Night Mare by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online

need to fear him. Just horses should fear him.”
    That might be true; certainly Imbri would never again be careless about the Horseman. But it was irrelevant; she had to get the message through. “That is for the King to decide. You must give him the message.”
    “What message?”
    “Beware the Horseman!” Imbri’s image shouted, frustrated.
    Chameleon’s image looked around nervously. “Where is he?”
    What was this? Was the woman a complete idiot? Why had the Night Stallion sent Imbri to such a creature? “The Horseman is west of here. He may be hazardous to the health of Xanth. The King must be warned.”
    “Oh. When my husband Bink comes home, I’ll tell him.”
    “When will Bink be back?” Imbri inquired patiently.
    “Next week. He’s up north in Mundania, working out a new trade agreement with Onesti, or something.”
    “I certainly hope he works on it with honesty,” Imbri said. “But next week’s too long. We must warn the King tomorrow.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t bother the King! He’s seventy years old!”
    “But this affects the welfare of Xanth!” Imbri protested, getting frustrated again.
    “Yes, Xanth is very important.”
    “Then you’ll warn the King?”
    “Warn the King?”
    “About the Horseman,” the centaur filly said, keeping her tail still and her face straight with an effort.
    “But the King is seventy years old!”
    Imbri stamped a forefoot angrily, in both her dream form and her real form. “I don’t care if he is a hundred and seventy years old!
I
am! He’s still got to be warned!”
    Chameleon stared at the filly image. “You certainly don’t look that old!”
    “I am a night mare. We are immortal, at least until we die. I have a soul now, so I can age and breed and die when I’m material, but I never aged before, once I matured. Now, about the King—”
    “Maybe my son Dor can tell him.”
    “Where is your son now?” Imbri asked warily.
    “He’s south at Centaur Isle, getting the centaurs to organize for possible war. Because Good Magician Humfrey says there may be a Wave. We don’t like it when Waves are made. But I don’t think the centaurs believe it.”
    “A Wave?” It was Imbri’s turn to be confused. She knew the woman wasn’t talking about the ocean.
    “The Nextwave,” Chameleon clarified unhelpfully.
    Imbri let that go. She had seen the Lastwave, but that had been a long time ago. “When will Dor be back here?”
    ‘”Tomorrow night. Just in time for the elopement.”
    Somehow the woman’s ingenuous remarks kept making Imbri react stupidly, too. “Elopement?”
    Chameleon might not be smart, but she had a good memory. “Dor and Irene—she’s King Trent’s daughter, a lovely child with the Green Thumb, only it’s really her hair that’s green—have been engaged for eight years now, a third of their lives. They could never decide on a date. We think Dor’s a little afraid of the responsibility of marriage. He’s really a very nice boy.” Obviously “nice” meant “innocent” in this connection. Imbri was surprised to learn that any innocent males remained in Xanth; perhaps this was merely the fond fancy of a naive mother. “Irene is twenty-three now, and she’s getting impatient. She never was a very patient girl.” This seemed to mean that the other woman in Chameleon’s son’s life was not viewed with entire favor, but was tolerated as a necessary evil. In this attitude, Chameleon was absolutely typical of the mothers of sons. “So she’s going to come here at night and take Dor away and marry him in an uncivil ceremony, and then it will be done. Everyone will be there!”
    So the pleasure of a wedding ceremony overwhelmed the displeasure of turning her son over to an aggressive girl. This, too, was normal, except—
    “For an elopement?” Imbri felt more stupid than ever. Was this a human folk custom she had missed? She had understood that elopements were sneak marriages; certainly she had delivered a number of bad