"Smash, look out!" Tandy cried. "More heads!"
Apparently a couple of the ones he had dealt with had not been completely destroyed, and had revived.
This was unusual; things seldom recovered from the impact of ogre force. He grabbed these-and
discovered they sprouted from the same neck. Their junction formed a neat Y. He was sure he hadn't encountered this configuration before.
"More heads!" Tandy screamed.
"Now there were six more, in three pairs. New heads were growing from the old ones!
"It's a hydra!" the Siren cried. "Each lost head generates two more! You can never get ahead of it!"
"I've got too many heads of it!" Smash muttered, stepping back. The hydra was generating a small forest of hissing heads, each lunging and snapping at anything in range. Two were squaring off at each other.
"You can't kill a hydra," the Siren continued. "Its essence is immortal. It draws its strength from the water."
"Then I shall remove the water," Smash said. "It will be easy to bash a hole in this rim and let the lake out."
"Oh, please don't do that!" the Siren protested. "I'm a creature of water, and I hate to see it mistreated.
You would ruin a perfectly lovely lake, and drown many innocent creatures below, and kill many innocent lake denizens. There is an entire ecology in any such body-"
Was the mermaid becoming the conscience of the group? Smash hesitated.
"That's true," John admitted. "Pretty lakes should be left alone. Most of them have much more good than evil in them."
Smash looked at Tandy. "I agree," she said. "We don't want to harm others, and this water is nice."
The ogre shrugged. He didn't want trouble with his friends. As he thought about it, with his amplified Eye Queue intelligence-which remained a nuisance-he realized they were right. Wanton destruction could only beget a deterioration of the environment of Xanth, and that would, in the long run, damage the prospects of ogres. "No harm to others," he agreed gruffly. If any other ogres ever heard of this, he would be in trouble! Imagine not destroying something!
"Oh, I could kiss you," Tandy said. "But I can't reach you."
Smash chuckled. "Good thing. Now we'll have to swim across the lake. Do all of you know how to swim?"
"Oh, I couldn't swim," John said. "My wings would break."
"Maybe you can fly now," the Siren suggested.
"Maybe." The fairy tried, buzzing her pretty wings, making the flower-pattern blossoms again. She seemed to lighten as the downdraft of air dusted dirt out from the ridge, but she did not quite take off.
Then she jumped. A gust of wind passed at that moment, carrying her out over the rim. She agitated her wings furiously, but could not sustain elevation and began to fall.
Smash reached out and caught her before she crashed into the rocky slope. She screamed, then realized he was helping her, not attacking her. He set her carefully back on the ledge, where she stood panting prettily and quivering with reaction.
"Not yet, it seems," the Siren said. "But you might sit on Smash's back while he swims."
"I suppose," the fairy agreed faintly. Her little bare bosom was heaving. It occurred to Smash that the loss of the ability to fly might be quite disturbing to a creature whose natural mode of travel was flight.
He might react similarly if he lost his ogre strength.
They entered the water. Tandy could swim well enough, and, of course, the Siren converted to mermaid form and was completely at home. John perched nervously on Smash's head and was so light he hardly felt her weight. He began stroking across the lake, careful not to splash enough to cause trouble, despite his pleasure in splashing. Some sacrifices were necessary when one traveled in company.
The Siren led the way, easily outdistancing the others. That creature certainly could swim; she was in her element.
Then something loomed from the north. It was huge and dark, like a low-flying thundercloud, scooting across the water. Simultaneously the awful wailing came again, and now Smash realized it came from the cloud-thing. There was also a pattering drumbeat punctuating the wails.
The Siren paused in place. "I don't like this," she said. "That thing is trotting on the surface of the water; I feel the vibrations of its footfalls. And it's headed for us. I could outdistance it, I think; but Tandy can't, and Smash can't do much without imperiling John. We had better get out of the water."
"It's coming too fast," John said. "It will catch us before we get back to shore."
She was right. The monster loomed rapidly onward, casting a dark shadow. It was not actually a cloud, but was composed of gray-blue foam, with a number of holes through which the wailing passed, and hundreds of little feet that touched the water. When it moved to one side, they saw the prints left on the surface, just like the ones they had seen before. The prints of wails.
"Oh, we are doomed!" John cried. "Save yourself, Smash; dive under the water, hide from it!"
An ogre hide from a monster? Little did the fairy grasp the magnitude of the insult she had innocently rendered. "No," Smash said. "I'll fight it."
"It's too big to fight!"
"It probably smothers its prey by surrounding it," Tandy said. She was being practical. She seemed much less afraid of things since having 'discovered the ultimate nature of fear inside the gourd. Monsters were only monsters, when one's soul was intact. "You can't fight fog or jelly."
Smash realized she was probably right. These assorted girls were making more sense than he would have thought before he came to know them. In the water, with a delicate and flightless fairy on his head, he could not fight efficiently anyway-and if there was nothing really solid to punch out, his fists would be of little use.' It galled him to concede that there were monsters that an ogre couldn't handle, but in this case it seemed to be so. Curse this Eye Queue that made him see reason!
"I'll lead it away!" the Siren cried. She was hovering in the water, her powerful tail elevating her body, so that it was as if she stood only waist-deep. She would have been a considerable sight, that way, for a human male. It seemed to Smash that she should have no trouble attracting a merman, at such time as she found one. "You swim on across the lake," the Siren continued. She set off toward the west, moving with amazing velocity. She was like a bird in flight across the surface of the lake.
When she was a fair distance away, she paused and began to sing. She had a beautiful voice, with an eerie quality, a little like the wailing of the monster. Perhaps she was deliberately imitating it.
The monster paused. Then it rotated grandly and ran toward the Siren, its little feet striking the water without splashing, leaving the prints. That mystery had been solved, though Smash did not understand how the prints remained after the wailing monster moved on. But, of course, the effects of magic did not need any explanation.
Once the monster had cleared the area, lured away by the Siren, Smash and Tandy swam on across. It was a fair distance, and Tandy tired, slowing them; it seemed there were not many lakes this big in the underworld. Finally Smash told her to grab hold of one of his feet so he could tow her. The truth was, he was getting tired himself; he would have preferred to wade, but the water was far too deep for that. It would have been un-ogrish to confess any weakness, however.
They made it safely to the north lip. They drew themselves out and rested, hoping the Siren was all right.
Soon she appeared, swimming deep below the surface. Her tail gave her a tremendous forward thrust, and she was a thing of genuine beauty as she slid through the water, her hair streaming back like bright seaweed, her body as sleek and glossy as that of a healthy fish. Then she came up, her head bursting the surface, her hands rising automatically to brush back her wet tresses, mermaidlike. "My, that was interesting!" she said, flipping out of the water to sit on the rim, her tail hidden in the water, so that now she most resembled a healthy nymph.