When they reached their usual spot of questioning, Dor noticed that there was a large old broad-leaved tree that hadn’t been there before. This was certainly a different locale. But that in itself did not mean much; the landscape did shift with the Mundane aspects, sometimes dramatically. It was not just time but geography that changed; some aspects were flat and barren, while others were raggedly mountainous. The only thing all had in common was the beach line, with the sea to the south and the terrain to the north. Amolde was constantly intrigued by the assorted significances of this, but Dor did not pay much attention. “What have you seen lately?” he asked the sand.
“Nothing much since the King and his moll walked by,” the sand said.
“Oh.” Dor turned to trek back to the magic section.
The centaur paused. “Did it say-?”
Then it sank in. Excitement raced along Dor’s nerves. “King Trent and Queen Iris?”
“I suppose. They were sort of old.”
“I believe we have our window at last!” Amolde said. “Go back and alert the others; I shall hold the window open.”
Dor ran back east, his heart pounding harder than warranted by the exertion. Did he dare believe? “We’ve found it!” he cried. “Move out now!”
They dived into the boat. Smash poled it violently forward. Then the ogre’s effort diminished. Dor looked, and saw that Smash was striving hard but accomplishing little.
“Oh-we’re out of the magic of Xanth, and not yet in the magic aisle,” he said. “Come on-we’ve all got to help.”
Dor and Irene leaned over the boat on either side and paddled desperately with their hands, and slowly the boat moved onward.
They crawled up parallel to the centaur. “All aboard!” Dor cried, exhilarated.
Amolde trotted out through the shallow water and climbed aboard with difficulty, rocking the boat. Some sea water slopped in. The craft was sturdy, as anything crafted by an ogre was bound to be, but still reeked of lime jelly, especially where it had been wet down.
The centaur stood in the center, facing forward; Irene sat in the front, her fair green hair trailing back in the breeze. It had faded momentarily when they were between magics, just now; perhaps that had helped give Dor the hint of the problem. It remained the easiest way to tell the state of the world around them.
Dor settled near the rear of the boat, and Smash poled vigorously from the stern. Now that they were within the magic aisle, the ogre’s strength was full, and the boat was lively. The black waves coursed rapidly past.
“I wish I had known this was all we had to do to locate King Trent,” Dor said. “We could have saved ourselves the trip into Modern Mundania.”
“By no means,” Amolde protested, swishing his tail. “We might have discovered this window, true; but each window opens onto an entire Mundane world. We should soon have lost the trail and ourselves and been unable to rescue anyone. As it is, we know we are looking for Onesti and we know where it is; this will greatly facilitate our operation.” The centaur paused. “Besides which, I am most gratified to have met Ichabod.”
So their initial excursion did make sense, after all. “What sort of people do you see here?” Dor asked the water.
“Tough people with baggy clothes and swords and bows,” the water said. “They’re not much on the water, though; not the way the Greeks were.”
“Those are probably the Bulgers,” Amolde said. “They should have passed this way in the past few decades, according to Ichabod.”
“Who are the Bulgers?” Irene asked. Now that they were actually on the trail of her lost father, she was much more interested in details.
“This is complex to explain. Ichabod gave me some detail on it, but I may not have the whole story.”
“If they’re people my father met-and if we have to meet them, too-I want to know all about them.” Her face assumed her determined look.
The boat was moving well, for the ogre’s strength was formidable. The shoreline stretched ahead, curving in and out, with inlets and bays.
“We do have a journey of several days ahead of us,” the centaur said. “Time will doubtless weigh somewhat ponderously on our hands.” He took a didactic breath and started in on his historical narrative, while the ogre scowled, uninterested, and Grundy settled down in his nest to sleep. But Dor and Irene paid close attention.
In essence it was this: about three centuries before this period, there had been a huge Mundane empire in this region, called-as Dor understood it-Roaxn, perhaps because it spread so far. But after a long time this empire had grown corrupt and weak. Then from the great inland mass to the east had thrust a formerly quiescent tribe, the Huns, perhaps short for Hungries because of their appetite for power, pushing other tribes before them. These tribes had overrun the Roaming Empire, destroying a large part of it. But when the Hungry chief, Attaboy, died of indigestion, they were defeated and driven partway back east, to the shore of this Black Sea, the very color of their mood. They fought among themselves for a time, as people in a black mood do, then reunited and called themselves the Bulgers. But the Buls were driven out of their new country by another savage tribe of Turks-no relation to the turkey oaks-called the Khazars. Some Buls fled north and some fled west-and this was the region the western ones had settled, here at the western edge of the Black Sea. They couldn’t go any farther because another savage tribe was there, the Avars. The Avars had a huge empire in eastern Europe, but now it was declining, especially under the onslaught of the Khazars. At the moment, circa Mundane AD 650-the number referred to some Mundane religion to which none of these parties belonged-there was an uneasy balance in this region between the three powers, the Avars, Bulgars, and Khazars, with the Khazars dominant.
Somehow this was too complex for Dor to follow. All these strange tribes and happenings and numbers-the intricacies of Mundania were far more complicated than the simple magic events of Xanth! Easier to face down griffins and dragons than Avars and Khazars; at least the dragons were sensible creatures.
“But what has this to do with my father?” Irene demanded. “Which tribe did he go to trade with?”
“None of the above,” the centaur said. “This is merely background. It would be too dangerous for us to deal with such savages. But we believe there is a small Kingdom, maybe a Gothic remnant, or some older indigenous people, who have retained nominal independence in the Carpathian Mountains, with a separate language and culture. They happen to be at the boundary between the Avars, Bulgars, and Khazars, protected to a degree because no one empire can make a move there without antagonizing the other two, and also protected by the roughness of the terrain. Hence the A, B, K complex King Trent referenced-a valuable clue for us. A separate region is the Kingdom of Onesti. It is ensconced in the mountains, difficult to invade, and has very little that others would want to take, which may help account for its independence. But it surely is eager for peaceful and profitable trade, and Ichabod’s Mundane reference suggests that it did have a trade route that has been lost to history, which enabled the Kingdom to prosper for a century when their normal channels appeared to be blocked. That could be the trade route to Xanth that King Trent sought to establish.”
“Yes, that does make sense,” Irene agreed. “But suppose one of those other tribes caught my father, and that’s why he never returned?”
“We shall trace him down,” the centaur said reassuringly. “We have an enormous asset King Trent lacked- magic. All we need to do is go to Onesti and query the people, plants, animals, and objects. There will surely be news of him.”
Irene was silent. Dor shared her concern. Now that they were on the verge of finding King Trent-how could they be certain they would find him alive? If he were dead, what then?
“Are we going to have to fight all those A’s, B’s, and K’s?” Grundy asked. Apparently he had not been entirely asleep.
“I doubt it,” Amolde replied. “Actual states of war are rarer than they seem in historical perspective. The great majority of the time, life goes on as usual; the fishermen fish, the blacksmiths hammer iron, the farmers farm, the women bear children. Otherwise there would be constant deprivation. However, I have stocked a friendship- spell for emergency use.” He patted his bag of spells.
They went on, the ogre poling indefatigably. Gradually the shoreline curved southward, and they followed it. When dusk came they pulled ashore briefly to make a fire and prepare supper; then they returned to the boat for the night, so as not to brave the Mundane threats of the darkness. There were few fish and no monsters in the Black Sea, Grundy reported; it was safe as long as a storm did not come up.
