Night Mare Read online

  "A most delightful story!" the man said, patting Imbri on the shoulder. She felt good, and felt foolish for the feeling. What did she care for the opinion of a human man? Perhaps her new solidity made her more susceptible to the opinions of solid creatures. "This is a fascinating derivation. Faux Pass--the giant misstep. I suspect that term will in due course enter the language, for many people make missteps of one nature or another."

  They emerged to the north. The plain spread out, filled with lush tall grass. Imbri was delighted; here she could graze her fill.

  "I think I see a print," the man said. "Over there." He made a gesture.

  Imbri hesitated, uncertain which way he meant, as his gesture had been confusing. She did want to find the day horse; he was such a handsome animal--and he was also male. She veered to the left.

  "No, wrong way," the man said. "There." He gestured confusingly again.

  She veered right.

  "No, still wrong," he said.

  Imbri stopped. "I can't tell where you mean," she projected, irritated, her dream girl frowning prettily through strands of mussed-up hair.

  "Not your fault," the man said. "I love your little imaginary pictures; you have no trouble communicating. My verbal directions are too nonspecific, and you evidently are not familiar with my human gestures. But I think I can clarify them." He jumped down, removing something from his clothing. It was a little brass stick with cords attached to each end. "Put this in your mouth, behind your front set of teeth." He held the stick up to her face, sidewise, nudging it at her mouth, so that she had either to take it or to back off. She opened her mouth doubtfully, and set it in, between her front and back teeth, where there was the natural equine gap. Human beings did not have such a gap, which was another one of their problems; they could not chew nearly as well as horses could, since everything tended to mush up together in their mouths, unappetizingly.

  "Now I will tug on these reins," he explained. "That will show you exactly where to go. Here, I'll demonstrate." He jumped on her back again and got the two cords reaching from the metal bit to his hands. "Turn that way," he said, tugging in the right rein.

  The bit pulled back against her hind teeth uncomfortably. To ease the pressure, Imbri turned her head to the right. "You've got it!" the man cried. "You are a very smart horse!"

  It had not been intelligence; it had been discomfort. "I don't like this device," Imbri projected.

  "You don't? I'm so sorry. Let's turn to the left now." He tugged at the other rein, sending a twinge to that side of her jaw.

  But Imbri had had enough. She balked, planting all four feet firmly on the ground and trying to spit out the brass bit. It tasted awful, anyway. But the reins held it in place, annoyingly. She sent a fierce dream at him, of her dream girl self gesturing in righteous ire, tresses flouncing. "Get off my back, man!"

  "You must address me by my proper title," the man said. "I am known as the Horseman."

  The Horseman! Suddenly Imbri's misplaced memory returned. Her message was "beware the Horseman"--and now she had an inkling of its meaning.

  "Beware the Horseman, eh?" the man repeated, and Imbri realized she had spoken her thought in the dream. Angrily she exploded her dream girl image into a roil of smoke, but this did not daunt the man. "So you carry a message of warning about me! What a fortunate coincidence this is, mare. I certainly can not afford to let you go now. I must take you home with me and keep you confined so that you can not betray me."

  Imbri did not know what to do, so she continued to do nothing. She had unwittingly put herself in the power of the one person she should have avoided!

  "Time to go home," the Horseman said. "I'll come back and catch the day horse later; you are too valuable a captive to let escape. I understand you night mares can pass through solid rock at night, and even turn invisible. That means I must get you safely corralled before darkness comes. Move, move, mare!"

  Imbri refused to move. It was true; he could not hold her at night even if he remained awake and alert. If he slept, she would send him a dream so bad he would be paralyzed. Time was on her side. But she had no intention of obliging him one moment longer than necessary. Her feet would remain planted here until she figured out how to dump him.

  "I have another little device that may amuse you," the Horseman said. "It makes horses go." And he banged his heels into her flanks.

  Pain lanced through her. There were knives on his boots! Imbri was leaping forward before she realized it, jolted by the shock. A horse's natural response to fright or pain was to bolt, as running was normally the most effective defense.

  "You appreciate my spurs?" the Horseman inquired. He drew on the left rein, forcing her to curve around that way.

  Imbri tried to slow, but the spurs stung her again, making her run faster. She tried to veer right, but the bit in her mouth cut cruelly and she had to go left. The Horseman had subjected her to his awful will!

  No wonder the day horse had fled this terrible man! If only she had realized the Horseman's nature! If only she had not foolishly forgotten her warning message!

  But these things had come to pass, and she was paying the price of her neglect. If she ever got out of this fix, she would be a wiser mare!

  The Horseman rode her back through the Faux Pass and west along the south side of the mountain range. Imbri stopped fighting her captor and found it amazingly easy to yield to his directives. The Horseman did not hurt her unless she resisted.

  Imbri cursed herself for her inability to resist. But she was rapidly becoming conditioned to the will of the Horseman. When she tried to resist, he punished her; when she obeyed, he praised her. He seemed so sure of himself, so reasonable, so consistent, while she seemed, even to herself, like a poorly mannered animal. For now, until she figured out an effective course of independence, she had to go along.

  But capitulation was not enough. He wanted information, too. "Who gave you that warning to beware of me?" he asked.

  Imbri hesitated. The Horseman touched her sore flanks with his awful spurs--they weren't actually knives, they just felt like it--and she decided that there was no harm in answering. She sent a dreamlet, representing herself in woman form, in shackles, her side bleeding from abrasions, and with a brass bar in her mouth. "Ve commands va Powers of va Night," the woman said around the bit.

  "Do not tease me, mare," the Horseman said, touching her again with the spurs. "Your dreams can speak clearly."

  She had to give up that ploy. "He commands the Powers of the Night," she repeated clearly. "The Night Stallion. He assigns the dreams to be delivered. He sent the message."

  "The Night Stallion," the Horseman repeated. "Naturally you equines revert to the herd in the wild state. But he is confined to the night?"

  "To the gourd," she clarified. "It keeps us secure by day." Now she wished she had never left it!

  "Explain," he said. "The only gourd I know is the hypnogourd that has a little peephole. Anyone who sets eye to that is instantly hypnotized and can not move or speak until someone else breaks the connection."

  "That is the same," Imbri's tattered dream girl said, looking woeful. She hated giving so much information to the enemy, but didn't see how this particular news would help this man. He already knew better than to peek into a gourd, unfortunately. "We night mares are the only creatures who can pass freely in and out of the gourd. All gourds are the same; all open onto the same World of Night. When a person looks into any gourd, his body freezes but his spirit takes form inside and must thread its way through our labyrinth of entertainments. Those who remain too long risk losing their souls; then their bodies will never be functional again."

  "So it's a kind of trap, a prison," he said thoughtfully. "I suspected some such; I'm glad you are choosing to tell me the truth, mare. How many spirits can it contain?"

  "Any number. The gourd is as large as Xanth in its fashion. It has to be, to contain dreams for every person in Xanth, every night, no two dreams the same. To us in the gourd, the rest of
Xanth seems small enough to carry under one of your arms."

  "Yes, I see that now. Very interesting. We can carry your world around, and you can carry ours around. It's all relative." After a moment he had a new question. "To whom were you to deliver your message?"

  Now Imbri resisted, being sure this would affect the conduct of the war. But the Horseman dug in his spurs again, and the pain became so terrible she had to tell. She had never had to endure pain before, for it didn't exist in immaterial form; she couldn't handle it. "I was to go to Chameleon with the message for the King."

  "Who is Chameleon?"

  "The mother of Prince Dor, the next King. She is an ugly woman."

  "Why not take the message directly to the King?" The spurs were poised.

  "I don't know!" The dream girl flinched, putting her hands to her sides.

  The spurs touched. Desperately, Imbri amplified. "My mission was to be secret! Maybe it was a ruse, to report to the woman, who would relay the message to the King. No one would suspect I was liaison to the gourd."

  "The King is important, then? Nothing can be done without his directive?"

  "The King rules the human concerns of Xanth," Imbri agreed. "He is like the Night Stallion. His word is law. Without his word, there would be no law."

  "Yes, that makes sense," the Horseman decided, and the spurs did not strike again. "If you reported directly to the King, the enemy might catch on, and know the warning had been given. That could nullify much of its effect. Still, I think it better yet to nullify all its effect by preventing the message from being delivered at all. Because, of course, it is an apt warning; your Night Stallion evidently has good intelligence."

  "He is the smartest of horses," Imbri agreed in a fragmentary dreamlet. "He knows more than he ever says, as does Good Magician Humfrey."

  "Intelligence, as in gathering data about the enemy," the Horseman clarified. "This is the activity I am currently engaged in. But, of course, your Stallion has the night mare network. You mares were peeking into our brains as we slept, weren't you? No secrets from your kind."

  "No, we only deliver the dreams," Imbri protested, her pride in her former profession overriding her wish to deceive the Horseman. "We can't tell what's in people's minds. If we could, I would never have let you put this bit in my mouth." That brass tasted awful, and not just physically!

  "How, then, did you know about me? I know you knew, because of your message of warning about me."

  "I don't know. The Night Stallion knows. He has a research department, so he can tell where to target the bad dreams. But he can't usually tell waking people. There's very little connection between the night world and the day world."

  "So I now understand. Many secrets are buried in the depths of night! But what of this Good Magician, who you say also knows a great deal? Why hasn't he warned Xanth about me?"

  "Magician Humfrey only gives information in return for one year's service by the one who asks," Imbri said, "Nobody asks him anything if he can help it."

  "Ah, zealously guarded parameters," the Horseman said, seeming to like this information. "Or the mercenary motive. So for the truth about Xanth's situation, a person must either pay a prohibitive fee or peer into the peephole of a gourd--whereupon he is confined and can not extricate himself by his own effort. It is a most interesting situation. The people are almost entirely dependent on the King for information and leadership. If anything were to happen to King Trent--" He paused a moment. "His successor, Prince Dor--is he competent?"

  "All I know is what I have picked up from people's dreams," Imbri temporized.

  "Certainly. And their dreams reflect their deepest concerns. What about Prince Dor?"

  "He has hardly had any experience," she sent unwillingly. "When he was a teenager, about eight years ago, King Trent went on vacation and left Dor in charge. He had to get his friends to help, and finally the Zombie Master had to come and take over until King Trent returned. There were a lot of bad dreams then; we mares were overloaded with cases and almost ran our tails off. It was not a very good time for Xanth."

  "So Prince Dor is not noted for competence," the Horseman said. "And next in the line of succession is the Zombie Master, whom the people don't feel comfortable with. So there really is no proper successor to King Trent." He lapsed into thoughtful silence, guiding Imbri by nudges of his knees. When he pushed on one side, he wanted her to turn away from that side. He was not wantonly cruel, she understood; all he required was the subordination of her will to his in every little detail.

  That was, of course, one thing she couldn't stand. At the moment she could not escape him, but she would find a way sometime. He couldn't keep the bit and spurs on her forever, and the moment he slipped, she would be gone-- with a whole lot more news about him than she had had originally. Beware the Horseman, indeed!

  They came to the Horseman's camp. There were two men there. Mundane by their look. "Found me a horse!" the Horseman called jovially.

  "Where's the other horse?" one asked.

  "He bolted. But I'll get him tomorrow. This one's better. She's a converted night mare."

  "Sure enough," the Mundane agreed uncertainly, eyeing Imbri. It seemed he thought the reference to night mare was a joke. Mundanes could be very stupid about magic. "Better off without the white horse," the other Mundane said. "For all the riding you get on him and all the feeding you give him, he's never around when you need him."

  "He's got spirit, that's all," the Horseman said with a tolerant gesture. "I like a spirited animal. Now put a hobble on this one; she's a literal spirit, and she's not tame yet."

  One of the henchmen came with a rope. Imbri shied away nervously, but the Horseman threatened her again with his awful spurs, and she had to stand still. The henchman tied the rope to her two forefeet, with only a short length between them, so that she could stand or walk carefully but could not run. What a humiliating situation!

  They put her in a barren pen where there was a grimy bucket of water. They dumped half-cured hay in for her to chew. The stuff was foul, but she was so hungry now that she had to eat it, though she feared it would give her colic. No wonder the day horse had bolted!

  All day she remained confined, while the Mundanes went about their brutish business elsewhere. Imbri drank the bad water, finished off the bad hay, and slept on her feet in the normal manner of her kind, her tail constantly swishing the bothersome flies away. She had plenty of time to consider her folly. But she knew the night would free her, and that buoyed her spirit, her half soul.

  Now she meditated on that. Few of her kind possessed any part of any soul, and those who obtained one generally didn't keep it, as the Night Stallion had reminded her. Yet she clung to her soul as if it were most important. Was she being foolish? Imbri had carried the half-human Smash the Ogre out of the gourd and out of the Void, but it was not any part of his soul she had. It was half the soul of a centaur filly. That soul had changed her outlook, making her smarter and more sensitive to the needs of others. That had been bad for her business and had finally cost her, her profession. But as she gradually mastered the qualities of the soul, she became more satisfied with it. Now she knew there was more to life than feeding and sleeping and doing her job. She was not certain what more there was, but it was well worth searching for. Perhaps the rainbow would have the answer; one look at the celestial phenomenon might make her soul comprehensible. Yet that search had led her into the privation of the moment.

  As evening approached, the Horseman and the two henchmen appeared and started hauling firewood logs from the forest. The wood fairly glowed with eagerness to burn. They threw a flame-vine on the pile, and burn it did. The fire blazed high, turning the incipient shadows to the brightness of day.

  Suddenly Imbri realized what they were doing. The Mundanes were keeping the pen too light for her to assume her nocturnal powers! As long as that fire burned, she could not escape!

  With despair she watched as they hauled more logs. They had enough wood to carry the
m through the night. She would not be able to dematerialize.

  The sun tired and dropped at last to the horizon, making the distant trees blaze momentarily from its own fire. Imbri wondered whether it descended in the same place each night, or whether it came down in different locations, doing more damage to the forest. She had never thought about this before, since the sun had been no part of her world, or she would have trotted over there and checked the burned region directly.

  The fire blazed brighter than ever in the pen, malevolently consuming her precious darkness. It sent sparks up into the sky to rival the stars. Perhaps they were stars; after all, the little specks of light had to originate somewhere, and new ones would be needed periodically to replace the old ones that wore out. The Mundanes took turns watching Imbri and dumping more wood on the fire as it waned.

  Waned, she thought. That jogged a nagging notion. She wished it had waned this night, putting out the fire. Waned? Rained; that was it. If only a good storm would come and douse everything. But the sky remained distressingly clear.

  Slowly the henchman on guard nodded. He was sleeping on the job, and she was not about to wake him--but it didn't matter, because the fire was more than bright enough to keep her hobbled, whether he woke or slept. She might hurl a bad dream at him, but that would only bestir him with fright, making him alert again. She would have to deal with that fire first. But how, when she was hobbled?

  Then she realized how to start. She approached the fire and put her front feet forward, trying to ignite the rope that hobbled her. But the blaze was too fierce; She could not get close enough to burn the rope without burning herself.

  She turned about and tried to scrape dirt onto the blaze with a hind hoof. But the ground was too solid; she could not get a good gouge. She seemed helpless.