Question Quest (25 page)

I did not tell her of my relation to Crombie, but I felt responsible. For Bink had liked her all right, in her neutral stage, but Crombie's animosity had driven her away. Crombie had made up some story about how his mother had been able to read minds, and had driven his father loco. He probably believed that nonsense, by now. Or maybe that was his interpretation of his family life: concealing the shame of the Mundane mother and a crotchety Magician father.

I had bad news for Chameleon: her magic was inherent, and could not be eliminated without eliminating her. But I did have an Answer, for which I accepted no payment, because it was probably worse than the malady: she could go to Mundania. There she would revert to her neutral state and remain there, being neither lovely nor ugly, smart nor stupid.

“Where is Bink going?” she asked.

“Probably to Mundania,” I said heavily.

“Then that's where I want to be.”

I stared at her, but it did make sense. She could have her neutral state and her man, together, by that grim expedient. So I told her of the magic path available, and the magic bridge, and warned her about not trying to turn back on either, and sent her on her way after Bink. Perhaps it was for the best. She could gain on him, if she hurried, and perhaps catch him before he left Xanth. Or, better, right after, because by then she would be into her awful-smart phase and would need to get out of the magic before showing herself to him.

It would be nice for them if they could be happy together in Mundania. It was not a completely dreadful place, I knew, when properly understood. After all, I had had thirty-five years of satisfaction with a Mundane wife. But I still hated the idea of the loss of that Magician-caliber talent Bink had; it was such a colossal waste.

So I watched Bink go, glumly. I think I was glummer than he was.

But when he passed beyond the Shield, it suddenly became more interesting. For there was a Mundane army—and Magician Trent was leading it! My magic mirror could show me scenes as far as the magic went, and that was for a certain distance beyond the Shield. Xanth did not end at the Shield; it was merely circumscribed there. Trent had returned, and in that limited section between Mundania and the Shield, his magic talent was operative.

Things got complicated after that. Trent captured both Bink and Chameleon and tried to coerce them into joining his effort to invade Xanth from Mundania, but they refused. They tried to escape, but Trent pursued them, and an improbable coincidence got them under the Shield where it was damped out by deep water, and further coincidences got them through assorted hazards. Then—

I was amazed. The three, now reluctant allies because of the adversity of the Xanth jungle, made their way to Castle Roogna itself! The castle accepted them, even encouraged their progress—because two of them were Magicians. It didn't care about the legal structure of Xanth; it just wanted a Magician to be king and renovate the structure and the status of the castle so that it would once more be the center of Xanth. And that was no bad thing.

Then the three went on from Castle Roogna, remaining together under a truce though Bink and Chameleon still opposed Magician Trent. The two remained foolishly loyal to the existing order. I shook my head, watching them in the mirror.

It became even stranger. The two factions agreed to settle their differences by dueling. It was, in effect, Magician against Magician, and that was dangerous. But in the course of the almost unbelievable coincidences that kept Trent from transforming Bink into something harmless, Bink's talent became evident. He could not be harmed by magic! Not even Magician-class magic. That explained why magical threats had always somehow missed him. That was perhaps the most devious and wonderful talent in Xanth.

But Trent, realizing this, was undeterred. He simply changed to the use of his sword. Bink's talent did not protect him against purely physical attack. But he was saved by the intercession of Chameleon, who took the strike intended for Bink, because she loved him.

At that point Trent had had enough. He concluded that he did not want the throne at the price of these two young lives. He helped Bink come to me, to fetch healing elixir for Chameleon. This is a simplification, but it will do. The full story has been duly recorded by the Muse of History.

Then the Storm King died, and suddenly the entire complexion of things changed. The elders naturally asked me to assume the throne, and I naturally pointed out that there was now an alternative.

So it was that Magician Trent became king after all, and Castle Roogna was indeed restored to its former glory. Trent married the Sorceress Iris and made her queen, to keep her out of mischief, and Crombie took up service as a soldier for the King. Bink married Chameleon, being satisfied with her as she was, changes and all. He was made Official Researcher of Xanth, so he could explore whatever interested him, especially things magical. It was in fact a happy ending.

But things had hardly settled down for me, before Bink was getting into more complications. His wife, Chameleon, was expecting the stork, but her phases of beauty and ugliness continued as before. She was not pleased, having discovered she didn't really want a baby, now that it was too late, and she compensated by eating a great deal and growing unreasonably fat in the tummy. Many women did that. Normally the arrival of the baby thinned such women down in a hurry, because they were kept so busy taking care of it. But Chameleon in her ugly-smart stage was surely no joy to be near.

That was why Bink elected to go in search of the source of magic. He set off on the adventure with two other dissatisfied males. One was Chester Centaur, whose ugly nose was farther out of joint because the arrival of his foal, Chet, had completely distracted his mare, Cherie. The other was Crombie the Soldier, my now-unacknowledged son, who was fed up with the imperial female ways of Queen Iris. Actually, I really couldn't condemn him for that; even a normal man would have found her burdensome if constantly exposed. His talent for finding things was being put to excellent use, pointing the direction they had to go to find that source. King Trent transformed him into a griffin, however, so that he could fly and fight and guard the party. They were on their way, Bink riding the centaur.

They promptly ran afoul of a dragon and a nest of nickelpedes. Unfortunately, those did not turn them aside, and all too soon they arrived at my castle. They wanted advice for their quest, and I knew what they meant. This was no innocent jaunt; they were seeking the source of magic, and that meant they would have to have a fully functional Magician along. Otherwise they would have no chance of success and would probably just get themselves killed. Even Bink himself; he could not be harmed by magic, but there were plenty of nonmagical dangers in Xanth too.

I hoped to discourage them, but Bink fought his way into my castle and I had to talk with him. When I explained that he would have to take a Magician along, he misinterpreted it completely.

“You old rogue!” he exclaimed. “You want to come!”

“I hardly made that claim,” I said with restraint. “The fact is, this quest is entirely too important to allow it to be bungled by an amateur, as well Trent knew when he sent you here. Since there is no one else of suitable expertise available, I am forced to make the sacrifice. There is no necessity, however, that I be gracious about it.”

So it was that I mothballed the castle and joined the quest. I brought along a number of my magics-folklore claimed I had a hundred spells, but that was an understatement—and Grundy Golem, who was doing his service for me. His talent was translation, and the obnoxious little string man was good at it. I should know; I had animated him four years before for this purpose, only to have the ungrateful twerp run away. He had returned when he discovered that he wasn't real, and asked me how to become real. Like many ignorant folk, he hadn't cared for my Answer: “Care.” It would take him time to fathom it, of course.

Unfortunately Grundy took pleasure in doing misleading translations of the griffin Crombie's words, stirring up trouble between him and Chester, who was a pretty ornery centaur to begin with. For example, he translated “centaur” as “horse-rear” and “ass,” and professed confusion as to which end of the centaur it applied to. I stayed out of it; as far as I was concerned, Crombie was a stranger to me until he chose to be otherwise.

We did not reach our destination by nightfall, and sought shelter. Crombie's talent indicated the house of an ogre as a suitable place. Distrusting this, I invoked Beauregard. We exchanged the usual friendly insults, to the probable amazement of the others. “Of course it's safe,” he assured me. “It's your mission that's unsafe.” He explained that the ogre was a vegetarian, so would not crunch our bones. This ridiculous assertion turned out to be accurate; Crunch was a veritable pacifist among ogres.

So we enjoyed the hospitality of Crunch Ogre, after a bit of repartee, and he served us a good meal of purple bouillon with green nutwood. Then he told us his story, rendered into crude rhyming couplets by the golem. He had met and loved a curse fiend actress who was playing the part of an ogress, and was therefore exquisitely ugly. He had snatched her and hidden from the other curse fiends, avoiding their massive destructive curse by becoming a vegetarian. The curse had oriented on a bone cruncher. It was a surprisingly neat ploy, for an ogre; probably the actress had thought of it. For one thing, that would prevent him from ever crunching her bones.

But the mock ogress now lay stunned in a dead forest. Crunch wanted to know whether to fetch her from there. Crombie, Chester, and Bink recommended that he do so (Crombie had thought he was doing the opposite, not realizing that ogres liked being made miserable by their females). Beauregard, participating in their dialogue, learned the rest of what he needed about the fallibilities of intelligent life on the surface of Xanth, and returned to his realm to write his dissertation.

Next day we continued on along a magic path to the Magic Dust Village, which was inhabited exclusively by women of many humanoid species. This was because their men had been lured away by the melody of the Siren. There were trolls, harpies, wood nymphs, sprites, fairies, elves, centaur fillies, griffin cows, and even a female golem to keep Grundy company. That last startled me; someone must have made that one recently, because there had been no females of his species before. Now the women were eager for male company. Indeed, they just about buried us in their eager softness. The males were of mixed feelings about this, some of them being otherwise committed, and one being a woman hater.

Then the Siren sang—and all of us were lured to go to her, losing our volition. The women tried to hold us back, but could not. Until Crombie the woman-hater rebelled and pecked in his griffin form at a tangle tree we were passing. That got us into a fight with the tree. Its tentacles wrapped around us. Crombie fought his way free, flew away—but then returned with the women of the village, who attacked the tree with torches. Fifty of them went after its tentacles, under the direction of the woman hater. They were grimly determined and courageous. I think that was the beginning of the end of Crombie's problem with women, though it would take time for the end of the end to come.

But before that battle had been concluded, the song of the Siren came again. It mesmerized us; we males could not resist its spell, though it had no effect on the women.

But an incident with a battering ram caused a pineapple to explode by Chester's head, deafening him. As a result, he could no longer hear the Siren, and was freed from her spell. He fired an arrow through her heart, and her music stopped.

We approached her. She was not yet dead. She lay on her little isle in a lake. She was the loveliest mermaid I had seen in a century, with hair like flowing sunshine and tail like flowing water and bare breasts that the Adult Conspiracy prevents me from describing, just in case a juvenile male should happen someday to see these words. She was soaked in blood from her wound, yet she pleaded only love.

Perplexed by this, I consulted my portable magic mirror. It confirmed that she intended us no harm. So I brought out my vial of healing elixir and healed her. She was instantly healthy again; that type of magic is beautiful to see.

We learned that though the Siren summoned men, they inevitably were drawn on to her sister the Gorgon at the next isle. The Gorgon's gaze turned men to stone, but had no effect on women. Later, as the Gorgon matured, that changed, and she stoned men and women and even animals. Perhaps she should have been recognized as a Sorceress for that phenomenal power. But for a reason I shall get to in due course, I am not objective about that.

Meanwhile the Siren was good company. She was a mermaid, but she was able to make legs so that she could walk on land. A certain number of merfolk can do that, though they seldom bother. She made us a dinner of fish and sea cucumber, and a bed of soft dry sponges, and we spent the night there.

Next morning we went on to brace the Gorgon. The others had to be blindfolded, and I used the mirror, because the stoning spell could not reflect from it, while the rest of her did. This was special magic called polarization.

The Gorgon turned out to be as lovely as her sister. She was fully human in the sense that she had no fish tail, but her hair consisted of little serpents. It was surprising how prettily they framed her sweet face. She was also as innocent as the Siren, having no notion of the mischief her magic was doing. All around her island statues of men stood; she thought these were gifts, not realizing that they were what remained of the men themselves.

I tried to explain this to her, but was handicapped because her loveliness in the mirror distracted me. I wanted to turn and face her directly, and did not dare. “Men must not come here anymore,” I said. “They must stay home, with their families.”

“Couldn't just one man come—and stay awhile?” she asked plaintively.

“I'm afraid not. Men aren't, er, right for you.” What a tragedy! Any man would love this lovely woman, if not turned to stone before he had the chance.