A Spell for Chameleon (Xanth 1) (35 page)

Bink found this increasingly awkward. "This is not exactly a social leave-taking. I'm sorry." He wished now that he hadn't observed
Trent's wife and son, or learned their identifies; those had obviously been good people, undeserving of their fate, and Bink was wholly in sympathy with the Magician's grief. "The castle won't let us go voluntarily. We have to force it. So we have planted bombs, and--"

"Bombs!"
Trent exclaimed. "Those are Mundane artifacts. There are no bombs in Xanth--and shall be none. Never, while I am King."

"It seems there were bombs in the old days," Bink said doggedly. "There's a cherry-bomb tree in the yard. Each cherry explodes on impact, violently."

"Cherry bombs?"
Trent repeated. "So. What have you done with the cherries?"

"We have used them to mine the castle supports. If Roogna tries to stop us, we will destroy it. So it is better if it lets us go in peace. I needed to tell you, so you could disarm the bombs after we're gone."

"Why tell me this? Don't you oppose my designs, and those of Castle Roogna? If Magician and castle were destroyed, you would be the clean victor."

"Not clean. It's not the kind of victory I want," Bink said. "I--look, you could do so much good in Xanth, if you only--" But he knew it was useless. It simply was not the nature of an Evil Magician to devote himself to Good. "Here is a list of the bomb locations," he said, setting a piece of paper on the table. "All you have to do is pick up the packages and bags very carefully and take them outside."

Trent shook his head. "I don't believe your bomb threat will work to effect your escape, Bink. The castle is not intelligent per se. It only reacts to certain stimuli. It might let Chameleon go, but not you. In its perception, you are a Magician, therefore you must remain. You may have out-thought Roogna, but it will not comprehend the full nature of your ploy. Thus the zombies will balk you, as before."

"Then we shall have to bomb it."

"Exactly. You will have to set off the cherries, and all of us will be destroyed together."

"No, we'll get outside first, and heave a cherry back. If the castle cannot be bluffed--"

"It can't be bluffed. It is not a thinking thing. It merely reacts, you will be forced to destroy it--and you know I can't permit that. I need Roogna!"

Now it was getting tough. Bink was ready. "Chameleon will set off the bombs if you transform me," he said, feeling the chill of challenge. He didn't like this sort of power play, but had known it would come to this. "If you interfere in any way--"

"Oh, I would not break the truce. But--"

"You can't break the truce. Either I rejoin Chameleon alone or she heaves a cherry into a bomb. She's too stupid to do anything but follow directions."

"Listen to me, Bink! It is my given word that prevents me from breaking the truce, not your tactical preparations. I could transform you into a flea, and then transform a roach into your likeness and send that likeness down to meet Chameleon. Once she set down the cherry--"

Bink's face reflected his chagrin. The Evil Magician could void the plan. Chameleon-stupid would not catch on until too late; that nadir of intelligence worked against him as well as for him.

"I am not doing this,"
Trent said. "I tell you about the possibility merely to demonstrate that I, too, have ethics. The end does not justify the means. I feel that you have allowed yourself to forget this temporarily, and if you will listen a moment you will see your error and correct it. I cannot allow you to destroy this marvelous and historically significant edifice, to no point."

Already Bink was feeling guilty. Was he to be talked out of a course he knew was right?

"Surely you realize," the Evil Magician continued persuasively, "that the entire area would erupt in vengeful wrath if you did this thing. You might be outside the castle, but you would remain in the Roogna environs, and you would die horribly. Chameleon, too."

Chameleon, too--that hurt. That beautiful girl devoured by a tangle tree, ripped apart by zombies..."It is a risk I must take," Bink said grimly, though he realized the Magician was correct. The way they had been herded to this castle--there would be no escaping the savagery of the forest. "Maybe you will be able to persuade the castle to let us go, rather than set off that chain of events."

"You are a stubborn one!"

"Yes."

"At least hear me out first. If I cannot persuade you, then what must be must be, though I abhor it."

"Speak briefly." Bink was surprised at his own temerity, but he felt he was doing what he had to. If
Trent tried to approach within six feet, Bink would take off, to avoid transformation. He might be able to outrun the Magician. But even so, he could not wait too long; he was afraid that Chameleon would tire of waiting and do something foolish.

"I really don't want to see you or Chameleon die, and of course I value my own survival,"
Trent said. "While I love nobody alive today, you two have been as close to me as anyone. It is almost as if fate has decreed that like types must be banned from the conventional society of Xanth. We--"

"Like types!" Bink exclaimed indignantly.

"I apologize for an invidious comparison. We have been through a great deal together in a short time, and I think it is fair to say we have saved each other's lives on occasion. Perhaps it was to associate with your like that I really returned to Xanth."

"Maybe so," Bink said stiffly, suppressing the mixed feelings he was experiencing. "But that does not justify your conquering Xanth and probably killing many entire families."

Trent looked pained, but controlled himself. "I do not pretend that it does, Bink. The Mundane tragedy of my family was the stimulus, not the justification, for my return. I had nothing remaining in Mundania worth living for, so naturally my orientation shifted to Xanth, my homeland. I would not try to harm Xanth; I hope to benefit it, by opening it up to the contemporary reality before it is too late. Even if some deaths occur, this is a small price to pay for the eventual salvation of Xanth."

"You think Xanth won't survive unless you conquer it?" Bink tried to put a sneer in his tone, but it didn't register very well. If only he had the verbal control and projection of the Evil Magician!

"Yes, actually, I do. Xanth is overdue for a new Wave of colonization, and such a Wave would benefit it as the prior ones did."

"The Waves were murder and rapine and destruction! The curse of Xanth."

Trent shook his head. "Some were that, yes. But others were highly beneficial, such as the Fourth Wave, from which this castle dates. It was not the fact of the Waves but their mismanagement that made trouble. On the whole they were essential to the progress of Xanth. But I don't expect you to believe that. Right now I'm merely trying to persuade you to spare this castle and yourself; I'm not trying to convert you to my cause."

Something about this interchange was troubling Bink increasingly. The Evil Magician seemed too mature, too reasonable, too knowledgeable, too committed.
Trent was wrong--he had to be--yet he spoke with such verisimilitude that Bink had difficulty pinpointing that wrongness. "Try to convert me," he said.

"I'm glad you said that, Bink. I'd like you to know my logical rationale. Perhaps you can offer some positive critique."

That sounded like a sophisticated intellectual ploy. Bink tried to perceive it as sarcasm, but he was sure it was not. He feared the Magician was more intelligent than he, but he also knew what was right. "Maybe I can," he said guardedly. He felt as if he were walking into the wilderness, picking the most likely paths, yet being inevitably guided to the trap at the center. Castle Roogna--on the physical and intellectual levels. Roogna had lacked a voice for eight hundred years, but now it had one. Bink could no more fence with that voice than he could with the Magician's keen sword--yet he had to try.

"My rationale is dual. Part of it relates to Mundania, and part to Xanth. You see, despite certain lapses in ethics and politics, Mundania has progressed remarkably in the past few centuries, thanks to the numbers of people who have made discoveries and spread information; in many respects it is a far more civilized region than Xanth. Unfortunately, the Mundanes' powers of combat have also progressed. This you will have to take on faith, for I have no way to prove it here. Mundania has weapons that are easily capable of eradicating all life in Xanth, regardless of the Shield."

"That's a lie!" Bink exclaimed. "Nothing can penetrate the Shield!"

"Except perhaps the three of us,"
Trent murmured. "But the main restriction of the Shield is against living things. You could charge through the Shield--your body would penetrate it quite readily--but you would be dead when you got there."

"Same thing."

"Not the same thing, Bink! You see, there are big guns that throw missiles which are dead to begin with, such as powerful bombs, like your cherry bombs but much worse, preset to explode on contact. Xanth is a small area, compared to Mundania. If the Mundanes were determined, they could saturate Xanth. In such an attack, even the Shieldstone would be destroyed. The people of Xanth can no longer afford to ignore the Mundanes. There are too many Mundanians; we can't remain undiscovered forever. They can and will one day wipe us out. Unless we establish relations now."

Bink shook his head in disbelief and incomprehension.

But
Trent continued without rancor. "Now, the Xanth internal aspect is quite another matter. It poses no threat to Mundania, since magic is not operative them. But it does pose an insidious but compelling threat to life as we know it in Xanth itself."

"Xanth poses a threat to Xanth? This is nonsense on the face of it."

Now
Trent's smile was a bit patronizing. "I can see you would have trouble with the logic of recent Mundanian science." But he sobered before Bink could inquire about that. "No, I am being unfair to you. This internal threat of Xanth is something I learned just in the past few days from my researches in this library, and it is important. This aspect alone justifies the necessity of preserving this castle, for its accumulated ancient lore is vital to Xanth society."

Bink remained dubious. "We've lived without this library for eight centuries; we can live without it now."

"Ah, but the manner of that life?'
Trent shook his head as if perceiving something too vast to be expressed. He got up and moved to a shelf behind him. He took down a book and riffled carefully through its creaking old pages. He set it down before Bink, open. "What is that picture?"

"A dragon," Bink said promptly.

Trent flipped a page. "And this?"

"A manticora." What was the point? The pictures were very nice, though they did not coincide precisely with contemporary creatures. The proportions and details were subtly wrong.

"And this?"

It was a picture of a human-headed quadruped, with hoofs, a horse's tail, and catlike forelegs. "A lamia."

"And this?"

"A centaur. Look--we can admire pictures all day, but--"

"What do these creatures have in common?"
Trent asked.

"They have human heads or foreparts--except the dragon, though the one in this book has an almost human shortness of snout. Some have human intelligence. But--"

"Exactly! Consider the sequence. Trace a dragon back through similar species, and it becomes increasingly manlike. Does that suggest anything to you?"

"Just that some creatures are more manlike than others. But that's no threat to Xanth. Anyway, most of these pictures are out of date; the actual creatures don't look quite like that any more."

"Did the centaurs teach you the Theory of Evolution?"

"Oh, sure. That today's creatures are evolved from more primitive ones, selected for survival. Go back far enough and you find a common ancestor."

"Right. But in Mundania creatures like the lamia, manticora, and dragon never evolved."

"Of course not. They're magic. They evolve by magic selection. Only in Xanth can--"

"Yet obviously Xanth creatures started from Mundane ancestors. They have so many affinities--"

"All right!" Bink said impatiently. "They descended from Mundanes. What has that got to do with your conquering Xanth?"

"According to conventional centaur history, man has been in Xanth only a thousand years,"
Trent said. "In that period there have been ten major Waves of immigration from Mundania."

"Twelve," Bink said.

"That depends on how you count them. At any rate, this continued for nine hundred years, until the Shield cut off those migrations. Yet there are many partially human forms that predate the supposed arrival of human beings. Does that seem to be significant?"

Bink was increasingly worried that Chameleon would foul up, or that the castle would figure out a way to neutralize the cherry bombs. He was not certain that Castle Roogna could not think for itself. Was the Evil Magician stalling to make time for this? "I'll give you one more minute to make your case. Then we're going, regardless."

"How could partially human forms have evolved--unless they had human ancestors? Convergent evolution doesn't create the unnatural mishmash monsters we have here. It creates creatures adapted to their ecological niches, and human features fit few niches. There had to have been people in Xanth many thousands of years ago."

"All right," Bink agreed. "Thirty seconds."

"These people must have interbred with animals to form the composites we know--the centaurs, manticoras, merfolk, harpies, and all. And the creatures crossbred among themselves, and the composites interbred with other composites, producing things like the chimera--"

Bink turned to go. "I think your minute is up," he said. Then he froze. "They what?"