instantly abolish my own magic and return to my sinecure at the museum, my shame extirpated.”
And there was the centaurs fundamental disturbance, Dor realized. He resented their dastardly deed that had ripped him from his contented existence and made him an exile from his kind. Dor could hardly blame him. Amolde’s agreement to travel with them to Mundania to help rescue King Trent did not mean he was satisfied with his lot; he was merely making the best of what was for him an awful situation.
“Me help he go, with big heave-ho!” Smash offered.
“But we need his magic,” Irene said, verbally interposing herself to prevent further trouble. “Just as we need your strength, Smash.” And she laid her hand on the ogre’s ponderous arm, pacifying him.
Dor found himself resenting this, too, though he understood her motive.
The peace had to be kept.
They settled down for the night-and the sand gave alarm. The monsters it warned of turned out to be sand fleas-bugs so small they could hardly even be seen. Amolde dug a vermin-repulsor spell out of his collection, and that took care of the matter. They settled down again and this time slept. Once more the nightmares were unable to reach them, since the magic horses were bound to the magic realm of Xanth and could not cross the Mundane territory intervening. Dor almost felt sympathy for the mares; they had been balked from doing their duty to trouble people’s sleep for several nights now, and must be very frustrated.
They resumed their march in the morning. But as the new day wore on, the gloom of failure became more pervasive. “Something certainly appears to be amiss,” Amolde observed. “From what we understand, King Trent had to have passed this vicinity-yet the objects here deny it. Perhaps it is not entirely premature to entertain conjectures.”
Smash wrinkled his hairy brow, trying to figure out whether this was another rarefied insult. “Say what’s on your mind, horsetail,” Grundy said with his customary diplomacy.
“We have ascertained that the Queen could not have employed her power to deceive the local objects,” Amolde said didactically.
“Not without magic,” Dor agreed. “The two of them were strictly Mundane-type people here, as far as we know.”
“Could they have failed to come in from the sea?”
“No!” Irene cried emotionally.
“I have queried the sea,” Dor said. “It says nothing like that is in it.” Irene relaxed.
“Could they have employed a completely different route? Perhaps crossed to the eastern coast of Xanth and sailed north from there to intercept another region of Mundania?”
“They didn’t,” Irene said firmly. “They had it all planned, to come out here. Someone had found a good trade deal, and they were following his map. I saw it, and the route passed here.”
“But if you don’t know -“ Dor protested.
“I didn’t know they were going to travel the route, then,” she said. “But I did see the map when their scout brought it in, with the line on it Now I know what it meant. That’s all I saw, but I am absolutely certain this was the way they headed.”
Dor was disinclined to argue the point further. This did seem to be the only practical route. He had told the others all he knew about King Trent’s destination, and this route certainly did not conflict with that information.
“Could they have been intercepted before leaving Xanth?” Arnolde continued, evidently with an intellectual conclusion in mind. “Waylaid, perhaps?”
“My father would have turned any waylayer into a toad,” she said defiantly. “Anyway, inside Xanth, my mother’s illusion would have made them impossible to identify.”
“Then it seems we have eliminated the likely,” Amolde said. “We are thus obliged to contemplate the unlikely.”
“What do you mean?” Irene asked.
“As I intimated, it is an unlikely supposition that I entertain, quite possibly erroneous-“
“Spit it out, brownfur,” Grundy said.
“My dear vociferous construct, a civilized centaur does not expectorate. And my color is appaloosa, not mere brown.”
Irene was catching on to her power over the centaur, and over males in general. “Please, Amolde,” she pleaded sweetly. “It’s so important to me to know anything that might help find my lost father-“
“Of course, dear child,” Amolde agreed quickly, adopting an avuncular pose. “It is simply this: perhaps King Trent did not pass this region when we suppose he did.”
“It had to be within this past month,” she said.
“Not necessarily. That is the extraordinary aspect of this supposition. He may have passed here a century ago.”
Now Dor, Irene, and Grundy peered at the centaur intently to see whether he was joking. Smash, less interested in intellectual conjectures, idly formed sandstone by squeezing handfuls of sand until the mineral fused. His new gauntlets evidently enabled him to apply his power in ways that were beyond his natural limits before, since even ogre’s flesh was marginally softer than stone. A modest sandstone castle was developing.
“You happen to sleep with your head underwater last night?” the golem inquired solicitously.
“I have, as I have clarified previously, engaged in a modicum of research into the phenomena of Mundania,” Amolde said. “I confess I know only the merest fraction of what may be available, and must be constantly alert for error, but certain conclusions are becoming more credible. Through history, certain anomalies have manifested in the relationship between continuums. There is of course the matter of linguistics-it appears that there exist multiple languages in Mundania, yet all become intelligible in Xanth. I wonder if you properly appreciate the significance of-“
Irene was growing impatient. She tapped her small foot on the ground.
“How could he have passed a century ago, when he wasn’t even born then?”
“It is this matter of discontinuity, as I was saying. Time seems to differ; there may be no constant ratio. There is evidence that the several Waves of human colonization of Xanth originated from widely divergent subcultures within Mundania, and, in fact, some may be anachronistic. That is to say, the last Wave of people may have originated from a period in Mundania preceding that of the prior Wave.”
“Now wait!” Dor exclaimed. “I visited Xanth of eight hundred years ago, and I guess that was a kind of time travel, but that was a special case. Since there’s no magic in Mundania, how could people get reversed like that? Are their times mixed up?”
“No, I believe their framework is consistent in their world. Yet If the temporal sequence were reversed with respect to ours-“
“I just want to know where my father is!” Irene snapped.
“He may be in Mundania’s past-or its future,” the centaur said. “We simply do not know what law governs transfer across the barrier of magic, but it seems to be governed from Xanth’s side. That is, we may be able to determine into what age of Mundania we travel, whereas the access of Mundania to Xanth is random and perhaps in some cases impossible. It is a most intriguing interface. It is as if Xanth were a boat sailing along a river; the passengers may disembark anywhere they choose, merely by picking their port, or a specific time on the triptych, so to speak, but the natives along the shores can take only that craft that happens to pass within their range. This is an inadequate analogy, I realize, that does not properly account for certain-“
“The King can be anywhen in Mundania?” Irene demanded skeptically.
“Marvelously succinct summation,” Amolde admitted.
“But he told me ‘medieval,’” Dor protested.
“That does narrow it,” the centaur agreed. “But it covers an extraordinary range, and if he was speaking figuratively-?”
“Then how can we ever find him?” Irene demanded.
“That becomes problematical. I hasten to remind you that this is merely a theory, undocumented, perhaps fallacious. I would not have introduced it for consideration, except-“
“Except nothing else fits,” Irene said. “Suppose it’s right. What do we do now?”
“Well, I believe it would expedite things if we located research facilities in Mundania. Some institution where detailed records exist, archives-“
