Night Mare (16 page)

“Surely so!”

“And now he is gone, or temporarily incapacitated—that is one illusion I must cling to!—and I can play the role I am supposed to: that of the grieving, loyal wife. Because it is true. A marriage of convenience turned secretly real— for me, at least. And I can do what I can for the good of Xanth, because that is what
he
would be doing, and now I can only realize myself through him.” She grimaced. “I, the original feminist! How utter was my fall, the worse because it is unrecognized.”

“I don’t see that as a fall,” Imbri said.

“You are a mare.” But the Queen smiled, accepting the comfort. “I would give anything to have him back, on any basis, or to join him in his ensorcellment. But it seems that is not my decision to make, any more than any of the other crucial decisions of my life have been.”

Queen Iris sank then into a deeper sleep, and Imbri let her descend below the threshold of dreams, gaining her precious rest. Imbri had not suspected the depth and nature of Iris’s feeling and had not sought such knowledge, but was glad she had learned of it. Truly, human folk were more complex than equine folk!

In the same period of a few days, King Dor’s hastily marshaled and outfitted army prepared to meet the enemy onslaught. Everyone knew that King Trent could have organized an effective campaign—but King Trent was sadly out of it. People lacked confidence in Dor—but he was the only King Xanth had. Was he enough?

Dor accompanied the army north, along with his private bodyguard composed of long-term boyhood friends. He rode Chet Centaur, who was armed with a fine bow, spear, and sword, and who could magically convert boulders to pebbles, a process he called calculus. Chet’s sister Chem was along, too, for her magic talent of map projection was invaluable for charting the positions of Xanth and Nextwave troops. Chem carried Grundy the Golem, whose ability to converse with living creatures complemented King Dor’s ability to talk with inanimate things; together they could amass a lot of information in a hurry. Smash the Ogre also came. He now resembled a large, somewhat brutish man, for he was half man by birth. But when the occasion required, he could still manifest as the most fearsome of ogres. Since he could not readily keep pace with the centaurs afoot in man form, Imbri served as his steed. She knew Smash from the time be bad visited the world of the gourd. He had terrorized the walking skeletons, but had been gentle with her, and in a devious manner she owed her half soul to him.

Of course, Imbri knew Chem in an even closer manner. It was half of the centaur filly’s soul she had. This was the first time Imbri had encountered her since that exchange.

They trotted side by side, following King Dor and Chet. Chem was a pretty brown creature with flowing hair and tail and a slender, well-formed human upper torso. Imbri liked her, of course, but felt guilty about the soul. So as they moved, she conversed by dream privately with the filly.

“Do you remember me, Chem? I have half your soul.”

“I remember. You helped us escape the Void. Without you, we would have been doomed, for nothing except night mares can travel out of that awful hole. Now you are helping Chameleon, aren’t you?”

“She doesn’t like battle, but wants to safeguard her son Dor, so she delegated me to carry the ogre. I think that makes sense, in her fashion.”

“Yes, I know. My folks wanted me to stay at Castle Roogna with the wives—Queen Iris, Queen Irene, Chameleon, and Smash’s wife Tandy, who is as nice a girl as I know. But I’m not married, and I don’t feel quite at home with the wifely types. They live mostly for their males.”

Imbri remembered her conversation with Queen Iris. “They seem to like it that way.”

“I can’t see it. So I persuaded King Dor he needed me at the front”

Imbri’s mental image of another female centaur laughed. She liked this creature better than ever! “Now that I’m a day mare, I suppose I should return your soul—”

“No, it was a fair exchange, as these things go,” Chem said. “As I said, without your help, and the help of those other two night mares, Crises and Vapors—without them, Smash, Tandy, and I would not have been able to resume our normal lives. My half soul is regenerating nicely now, and I hope your half soul is doing the same.”

“It may be,” Imbri said. “I don’t know how to judge. I was always a soulless creature before.”

“Some of the best creatures are soulless,” Chem said. “I don’t know why souls should be limited to human and part-human creatures. Some dragons are more worthy than some Mundanes.” Her gaze flicked to Imbri’s rider. “And even some ogres are good people.”

“I caught that!” Grundy exclaimed. “They’re talking about you, Smash, in dreams.”

“And why not?” Smash inquired mildly. “They’re friends of mine.”

“Aw, you don’t even think like an ogre any more. You’re no fun,” the golem complained. The others laughed.

“And there may be some reason for you to have that half soul,” Chem concluded privately in Imbri’s dream. “Often these things turn out to have greater meaning or direction than we at first appreciate. I like to think that someday my shared soul will help you as greatly as your assistance helped me. Obviously it won’t rescue you from the Void, but—.”

They spied a harpy sitting on a branch of a pepper tree. The marching troops had skirted this tree generously, so as not to catch the sneezes. The harpy seemed to be immune, perhaps because she was already fouled up with dirt. “Hey, birdbrain!” Grundy called in his usual winning manner. “How about doing some aerial reconnaissance for us?”

“For you?” the harpy screeched indignantly. She had the head and breasts of a woman and the wings and body of a buzzard. This one was fairly young; were it not for the caked grime, her face and form might have been tolerable. “Why should I do anything for your ilk, you blankety blank?”

Imbri and Chem stiffened, the latter’s delicate shell-pink ears reddening, and Smash turned his head, for the blanks had not been exactly blank. Harpies were as foul of mouth as they were of body, and that was about the limit of foulness in Xanth.

“For the greater good of Xanth, fowlmouth,” Grundy called back, being the fastest to recover from the verbal horror that had spewed like festering garbage from the harpy’s mouth. Indeed, he seemed to be mentally filing the terms for future use, though there were few if any occasions where he might safely do so. “To help stop the invading Mundanes from ravaging everything.”

“The greater good of Xanth can go blank up a blankety blank, sidewise,” the harpy retorted. “It’s no blankety doubleblank to me.”

Again it took a moment for the terminology to clear. Even the pepper tree was turning red. If there was one thing harpies were good at, it was bad language.

“There will also be a lot of carrion after the battle,” Grundy said. “Gooey, gooky corpses steaming in the sun, swelling and popping open, guts strewn about—”

The harpy’s eyes lighted with dismal fires. “Oh, slurp!” she exclaimed. “It makes me unbearably hungry!”

“I thought it might,” Grundy said smugly. Strangely enough, no one else looked hungry. “All you have to do is fly by the enemy positions and report where they are and how many—”

“That’s too much blank blank work!”

“Spiked eyeballs, chopped livers, severed feet—”

“I’ll do it!” the harpy screeched, licking her dirty lips. She launched from the tree, stirring up a huge cloud of pepper, and flapped heavily north.

“But the Mundanes may shoot her down with an arrow,” Chem protested without much conviction.

“The smell will keep them beyond arrow range,” Grundy said facetiously. It occurred to Imbri, however, that he might be right; it took some time to get used to harpy scent.

Now they came to the Gap Chasm and proceeded across. This was the only visible two-way bridge, so was the most used; it would have to be the first to go if the Mundane Wave got this far.

The Gap Dragon was present; it raged and reached upward, but the Gap was too deep to make this a serious threat “Go choke on your own tail, steamsnoot!” Grundy called down to it, and dropped a cherry bomb he had plucked carefully from the Castle Roogna orchard tree. The dragon snapped at it and swallowed it whole. There was a muffled boom as the bomb detonated, and smoke shot out of the dragon’s ears. But it seemed to make no difference; the monster still raged and pursued them. The Gap Dragon was tough; no doubt about it!

By the time they were across, the harpy was back. “There are about three hundred of them,” she reported. “They’re headed toward the nickelpede crevices. I don’t like that; the nickels don’t leave anything behind worth eating.”

Chem concentrated, and her magic map formed. It showed the nickelpede crevices, a minor network of cracks in the ground. “Where exactly are the Mundanes?” she asked.

The harpy gave her the specifics, and Chem plotted them on her map. Then the harpy flew off, explaining that she had trouble with the smell of the human folk. Now they had a clear notion of the disposition of the enemy troops. “But there are only three hundred of them here,” Chem remarked. “That suggests they are holding back half their force, perhaps as a reserve.”

They drew abreast of King Dor to advise him. “Yes, we’ll try to drive them into the nickelpede crevices,” he agreed. “If they take cover there, they’ll regret it.”

But Dor’s troops were out of condition and not young; their average age was near fifty. Progress was slow. They would not reach the Mundane Wave before it cleared the nickelpede region. Such a fine opportunity lost!

“We shall have to establish our position and wait for them,” King Dor decided. “As I recall, there’s a love spring north of the Gap—”

“There is,” Chem agreed, projecting her map. “Right here.” She pointed to the spot. “We’re already past it, and the path by it is one-way; we can’t reach it from here.”

“That’s fine; I don’t want to reach it. I want to avoid it. I don’t want my troops drinking from it.”

Grundy laughed. “That’s for sure! But maybe if we fetched some of that water for the Mundanes, they’d immediately breed with any female creature they saw—”

“No,” Dor said. “That’s not funny, Grundy. We won’t fight that way.”

The golem scowled. “You can be sure the Mundanes would fight that way! They have no civilized scruples. That’s what makes them so tough.”

“But we do have civilized scruples,” King Dor said. “Perhaps that is what distinguishes us from the Mundanes. We shall maintain that distinction.”

“Yes, your Majesty,” the golem agreed with disgust.

“What other difficult aspects are there between us and the Nextwave?” King Dor asked Chem.

“There’s a river that changes anyone who drinks from it into a fish,” she answered, pointing it out on the map. “From what Ichabod said, I think they’ve encountered an arm of that river farther north, but they may not realize it’s the same. And over here is the Peace Forest, where people become so peaceful they simply lie down and sleep forever—”

“That won’t give the Mundanes any trouble,” Grundy said. “They’re not peaceful at all!”

“But we should keep our troops clear of it,” King Dor said. “And the river. We’ll have to find a safe supply of water. Anything else?

“Just the nickelpedes,” Chem answered. “But the Mundanes will be past that region and the peace pines. The river is probably where we’ll meet them.”

King Dor sighed. “So be it. I hope we can stop them without too much bloodshed.”

No one replied. Imbri knew they shared one major concern: did this young, untried King have what it took to halt the devastating incursion of a Mundane Wave of conquest? They would know the answer all too soon.

To the gratified surprise of all, King Dor did seem to know what he was doing. He ranged his troops along the river, having them dig trenches and throw up embankments with brush piled up in front so that the archers could sight on the enemy without exposing themselves. He had the spearmen ranged in front of the archers, to protect them from charging enemy troops, and the swordsmen in front of the spearmen. “Do not break formation until your captains give the order,” King Dor concluded. “They outnumber us; they may try a false retreat, to draw us out, so they can fall on us in the open. Beware! Do not assume that those who lack magic are not dangerous.”

The men chuckled. They were all former Mundanes and lacked magic themselves. The King had paid them a kind of compliment.

Now they just had to wait for the arrival of the enemy. The harpy, eager for the spoils of battle, continued her spy overflights, so everyone knew the Mundanes were not trying anything fancy. They were marching straight down the main path, without any attempt at secrecy. They had no advance scouts and sent no detachments out to flank a potential enemy force. In this respect they were indeed merely a horde charging down the route of least resistance, at greatest speed. Their progress was marked by flame and smoke; they left mainly ashes in their path. The North Village was gone, and it would be long before the centaur range was green again.

Imbri hurt, thinking of all that wanton destruction of excellent pasture. Yet she could understand the Mundanes’ rationale; the fire destroyed the unknown threats of magic and routed hiding magic creatures, making the Mundanes feel more secure.

“I don’t trust this,” Chet Centaur said. “Either they’re criminally careless or they have no respect at all for the opposition. Or it’s a ruse of some sort. Where are the rest of their troops?”

“Maybe they plan to take Castle Roogna before we know they’re coming,” King Dor said, perplexed. “Mundanes are unsubtle folk, but we can’t afford to underestimate them. All I want is to stop them today. If they have to forage in their own burned-out territory, they’ll soon be hungry.”

“And thirsty,” Grundy added, eyeing the river.

“I suppose transformation is kinder than slaughter,” King Dor agreed with a sigh. “Certainly King Trent believed that it was.”

It was late in the afternoon when the Nextwave arrived. The motley crew forged up to the river, not even noticing the embankments beyond it. There was no action by Dor’s army; his captains would give the attack order only on his signal. Imbri was much impressed; the young King had amazing grasp of the strategy of battle. It was almost as if he had fought Mundanes before—and of course that was impossible, as there had been no Wave in his lifetime, or in the lifetimes of his parents or grandparents. Only Imbri herself had ever seen a Wave surge into Xanth, as far as she knew, though maybe Good Magician Humfrey was old enough. Well, there were the zombies and ghosts, who had existed in their ageless manner for centuries, but they didn’t really count.