Horrors of the Dancing Gods (18 page)

"Looks like a giant clutching hand with claws," Marge noted.

"If you take the hovecraft, which is the fastest way there, then you'll land here, at Red Bluffs," Macore told them, pointing to an area midway between the fingers of the "hand."

"Seems pretty much like an advertisement to land in a town," Irving noted worriedly.

"Well, it's not all that bad, and it's not like they won't know you're coming," the former thief replied. "The hovecraft is the only assurance that you'll get by all the evils that surround the place, and that means tickets, and that means everybody official will know, right? It's no big deal. You have to take Yuggoth on its own terms. Sure, it's the source of all evil, but in many ways it's just another place with a lot folks, a lot of races, a lot of threats, and maybe even some normal types. Even some good guys."

"Good guys? But you and everybody else said you couldn't trust anybody there!"

"You can't
trust
them, but that's because you never know who you
can
trust. Look, think it out. You can't have pure evil without victims. Otherwise it's just an intellectual exercise. So the vast majority of folks on Yuggoth are, like everywhere else, just ordinary folks. Hell, suppose there weren't any normal folks for vampires to bite. I mean, they'd all starve, right? And there have to be folks to dominate, to take over, to rule and oppress, like that. And now and again, from that kind of stock, rises somebody who can really battle the evil bastards. It's just a million times more likely that the scientists really are mad, that the nice boy next door really is an ax murderer, that the local meat market—well, you get the idea."

"Um, yeah. Sort of."

Irving held up the Rules volume. "I've been studying things about it. It's not a place where I'd like to live, but at least it's still got rules. Wolfsbane, garlic, crosses, those sorts of things still work. There's nothing over there that's any more absolute than here."

'Well, yeah. But there's a lot more of it, and it's a lot more concentrated and in a lot more varieties. And once you're there, you're committed to one of a limited series of options," Macore warned them.

"Yeah? Like what?' Marge asked.

"Well, get control of that McGuffin thing and you're made and home free. Otherwise, you'll wind up either being trapped there or corrupted, warped, and changed until you are more at home there than here. Nobody who gets on the hovecraft ever comes back and walks off it at this end."

"You
said you'd been there—and you got back," Irving noted.

He nodded. "Yeah, but you don't know the deal I had to make or what I had to do. That's why I have such doubts about what's beyond that darkness I see ahead. You don't want to do anything close to that if you can help it, kid. I was stupid-ass lucky, nothing else. And these two—they are made of different stuff. Don't count on coming out of there whole. You plan to get that McGuffin and wish all of you out whole. You just don't want to deal with any alternatives."

CRUISING DESTINY'S THREAD

The Land of the Sources of Evil shall always be across the waters toward some bleak shore.

—
Rules, Vol. p. 6660)

THEY HAD DISCUSSED VARIOUS WAYS OF REACHING YUGGOTH, but eventually the evidence both from Macore and from other old hands around the docks convinced them that the hovecraft was the only reasonable way in. Out was a different question entirely. Additionally, word came by messenger from Ruddygore that their passage had been taken care of, which kind of settled the question. The message also stated that as yet even the nearly all powerful wizard hadn't been able to put a background to the halfling or a true name to the slain stepfather. It seemed almost inconceivable that that much could be hidden from Ruddygore, and this indicated to them all that whoever was behind this was very powerful and very formidable, indeed, in all realms.

The boat sailed once a week from its own private dock about ten kilometers west of the resort. It was a lonely spot, forced on the operator by a tourist industry that didn't want anybody scared off.

In point of fact, it looked like
nobody
wanted much to do with them. The spot consisted of a large pier,
a
small closed terminal and ticketing kiosk, and nothing else or any sign that anyone had set up even temporarily to help the passengers either on or off. There wasn't even a large sign to indicate what docked or sailed from this remote place, but somehow, just looking at it, you
knew.
You could feel it, a kind of deep chill down to your very soul.

Of course, gargoyles on the ticket kiosk didn't help, either.

Large black birds circled above and occasionally came down and landed on the kiosk. The huge yellow-eyed creatures seemed to be the masters of the area; the gulls and others so prevalent elsewhere seemed to avoid the place.

"Ravens," Marge noted. "It figures."

Irving walked up to the kiosk, ignoring the birds, and read the very fancy sign in the window. "Arrives one hour after sundown every Monday, leaves one hour before sunrise every Tuesday. Nice. I wonder what happens if it's late and doesn't get off until sunrise. Does it turn to dust or explode or something?"

Marge yawned. "Well, being a night person myself, I can't complain about the scheduling, but I guess we ought to keep crucifixes and the like around anyway, huh?"

"No religious symbol, for good or evil, has any power without the holder's complete and absolute faith in what it represents," Poquah reminded her. "I'm afraid we are all much too jaded to depend on that."

"Um, yeah. It
does
sort of put us at a disadvantage," she admitted.

Irving wandered back over, frowning.

"What's the matter, Irv? Second thoughts?"

"No," he replied. "I was just wondering where everyone else is."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

He looked up at the sky for a moment. "I would say we're no more than an hour or so before sundown. It's Monday, so unless they're skipping a week, they should be here in about two hours, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so. So?"

"Well, where's the traffic?
Somebody
has to use this service. That's a pretty big dock from the looks of it, and the length of space between the knobs they use to tie things up shows a pretty fair-sized boat, too. You don't run a big boat empty. You either run a small boat or no boat, right? But here we are, maybe two hours ahead of the boat, and we're the only ones here."

Poquah looked around and shook his head. "I don't know, but something tells me that we will find the answer to this shortly. I
feel
it. We will not be the only passengers."

And as the sun set and shadows began to shimmer and then blend into the landscape, he was proved correct.

You needed faerie sight to see them, but Irving's cultivation of some magical powers in his own right had given him that ability, which his two companions had as a matter of course. It was not, however, an unmixed blessing, particularly in this case.

It began with what seemed like the wind, although there was no wind, a great, deep roar of misery, a cosmic sigh of regret, coming, it seemed, from all places at once. Then, slowly, they began to arrive and resolve themselves in the total darkness.

People ... long chains of people, male and female, all linked together by spell threads so deep and dense that they seemed jet black. All were nude, and in spite of a deathly pale cast to their skins and a hollow, hopeless series of expressions that were hard to look at, they seemed in the main no older than Irving and in excellent shape. It was easy to see, though, that they were not what they appeared; although they seemed to be regular humans of a number of human racial types, the bodies were actually entirely faerie.

"Human souls," Poquah explained, shaking his head.

Marge was aghast. In all the time she'd been on this world, she'd never seen anything like it. "But—they look so
healthy!"

"In a sense they are. This is the true faerie component of humanity," the Imir told her. "Everyone comes out his ideal and ageless self, of course. However, these will soon change, as this material is both malleable and corruptible. It is raw material on its way to the foundry to be reshaped to their new masters' whims."

"Then they're on their way to Hell? Via
boat?"

"Perhaps. Some will go there, some won't. Don't think of Hell as a place of eternal punishment. It is not, except in the sense that it is totally removed from all that is Heaven. These people are now at the eternal mercy of Hell and its rulers. In a sense, going the other way is the same thing, but it is generally felt that God and the angels are much better to work under than Satan and the demons. Just don't think of it as necessarily eternal punishment. These people are being sent where their souls' owners wish, to be used for those owners' purposes."

A mysterious tall, dark figure nearby overheard the explanation and came over toward them. It wore a dark robe and hood, and only the glow of two beady red eyes and a larger glow below showed any features at all.

"Hello, brothers and sister," the creature greeted them in a deep but convivial voice that sounded so silky smooth, it reminded Marge of a Texas politician. "Couldn't help overhearing your explanation, there, friend, and you're pretty much on the mark." A black arm went up and took something from the mouth, and as the glow swept down with it, they could see that the mysterious larger object was a very large, fat, and somewhat smelly cigar. "Nimrod's the name. Louie B. Nimrod. That's my string over there." He pointed to a long and typically unhappy lot, and they could now see the nearly absolute black of the spell against the night that linked them to the demon.

"You're taking them to Hell?" Marge asked uneasily. "I thought if you were supposed to go there, you just
went."

"Oh, my, no! I'm taking them to Yuggoth, of course. I assume that's why you and everybody else are here. I mean, this boat don't go to Hell, little lady. You're right to some extent about not needing some of this in the more routine operations, but you
always
got to collect 'em. Even the enemy collects. They generally got an easier collection job than we do, of course. Damn fools actually
want
to go with them. They don't know the eternity of total boredom that awaits them up there."

"Your reputation for what happens to them after they go with you does not include boredom in general, I'll give you that," Marge commented dryly.

"Oh, it's not
nearly
that bad. I mean, we're not talking circles of punishment and fiery pits and all that rubbish. Why would we? That would put us in the business of punishing the enemies of our enemy, wouldn't it? That lake of fire business is if we lose, and we've not lost by a long shot. We're at
war.
These are
soldiers.
They became soldiers the moment they enlisted in
our cause when still alive, and they're even more useful now that they've gone through their enlistment incentives and bonuses."

"Enlistment incen— oh!" Marge suddenly realized that the demon was talking about whatever these people got from demons like Nimrod while still alive. It took a little mental gymnastics to switch points of view here. "So what do they do for you now?"

'Well, now that they're totally ours, they go to work. Privates all, of course. Pretty rare to get instant officer material from the living, although it
does
happen. These are mostly support troops in the making. We'll put 'em in and train 'em on Yuggoth in the basics. Sort of the ditchdiggers, heavy laborers, that kind of thing. We'll evaluate, test, observe, and the most promising ones will eventually get promoted, while the rest will stay down doing the crap work that always has to be done by somebody. And of course we'll be checking for special skills and aptitudes to develop."

"Is this normal, though?" Poquah asked him. "So many off to Yuggoth instead of to Hell?"

The demon took another puff and then replied, waving his cigar for emphasis like a prop. "See, we don't have to
enlist
most folks. They volunteer, whether here or on Earth. We don't even bother with them.
These,
though, are ones I had to enlist. Ones with a real possibility of going the enemy's way.
These
are the ones we really prize, since they're generally the most useful to us and have the most potential to harm the enemy. We always keep our bargains to the letter, so now they all get their chance before being sent down. It's not always easy, I don't mind telling you! I mean, we don't even bother with the usual types—murderers, rapists, torturers, politicians, lawyers, TV evangelists, that sort.
These,
now—revolutionaries, wide-eyed save-the-world types, bleeding hearts, guilt trippers—these people all had the best of intentions, the noblest and most self-sacrificing of motives. That's where
I
come in. My firm, Azaroth, Beelzebub, Zarnath, and Smith, P.A., is one of the top recruiting firms in Husaquahr. Why, in independent surveys by I. M. Power, four out of five of our
clients
rated us tops in delivering what we say, and our collection rate is among the best in the business. You won't catch ABZS clients haunting houses and stalking graveyards, no, indeed!"