Songs of the Dancing Gods (44 page)

He didn’t see Marge on the porch, but the whole place was a mob scene as it was, and he couldn’t blame her. At the moment, it was everybody for him or her or itself, and the safest place to be was out there, on the ice.

Suddenly there was the sound of doom, like horrible drums from the depths of the earth, beating an awful time. It seemed not to be coming from the Devastation, which now had its own jet of furious steam, but from behind, from the direction away from the battlefield. Kicking away some panicky people, Tiana climbed up on the wall and looked out, trying to see what was making the eerie, rhythmic sounds. And when he did see, he knew indeed that this was all some horrible nightmare, that he’d gone totally and completely insane.

Either that, or a Danish naval coast guard icebreaker was coming toward the palace, propelled by the furious slashing of massive oars sticking out of holes cut in the hull.

“It’s Ruddygore!” Marge shouted in the air above Tiana with undisguised glee.

Sure enough, there was the huge sorcerer, resplendent in his Grand Master’s robes, sitting in something like a throne right at the bow.

The ship stopped, and the entire thronelike chair rose into the air and deposited itself, and the sorcerer, gently onto the ice.

Throckmorton P. Ruddygore looked over at the smoking area of the Devastation and muttered, “Oh, my! This might well be ugly!” Then he got up and began walking regally over the snow and ice toward the black island and its palace.

The fleeing castle personnel, whether human, Bentar, or something else, soldier and slave alike, gave way before him, keeping a fearful distance. Tiana suddenly found himself alone atop the wall.

Ruddygore spotted him. “Hello! Where’s Sugasto?”

“Haven’t seen him since last night,” Tiana called back.

“Ruddygore!” Marge screamed, practically flying into him and bowling him over. “Late, as usual!”

“Not at all,” the sorcerer replied. “Until either the bodies were destroyed or Boquillas died, or both, I was powerless to alter events. Even I couldn’t do them in, you see. But now, now that the Baron is ashes, it’s no longer your business to close this affair, but mine. Mine—and Sugasto’s.”

“He’s the new young gun, Pard,” she responded. “You think you can take him?”

Ruddygore always looked to her like Santa Claus, but the expression on his face now was anything but cheery or merry. It was the kind of look that froze brave men, and sent everyone running.

“There’s only one way to find out,” he said softly. “The Baron is dead. The Council will back only one of us now.”

He walked up the black slope and into the garden area. As he reached it, an idol like a great hooded cobra suddenly wriggled, as if corning to life, and hissed at him.

He hissed back at it, and it was engulfed in fire.

“Sugasto! ” he called in his booming voice, the call echoing throughout the complex. “Sugasto! Come! It is finally our time!”

“Over here, fat man!” came a response, and they all looked and saw the Master of the Dead in his full black robes, standing on the far side of the porch.

“What say we meet on the ice?” Ruddygore suggested calmly. “Less chance of debris and more open space. Besides, we might have to tend to a bit of other business over there before we square off.”

Sugasto nodded. “The ice it is. But I fear nothing coming from that pit. The horrors frozen there fought my sort of fight.”

Marge felt exhausted, but she wasn’t about to miss this. As the assembled soldiers and staff stepped back to watch, forming almost an audience, Tiana got down from his perch and walked up to Marge, now standing at the other end of the porch looking out at the ice.

“What are they going to do?” he asked the Kauri.

“Wizard’s battle,” she responded. “It’s required by the Rules, I think, anyway, to end this sort of stuff.”

“He will win, will he not? Ruddygore, I mean.”

She shook her head. “I dunno. I keep looking at that steam over there. You can’t see it—yet. But magical strings are forming shapes behind that mist, ugly shapes. And Ruddygore lacks the killer instinct. Remember Boquillas.”

Between the wall of steam and the palace island was the broad expanse of ice. Now the two figures, both looking rather small against its plain backdrop, faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet, like two gunfighters in some bleak frontier showdown.

“I didn’t teach you everything, Sugasto,” Ruddygore noted.

“All that time in the madness of the djinn where you sent me wasn’t wasted, either, old man,” the Master of the Dead responded. “As you have already seen.”

“Your zombies are of little use to you now,” the big man said. “And you’ll not find my soul so easy to pluck.”

Sugasto’s hand went up, and an enormous ball of the blackest magic flew toward Ruddygore. Ruddygore responded with a massive, almost blinding flash of light that banished it.

“I saw that!” Tiana exclaimed.

“They’re just warming up, feeling each other out,” Marge told him. “I’m more worried about something else. I just figured out why Sugasto was so pleased to have this fight where it is. Every time they hurl something, either one, more power builds behind the mist, more incredible magic rushes in and solidifies.”

Now both sorcerers let loose huge spells that met in the middle, and the entire area between them was awash in color, like a giant, jagged splotch of varicolored paints, the colors mixing and swirling and oozing around, forming shapes. Fierce, lion-like things, and things like some horrible nightmare of bears, against demonic shapes, ugly, serpentine, and gargoylelike, all roaring their fury and going at each other as the two men, like puppeteers, kept moving their hands and arms in fantastic, gyrating motions.

“I wonder what it seems like to them?” Tiana breathed.

Upon a vast plain of crackling, multicolored energy, the two protagonists stood not as people but as thoughts or expressions, each with his own distinctive colors. Thrust, parry, thrust again, done with the speed of thought, and with any of the weapons the imagination could supply; this was the plane of the wizard’s battle.

“The djinn prepares you well for this, old man,” Sugasto taunted. “Planes of madness, without rules, without form, until you give it thus.”

An enormous demonic monster materialized, pouncing with a horrible roar upon Ruddygore. The big man became a massive mouth, all teeth and gullet, swallowing the creature and not resisting a very large burp!

“True, my boy, but I’ve been there since last you were!” Ruddygore responded.

Massive energy, all blues and greens and bright orange for strength, flashed out from the big man and took form; a great squidlike horror whose tentacles reached out and threatened to grab the brilliant will-o’-the-wisp that was Sugasto.

The man in black became a giant, whirling blade, cutting the tentacles like salami, stacking them up in uneven piles.

“You’re every bit as good as the potential I saw in you when you were just a lad,” Ruddygore noted. “You still lack imagination, though.”

“Imagination! Fine talk from a man who plays the game so incessantly that he has forgotten why the game is played at all!”

“You never understood, Sugasto, and that was your tragedy,” the big man responded. “The lust for power, the god complex, has consumed you. You would be a god or the devil himself, yet those are the worst jobs in all Creation, for they are the loneliest. Let us stop this childish playing, Sugasto. Let me show you your victory! Let me give you your vision of the new world!”

There was blackness, blackness all around, and the man in black was falling, falling down an endless hole. There was no top, no bottom, no sides, only blackness, falling forever. There was no one to catch him, no one to save him, no one even to sympathize. He was utterly, completely alone, falling forever.

No! There were others around him! Almost in terror, he reached out for them, drew them to him with his mighty power. Yes! Lots of people! They whirled with him, falling in the darkness, and he could see them, millions of them; men, women, children, all with glazed eyes and vacant stares, all without minds, without souls. …

Sugasto screamed.

From the porch, Marge pointed to the figure of the man in black. “He’s staggering! He’s down! Way to go, Ruddygore!”

But at the moment of victory, there came an ominous rumbling from the still steaming edge of the Devastation. Suddenly, the ice trembled, and huge fissures opened, coming outward in the direction of both sorcerers, the crack coming between them.

It was so unexpected that Ruddygore was knocked off his feet and off his concentration, allowing a weakened Sugasto some breathing room.

And then, suddenly, rising from the ice between the two wizards, emerged a monstrous head, with huge, glaring eyes, nostrils that snorted smoke and fire, and fangs dripping with the ichor of doom. Dragonlike, it was more than a dragon, it was the horrible face of all that was feared in dragons.

A second opening, then a second head, even more frightening and hideous than the first, appeared, snorted, and looked around. Now, yet a third appeared, and a small part of the body as well, showing the monster, fully thirty feet high, its three heads taking in the scene, looking as if it could devour them all. The castle crowd, once an audience, began running over the ice, away from the three-headed nightmare from the Devastation, but the sorcerers could not run.

Sugasto looked up and saw it, and smiled evilly. Getting to his feet as best he could, he pointed to Ruddygore who was still down, but struggling to get up.

“Creature of evil from times past, I charge thee destroy in the name of our same master whose reign from Hell is secure. Devour him who would stop our master’s plan!” the man in black intoned, pointing at Ruddygore.

For a moment all three heads looked slightly puzzled, although they appeared to have understood; then, suddenly, long necks turned as one toward Ruddygore, just getting to his feet, and three sets of horrible, gaping jaws whose fangs were larger than the white-bearded sorcerer, came down for him.

CHAPTER 14

SWAN SONG FOR HEROES

That is not dead which can eternal lie; And in strange eons, even death may die. —The Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred

SERPENTINE HEADS FROM THE THREE-HEADED GORGON LOOMED nightmarishly over the suddenly very small, frail figure of Ruddygore. One of the heads licked its chops with a horrendous forked tongue and made to go down for the figure. Suddenly, it stopped, its eyes wide.

“Why, it can’t be!” the left head exclaimed. It swooped down and examined Ruddygore almost like a specimen in a jar. The right head followed.

“It is! It is!” the right head cried. “Look! It’s young Muloch, all grown up and become a real sorcerer!”

“No!” the middle head exclaimed. “And yet—yes, you just might be right!”

The heads jerked around in rare unison until three sets of flaming, flaring nostrils were right in front of Ruddygore as he struggled to his feet.

“Hello, boys!” he managed. “Good to see you! It’s Ruddygore these days.”

Sugasto stood, wide-eyed, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. “Destroy him! Eat him!” he screamed.

“Who’s that boorish little prick?” the left head roared.

“He’s very loud,” the center head noted.

“And most uncivil,” the right head chimed in.

“An old student of mine who got ambitious,” Ruddygore told it or them. “The sort who wonders too early why he should be taking lessons from an old fart when he knows, or thinks he knows, more than his teacher.”

“Can we eat him?” the right head asked.

“Oooh! Let’s!” the left head responded.

The center head looked at Ruddygore, who turned up his arms in an exaggerated “I-don’t-care” shrug.

“All right, lads! At him, then!” the center head cried.

Sugasto unfroze and started running for the palace and solid ground.

“Oh, what fun!” the left head said.

“Yes, it’s always much more fun when they run!” the right agreed.

Sugasto made it to the black, warm earth and scrambled up, the gorgon not far behind him. He reached the top not far from Marge and Tiana, and suddenly froze again.

Legions of blank-eyed zombies blocked his path.

Macore was singing the Gilligan’s Island song to them from the wall. He pointed. “There he is! There’s the one who broke it! Com’on, little buddies! At ‘em!”

Sugasto stared and raised his hand. “Back! Back! I am the Master of the Dead! Obey me!”

But they continued to stare vacantly, blocking his way up, and, from behind him the center head of the gorgon came down and seized him in its jaws, then lifted him, screaming, by its mouth.

The other two heads started objecting and tearing into the sorcerer, who soon stopped struggling. The center head coiled, like a spring, then let go, tossing Sugasto high in the air, the heads jockeying for position as he came down.

“I’ve got him!”

“No you haven’t! I’ve got him!”

But he went right down the center head’s gullet, and that head suddenly had an incredibly pleased look about its grisly self.

“No fair! You cheated!” the right head complained.

“Yes, you were the one who threw him up, and you knew how hard and how far,” the left head commiserated.

“Well, what do you want me to do?” the center head huffed. “Regurgitate him so you can have a second shot?”

“After all this time in this crazy world,” Marge commented, “I thought I’d seen it all and couldn’t be surprised by anything anymore.” She shook her head in wonder. “Boy, was I wrong about that!”

Marge and Tiana turned from this argument to Macore, who was standing below before an audience of the living dead.

“Macore! How did you do it?” Tiana called to him.

He shrugged sheepishly. “I dunno. I made a run for it when the buildings started shaking, then decided to see if I could at least save some of the tapes. There they were, all staring at this busted television. When I came in, they turned on me. Surrounded by zombies, there was nothing else I could think to do, so I started singing, and they followed me out! Somehow, in their dim brains, I think they think I’m Gilligan!”