Songs of the Dancing Gods (38 page)

“We aren’t going to make it.” Macore sighed wearily. “We’re just too all in, and we’re—what? Halfway, maybe, or a little more?”

“We can’t exactly do much else but press on,” Joe pointed out. “If we’re on target, to our right and left this goes on for fifty to a hundred miles, and it’s at least twenty back and maybe that forward.”

“Then we’re going to have to figure out some way to get some rest in here,” the thief responded.

“What do you suggest? Spread blankets and nod off?” the mercenary asked. “Lie on a blanket and you’ll draw Technicolor after a while, no matter what. Lie down in the snow and you might not, but the cold will transfer in through these furs and freeze our sweat.”

Macore stopped, knelt down, and examined the snow. “Maybe not. It’s very dry, powdery stuff, and there’s absolutely no wind in here. I suggest we take turns. One of the girls and one of us. We might get frostbite or worse, but if one each of us is up, we can watch over the sleepers, both for signs of freezing or any magic buildups. A blanket roll can act as a pillow, keeping the head up and our breath heading upward. I think it’s possible. On the other hand, it’s got to be possible. Otherwise we’re gonna drop one by one and get the full treatment anyway.”

“I can keep myself awake,” Joe told him, although he wasn’t all that sure he really could. “You take it first, Macore.”

“I will stay up with you, Master. I, too, can remain awake,” Mia insisted.

He shook his head. “No, Mia. I want one of the two of us at least to be in some kind of shape, and Marge is going to be a lot easier forcing herself to stay up now than in midday. Most of all, I trust you totally to keep me out of trouble while I’m out, so I might actually be able to rest; I’m not sure I’d trust Macore.”

It was a tough watch, although not particularly a boring one, as Mia would turn or shift, threatening to breathe down on the ice, only to have to be turned back, and Macore proved a fitful sleeper. Time and again there would be magical agitation starting, causing either Joe or Marge to have to make adjustments. In between, the two guardians had nothing to do but talk.

“Well,” Marge sighed, “here we are again, in the middle of it. It seems as if we keep doing it, theme and variation, over and over again. Same old challenges, same old enemies.”

He nodded. “When we started off, it felt like old times, but it’s grown old quickly,” he told her. “I’m tired, Marge. Tired of being pushed around by forces over which I have no control, tired of being the only guy who can fight this or that villain, tired of playing the game. Sooner or later, my luck’s got to run out. The worst part is, I’m almost afraid that it won’t.”

“Huh?”

He gave a long, mournful sigh. “I keep thinking of what Sugasto said about Ruddygore—that the old man was maybe thee oldest living sorcerer, that he’d been playing the game so long that he was playing it on automatic, just to keep playing, with nothing but temporary objectives. Pushing pawns around the board like us, doing it again and again. Maybe Ruddygore loves the game for its own sake, but I don’t. I know evil is always around and all that, but we small few can’t be the only ones who can fight it. We can’t be. Most heroes and heroines in the stories and legends get no more than three shots and they’re gone, happily-ever-aftering or riding off into the sunset. We just seem to be going on and on and on.”

“I know what you mean,” she admitted to him. “I’ve been doing this to relieve the routine imposed on me, but it gets riskier and riskier each time, and I have more to lose. It would be nice just to have a break. A real long break to relax and smell the flowers and maybe see a little of this big world without having always to run for it or fake it. Even Macore—the old Macore would never have gotten so hung up on this stupid Gilligan’s Island thing. He may have gone nuts over it, but it wouldn’t have been his whole life or the focus of his dreams. I just wonder if we haven’t shot our wad. The Rules tend to follow the story and legend requirements pretty well here. Usually, after great adventures, the grand epics go, there comes a time, almost always at the end of the third book, when the supervillain is vanquished, taken out. Forget that happily-ever-after stuff, though; that’s fairy tales for kids, and even the Grimm tales really were grim until Walt Disney rewrote them.”

“What are you getting at?” he asked her, feeling a bit uneasy.

“I think we’re stuck, doing this over and over again, until we take the bastards out. And I mean out. Then it’ll be some new class of villains to be set against some new set of heroes. There’s really no end of it until we die or they do.”

“Could be,” he admitted. “But—how the hell are we gonna take out a world-class sorcerer like Sugasto? And the Baron just keeps slipping away more and more. We had him in our hands, under our complete control, and let him slip away.”

“That’s the point. It was supposed to happen then. If we’d taken the Baron completely out, then and there, no matter what plots Ruddygore came up with, it would have been over for us. Sugasto is Ruddygore’s problem. He picked the S.O.B. to be an adept and then exiled him in the Lamp, rather than kill him in a wizard’s duel; then, when he needed the Lamp, Sugasto was loosed again. The Baron’s ours.”

“You ever think maybe he let the Baron go? That is, made it possible?”

“Huh? Why?”

“To keep us in. To keep from having to go against Sugasto with a green crew. And, most important, because I am the only one the Rules will allow to meet this threat. I’m not going to make that mistake again, though. If I ever have another crack at the Baron, it’s him or me.”

“You’ll get that crack. You’ll both keep getting at each other until one of you goes. That’s the system. The trouble is, even if we get him, it’s not necessarily happy-ending time.”

“What do you mean?”

“From King Arthur to Bilbo Baggins, when the ultimate evil in a world is vanquished, it’s after the good guys have given all they can. Even the ones that pull through have had it. They always seem to wind up sleeping beneath a hill, like Barbarossa, or sailing off into the mists toward some Old Heroes Retirement Haven, whether they’re human or fairy. They Ve done their bit, they’re tired and worn, and they just want out. Isn’t that what you were saying?”

He nodded. “Sort of. I don’t necessarily want out of life, though—I’ve got a son, after all, and somebody I love. I just want out of the game.”

She nodded. “I just wish I could shake the feeling I’ve had since Ruddygore’s place that the buy-out is pretty damned heavy.”

“You’re Little Miss Gloom and Doom this morning, aren’t you? Now I’m really not looking forward to this!”

The system did work, and when the sun was nearly overhead, they awoke the sleepers, detailed their own problems in watching over them, then tried it themselves. By dusk, all of them had at least some decent sleep and without real incident, although Mia had to admit quietly to Joe that it was well that she was a slave devoted to her master; otherwise, she would have killed Macore long before he got to recounting Episode Forty-One.

Although all of them still felt tired and physically wrecked, they made the other side shortly before dawn the next morning, to find that they were less than three miles south of the palace complex. Shrouded in clouds and mist, it was an imposing place, less a palace than a true island with a massive building at its center. It rose, black and forbidding, out of the ice, a massive volcanic cinder cone, with hissing fumaroles and geysers occasionally shooting from its flanks. It wasn’t all that much above the ice pack—perhaps twenty or thirty feet—but it was a clear oasis.

“Odd. I always thought of volcanoes as two miles high and snow-capped,” Marge remarked. “Still, Hawaii is a bunch of volcanoes and much of it seems fairly low. That’s because you’re only seeing the top of the volcano; the other couple of miles are underwater. It might be that much of that is really under the ice.”

Macore nodded. “I keep wondering about its relation to the Devastation. It’s so close, yet its great heat stops at the ice. It’s as if all the heat that was removed from that great inland sea to freeze it was somehow stored up here.”

Joe pointed through the mists of dawn at towers rising from the fog-shrouded island. “Well, there’s the palace. Tons of magic in there. God! You try it with fairy sight and all you get is night time again!”

Mia looked around. “I am more curious as to why there are no guards, Master, or terrible traps.”

Macore shrugged it off. “Nobody,” he said, “is supposed to get this far. When you build a fortified wall and fill it with every defense imaginable, you don’t also stick alarms and forts all over the inside. We’ve bypassed their impregnable defensive rings, which, I’ve no doubt, are nearly that. But the Rules always provide a blind spot. Don’t get cocky, though! Joe’s right—that place is black as pitch on the magical level. It’ll have its own internal security staff and gimmicks. Trip one and it’ll bring the full powers of both sword and sorcery down on us with nowhere to escape.” He looked at the place. “I wonder where they’d put my video gear?”

“Gear second, Macore,” Joe told him. “The bodies first. If we don’t get the bodies, the rest, your gear, our necks, won’t matter. The odds are, too, that those bodies will be inhabited by somebody and those bodies will have the capabilities we had, so they’ll be excellent fighting machines and well-guarded to boot. Once we finish them, then we’ll try for your gear.”

“Uh-uh. You do your business, I do mine. Once you do in those bodies, all hell will literally break loose, and I’ll have no chance. Once we’re inside, we’re no longer a company. You three go your way, I’ll go mine. If I can help, I will, but that’s as far as it goes.”

There was no reasoning with him on that, and Joe was frozen stiff. Taking advantage of the clouds of steam and fog and the cover that the time just before dawn still gave, they moved toward the massive black region.

The moment they stepped onto it, they knew they were in a different realm. Surrounded by ice, the island, perhaps a half mile around, felt as warm and tropical as back home in a Marquewood summer. For the first time, Joe and Macore both felt the effects of painful frostbite on their faces. They forced themselves to ignore it as much as possible, and Joe, at least, knew that healing would be rapid, thanks to his were curse. He still had a bloody area in his coat and under it where the crossbow bolt had struck, but already there was no sign of a puncture at the skin.

“We’re gonna have to stash these furs,” Macore noted. “I’m starting toward ‘well done’ already, and they slow me down. I’d say we pick a spot in these rocks and try to conceal them. We may need them again, if we have to take the backdoor out of here.”

Everyone was surprised to discover that, under it all, Macore wore his gun-metal gray thiefs outfit. It was patched and well worn, but it looked like the old Macore once more.

“I stole it back, too,” he explained. “I wouldn’t feel exactly me without it, and it’s a bit of a walk to the nearest tailor’s.”

“I wish I’d thought of that,” Joe admitted. “It looks like I’m going to make my play wearing just a sword and swordbelt. I don’t even think the boots are a good idea. For one thing, they’re getting very soggy now that they’re warm and, for another, they’ll make noise and give little traction up here. Still, I’m gonna be pretty damned embarrassed if I get into a fight.” He looked at Mia and grinned. “Now we are a pair, aren’t we?”

Clothing secured, they began moving up the slope, quietly, low to the ground. Marge signaled a halt, then flexed and un-flexed her wings. “Stay here a couple of minutes,” she whispered. “Let me check out what’s” around.”

“Be careful!” Joe warned. “They see or detect you and it’s all over.”

She nodded, then rose into the air, circled around, and was gone into the mist. She was gone only a minute or two, then came back beside them. “Feels like a Turkish bath on the top there. From the humidity, I can guess the heat. Up top are formal gardens of some kind all organized around thermal pools. It’s very pretty, really. There’s some statues of various Hypboreyan gods in the gardens and I’d watch out for ‘em. They all felt magically ‘hot,’ as it were. The gardens lead to the palace itself, first to a kind of porch with some fancy pools that seem built like Jacuzzis. Beyond those are arches that take you right inside the place.”

“Any guards?” Joe asked.

“Two bored-looking Bentar. Not like soldiers—just sort of wandering around like night watchmen. Careful, though. They have swords on, and, remember, only iron can hurt them. I’d steer clear if I could, though. The sounds of a swordfight this early will bring lots of folks running, and the Bentar can screech like mad if they’re hurt.”

Mia had her knife in her hand, but as they moved over the top and onto the gardens, she held it for a while in her teeth. The blade was an iron alloy; it would harm Bentar, but not easily.

The gardens truly were beautiful, a tropical Eden surrounded by the ice just beyond. Exotic trees and bushes were planted all over in a masterwork of royal gardening that obviously supplied the palace and also was in its own way a work of art.

If the gardens were Eden, then the statues placed here and there through them were Hell. Ugly, monstrous gods, on pedestals, each with its own small altar. Demonic figures, some reptilian, some ghastly distortions of the familiar, some with bat wings, and a few just indescribably loathsome. A statue for each main tribal god of any of the Hypboreyans, obviously, all gathered here for equal homage before the ruling family in a grotesque symbol of national unity.

Joe stared at one particularly vicious-looking doglike thing and thought, Now at least I know where the Hypboreyans get their sunny dispositions.

Still, Hypboreya was supposed to be a harsh land, requiring a particularly tough and ruthless breed to tame and keep tamed. Such people bred their own gods in their own images. They all felt what Marge had felt looking at the things. It was as if those grotesque miniatures were somehow alive, aware of them, and looking at them with malice. They gave them a wide berth.

There was the sudden sound of someone walking toward them from the direction of the palace, and they were immediately behind the hedges and in the bushes on both sides. Pretty soon a Bentar appeared, looking, as predicted, bored and sleepy. He was wearing a spiffier uniform than the regular troops, possibly a palace uniform, and wore a gold-encrusted sword and carried a bronze-tipped wooden pike, which he was using almost as an idle cane or walking stick. Joe’s hand went to Irving’s hilt, but he did not draw. One motion, he thought, directing that thought to the sword. There must be no unnecessary noise.