Bink understood, suddenly, that Grundy would gladly join them in madness, though he knew it led to disaster, if this could be the proof of his reality. Only the golem's unreality enabled Him to hang on to what life he had. What a paradoxical fate!
An arrow struck a catnip bush right beside him. The plant yowled and spat, nipping at the shaft, then batting it back and forth with its paw-buds.
"Oh, I want to stick an arrow right up under his tail!" Chester muttered. "That centaur's a disgrace to the species."
"First find the wood," Grundy cried.
One of the giant's batted stars whizzed over Bink's head and ignited a rubber tree. The plant stretched enormously, trying to get away from its own burning substance. The smell was horrible.
"We can't find anything here in the smoke," Chester complained, coughing.
"Then follow me!" Grundy cried, showing the way on his fish.
Choking, they followed the golem. The constellations raged above them, firing volleys of missiles, but could not score directly. Madness had no power over sane leadership.
Yet the madness tried! The whale took hold of the river again and yanked it brutally from its new channel. The water spilled across the starry field in a thinning, milky wash, forming a flood. Then it found a new channel, coursed along it, ripped out several stars growing there, and poured down toward the ground.
"Look out!" Bink cried. "We're at the foot of that waterfall!"
Indeed they were. The mass of water was descending at them like a globulous avalanche. They scrambled desperately-but it caught them, drenching them instantly in its milky fluid, crashing about them with a sound like thunder and foaming waist high. Crombie hunched, bedraggled, his feathers losing their luster; Chester wrapped his arms about his human torso as if to fend the liquid off; and the Magician-
The Good Magician was wrapped in a big, bright, once-fluffy beach towel. Soaked, it was worse than nothing. "Wrong vial," he explained sheepishly. "I wanted a raincoat."
They slogged out of the immediate waterfall and through the runoff. Bink found himself shivering; the water of the sky river was chill. The madness had been intriguing when the constellations first took on life, but now he wished he were home, warm and dry, with Chameleon.
Ah, Chameleon! He liked her especially in her "normal" stage, neither beautiful nor smart, but a pleasant middle range. It always seemed so fresh, that brief period when she was average, since she was always changing. But he loved her in any form and intellect-especially at times like now, when he was wet and cold and tired and afraid.
He swiped at a floating star, taking out some of his discomfort on it. The bright mote was probably as miserable as he, washed out of its place in the sky and become mere flotsam on earth.
The water here was too shallow for the whale, the only sky monster that might have been a real threat at this stage. The party wandered out of the slush. "In real life this must be a thunderstorm," Chester commented.
The walk became interminable. The golem kept urging them through the night. The wrath of the constellations pursued them some distance, then was lost as they plunged under the jungle canopy. The madness remained with them, however. The ground seemed to become a mass of peanut butter, roiling under their steps. The trees, dangerous in their own right, seemed to develop an alien menace: they turned purple, and hummed in chorus, and proffered sinister, oblong fruits. Bink knew that the madness, whether it seemed benign or malign, would destroy them all in moments if they yielded to it. His sense of self-preservation encouraged him to resist it, and his resistance became stronger with practice-but still he could not penetrate all the way to reality. In a way this resembled the Queen's illusion-but this affected emotion as well as perception, so was more treacherous.
He heard the golem squawking at Crombie in griffin-talk, then saw Grundy rest his flying-fish steed on Crombie's head. Apparently the fish was tired, and had to be relieved. "It deserves a reward," Bink said. "For its timely service."
"It does? Why?" Grundy asked. Bink started to answer, then realized the futility of it. The golem was not real; he did not care. Grundy did what he had to do, but human conscience and compassion were not part of his makeup. "Just take my word: the fish must be rewarded. What would it like?"
"This is a lot of trouble," Grundy muttered. But he swished and gurgled at the fish. "It wants a family."
"All he needs is a lady of his species," Bink pointed out. "Or a man, if he happens to be female. She. Whatever."
More fish-talk. "In the mad region he can't locate one," the golem explained.
"A little of that spell-reversal wood would solve that problem," Bink said. "In fact, we could all use some. We got mixed up by the madness and water and never thought of the obvious. Let's see if Crombie's talent can locate some more of that wood."
Crombie squawked with dismayed realization. He whirled and pointed-right at a quivering mound of jelly. "That's a bloodsucker tree," Grundy said. "We can't go there!"
"Why not?" Chester asked facetiously. "You don't have any blood."
"The wood must be beyond it," Bink said. "Crombie's talent is still working but we have to watch out for the incidental hazards along the way, now more than ever. In the night, and with the madness-only you can do it, Grundy."
"I've been doing it!" the golem said, aggrieved.
"We need light," Chester said, "Birdbe-uh, Crombie, where can we get safe light?"
The griffin pointed. There was a flock of long-legged, bubbly things with horrendously glowing eyes. Bink walked over cautiously, and discovered that these were plants, not animals; what had seemed like legs were actually stems. He picked one, and its eye emitted a beam that illuminated everything it touched. "What is it, really?" Bink asked.
"A torch-flower," Grundy said. "Watch you don't set fire to the forest."
The rain had stopped, but the foliage still dripped. "Not too much danger of that at the moment," Bink said.
Armed with their lights, they moved in the direction Crombie had pointed for the wood, meandering circuitously to avoid the hazards the golem perceived. It was obvious that they could not have survived the natural traps of the jungle without the guidance of the golem. It would have been bad enough in ordinary circumstances; the madness made it impossible.
Suddenly they arrived. A monstrous stump loomed out of the ground. It was as thick at the base as a man could span, but broke off at head-height in jagged ruin,
"What a tree that must have been!" Bink exclaimed.
"I wonder how it died?"
They closed about the stump-and suddenly were sane. The glowing eyes they held were revealed as the torch-flowers the golem had said they were, and the deep jungle showed its true magic instead of its mad-magic. In fact, Bink felt clearer-headed than ever before in his life. "The madness spell-it has been reversed to make us absolutely sane!" he exclaimed. "Like the golem!"
"Look at the path we came by!" Chester said. "We skirted poison thorns, carnivorous grass, oil-barrel trees-our torches could have exploded this whole region!"
"Don't I know it," Grundy agreed. "Why do you think I kept yelling at you? If I had nerves, they'd be frayed to the bone. Every time you wandered from the course I set-"
More things were coming clear to Bink. "Grundy, why did you bother to help us, instead of riding away on your fish? You went to extraordinary trouble-"