Bink glanced at Chester. 'I don't want to hurt him. Maybe if I can knock him out, get him out of range of the coral-'
'While I take care of birdbeak,' Chester said, nominally regretful.
'I don't want bloodshed!' Bink cried. 'These are our friends, whom we must rescue.'
'I suppose so,' Chester agreed reluctantly, 'I'll try to immobilize the griffin without hurting him too much. Maybe I'll just pull out a few of his feathers.'
Bink realized that this was as much of a compromise as Chester was prepared to make. 'Very well. But stop the moment he yields.'
Now he faced Humfrey again. 'I intend to pursue my quest. I ask you to depart, and to refrain from trying to interfere. It grieves me even to contemplate strife between us, but-'
Humfrey rummaged in his belt of vials. He brought one out. 'Huh-uh!' Bink cried, striding across. Yet his out right horror at practicing any kind of violence against his friends held him back, and he got there too late. The cork came out and the vapor issued. It formed into?a green poncho, which flapped about in the air before settling to the floor.
'Wrong bottle,' the Magician muttered, and uncorked another.
Bink, momentarily frozen, realized that he could not subdue the Magician until he separated the man from his arsenal of vials. Bink's talent might have helped Humfrey to confuse the bottles, but that sort of error could not be counted on after the first time. Bink drew his sword, intending to slice the belt from the Good Magician's waist-but realized that this seemed like a murderous attack. Again he hesitated-and was brought up short by the coalescing vapor. Suddenly thirteen black cats faced him, spitting viciously.
Bink had never seen a pure cat before, in the flesh. He regarded the cat as an extinct species. He just stood there and stared at this abrupt de-extinction, unable to formulate a durable opinion. If he killed these animals, would he be re-extincting the species?
Meanwhile, the centaur joined battle with the griffin. Their encounter was savage from the outset, despite Chester's promises. His bow was in his hands, and an arrow sizzled through the air. But Crombie, an experienced soldier, did not wait for it to arrive. He leaped and spread his wings, then closed them with a great backblast of air. He shot upward at an angle, the arrow passing beneath his tail feathers. Then he banked near the cavern ceiling and plummeted toward the centaur, screaming, claws outstretched.
Chester's bow was instantly replaced by his rope. He swung up a loop that closed about the griffin's torso, drawing the wings closed. He jerked, and Crombie was swung about in a quarter-circle. The centaur was about three times as massive as his opponent, so was able to control him this way.
A black cat leaped at Bink's face, forcing him to pay attention to his own battle. Reflexively he brought his sword around-and sliced the animal cleanly in half.
Bink froze again in horror. He had not meant to kill it! A rare creature like this-maybe these cats were all that remained in the whole Land of Xanth, being preserved only by the Magician's magic.
Then two things changed his attitude. First, the severed halves of the cat he had struck did not die; they metamorphosed into smaller cats. This was not a real cat, but a pseudo-cat, shaped from life-clay and given a feline imperative. Any part of it became another cat. Had a dog been shaped from the same material, it would have fractured into more dogs. So Bink hardly needed to worry about preservation of that species. Second, another cat was biting him on the ankle.
In a sudden fury of relief and ire, Bink laid about him with his blade. He sliced cats in halves, quarters, and eighths-and every segment became a smaller feline, attacking him with renewed ferocity. This was like fighting the hydra-only this time he had no spell-reversal wood to feed it, and there was no thread to make it drop. Soon he had a hundred tiny cats pouncing on him like rats, and then a thousand attacking like nickelpedes. The more he fought, the worse it got.
Was this magic related to that of the hydra? That monster had been typified by seven, while the cats were thirteen, but each doubled with each strike against a member. If there were some key, some counterspell to abolish doubling magic-
'Get smart, Bink!' Chester called, stomping on several cats that had wandered into his territory. 'Sweep them all into the drink.'
Of course! Bink stooped low and swung the flat of his sword sidewise, sweeping dozens of thumbnail-sized cats into the lake. They hissed as they splashed, like so many hot pebbles, and then thrashed to the bottom. Whether they were drowning or being poisoned he could not tell, but none emerged.
While he swept his way to victory, Bink absorbed the continuing centaur-griffin engagement. He could not observe everything, but was able to bridge the gaps well enough. He had to keep track, because if anything happened to Chester, Bink would have another enemy to face.
Crombie, initially incapacitated by the rope, bent his head down and sheared his bond cleanly with one crunch of his sharp beak. He spread his wings explosively, made a defiant squawk, and launched a three-point charge at Chester's head: beak, claw, and talon.
The centaur, thrown off balance by the abrupt slackening of the rope, staggered. He had better stability than a man, but he had been hauling hard. His equine shoulder thudded against a stalagmite and broke it off as the griffin made contact. Bink winced-but as it turned out, the stalagmite was more of a problem to Crombie than to Chester. The pointed top fell across the griffin's left wing, weighing it down, forcing Crombie to flap his other wing vigorously to right himself.
Chester rose up, one talon slash down the side of his face where the griffin's strike had missed his eye. But his two great hands now grasped the griffin's two front legs. 'Got you now, birdie!' he cried. But in this position he could not use his sword, so he tried to bash the griffin against the broken base of the stalagmite.
Crombie squawked and brought his hind legs up for a double slash that would have disemboweled the centaur's human portion had it scored. Chester hastily let go, throwing Crombie violently away from him. Then he grabbed for his bow and arrow again. The griffin, however, spread his wings to brake his flight, looped about, and closed in again before the arrow could be brought to bear. Now it was hand-to-claw.
Bink had cleared his area of little cats-but the Good Magician had had time to organize his vials and open the next. This coalesced into a mound of bright-red cherry bombs. Oh, no! Bink had had experience with these violent little fruits before, as there was a tree of them on the palace grounds. In fact, these were probably
