Smash hurled both dragons at the other ogre, who stood gloating, and grabbed for two more. In a moment both of these were
dragging,
and the dragging dragons were hurled up to drape about the ogre.
The fifth dragon, meanwhile, had fastened its jaws on Smash's legs. They were pretty good jaws, with diamond-hard teeth; they were beginning to hurt. Smash plunged his fist down with such force that the skull caved in. He ripped the body away and hurled it, too, at the other ogre.
The smog had largely cleared, perhaps abetted by the breeze from Smash's own activity. Now an immense shadow fell across them. Smash looked up. It was the mother dragon, so huge her landbound bulk blocked off the light of the sun. Not all big dragons were confined to Dragonland! It would take a whole tribe of ogres to fend her off--and the tribe of the Ogre-Fen Ogres would certainly not do that. Smash had been tricked into this nest because the other ogre knew it would be the end of him.
But
Smash
, having cursed the darkness of his witlessness, now suffered a flashback of dull genius. "Heee!" he cried, pointing a hamfinger at the other ogre.
The dragoness looked. There stood the ogre, in midgloat, with the five limp, little dragon cubs draped around his body like so much apparel. He had been so pleased with his success in framing Smash that he had not thought to clear the debris from
himself
. The liability of the true ogre had betrayed him--his inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Naturally the dragoness assumed that he was the guilty creature.
With a roar so horrendous that it petrified the local trees and caused a layer of rock on the cliff to shiver into dust, several diamonds to craze and crack; and a blast of fire that would have vaporized trees and cliff face, had the one not just been converted from wood to stone and the other not just powdered out, she went for the guilty ogre.
The ogre was dim, but not that dim, especially as a refracted wash of fire frizzled his fur. While the dragoness inhaled and oriented for a more accurate second shot, he flung off the little dragons and dived into the nest-pit, landing snoot-first in the diamonds. The contrast was considerable--the sheer beauty of the stones versus the sheer ugliness of the ogre. It looked as if he were trying to eat them.
Smash hardly paused for thought. At the moment, the dragoness was a greater threat to his health than the ogre. He wrestled a boulder out of the pit wall and heaved it up at the dragoness, while the other ogre struggled to his feet, shedding white, red, green, blue, and polka-dot diamonds. The dragoness turned, snapped at the boulder, found it inedible, and spit it out
Smash realized that the other ogre had disappeared. He checked, and saw a foot in a hole. The boulder he had thrown had blocked a passage, and the ogre was crawling down it, leaving Smash to face the fire alone. Smash didn't appreciate that, so he grabbed the foot and hauled the ogre back and out. Several more diamonds dropped from crevices on the creature's hide--black, yellow, purple, plaid, and candy-striped. In a moment
Smash
had the ogre in the air, swinging him around by the feet in a circle.
The dragoness was pumping up for a real burnout blast. Such an exhalation could incinerate both ogres in a single foop. She opened her maw, letting the first wisps of superheated steam emerge, and her belly rumbled with the gathering holocaust.
Smash let go of the ogre, hurling him directly into the gaping maw, headfirst.
The dragon choked on her own blocked fire, for the ogre's body was just the right size to plug her gullet. The ogre's feet, protruding slightly from the mouth, kicked madly. Then the ogre's broken teeth started working as he chewed his way out. The dragoness looked startled, uncertain how to deal with this complication.
Smash wasn't sure how this contest would turn out. The dragoness' fire was bottled, and her own teeth could not quite get purchase on the ogre in her throat, but she did have a lot of power and might be able to clear the ogre by either coughing him out or swallowing him the rest of the way. On the other hand, the ogre could chew quite a distance in a short time. Smash decided to depart the premises with judicious dispatch.
But where could he go? If he scrambled out of the nest, the dragoness might chase after him, and he would be more like a sitting duck than a running ogre, in the open. If he remained--
"Hssst!" someone called. "Here!"
Smash looked. A little humanoid nymph stood within the hole left by the boulder.
"I was raised in the underworld," she said. "I know tunnels. Come!"
Smash looked back at the dragoness, who was swelling with stifled pressure, and at the kicking ogre in her throat. The former was about to fire the latter out like a missile. He had sympathy for neither and was fed up with the whole business. What did he want with ogres anyway? They were dull creatures who crunched the bones of human folk.
Human folk.
"Tandy!" he cried. "I must save her from the ogres!"
The nymph was disgusted. "Idiot!" she cried. "I am Tandy!"
Smash peered closely at her. The nymph had brown hair, blue eyes, and a spunky, upturned little nose. She was indeed Tandy. Odd that he hadn't recognized her! Yet who would have expected a nymph to turn out to be a person!
"Now get in here, you oaf!" she commanded. "Before that monster pops her cork!"
He followed Tandy into the tunnel. She led him along a curving route, deep down into the ground.
The air here turned cool, the wall clammy.
"The dragon mines here for diamonds that my mother leaves," she explained. "There would be terrible disruption in Xanth if it weren't for her work. The dragons would go on a rampage if their diamonds ran out, and so would the other creatures if they couldn't get their own particular stones. It certainly is nice to know my mother has been here! Of course, that could have been a long time ago. There might even be an aperture to my home netherworld here, though probably she rode the Diggle and left no passage behind."
Smash just followed, more concerned about escaping the dragon than about the girl's idle commentary.
There was a sound behind them, like a giant spike being fired violently into bedrock. The dragoness had no doubt disgorged the ogre from her craw and now was ready to pursue the two of them here. Though the diameter of the tunnel was not great, dragons were long, sinuous creatures, particularly the wingless landbound ones, who could move efficiently through small apertures. Or she could simply send a blast of flame along, frying them. Worse yet, she might do both, pursuing until she got close, then doing some fiery target practice.
"Oh, I'm sure there's a way down, somewhere near," Tandy fussed. "The wall here is shallow; I can tell by the way it resonates. I've had a lot of experience with this type of formation. See--there's a fossil." She indicated a glowing thing that resembled the skeleton of a fish, but it squiggled out of sight before Smash could examine it closely.
Fossils were like that, he knew; they preferred to hide from discovery. They were like zombies, except that they didn't generally travel about much; they just rested for eons. He had no idea what their purpose in life or death might be. "But I can't find a hole!" Tandy finished, frustrated.
Smash knew they had to get out of this particular passage in a hurry. He aimed his fist and smashed a hole in the wall. A new chamber opened up. He dropped through, carefully lifting Tandy down.
"That's right!" she exclaimed. "I forgot about your ogre strength! It's handy at times."
A rush of fire flowed along the tunnel they had quitted. They had gotten out just in time!
"This is it!" Tandy cried.
"The netherworld!
I haven't been in this section before, but I recognize the general configuration. A few days'
walk,
and I'm home!" Then she reconsidered. "No, there isn't any direct connection. The--what's that thing that cuts Xanth in half? I can't remember--"
"The Gap Chasm," Smash said, dredging it out of his own fading memory. In his ogre personality, he was too stupid to forget things as readily as Tandy could.
"Yes. That. That would cut off this section from the section I live in, I think. Still--"
She led him through a dark labyrinth, until the sounds of the enraged dragon faded. They finally stood on a ledge near cool water. "She'll never find us here. It would douse her fire."
"I hope you'll be able to find our way out. I'm lost." Ogres didn't care one way or the other about the depths of the earth, but did like to be able to get around
to forage
for food and violence.
"When the time is right," she said.
"Maybe never."
"But what of our missions?"
Smash demanded. "What missions?" she asked innocently. Then
Smash
remembered. She no longer cared about seeking fulfillment. She had given up her soul.
But in a moment he realized this was not serious. "I have your half soul," he said. "Take it back." He put his huge paw on his head and drew out the fillet. It adhered to
his own
soul, with which it had temporarily merged; evidently the two souls liked each other, different as they were. At last her soul rested in his palm.
Then he moved the faintly luminous hemisphere to her head and patted it in. The soul dissolved, flowing back into her. "Oh, that feels so good!" she exclaimed. "Now I know how much I missed my soul, even the half of it!"
Smash, back to
his own
half soul, suddenly felt tired. He sank down on the rock where he was resting. It was dark here, but he didn't mind; it was easy to rest in this place.
Tandy sank down beside him. "I think my soul feels lonely," she said. "It was half, and then it was whole with yours, and now it's half again, with maybe the better half missing."
"Yours is the better half," he said. "It's cute and spunky and sensitive, while mine is gross and stupid."
"But strong and loyal," she said. "They complement each other. A full person needs strength and sensitivity."
"An ogre doesn't." But now he wondered.
She found his hamhand with her own. "Okay, Smash, I remember our missions now. I wanted to find a good husband, and you--"
"Wanted a good wife," Smash finished. "I didn't know it, but the Good Magician evidently did. So he sent me where I could find one. But somehow the notion of sharing the rest of my life with an ogress no longer appeals. I don't know why."
"Because true ogres and ogresses are brutes," she said. "You really aren't that kind,
Smash
."
"Perhaps I wasn't when I had the Eye Queue curse. But when I lost it, I reverted to my natural state."
"Are you sure your natural state is brutish?"
"I was raised to be able to smash ironwood trees with single blows of my horny fist," he said. "To wrestle my weight in dragons and pulverize them. To squeeze purple bouillon juice from purple wood with my bare hands.
To chew rocks into sand.
To--"
"That's impressive. Smash. And I've seen you do some of those things. But are you sure you aren't confusing strength with brutishness? You have always been very gentle with me."
"You are special," he said, experiencing a surge of unfamiliar feeling.
"Chem told me something she learned from a
Mundane
scholar. Chem and I talked a lot while you were in the gourd, there in the Void, because we didn't know for sure whether we would ever get free of that place. The scholar's name was Ichabod, and he knew this little poem about a Mundane monster resembling a tiger lily, only this one is supposed to be an animal instead of a plant."
"I have fought tiger lilies," he said. "Even their roots have claws. They're worse than dandy-lions."
"She couldn't remember the poem, exactly. So we played with it, applying it to you. Ogre, ogre, burning bright--'"
"Ogre's don't burn!"
"They do when they're stepping across the firewall," she said, "trying to fetch a boat so the rest of us can navigate past the loan sharks. That's what reminded Chem of the poem, she said.
The flaming ogre.
Anyway, the poem tells how they go through the jungle in the night, the fiery ogres, and are fearfully awful."
"Yes," Smash said, becoming pleased with the image.
"We had a good laugh. You aren't fearful at all, to us. You're a big, wonderful, blundering ball of fur, and we wouldn't trade you for anything."
"No matter how brightly I burn," Smash agreed ruefully.
He changed the subject. "How were you able to function without your soul? When you lost it before, you were comatose."
"Partly, before, it was the shock of loss," she said. "This time I gave it away; I was braced, experienced."
"That shouldn't make much difference," he protested. "A soul is a soul, and when you lose it--"
"It does make a difference. What a girl gives away may make her feel good, while if the same thing is taken by force, it can destroy her."
"But without a soul--"
"True. That's only an analogy. I suppose I was thinking more of love."
He remembered how the demon had tried to rape her. Suddenly he hated that demon. "Yes, you need someone to protect you. But we found no man along the route, and now we are beyond the Good Magician's assignment without an Answer for either of us."
"I'm not so sure," she said.
"We're drifting from the subject. How did you survive, soulless? Your half soul made me strong enough to beat another ogre; you had to have been so weak you would collapse. Yet you didn't."
"Well, I'm half nymph," she said.
"Half nymph?
You did seem like a nymph when--"
"I always thought of myself as human, just as you always thought of yourself as ogre. But my mother is Jewel the Nymph. So by heredity I'm as much nymph as girl."
"What's the difference?" He knew there was a difference, but found
himself
unable to define it.