Songs of the Dancing Gods

CHAPTER 10 THE ROAD TO HYPBOREYA

The eerily lit landscape sped by below with steady and impressive speed and power; huge, leathery wings beat in slow, steady rhythm like the drums of an oarsman. On the back of the creature, two small reddish figures reclined facing each other.

“Well, you’ve got to admit, there’s plenty of room for our gear and us with no weight problems,” Joe noted. “It hardly feels as if we’re even moving.”

“I feel like I’m riding bottom-side up on the Titanic” Marge responded. “And I hope that’s the only analogy we have to that ship tonight.”

“I’m just debating whether or not I even want to ask for the explanation of this,” Joe said, getting to his feet. He walked forward, then looked down in front of the wing. “We’re making incredible speed, though,” he noted. “I thought you said these suckers were slow.”

“Oh, they do all right once they get up to speed, and they have enormous endurance,” Marge replied. “It’s just that they take an hour to get up to speed, and a fair amount of time to slow down, too, unless they hit something. But we can outfly and outsprint them any day of the week.”

Joe stared at the landscape. “I wonder where we are? It would be a real joke if we were headed south, wouldn’t it? Wind up in the morning down in the City-States or over in the deserts of Leander?”

Marge looked around. “No, we’ve been making north northwest pretty steadily. You can see the river down there still if you look closely, snaking through the highlands and gorges. Figure we started about eight o’clock, giving us eight or nine hours of darkness, then some margin to slow and land. Add an hour to gain this altitude and get up to speed, a fair tail wind, and, I’d say we’ll make seven to eight hundred miles tonight. That’s not bad.”

“You were totally against this idea,” he reminded her.

She shrugged. “Call it feminine pragmatism.”

“How’s that?”

“If it had gone wrong, I would have been morally right and would have been the voice of reason over stupidity. Since it’s worked, I’ll take the eight hundred miles.”

“If we’ve got slowing and landing times, we’d better keep a lookout for any early signs of dawn,” he said worriedly, ignoring the comment. “I’d hate suddenly to become Joe, riding on Mia’s back, at this altitude and with this dead weight.”

“Well, that’s your worry, not mine,” the Kauri reminded him.

“Thanks a lot,” he said glumly. “See if you can find the map in my saddlebags without having the rest of the stuff blown all over creation. It might be an idea if we tried to figure out where we were before we had to land.”

Marge fumbled with the straps as she struggled to get the map out without freeing the whole mess. Finally she managed it, unfolded the thing, and they tried using her figures and some landmarks to get their bearings. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed, and for several minutes they couldn’t find anything that matched, but, as Mia continued to fly pretty much up the river, had it been straight, they were finally able to come up with some points they thought might coincide.

“If that range over there is the Kossims,” Joe said, pointing to a ragged line of jagged, glacier-scarred peaks, “then those are the Scrunder range in Hypboreya. Just beyond them should be the Golden Lakes. If that’s so, this will be mighty cold country even now. What sort of civilization is there, if any, in the Lakes area?”

“It shows a few villages with funny squiggles,” she replied. “Who knows what this chicken-scratch really says? I know that the crossed swords symbol there is military—a northern guard-post area, probably, to help protect the royal retreat. And that shows the Kossims are dwarf territory and the Scrunder is crawling with gnomes.”

“I’d take the dwarfs, but the gnomes are where we’re going,” he noted. “They have a reputation of being pretty flaky to the point of overdoing a gag to homicidal proportions. If we put down anywhere in there, the only civilization that’s marked is military, and I’m not sure I should use that safe conduct up here. Questions might be asked as to how a safe conduct probably dated yesterday wound up here today. The alternative is going around through gnome territory, right to the edge of the map. Then it’s sixty miles of solid ice. Man! You sure the Hypboreyan kings are human? What kind of people would have a summer palace in the middle of an ice pack?”

“I admit to being puzzled by that myself,” Marge admitted. “I know it’s still a long way to the North Pole, but that place should do a real good imitation. Still, there’s got to be some reason for all those soldiers scattered along there, and Ruddy-gore’s information is always pretty reliable. It’s off the map, though, and supposedly due north from that point there, just below the shaded area with the skull with its tongue stuck out disgustingly. I guess that’s the so-called ancient battlefield. How far did he say it was from there to this palace?”

“Sixty miles over the ice.” Joe sighed. “And no more full moons for a while.”

The creature they rode roared loudly, sounding very much like a cross between Godzilla and a train wreck. Joe turned, and saw what Mia was concerned about. The moon was low, half hidden in the haze below, and the sky was lightening up above.

“Uh-oh. Free ride’s over.” Joe sighed, feeling the beast already beginning to slow. “Looks hazy down there, but no snow except on the mountains.” He walked forward, until he was almost behind the eyes of the nazga. “Come down anywhere flat where you think you have room,” he shouted into what he hoped was an earhole. “If you see the lights of any settlements, come in near them but not so near as to be seen.”

A snort answered, and he hoped that meant “message received and understood.” He walked back to Marge and the packs.

“Marge, as soon as we untie this stuff, I want you to scout around for us,” he told her. “I don’t want any surprises, but we’ve got thirty or forty miles to the ice, then sixty on it. We’ll do it on foot if we have to, but if there’s any way to get any sort of transport, it would really help.”

“I’ll check for bus or train stations but I sincerely doubt I’ll find any,” she responded. “I’m also not too sure about horses, once we reach the ice. If it’s relatively snow-free here, then the odds are that ice pack is water, like the Arctic Ocean, and that means that this time of year lots of cracks and crevices. You ever been on that kind of ice before?”

“No,” he admitted, “but after coming face to face twice with Sugasto, I’m not going to let climate stop me.”

Mia chose a broad, flat area closer to the mountains than the sea. To the northwest, perhaps ten or twelve miles, there appeared to be some man-made lights, and another couple of such signs of habitation scattered about. It was as good a choice as possible.

He and Marge decided not to chance a landing; they jumped off and flew, matching the enormous creature as it glided in. It proved a needless precaution; Mia settled down finally as gently as a feather.

It was hazy, though, making Joe wonder just what the temperature might be around here. He and Marge went to Mia and quickly unstrapped the packs, letting them fall to the ground. He looked at Marge. “Quick and thorough, before sunup,” he told her. “Get going. We’ve got to decide what to take and what not to take.”

The price now had to be paid for what they had saved in time. No horses, no pack animals, and still a fair way to go. Although it was difficult to tell jusf exactly where they were on the map, he knew roughly where the ice pack started, and Ruddygore had indicated that if he headed there and looked out, he’d have no problems figuring out where to go.

While getting the stuff together, it suddenly occurred to him that this couldn’t be Arctic-style north; not only was it not far enough north from the subtropical regions for that, the sun wasn’t already up. Since, this time of year, the sun wouldn’t even go down, or not down much, it was clearly still a long way to the Pole, possibly a lot farther than they’d come. If that was the case, then why was it so cold here? And what kept the ice pack so frigid? Since he’d never before been out from between the tropic lines, at least not by much, he hadn’t given it much thought. This would be the equivalent on Earth of Rome or St. Louis, not Anchorage or Stockholm. That was the only reason this were trick had worked.

In the true Arctic, the sun would never have gone down this time of year, full moon or not.

Suddenly Ruddygore’s tale of the great battle, frozen in time in the ice by divine and not so divine intervention, came back to him. This was a place where natural law sort of worked almost all the time unless changed by something. If someone, sometime, had had sufficient power, there was no logic in Husaquahr that could stop him, her, or it from freezing the Equator and having palm trees at the poles. Or, it might just be that Husaquahr was in an Ice Age and nobody bothered to mention it before.

Very suddenly, the enormous creature that had brought them here shimmered and vanished, leaving a lone figure on all fours on the ground. He hardly noticed. He was suddenly Joe again, stark naked, and if the temperature was anywhere near freezing, it was on the wrong side of it.

He gave a holler as the shock hit him and started rummaging through the packs for his buckskin outfit and boots, praying that nothing had been left out. Mia, naked and hairless as before, ran over to him, puzzled. “Master, what is wrong? Did you step on something? Did something bite you?”

His teeth were already chattering as he found first the pants and got them on, then the shirt. She came to help him and he pushed her away, shouting, “Boots! Find me boots! And gloves, if we have them!”

“What is wrong?” she asked, looking through the other pack. “Here is your hat, Master. A bit flat, but—”

“Mia! I’m freezing! I need boots! And gloves!”

She rummaged around. “I did not know you were so sensitive, Master. It is a bit cool, but not terribly uncomfortable.”

“Mia, it’s the spell Sugasto gave you. You don’t feel the weather; it’s as if you have Marge’s flesh or even some kind of spacesuit on you can’t see, feel, or touch. I don’t. Of the three of us, I’m the only one this weather can harm or even kill. Ah! The boots!”

“And here are your gloves, Master,” she responded, still not quite following the reality of the situation. It just didn’t feel, or even look cold. Oh, on the mountains nearby there was snow, yes, but there was grass here, and even some flowers.

Joe felt much better, but he still felt damned cold. This outfit would be uncomfortable around here but would allow him to survive; on the ice pack, though, where it was clearly going to be much colder yet, this would be no more good than a loincloth.

Of course, there were the blankets they had used to keep the stuff together. Irving, the sword, was wrapped in three of them! He knelt down and began unwrapping the great weapon, for the first time more interested in the container than the contents.

“We’ve got plenty of wool and cotton in these blankets,” he told Mia. “You’re gonna have to rig something from them that’ll keep me much warmer.”

“Yes, Master. I will do what I can. Oh, look! When we speak we spout steam like a dragon!”

“That’s because it’s cold,” he told her again, trying to underline the concept. “We humans are always warm inside but the air is around freezing. Our breath, heated from inside us, gets blasted by the cold air and it turns to fog.”

She nodded. “I knew that happened, Master, but it honestly does not feel to me as if it is more than you might feel on a cool, cloudy day in Marquewood. This will take some getting used to. I will not know your requirements.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you,” he assured her. The trouble is, I wish I knew if my requirements can be met, he added to himself.

He strapped on the sword and tested it out with the gloves. A bit awkward, but this Irving didn’t need much in the way of feel—it did its own fighting.

He had finally warmed up to “just chattering and looked around. The mountains were a couple of miles over there, and, from the map, he assumed they were now in Hypboreya and that those were the Scrunder. Since that range was essentially east-west, it put the Lakes to their east and a bit behind him. To the north was almost a tundra; grasslands, rocky outcrops, yet basically flat. Not a lot of cover, but at least nothing much was going to be hiding from them, either. Still, he knew he would have to try and bluff his way through whoever was in the nearest settlement. He needed furs, not leather, around here. Best to wait for Marge to give him the lay of the land.

Mia found some of the bread and vegetables he’d packed. Nothing to drink, though, right around here, unless they wanted to go mountain climbing.

“So how come you came as that thing?” he asked her.

“Well, Master, first the man came and flew the flying horse away, but not before he told his friend that the flying horses could not see well at night anyway, and so I had to think of what would best serve our needs and get me out of there and then I remembered us being chased—”

He laughed. “All right! All right! I figured it was something like that. It’s done, it worked, and we’re here.” He looked around. “Why then do I suddenly long for that lousy cafe and that overpriced little room?”

He was suddenly convinced that they were being watched. That sixth sense that keeps men in his profession alive was tickling the back of his neck, and he suddenly whirled around.

He sensed—something getting out of the way fast, but where? And what? It was pretty flat here.

Mia saw him, tensed, and turned to look around as well. “What is it, Master?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably nothing, but I’d swear that something was in the grass over there only a moment ago.”

Before he could stop her, she ran over to where he was looking and looked around on the ground. She seemed to see something, because she suddenly crouched, as if waiting to pounce.

“Bunnies,” said a tiny voice from somewhere behind her, like the voice of a small child speaking through its nose. She whirled, and a nearly identical voice said, “Yes, bunny!”

Suddenly Mia stiffened, then stood, knees bent, her arms out in front of her and bent at the elbows so the hands hung down, and twitched her nose. She looked stupid, bewildered—and scared.

Joe reached down and pulled living from his scabbard. The great sword hummed in anticipation.

In fact, it hummed Melancholy Baby.

Gnomes! he thought suddenly. He’d heard of their stupid tricks. “Mia!” he shouted. “Snap out of it! You are not a rabbit! It’s gnomes! Gnomes playing tricks in your mind! Listen only to me, not to them!”

She blinked, seemed to wilt for a moment, almost assuming normal posture, when a chorus of the voices said, “Horsey! Horsey girl!” and she was back somewhat in the same position, only she was on tiptoes and actually whinnied!

In the meantime, Irving had finished Melancholy Baby with a flourish and was starting on God Bless America.

Wait a minute! he told himself. They can’t possibly know those songs! This is like a hypnotist’s act. Shut them out! Ignore them!

Suddenly, out of the ground, rose a horrible, roaring monster, all teeth and fangs, dinosaurlike and hungry. It roared, and Irving just about swung into action at his reflexive moves, now humming the theme from Rocky.

He moved in toward it, the sword poised, and almost struck— when the monster vanished, showing Mia there instead. Another split second…!

“All right, you little monsters!” he growled. “That’s pushing it too far! Irving—the next one you hear, anywhere, strike!” He knew that the sword could not possibly be affected by these creatures; its songs were strictly what was coming from his own subconscious.

“Irving?” a tiny voice just behind him said with disbelief. The sword took control, whirling Joe around and striking something with the flat of its blade. There was a terrible screech, and suddenly Joe was looking down at a tiny, limp form, sort of greenish but dull, with flecks of gray. It was about a foot tall, if that, with an oval-shaped, sexless body, two short, stubby legs, and equally short arms with tiny hands. The face was a cartoon mask, with eyes five times too big, a nose that looked more like a hanging dill pickle, and a rubbery, oversized mouth.

It also was out cold, and a real goose-egg-sized lump was rising on the side of its head.

Suddenly the ground virtually erupted with clones of the little creature, all chaptering excitedly and screaming, “Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve done to him!”

“Nothing the rest of you don’t deserve!” he shouted back. “That little bugger almost made me kill my companion! And the rest of you aren’t any better!”

Mia stared openmouthed at the assemblage of little green something or others, but she repeated, “Companion?”

“Spoilsport!” they began muttering to one another.

“Spoilsport my ass!” he responded angrily. “You want me to instruct this sword, which is very sensitive about its very fine name, to whack each and every gnome it can? With the blade this time?”

There was a collective gasp.

“Not so funny when it’s your neck on the line, is it?” he went on. “From the looks of it, your friend here is eventually gonna wake up. Maybe a day or two from now, but he’ll wake up and just have a headache. But that’s iron that struck him, and hard.”

“Iron not hurt gnomes,” one of the creatures said. “Swords hurt gnomes.”

“Well, you deserve it,” he told them. “We weren’t doing anything to you and you scared that poor girl and almost made me kill her!”

“You not live here. Gnomes live here,” another responded. “Gnomes no invite you two.”

Well, they had a point mere.

“We mean you no harm,” he told them, calming down a little. “We want to cause you no harm and will not unless you do more things to us.”

“What use live if gnomes no can have fun with mortals?” one of them asked, possibly rhetorically.

“You don’t get many people out here, I bet. And the ones that do probably don’t return.”

The closest gnome shrugged. “Mortals come, be gnomes’ toys. Gnomes play with toys till toys break. What wrong with that? Gnomes no go mortal places.”

“I’ve heard differently,” he told the creature.

The gnome shrugged. “Other gnomes might. Not me.”

He gave an exasperated sigh, tempered only by the fact that they were talking, not torturing. “Look,” he told them, “as soon as my other companion comes back, we are going to leave. We will not be back. If you leave us alone so we can do that, we will harm no more of you. Deal?”

They actually had to discuss it! During the mumbled and whispered debating, however, he caught strands of arguments concerning just how much gnomes had been suffering at the hands of bad mortals lately, and what bad times these were. It appeared that gnomes had been being killed off in large numbers by certain mortals with magic powers.

“We come from a good sorcerer with a charge to deal with those evil men,” he told them.

They suddenly got even more excited. “You think you gon’ kill bad men?” one asked.

He shrugged. “We are going to try to do what harm we can.”

“You sorcerer?”

“No, but we have other secrets.”

“Then you worse than dead already. Better off staying with gnomes.”

Marge suddenly came in and landed in the middle of them, startling the gnomes. She looked tired, but resigned to the state. At her descent, the gnomes started screaming, “Hawk! Hawk!” and in a moment there seemed none of the little creatures around.

“Jeez! I’ve been a party pooper before, but I never had that kind of effect!” she said.

“Maybe we better get what supplies we can and get out of here,” Joe suggested. “They’re not much easier to deal with when you talk to them than when they’re playing with you.” He looked at Mia. “You okay?!”

She nodded uncertainly. “I—I was sure I was a rabbit, then a horse,” she commented uneasily. “I do not like these creatures, Master.”

Mia repacked and rearranged and tore, cut, and tied, and with help from Joe managed to get a fair amount of it on her own back. Joe felt uncomfortable giving her that much of the supplies, but she insisted. At least, the gnomes laid off. Now and again they’d see one or two pop up gopherlike out of underground burrows, but they’d just as quickly vanish again.

“There’s a settlement of sorts right near the ice pack,” Marge told them. “It’s not much, but it’s something. It’ll take you the better part of the day to reach it, though.” She gave him the bearings. “There’s not much else for a very long way. That ice pack is kinda weird, though. There’s so much magic over it and even embedded in it that it looks as if a million two-year-olds got loose with the crayons. Beyond it, though, if I got high enough, I could almost make out your destination.”

“Almost?”

“On the other side of that mess of spells there’s a large area that seems almost covered in fog. On top of that, there’s an almost evil cloud around it that seems nearly black as pitch, and, to top it all off, there’s real smoke coming from there and reaching as high in the air as I could see. The thing would give me the creeps, except that the ice pack in front of it is even creepier.”

He nodded. “I don’t have any explanation for it, but at least it sounds as if we’re in the right place and a lot quicker than we could have been otherwise, thanks to Mia.”

“I assume from everything that you’re gonna chance the settlement,” she said rather than asked. “Looks military. I’d watch myself.”

He shrugged. “Can’t be helped. If I don’t get some cold-weather clothes better than these and maybe some gear for the ice, I don’t see how we can make it across anyway. You run ahead and find someplace to get some sleep. Check on us tonight. If we’re in trouble, you might well have to try to spring us.”

She nodded. “Will do. Uh—it just occurred to me why that high smoke rising in the air looked familiar, and if I’m right, it might explain something about this place.”

“Yeah?”

“I think there’s a volcano out there, either in the middle of or just the other side of the ice,” she told him. “Remember, the center of the Kauri home is a lava pool. If that’s another quiet-type volcanic region, it explains why folks might want to go there, and why it’s shrouded in mist. Hot water, thermal pools—it’s probably warm as toast and very pleasant inside there except for the company, like some kind of spa or hot springs type resort. And I’ll say this—if you were gonna hide anything at all, that would be where I’d hide it.”

“Makes sense. Now, go get some rest and don’t sleep near any gnome burrows. No were business tonight, and we might well need you.”

“Will do,” she replied. “Gnomes don’t bother me, though. They’re not intrinsically evil, just, well, gnomes. You watch it yourself, though. No telling what else might be out there.” She rose up into the air and was quickly gone.

“Well,” Joe sighed, fixing his pack as best he could, “let’s go the hard way.” He was going to have some problems with Mia in this environment; although she was apparently quite comfortable, he got the chills just looking at her.

The walk was cold, dreary, and deathly dull. The scenery was all in back of them, but, then, with the scenery had come the gnomes, and he felt well rid of those. As the sun rose, the temperature got above freezing, although not tremendously so, and that proved a worse condition than the freeze itself, as the top part of the ground turned to mud and cold marsh, making the footing not only messy but treacherous. Worse, it seemed to have loosened every mosquito, blackfly, and nipping gnat in all creation and they all seemed headed right for meal Number One, which was him. The spell that insulated Mia, while not insulating her from the mud, also seemed to ward them off; she walked right through small swarms of them without once getting bitten, although there was maximum exposure, while he, with only a few exposed areas, nonetheless seemed like lunch to them all. He’d swear that some of them were large enough to have rotor blades and all seemed born with full-blown pneumatic drills on their mouths.

After only a few hours walk, they could see their eventual destination, although it was still going to be most of the rest of the day to reach it. It was that flat and that featureless. It stood out as a small grouping of dark blips against what looked like clouds below them, but which, in reality, was ice. They were still much too far away to see over the ice itself, but even from here there was a decided plume of black smoke across the horizon. Joe never so much wanted to get to a place that was probably going to be deadly or worse in his life. If he had to succumb to evil, it was damned well going to be at least warm there.

The slogging toward that far-off settlement was perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, since he walked and walked and walked for hours on end, the goal in sight, and for the longest time it simply didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

These people, he decided, had to be supplied by air, just as the important ones who went out to that redoubt beyond the horizon had to come and go the same way. He couldn’t help but imagine a fleet of the huge nazga with teeth that spelled out Mack and Peterbilt and Kenworth on them, and broad wings bearing Rodeway and Yellow Freight and Preston logos, flown by a team of tough-looking aerial truckers, and wonder what in hell their truck stops looked like.

Just because there was little else to do and not much even to think about, he allowed himself to slip into fairy sight, and what he saw gave him plenty to think about.

Not too much on “shore,” as it were; the usual warm life-form readings here and there of who knew what, and not a lot on the ice, either—until you looked toward that distant horizon. There, not immediately offshore but well out, in the direction they’d have to go, he saw just what Marge was talking about.

Just there, and going to the horizon, it was not white in fairy sight, but instead appeared to him as if some giant was collecting all the yarn in the world and dropped his savings in the Grand Canyon. Brilliant, glowing magical strings, so many of them, in every conceivable color, and so dense and overlapping, that no sense at all could be made of any of it. A shift back to normal sight showed only the continuing whiteness, deceptive in the extreme, but he understood why such legends about that place existed.

Supernatural phenomenon? Perhaps the dumping ground for the leftovers by those who designed Husaquahr? Or really the site of a frozen battleground between ancient forces back when those with power approached the status of angels and demons? It didn’t matter. They had to cross that! Overland? Could anyone? He would bet almost anything that even Sugasto going out to the redoubt flew around that place. Ruddygore had almost shrugged it off, and yet Joe thought it might be the most dangerous part of the journey, perhaps more dangerous even than the summer palace.

What would happen if died here? he couldn’t help thinking. Died in a place so barren and so cold, a place without trees?

Mia broke his morbid train of thought with a more immediate worry. “Master, what will you tell people in those buildings when we reach them?” she asked him.

“Huh? Hadn’t really thought of that. I guess I just thought I could rely on the safe conduct.”

“But, Master, that won’t explain anything about why we are here in this awful and desolate place, or where we are going, and why. After all, if we were allowed to this hideaway, we would have been entitled to fly there, would we not?”

She had an abnormal ability to shout at him when his brain was in park.

What would be a good explanation? Science? Not likely; even if that really meant something here, he could hardly fake that kind of education. Magic? No, not magic, since clearly neither of them had any. Besides, they were both rather clearly what they really were, even to the most ignorant.

“I think we’re gonna have to fall back on the last refuge of the scoundrel in this sort of situation, particularly if they’re re_: ally all or mostly military types up there,” he told her.

“What do you mean, Master?”

“An insidious invention of bureaucrats and military personnel called the Top Secret gambit,” he replied. “It means that only I, not even you, know why we are here, and I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Do you think they will swallow that?”

He smiled grimly. “They might. After all, who but a lunatic, a sacrifice, or somebody really important would be up here in a place like this and going the place we’re going?”

“But they will alert the palace!”

“Perhaps. Depends on just how scared of Sugasto the bastard has made his own people, even up here.”

At least they didn’t have a hostile reception to deal with. In fact, they didn’t have any reception when they finally reached the place, perhaps an hour before sundown. The six buildings, all constructed of logs obviously brought overland or by air from somewhere else, looked incredibly weathered. Although none of the buildings were huge, all had two fireplaces and one had three. Nobody was on the lone street, and there wasn’t much in the way of horses or other steeds, either, although there was the loud barking of dogs down at the end.

“Where are the people, Master?” Mia asked, looking around.

He pointed to the chimney tops. “There’s smoke in all of them, so I assume they’ve got good sense and spend most of the time indoors.”

“But which one do we pick?”

He looked at them. None of them even had signs on them. He guessed that the feeling was that you were only up here if you were assigned here, and if you lived here you knew.

“Three chimneys,” he replied. “It’s got to be some kind of office or mess or some kind of social center, being the largest.”

He went up to the door, took a deep breath, grabbed the knob, opened the door, and went inside.

The first impression was of warmth. The place felt downright comfortable, but it only made certain parts of his body feel as if they were on fire from the contrast.

The place was something like a basic, small social club; it had a bar, a couple of tables, and one fireplace was being used to cook things on spits. Two slaves were in there, both males, one tending the cooking fire and the other wiping down the bar, both with rings in their noses, both as naked and hairless as Mia. They both turned and looked up at them. At a table, one of three, two of the toughest-looking women he’d seen since that truck stop in Wyoming ten years back looked at him in sheer amazement. Both were wearing fur-trimmed black uniforms and matching leather boots.

“Where the hell did you come from, Bub?” one asked in the kind of voice that matched her butch appearance exactly.

He hadn’t expected women officers.

“I was dropped off by courier nazga quite a ways from here, back toward the mountains, this morning,” he replied, trying to match their tough tone. “I’ve been freezing and getting bit since.”

“Nobody told us that anybody was coming,” she noted suspiciously.

“Nobody said to me that there was anybody here other than that there was some army personnel,” he responded. “And I see that there are.”

“We don’t exactly get many people up here, you know.” She got up, looking very irritated. “I think you ought to see security.”

“Fine with me,” he replied. “Can I leave my stuff here? The slave can help out yours. Just let me get some papers out.”

“Sure, go ahead.” She turned to the two slaves behind the counter. “You two better hadn’t burn my dinner! I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“It will be done, Mistress,” one responded in a rather gentle tenor.

“It better be, or you’ll sleep outside with the dogs tonight!”

Joe had just thawed enough to start feeling his bites when she led him outside again and down to the last small building in the settlement.

“Was this always a settlement or was it built for the army?” he asked, mostly trying to make conversation.

“I neither know nor care,” she responded frostily. “In there.”

He walked in after her and found himself in a smaller log house arranged into rooms like an office. Inside were two more women in the same uniforms as the first, looking as tough and weathered as the others. Were there no men here? he wondered.

“What have we here?” asked one of the security officers, a comparatively small woman with a loud, nasal soprano. She looked him over. “Where did he come from?” she asked the woman who’d brought him.

“Came waltzing into the club with a slave as if he owned the place,” his guide replied. “Female slave, too.”

“Go on back to dinner,” the officer told the guide. “We’ll handle this from this point.” The guide clicked her heels together, turned, and left.

“So,” said the security officer, “want to tell me what you’re doing out here at the end of nowhere?”

“No,” he responded.

She was almost as surprised as by his initial appearance. “No?”

“I have the same ultimate boss you do,” he told her, removing the safe conduct and handing it over. “Don’t worry—I am authorized to tell you that what I’m supposed to do has nothing at all to do with this place.”

She handed the safe conduct back. “This means little when you’re out of any beaten path and in a restricted military zone.”

He shrugged. “What am I gonna do?” he asked her sarcastically. “Launch an all-out attack? Me and my slave? Spy on you? Tell them about the Ultimate Weapon you’ve got here? Steal your dogs?”

“Could be. The only reason for this outpost is to prevent people from going any farther, particularly out on the ice beyond this point,” she told him. “If the reason you’re here has nothing to do with us, I assume that’s your objective. That makes you our primary mission right now.”

He sighed. “Mind if I sit?”

“At the moment, stand.”

“All right, all right. Yesterday I was invited to lunch by and with the Master of the Dead himself at an army camp just north of the Marquewood border. And you know exactly what I mean by ‘invited.’ ”

“All right. Get to the point.”

“It seems I impressed him on some other business, or maybe I pissed him off. Hard to say, but, since I’m still here, it was probably the former. For some reason he’s convinced that enemies, perhaps spies, might get to the summer palace by land. I don’t know what’s going on out there and I don’t want to know. He asked me if I would soothe his nerves by attempting ah undetected overland trek to the palace and, if I made it, attempt to gain entry without their security and spells knowing. I have something of a reputation for doing what people believe is impossible along those lines. A nazga was told to divert north of the mountains miles from here and drop me off. If you want to check you can go up there and see where it came in and we landed. Nazgas make their marks on the land. I gather for some reason they didn’t want to fly me closer in.”

“I’ll bet,” she commented, and his spirit felt better. She was actually buying this crap!

“There wasn’t much cold-weather gear that far south, so I was told I could get some here, since any spy would come equipped.”

“So why didn’t he put this in an order to us?”

He smiled dryly. “You obviously haven’t met the Master of the Dead if you have to ask that.”

“Perhaps. But, by definition, even his lapses aren’t his fault. Why should I believe you?”

“Logic. Do I sound insane? No? That leaves me as either a spy or who I say I am, and I have to ask you, now, would a spy walk in here with a story like this and no cold-weather gear, leaving his slave with your people?”

“Maybe. If he were clever enough.”

“Uh-huh. And even if I made it, how am I going to get back? How am I going to get messages out? The only way I have is via the palace and the Master of the Dead himself. Considering that, even if I were a spy, I wouldn’t exactly be much of a threat, now would I?”

“Could be,” she admitted. “But maybe not. We have one spy in custody right now from up around that area where you said you came from. He fell into the hands of the gnomes and is quite mad. The few who get away from the gnomes are always mad. Usually we have to bribe them to get people back at all; this one went so crazy the gnomes actually begged us to take him.”

“You’re sure he was a spy?”

“What else could he be? He’s too crazy now even to make enough sense to create a story, but there’s no other reason for coming here—unless your story is true, or unless he was someone who heard that there were only women on rear picket duty and thought he was going to have a field day.”

His eyebrows rose. “There are only women here?”

“Women and slaves to do the drudge work, and by law the slaves are all eunuchs. Why? You getting any ideas?”

“Nothing personal, but not along those lines,” he assured her, trying to sound both safe and not insulting. “When the, Master of the Dead personally orders you to do something, you don’t really think about much else.”

“Maybe,” she responded a bit suspiciously.

“I’d like to see that prisoner, though,” he told her. “I’ll leave my sword and stuff here. I just want to see what sort of person would come up here unauthorized. Having done a fair amount of spying in the south, I might have come across somebody that nervy.”

She shrugged. “All he does is sit and sing this bizarre chant in some alien tongue. You can see him, but no tricks. All of us are experts with bow arid crossbow and some of us are fine swordswomen. Not to mention that we have our own means of magical protections and can have the forces of true Darkness down on this place like a shot.”

“I’m not the enemy, damn it!” He unbuckled his sword and left it on her desk, then followed her back. “Besides, if you have anybody who can read the signatures of spells, have them check my slave. One of her spells is from the Master of the Dead himself.”

There was a small back area to the cabin, and she took a large set of keys on a master ring from a safe, then unlocked the rear door. Inside was a narrow outer area just wide enough to stand and not be grabbed by anybody inside, then a small single cell with thick bars.

Inside a small figure sat, stripped naked so that even if he could break out he’d freeze before getting very far. He was sitting on the bunk staring up at the ceiling in the semi-gloom and singing softly.

The man on the bunk looked over and saw Joe, and his eyes brightened. For a moment, Joe was afraid that his cover would be blown, but instead the little man yelled, “Skipper! YouVe come at last to rescue me! Take me back to the island, please*. Otherwise the cannibals will eat me!”

His beard and hair were long and unkempt, and his eyes were wild and distant, but Macore was still clearly recognizable.

Joe ignored the little thief. “What will you do with him?”

“Standing instructions. Anyone who comes here as a spy, after his value for information and interrogation is done, is to be enslaved by spell, castrated, and fitted with a nose ring. As you can plainly see, he’s of no interrogation value in any event now.”

“You can do that here?”

She nodded. “We are not merely a military unit, we are a coven. We would have done it during the last three days of the full moon but we’re short one right now. We can handle the rest of it, but that insulation spell is tricky. Complicated spells are best done during Black Sabbaths, and so he’s got a few more days until Sergeant Murrah returns from presiding over the Serpent Goddess Virgin Sacrifice and Bake Sale at Magash.”

He gulped. “Uh, yeah.”

“Do you know him?”

He nodded. “I do, and he’s no spy. He was as mad as this long ago. He probably had some strange-looking gadgets as well, if the gnomes didn’t take and destroy them.”

“No, they gave those back, too. We sent them on to the palace by courier, not knowing what they might be, but they looked to me like sophisticated spying gear of some foreign manufacture.”

Yeah, Taiwan, most likely, he thought. Aloud he said, “He worked for no government or master. At one time he was the greatest thief in all Husaquahr. Apparently one day he stole those things and looked into them and went mad. He’s been wandering all over since, but this is the last place I thought he’d be.”

“Skipper! You’ve got to spring your little buddy!” Macore cried plaintively.

They walked back outside, leaving Macore to scream about being deserted, and shut the door.

“Thank the Demon Rastoroth for that door!” the security woman muttered. “At least it keeps his ran tings in there!”

Joe scratched his chin through his beard and thought a moment. “You know, I might be able to use him.”

“Sorry—the regulations are absolute,” she told him. “If you stick around until we do the slave conversion, fine. Not otherwise.”

“I don’t want to delay all that long, but, what would be the harm? Consider—I’m heading toward the palace, not away from it. If he got away, he’d freeze or die on the ice. But I’m betting that somewhere in that scrambled brain of his is still the greatest thief in Husaquahr, the man who actually burglarized the Lamp of Lakash from the vaults of the enemy sorcerer Ruddygore himself.”

“Really? He did that?”

Joe nodded. “Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure he could walk out of there any time he wanted to, only without warm clothes and provisions, he’s stuck. If he had them, though, he’d head straight for his obsession, which is that gear you sent. If we told him it was in the palace, I’d wager he could make it there.”

“So? I thought the idea was to see if you could make it.”

He nodded. “But I’m on my own initiative as to how. If I set this little fellow out, and follow him, then if he makes it, /make it. And what is his reward if he does? He’s sent right back here, and by that time your thirteenth member will have returned. If he doesn’t, well, case closed.”

“So? And what sort of route do you plan to take for this?”

He shrugged. “To go around is to invite tripping alarms.

You’re not here to guard the castle; you’re here to prevent anyone from going in a straight line toward it, across the pan of the map marked ‘deadly and forbidden.’ If there is a weak spot in the palace defenses, it’s from that direction.”

“And with good reason!” she responded. “You can’t see it, but we can. What looks like plain ice is a seething cauldron of the strongest and most complex sorcery imaginable. And it’s coming from who knows how far beneath the ice? Imagine what might lie down there? No one wants to liberate that.”

He didn’t like the sound of it, but it was pretty much as he suspected. “Has anyone to your knowledge tried to cross it while you’ve been here?”

“No, but I’ve seen some of the results of the few who got back out. Whoever or whatever is imprisoned there is powerful beyond our imagination, and was frozen and trapped there by powers even greater.”

“I’ve heard the legends. A fierce battle frozen in progress.”

“That’s right. We draw additional power for our coven from it, but we try and reject it. You can feel it coming, trying to seize control. Even our demon master appears to fear and respect it. It is why we do nothing in the Arts unless we are complete.”

Which at least saves me from your witchcraft, he thought.

“You said you’ve seen people who were out there?”

She nodded. “Only you cannot call them ‘people’ anymore. Most are madder than that one back there, but with reason. I saw one with a goat’s head, a woman’s breasts, a fish tail, and the legs of a great bird. Some others were worse.”

“That’s just from walking on it? ”

“From melting even a small amount. So much is buried there, in such chaos, that any heat, any digging, anything that disturbs and melts what is below, is liberated but undirected. It is miles away before it starts, and always we feel it here. It goes almost to the palace itself—over fifty miles. It cannot be crossed.”

Joe felt very uneasy. “Well, that’s what I was sent to do. I realize that now. All the more reason to give me the prisoner as well. Unless you absolutely need another slave around here, and the little guy isn’t good for much except stealing stuff. Besides, you keep him, you won’t make him sane. You’ll still have to put up with that stuff.”

“Not if we cut out his tongue as well as the other,” she responded, but clearly she was thinking it over. “You are really going to try it through the forbidden area?”

“I’m afraid that’s the job. From what you say, maybe the Master of the Dead didn’t like me, after all.”

“I would say so, too.” She looked at him and sighed. “What a waste,” she muttered, almost to herself.

She was so adamant and clearly so fearful of the place that he couldn’t help harboring similar thoughts himself. For the first time, he began to doubt if he would ever see his son again.