Heaven Cent

by Piers Anthony

  "Perhaps—" Marrow began.

  Dolph paused in mid stride toward the drawbridge. He still had the sore places from damaged feathers to remind him about heeding adult advice.

  "—I should enter first, to be sure mere is nothing dangerous lurking inside," the skeleton concluded.

  "But wouldn't it be dangerous for you too?"

  "What could be dangerous to me?"

  Dolph was at a loss to answer that, so he didn't try. Anything that liked to bite legs would have trouble with Marrow's bones, and anything that liked to scare the living would have trouble scaring the dead.

  Marrow crossed the moat first, stomping his bone feet on the old wooden planking of the drawbridge. Nothing gave way beneath him. He reached the huge open gate, and looked around. Nothing stirred. He tapped the stone of the archway leading into the castle proper. The hollow sound echoed and expired. The castle seemed empty.

  Dolph walked across, a little embarrassed at his caution. How did it look for an adventurer to enter a deserted castle so hesitantly? He should have charged in, sword waving! If he had a sword. If anybody had been watching. If it mattered.

  Did it matter? Had his mother let him go because she knew that the Quest was harmless, that there was nothing to find? That all he could do was come here, look through the empty castle, and go home again? With Marrow along to be sure he didn't get lost? Some adventure that would be! Ivy was probably snickering in her insufferable big-sister way.

  Dolph resolved not to return home until he found the Good Magician. That would show them!

  Now all he had to do was figure out how to show them.

  They walked through the entire castle, finding nothing but deserted chambers festooned with cobwebs. The Magician's personal effects had been cleaned up and put away by folk from Castle Roogna shortly after the disaster had been discovered. Anything that remained to be discovered would have been found at that time. There was nothing left for Dolph. As Queen Irene had surely known.

  "There does not appear to be much here," Marrow observed.

  What else was new? Dolph stared at the floor in deep disgust. He knew that he had no choice but to go home, unless he could find something that no one else had been able to find.

  "However—" Marrow began.

  What possible qualification could the skeleton have now? Dolph had no confidence, but he waited, just in case.

  "—the perceptions of some other type of creature might detect something we can not," Marrow concluded.

  Dolph shrugged. He became a potato and peered around with his sharp eyes. All he saw was dust and desertion. He became a dogwood tree, and sniffed with his sensitive canine noses. All he smelled was dust and desertion. He became a shock of corn, and listened with his finely-tassled ears. All he heard was nothing.

  "Yet—"

  Dolph returned to boy form, waiting.

  "—there may be other modes of assessment, other means of measurement, that some other type of creature might use to discover the undiscovered," Marrow concluded.

  Had the skeleton lost what little wits he had in his hollow cranium? That was gibberish! But Dolph refrained from making the proper retort, still hoping against hope that there might be a good idea hiding somewhere. "What do you mean?"

  "I am accustomed to the various devious chambers of the realm of the gourd," Marrow explained. "It seems to me mat if there is anything remaining to be found here, it must be in such a chamber of the castle, undiscoverable by normal means."

  "A secret chamber?" This intrigued Dolph. "Where?"

  Marrow shrugged. "Wherever no one has looked before, assuming it exists."

  "But how could we find it? We looked everywhere there is to look."

  "I'm not sure. I thought perhaps one of your alternate forms could measure and discover whether—"

  Dolph became a huge measuring worm. He traversed the castle, measuring every step. And discovered that the measurements did not add up.

  They discussed it, and concluded that there was indeed a discrepancy in the middle of the castle. The rooms and stairs and walls formed a complex mosaic, so that it was almost impossible to tell what added up to what, but the measuring worm found the difference. There was room for a small hidden chamber. It might be merely a solid foundation of stones, but it could be a secret room.

  Dolph was elated. They had made a discovery that no one else had made! Now all they had to do was get into the chamber and see what was there.

  The stones of the castle were big and heavy: far too much so for a nine-year-old boy or a walking skeleton to move. But Dolph could handle that. "I'll become an ogre and bash my way in!" he said zestfully.

  "I am not certain—"

  "Yeah, you're right," Dolph agreed reluctantly. "Mustn't damage someone else's castle. But maybe if you could become a pry bar, the ogre could use it to move just a few blocks out of the way, and put them back after."

  "Kick me," Marrow said.

  Dolph gave him a good swift kick in the rear. Marrow flew apart, and fell together as a long, solid bar of bones with the skull forming a knob on the end.

  Dolph became an ogre. Now he was so big he hardly fit in the room, and he had monstrously hairy muscles. He gazed dully around, and spied a small spider spinning a web; the spider took one look at his ugly puss and fainted. Ogres were the strongest, ugliest, and stupidest creatures of Xanth, which was why they were so much fun.

  He reached for the bone pole—and another ogre tromped into the room. Dolph paused, surprised. "Who you?" he demanded in typical ogre style.

  "Who you?" the other responded in the same tone.

  "Me ask he mask," Dolph said. Ogres typically spoke in inane rhymes, which was pretty limiting for anybody but an ogre. What he meant was that he had asked first: that the other should unmask himself.

  "Me ask he mask," the other repeated.

  "Me bash he ash!" Dolph declared, angry at this mimicry. He raised a huge hamfist.

  "Me bash he ash," the other said, raising a similar hamfist.

  "Perhaps—" the skull-knob began

  Suddenly there was a second bone pole. "Perhaps—" its skull-knob said.

  Dolph reverted to boy form. "What's going on?"

  Another boy appeared before him. "What's going on?"

  “—we have another challenge," Marrow's skull said.

  "—we have another challenge," the second skull said, reappearing as the boy vanished.

  "This thing is copying whatever we do!" Dolph exclaimed.

  The boy reappeared. "This thing is copying whatever we do!"

  "A mimic-dog, I think," Marrow's skull said, immediately echoed by the other.

  "What's that?" Dolph and the creature asked.

  "A creature who mimics whatever it sees and hears," Marrow and the creature replied. "It has no intelligence of its own; it merely copies."

  "Maybe it will help us get in to the chamber, then," Dolph and the creature said. He reached for the bone pole.

  So did the mimic-dog. Their two hands closed on it together.

  Dolph changed back to the ogre. So did the other. This was getting nowhere.

  Now he remembered what Marrow had said about the challenge. In olden times, when the Good Magician was home, there had always been three challenges to those who sought to ask him a Question. Could there be some challenges left over? In that case, the first would have been to find the hidden chamber, and this could be the second. The mimic-dog could have been summoned by their finding of the chamber; the Good Magician could have set this up long ago for some other purpose. Now Dolph had blundered into it. How was he to get out of it?

  Well, if this thing was a dog, maybe it liked doggy things. Dogs were mainly Mundanian creatures, but some had strayed into Xanth. They liked dog biscuits.

  '”Talk to it, Marrow," he said, reverting to his normal shape.

  "Talk to it, Marrow," the creature echoed.

  "As you wish,*' the skeleton agreed.

  While the two bone poles chatted i
dly in duplicate, Dolph quietly fetched his knapsack. It seemed that the mimic-dog only mimicked the one who was doing the important talking or acting. Dolph took out his partly-eaten sandwich and squeezed it into the shape of a biscuit.

  He held the biscuit aloft. "I have a delicious big dog biscuit," he announced. "Does anyone want to eat it?"

  The other boy appeared. "Does anyone want to eat it?" he repeated, his mouth watering.

  "But nobody can eat it who is doing something else," Dolph said. He set the biscuit down and walked toward the wall. "I am doing something else."

  "I am doing something else," the other said. But his gaze lingered on the biscuit. He was tempted, all right!

  Dolph picked up the bone pole. "I have a long, hard job ahead," he said. "I don't know when I'm ever going to have time to eat a delicious sandwich-flavored big dog biscuit!"

  "... delicious sandwich-flavored big dog biscuit!" the other repeated, moving toward it as if drawn by a magic magnet.

  Dolph started prying at the largest stone. The mimic-dog did not interfere. When Dolph looked, the dog was gone. So was the biscuit.

  That was the way of dogs, he thought with satisfaction. When they got hold of something good to eat, they carried it away to a private place so they could consume it without interference. The mimic-dog had been unable to resist its basic nature.

  "You handled that very well," Marrow's skull remarked.

  "Well, when you said it was a challenge, I knew I had to get around it," Dolph said. "But does that mean there is one more challenge coming?"

  "It may," Marrow agreed. "We do not seem to be making much headway here."

  Indeed they were not. The stone seemed absolutely immovable. Dolph resumed ogre form and strained at it, but it would not budge.

  "This appears to be one solid mass," Marrow said. "What resemble individual stones are in fact merely projections of a single stone."

  "How do you know?" Dolph asked, reverting to boy form.

  "I have a certain feel for the inanimate, particularly in this form. I very much fear that we can not force an entry without destroying the castle."

  "The third challenge!" Dolph exclaimed. "How to get into a perfectly sealed chamber!"

  "So it would seem."

  Dolph kicked the bone pole and it fell back into the skeleton's normal shape. They pondered the problem. "Maybe we could make it perm—perm—"

  "Permeable?"

  "Soft. By using magic or something. Then we could cut a hole in it and get in."

  "Perhaps so. If there is something inside, there must be a way to enter."

  "Right. We just have to figure out what it is."

  Neither one of them had much idea. Finally Dolph tried random spells. "Stone, turn soft!" he ordered it.

  The stone changed color. It now looked like boiled mush.

  Dolph stared. "It worked!" he exclaimed, amazed.

  Marrow poked a bone finger at it. "It remains very hard," he said.

  Dolph touched it. The rock was absolutely solid. It looked so soft it should sag at any moment and crawl across the floor, but that was not the case.

  "The perversity of the inanimate," Marrow said. "I say it as should not."

  Dolph knew what perversity meant, because his big sister Ivy liked to use it on him. It meant doing the opposite of what he was supposed to. "Well, maybe the other way, then." He faced the rock. "Stone, turn hard!"

  The rock assumed a complexion like polished steel. It looked so hard he was almost afraid to touch it. Marrow poked it instead.

  "It has not changed," the skeleton reported regretfully. "It appears that we can affect only its appearance, not its reality."

  Indeed that seemed to be the case. The wall changed color freely, but never its hardness. They still could not get in.

  "But this must be the way," Dolph said. "The Good Magician wouldn't set up something like this just to look pretty!"

  "So it would seem."

  But they remained stumped. The wall would assume any color they asked, either by name or by description, but would not change in any other way. They could not get through it.

  Then Dolph had a bright idea. "Maybe we don't have to get in to it!"

  "Do you mean there is nothing worthwhile inside?*'

  "No! Maybe we can see what's in it instead of touching it!"

  "What good would that do?"

  "Let's find out!" Dolph addressed the wall: "Stone, be no color!"

  The wall became transparent, it looked like colorless gel, completely transparent.

  Now they could see through to the center. There was a small chamber there, and in the chamber was a piece of paper.

  "Very interesting," Marrow said. "You have penetrated the secret. But I can not read what is on the paper."

  "Neither can I," Dolph said. "But I do know how to read; that horsey centaur Chem made me learn. Maybe if I can see it from above—"

  They went upstairs. They lifted the tiles from the floor of the room above and swept away the dust. There was the transparent stone. They could see the paper flat-on!

  Dolph put his eye to the stone and peered down, but the paper was too far away; all he saw was black markings.

  "Perhaps—" Marrow began.

  "If I became an eagle, with sharp eyes," Dolph finished. "But then I might not be able to understand the writing I see."

  "But perhaps you could trace it with your claw, and then—"

  "Gotcha!" Dolph became the eagle, and peered down through the stone. Now he could make out die writing on the paper.

  He made a mental note of the first of the lines, then moved over and scratched similar lines in the dirt they had moved. He returned for another peek at the paper, then scratched a few more lines in the dirt. After several such exchanges, he had it all.

  He returned to boy form and looked at what he had scratched. It said:

  SKELETON KEY TO HEAVEN CENT

  It was certainly a message! But what did it mean? Neither one of them could make any sense of it.

  It was now getting late. They had spent all day on this. But Dolph was pleased because he knew he had made more progress than his mother had expected, and more than anyone had before. This was a message left by the Good Magician himself, and surely it told where to find him. All they had to do was figure it out.

  "Skeleton key," Dolph said. "Does that have something to do with you?"

  Marrow's tone indicated that he was smiling. "No, a skeleton key is -a magic key that fits any lock. Obviously only such a key can fit the lock of the Heaven Cent, whatever mat may be."

  "So first we need to find the skeleton key. But that could be anywhere!"

  "It occurs to me—"

  "Ha! You have an idea! I can tell!"

  "—that there could be a pun on the term 'key.' That also means a small island."

  "An island that's a skeleton?"

  "I understand that some islands are fashioned magically by the skeletons of creatures of the sea called corals."

  "Like the Brain Coral? I don't think—"

  "Other kinds of corals. They aren't smart, they merely form reefs or islands. Such an island might be termed a—"

  "A skeleton key!" Dolph exclaimed, catching on.

  "So perhaps we have merely to look on such a key to find the Heaven Cent."

  "Great! Let's go there!"

  "Unfortunately—"

  Dolph waited. The skeleton's inability to formulate a complete thought in one effort might be because his head was hollow. Dolph was discovering that a certain tolerance made things easier.

  "—there are a number of such skeletal keys off the coasts of Xanth," Marrow concluded. "We may have trouble ascertaining which one is correct."

  Dolph considered. "Well, the message reads from west to east, so if I kept on reading east, that must be where the Heaven Cent is."

  "I am not certain that makes sense."

  "It makes Heaven Cents!" Dolph said. "What key is east of here?"

  "Well, in very ge
neral way, there is the Isle of Illusion—"

  "Then we'll go there!" Dolph exclaimed.

  "But we don't even know that the message is for us!" Marrow protested. "The Heaven Cent may relate to something entirely different!"

  "Non-cents," Dolph said. "The Good Magician Humfrey always knew exactly what he was doing." Though he wondered as he spoke how Humfrey could have been caught unawares by the holy smoke, if that were the case.

  "But such an obscure message, so well hidden—"

  "He did that so that only the right person could find it or understand it," Dolph said confidently. "I am obviously that person. Tomorrow we'll go to the Isle of Illusion. Oh, my mother will have a fit!"

  "She certainly will," Marrow agreed with resignation. It was evident that the skeleton, like Queen Irene, had not anticipated this development. That delighted Dolph; now at last he could make the Quest his own, forging into uncharted territory. Sheer adventure!

  Chapter 3

  Vila

  In the morning they set out for the Isle of Illusion. Dolph had planned to fly there, but when he became the roc he discovered that his wing muscles were quite sore from the prior day's exertion. He wasn't a real roc, and lacked the stamina of practice; also, his flight was relatively clumsy. If he worked at it he knew he could get better, but it wasn't worth it; it was easier to walk for a while.

  They followed the enchanted path north and then east when they came to an intersection. This was the path that Esk and Chex had used; he had seen them in the Magic Tapestry. Esk had seemed like a great guy, with his quarter-ogre ancestry. Then he got involved with that brass girl Bria and turned all mushy. Dolph knew that he would never get mushy about any stupid girl; he knew what they were like. Like his arrogant big sister! No boy in his right mind would have anything to do with any girl like that! Just because Irene bossed Dor around unmercifully, Ivy figured she had a duty to boss Dolph around. No, as far as he was concerned, the only good girl was one who was far away.