"The same?"
Smash asked. "We're traveling north."
"Yes," Chem said. "Good Magician Humfrey told me where to intercept you. You see, I'm doing a thesis on the geography of uncharted Xanth, completing my education, but my folks won't let me travel alone through that region, so--"
"And so I escorted my little sister this far," Chet finished. He was a handsome centaur, with noble features, a fine coat, and excellent muscles on both his human and equine portions. But a purple scar marred his left shoulder, where a wyvern had once bitten him, causing serious illness. "I know she'll be safe with you. Smash. You're a big ogre now."
"Safe? We're about to try to cross this gulf!" Smash protested. "And we don't know how."
"Oh, yes.
The Gap Chasm.
I brought you a rope." Chet presented a neat coil. "Humfrey said you would need it."
"A rope!"
Suddenly their way down into the chasm was clear. Centaur rope was always strong enough for its purpose.
"I'll help get you down," Chet said. "But I'm not supposed to go myself. I have to return immediately to Castle Roogna with a message or two. What's the message?"
Smash's curse of intelligence enabled him to catch on. "A village is about to cut down a fireoak tree for timber. The tree's hamadryad will die. The King must save the tree."
"I'll tell him," Chet agreed. "Where is it?"
Smash turned to Fireoak, who sat listlessly on the
ground.
"Where is your tree?"
The hamadryad made a feeble motion with her hand.
"This is no good," Chet said. "Chem, let's use your map."
The filly walked over to Fireoak. "Show me on my picture," she said.
An image formed between them. It was a contour map of the
Land
of
Xanth
, a long peninsula with the Gap Chasm across its center and the ocean around it. "Show me where the tree is," Chem repeated.
Fireoak looked, slowly orienting on the scene. "There," she said, pointing to a region near the northern rim of the Gap.
Chem nodded. "There is a human village there, just setting up. That's already on my chart." She looked at her brother. "Got it, Chet?"
"Got it, Chem," the male centaur replied. "You always do make the scene. Smash, the moment you're down in the Gap, I'll gallop back and tell the King. I'm sure he'll handle the business about the tree. But it will take me a couple days to get there, so you'll have to protect the tree until then." He glanced about. "Was there any other message? It seems there should be more than one."
The people looked around at each other. Finally Tandy said, "I'd like to send a greeting to my father Crombie, if that's all right."
Chet tapped his head, making a mental note.
"One greeting to Crombie from daughter.
Got it."
He looked more carefully at Tandy. "He always bragged he had a cute daughter. I see he was correct."
Tandy blushed. She hadn't known her father had said that about her.
They tied the rope to the trunk of a steelwood tree. Chem insisted on going down first. "That will prove the rope is safe," she explained.
"Even Smash doesn't weigh more than I do."
Of course she was correct, for though her human portion was girlishly
slender,
her equine portion was as solid as a horse.
She backed down, her four hooves bracing against the steep side of the chasm. The rope looped once about her small human waist, just below her moderate bosom, and she used her hands to give herself slack by stages. When she got down to where the slope leveled out enough to enable her to stand, she released the rope.
The Siren went down next, having less trouble because she had so much less mass. Then Tandy, followed by the fairy,
who
fluttered her wings to make herself even lighter than she was. Smash then made a harness out of the end of the rope, set Fireoak in it, and stood on the brink to lower her carefully to Chem's waiting arms.
Finally Smash himself descended, merely applying one gauntlet to the rope and sliding rapidly down. Chet undid the upper end from the steelwood tree and dropped it into the chasm. They would need the rope again on the
north slope
.
"I'm on my way with one and a half messages," Chet called, and galloped off. "Remember: two days."
The slope continued to level, until they stood at the base. Here grass grew, but no trees. It was pleasant enough, and the
north slope
was visible a short distance away. They walked across, studying the rise for the most suitable place to ascend.
It certainly wasn't good for climbing with a party of girls. The ground sloped gently up to a corner; from there the cliff went almost straight up a dizzying height, beyond the reach of the rope, even if there were any place or way to anchor it.
"We must do what we started to do before," the Siren said. "Spread out and look for a suitable place to climb."
"I believe there are paths here and there," Chem said. "I don't have them on my map, because few people remember the Gap Chasm; it has an enduring forget-spell on it. But there has been enough travel in Xanth so that people have to have crossed it, and not just at the magic bridges."
"A forget-spell," the Siren said.
"How interesting.
That accounts for Fireoak's forgetting it. And I'm sure Smash has been here before, too. I hope that's the extent of the spell."
"What do you mean?" Tandy asked.
"Oh, I'm just a worrier over nothing."
"I don't think so," Tandy said. "If there's any danger, you should warn us."
The Siren sighed. "You're right. Yet if there is danger here, it's too late for us to avoid it, since we're already here. It's only that once I heard something about a big dragon in a chasm--and this is a chasm. It would be hard to escape a monster here. But of course that's far-fetched."
"Let's look for good hiding places, too," Tandy said.
"Just in case."
"Just in case," John agreed, overhearing. "Oh, suddenly I don't really like this place!"
"So we must try to get out of this chasm as fast as we can," Smash said, though the prospect of danger did not bother him. There really had not been much violence on this journey.
Chem trotted east, while
Smash
lumbered west, since these were the two fastest movers of the group. The girl, Siren, and fairy spread out in between. They left the hamadryad in the shade of a bush, since she was now too weak to walk.
The cliff face changed, sloping at different angles and different heights, but Smash found nothing that would really help. It looked as if he would have to bash out a stairway of sorts, tedious as that would be. But could he get the party up that way within two days, let alone in time to save the hamadryad and her tree?
There was a commotion to the east. Chem was galloping back, her lovely brown hair-mane flinging out, tail swishing nervously.
"Dragon!
Dragon!" she cried breathlessly.
The Siren's concern had been justified! "I'll stop it," Smash said enthusiastically, charging east.
"No! It's big. It's the Gap Dragon!"
Now
Smash
remembered. The Gap Dragon ranged the Gap Chasm, trapping and consuming any creatures foolish enough to stray here. The forget-spell had deceived him again. The monster really profited from that spell, since no one remembered the danger. But it was coming back to him now. This was a formidable menace.
The Siren, Tandy, and John were running west.
Behind them whomped the monster.
It was long and low, with a triple pair of stubby legs. Its scales were metallic, glistening in the sunlight, and clouds of steam puffed out of its nostrils.
Its body was the thickness of a good-sized tree trunk, but exceedingly limber
. It moved by elevating one section and whomping it forward, then following through with another, because its legs were too short for true running. But the clumsy-seeming mechanism sufficed for considerable velocity. In a moment the Gap Dragon would overtake the Siren.
Smash lumbered to the fray. He stood much taller than the dragon, but it reached much longer than he. Thus they did not come together with a satisfying crash. The dragon scooted right under Smash, intent on the nymphlike morsel before it.
The ogre screeched to a stop, literally, his callused hamfeet churning up mounds of rubble. He bent forward and grabbed the dragon's tail as it slid westward. He lifted it up, holding it tightly in both hands. This would halt the monster!
Alas, he had underestimated the dragon.
The creature whomped onward.
The tail lost its slack--but such was the mass and impetus of the monster that it wrenched the ogre into a somersault. He flipped right over, hanging on to that tail, and landed with a whomp of his own on his back--on the dragon's tail.
But Smash's own mass was not inconsiderable. The shock of his landing traveled along the body of the dragon in a ripple. When the ripple passed a set of legs, they were wrenched momentarily off the ground; when it arrived at the head, the mouth snapped violently. The jaws, reaching close to the desperately fleeing Siren, fell short.
Now
Smash
had the Gap Dragon's baleful attention. The dragon let out a yowl of discomfort and whipped its head around. Its tail, pinned under the ogre, thrashed about, so that
Smash
had trouble regaining his feet.
The dragon's neck curved in a sharp U-turn, bonelessly supple. The head traveled smoothly back along the length of the body. The monster hardly needed its legs for this sort of maneuver. In a moment the spreading jaws were at Smash's own head, ready to take it in.
The ogre, still flat on his back, stabbed upward with a gauntleted fist. The jaws closed on it, but the fist continued inexorably, punching past the slurp-wet tongue and into the back of the throat. The dragon's head was so large that Smash's whole arm was engulfed--but that strike in the throat caused the monster to gag, and the jaws parted again. Smash recovered his arm before it got chomped.
The ogre sat up, but remained in the midst of the coils of the dragon. The two grotesque heads of ogre and dragon faced each other, snout to snout. Smash realized that this time he had gotten himself into an encounter whose outcome he could not know. The Gap Dragon was his match.
Delightful! For the first time since attaining his full strength, Smash could test his ultimate. But at the moment they were all tangled up in an ineffective configuration, unable to fight decisively.
Smash made a face,
bulging
his eyes and stretching his mouth wide open.
"Yyrwil!" he yyrwiled.
The Gap Dragon made a face back, wrinkling up its snout horrendously and crossing its eyes so far that the pupils exchanged places.
"Rrooarw!" it rrooarwed.
Smash made a worse face, swallowing his nose and part of his low forehead.
"Ggrummf!" he ggrummffed.
The dragon went him one better, perhaps two better, swallowing its snout up past the ears and partway down its neck.
"Ssstth!" it ssstthed.
The monster was outdoing him. Petulantly, Smash bit into a rock and spit out a stream of gravel. The dragon's teeth were pointed, so it could not match that. Instead, it hoisted a petard of steam at him, the greasy ball of vapor curling the hairs of his face and clogging his nostrils.
So much for the niceties.
Now the real action commenced. Smash threw himself into the sheer joy of combat, the fundamental delight of every true ogre. It had been some time since he had crunched bones in earnest. Of course, this dragon was mostly boneless, but the principle remained.
He punched the dragon in the snout. This sort of punch could put a fist-sized hole in an ironwood tree, but the dragon merely gave way before the force of it and was only slightly bloodied. Then the dragon struck back, snapping sidewise at Smash's arm. That sort of bite could lop a mouthful of flesh from a behemoth, but the gauntlet extended back far enough to catch the edge of the bite and strike sparks from the teeth.
Then Smash boxed the dragon's right ear with his left fist--and the ear squirted right off the skull and flew out of sight. The dragon winced; that smarted! But the monster hardly needed that ear, and came back with a blast of steam that cooked the outer layer of the ogre's head. Smash's thick skull stopped the heat from penetrating to the Eye Queue-corrupted brain--more was the pity, he thought.
So much for the second exchange of amenities.
Smash had had slightly the better of it this time, but the fight was only warming
up.
Now the pace intensified.
Smash took hold of the dragon's upper jaw with one hand, the lower jaw with another, and slowly forced the two apart. The dragon resisted, and its jaw muscles were mighty, well leveraged, and experienced, but it could not directly withstand the full brute force of a concentrating ogre. Slowly the jaws separated.
The dragon whipped its body about. In a moment the sinuous length of it was wrapped about the ogre's torso, engulfing him anew. While Smash forced open the jaws, the dragon tightened its coils, constricting him.
All this was in slow motion, yet it was a race.
Would Smash rip the head apart first, or would the dragon squeeze the juice out of him?
The answer was uncertain. Smash was having trouble breathing; he was beginning to lose strength. It seemed to him that this should not be happening, or at least not this fast. But the dragon's jaws were now quite far apart, and should soon break.
Neither ogre nor dragon would give. They
remained,
their strength in balance. The jaws were on the verge of breaking, the torso on the verge of smothering. Who would succumb first? It occurred to Smash that he might break open the dragon's jaw, but be unable to extricate
himself
from its convulsed coils and smother because he couldn't breathe. Or the dragon might crush him--but suffer a broken jaw in Smash's dying effort. Both could lose this encounter.