The Source of Magic (37 page)

“But maybe the Demon wouldn’t go,” Bink said. “Maybe he likes it here—”

“Would you care to gamble your way of life on that assumption?”

“No!”

“Do you still condemn the coral for opposing you?”

“No, I suppose I would have done the same, in its place.”

“Then you will depart without freeing the Demon?”

“I’m not sure,” Bink said. “I agreed to listen to the coral’s rationale; I have done so. But I must decide for myself what is right.”

“There is a question, when the whole of our Land’s welfare is at stake?”

“Yes. The Demon’s welfare is also at stake.”

“But all this is just a game to X(A/N)
^th
. It is life to us.”

“Yes,” Bink agreed noncommittally.

The Magician saw that argument was useless. “This is the
great gamble we did not wish to take—the gamble of the outcome of an individual crisis of conscience. It rests in your hands. The future of our society.”

Bink knew this was true. Nothing Humfrey or the brain coral might try could affect him before he uttered the words to free the Demon. He could ponder a second or an hour or a year, as he chose, free of duress. He did not want to make a mistake.

“Grundy,” Bink said, and the golem ran up to him, not affected by the Thought vortices. “Do you wish to free the Demon Xanth?”

“I can’t make decisions like that,” Grundy protested. “I’m only clay and string, a creature of magic.”

“Like the Demon himself,” Bink said. “You’re nonhuman, not quite alive. You might be construed as a miniature Demon. I thought you might have an insight.”

Grundy paced the cave floor seriously. “My job is translation. I may not experience the emotion you do, but I have an awful clear notion of the Demon. He
is
like me, as a dragon is to a nickelpede. I can tell you this: he is without conscience or compassion. He plays his game rigorously by its rules, but if you free him you will have no thanks from him and no reward. In fact, that would be cheating on his part, to proffer you any advantage for your service to him, for that might influence you. But even if reward were legitimate, he wouldn’t do it. He’d as soon step on you as smell you.”

“He is like you,” Bink repeated. “As you were before you began to change. Now you are halfway real. You care—somewhat.”

“I am now an imperfect golem. Xanth is a perfect Demon. For me, humanization is a step up; for him it would be a fall from grace. He is not your kind.”

“Yet I am not concerned with kind or thanks, but with justice,” Bink said. “Is it right that the demon be freed?”

“By his logic, you would be an utter fool to free him.”

The Good Magician, standing apart, nodded agreement.

“Jewel,” Bink said.

The nymph looked up, smelling of old bones. “The Demon
frightens me worse than anything,” she said. “His magic—with the blink of one eye, he could click us all out of existence.”

“You would not free him, then?”

“Oh, Bink—I never would.” She hesitated prettily. “I know you took the potion, so this is unfair—but I’m so afraid of what that Demon might do, I’d do anything for you if only you didn’t free him.”

Again the Good Magician nodded. Nymphs were fairly simple, direct creatures, unfettered by complex overlays of conscience or social strategy. A real woman might feel the same way Jewel did, but she would express herself with far more subtlety, proffering a superficially convincing rationale. The nymph had named her price.

So the logical and the emotional advisers both warned against releasing the Demon X(A/N)
^th
. Yet Bink remained uncertain. Something about this huge, super-magical, game-playing entity—

And he had it. Honor. Within the Demon’s framework, the Demon was honorable. He never breached the code of the game—not in its slightest detail, though there were none of his kind present to observe, and had not been for a thousand years. Integrity beyond human capacity. Was he to be penalized for this?

“I respect you,” Bink said at last to Humfrey. “And I respect the motive of the brain coral.” He turned to the golem. “I think you ought to have your chance to achieve full reality.” And to the nymph: “And I love you, Jewel.” He paused. “But I would have respect for nothing, and love for nothing, if I did not respect and love justice. If I let personal attachments and desires prevail over my basic integrity of purpose, I would lose my claim to distinction as a moral creature. I must do what I think is right.”

The others did not respond. They only looked at him.

“The problem is,” Bink continued after a moment, “I’m not certain what
is
right. The rationale of the Demon Xanth is so complex, and the consequence of the loss of magic to our world is so great—where is right and wrong?” He paused
again. “I wish I had Chester here to share his emotion and reason with me.”

“You can recover the centaur,” Humfrey said. “The waters of the coral lake do not kill, they preserve. He is suspended in brine, unable to escape, but alive. The coral can not release him; that brine preserves it similarly. But you, if you save the magic of our land, you can draw on the phenomenal power of this region and draw him forth.”

“You offer another temptation of personal attachment,” Bink said. “I can not let it influence me!” For now he realized that he had not yet won the battle against the brain coral. He had prevailed physically, but intellectually the issue remained in doubt. How could he be sure the decision he made was his own?

Then he had a bright notion. “Argue the other case, Magician! Tell me why I should free the Demon.”

Startled, Humfrey demurred. “You should not free the Demon!”

“So you believe. So the coral believes. I can not tell whether that belief is really yours, or merely a function of the will of your master. So now you argue the opposite case, and I’ll argue the case for leaving him chained. Maybe that way the truth will emerge.”

“You are something of a demon yourself,” Humfrey muttered.

“Now I submit that these friends of mine are more important than an impersonal Demon,” Bink said. “I don’t know what’s right for X(A/N)
^th
, but I do know that my friends deserve the best. How can I justify betraying them by freeing the Demon?”

Humfrey looked as if he had swallowed the evil eye, but he came back gamely enough. “It is not a question of betrayal, Bink. None of these creatures would ever have experienced magic, if it had not been for the presence of the Demon. Now X(A/N)
^th
’s period of incarceration has been fulfilled, and he must be released. To do otherwise would be to betray your role in the Demon’s game.”

“I have no obligation to the Demon’s game!” Bink retorted, getting into the feel of it. “Pure chance brought me here!”

“That
is
the role. That you, as a sapient creature uninfluenced by the Demon’s will, come by your own initiative or accident of chance to free him. You fought against us all to achieve this point of decision, and won; are you going to throw it all away now?”

“Yes—if that is best.”

“How can you presume to know what is best for an entity like X(A/N)
^th
? Free him and let him forge his own destiny.”

“At the expense of my friends, my land, and my love?”

“Justice is absolute; you can not weigh personal factors against it.”

“Justice is
not
absolute! It depends on the situation. When there is right and wrong on both sides of the scale, the preponderance—”

“You can not weigh rights and wrongs on a scale, Bink,” Humfrey said, becoming passionate in his role as Demon’s Advocate. Now Bink was sure it was the Good Magician speaking, not the brain coral. The enemy had had to free Humfrey, at least to this extent, to allow him to play this game of the moment. The Magician’s mind and emotion had not been erased, and that was part of what Bink had needed to know. “Right and wrong are not to be found in things or histories, and can not be properly defined in either human or Demon terms. They are merely aspects of viewpoint. The question is whether the Demon should be allowed to pursue his quest in his own fashion.”

“He
is
pursuing it in his own fashion,” Bink said. “If I don’t free him, that’s according to the rules of his game, too. I have no obligation!”

“The Demon’s honor compels him to obey a stricture no man would tolerate,” Humfrey said. “It is not surprising that your own honor is inferior to that perfect standard.”

Bink felt as if he had been smashed by a forest-blasting curse. The Magician was a devastating in-fighter, even in a cause he opposed! Except that this could be the Magician’s real position, that the coral was forced to allow him to argue. “My
honor compels me to follow the code of my kind, imperfect as that may be.”

Humfrey spread his hands. “I can not debate that. The only real war between good and evil is within the soul of yourself—whoever you are. If you are a man, you must act as a man.”

“Yes!” Bink agreed. “And my code says—” He paused, amazed and mortified. “It says I can not let a living, feeling creature suffer because of my inaction. It doesn’t matter that the Demon would not free me, were our positions reversed; I am not a Demon, and shall not act like one. It only matters that a man does not stand by and allow a wrong he perceives to continue. Not when he can so readily correct it.”

“Oh, Bink!” Jewel cried, smelling of myrrh. “Don’t do it!”

He looked at her again, so lovely even in her apprehension, yet so fallible. Chameleon would have endorsed his decision, not because she wished to please him, but because she was a human being who believed, as he did, in doing the right thing. Yet though Jewel, like all nymphs, lacked an overriding social conscience, she was as good a person as her state permitted. “I love you, Jewel. I know this is just another thing the coral did to stop me, but—well, if I hadn’t taken that potion, and if I weren’t already married, it would have been awfully easy to love you anyway. I don’t suppose it makes you feel any better to know that I am also risking my wife, and my unborn baby, and my parents, and all else I hold dear. But I must do what I must do.”

“You utter fool!” Grundy exclaimed. “If I were real, I’d snatch up the nymph and to hell with the Demon. You’ll get no reward from X(A/N)
^th
!”

“I know,” Bink said. “I’ll get no thanks from anyone.”

Then he addressed the huge demon face. “I free you, Xanth,” he said.

I
nstantly the Demon burst loose. The seeping magic of X(A/N)
^th
’s immediate environment was as nothing compared to the full magic of his release. There was a blinding effulgence, a deafening noise, and an explosion that threw Bink across the cavern. He crashed jarringly into a wall. As his senses cleared he perceived the collapse of the cavern in slow-motion sight and sound. Huge stones crunched to the floor and shattered into sand. All the world seemed to be collapsing into the space left by the Demon. This was a demise Bink had not anticipated: not willful destruction by X(A/N)
^th
, not the tedium of loss of magic, but careless extinction in the wake of the Demon’s departure. It was true: the Demon didn’t
care
.

Now, as the dust clouded in to choke him and the only light was from the sparks of colliding rocks, Bink wondered: what had he done? Why hadn’t he heeded the brain coral’s warning, and left the Demon alone? Why hadn’t he yielded to his love for Jewel, and—

Even in the ongoing carnage, while expecting momentary conclusion of his life, this made him pause in surprise. Love? Not so! He was out of love with Jewel!

That meant the magic really was gone. The love potion had been nullified. His talent would no longer protect him. The Land of Xanth was now one with Mundania.

Bink closed his eyes and cried. There was a great deal of dust in the air that needed washing out of his eyes, and he was wrackingly afraid, but it was more than that. He was crying for
Xanth. He had destroyed the uniqueness of the world he knew; even if he survived this cave-in, how could he live with that?

He did not know how the society he had belonged to would react. What would happen to the dragons and tangle trees and zombies? How could the people live, without magic? It was as if the entire population had abruptly been exiled to the drear realm of no-talents.

The action abated. Bink found himself grimed with rock powder, bruised, but with limbs and sword intact. Miraculously, he had survived.

Had anyone else? He peered through the rubble. Dim light descended from a hole far above, evidently the Demon’s route of departure. X(A/N)
^th
must simply have shot up and out, forging his path heedlessly through the rock. What power!

“Magician! Jewel!” Bink cried, but there was no answer. The fall of stone had been so complete that only his own section remained even partially clear. His talent must have saved him, just before it faded. He could not depend on it any more, however; it was evident that spells had been the first magic to go.

He stepped out over the rubble. More dust swirled up; it coated everything. Bink realized that though he thought he had been aware of the whole process of the Demon’s departure, he could actually have been unconscious for some time. So much dust had settled! Yet he had no bruise on his head, and no headache. Yet again, the physical and magical explosion of the Demon’s release could account for many incongruous effects.

“Magician!” he called again, knowing it was futile. He, Bink, had survived—but his friends had lacked his critical protection at the key moment. Somewhere beneath this slope of stone …

He spied a glint, a wan reflection, only a glimmer between two dusky rocks. He pried them apart, and there it was: the bottle containing Crombie. Strewn across it was a bit of rag. Bink picked up the bottle, letting the cloth fall—and saw that it was what remained of Grundy the golem. The little man-figure had owed its animation to magic; now he was just a limp wad of material.

Bink closed his eyes again, experiencing another chill seizure of grief. He had done what he had felt was right—but he had not truly reckoned the consequence. Fine points of morality were intangible; life and death were tangible. By what right had he condemned these creatures to death? Was it moral for him to slay them in the name of his morality?