The Source of Magic (41 page)

“Yes,” Cherie agreed, finding hope as Bink lost it. “Maybe the King will know how to go about it. Get on my back; I’m going to gallop.”

Bink remounted her, and she took off. She did not have the sheer power Chester had, but Bink had to cling to her slender waist to stay on as she zoomed through the forest.

“And with magic, I’ll be beautiful again …” she murmured into the wind, wistfully.

Bink, tired, nodded sleepily as Cherie charged on through
the desolate wilderness. Then he was almost pitched off as she braked.

They faced a huge shaggy pair of creatures. “Make way, you monsters!” Cherie cried without rancor. They were, after all, monsters. “This is a public easement; you can’t block it!”

“We not block it, centaur lass,” one monster said. “You give way to let we pass.”

“Crunch the Ogre!” Bink exclaimed. “What are you doing so far from home?”

“You know this monster?” Cherie asked Bink.

“I certainly do! What’s more, now I can understand him without translation!”

The ogre, who now resembled a brute of a man, peered at Bink from beneath his low skull. “You man we met, the one on quest? Me on gooeymoon with she loved best.”

“Gooeymoon?” Cherie murmured.

“Oh, so that’s Sleeping Beauty!” Bink said, contemplating the ogress. She was as ugly a creature as he cared to imagine. Yet beneath her hair, which resembled a mop just used to wipe up vomit, and her baggy coarse dress, she seemed to have rather more delicate contours than one might expect in an ogress. Then he remembered: she was no true ogress, but an actress, playing a part in one of the fiend’s productions. She could probably look beautiful if she tried. Why, then, was she not trying? “Uh, one question—”

The female, no dummy, caught his gist before he got it out. “True, me once have other face,” she told Bink. “Me glad get out of that rat race. Me find man better than any fiend; me like it best, by he be queened.”

So the prima donna had found a husband worthy of her attention! After meeting the fiends, Bink found himself in agreement with her choice. She was maintaining the ogress guise, which was in any event merely a physical reflection of her normal personality, while teaching Crunch to speak more intelligibly. One savvy lady fiend, there! “Uh, congratulations,” Bink said. Aside, he explained to Cherie. “They married on our advice. Humfrey and Crombie and Chester and the golem and I. Except that Humfrey was asleep. It was quite a story.”

“I’m sure,” Cherie agreed dubiously.

“Yes, me bash he good,” the fair she-ogre said. “He head like wood.”

“Ogres are very passionate,” Bink murmured.

Cherie, after her initial surprise, was quick to catch on. “How do you keep his love?” she inquired with a certain female mischief. “Doesn’t he like to go out adventuring?”

Bink realized she was thinking of Chester, perhaps unconsciously.

“Me let he go, me never say no,” the ogress said, full of the wisdom of her sex. “When he come back, me give he crack.” She struck the ogre with a horrendous backhand wallop by way of example. Just as well, for Bink had been about to misunderstand the reference. “Make he feel like beast, then give he feast.”

Crunch’s face contorted into a smile of agreement. He was obviously well satisfied. And probably better off, Bink thought, than he might have been with a natural ogress, who would have taken his nature for granted. Whatever faults the actress might have, she certainly knew how to handle her male.

“Does the loss of magic interfere with your lifestyle?” Bink inquired. Both ogres looked at him blankly.

“They never noticed!” Cherie exclaimed. “There’s true love for you!”

The ogre couple went on its way, and Cherie resumed her run. But she was thoughtful. “Bink, just as a rhetorical example—does a male really like to feel like a beast?”

“Yes, sometimes,” Bink agreed, thinking of Chameleon. When she was in her stupid-beautiful phase, she seemed to live only to please him, and he felt extremely manly. But when she was in her smart-ugly phase, she turned him off with her wit as well as her appearance. In that respect she was smarter when she was stupid than when she was smart. Of course now all that was over; she would stay always in her “normal” phase, avoiding the extremes. She would never turn him off—or on.

“And a centaur—if he felt like a real stallion at home—”

“Yes. Males need to feel wanted and needed and dominant,
even when they aren’t. Especially at home. That ogress knows what she’s doing.”

“So it seems,” Cherie agreed. “She’s a complete fake, a mere actress, yet he’s so happy he’d do anything for her. But lady centaurs can act too, when they have reason …” Then she was silent as she ran.

B
ink, nodding again, was suddenly jolted awake. Cherie was braking so hard he was being crushed against her human back. He threw his arms about her waist, hanging on, careful not to grab too high. “What—?”

“I almost forgot. I haven’t nursed Chet in hours.”

“Chet?” Bink repeated dazedly. Oh, the foal.

She signaled to her young one, who promptly came up to nurse. Bink hastily excused himself for another kind of call of nature. Centaurs were not sensitive about natural functions; in fact they could and did perform some of them on the run. Humans were more squeamish, at least in public. It made him realize one reason why Cherie did not seem as lovely now: her breasts were enlarged to the point of ponderosity, so that she could nurse her foal. Little centaurs required a great deal of milk, especially when they had to run as much as this one did.

After a decent interval Bink cautiously returned. The foal was still nursing, but Cherie spied Bink. “Oh, don’t be so damned human,” she snapped. “What do you think I’m doing—magic?”

Bink had to laugh, embarrassed. She had a point; he had no more occasion to let his squeamishness interfere with business than she did. His definitions of what might be obscene made no more sense than hers. He came forward, albeit diffidently. It occurred to him that centaurs were well adapted to their functions; had Cherie had an udder like a horse, the foal would have
had a difficult time. He was an upright little chap, whose human section did not bend down like the neck of a horse.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Cherie exclaimed.

Oh, no! “You strayed from the path? We’re lost?”

“We’re on the path. But we should not be going toward Castle Roogna. Nobody there can help.”

“But the King—”

“The King is just an ordinary man, now. What can he do?”

Bink sighed. He had just assumed King Trent would have some sort of answer, but Cherie was right. “What can
anyone
do without—” He was trying to spare her the use of the obscene word, though he knew this was foolish.

“Nursing Chet started me thinking,” she said, giving the foal a loving pat on the head. “Here is my foal, Chester’s colt, a representative of the dominant species of Xanth. What am I doing running away from Chester? Chet needs a real stud to teach him the facts of life. I could never forgive myself, if—”

“But you’re not running away!” Bink protested. “We’re going to the King, to find out what to do in the absence of—how we can—”

“Oh, go ahead, say it!” she exclaimed angrily. “Magic! You have shown me in your blundering human way that it is necessary and integral to our way of life, including my own private personal life, damn you. Now I’m taking the rationale further. We can’t just go home and commiserate with former Magicians; we have to
do
something. Now, immediately, before it’s too late.”

“It’s already too late,” Bink said. “The Demon is gone.”

“But maybe he hasn’t gone far. Maybe he forgot something, and will return to fetch it, and we can trap him—”

“No, that wouldn’t be right. I meant it when I freed him, even though I don’t like the result of that freedom.”

“You have integrity, Bink, inconvenient as it sometimes is. Maybe we can call him back, talk to him, persuade him to give us back a few spells—”

Bink shook his head. “No, nothing we can do will influence the Demon Xanth. He doesn’t care at all about our welfare. If you had met him, you’d know.”

She turned her head to face him. “Maybe I’d better meet him, then.”

“How can I get it through your equine brain!” Bink cried, exasperated. “I told you he’s gone!”

“All the same, I want to see where he was. There might be something left. Something you missed. No offense, Bink, but you
are
only human. If there were some way we could—”

“There is
no
way!” Bink cried. Chester had been stubborn enough, but this filly—!

“Listen, Bink. You rubbed my nose in the fact of my need of magic. Now I’m rubbing yours in the fact of your need to
do
something, instead of just giving in. You may tell yourself you’re going to fetch help, but actually you’re just running away. The solution to our problem is at the prison of the Demon, not at the King’s palace. Maybe we’ll fail—but we do have to go back there and try.” And she started back the way they had come. “You’ve been there; show me the way.”

Involuntarily, he ran along beside her, very much like the foal. “To the cave of the Demon?” he asked incredulously. “There are goblins and demagicked dragons and—”

“To hell with all that obscenity!” she neighed. “Who knows what is happening to Chester now?”

There it was: her ultimate loyalty to her mate. Now that he thought of it that way, his own attitude seemed inferior. Maybe his humanity did make him imperfect. Why hadn’t he stayed at least long enough to locate his friend? Because he had been afraid of what he might find. He had, indeed, been running away!

Maybe Chester could be hauled out of the brine and saved without the aid of magic. Maybe Good Magician Humfrey yet survived. A small chance, certainly—but so long as there was any chance at all, Bink was derelict in his duty to his friends by not making every possible effort to find them. He had the sick certainty that they were dead, but even that confirmation would be better than his hiding from the truth.

He climbed back aboard Cherie, and she launched herself onward. They made amazingly good progress. Soon they had passed the place where they had encountered each other, and
were galloping across the terrain in the direction Bink indicated. A centaur could really move—but even so, it was almost as if there were some magic enchantment facilitating their progress. That was an illusion, of course, and not a magical one. It was just that Cherie was now goaded by her eagerness to rescue her stallion, foolish as that ambition might be. Bink directed her to the tangle-tree cleft, bypassing the magic-dust village.

As they galloped up, it seemed to Bink that the tangler quivered. That had to be a trick of the fading light, since without magic the monster was impotent.

Cherie drew up to the branch that overlapped the rim of the chasm. “Climbing down a tangle tree—I find that hard to—” She broke off. “Bink, it moved! I saw it!”

“The wind,” Bink cried with abrupt illumination. “It rustles the tendrils!”

“Of course!” she agreed, relieved. “For a moment I almost thought—but I knew it wasn’t so.”

Bink peered down into the crevasse, and spied the crack in its base where the tree’s big root crossed. He really did not want to go down there again, but didn’t want to admit it. “I—uh—I can swing down on a vine. But you—”

“I can swing down too,” she said. “That’s why centaurs have strong arms and good chest muscles; we have greater weight to support. Come, Chet.” She grasped a large tentacle and stepped off the brink.

Sure enough, she was able to let herself down, hand under hand, with her front legs acting as brakes. Her posterior swung grandly around in a descending spiral until she reached the base. The colt followed her example, though with such difficulty that she hastened to catch him at the base. Embarrassed by their examples, Bink swung down himself. He should have led the way, instead of letting fillies and foals do it!

At the base of the tree, gazing down into the looming black hole that was the aperture to the underworld, Bink had further misgivings. “This descent is worse; I don’t think Chet can make it. And how could you climb up again? It nearly killed me getting to the top, and your weight—no offense—”

“Chester could climb it,” Cherie said confidently. “Then he could haul the rest of us up.”

Bink visualized the muscles of Chester’s human torso, and remembered the colossal power of the centaur. Only a monster like the ogre had more strength of arm. Maybe, just maybe, it was possible, especially if they set up a double rope so the rest of them could haul on the other end and help Chester lift himself. But that presumed they would actually find and rescue Chester. If they failed, Cherie herself would be lost, for Bink could never haul her up. He might handle the foal, but that was the limit.

Cherie was already testing tangler tentacles for strength. She had faith that banished doubt, and Bink envied her that. He had always thought of Chester as the ornery one, but now he understood that the true strength of the family lay in Cherie. Chester was mere magic putty in her hands—oops, obscene concept!—and so also, it seemed, was Bink.
He
did not want to return to the horrors of the depths, to battle uselessly against the half-goblins and snake-dragons in the dark. But he knew he would do it, because Cherie was going to rescue her poor dead stallion, or else.

“This one’s good,” she announced, tugging at a particularly long, stout tentacle that dangled from the very top of the tree. “Bink, you climb up and sever it with your knife.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he said with imperfect enthusiasm. Then he was ashamed of himself. If he was going to do this thing, at least he should do it with some spirit! “Yes, of course.” And he started to climb the dread trunk.

He experienced a strange uplift and exhilaration. It was as if a burden had been lifted from his body. In a moment he realized what it was: conscience. Now that he had made his decision, and knew it was right even if suicidal, he was at peace with his conscience, and it was wonderful. This was what Cherie had experienced, which had made her almost fly through the wilderness, her strength expanded. Even without magic, there was magic in a person’s attitude.