Ogre, Ogre (Xanth 5) Read Free Page A

and fear and shame and horror, making her miserable. But she fought it back, nerved herself, and leaped for the dark horse.
    She made it. Her tedious rehearsals had served her well. She landed on the nightmare's back, clutched the sleek mane, and clasped its powerful body with her legs.
    For an instant the mare stood still, too surprised to move. Tandy knew that feeling. Then the creature took off. She galloped through the wall as if it were nothing--and indeed it felt like nothing, for they had dematerialized. The power of the nightmare extended to her rider, just as the sleeping power of the pills extended to their wearer. Tandy remained asleep, in the dream-state, fastened to her steed.
    The ride was a terror. Walls shot by like shadows, and open spaces like daylight, as the mare galloped headlong and tailshort. Tandy hung on to the mane, though the strands of it cut cruelly into her hands, because she was afraid to let go. How hard would she fall, where would she be, if she lost purchase now? This was a worse dream than any before--and the sleeping pills prevented her from waking.
    They were already far away from her mother's neat apartment. They cruised through rock and caverns, water and fire, and the lairs of large and small monsters. They galloped across the table where six demons were playing poker, and the demons paused a moment as if experiencing some chill doubt without quite seeing the nightmare. They zoomed by a secret conclave of goblins planning foul play, and these, too, hesitated momentarily as the ambience of bad visions touched them. The nightmare plowed through the deepest recess, where the Brain Coral stored the living artifacts of Xanth, and the artifacts stirred restlessly, too, not knowing what moved them. Tandy realized that when a nightmare passed a waking creature, she caused a brief bad thought. Only in sleep did those thoughts have full potency.
    Now Tandy had another problem. She had to guide this steed--and she didn't know how. If she had known how, she still wouldn't have known the way to Castle Roogna. Why hadn't she thought of this before?
    Well, this was a dream, and it didn't have to make sense. "Take me to Castle Roogna!" she cried. "Then I'll let you go!"
    The nightmare neighed and changed course. Was that all there was to it? It occurred to Tandy that the steed was as frightened as Tandy herself was. Such horses weren't meant for riding! So maybe the mare would cooperate, just to be rid of her rider.
    They burst out of the caverns and onto the upper surface of Xanth. Tandy was used to strange things in dreams, but was nevertheless awed. Her eyes were open--at least they seemed to be, though this could be merely part of the dream--and she saw the vastness of the surface night. There were spreading trees and huge empty spaces and rivers without cave-canyons, and above was a monstrous ceiling full of pinpoints of light in great patches. She realized that these were stars, which her father had told her about--and she had thought he was making it up, just as he made up tales of the heroic deeds of the men of legendary Xanth's past--and that where there were none was because of clouds. Clouds were like the vapor surrounding waterfalls, loosed to ascend to the heavens. Turn a cloud loose, and naturally it did whatever it wanted.
    Then from behind, a cloud came a much larger light, surely the fabled sun, the golden ball that tracked across the sky, always in one direction. No, not the sun, for that chose to travel, for reasons of its own, only during the day.
    Jewel had told her that, though Tandy wasn't sure Jewel herself had ever seen the sun. When Tandy had asked her father whether it was true, Crombie had just laughed, which she took to be affirmation of the orb's diurnal disposition. Of course things didn't need sensible reasons for what they did. Maybe the sun was merely afraid of the dark, so stayed clear of night
    No, this must be the moon, which was an object of similar size but dimmer