"What of John?" Tandy cried.
"She's sitting there by the ironwood tree. Her eyes are closed. I don't think she quite comprehends what has happened. Her wings--"
Tandy was fashioning the rope into a smaller harness. "Lower this to her. We'll draw her up!"
Smash merely stood where he was, listening. His brief surge of strength had been exhausted; now he could do nothing. He felt ashamed for his weakness and the horrible consequence of it, but had no further resource. John had thought she would be safe in the company of an ogre!
Chem drew the fairy up. Smash saw John huddled in the harness. Her once-lovely wings, with the blossoming flower patterns, were now melted amorphous husks, useless for flying. Would they ever grow back? It seemed unlikely.
"Well, we crossed the chasm," Tandy said. She was not happy. None of them was. One of their
number
had lost her invaluable wings, another was too wasted to stand, and Smash was too tired to move. If this was typical of the hazards they faced, traversing central Xanth, how would they ever make it the rest of the way?
"Well, now," a new voice declared. Smash turned his head dully to view the speaker. It was a gnarled, ugly goblin--at the head of a fair-sized troop of goblins.
Goblins hated people of any type. The strait had become yet
more dire
.
If you fight, we'll shove you all over the brink without your rope," the goblin leader said. He was a stunted black creature about John's height, with a huge head, hands, and feet. His short limbs seemed twisted, as if the bones had been broken and reset many times, and his face was similarly uneven, with one eye squinting, the other round, the nose bulbous, and the mouth crooked. By goblin standards, he was handsome.
The goblins spread out to surround the party. They peered at the ogre, centaur, hamadryad, fairy, siren, and girl as if all were supreme curiosities. "You crossed the Gap?" the leader asked.
Tandy took it upon herself to answer. "What
right have
you to question us? I know your kind from the caves. You don't have any useful business with civilized folk."
The leader considered her. "Whom do you know in the caves, girl-thing?"
"Everybody who is anybody," she retorted. "The demons, the Diggle-worm, the Brain Coral--"
The leader seemed fazed. "Who are you?"
"I am Tandy, daughter of Crombie the Soldier and Jewel the Nymph. You know who sets out those black opals you goblins steal to give to your goblin girls! My mother, that's
who
. Without her there wouldn't be any gems of any kind to find anywhere."
There was a muttering commotion. "You have adequate connections," the goblin leader grudged. "Very well, we won't eat you. You may
go,
girl-thing."
"What of my friends?" Tandy asked suspiciously.
"They have no such connections. Their mothers don't plant gems in the rocks. We'll cook them tonight."
"Oh, no, you won't! My friends go with me!"
"If that's the way you want it," the goblin said indifferently.
"That's the way I want it."
"Come this way, then. You'll all go in the pot together."
"That's not what I meant!" Tandy cried.
"It isn't?" The goblin seemed surprised. "You said you wanted to be with your friends."
"But not in the pot!"
The goblin shook his head in confusion. "Females change their minds a lot. Exactly what do you want?"
"I want us all to continue our trip north through Xanth," Tandy said, enunciating clearly. "I can't do it alone. I don't know anything about surface Xanth. I need the ogre to protect me. If he weren't worn out from fighting the Gap Dragon and hauling us all up out of the Gap, he'd be cramming all of you into the pot!"
"Nonsense.
Ogres don't use pots."
Tandy huffed herself up into the resemblance of a tantrum. But before she completed the process, a goblin lieutenant sidled up to whisper in the leader's ear. The leader nodded. "Maybe so," he agreed. He turned back to Tandy. "You are five females, guarded by the tired ogre?"
"Yes," Tandy agreed guardedly.
"How many others has he eaten?"
"None!"
Tandy responded indignantly. "He doesn't eat friends!"
"He can't be much of an ogre, then."
"He beat up the Gap Dragon!"
The goblin considered. "There is that." He came to a decision. "My name is Gorbage Goblin. I control this section of the Rim. But I have a daughter, and we are exogamous."
"What?" Tandy asked, bewildered.
"Exogamous, twit.
Girls must marry outside their home tribes. But there is no contiguous goblin tribe; we are apart from the main nation of goblins. The dragons extended their territory recently, cutting us off." He scowled. "The other goblins keep forgetting us, the slugbrains. I don't know why."
Smash knew why. It was the forget-spell laid on the Gap Chasm. These goblins lived too close to it, so suffered a peripheral effect.
"So my daughter Goldy Goblin must cross to another tribe," Gorbage grumbled. "But travel beyond our territory is now hazardous to the health. She needs a guard."
Tandy's face lighted with eventual comprehension. "You want us to take your daughter with us?"
"To the next goblin tribe, north of here.
Beyond the dragons, in the midst of the five forbidden regions, near the firewall.
Yes."
Five forbidden regions?
Firewall?
Smash wondered about that. It didn't sound like the sort of territory to take five or six delicate girls through.
"You will let us go if we do that?" Tandy asked.
"You and the ogre."
Tandy's face set. She was a very stubborn girl at times. "All of us."
The goblin leader wavered. "That's a lot to ask. We haven't had fresh meat in several days."
"I don't care if you never have fresh meat again!" the girl flared. "You can cook up zombies if you get hungry. I want all my friends."
"It's only one daughter you're taking north, after all."
"Remember the feminine wiles," the Siren murmured.
Tandy considered. "The ogre can't do all the guarding," she said reasonably. "When he fights off a big dragon or a tangle tree or something, he gets tired. Then he has to rest, and someone else stands guard, like the centaur. If we cross a lake, the Siren scouts it out first. We never know whose skill will be useful." She paused, then with an effort turned on extra charm, "it you really want your daughter to travel safely--"
Gorbage capitulated with bad grace.
"Oh, very well.
All of you go. It's a bad deal for me, but Goldy will slaughter me if I don't get her matched soon. She's a cussheaded lass, like all her kind."
Smash was amazed. Tandy had, with a little timely advice from the Siren, talked them out of disaster and gotten them all free passage through goblin-infested territory. Already his own strength was filtering back; all he needed was a little rest. But there was no longer any need for Violence.
Goldy Goblin turned out to be
a petite, amazingly pretty lass
. The goblin females were as lovely as the goblin males were ugly. "Thank you so much for taking me," she said politely. "Is there anything I can do in return?"
Tandy had the grace to take this seriously. "We have to stop by a fireoak tree in this vicinity. If you could show us the best route to it--"
"Certainly.
There's only one fireoak hereabouts, with a resident hamadryad nymph--" Goldy paused, spying Fireoak. "Isn't that she?"
"Yes. She's trying to save her tree. We must get her back to it as soon as possible."
"I know the way. But the path to it goes by a hypnogourd patch. So you have to be careful."
"I don't want to go near the gourds!" Tandy cried, horrified.
But Smash remembered his contact with the coffin inside the other gourd. Was it possible that--? "I want a gourd," he said.
The Siren was perplexed. "Why would you want a terrible thing like that?"
"Something I may have forgotten in there." The Siren frowned but dropped the subject. They trekked on. Smash carrying the hamadryad. He tried not to show it, but his strength had returned only partially. Fireoak was light, the kind of burden he could normally balance on his little finger without effort, but now he had to control his breathing, lest he pant so loudly he
call
attention to himself. He would be no help at all if they happened on another dragon. Maybe he just needed a good meal and a night's sleep. Yet it had never before taken him so long to recover from exertion. He suspected something was wrong, but he didn't know what.
They came to the region of hypnogourds. The vines sprawled abundantly, and gourds were all about. Smash stared at them, half mesmerized. He had thought his soul lost when the Siren smashed the other gourd--but was it possible that the gourd had been a mere window on the otherworld reality? His Eye Queue was crazy enough to think this was so. Could he use another gourd to return to that world and fight for his soul?
He felt small hands on his arm. "What is
it.
Smash?" Tandy asked. "I'm deathly afraid of those things, but you seem fascinated. What's with you and those awful gourds?"
He answered, not fully conscious of his situation. "I must go fight the Night Stallion."
"A Dark Horse?"
"The ruler of the nightmares.
He has a lien on my soul."
"Oh, no!
Is that how you rescued my soul?"
Smash snapped out of it. He hadn't meant to say anything about the lien to Tandy. "I'm gibbering. Ignore it."
"So that's why you wanted another gourd," the Siren said. "You had unfinished business there! I didn't realize..."
Now the goblin girl approached. "The ogre's been into a gourd? I've seen that happen before. Some people escape unscathed; some lose their souls; some get only halfway free. We lost a lot of goblins before we caught on. Now we use those gourds as punishment. Thieves are set at a peephole for an hour; they usually escape with a bad scare and never thieve again. Murderers are set there for a day; they often lose their souls. It varies; some people are cleverer than others, and some luckier. The lien is like a delayed sentence; a month or two and it's all over."
"A lien!" the Siren said.
"How long for you.
Smash?"
"Three months," he replied glumly.
"And you said nothing!" she cried indignantly. "What kind of a creature are you?" But she answered herself immediately.
"A self-sacrificing one.
Smash, you should have told us."
"Yes," Tandy agreed faintly. "I never realized--"
"How can a person nullify such a lien?" the Siren asked, getting practical.
"He has to go back in and fight," Goldy said. "If he doesn't, he just gets weaker, bit by bit, as the Stallion calls in the soul. It's too late to fight, once the lien is due. He has to do it early, while he has most of his strength."
"But a person can redeem himself if he goes in early?" the Siren asked.
"Sometimes," the goblin girl said.
"Maybe one out of ten.
One of our old goblins is supposed to have done it a long time ago in his youth. We're not sure we believe him. He mumbles about trials of fear and pain and pride and such-like, making no sense at all. But it is theoretically possible to win."
"So that's why Smash has gotten so weak," the Siren said. "He was using his strength as if he had plenty to spare, but he has an illness of the soul."
"I know about that," Fireoak breathed.
"I didn't know!" Tandy said, clouding up. "Oh, it's
all my
fault! I never would have taken my soul back if--"
"I didn't know, either," the Siren said, calming her. "But I should have suspected. Maybe I did suspect; I just didn't pursue the thought fast enough. I forgot that
Smash
is no longer a simple-minded ogre; he has the devious Eye Queue contamination, making him react more like human folk."
"The curse of human intellect, replacing the primeval beastly innocence," Tandy agreed. "I, too, should have realized--"
"Tandy, we've got to help
Smash
destroy that lien!"
"Yes!" Tandy agreed emphatically. "We can't leave him to the law of the lien."
Smash almost smiled, despite the seriousness of the situation. During his travels with Prince Dor, he had encountered the law of the loin; was this related?
"I'll help," Goldy said.
The Siren frowned. "What is your interest? Your tribe was going to eat us all."
"How can I get to another goblin tribe if I don't have a strong ogre to clear the way? I do know a little bit about the matter."
"I suppose you do have a practical interest," the Siren agreed. "We all need the ogre, until we find our own individual situations. What do you know about the gourds that might help?"
"Our people have reported details of the gourd geography. It's the same for every gourd; they're all identical inside. But each person enters at a different place, and it's possible to get lost. So it is best to carry a line of string to mark the way."
"But a person is out the moment his contact with the peephole is broken! How can he get lost?"
"It's not that sort of lost," Goldy said. "There's a lot of territory in there, and some pretty strange effects. Some talk of graves, others of mirrors. A person always returns to the spot he left, and the time he left, no matter how long he's been away from it; a break in the sequence is only an interruption, not a change. If he's lost in gourdland, he's still lost when he returns there, even if he's been a long time out of his gourd. He doesn't know where he's going because he doesn't know where he's been. But if he strings the string, it'll mark where he's been, and he'll know the moment he crosses his trail. And that's the secret."
Smash was getting quite interested. He had been out of his gourd for some time, but apparently could still return. "What secret?"