The brass girl shook her head doubtfully. "I'm not sure. You are no ordinary ogre, they inform me. For one thing, they told me you're much smarter than most of your kind."
"That's because of the curse of the Eye Queue. Once I get rid of that, I'll be blissfully stupid again. Just like any other ogre. Maybe more so."
"There is that," Biythe agreed. "I don't think Tandy would like you to be just like any other ogre."
The room stopped moving, after a jolt that bounced her off his knee. "Well, here we are at the paper world," she said.
The elevator opened onto a literal world of paper. Green-colored fragments of paper served for a lawn; brown and green paper columns were trees; a flat paper sun hung in the painted blue sky. At least this world had color, in contrast with the monochrome of most of the rest of the gourd.
"This is as far as I go," Biythe said as Smash stepped out. "If it's any comfort, I think that in some ways you're still pretty stupid, even with the Eye Queue."
"Thank you," Smash said, flattered.
" 'Bye, ogre." The door closed and she was gone. Smash turned to the new adventure that surely awaited him.
Paper was everywhere. Smash saw a bird; idly he caught it out of the air in a paw, not to hurt it but to look at it, because it seemed strange. It turned out to be strange indeed; it, too, was made of paper, the wings corrugated, the body a cylinder of paper, the beak a stiffened, painted triangle of cardboard. He let it go and it flew away, peeping with the rasp of stiff paper.
Curious, he caught a bug. It was only an intricate convolution of paper, brightly painted. When he released it, the paper reconvoluted and the bug buzzed away. There were butterflies, also of paper. The bushes and stones and puddles were all colored paper. It seemed harmless enough.
Then a little paper machine charged up. Smash had seen machines during a visit to Mundania and didn't like them; they were ornery mechanical things. This one was way too small to bother him seriously, but it did bother him lightly. It fired a paper spitball at him.
The spitball stung his knee. Smash smiled. The miniature machine had a name printed on its side: TANK. It was cute.
The ogre stomped on. The tank followed, firing another damp paper ball. It stung Smash on the rump. He frowned. The humor was wearing thin. He didn't care to have a dent to match that of the brass girl.
He turned to warn the tank away--and its third shot plastered his nose.
That did it. Smash lifted one brute foot and stomped the obnoxious machine flat. It was only paper; it collapsed readily. But an unexpended spitball stuck to the ogre's toe.
Smash tromped on, seeking whatever challenge this section offered. But now three more of the paper tanks arrived. Burp--burp--burp! Their spitballs spit in a volley at the ogre, sticking to his belly like a line of damp buttons. He stamped all three paper vehicles flat.
Yet more tanks arrived, and these were larger. Their spitballs stung harder, and one just missed his eye. Smash had to shield his face with one hand while he stomped them.
He heard something behind. A tank was chewing up his line of string! That would prevent him from knowing when he crossed his own trail, and he could get lost. He strode back and picked up the tank, looking closely at it.
The thing burped a huge splat of a spitball at him that plugged a nostril. Smash sneezed--and the tank was blown into a flat sheet of paper. Words were printed on it: GET WITH IT, DOPE.
Funny--Smash had never learned how to read. No ogre was smart enough for literacy. But he grasped this message perfectly. This must be another facet of the curse of the Eye Queue. He pretended he did not fathom the words.
He turned again--and saw a much bigger paper tank charging down on him. He grabbed the tip of the cardboard cannon and pinched it closed just as the machine fired. The backpressure blew up the tank in a shower of confetti.
But more, and yet larger, tanks were coming. This region seemed to have an inexhaustible supply! Smash cast about for some way to stop them once and for all.
He had an idea. He bent to scoop through the paper-turf ground. Sure enough, it turned to regular dirt below, with rocks. He found a couple of nice quartz chunks and bashed them together to make sparks. Soon he struck a fire. The paper grass burned readily.
The tanks charged into the blaze--and quickly caught fire themselves. Their magazines blew up in violent sprays of spit. Colored bits of paper flew up in clouds, containing pictures and ads for products and all the other crazy things magazines filled their pages with. Soon all the tanks were ashes.
Smash tromped on. A paper tiger charged from the paper jungle, snarling and leaping. Smash caught it by the tail and shook it into limp paper, the black and orange colors running. He dipped this into a fringe of the fire and used the resulting torch to discourage other paper animals. They faded back before his bright-burning tiger, and he proceeded unhampered. Apparently there was nothing quite so fearful as a burning tiger. If this had been a battle, he had won it.
Now he came to a house of cards. Smash knew what cards were; he had seen Prince Dor and Princess Irene playing games with them at Castle Roogna, instead of getting down to basics the way ogres would. Sometimes they had constructed elaborate structures from the cards. This was such a structure--but it was huge. Each card was the height of Smash himself, with suit markings as big as his head and almost as ugly.
He paused to consider these. At the near side was the nine of hearts. He knew what hearts were: the symbol of love. This reminded him irrelevantly of what the brass girl had told him about Tandy. Could it be true that the tiny human girl liked him more than was proper, considering that ogres weren't supposed to be liked at all? If so, what was his responsibility? Should he growl at her, to discourage her? That did seem best.
He entered the house of cards, careful not to jostle it. These structures collapsed very readily, and after all, this might be the way out of the paper land. He felt he was making good progress through the worlds of the gourd, and he wanted to go on to the last station and meet the Dark Horse.
The inner wall showed the two of clubs. Clubs were, of course, the ogre's favorite suit. There was nothing like a good, heavy club for refreshing violence! Then there was the jack of diamonds, symbolizing the wealth of dragons. His curse of intellect made symbolism quite clear now. He remembered how many of the bright little stones the Dragon Lady had had; this was probably her card. Then there was the two of spades, with its shovel symbol. The suit of farmers.
In the center of the house of cards was the joker. It depicted a handsomely brutish ogre with legs that trailed into smoke. Of course! Smash pushed against it, assuming it to be his door to the next world--and the whole structure collapsed.
The cards were not heavy, of course, and in a moment Smash's head poked above the wreckage. He looked about.
The scene had changed. The paper was gone. The painted sky and cardboard trees existed no longer. Now there was a broad and sandy plain, like that of the nightmares realm, except that this one was in daylight, with the sun beating down hotly.
He spied an object in the desert. It glinted prettily, but not like a diamond. Curious, Smash stomped over to it. It was a greenish bottle, half buried in the sand, fancily corked. He found himself attracted to it; a bottle like that, its base properly broken off, could make a fine weapon.
He picked it up. Inside the bottle was a hazy motion, as of slowly swirling mist. The cork had a glossy metallic seal with a word embossed: FOOL.
Well, that was the nature of ogres. He was thirsty in this heat; maybe the stuff in the bottle was good to drink. Smash ripped off the seal and used his teeth to pop the cork. After all, he was uncertain how long it would be before he came across anything potable, here in the gourd. But mainly, his action was his Eye Queue's fault; because of it, he was curious.
As the cork blasted free, vapor surged out of the bottle. It swelled out voluminously. Too bad--this was neither edible nor potable, and it smelled of sulfur. Smash sneezed.
The vapor fo
rmed a big greenish cloud, swirling about but not dissipating into the air. In a moment, two muscular arms projected from it, and the remainder formed into the head and upper torso of a gaseous man-creature about Smash's own size.
"Who in the gourd are you?" Smash inquired. "Ho, ho, ho!" the creature boomed. "I be the ifrit of the bottle. Thou has freed me; as thy reward, I shall suffer thee to choose in what manner thou shalt die."
"Oh, one of those," Smash said, unimpressed. "A bottle imp." He now recognized, in retrospect, this creature as the figure on the joker card. He had taken it to be an ogre, but, of course, ogres had hairy legs and big flat feet, rather than trailing smoke.
"Dost thou mock me, thou excrescence of excrement?" the ifrit demanded, swelling angrily. "Beware, lest I squish thee into a nonentitious cube and make bouillon soup of thee!"
"Look, ifrit, I don't have time for this nonsense," Smash said, though the mention of the bouillon cube made him hungry. He had squished a bull into a bouillon cube once and made soup with it; he could use some of that now! "I just want to find the Night Stallion and vacate the lien on my soul. If you aren't going to help, get out of my way."
"Surely I shall destroy thee!" the ifrit raged, turning dusky purple. He reached for the ogre's throat with huge and taloned hands.
Smash grabbed the ifrit's limbs, knotted them together in much the way he had tied the extremities of the ghastlies, and jammed the creature headfirst back into the green bottle. "Oaf! Infidel!" the ifrit screamed, his words somewhat distorted since his mouth was squeezed through the bottle's neck. "What accursed mischief be this?"
"I warned you," Smash said, using a forefinger to tamp more of the ifrit into the container. "Don't mess with ogres. They have no sense of humor."
Struggle as he might, the ifrit could not prevail against Smash's power. "Ooo, ouch!" the voice came muffled from the glass. "OooOOoo!" For Smash's finger had rammed into the creature's gasous posterior.
Then a hand came back out of the bottle. It waved a white flag.
Smash knew that meant surrender. "Why should I pay attention to you?" he asked.
"Mmph of mum genuine free wish," the voice cried from the depths of the bottle.
That sounded promising. "But I don't need a wish about how I will die."
"Mmmph oomph!"
"Okay, ifrit. Give me one positive wish." Smash removed his finger.
The ifrit surged backward out of the bottle. "What is thy wish, 0 horrendous one?" he asked, rubbing his rear.
"I want to know the way to the next world."
"I was about to send thee there!" the ifrit exclaimed, aggrieved.
"The next gourd scene. How do I get there?"
"Oh." The ifrit considered. "The closest be the mirror world. But that be no place for the like of thee. Thy very visage would shatter that scene."
This creature was trying to lull him with flattery! "Tell me anyway."
"On thy fool head be it." The ifrit made a dramatic gesture. There was a blinding flash. "Thou wilt be sorree!" the creature's voice came, fading away with descending pitch as if retreating at nearly the speed of sound.
Smash pawed his eyes, and gradually sight filtered back. He stood among a horrendous assortment of ogres. Some were much larger than he, some much smaller; some were obesely fat, some emaciatedly thin; some had ballooning heads and squat feet, others the other way around.
"What's this?" he asked, scratching his head, though it had no fleas now.
"This...this...this...this," the other ogres chorused in diminishing echo, each scratching his head.
The Eye Queue needed only that much data to formulate an educated hypothesis. "Mirrors!"
"Ors...ors...ors...ors," the echoes agreed. Smash walked among the mirrors, seeing himself pacing himself in multiple guises. The hall was straight, but after a while the images repeated. Suspicious, he used a horny fingernail to scratch a corner of one mirror, then walked farther down the hall, checking corners. Sure enough, he came across another mirror with a scratch on it, just where he had made his mark. It was the same one, surely. This hall was an endless reflection, like two mirrors facing each other. One of those endless loops he had been warned about. In fact, now he saw three lines of string: he had been retracing his course. He was trapped.
The ifrit had been right. This was no place for the like of him. Already he was hungrier, and there no food here. How could he get out?
He could smash through a mirror and through the wall behind it, of course--but would that accomplish anything? There were situations in which blind force was called for--but other situations, his Eye Queue curse reminded him obnoxiously, called for subtler negotiation. The trick was to tell them apart. One could not conquer a mirror by breaking it; one could only forfeit the game.
Smash stared into the scratched mirror, and his distorted image stared back. The image was almost as ugly as he was, but the distortion hampered it, making it less repulsive than it should have been. Probably that was why it was snarling.
He turned and contemplated the three strands of string on the floor. He saw where the first one started: it came from another mirror. So he had entered here through a mirror. Surely that was also the way to leave. If he found some means to make another blinding flash, would he be able to step through, as before? But he had no flash material.
Then he remembered what he had beard in the Gap Dragon's Ear. Could that relate? It had sounded like his voice, talking about a mirror. He decided to try it.
He positioned himself squarely before the mirror. He elevated his hamfist. "Mirror, mirror on the wall," he intoned, imitating his own voice as well as he could. "Pass this fist or take a fall." Then he punched forward.
His fist smashed through the glass and into the wall behind it. The mirror tinkled in pieces to the floor.
Smash leaned forward to peer through the hole in the wall. It opened on another hall of mirrors. Sure enough, there was no escape there; he was caught among the mirrors until he found the proper way out.
He tromped to the next mirror. He raised his fist again and spoke his rhyme. The he punched through, with the same result.
This did not seem to be working. But it was the only clue he had. Maybe when the other mirrors saw what was happening, they would capitulate. After all, this technique had been effective with the shocking doorknobs. The inanimate tended to be stupid, as Prince Dor had shown, but it did eventually learn what was good for it.
The change happened sooner than anticipated. His fist did not strike the third mirror; it passed through without resistance. His arm and body followed it, and he did a slow fall through the aperture.
He rolled on something soft and sat up. He sniffed. He looked. He salivated.
He sat on a huge bed of cake, replete with vanilla icing. Pastries and sweets were all about him, piled high: doughnuts, strudel, eclairs, tarts, cookies, creampuffs, gingerbread, and more intricate pastries.
Smash had been growing hungry before; it had been well over an hour since he had last filled up. Now he was ravenous. But again the damned curse of the Eye Queue made him pause. The purpose of these worlds inside the gourd seemed to be to make him unhappy. This food did not fit that purpose--unless there were something wrong with it. Could it be poisoned? Poison did not bother ogres much, but was best avoided.
One way to find out. Smash scooped up a glob of floor and crammed it in his big mouth. The cake was excellent. Then he got up and explored the region, keeping himself busy while waiting for the poison to act. He had not eaten enough to cause real damage to the gross gut of an ogre, but if he felt discomfort, he would take warning.
He was in a large chamber completely filled with the pastries. There was no apparent exit. He punched experimentally through a wall of fruitcake, but the stuff seemed to have no end. He suspected he could punch forever and only tear up more cake. There appeared to be no reasonable limit to the worlds that fit inside the gourd. How, then, was he to escape this place?
His stomach suffered nothing
but the ravages of increasing hunger, so he concluded the food was not poisoned. Still he hesitated. There had to be some trap, something to make him hurt. If not poison, what? There seemed to be no threat, no spitball-shooting tanks, no ifrit, not even starvation from delay.
Well, suppose he fell to and ate his fill? Where would he be? Still here, with no way out. If he remained long enough, stuffing himself at will, he would lose his soul by default in three months. No point in that.
Yet, no sense in going hungry. He grabbed a bunk of angelcake and gulped it down. He felt angelic. That was no mood for an ogre! He chomped some devilsfood, and felt devilish. That was more like it. He gulped some dream pie, and dreamed of smiting the Night Stallion and recovering the lien on his soul.
Wait. He forced himself to stop eating, lest he sink immediately into the easy slough of indulgence. Better to keep hungry and alert, his cursed taskmaster of an Eye Queue told him. What did the Eye Queue care about hunger? It didn't have to eat! But he went along with it for the moment, knowing it would give him no peace otherwise. He would reward himself only for making progress in solving this particular riddle. That was discipline no ordinary ogre could master, infuriating as it was.
Still, time was passing, and he had no idea how to proceed. There had to be something. After all, it wasn't as if he could simply eat his way out of here.
That thought made him pause. Why not eat out? Chew a hole in the wall until he ran out of edibles--which would be another world.
No. There would be too much cake for even an ogre to eat. Unless he knew exactly where a weak spot was--
Weak spot Surely so. Something that differed from the rest of this stuff.
Smash started a survey course of eating, looking for the difference. All of it was excellent. A master pastry chef had baked this chamber.
Then he encountered a vein of licorice. That was one confection Smash didn't like; it reminded him of manure. True, some ogres could eat and like manure, but that just wasn't Smash's own taste. Naturally he avoided this vein.
Then his accursed, annoying, and objectionable Eye Queue began percolating again. The Eyes of the vine saw entirely too much, especially what wasn't necessarily there. Manure. What would leave manure in the form of a confection?