, Bink wondered, if the wood were to touch the serpent? Would it give the serpent a different view of reality? Would the centaur then seem to be something else? How could anyone be sure what magic was real, and what false?
The serpent hissed and gaped its jaws so widely that its mouth became as tall as the centaur. Its sinuous tongue snaked out to wrap around Chester’s sword arm, immobilizing it, but Chester shifted his weapon to his other hand, and efficiently lopped off the tongue. The serpent made a hissing howl of agony and snapped its mouth closed, the tusks clanging against each other. Chester took a moment to unwrap the segment of tongue from his arm, then resumed slashing at the nose. He was holding his own.
The dragon arrived. It zoomed in at the Good Magician. Humfrey might be captive to the madness, but he was not a fool. His hand dived into his jacket and came out with a vial. But so swift was the dragon’s onslaught that there was no time to open the container. Instead, Humfrey flipped it into the opening mouth. The dragon snapped at it automatically. The vial crunched under its bite. Vapor exploded, expanding into a cloud that jetted out between the dragon’s teeth and coalesced about its head. But it did not form into anything else—no demon, no smoke screen, not even a sandwich. It just clung there in hardening gobs.
“What is it?” Bink cried. “Did the vial misfire?”
“I had to grab randomly,” Humfrey replied. “It’s —I believe it is foaming insulation.”
“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 nave 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 him. 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 preempted by the serpent. Now, seeing the fate of their companions, these three bellowed then- rage 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 yon 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.