The dragon exploded. Stars shot out in every direction, scorching the jungle foliage below, zooming by Bink to the side, and making a fine display above.
"-explosively flammable when ignited," Humfrey finished.
They watched the upward-flying stars rise to their heights, then explode in multicolored displays of sparks. The whole night sky became briefly brighter.
"I tried to warn that dragon," Humfrey said without sympathy. "One simply does not apply open flame to flammable insulation."
Bink, privately, hardly blamed the dragon for misunderstanding that caution. He would have made the same mistake as the dragon had. If his talent permitted it. But this did impress on him one thing: should he (perish the thought!) ever have a serious disagreement with the Good Magician, he would have to watch out for those magic bottles! There was no telling what might come out of them.
Now a monster found Bink. It was the hydra. It had no wings, and could not have used the stairs because they were blocked by the serpent The hydra seemed to have descended by hanging from a thread-but no such thread was visible.
Bink swung at the monster with his sword. He was in excellent form; he caught the nearest of the seven heads cleanly, just behind the horns, and it flew off. Gore spouted out of the neck with such force that the jet separated into two channels. If this was all it took to beat this monster, Bink would have no trouble!
The two jets coagulated in midair, forming into twin lumps still attached to the neck. As more gore emerged, it splashed over these lumps, hardening, enlarging them. Excrescences developed, and the color darkened, until-
The lumps became two new heads! Each was smaller than the original, but just as vicious. Bink had only succeeded in doubling the menace he faced.
This was a problem. If each head he cut off converted into two, the longer and better he fought, the worse off he would be! Yet if he did not fight well, he would soon be consumed in seven-no, eight chunks. "Catch, Bink!" Chester called, throwing something. Bink didn't appreciate the interruption to his concentration, but grabbed for it anyway. In the dark his sweeping fingers merely batted it aside. In the moment it touched him, his sanity returned. He saw himself on a branch of the tree, pointing his sword at-
But then the reverse-spell wood bounced out of range, and the madness resumed its grip on nun. He saw the chunk fly toward the hydra-and one of the heads reached out to gulp it down.
In that instant Bink suffered a rapid continuation of his prior line of thought. What would spell-reversal do inside an imaginary monster? If the hydra form were wholly a product of Bink's distorted perception-his madness, which he shared with his friends-it should be nullified-no, the wood had to be near him, to nullity the monsters he perceived. But since his friends saw the monsters too, and the wood could not be near them all at once-it had to be that the wood would not affect the monster, unless that monster had objective reality. Even then, the wood would not affect the form of the hydra, but only its talent-if the hydra had a talent. Most magical creatures did not have magic talents; their magic consisted of their very existence. So-nothing should happen.
The hydra screamed from all its eight mouths. Abruptly it dropped to the ground. It landed heavily and lay still, its stars fading out
Bink watched it, openmouthed. The hydra had not changed form-it had suffered destruction. What had happened?
Then he worked it out. The hydra had a magic talent after alclass="underline" that of hanging by an invisible thread. The spell-reversal wood had nullified that magic, causing the monster to plummet forcefully down to its death. Its invisible thread had not disappeared; it had acted to draw the creature down as powerfully as it had drawn it up before. Disaster!
But now the wood was gone. How were they to escape the madness?
Bink looked up. The Good Magician's foaming agent had destroyed the dragon, and Chester's hooves and sword had beaten back the serpent. Crombie's fighting spirit had proved to be too much for the winged horse. So the individual battles had been won. But the war remained unpromising.
A number of constellations had remained in the sky. The centaur, giant, and whale had not been able to descend, because they lacked wings or flying magic, and the stairway had been pre-empted by the serpent. Now, seeing the fate of their companions, these three bellowed then raged from the safety of the nocturnal welkin. Novas and ringed planets and miniature lightning bolts and curly-tailed comets radiated from their mouths in confusing profusion and wonderful foulness, with the whale spouting obscene curlicues.
"Oh, yeah?" Chester bawled. "We'll come up there and do the same to you! You're the cowards who started it all!" And Crombie and Humfrey and Bink closed in about him as well as they were able.
"No, stop!" Grundy screamed from his flying fish, zooming in a circular holding pattern. "You've all seen the nature of your madness. Don't yield to it again! Pass the wood around, restore your perspectives, get your feet on the ground again! Don't let the spooks lure you to destruction!"
"He's right, you know," Humfrey muttered.
"But I dropped the wood!" Bink cried, "I dropped our sanity!"
"Then go down and fetch it!" the golem cried. "And you, horserear-you threw it to him. You go down and help him."
"Squawk!" Crombie exclaimed. "And birdbeak says he's going up alone to grab all the glory for himself."
"Oh no he doesn't!" Chester roared.
"Right!" the golem agreed. "You have to go together, to be fair about it. You real creatures place great store by fairness, don't you? Or is honor a foreign concept to you, birdbeak? You don't want horserear's competition, because you know he'd show you up if you didn't have a head start?"
"Squawk! Squawk!" Bink almost thought he saw a comet spew from Crombie's mouth.
"Right! So you prove you can match him anywhere, anytime-by getting down there and finding that wood before he does. And take the gnome with you. Horse-rear can take the washout with him."
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.