Horrors of the Dancing Gods (9 page)

It was a real thought.

"All right," Joe agreed, "tell you what—if we can find an old, serviceable pair of fencing foils, we can start with that. I think even
I
can handle one of those, and rusty as
I am on skills and totally unconditioned for any such use in this body, I still could probably hold my own for teaching. If you learn to fence reasonably, handle a rapier well, you're one up on a lot of people who only know brute strength defense with a saber or short sword. We'll see how long the money holds out and what we can afford here. Still, it's not a bad idea if you can handle it, and I've seen your nerve in action. I mean, if we go on any kind of adventure together, somebody is going to have to protect
me!"

* * *

It wasn't that difficult to find a vendor in one of the towns along the Great River Road who had such a set; secondhand weapons were quite common in the region, particularly well-used ones pawned or lost in gambling by students at the civil and military institutions of the southern City-States. Finding them in any decent condition, well balanced and with the safety caps still present, was a bit harder. Joe also found that her very rusty and virtually never used knowledge of fencing foils wasn't really all that good, either. With the great sword, you just heaved and let it do the work. At Joe's best, as the person she'd once been, there wouldn't have been much of a contest with such weapons—Joe could put up a decent front and show but wasn't really all that good. Compared with someone who knew nothing and had never had
any
training, however, Joe was an expert.

They were able to make a decent deal on both an older set and a fair bow and quiver of arrows. It actually made Joe feel a little better that they had
something
to use, no matter how inadequate. This was still a fairly dangerous land and a primitive one, and in much of it life was very cheap. Just having weapons on display kept a bit of the threat away. It was sort of like putting a top burglar alarm on your house. The alarm wouldn't keep out a decent burglar, but an average one might look at the trouble of undoing yours versus the lack of trouble going into your alarmless neighbor's and decide to burgle next door instead.

After all, the only people who really knew how good you were with any weaponry were ones who'd seen you in action. Until then, you were always a potential threat.

Crossing the great river wasn't nearly as easy. Despairing of finding a decent ferry that far down, Joe finally decided that the only way would be to take a river tramp, a small ship that went from port to port along the river, up and down, carrying local supplies and commerce. Many were little more than filthy barges with single rectangular sails, occasionally in league with some river faerie or having a few muscular oarsmen aboard for the hard parts.

Such was the
Catarwahl,
apparently last cleaned sometime around the expulsion from Eden and smelling like it, too, manned by the somewhat questionable and unquestionably boozy Captain Letchu, along with his wife and son, who could be told apart less by age than by the mustache the wife had. They were going downriver now, which meant they could mostly follow the slow but dependable currents in a kind of diagonal pattern, crisscrossing the river in a series of triangles until they reached the end. Going back upriver, if they had no wind, was a matter of contracting with some hippogryphs or other river faerie to give them a decent tow.

"I'll takes yer as fer as Azkim," the captain told them. "No more for that pittance."

"You're a money-grubber of the first water," Joe retorted. "This is river robbery, and you know it. It just about cleans us out."

That was by no means the truth, but it was more than a
bargaining ploy. Letchu was in fact charging them about ten times what any other ferry would, and it wasn't a good idea to give people like that the idea that you perhaps had even more money or valuables. This drooling, filthy trio was nonetheless bigger than bears and looked twice as mean.

Alvi seemed entranced by the prospect of crossing the big river and oblivious to most of the unspoken parts of the deal, but standing on the rail near the bow as they pulled away from the dock, she seemed excited and relieved.

"It's a good thing you
are
a
halfling and me a wood nymph, considering
this,"
Joe noted sourly. "I have a good idea that if we seemed to have any value ourselves, we'd wind up being tied up and sold down in Yingling."

"Really? They
do
that?"

"Sure. Back where I came from they called it 'Shang-haiing' somebody, after a city way off on the other side of the world where the ships would often be headed in ancient days. Unable to get sailors to go on those long and risky but very profitable voyages, they just hired men to find people in the bars, drug or knock them out, and they'd wake up well out at sea, where they either signed on as crew or got tossed overboard with lead weights. Most of 'em signed. The women, well, they were sold as domestics, field workers, prostitutes, you name it. Not much different here. There's still things like slavery here, too, handy if you have a need for planters and pickers and such back in those huge jungle plantations. That's why most of the good guys here travel in groups. The bad guys, too, come to think of it."

"Well, all I can say is that I don't see the world as quite as nasty as you," Alvi noted. "I'm sure that's all part of it, but there's so much more. It's kind of pretty here on the river, with all those creatures in the water, all the boats big and small, the colorful costumes—I am really getting to like it in
spite
of how mean some of 'em can be." She sniffed. "I have to admit, though, its smells leave something to be desired right now." She discovered that any exposed part of her that touched any part of the ship got covered in some thick, foul-smelling black stuff. Joe was not immune, either, but chuckled.

"It's peat, I think. They take it out of bogs up north, and it's burned for heat. It's cleaner than the dung, but it's no winner."

"They
cook
with it?" Alvi was appalled.

"No, they don't usually cook with it," Joe told her. "They use wood for that, if and when they can find it in condition to be properly burned. Sometimes oils. It's used to heat their houses. It gets extremely cold up north, I can tell you."

Alvi thought that over. "I—I
think
I know what you mean, but I don't remember ever being so cold that I had to heat the inside of a place. Is that where they make the snow?"

'Well, it's not made, it just falls. Temperature gets cold enough, it snows instead of rains. It's all water. They pack a
lot of snow and ice in special boats now and use preserving spells to sustain them all the way downriver here so the rich folks can have chilled wines and store meat and fish for several days or even weeks."

"That's the only way I ever saw it," Alvi acknowledged. Do you think we'll get to anyplace that's really cold on this trip?"

"Not for a while, I hope." Joe laughed. "We're in the tropics and heading south into more of them. Where from there, though—that's what we have to find out. I
hope we stay warm. I can take the cold, but not for long periods, and it can slow me down. If I freeze, I can be stiff for years, centuries, maybe forever, until I'm thawed out. And if
you
freeze, you're dead. I had enough cold stuff the last time, in the place where I wound up like this. I think I'm owed the heat."

It took about ninety minutes to make the full downriver crossing to the very small town of Azkim, and by that point and with scrambling to get out of the boat, both of them were black as, well, pitch.

"Now what?" Alvi asked Joe.

"First, I think we find a shallow river access and wash this crap off us. Then we'll find a place for you to buy something to eat, and we'll camp somewhere close. Too late to do much more today. Tomorrow we'll continue south, on
this
side of the river. Down to the Coast Highway, then west to the Leander border. If we can keep going at this pace more or less, we should make it to the jumping-off place for the Marmalade Islands and their resorts in maybe ten days to two weeks. If we're lucky, my old friend will still be doing three-hour tours ..."

It
was
slow going once they veered off the River of Dancing Gods and took older, rarely used trails to the south and southwest, but that suited them both just fine. It made it easy almost to forget that Husaquahr existed, that there was hatred and bigotry and violence all around, and instead made it almost seem to be an extended and entertaining picnic.

It had been a long time since Joe had allowed herself to get friendly with, let alone close to, anybody else, and it was very strange: the longer they traveled together, the less odd Joe thought Alvi looked. In
this
world, where
everybody
seemed more than a little off, familiarity bred acceptance more than anything else.

Alvi, too, had the same reaction toward Joe, the first real
friend
and confidant outside of family members and close servants she'd ever known and somebody who seemed very wise and fascinating. The idea that Joe was a wood nymph hardly mattered; if Alvi had any prejudices toward the more elemental faerie, they surely didn't apply to Joe.

Several times they actually stepped behind cover when encountering parties of travelers, particularly humans; it was tough to know who was who and what was what in that unfamiliar region and whether anybody had yet caught on to who that six-armed halfling had been.

Joe did in fact try teaching Alvi a little of his fencing skills, but it wasn't anything serious. Alvi's body wasn't designed for finesse; clearly it would be better off with short swords, cutlasses, or possibly sabers, since a cut and slash would be most effective with all those arms. Joe wasn't that much better; the short reach, a lack of really fast reflexes, and easy tiring of the arm muscles just made swordplay ridiculous, and unlike mortals and perhaps halflings as well, all the exercising and workouts in the world wouldn't change a faerie body that was already predefined.

Shortly after reaching the coast, they came upon a small town sitting on a bluff above the wide ocean, and Joe was suddenly a bit wary. "You never know what's happened when you're out of circulation awhile," she commented. "Let me go in alone and snoop around and see if there's
any
kind of hue and cry for you. If there is, we'll bypass as much as we can. If not, we'll use the main road here and make a little time. I also want to get an idea of how far we still have to go."

Alvi didn't like it. "We been partners since we started; I hate to see you go in there alone. I mean, there's no trees, bushes, nothin' out there but grass and sand and this chalky dirt. You've got nothin' to defend yourself with if you need it. and wood nymphs don't travel much beyond where they live, do they? You're gonna stick out in your own way as much as I do."

"I'm used to that," Joe assured her. "Don't worry. Besides, I have nothing, so there's nothing for anybody to steal; I want nothing except some conversation, so they either talk to me or they don't. And I long ago swallowed my pride and decided to let the nymph part work if I have to. Just take it easy and use the fields here to get around to the other side, like that bluff with the gumdrop-shaped bush on it over there, and wait. I shouldn't be too long."

Alvi was strangely hesitant. "Okay, but—I dunno. I just get a really strange feeling when I look at that little place there. I don't think I ever felt anything really like it before. It's—weird?"

Joe knew that such feelings weren't to be taken lightly in Husaquahr. "What kind of feeling? Queasy? Shivers? Chills?"

"Nothin' like that exactly. I—I
said
I can't describe
it.
Like—like whoever's up there already knows we're corning. Like we're expected for dinner or something."

Joe frowned. "Well, if you're getting that kind of feeling, maybe concealing you isn't the best way, but I don't think we should give them both of us at once if it is something unfriendly. Trust me on this one. Easy, casual walk up the road and into town, but keep an eye out and play it by my signals. I've been in bad spots before."

It was Alvi's turn to doubt "It
could
just be my imagination ..."

"Probably not. Particularly when you start to doubt yourself. That's probably in the Rules someplace. Just be on guard and proceed slowly with me. No weapons. Unless we're attacked or you or I get a strong feeling of serious danger, we might just be spooking somebody unnecessarily."

It certainly didn't feel like an ambush. The tiny
town of a half dozen ramshackle wooden structures looked to have seen much
better days and to have survived mostly because the breeze off the land wasn't
quite
strong enough to blow it over the cliff. Once it had clearly been a way station for weary travelers on their way to and from the City-States and the Leander ocean resorts, but commerce, for some reason, had passed it by. From the looks of a
boarded-up well and dry troughs, it appeared either that the well had run dry—unlikely in that climate—or that it was contaminated by something that had doomed this as a rest stop. Across the road were the remains of stables, now little more than boards on crude rock foundations.