That night, Nell again heard the voices, but this time they seemed to be shouting, "Look in the trees! Look in the trees!"

The next morning, she went into the remaining grove of trees and explored it even as Harv was cutting the last of them down. Again she found nothing.

Neither one of them slept well that night, for they knew that they were burning the last of their wood, and that the next night they would have no protection from the trolls. Nell heard the voices again, and this time they seemed to be shouting, "Look under the ground! Look under the ground!"

Later, after the sun came up, she went exploring again and found a cave whose entrance had been shut up by trolls. When she opened the cave, she found four dolls: a dinosaur, a duck, a rabbit, and a woman with long purple hair. But she did not see anything living that could have made the voices.

Nell and Harv went into the Dark Castle itself that night and shut themselves up in a room high in one tower and pushed heavy furniture against the door, hoping that it would keep the trolls at bay. The room had one tiny window, and Nell stood next to it watching the sun go down, wondering if she would see it rise again. Just as the last glimmer of red light disappeared beneath the horizon, she felt a puff of air at her back and turned around to see an astonishing sight: The stuffed animals had turned into real creatures!

There was a great scary dinosaur, a duck, a clever little bunny rabbit, and a woman in a purple gown with purple hair. They explained to Princess Nell that her wicked stepmother was an evil sorceress in the Land Beyond, and that the four of them had long ago sworn to defeat her evil plans. She had placed an enchantment on them, so that they were dolls in the daytime but returned to their normal selves at night. Then she had imprisoned them in this castle, where the trolls had shut them up inside a cave. They thanked Nell for releasing them.

Then Nell told them her own story. When she mentioned how she and Harv had been plucked from the ocean wrapped in cloth of gold, the woman named Purple said, "This means that you are a true Princess, and so we pledge our undying loyalty to you." And all four of them bent down on one knee and swore an oath to defend Princess Nell to the death.

Dinosaur, who was the fiercest of them all, mounted a campaign to stamp out the trolls, and within a few days they had all been driven away. Thereafter Nell was no longer troubled in her sleep, for she knew that the scary trolls, who had once given her bad dreams, had been replaced by her four night friends.

Judge Fang didn't torture people frequently. This was for several reasons. Under the new system of Confucian justice, it was no longer necessary for every criminal to sign a confession before a sentence was carried out; all that was needed was for the magistrate to find him guilty on the strength of the evidence. This alone relieved the Judge of having to torture many of the people who came before his bench, though he was often tempted to force confessions from insolent Western thetes who refused to take responsibility for their own actions. Furthermore, modern surveillance equipment made it possible to gather information without having to rely on (sometimes reticent) human witnesses as the magistrates of yore had done.

But the man with the red dreadlocks was a very reluctant witness indeed, and unfortunately the information locked up in his brain was unique. No airborne cine aerostat or microscopic surveillance mite had recorded the data Judge Fang sought. And so the magistrate had decided to revert to the time-honored methods of his venerable predecessors.

Chang strapped the prisoner (who would only identify himself as a Mr. PhyrePhox) to a heavy X-shaped rack that was normally used for canings. This was purely a humanitarian gesture; it would prevent PhyrePhox from thrashing wildly around the room and injuring himself. Chang also stripped the prisoner from the waist down and situated a bucket under his organs of elimination. In so doing he happened to expose the only actual injury that the prisoner would suffer during this entire procedure: a tiny, neat scab in the base of the spine, where the court physician had thrust in the spinal tap the previous afternoon, and introduced a set of nanosites– nanotechnological parasites– under the supervision of Miss Pao. In the ensuing twelve hours, the 'sites had migrated up and down the prisoner's spinal column, drifting lazily through the cerebrospinal fluid, and situated themselves on whatever afferent nerves they happened to bump up against. These nerves, used by the body to transmit information such as (to name only one example) excruciating pain to the brain, had a distinctive texture and appearance that the 'sites were clever enough to recognize. It is probably superfluous to mention that these 'sites had one other key feature, namely the ability to transmit bogus information along those nerves.

That tiny scab, just above the buttocks, always drew Judge Fang's attention when he presided over one of these affairs, which fortunately was not more than a few times a year. PhyrePhox, being a natural redhead, had deathly pale skin.

"Cool!" the prisoner suddenly exclaimed, swiveling his head around in a spray of dreadlocks, trying as best he could to look down and back over his freckled shoulder. "I got this feeling of, like, stroking some, like, really soft fur or something against my left inner thigh. That is so bitching! Do it again, man! Whoa, wait a minute! Now it's the same feeling, but it's like on the sole of my right foot!"

"The attachment of the nanosites to the nerves is an aleatory process– we never know which nanosite will end up where. The sensations you are experiencing now are a way for us to take inventory, as it were. Of course, nothing is actually happening in your thigh or foot; it all takes place within the spinal column, and you would feel it even if your legs had been amputated."

"That's really weird," PhyrePhox exclaimed, his pale green eyes going wide with amazement. "So you could even, like, torture a basket case." His eye and cheek twitched on one side. "Damn! Feels like someone's tickling my face now. Hey, cut it out!" A grin came over his face. "Oh, no! I'll tell you everything! Just don't tickle me! Please!"

Chang was first stunned and then furious at the prisoner's breach of decorum and made a move toward a rack of canes mounted to the wall. Judge Fang steadied his assistant with a firm hand on the shoulder; Chang swallowed his anger and took a deep breath, then bowed apologetically.

"You know, PhyrePhox," Judge Fang said, "I really appreciate the moments of levity and even childlike wonder that you are injecting into this process. So often when we strap people to the torture rack, they are unpleasantly tense and hardly any fun at all to be around."

"Hey, man, I'm into new experiences. I get lots of experience points for this, huh?"

"Experience points?"

"It's a joke. From swords-and-sorcery ractives. See, the more experience points your character earns, the more power he gets."

Judge Fang straightened one hand and snapped it backward past his head, making a whooshing sound like a low-flying fighter plane. "The reference escaped me," he explained for the benefit of Chang and Miss Pao, who did not recognize the gesture.

"Feels like there's something tickling my right eardrum now," the prisoner said, snapping his head back and forth.

"Good! That means a nanosite happened to attach itself to the nerve running from your eardrum into your brain. We always consider it an omen of good fortune when this happens," Judge Fang said, "as pain impulses delivered into this nerve make a particularly deep impression on the subject. Now, I will ask Miss Pao to suspend this process for a few minutes so that I can have your full attention."