Smash took hold of the bars with both hands and heaved. His power should have launched the entire wall toward the clouds, but there was nary a budge. This was the strongest stuff he had encountered!
Smash paused to consider. What material could resist the might of an ogre?
Thinking was hard for his kind. His skull heated up uncomfortably, causing the resident fleas to jump off with hot feet. But in due course he concluded that there was only one thing as tough as an ogre, and that was another ogre. He peered at the bars. Sure enough-these were ogres' bones, lashed together with ogres' sinews. No wonder he had found them impervious!
This was a formidable barrier. He could not bash blithely through it-nor would he wish to, for the bones of ogres were sacred to ogres. Little else was.
Smash pondered some more. His brain was already sweating from the prior effort; now there was a scorched smell as the fur of his head grew hot. Ogres were creatures of action, not cerebration! But again his valiant and painful effort was rewarded; he rammed through a notion.
"Oh, ogres' bones," he said. "Me know zones of deep, deep ground where can't be found."
The wall of bones quivered. All bad ogres craved indecent burial after death; it was one of their occasional links with the species of man. The best interment was in a garbage dump or toxic landfill for the disposal of poisonous plants and animals, but ordinary ground would do if properly cursed and tromped down sufficiently hard.
"Me pound in mound with round of sound," Smash continued, arguing his case with extraordinary eloquence.
That did it. The wall collapsed into an expectant pile. Smash picked up a bone, set it endwise against the ground, and, with a single blow of his gaundeted fist, drove it so deep in the earth that it disappeared. He took another and did the same. "Me flail he nail," he grunted, invoking an ogrish ritual of disposal. He was nailing the ground.
Soon all the bones were gone. "Me fling he string," he said, poking the tendons down after the bones with his finger and scooping dirt over the holes. Then he stomped the mound, his big flat feet making the entire region reverberate boomingly. Stray stones fell from the walls of the castle, and the monster of the moat fled to the deepest muck.
At last it was time for the concluding benediction. "Bone dark as ink, me think he stink!" he roared, and there was a final swirl of dust and grit. The site had been cursed, and the burial was done.
But now a new hazard manifested. This was a kind of linear fountain, the orange liquid shooting up high and falling back to flow into a channel like a small moat. It was rather pretty-but when Smash started to push through it, he drew back his hand with a grunt. That was not water it was firewater!
He tried to walk around it, but the ring of fire surrounded the inner castle. He tried to jump over, but the flames leaped gleefully higher than he could, licking up to toast his fur. Ogres could not be hurt by much, but they did feel pain when burned. This was awkward.
He tried to pound out a tunnel under the fire, but the water flowed immediately into it and roasted him some more. It danced with flickering delight, with evilly glittering eyes forming within its substance, winking, mocking him, and fingers of flame elevating in obscene gestures. This was in fact a firewater elemental, one of the most formidable of spirits.
Smash pondered again. The effort gave him a splitting headache. He held his face together with his two paws, forcing the split back together, squeezing his skull until the bone fused firm, and hurried back to the moat to soak his head.
The cool shock of water not only got his head back together, it gave him an idea. Ideas were rare things for ogres, and not too valuable. But this one seemed good. Water not only cooled heads, it quenched fire. Maybe he could use the moat to break through the wall of fire.
He formed his paw into a flipper and scooped a splash through the hole in the outer wall toward the firewall. The splash scored-but the fire did not abate. It leaped higher, crackling mirthfully. He scooped again, wetting the whole region, but with no better effect The firewall danced unharmed, mocking him with foul-smelling noises.
Ogres were slow to anger, because they lacked the wit to know when they were being insulted. But Smash was getting there. He scooped harder, his paw moving like a crude paddle, hurling a steady stream of moatwater at the wall. Still the fire danced, though the water flooded the region. Smash labored yet harder, feeling the exhilaration of challenge and violence, until the level of the moat lowered and the entire cavity between the outer wall and the firewall surged with muddy fluid. The sea monster's tail was exposed by the draining water; it hastily squiggled deeper. Still the fire danced, humming a hymn of victory; it could not be quenched. Water was as much its element as fire. It merely flickered on the surface, spreading wider, reaching toward Smash. Was there no way to defeat it?
"Hooo!" Smash exclaimed, frustrated. But the blast of; his breath only made the flame bow concavely and leap yet higher. It liked hot air as well as cool water, Smash couldn't think of anything better to do, so he kept shoveling water. The flood level rose and backwater coursed out through the gap. Smash tried to dam it up with rubble, but the level was too high. The fire still flickered merrily on the surface, humming a tune about an old flame.
Then the ogre had one more smart notion, a prohibitively rare occurrence for his kind. He dived forward, spread his arms, and swam under the fire. It couldn't reach him below the moatwater. He came up beyond it, the last hurdle navigated.
"Ccurrssess!" the firewater hissed furiously, and flickered out.
Now Smash stood within a cluttered room. Books overflowed shelves and piled up on the floor. Bottles and boxes perched everywhere, interspersed with assorted statuettes and amulets and papers. In the middle of it all, like another item of clutter, hunched over a similarly crowded wooden desk, was a little gnome of a man. Smash recognized him-the Good Magician Humfrey, the man who knew everything.
Humfrey glanced up from his tome. "Don't drip on my books, Smash," he said.
Smash fidgeted, trying not to drip on the books. There was hardly room for him to stand upright, and hardly a spot without a book, volume, or tome. He started to drip on an amulet, but it crackled ominously and he edged away. "Me no stir. Magician sir," he mumbled, wondering how the Good Magician knew his name. Smash knew of Humfrey by description and reputation, but this was the first time the two had met.
"Well, out with it, ogre," the Magician snapped irritably. "What's your Question?"
Now Smash felt more awkward than ever. The truth was, he did not know what to ask. He had thought his life would be complete when he achieved his full growth, but somehow he found it Wasn't.
Something was missing-and he didn't know what. Yet he could not rest until the missing element was satisfied. So he had tromped to see the Good Magician, because that was what creatures with seemingly insoluble problems did-but he lacked the intellect to formulate the Question. He had hoped to work it out during the journey; but, with typical ogrish wit, he had forgotten all about it until this moment. There was no getting around it; there were some few occasions when an ogre was too stupid for his own good.
"No know," he confessed, standing on one of his own feet.
Humfrey scowled. He was a very old gnome, and it was quite a scowl. "You came here to serve a year's service for an Answer-and you don't have a Question?"
Smash had a Question, he was sure; he just didn't know how to formulate it. So he stood silent, dripping on stray artifacts, like the unsmart oaf he was.
Humfrey sighed. "Even if you asked it, it wouldn't be the right Question," he said. "People are forever asking the wrong Questions, and wasting their efforts. I remember not long ago a girl came to ask how to change her nature. Chameleon, her name was, except she wasn't called that then. Her nature was just fine; it was her attitude that needed changing." He shook his head.