pell For Chameleon

"The time may indeed have come for us to part," Trent said. "I have appreciated your company, but the situation seems to be changing. Perhaps you should attempt to leave this castle now. I shall not oppose you. Should we manage to separate, we can consider the truce abated. Fair enough?"

"How nice," Chameleon said. "You can relax over your books while the jungle tears us up."

"I do not think anything here will actually hurt you," Trent said. "The theme of Castle Roogna is harmony with man." He smiled again. "Harmony, not harm. But I rather doubt you will be permitted to depart."

Bink had had enough. "I'll take my chances. Let's go."

"You want me to come along?" Chameleon asked hesitantly.

"Unless you prefer to stay with him. You might make a very pretty Queen in a couple of weeks."

Trent laughed. Chameleon moved with alacrity. They walked to the stairs, leaving the Magician poring over his book again.

Another ghost interrupted them. This one seemed larger than the others, more solid. "Waarrningg," it moaned.

Bink stopped. "You can speak? What is your warning?"

"Dooom beeyo

"Oh. Well, that's a chance we've already decided to take," Bink said. "Because we are loyal to Xanth."

"Xaaanth!" the spirit repeated with a certain feeling.

"Yes, Xanth. So we must leave."

The ghost seemed nonplused. It faded.

"It almost seems they're on our side," Chameleon commented. "Maybe they're just trying to make us stay in the castle, though."

"We can't afford to trust ghosts," Bink agreed.

They could not exit through the front gate, because the portcullis was firm and they did not understand the mechanism for lifting it. They poked through the downstairs rooms, searching for an alternate exit.

Bink opened one promising door-and slammed it shut as a host of leather-winged, long-toothed creatures stirred; they looked like vampire bats. He cracked the next open more carefully and a questing rope twined out, more than casually reminiscent of the tree vines.

"Maybe the cellar," Chameleon suggested, spying stairs leading down.

They tried it. But at the foot, huge, baleful rats scurried into place, and they were facing, not fleeing, the intruders. The beasts looked too hungry, too confident; they surely had magic to trap any prey that entered their territory.

Bink poked his staff at the nearest, experimentally. "Scat!" he exclaimed. But the rat leaped onto the pole, climbing up toward Bink's hands. He shook it, but the creature clung, and another jumped to the staff. He thunked it against the stone floor, hard-but still they hung on, and still they climbed. That must be their magic--the ability to cling.

"Bink! Above!" Chameleon cried.

There was a chittering overhead. More rats were crowding the beams, bracing themselves to leap.

Bink threw the staff away and backed hastily up the stairs, holding on to Chameleon for support until he could get turned around. The rats did not follow.

"This castle is really organized," Bink said as they emerged on the main floor. "I don't think it intends to let us go peacefully. But we've got to try. Maybe a window."

But there were no windows on the ground floor; the outer wall had been built to withstand siege. No point in jumping from an upper turret; someone would surely break a bone. They moved on, and found themselves in the kitchen area. Here there was a back exit, normally used for supplies, garbage, and servants. They slipped out and faced a small bridge across the moat: an ideal escape route.

But there was motion on the bridge already. Snakes were emerging from the rotten planking. Not healthy, normal reptiles, but tattered, discolored things whose bones showed through oozing gaps in the sagging flesh.

"Those are zombie snakes!" Chameleon cried with genuine horror. "Waked from the dead."

"It figures," Bink said grimly. "This whole castle is waked from the dead. Rats can thrive anywhere, but the other creatures died out when the castle died, or maybe they come here to die even now. But zombies aren't as strong as real living things; we can probably handle them with our staffs." But he had lost his own staff in the cellar.

Now he smelled the stench of corruption, worse than that of the harpy. Waves of it rose from the festering snakes and the putrescent moat. Bink's stomach made an exploratory heave. He had seldom encountered genuine, far-advanced decay; usually either creatures were living or their bones were fairly neat and dean. The stages in between, of spoilage and maggot infestation and disintegration, were a part of the cycle of life and death he had chosen not to inspect closely. Hitherto.

"I don't want to try that bridge," Chameleon said. "We'll fall through-and there are zombie crocs in the water."

So there were: big reptiles threshing the slimy surface with leather-covered bones, their worm-eaten eyes gazing up.

"Maybe a boat," Bink said. "Or a raft-"

"Uh-uh. Even if it weren't rotten and filled with zombie bugs, it would-well, look across the water."

He looked. Now came the worst of all, walking jerkily along the far bank of the moat: human zombies, some mummified, others hardly more than animate skeletons.

Bink watched the awful things for a long moment, fascinated by their very grotesqueness. Fragments of wrappings and decayed flesh dropped from them. Some dribbled caked dirt left from their over-hasty emergence from their unquiet graves. It was a parade of putrefaction.

He thought of fighting that motley army, hacking apart already-destroyed bodies, feeling their rotting, vermin-riddled flesh on his hands, wrestling with those ghastly animations, saturated with the cloying stink of it all. What loathsome diseases did they bear, what gangrenous embraces would they bestow on him as they fell apart? What possible attack would make these moldering dead lie down again?

The spell-driven things were closing in, coming across the ragged bridge. Surely this was even worse for the zombies, for they could not voluntarily have roused themselves. They could not retire to the pleasant seclusion of the castle interior. To be pressed into service in this state, instead of remaining in the bliss of oblivion-"l-don't think I'm ready to leave yet," Bink said.

"No," Chameleon agreed, her face somewhat green. "Not this way."

And the zombies halted, giving Bink and Chameleon time to reenter Castle Roogna.

Chapter 13. Rationale

Chameleon was now well through her "normal" phase, which Bink had known before as Dee, and moving into her beauty phase. It was not identical to the prior Wy

First, his priority was to get away from here; second, he was not at all sure he wanted to associate himself in any permanent way with so changeable an entity. If only she were beautiful and bright-but no, that would not work either. He realized now why she had not been tempted by Trent's offer to make her beautiful, when they were first captured outside the Shield. That would merely have changed her phase. If she were beautiful when she was smart, she would be stupid when she was ugly, and that was no improvement. She needed to be free of the curse entirely. And even if she could be fixed permanently at the height of both beauty and brains, he would not trust her, for he had been betrayed by that type too. Sabrina-he choked off that memory. Yet even an ordinary girl could get pretty dull if she had no more than ordinary intelligence or magic...