Centaur Aisle (35 page)

"That tangler should be almost full-grown now," Irene said. "I hope Arnolde has the sense to stay away from its tentacles." Then she reconsidered. "But not so far away the lack of magic kills the tree. He's got to keep it in the aisle until it does its job. Once he leaves, it will die."

"Speak to me, wall," Dor said, touching the stone. There was no response.

"What's up?" Smash inquired from the next cell.

"Grundy took a sprouted tangler seed to Arnolde," Dor explained. "We hope the centaur's on his way here."

"At length, me strength," the ogre said, comprehending.

"Hey—you rhymed!" Dor cried. "He must be here!"

"Me see," Smash said. He punched his fist through the wall near Dor.

"You've got it!" Dor said. "Go rip open your door! Then you can free Irene and me!"

The ogre tramped to the front of his cell and gleefully smashed at his front door. "Ooo, that hurt!" he grunted, shaking his gauntleted fist. The door had not given way.

"His strength is gone again!" Irene said. "Something's wrong!"

Dor cudgeled his brain. What could account for this partial recovery? "Where is the centaur now?" he asked his back wall, fearing it would not answer.

"Right outside Irene's cell," it replied. "Clinging to a narrow track above a chasm, terrified."

Dor visualized the centaur's position. "Then he can't face directly into the castle?"

"He can only turn a little," the wall agreed. "Any more and he'll fall off. Soldiers are getting ready to put arrows in his tail, too."

"So his magic aisle slants in obliquely," Dor concluded. "It covers this wall, but not the front of our cells."

"Anybody can see that, idiot," the wall agreed smugly.

Dor used his sunstone to verify the edge of the aisle. The gem flashed and darkened as it passed outside the magic. The line was only a few handspans inside Dor's wall, projecting farther into Smash's cell.

"Hey, Smash!" Dor cried. "The magic's only at this end. Bash out the outer wall to let Arnolde in."

"Right site," Smash agreed. He aimed his huge, horny, gauntleted ham-fist.

"Don't hit me!" the wall cried. "I support the whole castle!" But it was too late; the fist powered through the brick and stone. "Oooo, that smarts!"

The wall turned out to be double: two sections of stone, with a filling of rubble between. Smash zipped out the loose core, then pulverized the outer barrier, gaining enthusiasm as he went. In moments bright daylight shone through the cloud of dust.

The ogre ripped out more chunks, widening the aperture. Beyond was the back of the mountain, falling awesomely away into a heavily wooded valley.

"Good to see you, brute!" Arnolde's voice came. "Clear an entrance for me before these savages attack!"

Smash leaned out. He grabbed a stone. "Duck, cluck," he warned, and hurled his missile.

There was a thud and scream as someone was knocked off the ledge. "What did you do?" Irene cried, appalled.

Then Arnolde's front end appeared in the gap in the wall. Centaur and ogre embraced joyously. "I think he knocked off an enemy," Dor said.

Irene sounded weak with relief. "Oh. I guess they're friends now."

"We need both magic and power," Dor agreed. "Each is helpless without the other. They have come to understand that."

"We have all come to understand a lot of things," she agreed, smiling obscurely.

Now Arnolde faced the front door, putting it within the aisle, and Smash marched up and kicked it off its moorings. Then he took hold of the front wall and tore it out of the floor. Debris crashed down from the ceiling. "Don't bring the whole castle down on us!" Dor warned, while Irene choked on the voluminous dust.

"Me wrastle this castle," the ogre said, unworried. He hoisted one paw to the ceiling, and the collapse abated.

There was a stray guard in the hall. The man watched the progress of the ogre a few moments in silence, then fainted.

Grundy reappeared. "Troops coming," he reported. "We'd better move."

They moved. Doors and gates were locked, but Smash smashed them clear like so much tissue. When they encountered a wall, he burst right through it. They emerged into an inner court, where flowers grew. "Grow! Grow! Grow!" Irene ordered, and the plants exploded upward and outward.

"Where is our safest retreat?" Dor asked the next wall.

"The other side of me, dolt," it replied.

Smash opened another hole and they trooped out into a section of forest. Soon they had hidden themselves well away from the castle. They were together again and free, and it felt wonderful.

They paused, catching their breaths, assessing their situation. "Everybody all right?" Dor asked around. "No serious injuries?" There seemed to be none.

"So have you reconsidered?" Irene inquired. "You know how I abhor you."

He looked at her. She was still wearing his jacket over her bare upper torso, her hair was tangled, and dirt smudged her face. She seemed preter-naturally lovely. "Yes," he said. "And the answer comes out the same. I still hate you." He took her in his arms and kissed her, and she was all eager and yielding in the manner of her kind—when her kind chose to be.

"If that be hate," Arnolde remarked, "I would be interested in witnessing their love."

"The idiots are engaged to each other," Grundy explained to the others. "It seems they saw the light in the darkness, or something."

"Or something," the centaur agreed dubiously.

Chapter 11. Good Omen

"N
ow we have arrived," Dor said, taking charge after reluctantly disengaging from Irene. "But we have not accomplished our mission. I believe this is the place King Trent and Queen Iris came to. I think the table told me they were here, just before I passed out from King Oary's drug. But I might have dreamed that; the memory is very foggy. Have we any solid proof?"

"Apart from the henchman who speaks the language of Xanth?" Grundy asked.

"That's circumstantial," Irene said. "It only proves he had contact with the Xanth scout, not that King Trent actually came here. We have to be sure."

"My evidence is rather tenuous," Arnolde offered. "It seems that the stable hands had difficulty thinking of me as a person of intellect, and spoke more freely in my vicinity than they might otherwise have done. I declined to speak to them, in what I confess might be construed as a fit of pique—"

"Chic pique," Smash chuckled.

"And so they did not realize that the magic in your vicinity caused their language to be intelligible to you, or that you had the wit to comprehend it," Dor put in, pleased. "
We
could not communicate with them without an interpreter, so it was natural for them to assume you couldn't either. That, combined with their tending to think of you as an animal—"

"Precisely. My pique may have been fortuitous. So I found myself overhearing certain things that were perhaps not entirely my affair." He smiled. "In one case, literally. It seems one of the cooks has a continuing liaison with a scullery maid—" He broke off, grimacing. "Right beside my stall! It was instructive; they are lusty folk. At any rate, there was at one point a reference to a certain alien King who, it seems, had claimed to be able to perform magic."

"King Trent!" Dor exclaimed. "My memory was right, then, not a dream! The table did say King Trent was here!"

"I think we always knew it!" Irene agreed, glowering in memory of the betrayal associated with that table.

"The translator knew about the magic of Xanth," Dor continued. "But of course no one could do magic here in Mundania, until we discovered you, Arnolde. King Trent would have said he could do magic
in Xanth,
and the qualification got dropped in translation."

"Certainly," the centaur agreed. "It seems that King Oary somehow anticipated magic that he thought might greatly enhance his power and was very angry when that magic did not materialize. So he arrested the alien King treacherously and locked him away, hoping to coerce him into performing, or into revealing the secret of his power."

"Where?" Irene demanded. "Where is my father?"

"I regret I did not overhear more than I have told you. The alien King was not named. I do not believe the people of the stables knew his identity, or believe in his power, or know where he may be confined. They merely gossip. The apparent magic of Smash's initial display of strength, and the manner we communicated with King Oary, caused a considerable ripple of interest around the castle, and indeed in the entire Kingdom of Onesti, which accounts for the gossip about similar cases. But already this interest is waning, since both strength and communication appeared to have been illusion. It is very easy to attribute phenomena to illusion or false memory when practical explanations are lacking, and Mundanes do this often." He smiled grimly. "I daresay a new round of speculation has commenced, considering the events of the past hour. Your tangle plant, Irene, was gratifyingly impressive."

"It sure was!" Grundy agreed enthusiastically. "It was grabbing people right and left, and it ripped the stall apart. But when Arnolde left, the tan-gler sank down dead."

"Magic plants can't function without magic, dummy," Irene said.

"Fortunately," Arnolde agreed. "On occasion it reached for me; then I angled away from it, depriving it of magic, and it desisted. After a time it ceased to bother me."

"Even a tangler isn't totally stupid!" Irene laughed.

"At least we have more to go on," Dor said. "We can be pretty sure King Oary imprisoned King Trent and Queen Iris, and that they remain alive. Oary's experience with us must have enhanced his conviction that anyone from Xanth is hiding magic from him, since we really did have magic, then stopped showing it when he imprisoned us. He probably intended to force us to tell him the secret of magic so he could do it, too, or at least compel the rest of us to perform for him."

"King Oary strikes me as a pretty cunning old rascal," Irene said. "Wrongheaded but cunning."

"Indeed," Arnolde agreed. "From my observation, he runs this Kingdom reasonably well, but unscrupulously. Perhaps that is what is required to maintain the precarious independence from the larger empires on three sides."

"We still need to locate King Trent," Dor said. "Arnolde, did you hear anything else that might remotely connect?"

"I am not sure, Dor. There was a reference to King Omen, Oary's predecessor who disappeared. It seems the common folk liked him and were sorry to lose him."

"He was King?" Dor asked. "I understood he was underage, so Oary was regent, and Omen never actually became King."

"I gather in contrast that he was indeed King, for about a year, before he disappeared," the centaur said. "They called him Good Omen, and believe the Kingdom of Onesti would have prospered under his guidance."

"Surely it would have," Dor agreed. He realized that King Oary might have preferred to minimize King Omen's stature in order to make his own position more secure. If the Kingdom of Onesti was well run, it could have been mostly King Omen's doing. "A trade agreement with Xanth could help both Kingdoms. Maybe King Omen was arranging that, then got deposed before King Trent arrived. King Oary's greed has cost him that chance."

"The peasants suspect that King Omen was illicitly removed," the centaur continued. "Some even choose to believe that he still lives, that King Oary imprisoned him by subterfuge and usurped power. This may of course be mere wish fulfillment—"

"And just may be the truth," Irene put in. "If King Oary deceived and imprisoned us and did the same with my parents, why not also with Good King Omen? It certainly fits his pattern."

"We are indulging in a great deal of supposition," Arnolde said warningly. "We could encounter disappointment. Yet if I may extend the rationale—it occurs to me that if King Trent and King Omen both survive, they may be confined together. We have already seen that the dungeons of Castle Onesti are not extensive. If there is another castle, and we find one confined there—"

"We find the other!" Irene finished. "And if we rescued them both, Good Omen would be King of Onesti again and all would be well. I'd sure like to depose hoary King Oary!"

"That was the extrapolation of my conjectures," Arnolde agreed. "Yet I reiterate, it is highly speculative."

"It's worth a try," Dor said. "Now let's plan our strategy. Probably only King Oary knows where King Trent and/or King Omen are incarcerated, and he won't tell. I could question the stones of the castle, but probably the Kings aren't here at all, and the stones wouldn't know anything about other places. If the local servants don't know anything about it, it probably isn't known. So the question is, how can we get him to tell?"

"He ought to have a guilty conscience," Irene said. "Maybe we could play on that."

"I distrust this," Dor said. "I encountered some bad people and creatures in another adventure, and I don't think their consciences troubled them, because they simply didn't believe they were doing anything wrong. Goblins and harpies—"

"Of course they don't have consciences," Irene snapped. "But Oary is a person."

"Human beings can be worst of all, especially Mundanes," Dor said. "Many of them have ravaged Xanth over the centuries, and King Oary may contemplate something similar. I just don't have much confidence in any appeal to his conscience."

"I perceive your point," Arnolde said. "But I think 'appeal' is not the appropriate term. A guilty conscience more typically manifests in the perception of nocturnal specters—"

"Not many specters running around this far from Xanth," Grundy pointed out.

"We could scare him into giving it away!" Irene exclaimed.

"Tonight," Dor decided. "We must rest and feed ourselves first—and hide from King Oary's troops."

They had no trouble avoiding the troops. It took Oary's forces some time to organize, after the devastation Smash had caused during the breakout, and only now, after the long discussion, was any real activity manifesting at the castle. Irene made vines grow, bristling with thorns; in their natural state these had been a nuisance, but now they were a menace. When the magic moved away, the vines died, for they had been extended far beyond their natural limits—but the tangle of thorns remained as a formidable barrier. That, coupled with the Mundanes' knowledge that the ogre lurked in the forest, kept the guards close to the castle even after they emerged. They were not eager for contact with the creature who had bashed all those holes in the massive walls.