The brass people were converging, exactly where they had been when he left. They seemed not even to be aware of his brief absence. The building was moving, too-but it had not moved in the interim. His Eye Queue-cursed brain found all this interesting, but Smash had no time for that nonsense at the moment. The brassies were almost on him.
The first one struck at him. The man was only half Smash's height, but the metal made him solid. Smash hauled him up by the brassard and threw him aside. Smash still lacked the strength to do real damage, but at least he could fight weakly. In his strength he would have hurled the brass man right through the brass wall of the building.
A female grabbed at him. Smash hooked a forefinger into her brassiere and hauled her up to his eye level. "Why are you attacking me?" he asked, curious rather than angry.
"We're only following our program," she said, kicking at him with a pretty brass foot.
"But if you fight me, I shall have to fight you," he pointed out. "And I happen to be a monster."
"Don't try to reason with me, you big hunk of flesh; I'm too brassy for that." She swung at him with a metal fist. But he was holding her at his arm's length, so she could not reach him.
Something was knocking at his knee. Smash looked down. A man was striking at him with his brass knuckles. Smash dropped the brass girl on the brass man's brass hat, and the two crashed to the floor in a shower of brass tacks. They cried out with the sound of brass winds.
Now a half-dozen brassies were grabbing at Smash's legs, and he lacked the strength to throw them all off at once. So he reached down to pluck them off one at a time-He was under the tree again. He saw the problem immediately. Half a dozen brassies-no, these were men and women of the human village-were converging on the tree, bearing wicked-looking axes. The hamadryad was screaming.
Smash had no patience with this. He stood up, towering over the villagers, ogre-fashion. He roared a fine ogre roar.
The villagers turned and fled. They didn't know Smash was short of strength at the moment. Otherwise they could have attacked him and perhaps put him in difficulty, in the same way the brassies were doing in the gourd. He had replaced the illusion of the lunatic fringe with the illusion of his own formidability.
The hamadryad dropped from her tree, her hair glowing like fire, catching him about the neck. She was now a vibrant, healthy creature. "You great big wonderful brute of a creature!" she exclaimed, kissing his furry ear. Smash was oddly moved; as the centaur had noted, ogres were seldom embraced or kissed by nymphs.
He handed the hamadryad back into her tree, then settled down for another session in the gourd. None of them had anywhere to go until the King got the news and acted to protect the tree permanently, and he wanted to wrap up this gourd business.
"Wake me at need," he said, noting that the shimmer of the lunatic fringe was now almost gone. If trees had ogres to protect them instead of cute but helpless hamadryads, very few trees would be destroyed.
Of course, ogres themselves were prime destroyers of trees, using them to make toothpicks and such, so
he was in no position to criticize. He applied his left eye to the peephole this time, giving his right orb a rest.
He stood in an alley between buildings. What was this? The sequence was supposed to pick up exactly where it had left off. What had gone wrong?
The two buildings slid toward him, forcing him to scoot out of the way. Smash emerged into a new space-and saw his line of string. He was about to cross his own path! But he couldn't retreat; the buildings were clanging behind him.
Still, his cursed Eye Queue wouldn't let him leave well enough alone. It wanted to know why the gourd scene had slipped a notch. Was the gourd getting old, beginning to rot, breaking down its system? He didn't want to be trapped in a rotting gourd.
The buildings separated, starting to converge on a new spot. The alley reopened, the string he had just set out running down its length-and stopping.
Smash ran to the end of it. The string had been severed cleanly; it ended at the point he had re-entered the vision.
But as the buildings separated. Smash saw another cut end of string. That must be where he had been before, just a little distance away. He had jumped no farther than he could have bounded by foot. But he hadn't jumped physically; he had left the scene, then returned to it slightly displaced. Why?
The buildings reversed course and closed on him again. They certainly wasted no time pondering questions! Smash ran back, his mind working. And suddenly it came to him-he had switched eyes! His left eye was a little apart from his right eye-and though that distance was small in the real world of Xanth, it was larger in the tiny world of the gourd. So there had been a shift, and a break in his string.
Well, that had freed him of the brass folk. But Smash couldn't accept that. He didn't want to escape, he wanted to win, to conquer this setting and go on to the next, knowing he had narrowed the Night Stallion's options. He wanted to do his job right, leaving no possible loophole for the loss of his soul. So he had to go back to the place he had left off, and resume there.
He followed his prior line, dragging his new line behind him. He found the square pit as the building moved off it, and he got down into it. The building swung back, and the interior light came on. Smash climbed out and ran to the end of his string.
The brass folk saw him and came charging in. Smash tied the two ends of string together, making his line complete, then stood as half a dozen people grabbed him. This was where he had left off; now it was all right.
He resumed plucking individual brass folk off. One of them was the girl in the brassiere. "You again?"
he inquired, holding her up by one finger, as he had done before. It was really the best place, since she was flailing all her limbs wildly. "Do I have to drop you again?" "Don't you dare drop me again!" she flashed, her brass surface glinting with ire. She took an angry breath-which almost dislodged her, for she had a full brassiere and his purchase on it was slight. "I have a dent and three scratches from the last time, you monster!" She pointed at her arms. "There's a scratch. There's another. But I won't show you the dent."
"Well, you did kick at me," Smash said reasonably, wondering where the dent was.
"I told you! We have to-"
Then he was back in Xanth again. Smash saw the problem immediately; a cockatrice was approaching the tree. The baby basilisk had evidently been recently hatched and was wandering aimlessly-but remained deadly dangerous.
"Put me down, you lunk!"
Startled, Smash looked at the source of the voice. He was still holding the brass girl, dangling by her brassiere hooked on his finger. She had been brought out of the gourd with him!
Hastily Smash set her down, carefully so she would not dent. He had a more immediate matter to attend to. How could he get rid of the cockatrice?
"Oh, look," the brass girl said. "What a cute chick!" She stepped over to the terrible infant, reaching down.
"Don't touch it!" the Siren cried. "Don't even look at it!"
Too late. The brass girl picked up the baby monster. "Oh, aren't you a sweet one," she cooed, turning it in her hand so she could look it in the snoot.
"No!" several voices cried.
Again they were too late. The brass girl stared deeply into the monster's baleful eyes. "Oh, I wish I could keep you for my very own pet, along with my other pets," she said, touching her pert nose to its hideous schnozzle. "I don't have anything like you in my collection."
The chick hissed and bit-but its tiny teeth were ineffective against the brass. "Oh, how nice," the girl said. "You like me, don't you!"
Apparently the little monster's powers were harmless against the metal girl. She was already harder than stone.