"We came to impress you with the need for this," Esk said, knowing that the chances of impressing these monsters with anything they had to say was so small as to be worthless.

"Such mess, impress?" the ogre who had brought them demanded, and all of them laughed with a volume and crudity that only their kind could manage. -- "Yes, impress," Esk continued doggedly. "For your help."

The first ogre thought about that. His cranium heated with the effort, and the fleas got hotfeet and jumped off. Finally he exclaimed: "Me say okay!"

The other ogres, glad to be relieved of the horrible effort of having to think for themselves, bellowed their agreement.

"Wonderful," Latia said. "Now all we have to do is impress them, and our case is won."

"Maybe we can do that," Bria said brightly. "We each have our natures and our talents."

"I'm not sure-" Esk began.

"For example, I can be very hard when I want to be. I'll show you." She climbed out of the pack, which the ogre had set on the ground beside the pot. "Eat me, ogre!" she cried. "Chew me up!"

The ogre did not wait for a second invitation. He s.n.a.t.c.hed her up a moment before three other ham hands reached her, and jammed her feet in his maw. He chomped.

There was a pause. Then slow surprise spread across his puss from the region of his maw. For his teeth had crunched something much harder than bone.

He pulled Bria out and looked at her. She still looked edible. "She sweet; me eat," he concluded, and opened his maw wide and jammed in her head.

But the teeth crunched again on hard metal. Bria's head remained attached. "Can't you do better than that, ogre?" she cried from the vicinity of his tongue.

Confused, the ogre hauled her out. Immediately another ogre grabbed her and chomped on an arm. It was a powerful chomp; the sound of it rang metallically, startling a pa.s.sing cloud so that it dropped a little water. A chip of yellow tooth flew out.

"Tough, she, me agree," the ogre confessed.

"Do I impress you?" Bria demanded.

The ogres exchanged glances. They were stupid glances, and traveled very slowly, so this took some time. The surrounding trees tilted away, worried when ogres acted strangely. But eventually they all nodded agreement; they were impressed.

"So that's how it goes," Latia said. "Well, let's see what I can do." She climbed out of the pack and addressed the ogres. "Who is the ugliest among you?" she asked.

An ogress leaned forward. As she did so, all the nearby plants wilted "Me be ugly, me say smugly!"

She certainly was ugly; Esk had never seen a more horrendous puss.

"I can be uglier than you," Latia said.

All the ogres laughed at this, not even needing time for thought. It was obvious that n.o.body could be uglier than the ogress.

"Ugly is as ugly does," Latia said stoutly. "What can your ugly do?"

The ogress turned and lumbered into her hovel. A flock of bats flew out, looking stunned. She brought out a battered pitcher of milk. She grimaced at it-and the entire pitcher curdled.

Esk gaped. That was ugly indeed! He had thought the stories about that sort of thing were exaggerated.

Then Latia put her hands to her head. She had powder and chalk, and was using these to make up her face.

"What's she doing?" Bria asked.

"She's an actress," Esk said. "All curse fiends are good at drama. They can make themselves quite pretty-and I guess ugly, if they want to."

Latia looked up. Her face, homely to begin with, had been transformed. Now it so ugly it was sickening. But the ogres just looked, undismayed; they were used to ugly.

Then Latia walked over to the big pot. "Lift me up," she said.

Curious, an ogre picked her up and held her over the pot. Latia aimed her face down, and scowled.

The water curdled.

Esk gaped. So did the ogres.

"Well?" Latia inquired, as the ogre set her down.

"We confess, we impress," an ogre muttered, still staring at the pot. He poked a ham finger in. The water was definitely curdled, not frozen. It clarified in the region of his finger, finding this to be relatively pretty.

Esk remembered how his grandmother, a curse fiend, had emulated an ogress and won his grandfather's love. At last he had a notion how she had done it.

But now it was his turn. What could he do to match what the women had done? If he got mad, he could develop ogre strength for a short time -but that would only match the strength every normal ogre had, not exceed it. That would not impress them.

Then he realized what would. "Who is stupidest?" he asked.

"Me!" the first ogre cried, forgetting to rhyme.

"Me, me!" another exclaimed, remembering.

There was a chorus of claims, for of course each was proud, and considered himself the stupidest creature of all time. But finally one emerged as dominant: the hugest and slackest-jawed of them all. He was so muscular that when he tried to think, the muscles bulged on his head, but so stupid that his effort to think couldn't even dislodge the fleas; his skull couldn't get hot enough.

"Well, I am stupider than you," Esk a.s.serted. "I'll prove it."

Then he concentrated, and his terror of failure invoked his ogre strength. He marched across and wrapped his arms around the ogre's legs, and picked him up and swung him around, exerting all his ogre power, and cracked the ogre's head into a tree. The tree snapped off, but the ogre wasn't hurt, of course.

The ogre was, however, annoyed. Ogres didn't really like snapping tree trunks with their faces; they preferred ham fists. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the fallen trunk and swung it toward Esk, ready to smash him down into the ground with a single blow.

Esk stood his ground. "What could be stupider than doing what I did to an ogre like that?" he asked.

The ogres considered. Then, as the tree came down and Esk jumped aside, they started to laugh. The welkin shuddered with their haw-haws, making the sun vibrate and shed a few rays, and even the ogre Esk had attacked joined in. It was a good joke indeed. Nothing could be stupider than that!

"That was a dam fool thing to do!" Latia snapped.

"Totally idiotic!" Bria said.

"Precisely," Esk agreed. "It was the stupidest thing I could have done."

They were silent, acceding to the sincerity of his claim.

Thus it was that Esk's party impressed the ogres and won their support for the mission. Now all they had to do was survive the ogres* welcoming party and manage to explain how to reach the Vale of the Vole from here. The ogres would help.

Chapter 12. Wiggle.

Volney tunneled down toward the wiggle princess, guided by the locator pebble the squiggles had given him. This stone, like the other, was reversed for him; he had to orient on the foulest taste, avoiding the good taste.

The wiggles, as he understood it, were the strongest borers of all the clans of the voles. More correctly, their larvae were. When a pair of wiggles mated, the female went to a suitable patch of rock and made her nest, and when the larvae hatched they drilled out into that rock in an increasing radius until they found good locations for feeding and growth. Very few were lucky; the great majority of the thousands of larvae perished when they used up all their strength in the vain search.

The wiggles' problem was that their tastes were highly selective. Each individual liked only a particular flavor of rock, and would not eat any other. Since there were many hundreds of flavors, and the veins of rock were randomly distributed, the chances of a single wiggle larva happening on its particular flavor were perhaps one in a thousand. There were several thousand larvae in a typical swarm, so normally a few did find their homes. This was the reason that the ground was not overridden with wiggles; a female mated only once, and was thereafter sterile, because all the egg cells in her body were expended in the laying of the larvae. In any given year, there would be only one or two swarms, limited to their particular veins of stone. It might have helped if the stone that was suitable for swarming was the same as what was suitable for eating; then all the larvae would settle down immediately and eat.

But as he reviewed this in his mind, Volney saw why this was not so. If all the thousands of wiggle larvae ate the rock they swarmed in, they would soon finish it, and the vein would become a pulsing ma.s.s of partially matured wiggles. None of those would grow to maturity, because the food would be gone. All would perish, and the swarm would die out without descendants. So it was necessary for swarm taste and grow taste to differ; the swarm taste was identical for all the larvae, while the grow taste was different for each. The wiggle system really did make sense, when taken on its own terms.

But this particular wiggle princess, the squiggles had explained, was a mutant, or close to it. There was normally a good range of variation in a swarm, with the tastes of individual larva including the most mundane flavors of rock and the most exotic. The flavor required for swarming matched that of the princess's food; since she normally consumed most of the food in the process of maturing, she then had to find similar rock in another place for her nest. This particular female had an extremely exotic taste, so had been unable to find any more of her kind of rock. She could not mate until she was a.s.sured of a proper nesting site. Once she found that, she would summon a male, and they would mate, and she would go to the new site to make the nest.

The reason the squiggles, who were fairly canny creatures, thought Volney might be interested, was that this princess's taste was for air-flavored stone. She had found her vein and consumed it, but that seemed to be the only such vein available. Generally wiggles preferred rock-flavored stone; she was a real rarity. But what she might not realize was that there was a good deal of air-flavored stone on the surface, because of the way the air contaminated everything it touched. In fact, a similar taste accounted for those few swarms that occurred at the surface, when a wiggle female happened on the surface and had a matching taste. The creatures of the surface believed that they had to destroy every wiggle larva in the swarm to prevent any from generating new swarms; that was their ignorance. The truth was that their effort made very little difference, apart from some temporary complications caused by the manner the larvae drilled through things, because none of the larvae would have the same taste as their queen-mother. Only those with some taste for deep rock, who managed to reach a suitable vein of it, would survive. All the surface creatures needed to do was ignore the swarm, and it would pa.s.s. Thus spake the squiggles, who had been more than satisfied to educate one of their lofty volish cousins on the facts of life at the other end of the spectrum.

All this was news to Volney, who had shared the conventional surface creature alarm about wiggle swarming. That showed that there was some justice to the att.i.tude of the lower species of ground borers: the voles of the Vale had gotten out of touch, and were forgetting the nature of their relatives. He would have to reeducate his companions of the Vale, once this mission was over.

But first he had to get it over, and that was not a sanguine prospect.

Though a wiggle swarm might not be the disaster he had supposed, it would still be devastating enough in the temporary sense, because of the way the larvae drilled through everything they encountered, leaving their little zapp holes. Such holes could be quite painful for other living creatures, and even lethal. To loose a swarm on the Vale of the Vole-he remained uncertain how wise that might be, even if the voles and other creatures there had sufficient warning to evacuate the area until the swarm had pa.s.sed. Concerns of this nature had caused him to dismiss the notion of seeking the wiggle princess out of paw, before. But now, with the failure of the other two members of the party to obtain help, he had to try it. He hoped he wasn't making a terrible error.

Such were his thoughts as he tunneled down at a slant, following the foul taste of the pebble. Periodically he rested and ate some fruit and root from his pouch, for this was an extensive dig. In due course he slept, keeping his whiskers alert for nickelpedes; he had no intention of being trapped that way again!

After two days, the sourness of the pebble practically numbed his tongue. He was getting close!

Indeed, in another moment he broke through to the tunnel network of the princess. He blinked, for it was lighted; bright fungus grew on the walls, illuminating the region in pastel shades. There was a definitely feminine aura here; he would have known immediately that this was the abode of a female even if he had stumbled on it by accident. He paused to prepare himself for the encounter, then sent out a call in voletalk.

She answered immediately. "Who intrudes on my network?"

Volney was taken aback. Her voice, in vole terms, was dulcet. He had expected a somewhat grating encounter, for his kind had very little contact with her kind.

"I am Volney Vole, seeking perhaps a favor." His words reminded him of the manner his human and centaurian companions hissed their "s" sounds, making their speech artificial; he was of course too polite to mention it to them, realizing that they probably suffered from infirmities of their palates.

She appeared, and he was surprised again. She was a surprisingly pet.i.te creature, reminiscent of a female of his own species, with gray fur that seemed to glow. She resembled a wiggle larva not in the slightest; she was definitely of the family of voles.

"And I am Wilda Wiggle," she responded. "I would be more than happy to grant you that favor, but I am not at the moment seeking a mate."

"So I have been informed," he said, surprised at her interpretation. He was not her type! A vole and a wiggle, however compatible physically, were incompatible genetically; they could only go through the motions of mating, never producing offspring. "My favor is not of that nature; I am not of your particular species."

"What is it, then?" She fluffed out her fur, looking very pretty. Volney became conscious of the grime on his own fur, because of his two days of boring. He should have taken time to lick himself clean! But he had a remedy: he shifted to his surface suit, his fur turning gray, his eyes brown. Because he had not been boring in that, it was clean.

"I am from the Vale of the Vole, and we have a severe problem. The demons are hara.s.sing us, and they have straightjacketed our formerly friendly river, the Kiss-Mee, and made it and the Vale unfriendly. We are seeking some way to drive the demons off, so that we can restore the river to its natural and superior state, so that our Vale may be pleasant again."

"That is very interesting, I'm sure," she said politely. "But I think it is no affair of mine."

"It occurred to me that if a wiggle swarming were to occur in that vicinity, the demons would be discomfited, and would depart, allowing us to restore the river."

"But wiggles do not swarm on the surface," she protested. "There is no decent-tasting rock there!"

"There may be," he said. "According to the squiggles, who bore both in the depths and near the surface, there is a good deal of air-flavored stone at the surface."

"Air-flavored stone?"

"I understand that the flavor you prefer is of that nature."

"I know what I like, but I never knew what it was called. Do you mean to say that there is stone in the flavor I require at the surface?"

"The squiggles seem to think so. When I first encountered them, they mistook me for you, because of the odor remaining on my fur. Therefore it seems that the particular atmosphere of the Vale may be compatible for you."

"You don't smell like my rock," she protested.

"It has largely dissipated now, for I have been some time away from the Vale. But perhaps some smell remains in my pouch." He opened his pouch.

She sniffed. "Yes! That is my flavor! Oh, I wish I had known before! I must mate and go there immediately!"

"There is a complication," he said. "The larvae of a wiggle swarm are damaging to the creatures of a region."

"Damaging? I know nothing of this."

"That is because your kind normally swarms in limited veins of specialized rock, where no other creatures live. On the surface the range of a swarm becomes virtually unlimited, because the larvae travel through the air, which offers little resistance. They leave holes in the creatures, which is awkward."

"Oh, I see. I suppose that could be awkward, as you say. But why don't you use a containment spell?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"A containment spell. This has been used historically by our kind-on those rare occasions when our territory overlaps that of other creatures. It confines the swarm to a set radius, so that no harm occurs beyond it."

"But doesn't that interfere with your cycle of reproduction? If the larvae cannot travel freely, how can they find the rocks they need?"

"Not any more than a limited vein of swarming rock does," she pointed out. "We wiggles are accustomed to limitations. If the containment spell limits only the radius and not the depth, some larvae will find deep rock. Those that remain on the surface have no chance anyway, as they seek a different flavor."

Volney was highly gratified. "Then it appears we can exchange favors," he said. "Tell me where this containment spell is, and I will tell you where the Vale is."

She was visibly pleased. She fluffed out her fur some more, and gazed at him with eyes that shifted from brown to gray as her fur converted the opposite way. "It is lost at the moment; someone carried it into a gourd and failed to bring it out."

"Would that be on the Lost Path in the gourd?" he asked, remembering something that Esk had said.

"Why, yes, I suppose so. So if you go there, you should be able to find it." She gazed at him with those big eyes, that were now turning from gray to violet, while her coat became pleasantly green. It was evident that the wiggles were more versatile about coloration than the voles were. "You are a handsome vole, Volney."

"The Vale is-are you familiar with the outline of the land of Xanth? -it is in the central part, south of the Gap Chasm, north of Lake Ogre-Chobee."

"I am sure I can find it," she said. Her eyes were brightening to red, while her fur was turning silver. "I am so glad you came to see me!"

There was something about her att.i.tude that nagged him. He looked into her face, and realized what an extraordinarily attractive creature she was. Those blazing red eyes- Red eyes! That was the color of mating!