my patience is wearing thin. At any time they might move the Shieldstone routinely, rendering your information valueless. If one of you does not give me the information I need today, tomorrow I shall transform you both. You, Bink, will be a cockatrice; you, Fanchon, a basilisk. You will be confined in the same cage.'
Bink and Fanchon looked at each other with complete dismay. Cockatrice and basilisk-two names for the same thing: a winged reptile hatched from a yolk-less egg laid by a rooster and hatched by a toad in the warmth of a dungheap. The stench of its breath was so bad that it wilted vegetation and shattered stone, and the very sight of its face would cause other creatures to keel over dead. Basilisk-the little king of the reptiles.
The chameleon of his omen had metamorphosed into the likeness of a basilisk-just before it died. Now he had been reminded of the chameleon by a person who could not have known about that omen, and threatened with transformation into- Surely death was drawing nigh.
'It's a bluff,' Fanchon said at last. 'He can't really do it. He's just trying to scare us.'
'He's succeeding,' Bink muttered.
'Perhaps a demonstration would be in order,' Trent said. 'I ask no person to take my magic on faith, when it is so readily demonstrable. It is necessary for me to perform regularly, to restore my full talent after the long layoff in Mundania, so the demonstration is quite convenient for me.' He snapped his fingers. 'Allow the prisoners to finish their meal,' he said to the guard who reported. 'Then remove them from the cell.' He left.
Now Fanchon was glum for another reason. 'He may be bluffing-but if they come down in here, they'll find the bricks. That will finish us anyway.'
'Not if we move right out, giving them no trouble,' Bink said. 'They won't come down here unless they have to.'
'Let's hope so,' she said.
When the guards came, Bink and Fanchon scrambled up the rope ladder the moment it was dropped. 'We're calling the Magician's bluff,' Bink said. There was no reaction from the soldiers. The party marched eastward across the isthmus, toward Xanth.
Within sight of the Shield, Trent stood beside a wire cage. Soldiers stood in a ring around him, arrows nocked to bows. They all wore smoked glasses. It looked very grim.
'Now I caution you,' Trent said as they arrived. 'Do not look directly at each other's faces after the transformation. I can not restore the dead to life.'
If this were another scare tactic, it was effective. Fanchon might doubt, but Bink believed. He remembered Justin Tree, legacy of Trent's ire of twenty years ago. The omen loomed large in his mind. First to be a basilisk, then to die
Trent caught Bink's look of apprehension. 'Have you anything to say to me?' he inquired, as if routinely.
'Yes. How did they manage to exile you without getting turned into toads or turnips or worse?'
Trent frowned. 'That was not precisely what I meant, Bink. But, in the interest of harmony, I will answer. An aide I trusted was bribed to put a sleep spell on me. While I slept, they carried me across the Shield.'
'How do you know it won't happen again? You can't stay awake all the time, you know.'
'I spent much time pondering that whole problem in the long early years of my exile. I concluded that I had brought the deception upon myself. I had been faithless to others, and so others were faithless to me. I was not entirely without honor; I breached my given word only for what I deemed to be sufficient cause, yet-'
'That's the same as lying' Bink said.
'I did not think so at the time. But I dare say my reputation in that respect did not improve in my absence; it is ever the privilege of the victor to present the loser as completely corrupt, thus justifying the victory. Nevertheless, my word was not my absolute bond, and in time I realized that this was the fundamental flaw in my character that had been my undoing. The only way to prevent repetition was to change my own mode of operation. And so I no longer deceive-ever. And no one deceives me.'
It was a fair answer. The Evil Magician was, in many respects, the opposite of the popular image; instead of being ugly, weak, and mean-Humfrey fitted that description better-he was handsome, strong, and urbane. Yet he was the villain, and Bink knew better than to let fair words deceive him.
'Fanchon, stand forth,' Trent said.
Fanchon stepped toward him; open cynicism on her face. Trent did not gesture or chant. He merely glanced at her with concentration.
She vanished.
A soldier swooped in with a butterfly net, slamming it down on something. In a moment he held it up-a struggling, baleful, lizardlike thing with wings.
It really was a basilisk! Bink quickly averted his eyes, lest he look directly at its horrible face and meet its deadly gaze.
The soldier dumped the thing into the cage, and another smoke-glass-protected soldier shoved on the lid. The remaining soldiers relaxed visibly. The basilisk scrambled around, seeking some escape, but there was none. It glared at the wire confinement, but its gaze had no effect on the metal. A third soldier dropped a cloth over the cage, cutting off the view of the little monster. Now Bink himself relaxed. The whole thing had obviously been carefully prepared and rehearsed; the soldiers knew exactly what to do.
'Bink, stand forth,' Trent said, exactly as before.
Bink was terrified. But a corner of his mind protested: It's still a bluff. She's in on it. They have rigged it to make me think she was transformed, and that I'm to be next. All her arguments against Trent were merely to make her seem legitimate, preparing for this moment.
Still, he only half believed that. The omen lent it a special, awful conviction. Death hovered, as it were, on the silent wings of a moth hawk, close
