the area. Smash got a clear view of his situation.
Oops! He had fallen directly into a dragon's nest! This was the lair of a big surface dragon, open to the day because such a monster feared nothing, not even ogres. The dragon wasn't here at the moment, but its five cubs were.
In a moment all of them were up and alert. They were large cubs, almost ready to depart the nest and start consuming people for themselves. They were all as massive as Smash, with coppery snouts, green metal neck scales, and manes of silvery steel. Their teeth glinted like stars, and their tongues slurped about hungrily. As the light returned, all recognized him as an enemy and as prey. What a trap this was!
The ogre looked over the brink of the pit. 'Ho ho ho ho!' he roared thunderously, causing the nearby trees to shake. 'Me screw he blue!' For Smash stood on blue diamonds that made up the nest, which he had taken for gravel. All dragons liked diamonds; they were pretty and hard and highly resistant to heat.
Because dragons hoarded diamonds, the stones assumed unreasonable value, being very rare elsewhere.
Smash understood this extended even to Mundania, though he wasn't sure how the dragons managed to collect the stones from there.
Dragons were not much for ceremony. All five pounced, blasting out little jets of flame that incinerated the vegetation around the nest and heated the diamonds at Smash's feet, forcing him to jump.
Smash, angry at himself for his stupidity in falling into this mess-imagine being outwitted by a dull ogre!- reacted with inordinate, i.e., ogrish, fury. He just wasn't in the mood to mess with little dragons!
He put out his two gauntleted hands and snatched the first dragon out of the air. He whipped it about and used it to strike the second in mid-pounce. Both dragons were knocked instantly senseless. Weight for weight, no dragon was a match for an ogre; only the advantage of size put the big dragons ahead, and these lacked that.
Smash hurled both dragons at the other ogre, who stood gloating, and grabbed for two more. In a moment both of
these were dragging, and the dragging dragons were hurled up to drape about the ogre.
The fifth dragon, meanwhile, had fastened its jaws on Smash's legs. They were pretty good jaws, with diamond-hard teeth; they were beginning to hurt. Smash plunged his fist down with such force that the skull caved in. He ripped the body away and hurled it, too, at the other ogre.
The smog had largely cleared, perhaps abetted by the breeze from Smash's own activity. Now an
immense shadow fell across them. Smash looked up. It was the mother dragon, so huge her landbound bulk blocked off the light of the sun' Not all big dragons were confined to Dragonland! It would take a whole tribe of ogres to fend her off-and the tribe of the Ogre-Fen Ogres would certainly not do that.
Smash had been tricked into this nest because the other ogre knew it would be the end of him.
But Smash, having cursed the darkness of his witlessness, now suffered a flashback of dull genius.
'Heee!' he cried, pointing a hamfinger at the other ogre.
The dragoness looked. There stood the ogre, in midgloat, with the five limp, little dragon cubs draped around his body like so much apparel. He had been so pleased with his success in framing Smash that he had not thought to clear the debris from himself. The liability of the true ogre had betrayed him-his inability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Naturally the dragoness assumed that he was the guilty creature.
With a roar so horrendous that it petrified the local trees and caused a layer of rock on the cliff to shiver into dust, several diamonds to craze and crack; and a blast of fire that would have vaporized trees and cliff face, had the one not just been converted from wood to stone and the other not just powdered out, she went for the guilty ogre.
The ogre was dim, but not that dim, especially as a refracted wash of fire frizzled his fur. While the dragoness inhaled and oriented for a more accurate second shot, he flung off the little dragons and dived into the nest-pit, landing snoot-first in the diamonds. The contrast was considerable-the sheer beauty of the stones versus the sheer ugliness of the ogre. It looked as if he were trying to eat them.
Smash hardly paused for thought. At the moment, the dragoness was a greater threat to his health than the ogre. He wrestled a boulder out of the pit wall and heaved it up at the dragoness, while the other ogre struggled to his feet, shedding white, red, green, blue, and polka-dot diamonds. The dragoness turned, snapped at the boulder, found it inedible, and spit it out Smash realized that the other ogre had disappeared. He checked, and saw a foot in a hole. The boulder he had thrown had blocked a passage, and the ogre was crawling down it, leaving Smash to face the fire alone. Smash didn't appreciate that, so he grabbed the foot and hauled the ogre back and out. Several more diamonds dropped from crevices on the creature's hide-black,, yellow, purple, plaid, and candy-striped. In a moment Smash had the ogre in the air, swinging him around by the feet in a circle.
The dragoness was pumping up for a real burnout blast. Such an exhalation could incinerate both ogres in a single foop. She opened her maw, letting the first wisps of superheated steam emerge, and her belly rumbled with the gathering holocaust.
Smash let go of the ogre, hurling him directly into the gaping maw, headfirst.
The dragon choked on her own blocked fire, for the ogre's body was just the right size to plug her gullet.
The ogre's feet, protruding slightly from the mouth, kicked madly. Then the ogre's broken teeth started working as he chewed his way out. The dragoness looked startled, uncertain how to deal with this complication.
Smash wasn't sure how this contest would turn out. The dragoness' fire was bottled, and her own teeth could not quite get purchase on the ogre in her throat, but she did have a lot of power and might be able to clear the ogre by either coughing him out or swallowing him the rest of the way. On the other hand, the ogre could chew quite a distance in a short time. Smash decided to depart the premises with judicious dispatch.
But where could he go? If he scrambled out of the nest, the dragoness might chase after him, and he would be more like a sitting duck than a running ogre, in the open. If he remained-
'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
