'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?'
'The Night Stallion is always in the last place a person looks, in the gourd,' the goblin girl explained.
'So all you have to do to reach him is always look in a new place-never in a place you've been before; that's a waste of time and effort. You are apt to get caught in an endless loop, and then you are really lost. You may never find him if you rehash your old route.'
'You do know something about it!' Tandy agreed. 'But suppose Smash threads the maze, finds the Night Stallion-and is too weak to fight him?'
'Oh, it's not that sort of strength he needs,' the goblin girl said. 'We've had physically strong goblins go in, and physically weak ones, and the weak ones do just as well. All kinds lose in the gourd. Physical strength may even be a liability. Destroying the facilities does not destroy the commitment. Only defeating the Stallion does that, on the Stallion's own terms.'
'What are the Stallion's terms?'
Goldy shrugged. 'No one knows. Our one surviving goblin refuses to tell, assuming he knows. He just sort of turns a little grayer. I think there is no way to find out except to face the creature.'
'I think we have enough to go on,' Tandy said. 'Let's take a gourd along. We have to get to the fireoak tree before the lunatic-fringe-spell gives out.' She went to harvest a gourd, her concern for Smash overriding her fear of the thing.
'I think the peephole is a lunatic fringe,' the Siren muttered.
They moved on. Smash pondered what the goblin girl had said. If physical strength was not important in the struggle with the Night Stallion, why was it important to join this contest early, before weakness progressed too far? Was that a contradiction or merely a confusion? He concluded that it was the latter.
There was weakness of the body and of the spirit; both might fade together, but they were not identical.
Smash was physically weak now because he had overextended himself; otherwise it should have taken him three months to fade. His soul had probably suffered relatively little so far. But if he waited till the end of the lien term to meet the Stallion, then his soul would be weak, and he would lose the nonphysical contest. Yes, that seemed to make sense. Things didn't have to make sense, with magic, but it helped.
They arrived at a pleasant glade. Within it was a crazy sort of shimmer that made Smash feel a little crazy himself; he turned his eyes away.
'My tree!' the hamadryad cried, suddenly reviving. Smash set her down.
'Where?'
'There! Behind the lunatic fringe!' She seemed to grow stronger instant by instant and in a moment pranced into the glade. Her body wavered and vanished.
'I guess the spell is still holding,' Tandy said. She followed Fireoak, carrying the gourd, and disappeared similarly. The others went the same route.
When Smash contacted the fringe, he felt a momentary surge of dizziness; then he was through. There before him was the tree, a medium-large fireoak, its leaves blazing in the late afternoon sunlight. The hamadryad was hugging its trunk in ecstasy, her body almost indistinguishable from it, and her color was returning. She had rejoined her soul. The tree, too, seemed to be glowing, and leaves that had been wilting were now forging back into health. Evidently it had missed her also. There was something very touching about the love of nymph and tree for each other.
Tandy approached him, her blue eyes soulful. 'Smash, if I had known-' She choked up. She shoved the gourd at him.
'We'll let you go into it until the lunatic fringe fades and the people attack this tree,' the Siren said.
'Maybe you'll have time to conquer the Night Stallion and regain your full strength.' She produced a ball of string that the hamadryad must have had stored in her tree. 'Use this so you won't get lost in there,'
'But first eat something,' Chem said, bringing an armful of fruits. 'And get a night's sleep.'
'No. I want to settle this now,' Smash said.
'Oh, please do at least eat something 1' Tandy pleaded. 'You can eat a lot in a hurry.'
True words-and he was hungry. Ogres were usually hungry. So he crammed a bushel of whole fruits into his mouth and gulped them down, ogre-fashion, and drank a long pull of water from the spring at the base of the tree.
As the sun dropped down behind the forest, singeing the distant tips of trees. Smash took leave of the six females as if setting out on a long and hazardous trek. Then he settled down against the trunk of the tree, put the gourd in his lap, and applied his right eye to the peephole.
Instantly he was back in the gourd world. He stood before the crypt, having just gotten up from his snooze. Tandy was not there; for a moment he had feared that she would be locked into this adventure with him, since she had been here before, but of course she was free now.
A chill wind cut around the stonework, ruffling his fur. The landscape was bleak: all gravestones and dying weeds and dismal dark sky. 'Beautiful!' he exclaimed. 'I would like to stay here forever.'
Then his Eye Queue, in its annoying fashion, forced him to amend his statement mentally. He would like to stay here forever after he rescued his soul from the lien and regained his full strength and saved the hamadryad's tree and had gotten Tandy and all the others to wherever they were going and found his Answer from the Good Magician. After these details, then this paradise of the gourd would be a nice retirement spot.
He had been afraid he would find himself somewhere else and be unable, after all, to pursue his quest to its close. Despite what the goblin girl had said, this was a different gourd, and might not know where his adventure in the last gourd had ended. Now he was reassured, and confident that he could locate the Night Stallion and abate the lien. After all, he was an ogre, wasn't he?
He held his ball of string, since he had willed it to accompany him, but again he had forgotten to bring his gauntlets or orange jacket. He backtracked to the back of the haunted house and anchored one end of the string to a post, then crossed the graveyard to the far gate, letting the string unravel behind. It was a good-sized ball, so he was confident he would have plenty to mark his way.
A skeleton came out to see what was going on; Smash made a horrendous face at it, and the thing fled so fast its bones rattled. Yes, the bone-folk remembered him here!
Beyond the gate was a broad, bleak, open plain illuminated by ghastly, pale white moonlight. Black, ugly clouds scudded horrendously across the dismal sky, forming dark picture-shapes that resembled trolls, goblins, and ogres. Naturally the other creatures were fleeing before the ogre-shapes. Smash was delighted; this was an even better scene than the last! Whoever had set up this gourd world had had ogre tastes in mind.
