At the last moment I got Wishful-Thinking Disease and shoved a pack of cigarettes in.

Then it was time. I stood in front of a full-length mirror wearing my new short life and stared myself as hard as I knew I could be.

“C’mon,” I growled sourly, “let’s get this done.” There was a flash of sound-light and then subzero ice-cold darkness. I felt myself falling. . . .

3

I woke up, sure enough, on another dusty road. The trees on each side of the road spread a rich canopy above me, all but eclipsing the deep blue sky. There was a slow-moving river off to my right, broad and deep, a thick woods to my left, broader and deeper, and, right in front of me, a saber-toothed tiger eyeing me calmly.

At first I thought it was a dream. The sky too blue, the woods too green—that sort of thing. Then I saw it was no dream. Or rather, smelled it. Trust me, a cat that size has a whiff to it. By “that size” I mean . . . well, imagine the biggest fastest motorcycle you’ve ever seen with teeth the size of the handgrips running around loose looking for fuel.

“Are you the One?” it asked me without speaking, reminding me where I was, the Place, the Horseclans Place, and reminding me also that this was no saber-toothed tiger. It was smart. It was a telepath.

It was a prairiecat.

“Are you the One?” it beamed to me again.

“The way my luck’s been running—probably,” I replied out loud.

It turned its head this way and that like a housecat. It beamed confusion. But not, thankfully, anger or irritation. It seemed to be intrigued, though. He did, I should say. For it was clearly a male.

“Come with me,” he beamed. “I am your Guide and your Shelter.”

“My Shelter?”

“Your thoughts cannot be stolen within my closeness.” “I see. Who would wish to steal them?”

“Enemies.”

“That’s a lot of help.”

“You are welcome,” he replied.

I laughed shortly. Prairiecats weren’t hip to sarcasm, it seemed.

“You are pleased?” he asked, noticing my laughter. “That depends. Where are you taking me?”

“Lord Smada.”

Now, that figured. Who else would be in on this but the old con man himself? I thought of objecting but what was the point?

I sighed, nodded, stood up. We started off down the road. We walked for a pleasant hour, the leafy ceiling rolling slowly above us, the great animal padding softly in front. This Place, whatever else it was, was indeed beautiful. And rich and full and wondrous. It was impossible, walking beneath such majesty, taking in that healthy soft air, not to feel more alive.

Even if you had been brought here to kill.

To hell with it! I thought again, even more strongly than before. Whatever happens, happens. There was a touch of righteous anger involved as well. For 1 hadn’t done anything wrong! I had never really hurt anyone except when I had been in this Place, and it was damned unfair to bring me back to do it some more.

Just because I enjoyed doing it was no reason to make me do it.

We turned away from the river road after a while and started cross-country. It wasn’t much harder going. The few really thick sections of undergrowth were easily avoided and the grass was luxurious and deep. It made you wonder why anyone would want to use the roads at all if he wasn’t with a caravan or something.

Still, I wasn’t used to this sort of sustained tramping and asked the cat if I could rest. “Of course, little two-legs,” he beamed, and we sat.

Maybe he did have a sense of humor after all, I was thinking, until I felt the cat’s disdain come over with his thoughts.

Sitting there I decided to take inventory. As expected, every single aspect of my possessions that did not fit this Place had been altered. Zippers to buttons, plastic shoelace eyes replaced by wooden ones, that sort of thing. There were odd runes and mysterious hieroglyphics instead of American presidents on my coins. My Premium California Red Table Wine had been changed to something like the stuff my aunt used to keep in an uncovered carafe in her formal living room for years at a time. My army-navy store magnesium match was now a couple of hunks of flint.

All my toilet paper was gone.

Incredibly enough, my cigarettes were not. They looked different and tasted awful but there they were, right down to the coarse parchment package with “L&M” o’n the front.

Weird. But then again, nice to know Someone had a sense of irony in this Place.

We began again a few minutes later. We walked several miles, stopping twice more. And everything was amazingly vibrant and alive and breathtaking and I remembered something Lanny had said when last we were here. He’d said he thought it wasn’t really the Horseclans world. It was too perfect. Too much like a movie. It wasn’t the world of those books or the world of our birth. It was something in between.

It was something raw and full of purpose.

It was getting almost too dark to see when we spotted the campfire. The cat stopped on a knoll and sat down, its huge tail curling behind it.

“Smada?” I whispered.

“No,” he beamed back. “Your comrades-in-arms.”

4

They didn’t want me.

They sat or lay sullenly around the fire surrounded by the cracked and broken masonry of what used to be some sort of building and stared hard-eyed in my direction. No one stood up to greet me after the cat told them my name. No one spoke to me or to anyone else. A couple of them exchanged disgusted looks.

There were eight of them, ranging in age from late teens to one old salt who was sixty if he was a day with the thickest gray hair and beard I had ever seen. He would have looked like a hippie had it not been for all those jagged scars on his face and the huge broadsword lying beside him. Oddly enough, his face was the most pleasant of the lot. Well, not his face. But his eyes. Clearly, he was not automatically ready to hate me as the others seemed to be.

But neither had I sold him. He did not return my nod. The cat then made an interesting little statement. He backed away to the edges of the firelight and lay down with his muzzle propped up on his forepaws. Watching.

It looked like audition time.

And you know what? That pissed me off. I hadn’t asked to be here. I hadn’t asked to be the One. I hadn’t asked to be stuck out here in the darkness of Never-Never Land with a bunch of raggedy-ass swordsmen too stupid to know what antiperspirant was, much less know how very badly they needed it. A little dentistry wouldn’t have hurt either. Make that a lot of dentistry.

I snorted as loudly as I could, stepped over to the fire, and lit one of my prehistoric cigarettes off one of the embers. Then I plopped loudly down on a stone and blew a smoke ring in the most impudent and irreverent manner I could manage.

To hell with it! Remember?

I don’t think they’d ever seen a cigarette before. But “Well, screw you, too, buddy!” translates everywhere.

Their reply came right away. Gruffle was the guy’s name. Long tangled black hair, a tall wiry build, a short wide sword, and a barroom-bully sneer. Did I mention dentistry?

He stood up with an exaggerated groan and raised himself to his full height, which was maybe two or three inches beyond my own. He put his hands on his hips and stared at me for a bit in a way calculated to have me see how unimpressed he was. Then he regarded his fellows.

“For one full day and part of night we have waited for such as this? We were told to await a leader—I see none. We were told to await a man of power—I see none. I see no power. And truly, I see no man.”

And with that he took a couple of dramatic steps around the fire and stood staring down at me.