The demon dropped the stone down the well. Smash saw the dark shape looming, but had no room to step out of the way.
Then light flared. Smash blinked. It was broad daylight in the
forest
of
Xanth
. "Are you all right?" the Siren asked. "I didn't dare let you stay out too long."
"I am all right," Smash said. "How is Tandy?"
"Unchanged, I'm afraid. Smash, I don't think you can destroy what is bothering her, because the horror is now in her mind. We could smash the gourd and it still wouldn't help her."
Smash considered. His skull no longer heated up when he did that. "I believe you are correct. I saw nothing really alarming in there. Perhaps I should go into the gourd with her and show her that it's not so bad."
The Siren frowned. "I suspect ogres have different definitions of bad. Just what happened in there?"
"Only a haunted house.
Shocking doorknob.
Ghost.
Squeezing walls--I suppose those could have been awkward for a human person.
Moving stairs.
A demon dropping a rock down a well."
"Why would a demon do that?"
"I don't know. I happened to be below at the time. Maybe it didn't like my greeting."
Tandy stirred. Her eyes swung loosely about. Her lips pursed flaccidly. She looked disturbingly like a ghost. "No, no house, no demon. A graveyard..." She lapsed into staring, her mouth beginning to drool.
"Evidently you had separate visions," the Siren said, using a puff from a puffball growing nearby to clean up the girl's face. "That complicates it."
"Maybe if we go in together, we'll share a vision," Smash conjectured.
"But there is only one peephole."
Smash poked his littlest hamfinger into the rind of the gourd.
"Two, now."
"You ogres are so practical!"
They set the gourd before Tandy, who immediately peered into the first peephole. Then
Smash
squatted so that he could peer into the second.
He was back in the well. The rock was plunging at his head. Hastily he raised a fist, since he didn't want a headache. The rock shattered on the fist, falling around him in the form of fragments, pebbles, and gravel.
So much for that.
If the demon would just drop a few more stones down. Smash would soon have this well filled up with rubble and could step out.
But the demon did not reappear.
Too bad.
Smash looked around the gloom. Tandy was not with him. He was in the same vision he had left, picking it up in the same moment he had left it He was using a different peephole, but that didn't seem to matter. Probably Tandy was back in her original vision, at the same point it had been interrupted, getting scared by whatever had scared her before. It seemed the gourd programmed each vision separately.
However, it was all the same gourd. Tandy had to be somewhere in here, and he intended to find her, rescue her from her horror, and smash that horror into a quivering pulp so it wouldn't bother her again. All he had to do was make a sufficient search.
He took hold of a stone in the wall of the well and yanked it out. Three more stones fell out with it. Smash took another; this time five more fell. This old well was not well constructed! He stood on these and drew out more stones. The well filled in beneath him steadily, and before long he was back at the surface. There was no sign whatsoever of the demon who had dropped the first rock on him. That was just as well, for Smash might have treated that demon a trifle unkindly, perhaps snapping its tail like a rubber band and launching the creature on a flight to the moon. The least that demon could have done was to stay around long enough to drop a few more useful boulders down the well.
Now he stood in a chamber surrounded by doors. He heard a faint, despairing scream. Tandy!
He went to the nearest door and grasped the knob. It shocked him, so he ripped the door out of its socket and threw it away. The room inside was a bare chamber: a false lead. He tried the next door, got shocked again, and ripped it out, too.
Another bare chamber.
He went to the third door--and it didn't shock him. The doors were learning! He opened this one gently. But it led only to another decoy chamber.
Finally he opened one that showed an outdoor walk. He hurried down this,
hurdling
a square that he recognized as a covered pitfall--ogres naturally knew about such things, having had centuries of ancestral experience avoiding such traps set for them by foolish men--and emerged into a windy graveyard.
Battered gravestones were all around, marking sunken graves. Some stones tilted forward precariously, as if trying to peer into the cavities they demarked. It occurred to
Smash
that the buried bodies might have climbed out and gone elsewhere, accounting for the sunkenness of the graves and the suspicions of the headstones, but this was not his concern.
The odor of carrion was stronger out here. Maybe some of the corpses had not been buried deep enough. A wind came up, cutting around the stone edges with dismal howling. Smash breathed deeply, appreciating it, then concentrated on the business at hand. Tandy!" he called. "Where are you?" For she had said she was in a graveyard, and this must be the place.
He heard a faint sobbing. Carefully he traced down the source. It was slow work, because the sound was carried by the wind, and the wind curved around the gravestones in cold blue streams, searching out the best edges for making moaning tunes. But at last he found the huddled figure, cowering behind a white stone crypt.
"Tandy!" he repeated. "It's I. Smash, the tame ogre. Let me take you away from all this."
She looked up, pale with fright, as if hardly daring to recognize him. Her mouth opened, but only drool came out.
He reached out to take her arm, to help her to her feet. But she was as limp as a rag doll and would not rise. She just continued sobbing. She seemed little different from her Xanth self. Something was missing.
Smash considered. For once he was thankful for the Eye Queue, because now he could ponder without pain. What would account for the girl's lethargy and misery? He had thought it was fear, but now that he was here, she should have no further cause for that. It was as if she had lost something vital, like eyesight or--
Or her soul.
Suddenly
Smash
remembered how vulnerable souls could be, and knew that if anyone were likely to blunder into a soul-hazardous situation, Tandy was the one. She knew so little of the ways of Xanth! No wonder she was desolate and empty.
"Your soul, Tandy," he said, holding her so that she had to look into his face. "Where is it?"
Listlessly she nodded toward the crypt. Smash saw that it had a heavy, tight stone door. Scrape marks on the dank ground indicated it had recently been opened. She must have gone inside, perhaps trying to escape the graveyard--and had been ejected without her soul.
"I will recover it," he said.
Now she bestirred herself enough to react. "No, no," she moaned. "I am lost. Save yourself."
"I agreed to protect you," he reminded her. "I shall do it." He set her gently aside and addressed the crypt. The door had no handle, but he knew how to deal with that. He elevated his huge bare fist and smashed it brutally forward into the stone.
Ouch! Without his gauntlets, his hands were
more tender
. He could not safely apply his full force. But his blow had accomplished its purpose; the stone door had cracked marginally and jogged a smidgen outward. He applied his horny fingernails and hauled the door unwillingly open.
A dark hole faced him. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a white outline. It was the skeleton of a man. It reached for him with bone-fingers.
Smash realized where the bodies in the sunken graves had gone. They had been recruited for guard duty and were walking about this crypt. But he was not in the mood for nuisance. He grabbed the skeleton by the bones of its arm and hauled it violently out of the crypt. The thing flew through the air and landed as a jumble of bones. The ogre proceeded on into the hole.
Other skeletons appeared, clustering about him, their connections rattling. Smash treated them as he had the first, disconnecting their foot-bones from their leg-bones and other bones, causing the bonepile to grow rapidly. Soon the remaining skeletons reconsidered, not wishing to have him roll their bones, and left him alone.
Deep in the ground the ogre came to a dark coffin. The smell was mouth-wateringly awful; something really rotten was in there. Was Tandy's soul in there, too? He picked up the box and shook it.
"All right, all right!" a muffled voice came from the coffin. "You made your point, ogre. You aren't afraid of anything. What do you want?"
"Give back Tandy's soul," Smash said grimly.
"I can't do that, ogre," the box protested. "We made a deal.
Her freedom for her soul.
I let her out of this world; I keep her soul. That's the way we deal here; souls are the currency of this medium."
"The Siren let her out by removing the gourd," Smash argued. "She never had to pay."
"Coincidence.
I permitted it, once the deal was struck. The negotiation is sealed."
Smash had lived and thought like an ogre a lot longer than he had lived and thought intelligently. Now he reverted to convenient old habits. He roared, picked up the coffin, and hurled it against the wall. The box fell to the floor, somewhat sprung, and several ceiling stones dropped on it. Nauseating goo dribbled from a crack in it. Dirt sifted down from the chamber wall to smooth the outlines.
"Maybe further negotiation is possible after all," the voice from the coffin said, somewhat shaken. "Would you consider trading souls?"
Smash readied his hamfist again. "Wait!" the voice cried, alarmed. It evidently wasn't used to dealing with real brutes. "I merely collect souls; I don't have the authority to give them back. If you want the girl's soul now, your only option is to trade."
The ogre considered. He might smash the coffin and its occupant to pieces, but that would not necessarily recover the soul. If Tandy's soul were in there, it could get hurt in the battering. So maybe it was better to bargain. "Trade what?"
"Another soul, of course.
How about yours?"
This box thought he was a typically stupid ogre. "No."
"Well, someone else's. What about that buxom mature nymph out in Xanth, with the sometime fish-tail? She probably has a luscious, bouncy, juicy soul."
Smash considered again. He decided, with
an
un-ogrish precision of ethics, that he could not make any commitments on behalf of the Siren. "Not her soul. And not mine."
"Then the girl's soul must remain."
Smash got another whiff of the stench from the coffin and knew that Tandy's soul could not be allowed to rot there. He still did not consider the deal by which the coffin had gotten Tandy's soul to be valid. He stooped to pick up the battered coffin again.
"Wait!" the voice cried. "There is one other option. You could accede to a lien."
The ogre paused. "Explain."
"A lien is a claim on the property of another as security for a debt," the coffin explained. "A lien on your soul would mean that you agree to replace the girl's soul with another soul--and if you don't, then your own soul is forfeit. But you keep your soul in the interim, or most of it."
It did seem to make sense.
"How long an interim?"
"Shall we say thirty days?"
"Six months," Smash said. "You think I'm stupid?"
"I did think that," the coffin confessed. "After all, you are an ogre, and it is well known that the brains of ogres are mostly in their muscles. In fact, their brains are mostly muscles."
"Not true," Smash said. "An ogre's skull is filled with bone, not muscle."
"I stand corrected. My skull is filled with necrosis. How about sixty days?"
"Four months."
"Split the difference: ninety days."
"Okay," Smash agreed. "But I don't agree you are entitled to keep any soul, just because you tricked an innocent girl into trading it off for nothing."
"Are you sure you're an ogre? You don't sound like one."
"I'm an ogre," Smash affirmed. "Would you like me to throw you around some more to prove it?"
"That won't be necessary," the coffin said quickly. "If you disagree with the assessment, you must deal with the boss: the Night Stallion. He makes decisions of policy."
"The Dark Horse?"
"Close enough; some do call him that. He governs the herd of nightmares."
It began to fall into place. "This is where the nightmares live?
By day, when they're not out delivering bad dreams to sleepers?"
"Exactly.
All the bad dreams are generated here in the gourd, from the raw material of people's fundamental fears--loss, pain, death, shame, and the unknown. The Stallion decides where the dreams go, and the mares take them there. Your girlfriend abused a mare, so it took a lien on her soul, and when she came here, that lien was called due. So her soul is forfeit, and now we have it, and only the Night Stallion can change that. Why don't we set you up for an appointment with the
Stallion,
and you can settle this directly with him?"
"An appointment?
When?"
"Well, he has a full calendar. Bad dreams aren't light fancies, you know. There's a lot of evil in the world that needs recognition. It's a lot of work to craft each dream correctly and designate it for exactly the right person at the right time. So the Stallion is quite busy. The first opening is six months hence."
"But my lien expires in three months!"
"You're smarter than the average ogre, for sure! You might force an earlier audience, but you'd have to find the Stallion first. He certainly won't come to you within three months. I really wouldn't recommend the effort of locating him."
Smash considered again. It seemed to him that this coffin protested too profusely. Something was being concealed here.
Time for the ogre act again.
"Perhaps so," he said. "There is therefore no point in restraining my natural inclination for violence." He picked up a rock and crumpled it to chips and sand with one hand. He eyed the coffin.