“I can do the clean and make up, Master. I used to be a maid, you remember.”
“Good.” He looked down at the sleeping Marge. “How would you like to fly?”
It felt kind of silly and looked sillier, all three of them there sitting on the floor, Mia to the left of Marge and holding her left hand, and Joe to the right of the Kauri, holding her right hand.
The curse of the were was a curse of the blood; by blood was it transmitted and by blood was it carried and held. Almost all of such curses were specific to some animal or demonic form, but there was a very rare form in which the last part of the curse’s spell had somehow been miswritten or garbled when first applied. Upon the nights of the full moon, such a one was transformed until either morning or moonset. But, since only half the curse was truly operable, at this mystic moment, both Joe and Tiana would turn into the nearest living animal, and remain that way until either moonset or dawn, whichever came first.
Although the faerie were neither human nor animal in the scientific sense, they qualified under the curse, as Joe had discovered more than once.
“It’s getting pretty boring,” Joe said grumpily, “and it’s pretty dark out there. Are you sure about this night, Marge?”
“I’m sure. Moonrise is a little late tonight. Any time now.”
“I truly hope so, my lady,” Mia sighed. “I am sitting on a particularly painful bruise.”
“Don’t worry about that. Weres are particularly fast healers,” Marge noted. “I remember hearing about one who had his head chopped through with an ax. The ax went through and. came out bloody, but aside from a scar that faded in a few days and a bad sore throat, he was no worse for wear. Scared the bejezus out of everybody and made a legend.”
“Did he get away?” Joe asked, not having heard that one.
“No. Somebody found an ornamental pole with a silver tip. Drove it right through him, poor guy.”
Joe was about to say something as soon as he could think what it was, when, suddenly, as the moon cleared the horizon opposite the window, it happened.
Joe felt a sudden dizziness and blurring of vision and thought, then a series of strange sensations as parts of him seemed to grow or contract or do other such things.
And, on the floor of the room, now sat three absolutely identical Kauris, holding hands. So identical were they, in fact, that not even another Kauri could tell them apart, save that Mia’s collar hung loosely around her neck. She let go of Marge and shook her wrists, and the two bracelets fell to the floor, then did the same with the anklets. Her collar, however, would have to remain uncomfortably on. Her head just wasn’t sufficiently smaller than her normal one to permit that.
And although her pierced earrings fell through the flesh to the floor, the ring still remained in her nose.
They hadn’t thought of that, but it seemed logical. Ruddygore said that, once in, nothing save death could remove ft.
Marge looked at it critically. “Huh! The only Kauri slave in all history! I hope that doesn’t set a precedent.”
“It won’t,” Joe responded, in a voice absolutely identical to Marge’s. “I think at least we’ll find that the ring has no effect.”
“You are right!” Mia said, delighted. “You are not my master or mistress or whatever it means for now.”
“Only temporarily,” Joe reminded her. “Jeez. The last time I was turned female I was embarrassed as hell. This just feels like a different suit of clothes. Maybe I’m finally getting able to handle almost anything.”
“I—I have never been of faerie before,” Mia commented. “It does not feel all that different. I wish I could keep these breasts, though.” She reached up and touched the back of her head. “And hair again!”
“You want different?” Joe responded. “Try a whole new set of muscles along your back you never had before.”
“Well, we can all sit in here and gab, or we can have a little fun,” Marge said. “Let me put out the light.” She went over and blew out the oil lamp.
“But it’s so dark—” Mia began, then stopped, her words ending with a gasp. It wasn’t dark. Everything was so clear, so sharp, so detailed! And the other two, they were softly glowing, a beautiful pastel reddish pink.
No, there was a difference, but very slight, in Joe’s glow, almost as if there was some green which the reddish glow did not quite mask.
“Been so long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to see human,” Marge commented. “The main thing to remember, though, is to think only about those things that need thinking about, like where you’re goin’ and what you wanna do. Let the body do what it does naturally and don’t fight it. Guide, but let the body do the work.” She went over to the window. “Everybody ready?”
“But I have never flown before—on my own wings!”
“Just get up on the windowsill, look where you’re goin’ —that’s the important part—and kick off!” Marge said, disappearing out the window.
“Go ahead,” Joe urged her. “It’s just your mental conditioning getting in the way. I was the same way once myself.” He got her up on the windowsill, but she looked out and got really nervous.
Suddenly, Joe pushed her behind, and out she went. For a moment, she felt as if she were falling, but, suddenly, she felt the flap of the wings on her back and soared upward.
Marge was suddenly beside her. “Relax, let the wings do the work,” she cautioned. “Don’t even think about them. Justly.”
Now Joe was beside her, too, and they were up, up in the night sky, far over the town.
Once she learned to let go and relax, it became almost second nature to fly. It was wonderful, one of the greatest feelings she’d ever known!
The landscape spread out all around her, but it looked quite different, not only because of the aerial perspective but also because of additional sights and information she was now receiving. Somehow, she instantly knew where she was in relation to anything else she could see, and just exactly how far it was to any point from there. While it was clearly dark, everything was easily visible in great detail, and much that was not seen by human eyes was visible, too. The very air had slight, subtle coloration and texture, and tiny sparklies of varying colors moved along, saying exactly where the air was moving, and how fast.
Areas of forest and field and far-off mountains also had their own strange patterns. Complex patterns, mostly, like tiny spi-derweblike strings of every color, intensity, and hue, and in and around areas where nothing should be there were patches of various pastel blobs in a variety of sizes.
It was beautiful.
“Fairy sight,” Joe told her. “The strings are spells, magic and sorcery of some sort. The blobs are living things, creatures mostly of faerie. Although we’re a sort of soft red, in general watch out for the reds and yellows and whites. They tend to be on the darker side of faerie. The blues and greens tend to be almost always to the good, the rest sort of in-betweens. Don’t take them for granted, though. As the Kauri are reds, and not evil, so, too, are there exceptions to all the Rules.”
“The reason why they call the darkest magic black is that it is,” Marge told her. “And black strings and blobs blend in and can’t be so easily seen until it’s too late. If you ever see any sort of blackness and suspect it might have moved, ever so slightly, stay away! Don’t depend on fairy flesh or the were curse to save you—there are things far worse than death. Just imagine something eating you alive… forever.”
The point was well taken, although, in truth, as weres they were better protected than Marge.
“Let’s go over to the military encampment first,” Joe suggested. “It’s likely to have fewer defenses from ones like us than the other place where the bigwigs are, and I want to see just what the hell they’re training for.”
It was becoming easier by the moment. You just picked some sparklies that were going in the general direction you wanted and got into their flow. Only when you had no lifting aid from the air did you work at it, and it quickly was b
ecoming automatic, even at that.
“Remember,” Marge warned, “we’re just about incapable of an offense, so, if you run into anything, fly or run like hell. If you can’t, let me handle it and go along with whatever I do, no matter how idiotic it looks to you. There are a few things only experience can tell you.”
From this height, you could see the military camp clearly, even at this distance. It was huge, with tents and temporary structures all over the place, some going all the way out to the horizon.
A lot of the Valisandran army was there, much of it bedding down for the night, but both Joe and Mia were struck by the enormous waves of feelings coming from the camp. Enormous waves of loneliness, unhappiness, even despair, and, over all, an atmosphere of terrible fear you could almost see. It was almost too much for Mia to handle, and she fought back tears. “Those poor guys,” she sympathized.
“Yeah, you really get the weight of the world as a Kauri.” Marge sighed. “After a while, though, you get to handle most anything. To me, that’s the biggest banquet hall I ever did see.”
“Yes, but how do you feed on it?” Mia asked, and, almost immediately, her body told her. “Ohhh…” she managed.
“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t feel hungry right now,” Marge told her, “because I’ve had no problems getting energy around this place and you got what I got. Maybe tomorrow night. It just seems normal only you get a whole extra body kick to it and, instead of being tired at the end, you’re rarin’ to go.”
Joe ignored the interchange, far more interested in the lay of the land. “There’s the centaurs there. Big, mean-looking suckers, aren’t they? They’d be like mounted archers that could hit a target at a couple of hundred yards, I bet. And over there, off by themselves… Bentar! I knew those bastards would be here someplace!”
The Bentar were the fiercest race of fighting fairies, totally without mercy, conscience, or any moral sense at all. Their tall, grim visages were at once like a bird of prey and yet oddly reptilian, with mean eyes that reflected the light. You didn’t need fairy sight to know those were real sons of bitches down there.
“I don’t understand it,” Marge said, shaking her head. “It looks as if they’re assembling something the size of the Battle of Sorrow’s Gorge, yet where’s the heavy stuff? The big catapults and siege machines and all the rest and the second army on wheels with all the supplies?”
Joe thought it over. “The only reason you’d have something like this without those things is if you didn’t think you were going to need them,” he replied. “That’s not an army of conquest being assembled down there—it’s an army of occupation.”
Mia looked out over the assemblage and to the stars beyond, and, quite suddenly, a few of the stars winked out, then on again, then others did the same.
“Black shapes!” she warned. “Coming in fast from the plain! Flying!”
“Scatter!” Marge shouted. “Rendezvous back on the hotel roof!”
The concept of being eaten alive forever hadn’t lingered far from Mia’s consciousness. She was off like a shot.
The Kauri, it was true, had no offense at all, but they were by no means helpless. In addition to Marge’s bag of illusory magic tricks, they were very light and very, very fast when they needed to be, and had a flight instinct second to none. There were some birds and tiny fairies, like pixies, that could match them in speed, but for both speed and distance they were virtually unequaled.
Mia rose, caught a fast current, and made six or seven miles from the military camp to the hotel roof in no more than seven minutes, a sprint that, she suddenly realized, meant she’d made something like sixty miles an hour! And she’d done it without really thinking at all!
Incredibly impressed with herself, she was equally amazed to find that Joe had beaten her.
“It’s the collar,” he said. “Probably slowed you down a bit. And, yeah, I’m impressed, too. I never knew she could do that. And we’re not even breathing particularly hard!” He looked around and frowned. “But where is Marge?”
They waited worriedly for several minutes. Finally, the real Kauri arrived, but not from the direction of camp, flying low.
“Sorry, but I figured I’d give ’em something to chase in the wrong direction. They’re pretty slow, relatively speaking. I had actually to slow down so I wouldn’t lose ’em until I was ready to.”
“What were they?” Joe asked, looking around at the sky.
“Nazga. All leathery wings and teeth and hard as a rock. Not too bright on their own, though, and one of ’em had riders. Odds were they were just told to patrol for flying intruders as a routine thing.”
“I’m not so sure about that other gathering now,” Joe said worriedly. “They’ll have a lot more security there than at the camp, and it’s possible they may be warned about us.”
“Aw, I doubt if those flying stomachs will bother warning anybody. They have enough trouble remembering their own names,” Marge replied. “But, you’re right. They’ll have a lot more security. I’m still game, though, if you are.”
Joe sat back on the rooftop and sighed. Mia looked at him and couldn’t get over how naturally feminine the moves and manner of the big macho man were as a Kauri. The fact that it was still his methodical fighting man’s mind speaking actually just gave his form real strength.
In fact, except for the slight difference in accent and choice of words, Joe, as a Kauri, seemed just like Marge.
“All right,” he said at last. “But we don’t push it. If we can’t get near, then we can’t get near. Understood?”
They both nodded.
“And, in any event,” he reminded them, “we’d better be back well before dawn.”
Mia looked at the horizon. “But where do we look for them?” she asked.
“We follow the road, of course,” he answered. “If they’ve got it blocked north, then it’s got to lead where they don’t want anyone going.”
They hadn’t flown on long before Mia said, “There’s a slight fog of some kind. You can see all right, but it’s like a thin, dark film over everything.”
“That’s been there since we entered this vile land,” Marge responded. “It’s just that you hadn’t had anything to contrast it with before. Now it’s getting more dense.”
“What is it?” Mia asked, curious.
“It is evil,” Marge told her. “It is the cloak of pure evil.” The Kauri felt no heat or cold, but Mia still felt a very real chill go through her. “It seems to come from the northwest,” she noted.
“Yes,” Joe agreed. “From Hypboreya.”
They passed over some military roadblocks, Joe noting that all the guards were Bentar. Clearly, if you got this far, you weren’t just going to be turned around with a warning. If you were lucky, the creatures from the dark side of faerie would kill you.
Beyond the roadblocks they flew low to the ground, hoping to avoid any faster and more efficient flying sentinels. Marge, who had all the experience in this sort of thing, took the lead, as the road and ground rose sharply in a series of switchbacks leading up the side of the great plateau. On a tiny ledge, Marge settled and the other two joined her.
“Well,” she said, “there it is.”
Below them were possibly the darkest forces in the service of Hypboreya, lined up as if for inspection, more immobile than any such armed force could possibly be. An army of the living dead.
“They look in a lot better shape than that crew Sugasto had around him the last time I had a run-in with him,” Marge commented.
“Those were reanimated corpses,” Joe reminded her. “Their value is as much psychological as anything, as you proved. Even a Kauri can kick their face in. I would doubt if they could handle the reanimation without a real expert sorcerer in the immediate neighborhood to keep them moving and direct their every action. These people below us are corpses, in a way, but they’re not dead. These are people whose souls he’s stolen and got bottled up somewhere, but whose bodies keep on. No souls, but with t
he rest of their brains keeping their bodies going, maybe even some of their skills, just no way to use them. They don’t think, but they can obey even complex commands.”
Mia was appalled. “There are thousands of them! Both men and women, too! Even children in some of those brigades! How monstrous!”
Joe nodded. “That’s why they’re so confident. They can probably send small numbers of these, mixed by age and sex, into various parts of Marquewood and maybe beyond. They’d have to be fed, of course, but they wouldn’t care what they ate. And, for whatever reason, their masters could send them anywhere, to do just about anything. There, Mia, is the step below slaves, doing whatever they’re told, knowing nothing, feeling nothing.”
“It’s the sickest thing I ever saw!” Marge commented. “It’s turning people into—robots. Machines.”
“Will they do that to their whole army?” Mia asked, sickened. “Those boys…”
“No, I doubt it,” Joe reassured her. “For one thing, a power like this is unique. The power to do this is also the power to pull the swaps. If you had that kind of power, would you let all your underlings know it? Who would you trust? Even Sugasto has to sleep sometime, have guards, servants. How would he know who to trust? Uh-uh. The Master of Dead would die himself before he’d let that secret out to anybody.”
“Except the Dark Baron,” Marge reminded him. “Remember, Boquillas pulled that trick, too, back on Earth.”
“Yeah, but only with help. He has no real power of his own, remember. I don’t know if Sugasto told him, or if he simply figured it out after seeing it done. He’s that smart. And, remember, he had a way so that even Dacaro, who was working the thing for him, couldn’t figure it out himself, and Ruddygore said the Baron purged his mind of the mechanism to prevent it getting out. So, it’s Sugasto. That means our Master of the Dead did all that handiwork himself down there. Others can control and work them, of course, but only he can make a zombie.”
“That’s what your old body is or was like then,” Marge noted.
He nodded. “But he’ll need more than animation, more than programming, and more than just a good actor to pull off his scheme. The government knew we weren’t coming back and was glad to get rid of us, I think. They couldn’t oppose our return, but they’d assassinate both if they had the slightest suspicion they were being had.”
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