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.
Chapter 4. Catastrophe
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 dose 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'
