Hackworth awakes from a dream;

retreat from the world of the Drummers;

chronological discrepancies.

Hackworth woke from a dream of unsustainable pleasure and realized it wasn't a dream; his penis was inside someone else, and he was steaming like a runaway locomotive toward ejaculation. He had no idea what was going on; but couldn't he be forgiven for doing the wrong thing? With a wiggle here and a thrust there, he finally nudged himself over the threshold, the smooth muscles of the tract in question executing their spinal algorithm.

Just a few deep breaths into the refractory period, and he had already disengaged, yelping a little from the electric spark of withdrawal, and levered himself up on one arm to see whom he'd just violated. The firelight was enough to tell him what he already knew: Whoever this woman was, it wasn't Gwen. Hackworth had violated the most important promise he'd ever made, and he didn't even know the other party.

But he knew it wasn't the first time. Far from it. He'd had sex with a lot of people in the past few years– he'd even been buggered.

There was, for example, the woman-

Never mind, there was the man who-

Strange to say, he could not think of any specific examples. But he knew he was guilty. It was precisely like waking up from a dream and having a clear train of thought in your mind, something you were working on just a few seconds ago, but being unable to remember it, consciousness peeled away from cognition. Like a three-year-old who has a talent for vanishing into crowds whenever you turn your back, Hackworth's memories had fled to the same place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for déjà vu, last night's dreams.

He knew he was in big trouble with Gwen, but that Fiona still loved him– Fiona, taller than Gwen now, so self-conscious about her still linear figure, still devoid of the second derivatives that add spice to life.

Taller than Gwen? How's that?

Better get out of this place before he had sex with someone else he didn't know.

He wasn't in the central chamber anymore, rather in one of the tunnel's aneurysms with some twenty other people, all just as naked as he was. He knew which tunnel led to the exit (why?) and began to crawl down it, rather stiffly as it seemed that he was stiff and laden with cricks and cramps. Must not have been very athletic sex– more in the Tantric mode.

Sometimes they had sex for days.

How did he know that?

The hallucinations were gone, which was fine with him. He crawled through the tunnels for a long time. If he tried to think about where he was going, he got lost and eventually circled back to where he started. Only when his mind began to wander did he make his way on some kind of autopilot to a long chamber filled with silvery light, sloping upward. This was beginning to look familiar, he had seen this when he was still a young man. He followed it upward until he reached the end, where something unusually stony was under his feet. A hatch opened above him, and several tons of cold seawater landed on his head.

He staggered up onto dry land and found himself in Stanley Park again, gray floor aft, green wall fore. The ferns rustled, and out stepped Kidnapper, who looked fuzzy and green. He also looked unusually dapper for a robotic horse, as Hackworth's bowler hat was perched on top of his head.

Hackworth reached up to feel himself and was astounded to feel his face covered with hair. Several months' growth of beard was there. But even stranger, his chest was much hairier than it had been before. Some of the chest hair was gray, the only gray hairs he had ever seen coming out of his own follicles.

Kidnapper was fuzzy and green because moss had been growing on him. The bowler looked terrible and had moss on it too. Hackworth reached out instinctively and put it on his head. His arm was thicker and hairier than it used to be, a not altogether unpleasing change, and even the hat felt a little tight.

From the Primer, Princess Nell crosses the trail of the enigmatic Mouse Army;

a visit to an invalid.

The clearing dimly visible through the trees ahead was a welcome sight, for the forests of King Coyote were surpassingly deep and forever shrouded in cool mists. Fingers of sunlight had begun to thrust between the clouds, and so Princess Nell decided to rest in the open space and, with any luck, bask in the sunlight. But when she reached the clearing, she found that it was not the flowerstrewn greensward she had expected; it was rather a swath that had been carved through the forest by the passage of some titanic force, which had flattened trees and churned up the soil as it progressed. When Princess Nell had recovered from her astonishment and mastered her fear, she resolved to make use of the tracking skills she had learned during her many adventures, so as to learn something about the nature of this unknown creature.

As she soon discovered, the skills of an advanced tracker were not necessary in this case. The merest glance at the trampled soil revealed not (as she had anticipated) a few enormous footprints, but millions of tiny ones, superimposed upon one another in such numbers that no scrap of ground was unmarked by the impressions of tiny claws and footpads.

A torrent of cats had passed this way; even had Princess Nell not recognized the footprints, the balls of loose hair and tiny scats, strewn everywhere, would have told the story. Cats moving in a herd! It was most unfeline behavior. Nell followed their track for some time, hoping to divine the cause of this prodigy. After a few miles the road widened into an abandoned camp freckled with the remains of innumerable small campfires. Nell combed this area for more clues, not without success: she found many mouse droppings here, and mouse footprints around the fires. The pattern of footprints made it clear that the cats had been concentrated in a few small areas, while the mice had apparently had the run of the place.

The final piece of the puzzle was a tiny scrap of twisted rawhide that Nell found abandoned near one of the little campfires. Turning it around in her fingers, Nell realized that it was much like a horse's bridle– except sized to fit around the head of a cat.

She was standing on the trail of a vast army of mice, who rode on the backs of cats in the way that knights ride on horses.

She had heard tales of the Mouse Army in other parts of the Land Beyond and dismissed them as ancient superstitions.

But once, several years ago, in an inn high in the mountains, where Princess Nell had stayed for the night, she had been awakened early in the morning by the sound of a mouse rooting through her pack. .

Princess Nell uttered a light-making spell that Purple had taught her, kindling a ball of luminance that hung in the air in the center of the room. The words of the spell had been concealed in the howl of the mountain winds through the rickety structure of the old inn, and so the mouse was caught entirely by surprise, blinded by the sudden light. Nell was startled to see that the mouse was not gnawing its way into her supply of food, as any mouse should have done, but rather was going through some of her papers. And this was not the usual destructive search for nesting material-this mouse knew how to read and was looking for information. Princess Nell trapped the mouse spy under her hands.

"What are you looking for? Tell me, and I shall let you escape!" she said. Her adventures had taught her to be on the lookout for tricks of all kinds, and it was important that she learn who had dispatched this tiny, but effective, spy.

"I am but a harmless mouse!" the spy squealed. "I do not even desire your food– information only!"

"I will give you a big piece of cheese, all to yourself, if you give me some information," Princess Nell said. She caught the mouse's tail and lifted him up into the air so that they could talk face-to-face. Meanwhile, with her other hand, she loosened the drawstring of her bag and drew out a nice piece of blue-veined Stilton.