Dana reached for the key. Her fingers closed on it. She lifted it from the hook. She brought it down to the lock.
"Wait," I said. "Let me make sure that really is the key." I held out my hand.
Dana gave it to me. I brought it to the lock, inserted it, and turned it. It resisted, seeming to want to come back out of the lock without completing its action, as if there were a spring behind it. I pushed it in farther, and maintained pressure, so as to complete the turn.
The door moved without moving. That is, it fogged out, and I stumbled through, because I had been pushing against the key. In a moment I was through, yet the door remained in place.
I caught my balance and turned back. There was the door. I put my hand against it, and found it solid. The key was gone from my hand.
But there it was, hung up on the hook on this side of the door. It had magically returned after being used.
But if it was now on this side, then what was on the other side? Could only one person be on this side at a time?
I reached for the key-and had to jump back, because Dana Demoness suddenly popped through, colliding with me. It was a painless collision, because she was marvelously well padded in front.
"Oops," she said, and turned to smoke. I smelled her pleasant essence as it brushed by my nose. Then she reformed a bit away. "It changed so fast!"
I knew the feeling. But I had another question. "The key-how could you use it, when it was on this side?"
"It was back on its hook on the other side," she said. "There must be two keys."
"MareAnn"s alone with Demetria," I said, starting to be alarmed.
"Metria doesn"t hurt folk physically. She does it all verbally or with illusion. She"s probably tired of this game now." Dana looked around. "Odd that we can"t get through that thicket wall. Normally, solid things are no barrier to demons. There must be special magic here, making it a demon-proof glade."
Then MareAnn stumbled through. I caught her before she fell. "It was so-" she started.
"I know," I finished.
Then the three of us turned to look at where we were. The thicket arched up high overhead, forming a dome that blocked the direct rays of the sun without cutting off the light; brilliance wafted down to touch the ground. On the ground orangeberry bushes grew, covered with fat berries.
"What a lovely place!" MareAnn exclaimed. "Let"s eat some berries before we depart."
We walked to the bushes and started picking and eating. Dana did too. "I never realized what fun eating could be," she said. "Of course the food does me no good, so I shouldn"t waste it."
"What happens to what you eat?" I asked, my curiosity manifesting again.
"I just hold it inside me as long as I"m solid. When I turn vaporous-" She fogged. "It drops out." Sure enough, a pile of chewed berries plopped to the ground.
We picked and ate with a will. The berries were delicious. Then MareAnn screamed.
"What?" I asked, hurrying over to join her.
She pointed. There, lying half hidden under the bushes, was a collection of bones.
Dana came across. "Oops," she said. "Those are human bones. Now we know what happened to those last three villagers: they died here."
"Are the berries poisonous?" I asked, abruptly horrified for more than one reason.
"Not that I know of," Dana said. "We demons are pretty good with poisons, and I didn"t taste any."
"Then what made them die?" MareAnn asked, shuddering.
"Maybe there"s an ogre in here," I said, looking around much more nervously than before.
"Let"s get out of here," MareAnn said.
We started back toward the door. But there, between it and ourselves, was a pack of ferocious animals. They had the heads of wolves and the bodies of spiders, and were about half man height.
"Wolf spiders!" Dana exclaimed. "They can"t hurt me, but they are surely dangerous to you."
"Now we know how the villagers died," I said grimly, feeling for my knife. But it seemed quite inadequate to the defense.
Five spiders advanced in the line. One remained behind to guard the stone door. Evidently they were experienced in trapping prey. Their technique and the bones indicated that.
MareAnn clung to me. "Oh, Humfrey, what can we do? I can"t summon the horses here; they can"t get in!"
I drew my knife. It seemed even less adequate than before. For one thing, I was no fighter, and for another, the blade was only as long as one of the enemy fangs. Even if I got in a lethal strike, that would stop only one spider.
Could we flee? No, the glade was entirely enclosed. This was an ideal hunting ground for the wolf spiders.
We would just have to fight and die, as the villagers had before us. "Stay behind me," I said. "Maybe I"ll be able to occupy them long enough for you to sneak to the door." It was an almost futile hope, but the best that offered.
"Oh, Humfrey, I love you," she said.
"You two are acting as if I"m not here," Dana said. "Both of you get behind me."
Numbly, we did so. She a.s.sumed the form of a fierce fire-breathing dragon. She swung her head toward the nearest spider and fired out a jet of flame.
But the spider merely leaped aside, and the flame missed. Meanwhile the others closed in from the sides. It was obvious that not even a dragon could stop them all. A dragon could not guard all sides at once.
"A basilisk!" I whispered. "Can you do that?"
"Shield your eyes," the dragon whispered back. Then it became a tiny lizard with wings.
Mare Ann and I clapped our hands to our eyes. It was death to meet the gaze of a bask!
But could the demoness actually kill with her glance? Fire was essentially nonmagical, and she could generate that by forming the innards of a dragon, but the death glance was magical, and demons didn"t possess that type of magic. If the spiders caught on- The basilisk hissed and swung its little head toward the spiders. The spiders did several double takes, then scrambled out of the way. The bluff was working!
Then one spider, perhaps a smidgen smarter than the rest, balked. He had seen the demoness, and then the dragon, and then the bask. He was catching on that it might be illusion. If he called the bluff, we would be in trouble again.
Dana-bask glared at him. He met her gaze. He did not die. He opened his wolf mouth to sound the charge.
I took the gamble of my life. I hurled my knife at the creature. I had never been good at throwing, either, but what else was there?
The knife whistled straight and true. It plunged right into the opened wolf mouth and stuck in the throat beyond. I was amazed. How could I have performed such a feat? I was neither a knife fighter nor a thrower. I had made my effort from unwitting desperation. Then I remembered my dunking in the healing spring. I was super healthy now; my body worked perfectly, as it never had before. It did exactly what I wanted it to-and I had wanted it to throw that knife hard and fast into the wolf mouth, striking with the point. I had underestimated my physical capacity.
The spider gave a whine of agony and collapsed.
The others turned to look. They saw their packmate dropping dead.
The basilisk"s tiny grim head swung toward the spiders.
They spooked. They almost scrambled over each other in their eagerness to flee. They ran for the thicket wall and jammed into a niche in it.
We followed. There was a twisted pa.s.sage amidst the thicket, partly between tree trunks and partly between stray stones, that led through to the other side. This was how the wolf spiders had gotten in, bypa.s.sing the thorns and the magic door. Once inside, they had made of the protected refuge a hunting ground.
We gathered stray branches and pulled th.o.r.n.y vines into the aperture. We made it tight again, so that no creature could get through. Of course it would be possible for the wolf spiders to clear it out again, but I doubted that they would, because they believed that this was now the hunting ground of a basilisk. The pack would surely hunt elsewhere in the future.
I went to the fallen spider and reached into its terrible mouth and pulled out my gory knife. I wiped it as clean as I could on the ground. Then we went to the door and used the key to exit, one at a time.
"I think you are a pretty brave mortal," Dana said to me. "That was an excellent shot with the knife and exactly what I needed to foster the illusion."
"I think you do have a soul," I replied. "If the key didn"t prove it, the way you defended us did. An ordinary demon would have laughed and let the wolf spiders tear us apart."
"True. But I wasn"t thinking about the proof of my soul at the time."
"Neither was I."
We smiled at each other. Then MareAnn summoned the winged horses, and we took off for Mount Parna.s.sus.
We proceeded with the survey. Dana didn"t even have to a.s.sume my form; she merely used the one she was comfortable with, which was an ethereally beautiful young woman, and interviewed the Maenads while we waited at the village. We would not have been able to fly to the Maenads anyway; it turned out that the oracle was as close to the mountain as we could go by air, because the Simurgh, the huge ancient bird who guarded the mountain and especially the great Tree of Seeds, did not permit other flyers there.
The Maenads had only one talent: vicious beauty. That did seem to make sense.
We surveyed the others in the region, and went on. In the following weeks Dana was increasingly helpful, both as interviewer and as guard; things we had feared before were no longer a threat, because it seemed that we had a dragon guarding us. Or worse.
In due course we returned to the South Village, and I made my first substantial report to King Ebnez. "So while there is much of interest in this region of southern Xanth," I concluded, "as yet I have found no Magician-caliber talents."
He nodded gravely. "There is much of Xanth remaining. Write up your report and save it, for the information will surely be useful in the future. Keep doing the survey until all of Xanth has been recorded. You are doing excellent work."
"Thank you, Your Majesty. There is one other thing."
"By all means. You wish riches or power?"
"No, nothing like that! I am getting the only thing I truly crave, which is information. I do have to share it with the oracle, but that turns out to be simple enough, though their Answer was useless to me. No, I have a plea to make for another person, which I fear you will not receive well."
"I will make the effort," he said with a gentle smile.
"A demoness is helping us. She has facilitated my effort greatly, and she saved my life at one point. She has a soul and wishes to be rid of it so that she can revert to the normal nature of her kind. But to do that, she must marry you."
Ebnez had been listening patiently and tolerantly, but at this point his jaw went slack. He coughed. After a moment he recovered himself. "I am afraid that is out of the question. Not only am I disinclined to marry this late in life, there is a proscription against the a.s.sociation of demons with kings, dating from-"
"I told her that, Your Majesty. But I promised to make her plea if she helped me, and she has helped me. She really seems to be a very nice creature."
"Perhaps some day there will be a King who has the confidence to vacate the proscription. It is within the kingly authority. But I am not that one."
"I shall tell her," I said unsurprised.
"Hold," he said in his kingly fashion. "You say she is truly helping you in the survey?"
"Yes. I fear I could not complete it without her."
"And if she receives an absolute refusal, she will have no reason to continue the work?"
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Then it would not be expedient to turn her down absolutely. I will lift the proscription to the extent of allowing her to appear in my presence, but I will not marry her. Tell her only that I am considering the matter."
"But is that honest, Your Majesty? I mean, if you have no intent-"
"Perhaps she will change my mind. We can not be certain what the future holds."
I realized that this was a good compromise. The King had no intention of marrying Dana now, but perhaps next year he would see it another way. Dana was certainly winsome enough and had a nice personality. "Thank you," I said. "I shall tell her." I had learned another lesson about diplomacy and the ways of getting things done.
I told her. Dana was heartened, if that term could apply to a creature who had no heart. "This is more progress than I feared possible," she said. "I shall continue to help you, and perhaps I can meet the King when you next report to him. I know he has no interest in marrying a stranger."
So it was. We interviewed the fauns and nymphs, and the curse fiends of Lake Ogre-Chobee (I was later to forget about their existence, but that comes later in this narrative), and we penetrated the region of madness and interviewed the folk of the Magic Dust Village. We discovered a truly unusual creature there: a centaurpede, like a centaur but with a hundred pairs of legs. Her name was Margaret, and she was without price when the Dust Villagers had to travel somewhere; they could all ride a single steed. The winged horses were a great help, and the unicorns, and sometimes the sea horses of the ocean, and I loved and needed Mare Ann both for the survey and as a man. But of course she valued her innocence, and I understood about that.
But Dana was a great help also, and I liked her too, and she had no compunctions about innocence. "If it weren"t for my conscience and the practical matter of unicorns, I would seduce you in a moment," she told me candidly. "I know all about the Adult Conspiracy and could initiate you into it in approximately ninety seconds. But as long as you love MareAnn and she loves you, I will not do it."
"Thank you," I said, somewhat awkwardly. I was getting really curious about the secrets that the adults guarded so rigorously, and such easy access to them was quite tempting. But not if it ruined my relationship with MareAnn.
Meanwhile, we made periodic reports to King Ebnez. I found many interesting things, but no Magician-caliber talents, to our mutual regret. Dana met the King, and was very polite to him, and he was increasingly nice to her. It was possible that he was slowly changing his mind about the prospect of marriage. It was said that a demoness could make a man deliriously happy, if she chose, and Dana was eager to do just that for him. But he worried about appearances and propriety and just what she would do if she succeeded in getting rid of her soul, and remained cautious.
Three years went by, and I aged from late fifteen to early nineteen, and MareAnn did something similar. Dana did not change; demons are pretty much eternal. We tracked down the human folk living near the dragons, and near the centaurs of central Xanth, and near the five great Elements of northern Xanth. We also interviewed elves and goblins, for it turned out that they were of human derivation and had souls, and some did have individual magic talents. My notes were becoming voluminous, and also my collection of useful artifacts. My bottle of healing elixir was only the first of a mult.i.tude; I was filling a room with bottles, each containing something magical and moderately wonderful. Whenever King Ebnez needed an item or specialized bit of information, he asked me, and I was increasingly likely to have a vial of something that answered his need. Folk were calling me the Magician of Information, and both MareAnn and King Ebnez prevailed on me to hurt no feelings by disabusing them of this status.
We were in the final stage of the survey, going through the isthmus of northwestern Xanth, when we received a message: return to the South Village at once. Alarmed, we did so.
Our worst fear was realized: King Ebnez was dying.
Dana was stricken as much as we were, for she had made a significant impression on him, and it seemed likely that in another year or so he would relent and marry her and allow her to make him deliriously happy after all. That feet that his life was nearing its end didn"t matter; it only meant that he had less to lose if he was not satisfied with her delirium. Now it seemed he had waited too long, and her long effort would be wasted.
He insisted on talking to me alone. He smiled when he saw me, and I tried to smile back, but the signs of his demise were on him, and dark vultures perched on the roof of his house. "Please, Your Majesty, let me give you some healing elixir," I urged him. "Then I can go fetch some water from the Fountain of Youth, which I discovered serendipitously in the course of my survey, and that will make you young again."
He shook his head feebly no. "You must not give the water of youth to any other person not of your immediate family," he said. "Use it for yourself only. It is not right to interfere with the natural process."
I had to promise. Of course it would be a long time before I had any need of such water myself, considering my excellent health, though I had hoped that MareAnn would take some when she got old. But the word of a King must be obeyed, and besides, he was probably making sense. I would not give either youth elixir or information about the location of the fountain to any person not of my family.
But worse was coming. "Have you found a Magician?"
"No. Not even any talent close to it. You are the only one in Xanth, I think, Your Majesty."
"Then a desperate measure is called for. I shall be dead within the hour, and Xanth must have a king. More particularly, it must have a king who will carry on the proper traditions of the role, and who will continue the good works I have tried to do. We have the potential to bring Xanth out of the Dark Age, if continuity is maintained."
"Yes, it must be maintained," I agreed. The survey was only one of this King"s endeavors; he was trying to see that every human being had a reasonable livelihood and was secure from the depredations of trolls and dragons. He was causing enchanted paths to be made, along which folk could walk in peace without molestation. Already it was possible to travel north and south from the South Village a considerable distance safely, and houses were being made along these paths, so that folk could come in to trade in the village without fear. The King hoped that such a network would be extended throughout Xanth eventually, and I liked the idea too. "There is so much good to be done! So you must live to do it, Your Majesty, and just a few drops of elixir-"
"No!" he said, showing uncharacteristic anger. "No, my time is done. Since we have no Magician to a.s.sume the throne, we shall simply have to make one. As king, I am the final authority on who is and is not a Magician. In due course we shall have to set up a committee or council of elders for this purpose; that is one of the reforms you shall see to."