"The fish!" Grundy exclaimed. "I have to pay him off!" He pried a sliver of wood from the massive stump and affixed it to the fish's dorsal fin with a bit of his own string. "There you go, bubble-eye," he said with something that sounded suspiciously like affection. "As long as you carry that, you'll see everything as it is, in the madness region. So you can spot your lady fish. Once you have succeeded, ditch the wood; I understand it is not good to see a female too realistically."
Crombie made an emphatic squawk of agreement that needed no translation.
The fish took off, zooming into the sky with a powerful thrust of bubbles, banking neatly around branches. Relieved of the golem's weight, and spurred by the hope of mad romance, it was a speedy creature.
"Why did you do that?" Bink asked the golem.
"You short of memory? You told me to, nitnoggin!"
"I mean, why did you do it with such grace? You showed genuine feeling for that fish."
"I couldn't have," Grundy snapped.
"And why did you guide us all around the hazards? If we had perished, your service to the Good Magician would have been finished."
"What use would that have been to me?" Grundy demanded, kicking angrily at a tuft of grass with one motley foot.
"It would have freed you," Bink said. "Instead, you went to a great deal of trouble to herd us off that stair and to safety. You really didn't have to; your job is translation, not leadership."
"Listen, washout-I don't have to take this crap from you!"
"Think about it," Bink said evenly. "Why help a washout?"
Grundy thought about it "I must have been mad after all," he admitted.
"How could you be mad-when you weren't affected by the madness?"
"What are you up to?" Chester demanded. "Why hassle the golem? He did good work."
"Because the golem is a hypocrite," Bink said. "There was only one reason he helped us."
"Because I cared, you nitwit!" Grundy yelled. "Why do I have to justify saving your life?"
Bink was silent. Crombie and Chester and the Good Magician turned mutely to face the golem.
"What did I say?" Grundy demanded angrily. "Why are you freeloaders staring at me?"
Crombie squawked. "Birdbeak says-" The golem paused. "He says-I can't make out what he says! What's the matter with me?"
"The wood of this tree reverses spells," Humfrey said. "It has canceled out your talent."
"I'm not touching that wood!"
"Neither are we," Bink said. "But we are all quite sane at the moment, because the ambience of the stump is stronger than that of a single chip. That is why we are now able to perceive you as you are. Do you realize what you said?"
"So the wood messes up my talent, same as it does yours. We knew that already!"
"Because it changes our magic without changing us," Bink continued. "Because what is us is real"
"But that would mean I'm halfway real!"
"And you halfway care," Chester said.
"That was just a figure of speech! I have no emotion!"
"Move away from the tree," Bink said. "Get out of the range of the stump. Tell us what you see out there."
Grundy paced away and looked about "The jungle!" he cried! "It's changed! It's mad!"
"Care," Bink said. "The Good Magician's Answer. In your effort to save us, you brought yourself halfway to your own destination. You have begun to assume the liabilities of being real. You feel compassion, you feel anger, you suffer pleasure and frustration and uncertainty. You did what you did because conscience extends beyond logic. Is it worth it?"
Grundy looked at the distortions beyond the stump. "It's madness!" he exclaimed, and they all laughed.
Chapter 9
Vortex Fiends
At dawn they emerged from the madness region, each holding a piece of spell-reversal wood. They had traveled tediously, separating Crombie at intervals from his piece of wood, getting his indication of the best immediate route, then returning his chunk to him so that he could perceive threats accurately until the next orientation.
Once they were out, they located a reasonably secure roost in a stork-leg tree, setting their pieces of wood in a circle about its spindly trunks so that no hostile magic could approach them without getting reversed. That was not a perfect defense, but they were so tired they had to make do.
Several hours later Bink woke, stretched, and descended. The centaur remained lodged on a broad branch, his four hooves dangling down on either side; it seemed the tree-climbing experience during the madness had added a nonmagical talent to his repertoire. The Magician lay curled in a ball within a large nest he had conjured from one of his vials. Crombie, ever the good soldier, was already up, scouting the area, and the golem was with him.
"One thing I want to know " Bink started, as he munched on slices of raisin bread from a loaf Crombie had plucked from a local breadfruit tree. It was a trifle overripe, but otherwise excellent.
Crombie squawked. " is who destroyed that reverse-spell tree," Grundy finished.
"You're translating again!"
"I'm not touching any wood at the moment." The golem fidgeted. "But I don't think I'm as real as I was last night, during the madness."
"Still, there must be some feeling remaining," Bink said. "It can be like that, approaching a goal. Two steps forward, one back-but you must never give up."
Grundy showed more animation. "Say, that's a positive way of looking at it, mushmind!"
Bink was glad to have given encouragement, though the golem's unendearing little mannerisms remained evident. "How did you know what I was about to ask? About the destruction of-"
"You always come up with questions, Bink," the golem said. "So we pointed out the location of the subject of your next question, and it matched up with the tree stump. So we researched it. It was a challenge."
That was an intriguing ramification of Crombie's talent! Anticipating the answers to future questions! Magic kept coming up with surprises. "Only a real creature likes challenges," Bink said.
"I guess so. It's sort of fun, the challenge of becoming real. Now that I know that maybe it's possible. But I still have this ragtag body; no amount of caring can change that. It just means that now I fear the death that will surely come." He shrugged, dismissing it "Anyway, the tree was blasted by a curse from that direction." He pointed.
Bink looked. "All I see is a lake." Then, startled: "Didn't the ogre say something about-?"
"Fiends of the lake, who hurled a curse that blasted the whole forest," Grundy said. "We checked: that is the lake."
Humfrey descended from the tree. "I'd better bottle some of this wood, if I can get my magic to work on it," he said. "Never can tell when it might be useful."
"Cast a spell hurling it away from your bottle," Chester suggested from the tree. He, too, dropped to the ground, after some awkward maneuvering that put his handsome posterior in jeopardy. Centaurs really did not belong in trees.
The Magician set up his vial and wood and uttered an incantation. There was a flash, a puff of smoke, and a gradual clearing of the air.
There sat the vial, corked. There sat the wood. The Good Magician was gone.