Heaven Cent Read Online Free PDF

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 idly 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.