Songs of the Dancing Gods (32 page)

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.