chafed by the bouncing; she would be sore for days! But at least she was getting there. Her bad dream slipped into oblivion for a while, as dreams tended to, fading in and out as me run continued.
Abruptly she woke. A dark castle loomed in the fading moonlight. They had arrived!
Barely in time, too, for now dawn was looming behind them. The nightmare could not enter the light of day. In fact, the mare was already fading out, for regardless of dawn, it was no longer bound when Tandy left the dreamstate. The sleeping pills must have finished their nap, and Tandy had finished hers with them. No-the stones were mostly gone; they must have bounced out one at a time in the course of the rough ride, and now only one was left, not enough to do the job.
In a moment the mare vanished entirely, freed by circumstance, and Tandy found herself sprawled on the ground, battered and wide-eyed.
She was stiff and sore and tired. It had not been a restful sleep at all. Her legs felt swollen and numb from thigh to ankle. Her hair was plastered to her scalp with the cold sweat of nocturnal fear. It had been a horrendous ordeal. But at least she was in sight of her destination.
She got painfully to her feet and staggered toward the edifice as the blinding sun hefted itself ambitiously above the trees. The Land of Xanth brightened about her, and the creatures of day began to stir. Dew sparkled. It was all strangely pretty.
But as she came to the moat and saw that there was the stirring of some awful creature within it, orienting on her, she had a horrible revelation. She knew what Castle Roogna looked like, from descriptions her father had made. He had told her wonderful stories about it, from the time she was a baby onward, about the orchard with its cherry-bomb trees, bearing cherries a person dared not eat, and shoes of all types growing on shoe trees, and all manner of other wonders too exaggerated to be believed. Only an idiot or a hopeless visionary would believe in the Land of Xanth, anyway! Yet she almost knew the individual monsters of the moat by name, and the same for the guardian zombies who rested in the graveyard, awaiting the day when Xanth needed defense. She knew the spires and turrets and all, and the ghosts who dwelt within them. She had a marvelously detailed mental map of Castle Roogna-and this present castle did not conform. This was the wrong castle.
Oh, woe! Tandy stood in dull, defeated amazement. All her effort, her last vestige of strength and hope, and her deviously laid plans to reach her father lay in ruins. What was she to do now? She was lost in Xanth, without food or water, so tired she could hardly move, with no way to return home. What would her mother think?
Something stirred within the castle. The drawbridge lowered, coming to rest across the small moat. A lovely woman walked out of the castle, subduing the reaching monster with a trifling gesture of her hand, her voluminous robe blowing in the morning breeze. She saw Tandy and came toward her-and Tandy ,saw with a new shock of horror that the woman had no face. Her hood contained a writhing mass of snakes, and emptiness where human features should have been. Surely the nightmare had saved the worst dream for last!
"Dear child," the faceless woman said. "Come with me. We have been expecting you."
Tandy stood frozen, unable even to muster the energy for a tantrum. What horrors lay within this dread castle? "It is all right," the snake-headed woman said reassuringly. "We consider that your phenomenal effort in catching and riding the nightmare constitutes sufficient challenge to reach this castle. You will not be subject to the usual riddles of admission."
They were going to take her inside! Tandy tried to run, but her strength was gone. She was a spunky girl, but she had been through too much this night. She fainted.
Chapter 2. Smash Ogre
Smash tromped through the blackboard jungle of Xanth, looking at the pictures on the blackboards because, like all his kind, he couldn't read the words. He was in a hurry because the foul weather he was enjoying showed signs of abating, and he wanted to get where be was going before it did. When he encountered a fallen beech tree across the path, he simply hurled it out of the way, letting the beech-sand fall in a minor sandstorm. When he discovered that an errant river had jumped its channel and was washing out the path and threatening to clean the grunge off his feet and make his toenails visible for the first time in weeks, he grabbed that stream by its tail and flexed it so hard that it splatted right back into its proper channel and lay there quivering and bubbling in fear. When an ornery bullhorn blocked the way, threatening to ram its horn most awkwardly into the posterior of anyone who distracted it. Smash did more than that. He picked it up by the horn and blew a horrendous blast that nearly turned the creature inside out. Never again would that bullhorn bother travelers on that path; it had been cowed.
This sort of thing was routine for Smash, for he was the most powerful and stupid of all Xanth's vaguely manlike creatures. The ground trembled nervously when he tromped, and the most ferocious monsters thought it prudent to catch errands elsewhere until he was gone. Naturally the errands fled with indecent haste, wanting no part of this. In fact, no creature with any wit at all wanted any part of this. For Smash was an ogre.
He was twice the height of an ordinary man, was broad in proportion, and his knots of hairy muscles stood out like the boles of tormented old trees. Some creatures might have considered him ugly, but these were the less imaginative individuals. Smash was not ugly; he was horrendous. By no stretch of imagination could any ogre be considered less than grotesque, and Smash was an appalling specimen of the breed. There had not been a more revolting creature on this path since a basilisk had crossed it Yet Smash, like most powerfully ugly creatures, had a rather sweet interior, hidden deep inside where it would not embarrass him. He had been raised among human beings, had gone on an adventure with
Prince Dor and Princess Irene, and had made friends with centaurs. He had, in short, been somewhat civilized by his environment, incredible as this might seem. Most people believed that no ogre was circled, decided the event must have been a fluke, and started to come in for another engagement. Ogres did not have a monopoly on stupidity!
Smash faced the lion-bodied bird. "Scram, ham!" he bellowed.
The blast of the bellow tore out half a dozen pinfeathers and two flight feathers, and sent the griffin spinning out of control. The creature righted itself again, but this time decided to seek its fortune elsewhere. Thus did it finally do something halfway smart, yielding the stupidity title to the ogre.
Smash took a flying leap into the center of the shoefly pie. Leatherlike pastry crust flew up. The ogre grabbed a big handful of the delicious mess and stuffed it into his maw. He slurped noisily on a boot, chewed the tongue in half, and masticated on a pleasantly tough heel. Oh, it was good! He grabbed two more handfuls, crunching soles and sucking on laces and spitting the metal eyelets out like seeds. Soon all the pie was gone. He burped up a few metal nails, well satisfied.
After gorging, he went to a stream and slurped a few gallons of shivering cool water. As he lifted his head, he heard a faint call. "Help! Help!"
Smash looked about, his ears rotating like those of the animal he was, to orient on the sound. It came from a nearby brambleberry bush. He parted the foliage with one gross finger and peered in. There was a tiny manlike creature. "Help, please!" it cried.
Ogres had excellent eyesight, but this person was so small that Smash had to focus carefully to see him.
Her. It was naked and had-well, it was a tiny female imp. "Who you?" he inquired politely, his breath almost knocking her down.
"I'm Quieta the Imp," she cried, rearranging her hair, which his breath had violently disarrayed. "Oh, ogre, ogre-my father's trapped and will surely perish if not rescued soon. Please, I beseech you most prettily, help him escape, and I will reward you in my fashion."