Piers Anthony - The Source of Magic

"Bink, I can't go."

"You have to go! Here there is only horror and danger, and I have no right to subject you to it. You must depart without discovering the source of magic, so that you will have no enemy."

Now she smelled of pine trees on a hot day, all pungent and fresh and mildly intoxicating. The elixir had cured her hoarseness, too, and had erased the no-sleep shadows under her eyes. She was as lovely as she had been the moment he first saw her. "You have no right to send me away, either," she said.

Humfrey moved. Bink's sword leaped up warningly. Jewel backed off, frightened again.

"Have no concern," the Magician said. "We approach the source of magic."

Bink, wary, hardly dared believe it. "I see nothing special."

"See this rock?" Humfrey asked, pointing. "It is the magic rock, slowly moving up, leaking through to the surface after hundreds of years, squeezing through a fault in the regular strata. Above, it becomes magic dust. Part of the natural or magical conversion of the land's crust." He pointed down. "Below-is where it becomes charged. The source of magic."

"Yes-but how is it charged with magic?" Bink demanded. "Why has the coral so adamantly opposed my approach?"

"You will soon know." The Magician showed the way to a natural, curving tunnel-ramp that led down. "Feel the intensifying strength of magic, here? The most minor talent looms like that of a Magician-but all talents are largely nullified by the ambience. It is as if magic does not exist, paradoxically, because it can not be differentiated properly."

Bink could not make much sense of that. He continued on down, alert for further betrayal, conscious of the pressure of magic all about him. If a lightning bug made its little spark here, there would be a blast sufficient to blow the top off a mountain! They were certainly approaching the source-but was this also a trap?

The ramp debouched into an enormous cave, whose far wall was carved into the shape of a giant demon face. "The Demon Xanth, the source of magic," Humfrey said simply.

"This statue, this mere mask?" Bink asked incredulously. "What joke is this?"

"Hardly a joke, Bink. Without this Demon, our land would be just like Mundania. A land without magic."

"And this is all you have to show me? How do you expect me to believe it?"

"I don't expect that You have to listen to the rationale. Only then can you grasp the immense significance of what you see-and appreciate the incalculable peril your presence here means to our society."

Bink shook his head with resignation. "I said I'd listen. I'll listen. But I don't guarantee to believe your story."

"You can not fail to believe," Humfrey said. "But whether you accept-that is the gamble. The information comes in this manner: we shall walk about this chamber, intercepting a few of the magic vortexes of the Demon's thoughts. Then we will understand."

"I don't want any more magic experience!" Bink protested. "All I want to know is the nature of the source."

"You shall, you shall!" Humfrey said. "Just walk with me, that is all. There is no other way." He stepped forward.

Still suspicious, Bink paced him, for he did not want to let the Magician get beyond the immediate reach of his sword.

Suddenly he felt giddy; it was as if he were falling, but his feet were firm. He paused, bracing himself against he knew not what. Another siege of madness? If that were the trap-

He saw stars. Not the paltry motes of the normal night sky, but monstrous and monstrously strange balls of flaming yet unburning substance, of gas more dense than rock, and tides without water. They were so far apart that a dragon could not have flown from one to another in its lifetime, and so numerous that a man could not count them all in his lifetime, yet all were visible at once. Between these magically huge-small, distant-close unbelievable certainties flew the omnipotent Demons, touching a small (enormous) star here to make it flicker, a large (tiny) one there to make it glow red, and upon occasion puffing one into the blinding flash of a nova. The realm of the stars was the Demons' playground.

The vision faded. Bink looked dazedly around at the cave, and the tremendous, still face of the Demon. "You stepped out of that particular thought-vortex," Humfrey explained. "Each one is extremely narrow, though deep."

"Uh, yes," Bink agreed. He took another step-and faced a lovely she-Demon, with eyes as deep as the vortex of the fiends and hair that spread out like the tail of a comet. She was not precisely female, for the Demons had no reproduction and therefore no sex unless they wanted it for entertainment; they were eternal. They had always existed, and always would exist, as long as there was any point in existence. But for variety at times they played with variations of sex and assumed the aspect of male, female, itmale, hemale, shemale, neutermale and anonymale. At the moment she was close enough to a category to be viewed as such, and it was not a he category.

"____________________ť" she said, formulating a concept so vastly spacious as to fail to register upon Bink's comprehension. Yet her portent was so significant it moved him profoundly. He felt a sudden compelling urgency to-but such a thing would have been inexpressibly obscene in human terms, had it been possible or even conceivable. She was not, after all, closest in category to female.

Bink emerged from the thought eddy and saw Jewel standing transfixed, meshed in a different current. Her lips were parted, her bosom heaving. What was she experiencing? Bink suffered a quadruple-level reaction: horror that she should be subjected to any thought as crudely and sophisticatedly compelling as the one he had just experienced, for she was an innocent nymph; jealousy that she should react so raptly to something other than himself, especially if it were as suggestive a notion as the one he had absorbed; guilt about feeling that way about a nymph he could not really have, though he would not have wished the concept on the one he did have; and intense curiosity. Suppose an itmale made an offer-oh, horrible! Yet so tempting, too.

But Humfrey was moving, and Bink had to move too. He stepped into an eternal memory, so long that it resembled a magic highway extending into infinity both ways. The line-of-sight-though sight was not precisely the sense employed-to the past disappeared into a far-far distant flash. The Demon universe had begun in an explosion, and ended in another, and the whole of time and matter was the mere hiatus between these bangs-which two bangs were in turn only aspects of the same one. Obviously this was a completely alien universe from Bink's own! Yet, in the throes of this flux of relevant meaninglessness, it became believable. A super-magic framework for the super-magical Demons!

Bink emerged from the Thought "But what do the Demons have to do with the source of the magic of Xanth?" he demanded plaintively.

Then he entered a new flux-a complex one. If we cooperate, we can enlarge our A's, the pseudo-female Demon communicated seductively. At least, this was as much as Bink could grasp of her import, that had levels and resonances and symbolisms as myriad as the stars, and as intense and diffuse and confusing. My formula is E(A/R}th, yours X(A/N)th. Our A's match.

Ah, yes. It was a good offer, considering the situation, since their remaining elements differed, making them noncompetitive.

Not on your existence, another protested. Enlarge our E, not our A. It was D(E/A)th, who stood to be diminished by the enlarging A.

Enlarge both D and E, another suggested. It was D(E/P)th. D(E/A)th agreed instantly, and so did E(A/R)th, for she would benefit to a certain degree too. But this left X(A/N)th out.

Reduce our N, T(E/N)th recommended, and this appealed to X(A/N)th. But T(E/N)th was also dealing with the E-raisers, and that gave T(E/N)th disproportionate gain for the contract. All deals fell through for no benefit.