Ogre, Ogre

by Piers Anthony

  But his curse, in its annoying fashion, caused him to question the simplicity of this procedure. The hoofprints were suspiciously convenient, crossing his line just at the point he thought to look, almost as if they were intended to be seen. He knew that tracking a creature was not necessarily simple, even when the prints were clear. The trail could meander aimlessly, looping about, getting lost in bad terrain. It could become dangerous if the quarry knew it was being tracked--and the Dark Horse surely did know. There could be tricks and ambushes.

  No, there was no sense playing the game of the Night Stallion. The trail was not to be trusted. It was something set up to delude an ordinary ogre. Better to force the Stallion to play Smash's game--and if the Horse did not know of Smash's hidden asset of intelligence, that could be a counter ambush. A smart ogre was quite different from a stupid one.

  Smash stomped on, following his straight line, halving the territory. This should also restrict the range of the Stallion, since it could not go any place Smash had already looked--as he understood the rules of this quest--and therefore could not cross the line.

  Yet the territory still seemed to be infinitely large. He might tromp forever and never come to the far side. For that matter, he hadn't started at the near side, either; he had simply appeared within the range and begun there. He also realized that halving the total territory did not necessarily cut the area remaining to be searched. Half of infinity remained infinity. Also, unless he knew which half the Stallion was in, he had gained nothing; he could spend all his time searching in the wrong half, his failure guaranteed.

  Smash pondered. His Eye Queue was really straining now, and probably the eyeballs of it were getting hot in their effort to see the way through infinity. One thing he had to say for the curse: it certainly tried to help him. It never really opposed its will to his own; it sought instead to call his attention to new aspects of any situation encountered, and to provide more effective ways of dealing with problems. He had discovered how useful that was when he had tried to function without its aid. Now he needed it again. How could he figure out a sure, fast way to proceed?

  The vine came up with a notion.

  Smash put the ball of string into his mouth and bit it in half. He now had two balls, each smaller than the first but magically complete. He took the first and rolled it violently forward.

  The ball zoomed straight on, unrolling, leaving its straight line of string. Since it had an infinite length, it would proceed to the infinite end of the plain. Infinity could be compassed by infinity; even an ordinary ogre might grasp that! This process would complete the halving of the Stallions range.

  Now Smash set his ear to the floor and listened. Yes--his keen ogre hearing heard a faint hoofbeat in the distance, to the forward right. The Stallion was up there somewhere, moving clear of the rolling string. Now Smash had the creature partially located. He had done something unexpected, forced his opponent to react, and gained a small advantage.

  Smash bit the remaining ball in half and shaped the halves into new balls. He hurled one to the east, establishing a pie-section configuration that trapped the Stallion inside. Then he listened again, determining in what quadrant the creature lurked, and pitched another half-ball in a curve. This wound grandly around behind the Stallion's estimated location, cutting off its retreat. For, though Smash had not tromped personally wherever the string went, the string remained his agent and surely counted. He was using a sort of leverage, and the Horse could not cross his demarcation, lest the animal break its own rule of being only in the last place Smash looked.

  He put his ear to the floor again. The beat of hooves had ceased. The Stallion had either gotten away or stopped running. Since the former meant a loss for Smash, he did the expedient thing and decided on the latter. He had at last confined his target!

  Smash stomped into the string-defined quadrant. If the Stallion were here, as he had to be, he would soon be found.

  In due course Smash spied a blotch on the horizon. He stomped closer, alert for some ruse. The blotch grew as he approached it, in the manner that distant objects did, since they did not like to appear small from up close. It took the form of an animal, perhaps a lion. A lion? Smash didn't want that! He refused to have a mundane monster foisted off on him in lieu of his object. "If it's a lion, it's a Stallion!" he muttered--and of course as he said it, it was true. A single, timely word could make a big difference.

  It was a huge, standing, wingless horse, midnight black of hide, with eyes that glinted black, too. This was surely the Night Stallion--the creature he had come to settle with, the ruler of the nightmare world.

  Smash stomped to a halt before the creature. He stood taller than it, but the animal was more massive. "I am Smash the Ogre," he said. "Who are you?" For it was best to be quite certain, in a case like this.

  The creature merely stood there. Now Smash saw that there was a plaque set up at its forefeet, and the plaque said: TROJAN.

  "Well, Trojan Horse," Smash said, "I have come to redeem the lien on my soul."

  He had expected the animal to charge and attack, but it did not move or respond. It might as well have been a statue.

  "How do I do this?" Smash demanded.

  Still no response. Evidently the creature was sulking, angry because he had caught it.

  Smash peered more closely at the Stallion. It certainly seemed frozen! He tromped forward and put out a hamhand to touch it.

  The body was metal-cold and hard. It was indeed a statue.

  Had he, after all, located the wrong thing? That would mean he had been deceived by a decoy and would have to do his search all over again. Smash didn't like this notion, so he rejected it.

  He looked at the floor. Behind the statue were hoofprints. The thing might be frozen now, but it had not always been. Probably its present stasis was merely another device to interfere with Smash's quest. This was one devious beast!

  Well, there was one way to take care of that. He stood before the Stallion and hoisted a hamfist. "Deal with me, animal, or I will break you into junk."

  The midnight orbs seemed to glitter ominously. Trojan did not like being threatened!

  Smash found himself alone, on a lofty, windy, rainswept pinnacle.

  He looked around. The top ledge was just about big enough for him to stretch out on, but almost featureless. The flat, slick rock terminated abruptly at the edge, plunging straight down to a smashing ocean far below. There were no plants, no food, no structures of any kind--just the tug of the wind and the roar of the ocean beneath.

  The Night Stallion had done this, of course. It had spelled him to this desolate confinement, getting rid of him. So much for fair combat.

  The storm swirled closer. Storms really liked to get a person stranded in a situation like this! A bolt of lightning crackled down, striking the pinnacle. A section of rock peeled off in a shower of sparks and collapsed, falling with seeming slowness to the distant water.

  Smash stood at the steaming brink and watched the tiny splash. The rock had been a fair chunk, massive, yet from this vantage it looked like a pebble.

  This was a really nice vacation spot for an ogre. But he didn't want a vacation; he wanted to fight Trojan. How could he get back into the action?

  Now his perch was too small to stretch out on. About a quarter of it had fallen. The wind intensified, taking hold of his fur, trying to move him off. He wanted to travel, but not precisely this way! What kind of a splash would he make?

  Rain splatted in passing sheets, making the surface doubly slick. The water coursed around his feet, digging under his calloused toes, trying to pry him from the rock so that he would be carried with it as it flowed over the brink in a troubled waterfall. Such a drop did not hurt water, but his own flesh might be less fortunate.

  A huge wave surged forward, below, taking dead aim at the base of the rock column. The wave smashed in--and the entire column trembled. More layers of stone peeled and fell. For a moment Smash thought the whole thing was coming down
, but about half of it withstood the violence and held its form. However, it was obvious that this perch would not endure much longer.

  Smash considered. If he stood here, the column would soon collapse, dropping him into the ravenous ocean. He was an ogre, true, but he lacked his full strength; he would probably be crushed between the tumbling rocks in the water. If he tried to climb down, much of the same thing would happen; the column would collapse before he got below. Ogres were tough, but the forces of nature operating here were overwhelming; he had no realistic chance.

  He saw that the ocean waves developed only as they got close to the tower. His Eye Queue concluded that this meant the water was much deeper away from this structure, because deep water didn't like to rouse itself from its stillness. That meant that region was safe to plunge into.

  Good enough. He hated to leave this pleasant spire, but discretion urged the move. He leaped off the brink, sailing out in a clumsy swan dive toward the deep water.

  Then he remembered he couldn't swim very well. In a calm lake he was all right; in a raging torrent he tended to drown.

  He eyed the looming ocean, surging deep and dark. It was no mere torrent; it was an elemental monster. He had no chance at all. Too bad.

  He faced the horse-statue. There was no tower, no ocean. It had all been a magic vision. A test, perhaps, or a warning. Obviously he had wiped out. He felt weak; he must have lost a chunk of his soul.

  But now he knew how it worked. The Night Stallion did not fight physically; the creature simply threw turbulent visions at him, the way Tandy threw tantrums and cursefiends threw curses. The ocean tower had been sort of fun. So were those tantrums, he realized; when Tandy hit him with one of them...But that was nothing to speculate on right now.

  "Try it again, horseface!" he grunted. "I still want my soul back."

  The Stallion's dark eyes flashed malignantly.

  And Smash stood in the center of a den of Mundane lions--real lions this time, not stallion or ant-lions. He felt abruptly weaker; this must be a Mundane scene, beyond the region of magic, so that his magic strength was gone.

  The lions snarled like mammalian dragons, lashed their tufted yellow tails, and stalked him. There were six of them: a male, four females, and a cub. The females seemed to be the most aggressive. They began sniffing him, trying to determine how dangerous he might be and how edible.

  Ordinarily, Smash would have liked nothing better than to mix with a new crowd of monsters in sublime mayhem. Ogres lived for the joy of bloody battle. But two things militated against his natural inclination--his Eye Queue and his weakness. According to the pusillanimous counsel of the first, it was best to avoid combat when the outcome was uncertain; and according to the second, the outcome was highly uncertain. He would do better, his cowardly intelligence informed him, to flee immediately.

  But two things were wrong with that course. There was no place to flee to, because he was in a walled arena with wire mesh over the top, so he could not escape, and the lions had him surrounded anyway. He would have to fight, unless he could bluff them.

  He tried the bluff. He raised his hamfists, though they were unprotected by his centaur gauntlets, and bellowed defiance. This was a stance that would frighten almost any creature of Xanth.

  But the lions were not creatures of Xanth. They were from Missouri, Mundania. They had to be shown. They pounced.

  Ordinarily, Smash would have been able to mince the mere six monsters with so many blows of fists, feet, and head. But with his strength reduced to Mundane normal, all he could handle was one. While he was pulping that one, the other five were chomping him.

  In a moment they had bitten through the hamstring tendons of his arms and legs, making his hamhands and hamfeet useless. They chomped through the nerve channel of his neck, making his head slightly less functional than before. He was now mostly helpless. He could feel, but could not move.

  Then they gnawed at him, taking their time, one female on each extremity, the male clawing out his belly for the tasty guts. The pulped cub roused itself enough to commence work on Smash's nose, biting off small bites so as not to choke on its meal. It hurt horribly as the monsters chewed off his hands and feet and delved for his kidneys, and it , wasn't much fun when the cub scooped out an eyeball, but Smash didn't scream. Noise seemed pointless at this point. Anyway, it was hard to scream properly when his tongue was gone and his lungs were being chewed out. He knew that when the beasts got to his vital organs, sensation would end, so he waited.

  But the lions were sated before then, for Smash was a lot of creature. They left him, delimbed and eviscerated, and piled themselves up for a family snooze. Now the flies appeared, settling in swarms, and every bite was a new agony. The sun shone down through the mesh, cooking him, blazing into his other eye, which paralysis prevented him from closing. Soon he was agonizingly blind. But he still felt the flies crawling up his nose, looking for new places to bite and lay their maggots. It was going, he knew, to be an exceedingly long haul.

  How had he gotten himself into this fix? By challenging the Night Stallion to recover his soul and to obtain help to rescue Tandy and Chem from the Void. Was it worth it? No, because he had not succeeded. Would he try it again? Yes, because he still wanted to help his friends, no matter how much pain came.

  He was back before Trojan, whole of limb and gut and eye. It had been another test case, and obviously he had lost that one, too. He should have found some way to destroy the lions, instead of letting them destroy him. But it seemed he still had most of his soul, and perhaps the third trial would enable him to win the rest of it back.

  "I'm still game, master of nightmares," he informed the somber statue.

  Again the eyes flashed cruelly. This creature of night had no sympathy and no mercy!

  Smash was standing at the base of a mountain of rocks. "Help!" someone cried. It sounded like Tandy. How had she gotten here? Had she disobeyed his instruction and entered the gourd, following his string to locate him? Foolish girl! Smash looked about, but found no one.

  "Help!" she cried again. "I'm under the mountain!"

  Smash was horrified. He had to get her out! There was no passage, so he started lifting and hurling away the boulders. He had most of his strength now, despite his prior losses, so this was easy enough.

  But there were many boulders, and somehow Tandy's voice always came from under the highest remaining pile. Smash was making progress leveling the mountain, but still had far to go. He was tiring.

  Gradually the pile of rocks behind him loomed higher than the pile before, but the cries continued to come from beneath. How had she gotten herself in so deep? He no longer had the strength to hurl the boulders away, but had to carry them with great effort. Then he could no longer lift them, and had to roll them.

  At last the mountain had been moved, and the ground was level. But now the voice came from deep below. This was, in fact, a pit the size of an inverted mountain, filled with more boulders--and Tandy was at the bottom.

  His body was numb with fatigue. It was a labor just to move himself now. In this respect his agony was worse than it had been in the lions' den, for there all he had to do was lie still and wait. Now he had to cudgel his reluctant muscles to perform, inflicting the torture of exertion on himself. But he kept going, for the job remained to be done. He shoved and heaved and slowly rolled the boulders out.

  The deeper he got, the worse the chore became, for now he had to shove the boulders up out of the deepening pit. Still her voice cried despairingly from below. Smash staggered. A boulder slipped from his falling grasp and rolled down to the lowest point. He lumbered after it, hearing her faint sobs. She seemed to be fading as fast as he was!

  But his strength had been exhausted. He could no longer move the boulder far enough, strain as he might. Still trying, he collapsed, and the big stone rolled over him.

  Again he faced the Night Stallion, his strength miraculously restored. He realized that Tandy had never been there in the vision, only
her voice, used to goad him into an impossible effort.

  "I'm still going to save my soul and my friends," Smash said, though he dreaded whatever the Dark Horse would throw at him next. Tandy might not have been literally below that mountain of rocks, but his success in these endeavors had a direct bearing on her fate, so it was the same thing. "Trojan, do your worst."

  The evil eyes flashed horrendously, darkening the entire area.

  Smash was in a compound with assorted other creatures. It was a miserable place, stinking of poverty, doom, and despair. Jets of bright fire shot from cracks in the ground, preventing escape. Harpies and other carrion birds wheeled above, watching for food.

  "Slop time!" a guard called, and dumped a pail of garbage into the compound. A gnome, an elf, and a wyvern pounced on the foul refuse. But before they got more than a few stinking scraps, the harpies swooped down in a squadron and snatched it all away, leaving only a pile of defecation in its place. The prisoners squabbled among themselves in angry frustration. Smash saw that all were emaciated; they had not been getting enough food. Small wonder, with those harpies hovering!

  What was to be his torture this time? For Smash realized now that these scenes were supposed to be extremely unpleasant, even for an ogre; each was awful in a different way. As he considered, the sun moved rapidly across the pale sky, as if time were accelerating, for normally nothing could prevail on the sun to hurry its pace one bit. Smash's hunger accelerated, too; it took a lot of food to maintain a healthy ogre.

  "Slops!" the guard called, and dumped the pail. There was another scramble, but the wyvern wasn't in it. That noble little dragon was now too far gone to scramble. In any event, the harpies got most of the slop again. Smash felt a pang; even garbage looked good now, and he had gotten none. Of course he wouldn't touch anything a harpy had been near, anyway; they spoiled ten times as much as they ate, coating their discards with poisonous refuse. Harpies were the world's dirtiest birds; in fact, real birds refused to associate with these witch-headed monsters.