The Source of Magic (25 page)

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.

A
t 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 non-magical 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.”