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then. Her nature was just fine; it was her attitude that needed changing." He shook his head.
    As it happened. Smash knew Chameleon. She was Prince Dor's mother, and she changed constantly from smart to stupid and from beautiful to ugly. Humfrey was right: her nature was just fine. Smash liked to talk with her when she was down at his own level of idiocy, and to look at her when she was at his level of ugliness. But the two never came together, unfortunately. Still, she was a fairly nice person, considering that she was human.
    "Very well," Humfrey said in a not-very-well voice. "We are about to have a first: an Answer without a Question. Are you sure you wish to pay the fee?"
    Smash wasn't sure, but did not know how to formulate that uncertainty, either. So he just nodded affirmatively, his shaggy face scaring a cuckoo bird that had been about to signal the hour. The bird signaled the hour with a terrified dropping instead of a song, and retreated into its cubby.
    "So be it," the Magician said, shrugging. "You will discover what you need among the Ancestral Ogres." Then he got up and marched to the door. "Come on; my effaced wife will see about your service."
    Numbly, Smash followed. Now he had his Answer--and he didn't understand it.
    They went downstairs--apparently, somehow, in a manner that might have been intelligible to a creature of greater wit, Smash had gotten upstairs in the process of swimming under the firewall and emerging in the Good Magician's study--where Humfrey's wife awaited them. This was the lovely, faceless Gorgon--faceless because if her face were allowed to show, it would turn men instantly to stone. Even faceless, she was said to have a somewhat petrifying effect. "Here he is," Humfrey said, as if delivering a bag of bad apples.
    The Gorgon looked Smash up and down--or seemed to. Several of the little serpents that substituted for her hair hissed. "He certainly looks like an ogre," she remarked. "Is he housebroken?"
    "Of course he's not housebroken!" Humfrey snapped. "He dripped all over my study! Where's the girl?"
    "Tandy!" the Gorgon called.
    A small girl appeared, rather pretty in a human way, with brown tresses and blue eyes and a spunky, turned-up nose. "Yes'm?"
    "Tandy, you have completed your year's service this date," the Gorgon said. "Now you will have your Answer."
    The little girl's eyes brightened like noontime patches of clear sky. She squiggled with excitement. "Oh, thank you, Gorgon. I'm almost sorry to leave, but I really should return home. My mother is getting tired of only seeing me in the magic mirror. What is my Answer?"
    The Gorgon nudged Humfrey, her voluptuous body rippling as she moved. "The Answer, spouse."
    "Oh. Yes," the Good Magician agreed, as if this had not before occurred to him. He cleared his throat, considering.
    "Also say, what me pay," Smash said, not realizing that he was interrupting an important cogitation.
    "The two of you travel together," Humfrey said.
    Smash stared down at the tiny girl, and Tandy stared up at the hulking ogre. Each was more dismayed than the other. The ogre stood two and a half times the height of the girl, and that was the least of the contrast between them.
    "But I didn't ask--" Tandy protested.
    "What me task?" Smash said simultaneously. Had he been more alert, he might have thought to marvel that even this overlapping response rhymed.
    The Gorgon seemed to smile. "Sometimes my husband's pronouncements need a little interpretation," she said. "He knows so much more than the rest of us, he fails to make proper allowance for our ignorance." She pinched Humfrey's cheek in a remarkably familiar manner. "He means this: the two of you. Smash and Tandy, are to travel through the wilds of Xanth together, fending off hazards together. That is the ogre's service in lieu of a year's labor at this castle--protecting his companion. It is also the girl's Answer, for which she has already paid."
    "That's exactly what I said," Humfrey grumped.
    "You