Gregory stared. “From what nightmare came this?”
“Yours,” Allouette snapped. “Step aside! Let the horses deal with it!”
The ogre’s rank odor hit the beasts and they reared, screaming, fire in their own eyes, for alien and horrid though the creature might seem, these were well-trained warhorses who knew to strike rather than flee.
The ogre screamed back and swung its club at the striking legs, but one of the horses cracked a hoof against its shoulder and the swing went wide, turning the creature half around—toward Allouette. Its piggy eyes fixed on her and it waddled toward her with menace, club swinging up.
Gregory shouted and leaped into its path. The ogre turned and swung its club at him. Gregory ducked; the club whistled over his head. Then a huge foot caught him in the stomach and lifted him into the air. He landed in a ball and rolled to his feet.
“Caitiff!” Allouette screamed, and snatched a dagger from her belt.
The ogre turned to her with a snarl, swinging its club high again—but her hand swung in a blur and a dagger-hilt seemed to sprout from the ogre’s shaggy chest. It looked down in surprise, then wrenched the blade loose, ignoring the gush of blood that followed, and stepped toward her with a howl of rage—but it lurched as it stepped. It looked down with a puzzled frown, as well it might have—for there was a lump of gray goo where its left foot had been, and as it watched, its right foot seemed to melt. It howled in horror as it shrank, its whole form sliding down and flowing in seconds until only a huge gray heap remained.
Allouette drew a sharp breath and said, “Well and quickly thought, my love.”
“It threatened you!”
Allouette looked up, surprised; she had never seen Gregory angry before. His eyes blazed, his face had reddened, his whole body was shaking—but she knew the cause and reached up to embrace him. “I was never truly in danger, love,” she said softly.
“But that club!” Gregory’s voice was muffled by her hair as he pressed his cheek against her head. “It might have hurt you!”
“I was faster than it was, dear—it could never have caught me,” she said, her tone soothing. “Still, you thought most amazingly quickly. How could you tell it was made of witch-moss?”
Gregory shrugged. “All monsters are, on this world of Gramarye. Some granny who does not know she is a projective telepath has been telling her grandchildren tales of night-stalkers again, and bits of witch-moss in the forest nearby flowed toward one another until there was enough of them to form the monster of which she spoke.”
The substance wasn’t properly a moss, it was a fungus, and for some strange reason, natural selection had made it sensitive to telepathic thought. A trained esper could fashion it into anything she wanted, even living forms, since it was already alive.
An untrained one could turn it into anything he could imagine—sometimes with disastrous results.
“It was worth a try,” Gregory explained. “If dissociating had failed, I could always have hurled it away with telekinesis.”
Allouette thought of the rage she had seen in his eyes and didn’t doubt that he could have summoned the emotional power to have lifted the huge mass and thrown it like a twig. The thought was frightening, but reassuring too; she felt a warm glow at the reminder of the intensity of his love for her, the more amazing because she hadn’t manipulated him into it.
Not for lack of trying, of course. How could she have known, when he proved immune to all her wiles, that he would have fallen in love with her for herself?
So she stepped away from him with perhaps more gentleness than she might have—just far enough away to lift her lips for a kiss. Gregory was still for a moment, then began to tremble again and his kiss, though feather-light, stunned her with its intensity.
When she caught her breath, she smiled into his eyes, her own glowing, and said, “Come. This creature may have left havoc in its path. We must track where it has been and remedy its devastation.”
Gregory looked up in surprise. “Why, even so! How compassionate you are to have thought of it! Come, let us seek!” He turned away, eyes on the ground.
Well, Allouette would have thought of it as caution and self-preservation, but she was quite content to let Gregory think her compassionate—and a trace of the thought lingered, not enough to convince her that he saw truly, but enough which, added to other such remarks he had made, would someday make her begin to wonder. For now, though, she paced the trail beside him, looking for the prints the ogre’s huge feet had made, pressed down into the hardened dirt by its massive weight; for rocks showing the darkness of moisture where those feet had overturned them; and a dozen other such signs.
Then she heard a brushing noise in front of her and looked up to see an even uglier face glaring down at her.
Her fingers bit into Gregory’s arm. “Do not move, dear, but look up!”
Gregory looked and froze.
She was a parody of the female form, a burlesque, a grotesque. Where the male’s hair had been a thatch, hers was a bramble bush, grayed with age, and her face had so many wrinkles it was hard to pick out which ones held eyes and mouth. She wore a giant sack for a dress with neckhole and armholes raggedly scooped out. She was bow-legged and massive of limb and paw, and her mouth opened to reveal the yellowed stumps of snaggled teeth as she let out a roar, lifting a huge club two-handed above her head. Her eyes burned with fury as she swung it down.
They sprang to either side and the vast cudgel slammed into the earth where they had been. “My turn!” Allouette shouted, and glared at the ogre-hag, thinking with all her might of plant cells dissolving their bonds, of molecules breaking away from one another, of candles melting into puddles of wax.
But the huge club was rising again, and Gregory called, “Quickly, my heart!” as he drew his sword and leaped in.
The hag howled and pivoted, club swinging down.
“Gregory!” Allouette screamed, completely losing her concentration—but her lover leaped back, and the weapon hissed where he had been while, behind him, the horses echoed the ogre’s shriek.
Allouette almost went limp with relief, then pulled herself together and focused madly on the thought of a snowman melting in the sun.
The horses pounded in side by side, necks stretching and teeth reaching for the ogre. She howled in rage, whirling her club in a roundhouse swing, but the horses reared and the club swished under their feet. Then those iron-shod hooves struck.
The ogre fell back with shouts of pain and bellows of rage. She began to swing her club in a circle overhead, wading back toward the warhorses, not realizing that she was sinking lower and lower with each step until she could no longer move. Only then did she look down, but before the horror of her dissolution could really break upon her, Allouette poured all her emotional energy into a vision of the snowman collapsing into slush, and the ogre disintegrated into a gelatinous mound.
“Well done!” Gregory embraced her, crowing with pride—so that she need sacrifice none of her own if she clung to him in dizziness or distress. “Oh, well and bravely done, my heart! Subtly and quickly, and the coup de grace delivered like a thunderclap!”
“But . . . but she was alive!” Allouette gasped. “And not slain, only . . . dissolved!”
“But so suddenly that she never knew,” Gregory pointed out. “Besides, my love, what was the creature a week ago? Only this same mound of fungus, nothing more.”