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off. I struck at the nearest talon, which was as thick as my thigh, and severed it with a single mighty-thewed blow. Blood spurted out of the artery in its center, and the ground that talon had supported crumbled. Blood soaked the divot, further weakening the structure. The scooped-up tree fell through, and I tumbled through with it. We plunged in a messy mass to the ground from the height of a standing tree.
    It was a bad fall, made worse by the gory dirt. I was knocked half silly, and my condition was not improved when several fair-sized rocks landed on me, crushing my legs. I don't know how other heroes manage to escape injury when caught in horrendous situations; certainly I had no such charm. I did the sensible thing--I lost consciousness.
    I recovered an hour later, my crushed leg healed. Oh, didn't I mention this? My magic talent is healing myself. If I am cut, it will seal up immediately if small, and in minutes if large. If I lose a finger, it regrows. If I lose a foot, it takes about an hour to regenerate. If I am killed by an arrow through the heart, I will recover in a day. Longer, if no one pulls out the arrow. So my crushed leg was a job for an hour, and I was as fit as ever. Maybe fitter, because the restored leg wasn't tired, the way the other one was.
    Evidently the big bird had left me for dead. That was a natural mistake. Similar confusions had happened before. I was, in fact, practically indestructible in any permanent sense. That was one reason I liked adventure. I had good magic for a hero.
    So now I resumed the pursuit. The ghost horse hadn't gone far. Thinking me out of it, he was grazing nearby. Yes, he was hungry!
    I yelled and bore down on him. He looked up, startled--and reacted as if he'd seen someone risen from the dead. Terrified, he took off, leaving half a munch of grass to drop to the ground behind. One might think a ghost horse would not be afraid of other ghosts, but that's not so; even ghosts fear what they don't understand, and the average ghost is a pretty timid creature. I ought to know! And, of course, a pooka isn't a complete ghost, because of that solidity; it's sort of in a halfway state, much the way a zombie is halfway between life and death. If the pooka ever slipped his chains, he'd fade into full spirit status. But the chains hold him to life, so he must graze and do most of the other things living creatures do, however inconvenient some of them may be. There are a number of things like that in Xanth, neither this nor that, but partaking of some of this and other of that.
    The chase was on again. The pooka fled southeast--and led me into griffin country. I could tell by the old spoor, the claw marks on the trunks of trees, and the griffin manure. I kept alert, for griffins can be aggressive creatures. I figured I could handle one griffin, but sometimes they traveled in prides, and that could be trouble. The roc had left me because I was too small a morsel to bother with, and it would have gotten dirt on its beak just scooping up my body. But griffins would eat me, and I wasn't sure how easy it would be for me to recover if that happened. Maybe if one of them ate most of me, I'd be able to collect myself together again--but I didn't care to risk it. For one thing, injuries, hurt me just the same as they do other folk, until they heal; why endure all that pain if I didn't have to? So I was careful. Maybe barbarians were supposed to laugh at scars as if they never felt a wound, but the humor of that escaped me.
    The pooka, hungry and tired, was less careful. He charged right through a griffin-retreat, where there was a big nest in a low-branching tree. A griffiness was on the nest, incubating an egg or something--I'm not quite clear on that aspect, as griffins are fussy creatures with royal lineages and don't tolerate much snooping--and she let out an awful squawk at this intrusion. The male griffin had been snoozing on a branch up higher in the tree, his wings folded while his