"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.
Chapter 15
Point of View
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 shoc
k 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.
"Nymphs are eternally young and beautiful and usually none too bright. They are unable to say no to a male for anything. My mother is an exception; she had to be smart and reliable to handle her job. She remains very pretty, prettier than I am. But she's not as smart as I am."
"You are young and beautiful," Smash said. "But so is Princess Irene, and she's a human girl."
"Yes. So that isn't definitive. Human girls in the flush of their young prime do approach nymphs in appearance, and have a number of nymphal qualities that men find appealing. But Irene will age, while true nymphs won't, She loves, while nymphs can't love."
"Can't love?" Smash was learning more than he had ever expected to about nymphs.
"Well, my mother does love. But as I said, she's a very special nymph. And my father Crombie used a love-spell on her. So that doesn't count."
"But some human people don't love, so that is not definitive, either."
"True. It can be very hard to distinguish a nymph from a thoughtless human girl. But one thing is definitive. Nymphs don't have souls."
"You have a soul! I am absolutely certain of that! It's a very nice little soul, too."
He could feel her smile in the dark. Her body relaxed, and she squeezed his paw. "Thank you. I rather like it myself. I have a soul because I'm half human. Just as you do, for the same reason."
"I never thought of that!" Smash said. "It never occurred to me that other ogres wouldn't have souls."
"They're brutes because they have no souls. Their strength is all magic."
"I suppose so. My mother was a variety of human, so I inherited my soul from her."
"And it gave you strength to make up for what you lost by being only half ogre."
"Agreed. That answers a mystery I was never aware of before. But you still haven't explained how you--"
"Functioned without a soul. Yes. It was simply a matter of how I thought of it. You see, human beings have always had souls; they have no experience living without them. Other creatures never had souls, so they have learned to cope. My mother copes quite well, though I suppose some of my father's soul has rubbed off on her." Tandy sighed. "She's such a good person, she certainly deserves a soul. But she is a nymph, and I am half nymph. So I can function without a soul. All I had to do, once I realized that, was to think of myself as a nymph. It made a fundamental difference."
"But I think of myself as an ogre--yet I have a soul."
"Maybe you should try thinking of yourself as a man, Smash." Her hand tightened on his.
"A man?" he asked blankly. "I'm an ogre!"
"And I'm a girl. But when I had to, I became a nymph.
So I was able to operate without sinking into the sort of slough I did before, in the gourd. I was able to follow your fight, and to step in when I needed to."
"A man!" he repeated incredulously.
"Please, Smash. I'm a half-breed, like you. Like a lot of the creatures of Xanth. I won't laugh at you."
"It's impossible! How could I ever be a man?"
"Smash, you don't talk like an ogre any more. You're not stupid like an ogre any more."
"The Eye Queue--"
"That vine faded a long time ago. Smash! And the one you got in the Void--that never existed at all. It was sheer illusion. Yet it made you smart again. Did you ever consider how that could be?"
It was his turn to smile in the dark. "I was careful not to think that one through, Tandy. It would have deprived me of the very intelligence that enabled me to indulge in that chain of thought, paradoxically."
"You believe in paradox?"
"It is an intriguing concept. I would say it is impossible in Mundania, but possible in Xanth. I really must explore the implications further, when I have leisure."
"I have another hypothesis," she said. "The Eye Queue was illusion, but your intelligence was not."
"Isn't that a contradiction? It's illogical to attribute an effect as significant as intelligence to an illusion."
"It certainly is. That's why I didn't do it. Smash, I don't think you needed the Eye Queue vine at all, ever. Not the illusory one or the original one. You always had the intelligence. Because you're half human, and human beings are smart."
"But I was never smart until the Eye Queue made me so."
"You were smart enough to fool everyone into thinking you were ogrishly stupid! Smash, Chem told me about the Eye Queue vine. Its effect wears off in hours. Sometimes its effect is only in self-perception. It makes creatures think they're smart when they aren't, and they make colossal fools of themselves without knowing it. Like people getting drunk on the spillage from a beerbarrel tree, thinking they're being great company when actually they are disgusting clowns. My father used to tell me about that; he said he'd made a clown of himself more than once. Only it's worse with the vine."
"Was I doing that?" Smash asked, mortified.
"No! You really were smart! And it didn't wear off, until you lost the vine in the flood. And it came back the moment you got a new vine, even though you only imagined it. Doesn't that suggest something to you. Smash?"
He pondered. "It confirms that magic is marvelous and not entirely logical."
"Or that you became smart only when you thought you ought to be smart. Maybe the Eye Queue showed you how, the first time. After that you could do it any time you wanted to. Or when you forgot to be stupid."
"But I'm not smart now," he protested.
"You should listen to yourself. Smash! You've been discoursing on the nuances of paradox and you've been talking in a literate fashion."
"Why, so I have," he agreed, surprised. "I forgot I had lost the Eye Queue."
"Precisely. So where does your intelligence come from now, ogre?"
"It must be from my human half, as you surmise. Like my soul. I just never invoked it before, because--"
"Because you thought of yourself as an ogre, until you saw what ogres really were like and started turning off them. Now you are sliding toward your human heritage."
"You see it far more clearly than I do!"
"Because I'm more objective. I see you from the outside. I appreciate your human qualities. And I think the Good Magician Humfrey did, too. He's old, but he's still savvy. I ought to know; I cleaned up his castle for a year."
"It didn't looked cleaned up to me. I could hardly find a place to stand."
"You should have seen it before I cleaned it up!" But she laughed. "Actually, I didn't touch his private den; even the Gorgon leaves that alone. If anyone ever cleaned up in there, no one would know where all his spells and books and things were. He's had a century or so to learn their locations. But the rest of the castle needs to be kept in order, and they felt the Gorgon shouldn't have to do it, since she's married
to him now, so I did it. I cleaned off the magic mirrors and things; some of them had pretty smart mouths, too! It wasn't bad. And in that year I came to understand that behind the seeming absent-mindedness of Humfrey there lies a remarkably alert mind. He just doesn't like to show it. He knew all about you, for example, before you approached the castle. He had you marked a year in advance on his calendar, right to the day and hour of your arrival. He watched every step of your progress. He chortled when you came up against those ogre bones; he'd gone to a lot of work to get those set up. That man knows everything he wants to know. That's why he keeps the Gorgon in thrall, instead of she him; she is in complete awe of his knowledge."
"And I thought he was asleep!" Smash said ruefully.
"Everyone does. But he's the Magician of Information, one of the most powerful men in Xanth. He knows everything worth knowing. So he surely knew how much of a mind you had and crafted his Answer accordingly. Now we know he was correct."
"But our missions--neither is complete! He didn't know we would fail, did he?"
She considered, then asked, "Smash, why did you fight the other ogre?"
"He annoyed me. He insulted me."
"But you tried to avoid trouble."
"Because I was at half-strength and knew I'd lose."
"But then you slugged him. You knocked out a tooth."
"He was going to eat you. I couldn't allow that."
"Why not? It's what ogres do."
"I had agreed to protect you!"
"Did you think of that when you struck him?"
"No," Smash admitted. "I popped him instantly. There was no time for thought."
"So there was some other reason you reacted."
"You're my friend!"
"Do ogres have friends?"
He considered again. "No. I'm the only ogre who ever had friends--and they were mostly human friends. Most ogres don't even like other ogres."
"Unsurprising," she said. "So, to protect me, twice you risked your soul."
"Yes, of course." He wasn't certain of the point of her comment.
"Would any true ogre have done that?"