The smell of fire and brimstone overwhelmed Harold Shea. Lightning flashed, thunder cracked—and the knight on the horse changed. Where before two magnificent creatures had battled the evil Malambroso, now a scarecrow of a man with a washbasin tied to his head charged against the wizard on a horse so knock-kneed and splayfooted it could barely trot. The horse stumbled on the uneven ground and pitched the transfigured Quixote feet-over-head into the bleeding sorcerer.
Malambroso, bloodied and weak, crawled away from the knight. Freed by Quixote's transformation and the breaking of the spell that had bound him to fight, he growled, "There will be another time and another place, Chalmers. Beware!" Then he vanished into nothingness, leaving only stinking yellow smoke behind him.
Sancho Panza cried out: "My master!" Then he picked a short, gnarled stick off the ground and attacked Chalmers. "You were one of them all along, you monster!"
Chalmers yelled, "He's cured! Look, Harold. Now you see the true Don Quixote!" He ran behind Shea.
Sancho Panza got in a solid lick with his cudgel. "Give me back my master," he demanded.
"This is the break we've—been waiting for—Harold," Chalmers panted as he dodged behind Shea again to avoid Panza and the stick. "With Quixote rational, his—delusions won't affect the m-m-math-ematics of magic any further. Keep this luna—tic off of me and I'll—spell us out of here." Panza doubled back, and landed another thwack on Chalmers' ribs.
Harold Shea stepped in and grabbed the squire's wrists. He twisted both of them outward until the little man dropped his stick. "Enough, sir squire," he said. "I'll take care of this now." He looked at Chalmers, who squatted, panting, at his side. "Go ahead, Doc."
Chalmers pulled Florimel's handkerchief out of the little leather travel bag that hung at his waist, and with it a feather Shea suspected of having chicken origins. He drew two circles side by side in the dirt, with an intersection between them like the set-and-subset diagrams children used in grade school.
The older psychologist carefully placed his wife's handkerchief, the feather, and a strand of his own hair into the intersection formed by the two circles, then asked Shea for a hair from his head. Shea complied. Chalmers dropped that into his intersection, too. Then he chanted:
Nothing happened. Chalmers waited. Shea waited. Even Sancho Panza stopped struggling and watched the circles in the dirt with keen interest.
When the silence stretched to uncomfortable lengths, Chalmers muttered, "That should have worked." He stood and turned to his associate and the still-captive squire, brushed the dirt from the knees of his garment, and fixed both men with a withering glance.
"That should have worked. Dammit," he muttered. "It's just like the chicken."
Shea saw a minor puff of sulfurous smoke erupt behind his partner, and a small, furious ball of feathers materialized with a squawk. It could have been the chicken the villagers had given Shea the day before— except that bird, feet still firmly tied, was digging bugs out of the weeds not twenty feet away.
Chalmers jerked around and stared down at the chicken he had conjured. He squawked louder than it had.
Harold Shea shook his head and turned Sancho Panza loose. The little squire had lost interest in flattening Chalmers. With a bewildered expression on his face, he looked one final time at the mysterious chicken, then hurried to his master's side. Shea watched him.
Panza tapped Quixote on the shoulder, spoke to him, shook him lightly—and finally wrung his hands and stared at the ancient, scrawny man who had once been a knight.
Don Quixote did not seem to know that Sancho was even there. The one-time knight stood in frozen silence, staring down at himself. He's in shock, Harold Shea thought. The emaciated old man slowly reached up and lifted the dented washbasin off of his head, and held it in front of his face. In the first faint light of dawn, Shea could see the glimmering wetness of tears that etched their way down the furrows of the old man's cheeks. He watched as Quixote studied his decrepit steed, Rosinante, then turned his attention to his skinny arms and gnarled hands. He watched as the old man, head hanging, shoulders stooped, mounted the swaybacked horse with arthritic caution, and began to ride away from his squire and the two psychologists, further into the hills.
Harold Shea felt as if he had witnessed the vandalism of a magnificent cathedral, and its replacement with a concrete block service station. Pity wrenched his heart. "By God," he swore softly, "I would not have you any other way than as the greatest knight in the world, on the greatest horse alive, whether Chalmers was right or not."
Lightning flashed again, and thunder cracked. A sheet of light enveloped the old man, and inside, forms flickered—and out of the light rode none other than the great Don Quixote on his mighty warsteed.
The knight pulled his steed in and held out one gauntleted hand. He looked long and hard at the horse and its gleaming trappings. Then without warning, he leveled his lance at Chalmers and charged. "Traitorous enchanter!" he yelled. "Two-faced fiend, who would magick me even while I fought as your champion! Now you shall reap your just reward!" The point of the lance dipped lower, aimed for Chalmers' middle.
Sancho Panza was a statue, wide-eyed with amazement. Reed Chalmers froze, and his face drained of color. Quixote galloped across the uneven field before Shea could even cry out a protest. The point of the great knight's lance closed the space to its target, crashed with thunderous impact into Chalmers belly—
—And shattered like glass into a thousand shards that rained shrapnel across the hillside. Rosinante flew backward onto his hindquarters from the force of the impact, and for the second time that morning, the knight Quixote was unhorsed.
Reed Chalmers looked down at his abdomen, ran his fingers over the unmarked surface, and whispered, "It didn't touch me." Then he fainted.
Now I'm in shock, Harold Shea thought bemusedly, while the world spun around him in fuzzy, loopy little circles. What just happened?
Quixote staggered to his feet and raised one mailed fist to the heavens. "After what this scoundrel has done to me, God, you cannot keep me to my oath!"
"OH, YES I CAN," a disembodied kettledrum voice thundered. "I HAVE A PERSONAL INTEREST IN THIS CASE."
Yipes, Shea thought, divine intervention comes home. And I wish it hadn't. He found the thought of a personally interested deity who made housecalls unnerving. It made agnosticism a hard line to hold.
Shea hurried to Chalmers' side, and knelt next to the unconscious man. He checked for a pulse. Chalmers had one—it was a bit fast, but strong and regular. Shea sighed with relief, until a pair of armored legs moved into his field of vision. Shea looked up ... and up, into the scowling face of the knight. "God will not permit me to break my oath by killing him," Quixote said, "but I will aid him no more. My squire packs our belongings, and we shall leave you when he is done."