Night Mare (6 page)

They climbed out of the moat and stood wetly before the stone structure. It was immense. Each vertical stone was the height of an ogre, crudely hewn, dauntingly massive.

They had little time to gawk. A monster came charging along the inner edge of the moat. The creature was horrendous. It had horse-hooves, a lion’s legs, elephantine ears, a bear’s muzzle, a monstrous mouth, and a branching antler projecting from the middle of its face. “Ho, intruders!” the beast bellowed in the voice of a man. “Flee as well as you can so I may have the pleasure of the hunt!”

Imbri recognized the monster. It was a centycore. This was a creature without mercy; no use to reason with it. They would need either to stop it or to escape it.

Imbri ran. She was a night mare; she could outrun anything. She left the centycore behind immediately.

Chameleon screamed and almost fell off. She was still an inexpert rider, not at all like the cruel Horseman, and could readily be dislodged by a sudden move. Imbri had to slow, letting the poor woman get a better hold on her mane. Then she accelerated again in time to avoid the monster.

Soon she had circled the region enclosed by the moat, being confined—and there was the monster again, facing her from in front. Imbri braked and reversed, angling her body to prevent Chameleon from being thrown off, and took off the other way. But she realized that this was no real escape; she would not be able to concentrate on anything else, such as exploring the megalithic structure and searching for clues to the whereabouts of the Good Magician’s castle, until she dealt with the centycore.

She slowed, letting the thing gain, though this terrified Chameleon, who was clinging to Imbri for dear life. Imbri hurled back a dreamlet picture of herself as a harpy hovering low, calling, “What are you doing here, monster?”

“Chasing you, you delectable equine!” the centycore bellowed back, snapping his teeth as punctuation.

Ask a foolish question! “We only came to seek the Good Magician,” Imbri sent.

“I don’t care what you seek; you will still taste exactly like horsemeat.” And the centycore lunged, his antler stabbing forward with ten points.

“Oh, I don’t like this!” Chameleon wailed. “I wish my husband Bink were here; nothing too terrible ever happens to him!”

That was surely an exaggeration, but Imbri understood her feeling. She accelerated, putting a little more distance between herself and the predator. How could she nullify the centycore? She knew she couldn’t fight it, as it was a magic beast, well able to vanquish anything short of a dragon. Even if she were able to fight it, she could not safely do so while Chameleon rode her; the woman would surely be thrown off and fall prey to the monster.

“Run through a wall!” Chameleon cried, sensing the problem.

“I can’t phase through solid things by day,” Imbri protested, her dreamlet showing herself as a mare bonking headfirst into a megalithic column and coming to a bonejarring stop. She felt Chameleon’s sympathetic hand pressure, though the accident had been only a dream; the woman tended to take the dreams too literally. “Only at night—and we have at least an hour of day left.” It seemed like an eternity, with the centycore pursuing.

But the description of the problem suggested the answer. Suppose they somehow made it prematurely dark? Then Imbri would be able to phase. For it wasn’t night itself, but darkness, that made her recover her full night mare properties; otherwise the Horseman’s fire would not have been able to hold her. The Powers of the Night came to whatever night there was, natural or artificial, whatever and whenever it was, for night was nothing but an extensive shadow. Just as day was nothing more than a very large patch of light.

How could they make it dark? Sometimes, Imbri understood, the moon eclipsed the sun, rudely shoving in front of it and blocking it out. But the sun always gave the moon such a scorching on the backside when the cheese did that, that the moon hardly ever did it again soon. There was very little chance of it happening right at this moment; the moon wasn’t even near the sun.

Sometimes a big storm blotted out most of the light, turning day to night. But there was no sign of such a storm at the moment. Count that out, too.

There was also smoke. A bad, smoldering blaze could stifle the day for a time. If they could gather the makings of a fire, then start it going—

“Chameleon,” Imbri sent in a dreamlet. “If I let you off behind a stone, so the monster doesn’t see you, could you make a fire?”

“A fire?” The woman had trouble seeing the relevance, naturally enough.

“To stop the centycore.”

“Oh.” Chameleon considered. “I do have a few magic matches that I use for cooking. All I have to do is rub them against something rough, and they burst into flame.”

“Excellent. Make a big fire—” Imbri projected a sequence in pictures: Chameleon hiding behind a stone column, dashing out when the monster wasn’t near, gathering pieces of wood and dry moss and anything else that might blaze. “A big, smoky fire. Keep it between you and the centycore.” Actually, the monster could go around the fire to get at the woman, but that wasn’t the point. The fire was merely the mechanism to generate smoke.

“I can do that,” Chameleon agreed. Imbri accelerated, leaving the centycore puffing behind, veered near a megalithic column, and braked as rapidly as she could without throwing her rider. Why hadn’t she tried a fast deceleration, or bucking, when the Horseman had ridden her? Because she, like a dumb filly, hadn’t thought of it. But she suspected it wouldn’t have worked anyway; the man understood horses too well to be deceived or outmaneuvered by one. Hence his name—the man who had mastered the horse.

Chameleon dismounted and scurried behind the megalith while Imbri galloped ostentatiously off, attracting the monster’s baleful attention. It worked; the centycore snorted after her, never glancing at the woman. It probably preferred the taste of horsemeat anyway. Imbri was relieved; if the monster had turned immediately on the woman, there could have been real trouble.

Imbri led the monster a merry chase, keeping tantalizingly close so as to monopolize its attention. Meanwhile, Chameleon dashed about, diligently gathering scraps of wood and armfuls of dry leaves and grass.

In due course the blaze started. A column of smoke puffed up.

“Ho!” the centycore exclaimed, pausing. “What’s this?”

Imbri paused with him, not wanting him to spy the woman behind the column. “That’s a fire, hornface,” she projected. “To burn you up.”

“It won’t burn me up!” the centycore snorted, the tines of his antler quivering angrily. “I will put it out!”

“You couldn’t touch it,” Imbri sent, her dreamlet showing the monster yelping as he got toasted on the rump by a burning brand.

“So you claim,” the centycore muttered, glancing at his posterior to make sure there was no burning brand being shoved at it. He approached the flame. Imbri skirted it to the other side and reached Chameleon, who climbed eagerly on her back. The woman evidently had been afraid, with excellent reason, but had performed well anyway. That was worth noting; she might not be smart, but she had reasonable courage.

The centycore kicked at the fire. A piece of wood flew out, starting a secondary blaze a short distance away. “You won’t put it out that way, bearsnoot,” Imbri projected with a picture of a burning branch falling on the monster’s antler and getting caught in it. The dream centycore shook his head violently, but the brand only blazed more brightly, toasting his snoot. In a moment the antler began to burn.

“Stop that!” the monster snapped, shaking his antler as if it felt hot.

“You’ll burn to pieces!” Imbri dreamed, causing the image’s antler to blaze more fiercely. Jets of flame shot out from each point, forming bright patterns in the air as the monster waved its antler about. The patterns shaped into a big word: FIRE.

“Enough!” the centycore screamed. He leaped for the moat and dunked his horn. That doused the dream flame; reality was too strong for it. But Imbri did manage to dream up a subdued fizzle where the points entered the water.

“Hey!” the nix protested, picking up the dream image. He froze the water around the antler, trapping the centycore head-down. The monster roared with a terrible rage and ripped his head free, sending shards of ice flying out. The nix changed to a fish and scooted away, daunted.

Now the centycore scooped icy water toward the fire with his antler. But the fire was too big and too far away; only a few droplets struck it, with furious hissing. Hell had no anger like that of a wetted fire, as Imbri knew from experience.

The centycore considered. Then he scooped up a hornful of muck from the edge of the moat and hurled that toward the fire. There was a tremendous hiss as the blob scored, and a balloon of steam and smoke went up.

“Ha ha, mare, he’s putting it out!” the nix called from a safe distance across the moat Apparently he felt that it was best to join sides with the monster. “I guess that knots your tail!”

“You shut up!” Imbri projected in a dream that encompassed both nix and centycore. “He won’t get it all!”

“That’s what you think, horsehead!” the nix cried.

Encouraged by this, the monster indulged in a fever of mudslinging. His aim was good; more gouts of smog ballooned out. The fire was furious, but was taking a beating.

“Curses, he’s doing it!” Imbri projected with wonderfully poor grace.

Indeed he was. Soon the fire was largely out and smoke suffused the entire region, making them all cough. The light of the sun diminished, for sunrays didn’t like smelly smog any better than anyone else did.

Was it dark enough? Imbri wasn’t sure. “If this doesn’t work, we’re finished,” she projected privately to Chameleon. “Maybe you should dismount.”

“I’ll stay with you,” the woman said loyally. Imbri chalked up one more point for her character, though she realized it might be fear of the monster that motivated Chameleon as much as support for Imbri.

Now the centycore reoriented on them. “You’re next, mareface!” he cried, and charged.

Imbri bolted for the megalith nearest the fire, where the smoke hovered most thickly. The centycore bounded after her. He was sure he had her now.

The mare leaped right into the stone column—and phased through it. Chameleon, in contact with her, did the same. The darkness was deep enough!

The monster, following too closely, smacked headfirst into the column. The collision jammed several points of his antler into the stone, trapping him there. He roared and yanked, but the stone was tougher than the ice had been, and he could not get free. That particular menace had been nullified.

Actually, Imbri now recognized an additional concern she hadn’t quite thought of before. She had not been certain she could phase a rider with her. She had brought the ogre out of the gourd, but he had already been in it, his body separate. She had carried the girl Tandy once, but that had been in genuine night. When she phased out of the Horseman’s pen, she had left the hobble behind, and it had certainly been in contact with her body. So the precedents were mixed. Apparently she could take someone or something with her if she wanted to, and leave it behind if she chose. It was good to get such details straight; an error could be a lot of trouble.

Now they could explore the center of the stone structure. They moved in cautiously.

There was a rumble, as of a column wobbling in its socket and beginning to crumble. Some sand sifted down from one of the elevated slabs. Both mare and woman looked up nervously. What was happening?

The noises subsided as they stood. Apparently it was a random event, possibly the result of the heat or smoke of the recent fire.

Imbri took another step forward. There was a long, moaning groan to the right, causing their heads to snap about. It was just another massive stone column settling, doing nothing.

Again Imbri stepped forward. The huge rock slab above slipped its support and crunched down toward them.

Imbri leaped backward, whipping her head around and back to catch Chameleon as the woman tried to fall off. The massive stone swung down where the two of them had been the moment before, thudding into the ground with an awesome impact.

“This place is collapsing!” Chameleon cried. “Let’s get out of here!”

But Imbri’s memory was jogged by something. “Isn’t it strange that it should collapse the very moment we enter it, after standing for what seems by the cobwebs and moss to have been centuries?” Actually, cobwebs could form faster than that, but Imbri wasn’t concerned about minor details. “This resembles the handiwork of the spriggan,” she concluded in the dream.

“Spriggan?”

“Giant ghosts who haunt old castles and megalithic structures. They are destructive in nature; that’s why old structures eventually collapse. The spriggan keep shoving at columns and pulling at cross pieces, until there is a collapse.”

“But why right now?” Chameleon asked, since Imbri hadn’t directly answered her own question. A creature had to make things quite clear for this woman.

“To stop us from proceeding farther. Don’t you remember the nature of Magician Humfrey’s castle?”

“Oh, yes. I had to ask him a Question once, before I married Bink, and it was just awful getting in! But not like this.”

“His castle is different each time a person comes to it. I’ve seen it on my way to deliver dreams. Never the same.”

“Yes, I remember,” she agreed. “He must spend a lot of time getting it changed.”

“So this is Humfrey’s castle
now.
A megalithic structure. We have passed two hazards and are encountering the third—the spriggan. They are preventing us from advancing by shoving the stones down in our path.”

“Oh.” Chameleon was not entirely reassured. “But we don’t have a Question. We’re on the King’s business.”

“Yes, I understand the Good Magician is not supposed to charge for official business. He must not have realized we were coming.”

“But he’s supposed to know everything!”

“But he’s old and absent-minded and set in his ways,” Imbri’s dream image reminded her. Still, she was not pleased at having to run this gauntlet. “So we must find out how to get past the ghosts,” Imbri concluded. “Then we will be able to consult the Magician despite his forgetfulness.”