Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (22 page)

The hint was obvious. So, Loren and I got out of the howdah and copied Ingemar’s method of leaving the crocodile. As soon as we reached the ground, the gigantic reptile started moving away.

I was a little sorry to see it go. Despite its fearsome appearance, the monster had been perfectly well-behaved and I hadn’t worried about being waylaid by anything while we were on top of it. Not even Hell’s creatures are likely to pester something that size.

There being nothing else to do, we passed through the entrance. It wasn’t a door, just a tall and narrow corridor through the stones that made up the structure. We emerged into a chamber about fifty feet across. Sitting on stools in a semi-circle at the opposite end were fourteen beings, staring at us.

I use the term “beings” because I can’t think of anything more suitably vague that still conveys intelligence. The appearance of the fourteen figures varied wildly in every manner except one: they were all hideous.

You were expecting something else from the gods of pus, pestilence, etc? Trust me, you don’t even want to think what the god of hemorrhoids looked like.

“At a guess,” I said, “we’re looking at the Lords of Xibalba.”

Sophia snorted. “You think?”

“What now?”

“I’m not sure. We need to greet all of them by name, if I remember the protocol, or we’ll be in immediate trouble. But there’s bound to be a trick involved.”

“How good are you with languages?”

“That’s one of my specialties. I’m not technically a witch, but my abilities when it comes to speaking in tongues are magical. For all practical purposes, I can understand any language after I’ve heard a few words spoken. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know.”

The germ of an idea came to me. A crudely direct idea, I admit, but what else do you expect from a theropod?

“Okay, then. Let’s see what happens.” I pulled out my flash and made the change.

Once in raptor form, I sprang over to the nearest Lord of Xibalba and smelled it. For me, in that form, smelling mostly meant licking it with my tongue.

At a guess, this one was the god of vomit. There was no way I could have made myself smell the thing, much less lick it with my tongue, if I’d still been in human form. But theropods are to fastidiousness what monkeys are to decorum. In a word, oblivious.

I then sprang over to the next one. At a guess, after a couple of licks, this one was the god of edema.

The third one, even before my tongue could examine it, I figured to be the god of acne. But before my tongue reached it, the Lord of Xibalba waved me off frantically and started gibbering something at its fellow gods.

I swiveled my head to look at Sophia. She had that same expression of intent concentration that she’d had when she was listening to the louse. So, seeing no further role to play at the moment, I squatted down in front of the semi-circle.

When a human squats, he looks more harmless than usual. Not so, for a Deinonychus. He looks like he’s about to spring into action.

All of the lords except the two at the far end were now gibbering wildly. Those two, on the other hand, were as inert as if they’d been made of the same stone the building was.

Which, as it turned out, they were.

“Okay,” said Sophia. “I’ve learned all their names by now, since they used them in jabbering at one another.” She pointed at the two silent ones. “Those are phonies. Mannequins. The other twelve . . . ”

She moved to the center of the chamber, bowed, and addressed each one of the Lords in turn. I didn’t understand any of it, but I found out later that the names were such charming monickers as One Death, Seven Death, Blood Gatherer—no St. Francis types in this crowd.

When she finished, the twelve real Lords of Xibalba starting gibbering again. After a few minutes of that, the racket died down and all of them looked at one of the Lords near the center of the semi-circle. This one was marginally less ugly than the others—you understand this doesn’t mean much? like being the best-dressed hog in a pigsty—but made up for it by having a smoking obsidian mirror embedded in its forehead.

Smoking Mirror leaned forward on its stool and gibbered something at Sophia. She gibbered back, he gibbered, she gibbered, eventually they were done.

She came over to where I stood. By then, I’d changed back to human form.

“It’s about what we figured,” she said. “They’ll hand Boatright and his people over to us if we pass some tests. To judge our worth—and don’t ask me how they gauge worth in the first place, I haven’t got a clue.”

“How many tests?”

“They’re being vague about that. Essentially, one test for every human they hand over. But for some reason they seem unable or unwilling to specify an exact number.”

I frowned. “There’s a gimmick in there, somewhere. Boatright had three people with him. Even monster gods dedicated to diseases should be able to count up to four.”

She shrugged. “There’s always a gimmick, dealing with the deities in this region of the hell universe. We’ll just have to see how it works out.”

Since I didn’t have a better plan, I nodded. “Where’s the first test?”

“From what I gather, as soon as we leave this edifice.”

That test turned out to be a giant jaguar, the size of a big tiger. Piece of cake, even though I was outweighed by at least three hundred pounds.

It’s not so much that dromaeosaurids are intrinsically more ferocious than modern predators—although they probably are. But the biggest factor is brains. A jaguar, even a giant one in Hell, is no smarter than any big cat. Even without a human intelligence riding piggyback, any dromaeosaurid can easily equal it. When you add the human intelligence, even as dimmed as it invariably is in were form, it’s just no contest.

Except for bears, modern predators almost exclusively use their teeth as their killing tools. Their claws and talons are a means to hold prey, not weapons. So I knew the jaguar wouldn’t be expecting me to shift to the side and disembowel it with one kick as it leapt at me. In Deinonychus form, the second toes on my rear feet have large sickle claws that will cut through almost anything short of thick metal or hardwood.

Normally, I would have just let the jaguar bleed out. Why take any risks at all? But since I figured time was pressing and had no idea what the rules of the test might be, I finished it off quickly with a bite to the neck. A Deinonychus has a bite force that’s even greater than a hyena’s, and almost equals that of a modern alligator of equal size. One bite was enough.

The next test required us to enter another stone edifice. Once inside, we found ourselves in a large chamber full of sharp obsidian blades. The blades were round and about the size of dinner plates.

“Oh, swell,” said Sophia. “The House of Razors.”

As soon as we entered, the blades lifted off the ground and started humming. Then, a few seconds later, began a complex series of motions that I soon realized constituted an impenetrable barrier if you wanted to get through them. It was like a moving version of the laser beam networks that are used in some security systems.

There was another door visible at the far end of the chamber. The nature of this test was depressingly clear.

While I’d been studying the pattern of the blades’ movements, Sophia had gotten that now-familiar intent look on her face. I only half-noticed, though, until she nudged me with her elbow.

“I think I can talk our way through them,” she said.

My contribution was: “Huh?”

But, sure enough, she started humming herself and before you knew it the blade pattern shifted to leave a narrow corridor in the middle. Sophia immediately hurried through, not quite running. After taking a deep breath, I followed.

Worked like a charm.

The next test went by the name of Cold House. The one after that, Bat House.

The first was full of hail the size of golf balls, freezing rain and winds just barely this side of hurricane force. That was purely a matter of endurance. The second one was full of—what else?—bats. Not fruit-eating bats, either. Vampire bats.

Wannabe vampires, I should say. Sophia started a godawful caterwauling that she told me later was the mating calls of lamias. That seemed to confuse the bats mightily. It would have scrambled my wits as well except that I shifted into were form. Theropods react to horrible noises about the same way they react to horrible smells: the blithe indifference that generally goes along with being on top of the food chain.

When we emerged from the Bat House, we looked around.

Nothing, beyond a lot of trees crowded around the small clearing where the stone edifice was situated.

“Those rotten bastards,” I grumbled. “We passed four tests. Boatright and his partners add up to four. So where are they?”

Sophia pointed to a tree off to our left. “Well, there’s one of them. Part of one, I should say.”

I followed her finger. There was a human head, perched in a fork of the tree about ten feet off the ground. A severed human head, to be precise.

“I think that’s Boatright himself,” I said. “Judging by the photos we had.”

We went over to the tree. Even in human form, it wasn’t hard for me to get up into the tree high enough to haul down the head.

“Yup, that’s Boatright. I wonder where the rest of him is?”

Sophia spotted a trail leading out of the clearing. “Let’s try that way.”

That way led to the House of Fire, followed by the House of Snakes. Along the way, we picked up the head of one of Boatright’s partners, the left foot of another and the upper body of a third. (They didn’t belong to Boatright. Wrong size and in the case of the foot, wrong color.)

“This sucks,” I said. “The Lords of Xibalba are going to work us to death.”

Wearily, Sophia nodded. We were both a lot worse off than we’d been at the start. Leaving aside exhaustion, we’d picked up enough bruises and minor cuts to make us look like extras in a zombie movie. Judging from the number of body parts we’d collected so far, we weren’t more than halfway there. I didn’t think we could last long enough to finish. Not doing it this way.

I said as much. Sophia grimaced. “I don’t disagree, but what’s the alternative?”

“We need to take a fifteen-minute break anyway. Let me think about it while we’re resting. There’s got to be something.”

It took me ten minutes to figure it out. Three minutes to explain the plan to Sophia. Five minutes to quell her doubts and objections.

Eighteen minutes all told, three minutes over my self-imposed time limit. Sue me. Watches don’t work right in Hell anyway.

4

When we re-entered
the first of the stone buildings—Greasy Grimy Godlet Guts House, I called it; 4-G for short—the Lords of Xibalba immediately started gibbering at us. They sounded angry to me; but then, they always sounded angry to me.

Sophia gibbered right back at them, and there was no doubt at all that her tone was hostile. Even the lords seemed to draw back a little from the fury in her voice.

“Guess I told them,” she said with self-satisfaction, after her tirade wound down. She didn’t bother to translate because I already knew the gist of what she’d been saying. It was my plan, after all.

You lousy bums are a bunch of cheats and chiselers and think you’re pulling a fast one, but you just wait and see. You’ll get your comeuppance. First, though, I have to sacrifice my loyal minion to regain my strength. Then I’ll bring him back to life as good as new—and you just watch what happens next!

That was about the gist of it. Add maybe a thousand Xibalba equivalents of Anglo-Saxon four-letter words.

As soon as she was done, she pulled out her machete. I flopped to the ground and rolled over on my back. Playing the part of a loyal minion to perfection, if I say so myself.

Sophia looked down at me, her face tight with anxiety. She was definitely paler than usual, too. It was obvious despite her complexion.

I winked at her. “Relax. Pretend we’re on our first date and I just made the crudest, grossest and most male chauvinist remark you ever heard. Hell, anyone ever heard.”

That made her grin. That same sly grin I was getting really very fond of.

I held up the flash, and did the transformation. Once in were form, I did my best to stay on my back. I couldn’t manage that very well, since the anatomy of a Deinonychus really isn’t suited to a supine posture. But I got close enough for our purposes.

The machete came up. The machete came down. Right into my belly.

It hurt like you wouldn’t believe. And I didn’t stint on the howling and shrieking because that was pretty much
de rigeur
in this crowd.

Sophia must have been a butcher in a previous incarnation. Either that or—probably more likely—she just had a will of iron. It didn’t take her more than a half a minute
to hack her way into my abdomen, do the needed quick and crude surgery, and haul out a section of my intestines.

In dramatic terms, this would have worked better if she’d cut into my chest and taken out my heart. The problem is that therianthropes in beast form are more vulnerable than most people think. You don’t
need
a silver bullet or blade to kill a were, it just makes things a lot easier and less chancy because you’ve got a metabolic poison working for you at the same time as whatever physical damage you’ve done. But enough physical damage in the right place will do the trick all by itself. Silver be damned. If you can stop a vital organ like a heart, a were will die.