As dusk closed, the aerial path descended to the ground, and they arrived at the
Magic
Dust
Village
. A troll came forth to meet them. "Ogre, do you come in peace or mayhem?" the creature inquired, standing poised for flight while other villagers hastily manned the fortifications and cleared children and the aged from the region.
"In peace!"
Tandy said quickly. "I am Tandy; this is Smash, who is protecting me from monsters."
The troll's eyes gaped. This was an unusual expression, even for this type of creature. "Protecting you from--?"
"Yes."
"Now, we have no prejudice against monsters here," the troll said, scratching his long and horny nose with a discolored claw. "I'm a monster myself, and some of my best friends are monsters. But only a fool trusts an ogre."
"Well, I'm a fool," Tandy said. "This ogre fought a tangle tree to save me."
"Are you sure you aren't a kidnap victim? You certainly do look good enough to eat."
Smash did not appreciate the implication, which would have passed him by had he not suffered the curse of the Eye Queue vine. "My father is Crunch, the vegetarian ogre," he said gruffly. "My family has not kidnapped anyone in years."
The troll looked at him, startled. "You certainly don't sound like an ogre! Did the Transformer-King transform you to this shape?"
"I was whelped an ogre!" Smash insisted, the first traces of roar coming into his voice.
Then the troll made a connection. "Ah, yes. Crunch married a curse-fiend actress. You have human lineage; that must account for your language."
"It must," Smash agreed drolly. He found he didn't care to advertise his misadventure with the vine. He would be laughed out of the village if its inhabitants learned he was intelligent. "But I should advise you, purely in the interest of amity, that I have been known to take exception to the appellation 'half-breed.' I am a true ogre." He picked up a nearby knot of green wood and squeezed it in one hand. The green juice dripped as the wood pulped, until at last there was a pool of green on the ground and the knot had become a lump of coal.
"Yes, indeed," the troll agreed hastily. "No one here would think of using that term. Welcome to our table for supper; you are surely hungry."
"We are only passing through," Tandy said. "We're going to Lake Ogre-Chobee."
"You can't get there from here," the troll said. "The Region of Madness intervenes."
"Madness?"
Tandy asked, alarmed.
"From the airborne magic dust we process. Magic is very potent here, and too much of it leads to alarming effects. You will have to go around."
They did not argue the case. Smash's inordinate intelligence, coupled with his memories of this region, corroborated the information; he knew it would be impossible for him to protect Tandy in the Region of Madness. There were tales of the constellations of the night coming to life, and of reality changing dangerously. In Xanth, things were mostly what they seemed to be, so that illusion was often reality. But illusion could be taken too far in the heightened magic of the Madness. Smash was now too smart to risk it.
They joined the villagers' supper. Creatures of every type came forth to feed, all well behaved: elves, gnomes, goblins, a manticore, fauns, nymphs, fairies, human beings, centaurs, griffins, and assorted other creatures. The hostess was the troll's mate, Trolla. "It is much easier to arrive than to depart," she explained as she served up helpings of smashed potatoes and poured out goblets of mead. "We have never had opportunity to construct an exit ramp, and our work mining the source of magic is important, so we stay. You may choose to remain also: we labor hard, but it is by no means a bad life."
Smash exchanged a glance with Tandy, since it occurred to him that this might be the sort of situation she was looking for. But she was negative. "We have a message from the sister of a neighbor of yours. We must get on and deliver it."
"A neighbor?"
Trolla asked.
"She is called the Siren."
There was a sudden hush.
"You know," Tandy said.
"The sister of the Gorgon."
"You are friend to the Gorgon?" Trolla asked coldly.
"I hardly know her," Smash said quickly, remembering that this village had suffered at the Gorgon's hands--or rather, her face, having had all the men turned to stone. Fortunately, that mischief had been undone at the time of the loss of magic, when all Xanth had become as drear as Mundania, briefly. Numerous spells had been aborted in that period, changing Xanth in ways that were still unraveling. "I had to see Good Magician Humfrey, and she's his wife. She asked us to say hello to the Siren."
"Oh, I see." Trolla relaxed, and the others followed her example. There were murmurs of amazement and awe.
"The Good Magician's wife!
And she turned him to stone?"
"Not anywhere we could see," Tandy said, then blushed. "Uh, that is--"
Trolla smiled. "He's probably too old for such enchantment anyway, so the sight of her merely stiffens his spine, or whatever." She gulped a goblet of mead. "The Siren no longer lures people, since a smart centaur broke her magic dulcimer. She is not a bad neighbor, but we really don't associate with her."
They finished their repast,
Smash
happily consuming all the refuse left after the others were done. The villagers set them up with rooms for the night. Smash knew these were honest, well-meaning folk, so he didn't worry about Tandy's safety here.
As he lay on his pile of straw.
Smash thought about the place of the
Magic
Dust
Village
in the scheme of Xanth. Stray references to it bubbled to the surface of his memory--things he had heard at different times in his life and thought nothing of, since ogres thought nothing of everything. From these suddenly assimilating fragments he was now able to piece together the role of this village, geologically. Here it was that the magic dust welled to the surface from the mysterious depths. The villagers pulverized it and employed a captive roc-bird to flap its wings and waft huge clouds of the dust into the air, where it caused madness close by,
technicolor
hailstorms farther distant, and magic for the rest of Xanth as it diluted to natural background intensity. If the villagers did not perform this service, the magic dust would tend to clump, and the magic would be unevenly distributed, causing all manner of problems.
Certainly the Magic Dusters believed all this, and labored most diligently to facilitate the proper and even spreading of the dust. Yet Smash's Eye Queue-infected brain obnoxiously conjured caveats, questioning the realities the villagers lived by.
If the magic really came from the dust, it should endure as long as the dust did, fading only slowly as the dust wore out. Yet at the Time of No Magic, all Xanth had been rendered Mundane instantly. That had happened just before
Smash
himself had been whelped, but his parents had told him all about it. They had considered it rather
romantic,
perhaps even a signal of their love. Crunch had lost his great strength in that time, but other creatures had been affected far more, and many had died. Then the magic had returned, as suddenly as it had departed, and Xanth had been as it was before. There had been no great movements of dust then, no dust storms. That suggested that the magic of Xanth was independent of the dust.
The dust came from below, and if it brought the magic, the nether regions must be more magical than the surface. Tandy had lived below, yet she seemed normal. She did not even appear to have a magic talent. So how
could the magic
be concentrated below?
But
Smash
decided not to raise these questions openly, as they would only make things awkward for the villagers. And perhaps the belief of the Dusters was right and his vine-sponsored objections were wrong. After all, what could a Queue of Eyes understand of the basic nature of Xanth?
His thought turned to a bypath. A magic talent--that must be what Tandy was questing for! He, as an ogre, was fortunate; ogres had strength as their talent. When Smash had gone to Mundania, outside the magic, ambience of Xanth, he had lost his strength and his rhyme, distressingly. Now he had lost his rhymes and his naivete, but not his strength.
Was the infliction of the curse of the Eye Queue really so bad? There were indeed pleasures in the insights this artificial intelligence afforded him. Yet ogres were supposed to be stupid; he felt sadly out of place.
Smash decided to keep quiet, most of the time, and let Tandy do the talking. He might no longer be a proper ogre in outlook, but at least he could seem like an ogre. If he generated an illusion of continuing stupidity, perhaps in time he would achieve it again. Certainly this was worth the hope. Meanwhile, his shame would remain mostly secret.
In the morning they walked along an old ground bound path to the small lake that contained the Siren's isle. It was pretty country, with few immediate hazards, and so Smash found it dull, while Tandy liked it very well.
The Siren turned out to be a mature mermaid who had probably been stunning in her youth and was not too far from it even now. She evidently survived by fishing and seemed satisfied with her lot, or more correctly, her pond.
"We bring greetings from your sister the Gorgon," Tandy called as they crossed the path over the water to the island.
Immediately the mermaid was interested. She emerged from the water and changed to human form--her fish-tail simply split into two well-formed legs--and came to meet them, still changing. She had been nude in the water, but it hardly mattered since she was a fish below the waist. But as she dried, the scales that had covered her tail converted to a scale-sequin dress that nudged up to cover the upper portion of her torso. For a reason that had never been clear to
Smash
, it was all right for a mermaid to show her breasts, but not all right for a human woman to do the same. The finny part of her flukes became small shoes. It was minor but convenient magic; after all,
Smash
thought, she might otherwise get cold feet. "My sister!" she exclaimed, her newly covered bosom heaving. "How is she doing?"
"Well, she's married to the Good Magician Humfrey--"
"Oh, yes, I had news of that! But how is she recently?"
"Recently?"
Tandy's brow furrowed.
Smash caught on to the nature of the Siren's question. "She wants to know whether the Gorgon is pregnant," he murmured.
Tandy was startled. "Oh--I don't know about that. I don't think so. But she does seem happy, and so does the Magician."
The Siren frowned. "I'm so glad she found hers. I wish I had found mine." And
Smash
now perceived, from this close range and the magnification of his interpretive intellect, that the Siren was not happy at all. She bad lost her compelling magic twenty years ago and had very little left
Such things had not before been concerns of Smash's.
Ogres hardly cared about the nuances of the lifestyles of nymphal creatures. Now, thanks to the curse of the Eye Queue, Smash felt the Siren's problem, and felt the need to alleviate it. "We are going to Lake Ogre-Chobee. Perhaps if you went there, you would find yours."
The Siren brightened. "That's possible."
"But we are having trouble finding the way," he said. "The Madness intercedes."
"It's a nuisance," the Siren agreed. "But there are ways around it"
"We would like to know of one."
"Well, there's the catapult. Yet you have to pay the cat's price."
"What is the cat's price?" Tandy asked warily. "If it's a kind of demon, we might not like it."
"It likes catnip--and that's not easy to get"
"Smash could get it," Tandy said brightly. "He fought a tangle tree and a pride of ant-lions."
"Well, he's an ogre," the Siren agreed matter-of-factly. "That sort of thing is routine for them."
"Why don't you come with us and show us where the catnip is?" Tandy suggested. "Then we can all go to the catapult and on to Lake Ogre-Chobee."
The Siren considered. "I admit I don't seem to be accomplishing much here. I never thought I'd travel with an ogre!" She faced Smash. "Are you tame? I've beard some bad things about ogres--"
"They're all true!" Smash agreed. "Ogres are the worst brutes on two legs. But I was raised in the environs of Castle Roogna, so am relatively civilized."
"He's really very nice, when you get to know him," Tandy said. "He doesn't crunch the bones of friends."
"I'll risk it," the Siren decided. "I'll lead you to the catnip." She adjusted her dress, packed a few fish for nibbling on the way, and set oft, leading them east of the lake.
The catnip grew in a section of the jungle separated by a fiercely flowing stream. They had to use a narrow catwalk past a cataract that was guarded by a catamount. "Don't fall into the water," the Siren warned. "It's a catalyst that will give you catarrh, catatonia, and catalepsy."
"I don't understand," Tandy said nervously. "Is that bad?"
"A catalyst is a substance that facilitates change," Smash explained, drawing on his new Eye Queue intellect. "In the case of our living flesh, this is likely to mean deterioration and decay such as catarrh, which is severe inflammation inside the nose, catatonia, which is stupor, and catalepsy, which is loss of motion and speechlessness. We had better stay out of this water; it is unlikely to be healthy."
"Yes, unlikely," Tandy agreed faintly. "But the catamount is on the catwalk! It will throw us off."
"Oh, I wouldn't be concerned about that," Smash said. He strode out on the catwalk. It dipped and swayed under his mass, but he had the sure balance of his primitive kind and proceeded with confidence.
"No violence!" Tandy pleaded.
The catamount was a large reddish feline with long whiskers and big paws. It snarled and stalked toward Smash, its tail swishing back and forth.