“High Lord, the witch will hurt us!” Fillip declared.
“Hurt us badly!” Sot agreed.
“No, she won’t,” Ben insisted. “If you’re careful, she won’t even know you’re down there. You’ve been down there before, haven’t you?” Two heads nodded as one. “She didn’t see you then, did she?” Two heads nodded again. “Then there’s no reason she will see you this time either, is there? Just do as I told you and be careful.”
Fillip and Sot looked at each other long and hard. There was enough doubt in their eyes to float a battleship. Finally, they looked back again at Ben.
“Just go down once,” said Fillip.
“Just once,” echoed Sot.
“All right, all right, just once,” Ben agreed, casting an anxious glance at the fading afternoon sun. “But hurry, will you?”
The gnomes disappeared reluctantly into the hollows gloom. Ben watched them until they were out of sight, then sat back to wait.
As he waited, he found himself thinking about Edgewood Dirk’s repeated references to masks. He wore a mask. The missing unicorns wore masks. That’s what the cat had said, but what did the cat mean? He propped himself up against the base of a tree trunk some dozen yards from where Dirk basked in the sunlight and tried to reason it through. It was, after all, about time he reasoned something through. Lawyers were supposed to be able to do that; it was indigenous to their profession. King or no in Landover, he was still a lawyer with a lawyer’s habits and a lawyer’s way of thinking. So think, he exhorted himself! Think!
He thought. Nothing came. Masks were worn by actors and bandits. You wore them to disguise yourself. You put them on and then you took them off when you were done with the disguise. But what did that have to do with him? Or the unicorns? None of us are trying to disguise ourselves, he thought. Meeks is trying to disguise me. Who’s trying to disguise the unicorns?
The wizards who took them, that’s who.
The answer came instantly to him. He shifted upright. The wizards stole the unicorns and then hid them by disguising them. He nodded. It made sense. So how did they disguise them? With masks? What, turned them into cows or trees or something? No. He frowned. Start over again. The wizards took the unicorns — how did they do that — so they could steal their magic. The wizards wanted the magic for their own. But what would they do with it? What use would they find for it? Where was the magic now?
His eyes widened. There were no longer any other true wizards besides Meeks. The source of his power was in the missing but now found books of magic, the books that were supposedly a compilation of the magics acquired by wizards down through the years — the books with the drawing of the unicorns! Sure, the unicorns in the books — or the one book, at least — were drawings of the missing unicorns!
But why make drawings?
Or are they the unicorns themselves?
“Yes!” he whispered in surprise.
It was so impossible that he hadn’t seen it before — but impossible only in his own world, not in Landover where magic was the norm! The missing unicorns, the unicorns no one had seen for centuries, their magic intact, were trapped in the wizards’ books! And the reason that there was nothing else in the books but the drawings of the unicorns was that the magic of the books was entirely that of the unicorns — magic that the wizards had stolen!
And harnessed to their own use?
He didn’t know. He started to say something to Dirk, then checked himself. There was no point in asking the cat if he was right; the cat would simply find a way to confuse him all over again. Figure it out for yourself, he admonished! The unicorns had been transformed by wizard magic into the drawings in the missing books — that would explain the disappearance of the unicorns for all these years, the reason that Meeks had sent the dream of the books to Questor, and the need Meeks had for the books. It would even explain Dirk’s reference to masks.