“But what are they doing here!” Mia asked him.
Joe pointed to a small compound just beyond the lines of zombies. “There. That’s the reason. This whole force is a bodyguard for whoever’s in there. Dollars to doughnuts that’s Sugasto in there with his commanders, and that the vast majority of these poor people were created on the spot, maybe over the last couple of days.”
“Then those crates near the building there—see them?” Mia pointed. “They are commercial wine crates—but there is not much wine grown in Valisandra. Even I know that.”
Marge gave a slight gasp. “That’s because those bottles have no wine in them. They’re the souls of these people!”
“We must do something,” Mia said. “We can’t just leave these poor people like this.”
“Go to fairy sight,” Marge told them. “Just concentrate and keep looking.”
They did, and slowly a complex of huge multicolored strings, crisscrossing and knotting this way and that, formed like a bubble over the whole compound, including the crates. It was the largest, most complex protective spell even Marge could remember.
“We’d never get past that,” she said firmly. “Even if we managed to evade the zombies, the Bentar, and whatever else is prowling about, there is just no way. We’d trigger something, get caught, and wind up in little bottles ourselves.” The Kauri sighed in frustration. “Short of somebody like Ruddygore, the only one who might break in there would be Macore. He even broke into Ruddygore’s vaults, remember.”
“Macore, I’m afraid, is more likely down with the dead,” Joe told her. “He passed through this region a couple of weeks ago. The innkeeper at the border remembered him.”
“It’s not much of a solution, in any event, I guess,” Marge said. “If we smashed the bottles, we’d liberate the souls but that would just allow them to pass on. The only way to restore them would be to* catch each one of them and stick the bottle down his or her throat, the way Ruddygore did with you. The trouble with that is, like Ruddygore, we’d have no way of knowing who was who, and the zombie we were trying to save would be trying to kill us for it. No, face it, it’s back to back and belly to belly at the zombie jamboree and we got to run.”
“Huh?”
“You’re too young. Zombie Jamboree: The Song That Killed Calypso by Lord Invader and his Three Penetrators. Never mind. It’s just my grave sense of humor coming up in a hopeless situation.”
“Look!” Mia cried in an excited whisper. “Someone’s coming out of the meeting place!”
Several figures, in fact. The distance was far enough that even with the Kauris’ super nightsight and eaglelike telescopic vision it was hard to make them out.
“The big guy in black’s got to be Sugasto, the old Master of the Dead himself!” Marge told them. “The others are probably his aides and military leaders—but who’s that long-haired sexy broad with him? I can’t quite get a fix on her.”
“I can’t, either,” Joe replied. “We need to get closer, and, right now, that would set off every alarm they have with them outside. Man! What I wouldn’t give for a telescopic rifle right now! Just a couple of shots and it would all be over!”
Marge wasn’t listening. “Whoever that girl is, she’s hanging all over Sugasto. Funny, I never thought he’d be interested in that kind of thing. I—oh, my God!”
It was said so sharply that it almost triggered the other two’s escape instincts. Joe calmed down, noting that a Kauri heart beat just as hard as a human one when scared. “What?” he managed.
“That girl with Sugasto! It’s Mahalo McMahon!”
“Can’t be,” Joe responded. “The Dark Baron was—” It hit him. “—in the body of Ma— Oh, my God!”
“They are together!” Marge added, stating the obvious. “For some reason, the Baron’s still in her body!”
“Could be he no longer knows how to get out of it,” Joe suggested, staring. It was the Hawaiian’s body. That was clear now. “Maybe Sugasto thinks it’s in his interest to keep the Baron like that, too. Who knows what Rules came into play?”
“Perhaps,” Mia suggested, “the Dark Baron has found that he likes being a young and attractive woman.”
“The Baron had as much interest in sex as a grapefruit does,” Joe replied. “But if that’s still him in that body, then it doesn’t matter about the rest, just as it doesn’t matter if the old bastard’s a coequal, Sugasto’s mistress, or his spiritual advisor. What it does mean is that the best mind in the history of sorcery is coupled with an incredibly powerful sorcerer. And our two most hated enemies are united and we’re walking right into their lair!”
“Uh-oh! Watch it!” Marge yelled, and all three took off as suddenly a beam of blinding yellow light emerged from the black-robed sorcerer and headed right for them.
The ledge on which they’d been standing a fraction of a second earlier exploded with a loud bang, throwing fragments of rock all over the place.
They weren’t waiting around to find out what came next, plunging rapidly over the other side toward the lowlands below.
“Look out behind and above!” Marge warned them, although they could barely hear her. From behind them, over the cliff wall, emerged a shimmering web of gold and crimson magic strings, woven tightly like a net, yet expanding like some gigantic firework. It descended rapidly now, continuing to fan out as it did so, and none of the three were sure they were going to make it when the thing finally got to their level.
Joe felt a burning sensation on his feet and legs but the thing barely brushed him, then dropped on past. Still, he felt suddenly terribly weakened, drained of energy, and was forced to the ground. He looked around, suddenly exhausted, and watched it drop just behind him and contract, singeing the ground a bit as it did so.
The other two were ahead of him; they had to have cleared it. But, man! What a hell of a piece of sorcery that was, and all extemporaneous! That guy has gotten good! he thought angrily. Too good. He looked down at the petite Kauri leg that had been just missed and saw an angry-looking welt, the kind he’d get from pressing his real leg against a hot stove.
That was the one trouble with the were curse, he thought grumpily. Only silver could really kill you, but whatever was tried still felt like the real thing and hurt like hell.
He tried to fly, but made it only a few yards before coming down again. He just didn’t have the energy. That thing, whatever it was, had drained him. He tested the leg, but even though it hurt like hell, he thought he was able to walk. How far was that place from town? Twenty miles, maybe, but that was air miles. And how far had they gotten away? He looked back at the cliff. Maybe four, five miles as the Kauri flies, tops. A long walk, and Kauris weren’t built for walking. Worse, some kind of alarm would be raised, if only because the Bentar at the roadblocks and on patrol would have seen the net spell as well and guessed the rest.
It was a vast area and he was now quite small, but if they brought in some aerial patrols of those creatures near the army camp, his pale passionate pink glow wouldn’t be hard to differentiate from the rest of the landscape. The best thing to do, he decided, was to find some cover and just lie low. Come sunup, he’d be himself again, stark naked and still grounded, but in much better shape to handle that kind of journey. He worried most about Marge and Mia. When he didn’t show up, they might well assume he got captured in the net. That would impel Mia, at least, to try and find him. He hoped that Marge could keep her from doing that.
There was the sudden sound of leathery wings high overhead, and, despite the pain, he ran for the cover of a nearby small stand of trees. The same wings that made flying so wonderful were real inhibitors in a run, catching the air and nearly pulling him off balance, but he made it. The real question was whether or not he’d been spotted from the air before he did.
This is ridiculous! he thought to himself: I’m a guy whose mortal flesh was changed by a curse into a Kauri and I have the fairy soul of a wood nymph! All that, and here I am huddling in the dark.
Wait a minute! Was there something that one of those perverted oddities might give him? There were a ton of Kauri tricks, if he knew how to do them. Unfortunately, these bodies didn’t come with owner’s manuals.
Currently, he was all fairy, and wood nymphs and Kauris were closely related. If he still had the wood nymph part, then maybe he could mate with one of these trees. It was a perfect. hiding place, but even if it were possible and he knew how to do it, there were real problems with it. Suppose it really worked and he was stuck forever as its nymph? Or worse, suppose he mistimed things and the sun came up and he changed back into Joe? Either thought was pretty ugly.
He heard horses and the shouts of men and Bentar, and there was still the sound of wings above, and they were coming closer. He tried to think, and realized that thinking what Joe would do was the wrong way to go. Joe was mortal and had quite different attributes. The real question was, what would Marge do if it were her here instead of him?
Marge, he realized suddenly, wouldn’t do anything. She’d let go, relax, clear her mind completely and with discipline keep it that way, letting the fairy part take complete control.
“Check those trees!” a Bentar snapped to subordinates, who galloped toward him.
Go blank, go blank, let instinct take over…
Slowly he pressed back into the nearest tree, backing up against the hard, tough bark.
Something gave, and the bark seemed almost spongelike, enveloping him just as the first Bentar reached the grove.
“Beat all the bushes and check those treetops!” the Bentar sergeant ordered.
“Uh—you mean climb ’em?” one of the soldiers asked.
“No, I mean flap your arms and go up and tweet like a bird!” their chief responded sarcastically. “Of course I mean climb ’em!”
Joe was enveloped in a cocoon of darkness, yet he could hear them clearly. Suddenly he felt little, painful pricks and felt a tremendous itch. With a shock, he realized that he was feeling what the tree was feeling, and the Bentar was using its clawed hands and feet and climbing! He could feel the creature on the branches above, but it was like a monkey on an elephant in comparison. The Bentar soldier poked and probed, but finally shouted down, “There’s nothing up here, sergeant!”
“This one’s clean, too!” someone else shouted from another point.
“Aw, we don’t even know what we’re lookin’ for, Sarge, or whether there’s anything to look for!” his soldier protested. “We can’t climb and poke every damned tree and bush in the place!”
“Whatever it was, it was pale red and it flew,” the sergeant responded. “I saw the aura briefly. But, yeah, you’re right. Come on down, you two! Whatever it is, it isn’t here or we’d have seen it or smelled it by now!” He snorted, then muttered, “This is no job for a soldier! If he thinks there’s something here, he should send those brainless mortals he’s got.”
The Bentar clambered down from the trees and remounted. The leathery wing sound came close enough to rustle the leaves.
“Start a sweep west of here, and let us know if you spot anything,” the sergeant shouted to the flyer. “If you do, we’ll come running, but I’m not going to waste time with this. It’s pointless!”
There was a gruff shouted response from above and then the wings flapped harder but grew swiftly fainter as it moved away. The Bentar turned on their horses and were soon gone as well.
In a few more minutes, it was as quiet as a grave again.
Joe, however, once more became a bit concerned about being trapped in the tree. Okay, I got in, now how do I get out?
And, after a moment, it came to him that you got out the same way you got in—by relaxing and willing yourself out. There was a gentle pushing, as if the matter at his back was firming up behind him and expanding, and he emerged from the tree.
He was relieved to find he was still a Kauri. That meant he was still a were and, therefore, still human, too. For all he knew, the wood nymph thing had nothing to do with it. This might well have been entirely a Kauri defense mechanism, since they were so close.
The leg no longer hurt very much. The were spell was repairing it, as it tended to repair almost anything except a silver wound.
If only that fairy soul business had been as a Kauri, he mused. Then he might have been able to accept it. Flying around, seeing the world, maybe even with Marge for company. But a wood nymph!
He was feeling better, even a bit stronger, but he didn’t want to test out his wings yet. No telling what was still around. Best to wait a bit, even if it meant he didn’t make it back before dawn. The object was to make it back at all. At least so long as he kept under cover here they were unlikely to come back and check this grove again, but it was a fair distance to the next cover.
Still, if he got back at all, it would have been worth it. The Baron in league with Sugasto again, and still in Mahalo’s sexy body! He wondered what happened to the real Mahalo McMahon. He’d totally forgotten to ask. She was stuck in the Baron’s nearly dead body the last he knew and being brought here, kept alive mostly by Ruddygore’s magic. Of course, Ruddygore had still had the Lamp at the time, so she could be anything or anybody. She’d have made an ideal Kauri, that’s for sure.
Make a wish. You can be anything and anybody you want to be. What would he do if offered that? He thought about it, and he had a lot more options than she had, because he knew Hu-saquahr and what was available here. There was a male counterpart to the Kauri someplace, he remembered hearing. It’d be nice to fly places and seduce all those troubled women, but as good as the Kauri life-style might be, it was, like most fairy lives, in the end, a pretty one-dimensional life that went on forever, never really adding new dimensions. That, more even than old friendship, was why Marge kept inviting herself along on these missions. It was a way, however limited, to do something a bit different.
The thing was, he realized that he’d just wish to be his old self again. He liked himself, his body, his image. He’d like to be smarter, or maybe wiser, and know a lot more, but, overall, he liked being Joe just fine.
Only he wasn’t Joe right now, he was a Kauri who looked and felt more like Marge. That body and those Kauri instincts were telling him right now what he needed to do to get his energy back, but he was going to trust to dawn first.
Still, it was worth risking a bit at this point to see if he could make at least most of the way back the easy way. He looked out and looked around and saw nothing close that was threatening. The wings spread, and he was airborne.
He was pretty weak, but flying, even from cover to cover, was sure better and faster than walking. By dawn, though, he still wasn’t back, and he was just too dead to go much farther. He felt sure he was beyond the first blockade, though, and knew it when he saw a ranch not far away. There was a barn there with a real hayloft, and he made for it, going in the top small door and collapsing on the hay stored there just as the first rays of the sun came over the horizon. Exhausted almost beyond endurance, he lay there, almost too tired to sleep, and watched the golden orb creep lazily up into the sky, its first warming rays coming right in the hayloft door and washing over him.
Suddenly he stirred himself up and looked down at himself. Wait a minute! This isn’t right! Then he sank back, too tired to even think straight anymore.
The sun was up and it was a bright, new day, and he was still a Kauri.
Marge was tired, too, but she wasn’t about to go to sleep yet. Mia had changed back to herself with the first rays of the sun, and she was frantic. “He is in the hands of those maniacs, I know it!” she wailed. “We must rescue him!”
Marge shook her head. “No, we can’t. I sure can’t do a damned thing now, even if I wanted to, and what the hell can you do? You go out there now, hollering that your master’s gone, and lots of things are gonna happen. First, they’ll all start checking to see if he’s still alive by touching your ring. When it’s established he is, they’ll turn you over to the military camp. The camp will put two
and two together—spies last night, a missing master this morning—and send you right up to Sugasto and the Baron. If they’ve got Joe, then they’ve got both of you, and that’s the end of that and everybody else. You saw those poor mindless zombies. In fact, they might be able to milk you for enough information to do a great Tiana. Remember, they want the palace Ti, the demigoddess Ti, and that’s the one you knew. You’d wind up plunging the whole world into darkness.”
“What can I do, then?”
“Well, I, for one, have known Joe longer than anybody here, and I think that if they had him captured they’d already be here for us. Think about it. He’s got no more resistance to common spells than you do, and about now he’d be in his human body again. He’d talk, and we’d be taken. You see any Bentar? Any soldiers coming up the stairs?”
“No.”
“Then he’s not captured. And, thanks to your ring, we know he’s not dead. I think he got hurt, maybe badly, in that mess last night—he took that dive steeper than we did.”
“But then—”
“Hear me out. He’s a were. Folks around here, even bad folks, don’t carry around silver-tipped arrows and they sure don’t shoot them at Kauris. That means his wounds, no matter what they were, kept him down for the count but that he’ll be good as new today. Look at you—not a bruise or sore spot on you! If he’s got any sense, he’ll hole up someplace, get some sleep, then start back. Since there’s another moon tonight, goodness knows what he’ll come back as, if it’s after dark, but he’ll be back.”
“Then what-?”
“I’m gonna grab some sleep because I want to be fresh tonight in case we have to do a little looking. It won’t be easy, since there’ll be open season on Kauris, but I’ve got some experience in this. You’ll stick close here because he might come back. If he’s not back by tomorrow morning, then we start panicking.”
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