Songs of the Dancing Gods

CHAPTER 11 DANCING IN THE DARK

Any Company which shall survive to reach the Ultimate Obstacle to the attainment of their Quest shall be able to secure what they need to complete the Quest. However, successful completion is not guaranteed, and there are no warranties, expressed or implied, in these Rules.

— The Books of Rules, XV, 304(a)

“Macore!”

The sleeping figure in the cell snored, paused in midsnore for a moment, then turned over but kept sleeping.

“Macore!” came a louder, more insistent whisper. “Wake up, damn it!”

The snore turned into a sort of piglike grunting, and the little thief muttered, “Huh? What?”

“Over here at the window.”

Sleepily he made his way up, grabbing his woolen blanket around him to ward off the chill of the night, and got to the window, standing then on tiptoes to see what was what. “Mary Ann?” he asked tentatively.

“No, you idiot! It’s Marge! You remember Marge, don’t you?”

He grew suddenly suspicious. “Yes, but I’ve been fooled before. There was a fellow in here today who reminded me of Joe, too. You might just be a dream sequence.”

She floated up so that her face was framed in the window. “Dream sequence my ass! That was Joe, under heavy disguise.”

“Well, if this is real, what the hell are you doing here?” He shivered. “Damn! It’s too cold to be a dream.”

“Ruddygore sent us on a quest to the palace out there on the ice. The same palace where they sent your tapes and video equipment.”

He was suddenly very wide awake, but not quite following. “Ruddygore is interested in Gilligan’s Island!”

“Afraid not. But your quest, at the moment, and ours come together. And if we do ours, Ruddygore will energize your equipment. Understand?”

“He wouldn’t do it before. He’s still mad because I beat his system on his vaults. That’s why I had to suffer like this!”

“He didn’t need something from you then.”

“Good point,” he admitted.

“Macore, how did you wind up here?”

“The gnomes tried playing all sorts of tricks on my head, but all they got were my memories of Gilligan’s Island episodes. Exposure to this magically transformed them from gnomes into a band of hostile critics. They tossed me out to these people.”

“No, no, I mean, what are you doing up here in the middle of nowhere to begin with?”

“I got a tip,” he told her. “They said that up here was this vast sea full of magic with a tropical island in the middle of it. Nobody mentioned that the sea was frozen. Naturally, I had to find out, you see.”

“Naturally,” she responded, not really seeing at all. “Well, part of what you heard is true. That sea of ice is filled with incomprehensible magic. On the other side there is a volcanic island, with a great palace in the middle of it.”

“That must be some powerful sorcerer,” he noted.

“The Master of the Dead, Sugasto, lives there sometimes. And it’s likely that’s where the Dark Baron is as well.”

He thought about it a moment. “Hold it! You’re telling me that you want to cross a place of unbelievable magical powers so you can get to where the Dark Baron and the Master of the Dead are? And they say I’m crazy!”

“Yeah, well, after looking the place over, I can go along with you on that, but it has to be done, if it’s possible. Surrounded by ice, patrolled in the clean areas by Bentar on nazgas, on the ground by an army of the dead, and by magical spells, the only way to reach it undetected is across that mean area. It’s so powerful in and of itself that there’s no way they’ll fly across it or put anybody in it or maintain any sort of spell of their own in that area.”

“I’d rather take my chances’ with the zombies and the Bentar and the rest,” he told her. “I looked that other place over and it made me dizzy.”

“You looked it over? When?”

“’Oh, I’ve got stuff—warm clothes, pikes, you name it-stashed all over this hick town.” He suddenly went into a Cagney impression. “They ain’t never built the prison that can hold Cody Jarrett!”

“That’s not Gilligan’s Island.”

He shrugged. “Would you believe that in the Disneyland Hotel that they only had one channel showing Gilligan’s Island at all, and then only once a day? I had to watch something”

“Yeah, well, I doubt if most people go to Disneyland to watch television. Never mind. You’re telling me you can walk out of there whenever you feel like it?”

“Sure. But they’ve been feeding me here, and pretty decently, too, and I wanted to get some strength. Besides, I leave before I’ve mapped out everything, they hit the alarms like mad.”

“Macore, you pushed your fabled luck to the limit on this one.” She told him their plans for him and the fact that the only reason it wasn’t already done was just chance.

He stood there, thinking about her words for a moment, then said, “Okay, you talked me into it. It probably wouldn’t matter to Gilligan and the Professor—all that time on that island with Mary Ann and they never once made a move on her—but it matters to me.”

“Good. Joe’s got them conned into believing he’s checking Sugasto’s security. He’s gonna try and spring you to help. It’s either get us to the palace or good-bye all that matters.”

“That would help. I’d like to look it over in daylight. You have any idea what any of that Fruit Loops spaghetti actually does?”

“I’ve gone as close as I dared to alone, and the only thing I can say is that the answer is, ‘almost anything.’ I think the old legend is true—this was a great battle between mighty forces of ancient times. But I don’t think they’re frozen in place down there, although that might have been the intent. I think everything and everyone in the battle was transformed into energy, magic energy, and then the whole mess was frozen in place. That’s why it’s so near the surface when it should be thousands of feet down in the ice. New snow and ice retain them in, but every once in a while melting of some kind liberates a spell which then turns back into whatever it was. That’s why they feel things from there trying to. get them once in a while. The trick is to cross that place without causing any melting of any kind.”

Macore whistled. “Tough trick if they’re close enough to melt out occasionally on their own. Let me sleep on it. But you make sure I get sprung before that last witch gets back!”

Even Joe suspected that it was the first surreptitious break-in to a major place in the world that had been performed before a live audience.

All thieves of Husaquahr had the power to see magic; those who did not generally were captured or died on their first job.

The witches of the station were more than convinced of his insanity when they watched the little man, bundled in furs, walk right out on the ice and then proceed for a good half an hour, until he was only a speck on the whiteness, right to the edge of what they called the Devastation.

They were prepared to counter him when he inevitably made his break for freedom; any sane man would. But even without his malady, Macore, once set upon a problem, became so absorbed in it that to flee simply wouldn’t have entered his head.

“What’s he doing out there?” one of the women asked, more to herself than the others.

“Well, he took a measuring stick, a sharp saw, and leather thongs from the dog sled area,” the security officer responded. “You figure it out. I didn’t like giving him the saw, which can be a weapon, but I had to admit to both personal and professional curiosity. If he can actually just walk into the Devastation and return, he will indeed be the genius the big man, here, says he is.”

“He’s been out there in almost that spot for quite a long time,” Joe noted a bit worriedly. “I hope he’s all right. I really should have gone with him, but he insisted that for this sort of thing he worked best alone.”

One witch was watching with a telescope. “He’s doing something down on the ice. First he appeared to pack snowballs and throw them into the Devastation! Now he’s working feverishly in the ice just this side of it. Now he seems to be lifting something—and now he’s just sat down on the ice!”

“He’s mad. All these are are the actions of a lunatic,” the security officer said impatiently. “Best to haul him back.”

“You go out there, right on the edge of that, and haul him back,” somebody said. “This is as near as I want to get to it.”

“He’s up again!” the woman with the telescope said. “Now he’s turned, facing the Devastation, just standing there. No, he just—he just took a step toward it! And another! He’s walking very oddly, but—he’s inside!”

Joe could use his second sight to see the massive collection of spells, but Macore was too far away and relatively too small to make out inside it.

“Can you see him?”

“No. He’s been swallowed up in the mass. You couldn’t see the Grand Altar of Stet if it were fifty feet inside. Not from this distance, anyway.”

“It seems as if he’s been in an awfully long time already,” Joe said worriedly.

And it was even longer still, as they watched and waited, perhaps a half hour or forty minutes. Finally, the security officer said, “That’s it. He’s finished. If he comes out of there at all we’ll not even recognize him as human. It can’t be done.”

“I wonder,” Joe mused. “According to your own charts, it’s about forty-two miles across to the palace at the narrowest crossing. If whatever he did worked, he’ll want to do time tests.”

“Wait! What’s that over there?” someone shouted, pointing to an area perhaps half a mile from where Macore had entered. The telescope swung, refocused.

“It’s certainly a manlike shape,” the woman said, peering through the eyepiece. “Too early to tell much more at this distance.”

But, as the figure grew closer, it clearly was Macore, and he didn’t seem to be any worse for the experience.

He got a cheering reception when he reached them, all but the security officer amazed at what the little man had done and forgetting his actual condemned prisoner status. The security officer cared not at all about the little thief, but she saw the potential if indeed someone had learned to cross the Devastation.

“Well,” Macore sighed, “it works, but I’m not sure it’ll do the job.”

Joe was surprised. “You walked in and around for quite some time.”

The thief nodded. “Sure I did—but I never went all that far in, and the kind of speed involved is very slow. I’d say two miles an hour if we’re doing okay. And that’s no rest, no sitting down on me job, for—what? Over twenty hours? That’s a pretty long time not to stop or even sit down. I’m not sure I could do it. I’m not sure anybody human could do it.”

Joe leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Consider the alternative.”

He nodded. “The sanest way, the way any good spy would do it, would be to walk around just this side of it, always prepared. When anybody came along, or any spell was sighted, they could then duck in there and continue around the problem, then re-emerge. The trouble is, walking around the stuff by that route, even at the southern end, is like a hundred and eighty miles.”

“I could make forty-two miles of relatively flat terrain, even with snow, in less than twenty hours, weather willing,” Joe told him.

“Uh-huh. With a couple of pounds of ice strapped to your boots?”

Macore’s solution, once given, was so obvious neither Joe nor the others could imagine why they hadn’t thought of it before.

“First, I saw that the spells were in fact below the ice. Not far, but below. Then I checked out how disturbed they could become by throwing ice balls into the area. Nothing happened. There’s a layer of snow on top that’s deep enough to give some traction and cushion weight. Then I cut blocks of ice out from the untouched section, strapped them to my feet with the thongs, and practiced a little walking. When I had it, I went in and walked around. No problem. It’s really very pretty in there, if a little weird. So long as nothing actually melts, you’re fine.”

“What about dragging some blocks of ice along in a sledge?” Joe suggested. “They could serve as seats and replacement blocks just in case.”

“Uh-uh. A sledge might not cause problems in and of itself, but it will cause friction,” the thief reminded him. “And friction is heat and heat melts ice. Add to that the idea that a sledge would clear away some of the snow and you have a prescription for real disaster.”

“We could travel pretty light,” Joe told him. “So the real problem is where and how to rest.”

“That’s about it. Just sitting down on the ice, even with nice furs on, might well transfer just enough heat to attract one or more of those things to you the way lightning’s attracted to the ground.”

“If you’ve solved this much, we’ll have to find a way to solve that other,” Joe said. “For now, what about—inside there? Any bumps, mounds, ridges, or crevasses?”

“No, it’s pretty smooth and level, at least on this side. No telling what it’s like much farther in or on the other side. Every once in a while you hear this little click or pop and then some really weird noises, from screams to yells to sounds like lightning makes through the air, but that’s about it.”

Joe nodded. “Well, we’re going to have to think this through today, that’s all. We either have to figure out how to gain more speed or how to rest.”

Macore nodded. “Somehow. I can’t figure out why you can’t fly into and over that, though, except that it’s attracted to heat and motion. Maybe flying through it creates enough friction in the air to draw it. I dunno.”

At the insistence of the security officer, Macore returned, was stripped and locked back in his cell, and it was there, in relative privacy, that they continued the conversation.

“What about Marge?” Joe asked. “Is she immune?”

“I doubt it. Not to the spells, anyway. Spells of that kind cover just about anything, even rocks and trees. I doubt if she’d need the blocks of ice, though. Anybody who can walk around here stark naked and jump into pools of lava back home isn’t going to give off heat—so long as she doesn’t fly. What about your girl?”

“Mia? I don’t know. She feels warm, and I’m not sure I’d like to risk her without the ice sandals. But she doesn’t feel the extremes. She walked barefoot on the ice pack! She rolled in the snow without effect!”

“Okay, that’s a break, then. It means she has normal body heat only relative to other living things. She touches you, it’s normal. She touches ice or snow or a hot poker, she’s got instant protection. The odds are very good she wouldn’t need the ice blocks, and also pretty good that she could carry ice. How strong is she?”

“Strong legs and back, fairly weak arms. Why?”

“If I’m right, she could carry a block of ice on her back.” He snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s part of it! We all carry ice with us. Except Marge, of course. A decent square would be enough to sit on and keep our warmth insulated.” He paused. “Uh-oh.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Joe, you ever see a dog do his business in the snow? It comes out at body temperature. It’s like pouring hot water or hot coal on the ice. We have to deal with that, too.”

“Well, we better deal with that fast,” he told the thief. “Their missing sergeant is due back in two days, and dear, sweet Lieutenant Quasa of security here doesn’t see any reason why sentence shouldn’t be carried out on you, pointing out that, as a slave, with Sugasto’s protective spell, you would still have all your old skills for what we need.”

Macore gulped. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t have what /need. Let me work on it today and tonight. If anything, we probably should make our start at nightfall anyway. It’s never warm enough on the ice out there to melt stuff of its own accord, but direct sunlight has to have an effect. Marge is better at night and you and I have the Sight, so it’ll be lit up like a celebration in there anyway. Still, we’re down to technical problems. We have the basic method.”

“I hope,” Joe replied, leaving him to his planning.

Mia had been spending most of her time helping the other slaves there. There were five in all for the detachment of thirteen women; all were native to Hypboreya, but, although slavery was an institution here, none had been born into it. They were all, effectively, political prisoners, sentenced to slavery for offenses against the interest of local sorcerers and high priests of cults, and, as such, had also been placed under spells of obedience, which she lacked. They were compelled to do exactly what they were told, and ask permission for just about anything else.

Mia thought them just a cut above the army of the living dead she had seen lined up on that plateau, and perhaps worse. They knew what had been done to them, and lived in daily humiliation with no hope of redemption.

She was down behind the bar helping with some cleaning and minor repair when the two women came in, and at first she paid them little attention and they, for their part, did not see her. She recognized one of the voices as that unpleasant and officious little witch of a security officer, Quasa.

“So what are you going to do?” the other woman with her asked the security chief. “That big man is dangerous.”

“He must eat and drink,” Quasa replied. “If we cannot make a decent potion that will put him out cold without his noticing, then we do not deserve membership in the Sisterhood.”

“Why not just let them go off in the Devastation?”

“He and the mad one have done what he says he was sent here to do—find a security breach to the palace. I am certainly not about to let the mad one go, unless enslaved. A mind that can work out that sort of thing would be of even more danger, should he make it in, and, being mad, he might be uncontrollable. If that happened, we would be blamed. As for the big one, we have nothing but his word that he is official, and I have never seen anyone in the empire who operated without clearance. He had to acknowledge knowing the other one because the little one, being mad, might well recognize and spoil his cover. It is no more difficult and much more efficient to enslave two at one time.”

“But what if he is truly working for the Master of the Dead?”

“Then we did our duty, and it is his fault for not insuring our cooperation. The man will have failed in his mission, thanks to us, and that will go well for our records, while he will have paid the price of failure. I would much rather answer for following procedure, in any event, than have to explain why and how I allowed possible spies to make it to the palace.”

“All right, but do we have to cut him, too? It gets so lonely here sometimes, and he’s so good looking…”

“Not only does the law mandate it, but it also would be taken wrongly if we did not, by those to whom we must report. I would rather follow regulations and do without a while longer rather than risk joining his status. As for his bitch, we’ll drug her, too, so that she does not try and protect him. Once he is converted, she will be common property and we can bind her to the coven.”

“When do you plan to do all this?”

“I told him our sister was due back the day after tomorrow. As you well know, she is due back any time now, and certainly by tomorrow. I say tomorrow night, moon or no moon.”

Mia crouched there, hardly daring to breathe, hoping against hope that the staff slave would not betray her. She waited, pretending to keep working, until the two women finished their drinks and left, then got up and went out the door.

Finding Joe wasn’t hard in that tiny place; finding him alone, when he was the only sane man around for hundreds of miles who was not in the palace, was more difficult. She had trouble unobtrusively separating him from the crowd, but finally managed.

“Master, in the bar, I overheard this Quasa woman saying that they were going to drug both of us and enslave us both to them as well as Macore,” she whispered excitedly to him.

He stiffened. “You’re sure?”

She nodded.

“Did they see you or know you were there?”

“No, Master.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, Master. Their missing one arrives a day early. You are deceived.”

He sighed, thinking. “Then we will have to go tonight. After dinner, I should think. They won’t do it tonight, since they’d have both of us to take care of for a day and night. Get together the supplies, everything we’ve talked about. Meet me behind the security shack as soon as you can with what you can manage. Food, but only one small wine flagon. We’ll use snow.” He shook his head, thinking about what they were going to attempt. “I sure hope Macore worked out those details.”

Marge had found a clever hiding place in the supplies building, where the slaves went to get what was needed. Now Joe headed there, knowing that he’d have to awaken her early, but she had to be ready.

He startled her so much when he shook her that she changed three shades of color before she realized it was him. Quickly, though, he outlined the changed situation.

“Joe, I’m not going to make it,” she told him. “You know we aren’t great walkers, and I haven’t fed in two days.”

“If you stay here, you’ll die. Same reason.”

“I know. Joe—we’ve been through a lot together. We’ve been as close as we could as comrades. I’m only alive and here in this world now due to your kindness long ago on a lonely road in West Texas. I’ve tried as much as possible to pay you back. Now I need something from you. Now. Right here. They won’t be coming back in tonight; I know their routine and what they already got.”

“Marge! Here? Now? I—”

She was changing, becoming a vision of an idealized Tiana, mixed with Mia, and now with every vision of every woman he’d ever loved or wanted to love. She was Venus, and Diana, and Lust herself.

“It is finally time, Joe,” the vision whispered to him, those big eyes holding him. “Make love to me, Joe. Make love to me now.”

Joe feigned an upset stomach at the end of the meal and excused himself, saying it was definitely not the food or the cooking, but rather an old ailment coming back.

Marge and Macore waited for him behind the security shack. He stared at the little thief, all dressed in thick furs, gloves, hat, and boots, although only the boots, being his originally, fit right.

“How’d you get out?” he asked the thief.

“I told you I could walk any time I wanted. That place couldn’t hold a baby.”

“Who told you about the advanced schedule?”

Macore looked positively rhapsodic. “Mary Ann! She came to me, Joe, as if in a vision, saying she loved me!”

Joe looked at Marge and gave a slight pig grunt. She smiled and shrugged sheepishly, but she sure wasn’t weak anymore.

In point of fact, Joe felt damned good himself; wide awake, alert, excited, adrenaline flowing, the darker thoughts and-fears that had been so close to the surface with him receding into the background. The Kauri were not true parasites; what they took from you was in the main stuff you wanted taken. Still, there was the present worry.

“I hope Mia’s okay,” he said. “We ought to get going.”

“Here she comes,” Marge noted. “You know, you’re right. She makes me feel cold to look at her and I’m not wearing anything more than she is.”

“Conditioning,” he told her. “We feel what we expect. Ah! Mia! Any problems?”

“A little, Master. The dog harness was a problem. I have my own knife as well. My lord Macore, the best I could find for you was a butcher knife.”

“It’ll do,” he replied. He stared at her in the semidarkness. “You know, I could almost swear you look familiar. I must say I don’t like the way they shave their slaves up here, though, although you look quite pleasant, my dear.”

“You remember her from Earth and the boat, Macore,” Marge told him. “Don’t worry about it. And the poor girl can’t help the way she looks. Mia, you’re gonna have to carry a real load out there and not drop with it. You think you can do it?”

“It is necessary, and so I must, my lady. I will not fail you all.”

“Grab all the gear and let’s get away from here and well out on the ice fast,” Joe ordered. “Sooner or later somebody is going to come looking for one of us and not find us. When they see Macore’s gone, too, they’ll put two and two together.”

“You think they’ll come after us?” Marge asked him. “I mean, you sort of showed them how it’s done.”

“I doubt it, but even if they do, they won’t be able to close on us, if we’re well away,” Joe replied. “And if they come in after us on their own ice blocks, they’re not going to think about all the things we did, and it’ll eat them alive.”

“One or two of ’em will come,” Macore predicted. “They won’t want to raise the alarm or report us missing, because it’ll go against them that they let us escape. They’ll want to bring us back, dead or alive.”

“Can’t they catch us with the dogs, Master?” Mia asked, concerned.

Macore chuckled. “Dogs won’t go near that place. Dogs got more sense.”

“Let’s go. We’ll organize this stuff on the edge before we go into the Devastation,” Joe told them. “Marge, since you’re way too small and light to carry much of anything, stay behind and check on pursuit. We’ll wait for you before we go in. Might as well make use of those fairy wings and all that excess energy while we can.”

She grinned. “Will do, boss. Now, in the words of my great grandpappy, ‘Git!’ ”

They got.

The moon had risen just at dusk, and was slowly rising in the sky. It was still almost full, of course; not enough for wereing, but enough to give them some light across the dangerous ice pack.

“I kinda wished it would be a bit darker,” Macore remarked. “I know we’re damned hard to spot out here under these conditions, but I feel like a backlit target.”

“Where do we go, Master?” Mia asked.

“Right where all those colors—” Suddenly he realized that, of all of them, she was the only one who couldn’t see the place. “Do you see anything at all over there, where I’m pointing?”

“The ice seems to look a bit different, Master, a bit more moonlit as if it is glowing slightly.”

“Good girl! That’s enough. For now, just follow me.”

They walked for quite some time, their boots crunching eerily in the dead silence of the cold. Joe turned back to Mia. “How are your feet feeling?”

“Sometimes it feels like hard, rocky ground, sometimes like walking on sand, Master,” she responded. “But I do not feel this cold.”

“Good. Not much farther to go.”

“Are you sure this is the narrowest point, from here?” Macore asked him.

“There’s not much to use for landmarks, but it’s close. Four point two miles northwest of the town, if their map is right. The area’s ragged, but basically oval in shape and pinched just above its middle. In the pinch, it’s supposedly forty-two miles. It broadens to about sixty-five, so I hope we’re right. The palace would be a mile north and about a quarter-mile in from the pinch on the other side.”

“If we miss, we’re gonna have everything from zombies to invader spells up the ass,” Macore noted. “We better hit this one dead on.”

Since the pinched oval of the Devastation was angled from the shore, he had been forced to guess on the pinch without being really able to see much of it, but he felt sure he was correct.

“Here,” he told them, putting down the pack for a moment. “This is as good a guess as any. Better start cutting our ice blocks now. Mia, we’ll cut your ice load large and heavy and then trim it down to something you can handle. You don’t need to walk on this stuff, but we’ll need what you carry to sit on.”

“Yes, girl, but even you must remember that, if you have to relieve yourself, it must go in the sack here,” the thief put in, already starting to cut his own blocks. “It’ll be as warm as ours. Once it’s cold, and that won’t take long, then we can dump it. We won’t have to carry our crap, at least.”

The great sword Irving cut through the ice as if it were butter, and soon Joe was trimming a block into two smaller, lighter, slabs with flat faces.

“We might well not need these,” the thief admitted, tying his own blocks on, “but we can’t chance it unless we have to. If we lose the blocks, or they splinter, or prove too cumbersome, then we’ll have to experiment. By that time the soles of our boots will be at ice temperature, anyway.”

Joe finished, and practiced a little walking. It was stiff, but he felt comfortable. He went over and helped Mia prepare his pack, then, after putting it on, they put together her harness and checked out progressively smaller rectangles of ice until she proclaimed that it was okay. What she could manage wasn’t huge, but it would do.

She slipped off the harness for a moment and started doing some of her stretching exercises. Joe watched her, then went over to her. “Mia,” he said gently “we’ve explained what’s in there, just below the top. You know that nobody’s ever been known to cross this thing and come out anything but a hideous monster.”

“Yes, Master. I know. But we will make it.”

“There are a couple of things I want to say before we go in there, just in case we don’t. The first is, if, somehow, I don’t make it, and you do, and Macore does as well, let him touch the ring and then finish what we set out to do. Understand?”

“Yes, Master.”

“If not, avoid anyone touching it and try and do it anyway if you can.”

“I will, Master.”

“Don’t let anything stop you, not even regard for me. No matter what you feel, remember those living dead back there and your own slavery and the way the slaves were back at that camp and think of all Husaquahr under those people—and all in Tiana’s name and mine. I swear I’ll die before I let them do that. Will you swear it, too?”

“I will, Master.”

“In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that I’ll sacrifice any life, including ours, to stop them, I want you to know something. I know you are just my slave, and that you were never my wife, and that you’re Mia, not Ti. But I want you to know, truthfully, that, as yourself, just as you are, and here and now, I love you more than I’ve loved any other woman.” And then he grabbed her and held her and gave her another of those kisses, only even deeper and more passionate than before.

Marge descended. “Break it up, you two!” she said sharply. “The posse’s hot on my tail and tryin’ to head us off at the pass!”

The pair broke, reluctantly, and quickly helped each other with their packs.

“Okay, gang! Let’s do it!” Macore shouted. All of them took deep breaths, paused a moment, then stepped into the Devastation.

The first thing that hit them was that the Devastation was neither desolate nor even quite quiet.

“It sounds as if you were really way, way, aways, and yet…” Marge said, fascinated.

“It sounds like Sorrow’s Gorge,” Joe completed. “My god! How long has this been here? Thousands of years, perhaps?”

Marge nodded. “And yet, somehow, you get the feeling that even the freezing didn’t so much stop the battle as freeze it. It’s as if the last second of that battle was being played, over and over again, like some broken record.”

“That was my impression when I was in here earlier,” Ma-core admitted. “I think the soundtrack changes a bit as we go, though. I think we are hearing the battle, or what was happening here on each spot, at that fatal moment back then. Kind of gives you the creeps, doesn’t it?”

“I hear it, too, Master,” Mia told Joe. “The sounds of armor and horses and men yelling and screaming and even the sounds of magic. You could almost see the whole thing in your mind from those sounds.”

“Well, we’d better get a different part of the program,” Marge noted, shaking herself out of it. “We’ve got a very long way to go, and, right now I bet, there’s at least a couple of Hypboreyan women’s guards cutting out ice blocks not far behind us.”

“Oh, don’t worry so much,” Joe told her. “We can take care of them in a fight.”

“Oh, really? And what good is even a great sword like yours against a crossbow? What’s next? Bare hands against automatic rifles?” Marge began walking, looking down at what to her was an incredible kaleidoscope of colors glowing just below the snow. “Huh! Why do I feel that under this snow is the dance floor from Saturday Night Fever?”

“Put a little of your inborn fairy warmth on those spots and you’ll do a dance, all right,” Joe told her.

“Hey! Take it easy! I have to do three steps to your two, remember, and I wasn’t built for forty mile hikes. I was never built for forty mile hikes. Ai yi yi! How do I get myself into these things?”

“You’ve had more rest than any of us,” he pointed out. “And probably a better meal, too.”

Macore looked around. “I just wish we could erase these tracks in the snow. We’re not gonna be real hard to track.”

Joe looked at Marge. “You just remember that, no matter what, you’ve got to suppress that panic reaction of yours. No flying and no running.”

At that moment there was a sudden pop.’ near them and from the lighted ground under the snow quickly came a ghostly visage of a skeletallike horror mounted on a nightmare steed, rushing toward them, only the head and torso of the rider and the head and neck of the steed visible. It was transparent, but it screamed a ghastly scream and came toward them—and was gone.

“What was that!” Joe asked.

Marge stood stock still. “See? I didn’t panic. I was too petrified. At least Husaquahr’s now got a space program.”

“Huh?”

“My heart’s in orbit.”

“What was it, Master?” Mia asked. “It was—horrible.”

“Oh, yeah,” Macore said calmly, “I forgot to mention those. They happen every once in a while. I don’t think they’re anything to worry about, just something being liberated briefly because of the settling in the ice or whatever.”

“Uh—Macore. Anything else you forgot to mention?” Marge asked dryly.

“Uh—not that I can think of. Say! This boring walk needs some livening up. Anybody want me to sing the entire Gilligan’s Island theme song, complete with the end verse everybody forgets?”

“No,” Joe and Marge responded in unison.

“Okay, okay. Sheesh! Everybody’s turning into a critic on this damned world!”

They walked some more in silence. The cold was really getting to Joe in spite of the borrowed furs and fur lining stuffed in his boots. They couldn’t really cover their faces very well, and, although there was no wind, it really did begin to bother him, and possibly Macore as well.

Equally troubling were the occasional manifestations that arose suddenly, each preceded by a cracking sound. They kept telling themselves and one another that they’d get used to it, but the farther in they went, the more horrible and gruesome the apparitions became. You just didn’t get used to it; you merely dreaded the next crack!.

“Jeez! Weren’t there any good guys in this fight?” Marge asked.

“Probably. Almost certainly,” Joe responded. “My best guess is that we’re either on a lightly defended part of the field or we’re inside the battle lines of one side. What’s more interesting is that we haven’t seen any human apparitions. Lots of dark fairy types, and some mean-looking monsters that might be fairy or mortal, a practical difference only to them, but no people.”

“I also wonder just how long ago this battle was,” Macore commented. “I mean, it’s ancient enough to have passed into legend, and I Ve yet to recognize any creature as something I’ve met, but the armor and the weaponry and things like saddles and such look very up to date. In fact, a lot of it looks better than what we have now.”

“Some races might have died out right here,” Marge noted. “Others might well have been transformed or scattered to the four comers of the world by any power strong enough to do this. As for the men, their souls might well be long gone and only their bodies remaining locked in the ice. We fairies, on the other hand, don’t have that luxury. I think that what we’re seeing are actual fairy souls, ancient ones, freed of their husks, unable to dissipate, rising in the cracks into the air and then dispersing to the air before a new husk can form. It’s pretty depressing, if you’re fairy.”

Joe sighed. “The only thing I can say is that everything I’ve seen so far is something I don’t mind having dissipated. I keep thinking that we might not have it right, though. I keep remembering Quasa’s tale of seeing the one-time humans turned into a collection of bestiary after being in here. I know there’s even supposed to be frozen spells in this crap, but that wouldn’t explain that sort of stuff. Nobody throws spells that give the enemy goat heads or fish tails.”

“Fairy blood was probably stronger then, like the magic,” Marge guessed. “There are fairies even today with goatlike heads, and others with fishlike tails. Suppose you were standing right on one of those openings when the fairy spirit rose? The instinctive thing would be to find cover, to find a temporary husk. If pieces of those souls had time to get to mortal flesh, they might produce that sort of thing.”

“The odds of being on top of one of these cracks when it goes is pretty slim,” Macore responded, thinking. “But if you added heat, you might get a whole bunch in full strength at once balding for the flesh. What do you bet that they peed themselves into monsters?”

After walking for what seemed like hours, at least, although there was no reliable way to tell time, they broke for a rest. The bag was well used, and they knew it would be a total discard by the time they were done, and the block of ice for a seat was barely big enough for Joe, with Macore almost sitting on his lap. The little thief looked up at the big man, grinned, and said, “Daddy.”

“You be good or I’ll throw you off!” Joe threatened.. Marge and Mia sat wearily in the snow, knowing that their body heat, at least, would not transfer without action on their part, and action was the last thing either of them wanted.

Mia looked back at their tracks. “Do you think they are still following us, Master?” she asked nervously.

“If they haven’t peed their own selves into oblivion or worse by now, yeah,” Macore answered before Joe could. “Most of ’em are kind of bored and not real energetic, but that Quasa is a tough, hard-nosed bitch who would pursue you to the City-States and beyond, if you forgot to fill out a form.”

Joe looked around. “If there was any kind of cover I’d almost be tempted to wait for them. If they do catch up, Mia and I will handle them, understand? Just stay behind us and don’t make yourselves targets.”

“But the crossbows!” Marge objected. “And you don’t dare run at them in here!”

“Don’t have to,” he told her. “It might be a little bloody and painful, but all the bolts I saw in there were wood or bronze-tipped.”

“Whatever you do, don’t bleed on the snow!” Macore warned. “Blood’s warm.”

“I’ll try not to, if it’s necessary. But if one of them goes down, it could be hairy.”

“We may find out after all,” Marge said. “If that’s not two figures of flesh and blood coming, I don’t know what they can be.”

Joe sighed tiredly and got up. “And it was always my experience that women seemed to be always going to the bathroom. Bad luck.”

“Perhaps not, Master,” Mia responded, getting up as well and pulling her knife from the pack, then walking slowly away from him. “I, for one, would rather meet these two than an assemblage of those horrors we’ve been seeing.”

Marge used her extraordinary vision. “Crossbows for sure. I doubt if there’s much hope of you not taking one in the chest, Joe.”

“Just remember where not to bleed!” Macore emphasized helpfully.

“And watch out for a chain reaction,” Marge warned. “If you get one of them and she falls and bleeds, it’s sure as hell gonna raise something.”

The two women stopped about twenty or twenty-five yards from them, crossbows now at the ready. They weren’t going to allow themselves to get close enough in to take a sword or knife.

“You’re coming back!” Quasa told them in a firm, businesslike tone. “All four of you. I don’t know where you came from, nymph, but you can’t fly here and you sure as hell can’t run.”

“Nymph! I’m a Kauri, you little broom-ridin’ boot-lickin’ daughter of a bitch!”

Joe drew his sword, which hummed in excitement of having its own feast. Below, the colored lights seemed to change and shift, as if reacting to the sword.

“Your crossbows won’t save you,” Joe told them flatly. “They’ll cause us a little pain, but that’s the way it goes. Your plan to amputate a part of me wouldn’t have worked, either. It would have come back. The only thing you could have done to me physically was make my hair fall out, and I kind of like my hair.”

Quasa seemed confused about the reply. Never before had she had someone in this position, where she could drop them with one well-placed shot but they couldn’t possibly get to her, when they didn’t surrender.

“What do you think you are? Demons? Sorcerers? You have no protective spells. I can see the spells you have. And the bitch is a slave. That’s plain to see!”

He took a step toward the women, and Mia, to one side and presenting a separate target, started in, as well.

“But not even a sorcerer can see blood curses,” he replied. “And even mercenaries and slaves can be werewolves.” He’d long ago given up any idea of explaining the concept of just a were.

“Werewolves! You’re bluffing!” But she didn’t sound so confident, and actually retreated a step.

“So you can’t kill us, you see,” Joe kept on. “But we can kill you with these weapons. You’re the ones who can’t run or hide, not us. Better be sure before you shoot that thing. Blood’s warm. You see the Devastation gathering around us? It senses battle, it senses death. Who knows what we’ll raise by our fighting? Perhaps you’ll have a pig’s head and a duck’s feet. How’s that for explaining to superiors?”

“Stay back!” the other woman screamed. “We’ll shoot!”

Joe and Mia kept their advances. Ten yards. Eight. Six. “We are already reconciled to that,” he said.

The other woman, frightened and confused, raised her crossbow and trained it at Joe.

“No! Shiza! Don’t!” Quasa screamed, but it was too late. Shiza fired her bolt.

It struck him with tremendous force right in his chest, the force of it almost bowling him over backward. It was only with an extreme will and the fact that he was wearing two flattened oversized ice blocks on his feet that kept him up at all. Even so, he bent over backward so much he was afraid he was going to touch the ground, and he did brush the snow slightly.

But, boy! That hurt like hell!

He straightened back up, looked down at the bolt buried deep in his chest, grabbed it with his left hand so Irving could remain in his right, and, gritting his teeth, he pulled the bloody thing out and away. It hurt more to remove the damned thing than it did to be shot by it.

“Man! Is that ever the worst case of heartburn I ever had!” Satisfied that the bloody thing had cooled, he threw it well away and continued forward.

It was too much for Shiza. She panicked, dropping the crossbow, then turned, kicked off the ice blocks on her own boots, and began running.

The display of color under them suddenly shifted and started chasing her. Puffs of electriclike energy bolts in a variety of colors seemed to come out of the snow, and the whole mess seemed to take on a life of its own. Joe, and even Quasa, stood frozen, watching what was going to happen.

The intensity of spells under the fleeing woman and following her was now blindingly bright and throbbing with energy. Even Marge watched with growing fascination. “I was right!” she muttered. “They’re fighting themselves below to get out to that body.”

Suddenly the place where the woman was now about thirty yards back erupted in the most complex pattern of magical strings any of them had ever seen, completely enveloping the woman. There was a crackling and suddenly the full volume sounds of fierce battle cries.

Where the woman had been caught by the forces below, there was now a mass of writhing, seething flesh in rapid motion under the furs, as the desperate fairy souls beneath struggled to get some sort of container, both to live and to prevent dissipation.

She was not one thing, or two, or five, but a hundred things, all competing inside her flesh for some sort of home. First an equine head, then one of some great lizard; a face, fleshy and fattened, had broadened lips, fangs, two broad noses and three eyes as well as a curly horn in the center.

The huge mouth opened, and it sounded as if she had the voice of hundreds, all speaking at once, and all speaking something different. But as none of them would yield, the flesh split, and from it came a horde of terrible, insane apparitions, all screaming in death agonies, then… gone.

“That,” said Joe, “is why it doesn’t really pay in the end to be one of the bad guys.”

Quasa turned and faced him and put down her crossbow. She tried a nervous chuckle. “All right. You win. I won’t bother you anymore. Honest I won’t. I’ll just walk home now, very slowly…”

The wound in his chest still smarted and would for some time, but there was no more blood, and it was becoming a persistent ache, like a bruise that went right through him. He smiled back at the security officer. “I don’t think so,” he told her.

“I’ll come with you, then, as your prisoner,” she suggested.

“I’ve been to the palace. It’s a neat place but really complicated. You need somebody to show you around.”

“I’m afraid we just couldn’t trust you,” he responded. “Sorry, but our laws and procedures require that we deal rather harshly with soldiers of an enemy nation who try and turn us into slaves instead of treating us as soldiers. I’m afraid you broke the Convention with me, my dear. I truly wish I had the means of punishment—of making you like Mia, or, better, having you trade places with Mia, whose feet you aren’t fit to lick. Unfortunately, I lack my magician, who’s away doing things and won’t be back until much too late.”

The crossbow, which had been lowered to her side, had none the less remained cocked. It began to come up now.

“No, Mia!” he shouted. “Just get clear of her! This one is Irving’s.”

The crossbow stopped, not quite fully up to shoot him. “Irving?” Quasa said, disbelieving. “You named a sword like that Irving?”

The sword arm moved rapidly in a single motion, the edge of the shining blade swishing across her.

For a moment she just stood there, a stupid half-grin on her face. Then, in astonishingly slow motion, Quasa sunk to her knees, and, only at that time, did her head fall off.

Joe stepped back as quickly as he could without running or disturbing the magical elements below, many of which were now rushing up to engulf the headless body and even the head itself.

“Coffee brown strings?” Marge said in a puzzled tone. “I don’t think I ever saw any that color before.”

The head went through a terrible series of transformations and gyrations including growing tiny hooves before it exploded like the previous body, but Quasa’s body, on the other hand, remained kneeling in the snow, frozen, as that massive coffee brown surge of strings rushed into it, easily forcing away strings of complex reds and violets.

The body twitched, then moved slightly. Joe continued backing away, and saw that Mia was safely back as well. They could do nothing now but watch.

The hands flexed, then went to the head and found only a bloody, spongy mass there, already cooling.

And then, to all of their complete astonishment, the headless body stood up.

“Don’t worry! At least we can outthink it!” Macore said optimistically.

“Don’t be so sure,” Joe responded. “We don’t know what shape or form it’s taken under those clothes.”

And then, slowly, something started to rise, almost ooze, out of the severed neck.

The head was somewhat bovine in appearance, but the eyes were huge, humanlike, and blazing with energy; when it opened its wide mouth, it showed, not a cow’s flat cud-chewing teeth, but a nearly sharklike view of pointed ones.

“I’ll lay ten-to-one odds to anybody that it doesn’t say ‘Moo’,” Macore said.

“I, Saruwok, live again!” it cried in a deep, booming voice that seemed to echo from within. The words were Husaquahrian, but spoken with a thick accent and many differences in inflection.

“A minotaur!” Marge breathed. “Or whatever inspired the minotaur. A bit smaller than the legends, though. It had less to work with, I suppose.”

“Particularly with its need to get a head,” Macore added, almost inviting an unprecedented aggressive strike by a Kauri for the remark.

Joe faced the creature, sword still drawn, confident that iron would do the trick with one like this. The traditional eight foot tall minotaur might have been a challenge, but at four feet or so, it was hard to take this one quite so seriously.

The minotaur spotted Marge. “You! Nymph! How long?”

”Damn it, I’m not a nymph!” she responded, really irritated. “I’m a Kauri!”

“Who the hell cares?” it roared. “How long?”

“A few thousand years, give or take. You’ve been out a long time.”

“A few… thousand…” The news seemed to shock Saruwok. Finally he asked, “How have my people fared since they were deprived of me?”

“Not well,” Marge told him. “You’re the first I’ve ever seen.”

The minotaur gave a hollow, booming sigh. “I feared as much. But now that I have regained life, I may liberate some of my fellow zlutas. We shall rise again!”

“Uh—you can raise them?” Joe asked, not really decided upon his course of action yet.

“With three bodies like your own, I think I can.”

“Yeah, you and who else?” Macore taunted.

“I am Saruwok, greatest warrior of my time!” he intoned. “I need no aid!”

Joe decided and approached the minotaur. “That may have been true a few thousand years ago, in your old husk,” he told the creature. “Unfortunately for you, I’m afraid you came up a little short.”

Dwarf steel came down with sudden swiftness, splitting the new head almost in two.

There was that crackling, electrical sound again, and this time it engulfed the body and was soon gone. The coat, pants, and boots stood there a moment, then collapsed into a heap.

“Score one for extinction,” Joe said, sheathing the blade.