Songs of the Dancing Gods (37 page)

“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.

CHAPTER 12

THE MALICE FROM THE PALACE

No quest shall be fulfilled until all the logical possibilities have been exhausted.

—The Books of Rules, XV, lll(c)

AFTER A WHILE THEY BEGAN TO TELL THE WARNING SIGNS OF strain under the ice well in advance; they began to anticipate and avoid trouble, and became more confident of acting within the Devastation.

It continued to be a very dangerous place, of course, intolerant of all false moves, but it was no longer a place neither understood nor abnormally feared, if one respected its own unique Rules and powers.

No longer feeling the threat of pursuit, and with Macore leading a careful and meticulous examination of what was and was not possible within the eerie area, they actually grew confident enough to try a few things that made life much easier. The blocks of ice proved unnecessary in the end, although one still had to be very careful, and that alone improved both men’s speed and comfort. Still, by sunrise, exhaustion was setting in. First it was Marge, already ill-suited for this journey and always having to force herself to work by day, then Mia, who’d had a full previous day, much of it strenuous, and Macore, who had earlier gone into the Devastation with his tests. Joe understood perfectly; he was going by force of will alone, determined that he would at least be the last to be seen failing.