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spurs, and she had to stand still. The henchman tied the rope to her two forefeet, with only a short length between them, so that she could stand or walk carefully but could not run. What a humiliating situation!
    They put her in a barren pen where there was a grimy bucket of water. They dumped half-cured hay in for her to chew. The stuff was foul, but she was so hungry now that she had to eat it, though she feared it would give her colic. No wonder the day horse had bolted!
    All day she remained confined, while the Mundanes went about their brutish business elsewhere. Imbri drank the bad water, finished off the bad hay, and slept on her feet in the normal manner of her kind, her tail constantly swishing the bothersome flies away. She had plenty of time to consider her folly. But she knew the night would free her, and that buoyed her spirit, her half soul.
    Now she meditated on that. Few of her kind possessed any part of any soul, and those who obtained one generally didn’t keep it, as the Night Stallion had reminded her. Yet she clung to her soul as if it were most important. Was she being foolish? Imbri had carried the half-human Smash the Ogre out of the gourd and out of the Void, but it was not any part of his soul she had. It was half the soul of a centaur filly. That soul had changed her outlook, making her smarter and more sensitive to the needs of others. That had been bad for her business and had finally cost her her profession. But as she gradually mastered the qualities of the soul, she became more satisfied with it. Now she knew there was more to life than feeding and sleeping and doing her job. She was not certain what more there was, but it was well worth searching for. Perhaps the rainbow would have the answer one look at the celestial phenomenon might make her soul comprehensible. Yet that search had led her into the privation of the moment.
    As evening approached, the Horseman and the two henchmen appeared and started hauling firewood logs from the forest. The wood fairly glowed with eagerness to burn. They threw a flame-vine on the pile, and burn it did. The fire blazed high, turning the incipient shadows to the brightness of day.
    Suddenly Imbri realized what they were doing. The Mundanes were keeping the pen too light for her to assume her nocturnal powers! As long as that fire burned, she could not escape!
    With despair she watched as they hauled more logs. They had enough wood to carry them through the night. She would not be able to dematerialize.
    The sun tired and dropped at last to the horizon, making the distant trees blaze momentarily from its own fire. Imbri wondered whether it descended in the same place each night, or whether it came down in different locations, doing more damage to the forest. She had never thought about this before, since the sun had been no part of her world, or she would have trotted over there and checked the burned region directly.
    The fire blazed brighter than ever in the pen, malevolently consuming her precious darkness. It sent sparks up into the sky to rival the stars. Perhaps they were stars; after all, the little specks of light had to originate somewhere, and new ones would be needed periodically to replace the old ones that wore out. The Mundanes took turns watching Imbri and dumping more wood on the fire as it waned.
    Waned, she thought. That jogged a nagging notion. She wished it had waned this night, putting out the fire. Waned?
Rained;
that was it. If only a good storm would come and douse everything. But the sky remained distressingly clear.
    Slowly the henchman on guard nodded. He was sleeping on the job, and she was not about to wake him—but it didn’t matter, because the fire was more than bright enough to keep her hobbled, whether he woke or slept. She might hurl a bad dream at him, but that would only bestir him with fright, making him alert again. She would have to deal with that fire first. But how, when she was hobbled?
    Then she realized how to