XANTH 07 Dragon on a Pedestal by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 10. Cyclopean Eye

In the morning. Ivy and Hugo and Stanley peeked over the edge of their ledge to spy out the worst. It was con firmed. A monster slept across the cave entrance.

They looked about the rest of the cave, seeking some other exit. There was none. This was a oneentrance domicile, and the monster blocked that one.

“Can we sneak out past him?” Ivy asked. “Before he wakes?” Hugo inspected the monster. It was humanoid, hairy and huge. There was no gap between it and the walls of the mouth of the cave. “We'd have to climb over its legs,” he said. “I don't think it would sleep long, then.”

“Maybe he'll go away soon,” Ivy said.

But as she spoke, the giant rolled over, so that his horren dously ugly face was toward them, and opened his eye.

“Uhoh,” Hugo said.

It was a fair comment, for the giant saw them. “Ho!” he roared with a voice like mottled thunder and scrambled to his feet. The cave entrance was high enough to admit two and a half ordinary people standing on each other's heads, but the hairy pate of the giant barely cleared it. “Midgets in cave!” the gaping mouth roared.

“Run for it!” Hugo cried in a fit of inspiration.

They tried. They slidscrambled down to the floor—but the only place to run was toward the monster, and his huge, hairy, knobbly legs barred the way. His enormous eye seemed to flash as it watched them, and his gigantic wooden club, formed from the trunk of a medium ironwood tree, hovered menacingly. The three of them lost what little nerve they had remaining and backed away.

But the giant followed them, poking forward with the club. “What you do in cave?” he roared, causing sand to rattle loose and sift down from the ceiling.

Ivy was terrified, but she knew her friends were brave. “We must fight him!” she declared. “We'll make him let us go!”

Hugo exchanged an incredulous glance with Stanley. The logic of women was indecipherable! Then he turned a blank face to Ivy. “Fight him?”

“Throw fruit at him!” she said encouragingly.

“But my fruit is rotten!”

“No it isn't!”

He remembered. “That's right; it isn't any more! But rotten fruit is okay for this!” He conjured a huge supempe tomato and hurled it at the giant. It struck about halfway up, splattering the crude animalskin clothing with drippy red tomatobrains.

“And you, Stanley, with your superhot steam—you can toast his toes!” she said encouragingly.

The little dragon pumped up his steam. It was indeed su perhot now, and he found his courage returning. If Ivy thought he could fight the giant effectively, maybe he could. He braced himself, aimed his snout precisely, and issued a searing jet of whitehot steam that heated the giant's callused, warty, big left toe.

The giant paused, taking a moment to realize that something was wrong. It was, after all, a long way from his toe to his head, and the pain took time to travel through the poorly main tained nerve channels. The aroma of cooking meat wafted up from the affected digit.

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