the wall. Still the fire danced, though the water flooded the region. Smash labored yet harder, feeling the exhilaration of challenge and violence, until the level of the moat lowered and the entire cavity between the outer wall and the firewall surged with muddy fluid. The sea monster's tail was exposed by the draining water; it hastily squiggled deeper. Still the fire danced, humming a hymn of victory; it could not be quenched. Water was as much its element as fire. It merely flickered on the surface, spreading wider, reaching toward Smash. Was there no way to defeat it?
'Hooo!' Smash exclaimed, frustrated. But the blast of; his breath only made the flame bow concavely and leap yet higher. It liked hot air as well as cool water, Smash couldn't think of anything better to do, so he kept shoveling water. The flood level rose and backwater coursed out through the gap. Smash tried to dam it up with rubble, but the level was too high. The fire still flickered merrily on the surface, humming a tune about an old flame.
Then the ogre had one more smart notion, a prohibitively rare occurrence for his kind. He dived forward, spread his arms, and swam under the fire. It couldn't reach him below the moatwater. He came up beyond it, the last hurdle navigated.
'Ccurrssess!' the firewater hissed furiously, and flickered out.
Now Smash stood within a cluttered room. Books overflowed shelves and piled up on the floor. Bottles and boxes perched everywhere, interspersed with assorted statuettes and amulets and papers. In the middle of it all, like another item of clutter, hunched over a similarly crowded wooden desk, was a little gnome of a man. Smash recognized him-the Good Magician Humfrey, the man who knew everything.
Humfrey glanced up from his tome. 'Don't drip on my books, Smash,' he said.
Smash fidgeted, trying not to drip on the books. There was hardly room for him to stand upright, and hardly a spot without a book, volume, or tome. He started to drip on an amulet, but it crackled ominously and he edged away. 'Me no stir. Magician sir,' he mumbled, wondering how the Good Magician knew his name. Smash knew of Humfrey by description and reputation, but this was the first time the two had met.
'Well, out with it, ogre,' the Magician snapped irritably. 'What's your Question?'
Now Smash felt more awkward than ever. The truth was, he did not know what to ask. He had thought his life would be complete when he achieved his full growth, but somehow he found it Wasn't.
Something was missing-and he didn't know what. Yet he could not rest until the missing element was satisfied. So he had tromped to see the Good Magician, because that was what creatures with seemingly insoluble problems did-but he lacked the intellect to formulate the Question. He had hoped to work it out during the journey; but, with typical ogrish wit, he had forgotten all about it until this moment. There was no getting around it; there were some few occasions when an ogre was too stupid for his own good.
'No know,' he confessed, standing on one of his own feet.
Humfrey scowled. He was a very old gnome, and it was quite a scowl. 'You came here to serve a year's service for an Answer-and you don't have a Question?'
Smash had a Question, he was sure; he just didn't know how to formulate it. So he stood silent, dripping on stray artifacts, like the unsmart oaf he was.
Humfrey sighed. 'Even if you asked it, it wouldn't be the right Question,' he said. 'People are forever asking the wrong Questions, and wasting their efforts. I remember not long ago a girl came to ask how to change her nature. Chameleon, her name was, except she wasn't called that then. Her nature was just fine; it was her attitude that needed changing.' He shook his head.
As it happened. Smash knew Chameleon. She was Prince Dor's mother, and she changed constantly
from smart to stupid and from beautiful to ugly. Humfrey was right: her nature was just fine. Smash liked to talk with her when she was down at his own level of idiocy, and to look at her when she was at his level of ugliness. But the two never came together, unfortunately. Still, she was a fairly nice person, considering that she was human.
'Very well,' Humfrey said in a not-very-well voice. 'We are about to have a first: an Answer without a Question. Are you sure you wish to pay the fee?'
Smash wasn't sure, but did not know how to formulate that uncertainty, either. So he just nodded affirmatively, his shaggy face scaring a cuckoo bird that had been about to signal the hour. The bird signaled the hour with a terrified dropping instead of a song, and retreated into its cubby.
'So be it,' the Magician said, shrugging. 'You will discover what you need among the Ancestral Ogres.'
Then he got up and marched to the door. 'Come on; my effaced wife will see about your service.'
Numbly, Smash followed. Now he had his Answer-and he didn't understand it.
They went downstairs-apparently, somehow, in a manner that might have been intelligible to a creature of greater wit, Smash had gotten upstairs in the process of swimming under the firewall and emerging in the Good Magician's study-where Humfrey's wife awaited them. This was the lovely, faceless Gorgon-faceless because if her face were allowed to show, it would turn men instantly to stone. Even faceless, she was said to have a somewhat petrifying effect. 'Here he is,' Humfrey said, as if delivering a bag of bad apples.
The Gorgon looked Smash up and down-or seemed to. Several of the little serpents that substituted for her hair hissed. 'He certainly looks like an ogre,' she remarked. 'Is he housebroken?'
'Of course he's not housebroken!' Humfrey snapped. 'He dripped all over my study! Where's the girl?'
'Tandy!' the Gorgon called.
A small girl appeared, rather pretty in a human way, with brown tresses and blue eyes and a spunky, turned-up nose. 'Yes'm?'
'Tandy, you have completed your year's service this date,' the Gorgon said. 'Now you will have your Answer.'
The little girl's eyes brightened like noontime patches of clear sky. She squiggled with excitement. 'Oh, thank you, Gorgon. I'm almost sorry to leave, but I really should return home. My mother is getting tired of only seeing me in the magic mirror. What is my Answer?'
The Gorgon nudged Humfrey, her voluptuous body rippling as she moved. 'The Answer, spouse.'
'Oh. Yes,' the Good Magician agreed, as if this had not before occurred to him. He cleared his throat, considering.
'Also say, what me pay,' Smash said, not realizing that he was interrupting an important cogitation.
'The two of you travel together,' Humfrey said.
Smash stared down at the tiny girl, and Tandy stared up at the hulking ogre. Each was more dismayed than the other. The ogre stood two and a half times the height of the girl, and that was the least of the contrast between them.
'But I didn't ask-' Tandy protested.
'What me task?' Smash said simultaneously. Had he been more alert, he might have thought to marvel that even this overlapping response rhymed.
The Gorgon seemed to smile. 'Sometimes my husband's pronouncements need a little interpretation,'
she said. 'He knows so much more than the rest of us, he fails to make proper allowance for our ignorance.' She pinched Humfrey's cheek in a remarkably familiar manner. 'He means this: the two of you. Smash and Tandy, are to travel through the wilds of Xanth together, fending off hazards together.
That is the ogre's service in lieu of a year's labor at this castle-protecting his companion. It is also the girl's Answer, for which she has already paid.'
'That's exactly what I said,' Humfrey grumped.
'You certainly did, dear,' the Gorgon agreed, planting a faceless loss on the top of his head.
'But it doesn't make sense!' Tandy protested.
'It doesn't have to make sense,' the Gorgon explained. 'It's an Answer.'
Oh. Now Smash understood, as far as he was able.
'May I go back to my tome?' the Good Magician asked petulantly.
'Why, of course you may,' the Gorgon replied graciously, patting his backside as he turned. The Good Magician climbed back up toward his study. Smash knew the man had lost valuable working time, but somehow the Magician did not seem unhappy. Naturally the nuances of human interrelations were
beyond the comprehension of a mere ogre.
The Gorgon returned her attention to them. 'He's such a darling,' she remarked. 'I really don't know how he survived a century without me.' She focused, seemingly, on Tandy. 'And you might, if you would, do me a favor on the way,' the Gorgon said. 'I used to live on an island near the Magic Dust Village, which I think is right on your
