Trouble came in the form of a seemingly innocent young man of about twenty-five. He trudged up to the castle, having somehow managed to cross the-the-to get through a difficult section of Xanth and avoid the inherent dangers of the countryside. He evidently had a Question, so I had AmbiGus spread the word and retire. I really didn't want to be bothered at this time.

But the man was determined. He rode the hippocampus through the moat, refusing to be bucked off by the water horse or to lose his nerve and quit. The hippocampus had not been trying too hard, of course, and had he succeeded in throwing the man, he would have arranged to not-quite trap him in the water, allowing him to beat a hasty escape. But the man had prevailed. That spoke for his stamina.

Then the man explored the huge facade door and found the little door set within it, and climbed in through that. AmbiGus had carefully crafted the inner door to be invisible but to yield readily to a push, its panel falling out. The man located it quickly. That spoke for his intelligence.

Finally he encountered the manticora, which was a creature the size of a horse with the head of a man, body of a lion, wings of a dragon, and a huge scorpion's tail. The monster had come to me to ask whether it, being only partly human (there must have been quite a gathering at a love spring when he came to be!), had a soul. I told him that only those who had souls were concerned about them. Satisfied with that obvious Answer, he was now serving his term of service, his instructions being to scare visitors without actually hurting them. If he could scare them off, good enough; if he could not, he had to arrange some un-obvious way of letting them pa.s.s. The visitor pa.s.sed, which spoke for his courage.

Well, I would have to see what he wanted. Sometimes I knew well ahead of time, but this one was curiously opaque, with no reference in the Book of Answers; I would just have to ask him. But I wasn't pleased at the prospect. I had produced too many love potions for country hicks and beauty potions for girls who hardly needed them, and this certainly seemed to be more of the same. How I wished a real challenge would appear, instead of these nothings!

The oaf yanked on the bell cord. DONG-DONG, DONG-DONG! As if I wasn't already on my way. And I still didn't know his name. I didn't want to ask it; I didn't want to admit that I, the Magician of Information, had not found it listed in my references. "Who shall I say is calling?" I inquired.

"Bink of the North Village."

Ha! Name and origin in one breath, both about as unheroic as it was possible to be. Naturally someone this dull wouldn't be named Arthur or Roland or Charlemagne! But I remained annoyed, so I pretended to mishear. "Drink of what?"

"Bink!" he said, getting annoyed himself. Good. "B-I-N-K."

I looked up at him, for this disgustingly healthy young man stood about twice my century-gnarled height. I was healthy too, but the years had gradually twisted me, and I never had been tall or handsome in the way he was. What conceivable problem could he have that might ameliorate the dullness of my existence for a moment?

"What shall I say is the business of your master Bink?" I asked, still needling the hayseed.

He clarified that he was Bink, and was looking for a magical talent. He was ready to deliver a year's service. "It's robbery, but I'm stuck for it," he confided, not yet catching on to my ident.i.ty; he a.s.sumed I was a servant. This was getting better as it went! "Your master gouges the public horrendously."

This was actually beginning to be fun. I played it for another laugh. "The Magician is occupied at the moment; can you come back tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow!" he exploded in a manner that warmed my heart. "Does the old b.u.g.g.e.r want my business or doesn't he?"

He had dug himself in deep enough. It was time to wrap it up. I led him up to my cluttered study and seated myself at my desk. "What makes you think your service is worth the old gouging b.u.g.g.e.r's while?"

I watched with deep satisfaction as the realization slowly percolated through his thick head. At last he knew to whom he was talking! He looked suitably crestfallen. "I'm strong," he finally said. "I can work."

I couldn't resist turning the screw just a bit more. "You are oink-headed and doubtless have a grotesque appet.i.te. You'd cost me more in board than I'd ever get from you." Probably true, but it might be fun having such a naive lunk around.

He only shrugged. At least he had the wit to know how unimportant he was.

"Can you read?"

"Some," he said doubtfully.

So he wasn't much at that. Good; that meant he wouldn't be prying into my precious tomes. "You seem a fair hand at insult, too; maybe you could get rid of intruders with their petty problems." Would he catch the implication: that his own problem was as petty as any? I could readily ascertain his talent; it was probably the ability to make a stalk of hay change color or something similarly ba.n.a.l. The Storm King required every person to have a talent, but most of them were so slight as to be barely worth it. That law was barely worth it, too.

"Maybe," he agreed, evidently determined not to aggravate me further.

I had had enough of this. "Well, come on; we don't have all day," I said, getting down from my chair. Actually we did have all day, if that was what it took. One advantage of boredom is that all-day distractions can be welcome, especially if they happen to become interesting.

I decided to try Beauregard on this one. The demon was still working on his paper, "Fallibilities of Other Intelligent Life," after several decades, and had finally come to me to ask for some kind of help. I had suggested that if he spent a decade or two in the bottle, helping me answer the Questions of living creatures, he should have a rich lode of fallibilities to a.n.a.lyze. He had agreed, merging service with research and snoozing between times. He pretended to be confined to the bottle and to the pentacle, though by our agreement neither was tight; it was for show so that the visitors wouldn't be terrified by the manifestation of a genuine demon. Why disabuse them? Demons were not nearly as horrendous as represented, and some, like Metria or my ex-wife Dana, could be surprisingly winsome at times. But it could be tricky to deal with them, even unknowingly, as my son Crombie had learned the hard way.

I lifted the bottle from the shelf and shook it to alert the demon that a show was coming up. It wouldn't do to uncork him and have him go right on sleeping. I set it in the middle of the five-pointed star painted on the floor. I gestured grandiloquently and stepped back out of the figure.

The demon put on the show. The bottle's lid popped off and smoke issued impressively. From the resulting cloud the figure coalesced. About the only thing that detracted from the effect was the pair of spectacles perched on the demon's nose. But the fact was that demons varied in temperament as men did, and this one felt more comfortable using spectacles to read small print, just as I did.

"O Beauregard," I intoned dramatically. "I conjure thee by the authority vested in me by the Compact," which was nonsense; the only compact was our deal to observe dull visitors without frightening them off. "Tell me what magic talent this lad, Bink of the North Village, possesses." I could see that the hayseed was suitably impressed by the rigmarole.

Beauregard played it like a pro. He oriented impressively on the man. "Step into my demesnes, mortal, that I may inspect you properly."

"Nuh-wA!" Bink exclaimed, drawing back. He was accepting it all at face value.

Beauregard shook his head as if regretting the loss of a tasty morsel. Of course demons don't eat people; they don't eat anything except in rare situations when they have to pa.s.s the food along, such as when nursing half-human babies. The Demoness Dana had not even done that; she had lost her soul, and bbrrupst! she was gone, "You're a tough nut."

My turn. "I didn't ask you for his personality profile! What's his magic?" For Beauregard was good at fathoming such things with cursory inspection.

Now the demon concentrated-and evinced surprise. "He has magic-strong magic-but I am unable to fathom it." He frowned at me, and proffered our usual insult. "Sorry, fathead."

"Then get ye gone, incompetent!" I snarled just as if meaning it, clapping my hands. The truth was this was getting considerably more interesting. If Beauregard couldn't fathom the talent, it had to be well beyond the minimum level.

The demon dissolved into smoke and returned to his bottle to resume his nap. No, this time he was reading a book; I could see him in miniature in there, turning a page. Bink, evidently quite impressed, stared at the bottle.

Now I got serious. I questioned Bink, but he was ignorant, of course. So I tried another device: the pointer and wall chart. I asked questions, and the pointer pointed to either a cherub, meaning yes, or a devil, meaning no. This only confirmed what Beauregard had said: strong magic, undefined.

I was really getting interested now. This was indeed turning out to be a challenge and was brightening my day.

I tried a truth spell on him. It wasn't that I thought he was being dishonest-he lacked the wit-but that this device addressed the magic within him, requiring it to clarify itself. But when I asked him his talent, the manticora abruptly roared. It was his feeding time. I had been at this ch.o.r.e longer than I had realized; time was pa.s.sing.

So I went down to feed the manticora, who turned out not to be that hungry. "I don't know what came over me," he said. "Suddenly I just had to roar as loud as I could."

Curious. I returned to Bink-who had, like the simpleton he was, broken a magic mirror during my brief absence by asking it a question beyond its competence. I was disgusted. "You're a lot more trouble than you're worth."

I restored the truth spell and started to ask him about his talent, again. Just then the cracked gla.s.s fell out of the mirror behind me, breaking my concentration. What a nuisance!

I tried a third time. And the whole castle shook. An invisible giant was pa.s.sing close by, his tread making the earth shudder.

I realized that more than coincidence was operating here. Some extremely powerful enchantment was preventing me from getting the answer. That had to be Magician-caliber magic! "I had thought there were only three persons alive today of that rank, but it seems there is a fourth." And, indeed, the joke had turned out to be on me, for I had a.s.sumed that this was a nothing situation. Why had my Book of Answers failed to warn me of the approach of this odd Magician?

"Three?" he asked stupidly.

"Me, Iris, Trent." I did not count the Storm King; he had been a Magician, but his talent had dwindled with age. He was way overdue for replacement. But Iris was a woman, and Trent exiled these past twenty years, and I certainly didn't want to be stuck with the ch.o.r.e again. But if we had here a genuine new Magician- this was now fascinating in its implications!

"Trent!" he exclaimed. "The Evil Magician?"

I explained that Trent had not really been evil, any more than I was good; it was just a popular misconception. But I doubted that Bink was getting it. He still thought in stereotypes.

And so I had to turn Bink away without an Answer, for it was not safe to probe further. It was unsatisfactory in one sense, but exciting in another. A new Magician-with undefined magic! Something interesting would surely come of this!

At this point I suffered a coincidental realization: now I understood why a creature like the Demoness Metria was always alert for new mischief. If I, as a man hardly over a century in age, was so eager for something interesting to pep up my boredom, how much worse it must be for a demon, who existed for many centuries without any responsibilities or vulnerabilities. That didn't mean that I liked Metria, but I could hardly blame her for her incidental mischief. I had been acting a bit like a demon when I tormented the loutish young Bink of the North Village.

After that I watched that young man. At first he was a severe disappointment. All he did was go straight back to the North Village, crossing on the invisible one-way bridge I had told him about. There he was exiled by the Storm King, who refused to heed the paper I had sent with Bink attesting to his undefined magic. The Storm King didn't like me any better than I liked him; my note was probably slightly worse than nothing. Maybe the notion that there might be significant magic here frightened the King, who was now, with the fading of his magic, technically an impostor. Bink was deemed to have no magic and was exiled and sent out of Xanth, beyond the Shield. That irritated me something awful, but all I could do was watch. Had I realized that the Storm King would be that petty, I would have looked for some way to bypa.s.s him. That was a Magician the idiot had exiled!

Or had he suspected the truth, and that was why he had exiled Bink-as a possible rival? My irritation progressed into something like anger. What a fool I had been to give up the throne to that broken wind!

Meanwhile, I had another client. This was a young woman who called herself Chameleon. She was plain, bordering on ugly. Her talent was intriguing, because it was involuntary: in the course of each month she changed gradually from average appearance to beautiful, and back through average to ugly. The magic mirror showed her physical phases: she was truly sublime when on, and truly hideous when off. Her intelligence and personality shifted in the opposite direction, counterpointing her appearance. Thus she was smartest when she was ugliest, and stupidest when she was beautiful. I verified this with my sources, and looked again at pictures of her extremes in the magic mirror. At her best she was a creature to make any man, even an old grouch like me, stop and stare, as I was doing now. At her worst she was a young crone, with a caustic tongue, whom no man would tolerate.

She wanted, of course, to be rid of her talent, as it was doing her no good. She was in constant danger of being seduced in her stupid-lovely stage or stoned in her smart-ugly stage. Only her neutral central stage was suitable. She also wanted to win the man she liked- who, coincidentally, was Bink. It seemed that she had encountered him twice recently, once in the-the- somewhere dangerous, when she was in her lovely phase, and they had been separated because of his heroism. The other time was in her neutral stage, and he had been in the company of a woman-hating man named Crombie. So she had followed Bink here, and now was begging me for help. For a spell for Chameleon.

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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mscribed 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 a.s.sorted 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-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sume 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 "a.s.s," 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 a.s.sured me. "It's your mission that's unsafe." He explained that the ogre was a vegetarian, so would not crunch our bones. This ridiculous a.s.sertion 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed her and hidden from the other curse fiends, avoiding their ma.s.sive 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, partic.i.p.ating 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 pa.s.sing. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 cuc.u.mber, 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.

"But I have so much love to give-if only a man would stay! Even a little one. I would cherish him for ever and ever, and make him so happy-"

The more I talked with her, the worse I was feeling.

"You must go into exile," I said. "In Mundania your magic will dissipate."

But she would have none of it. "I can not depart Xanth. I love men, but I love my home more. If this is my only choice, I beg of you to slay me now and end my misery."

I was appalled. "Slay you? I would not do that! You are the most attractive creature I have ever seen, even through a mirror! In my youth I would have-"

"Why, you are not old, sir," she protested, and her smile seemed genuine. "You are a handsome man."

The three blindfolded males squawked, coughed, and choked. That irritated me for some reason. "You flatter me," I said, being flattered. "But I have other business." I knew I had better get on with it quickly, because I was in danger of being smitten by this devastating woman in two respects: my body turned to stone, my heart turned to mush.