“You’re sure he was a spy?”
“What else could he be? He’s too crazy now even to make enough sense to create a story, but there’s no other reason for coming here—unless your story is true, or unless he was someone who heard that there were only women on rear picket duty and thought he was going to have a field day.”
His eyebrows rose. “There are only women here?”
“Women and slaves to do the drudge work, and by law the slaves are all eunuchs. Why? You getting any ideas?”
“Nothing personal, but not along those lines,” he assured her, trying to sound both safe and not insulting. “When the, Master of the Dead personally orders you to do something, you don’t really think about much else.”
“Maybe,” she responded a bit suspiciously.
“I’d like to see that prisoner, though,” he told her. “I’ll leave my sword and stuff here. I just want to see what sort of person would come up here unauthorized. Having done a fair amount of spying in the south, I might have come across somebody that nervy.”
She shrugged. “All he does is sit and sing this bizarre chant in some alien tongue. You can see him, but no tricks. All of us are experts with bow arid crossbow and some of us are fine swordswomen. Not to mention that we have our own means of magical protections and can have the forces of true Darkness down on this place like a shot.”
“I’m not the enemy, damn it!” He unbuckled his sword and left it on her desk, then followed her back. “Besides, if you have anybody who can read the signatures of spells, have them check my slave. One of her spells is from the Master of the Dead himself.”
There was a small back area to the cabin, and she took a large set of keys on a master ring from a safe, then unlocked the rear door. Inside was a narrow outer area just wide enough to stand and not be grabbed by anybody inside, then a small single cell with thick bars.
Inside a small figure sat, stripped naked so that even if he could break out he’d freeze before getting very far. He was sitting on the bunk staring up at the ceiling in the semi-gloom and singing softly.
The man on the bunk looked over and saw Joe, and his eyes brightened. For a moment, Joe was afraid that his cover would be blown, but instead the little man yelled, “Skipper! YouVe come at last to rescue me! Take me back to the island, please*. Otherwise the cannibals will eat me!”
His beard and hair were long and unkempt, and his eyes were wild and distant, but Macore was still clearly recognizable.
Joe ignored the little thief. “What will you do with him?”
“Standing instructions. Anyone who comes here as a spy, after his value for information and interrogation is done, is to be enslaved by spell, castrated, and fitted with a nose ring. As you can plainly see, he’s of no interrogation value in any event now.”
“You can do that here?”
She nodded. “We are not merely a military unit, we are a coven. We would have done it during the last three days of the full moon but we’re short one right now. We can handle the rest of it, but that insulation spell is tricky. Complicated spells are best done during Black Sabbaths, and so he’s got a few more days until Sergeant Murrah returns from presiding over the Serpent Goddess Virgin Sacrifice and Bake Sale at Magash.”
He gulped. “Uh, yeah.”
“Do you know him?”
He nodded. “I do, and he’s no spy. He was as mad as this long ago. He probably had some strange-looking gadgets as well, if the gnomes didn’t take and destroy them.”
“No, they gave those back, too. We sent them on to the palace by courier, not knowing what they might be, but they looked to me like sophisticated spying gear of some foreign manufacture.”
Yeah, Taiwan, most likely, he thought. Aloud he said, “He worked for no government or master. At one time he was the greatest thief in all Husaquahr. Apparently one day he stole those things and looked into them and went mad. He’s been wandering all over since, but this is the last place I thought he’d be.”
“Skipper! You’ve got to spring your little buddy!” Macore cried plaintively.
They walked back outside, leaving Macore to scream about being deserted, and shut the door.
“Thank the Demon Rastoroth for that door!” the security woman muttered. “At least it keeps his ran tings in there!”
Joe scratched his chin through his beard and thought a moment. “You know, I might be able to use him.”
“Sorry—the regulations are absolute,” she told him. “If you stick around until we do the slave conversion, fine. Not otherwise.”
“I don’t want to delay all that long, but, what would be the harm? Consider—I’m heading toward the palace, not away from it. If he got away, he’d freeze or die on the ice. But I’m betting that somewhere in that scrambled brain of his is still the greatest thief in Husaquahr, the man who actually burglarized the Lamp of Lakash from the vaults of the enemy sorcerer Ruddygore himself.”
“Really? He did that?”
Joe nodded. “Uh-huh. I’m pretty sure he could walk out of there any time he wanted to, only without warm clothes and provisions, he’s stuck. If he had them, though, he’d head straight for his obsession, which is that gear you sent. If we told him it was in the palace, I’d wager he could make it there.”
“So? I thought the idea was to see if you could make it.”
He nodded. “But I’m on my own initiative as to how. If I set this little fellow out, and follow him, then if he makes it, /make it. And what is his reward if he does? He’s sent right back here, and by that time your thirteenth member will have returned. If he doesn’t, well, case closed.”
“So? And what sort of route do you plan to take for this?”
He shrugged. “To go around is to invite tripping alarms.
You’re not here to guard the castle; you’re here to prevent anyone from going in a straight line toward it, across the pan of the map marked ‘deadly and forbidden.’ If there is a weak spot in the palace defenses, it’s from that direction.”
“And with good reason!” she responded. “You can’t see it, but we can. What looks like plain ice is a seething cauldron of the strongest and most complex sorcery imaginable. And it’s coming from who knows how far beneath the ice? Imagine what might lie down there? No one wants to liberate that.”
He didn’t like the sound of it, but it was pretty much as he suspected. “Has anyone to your knowledge tried to cross it while you’ve been here?”
“No, but I’ve seen some of the results of the few who got back out. Whoever or whatever is imprisoned there is powerful beyond our imagination, and was frozen and trapped there by powers even greater.”
“I’ve heard the legends. A fierce battle frozen in progress.”
“That’s right. We draw additional power for our coven from it, but we try and reject it. You can feel it coming, trying to seize control. Even our demon master appears to fear and respect it. It is why we do nothing in the Arts unless we are complete.”
Which at least saves me from your witchcraft, he thought.
“You said you’ve seen people who were out there?”
She nodded. “Only you cannot call them ‘people’ anymore. Most are madder than that one back there, but with reason. I saw one with a goat’s head, a woman’s breasts, a fish tail, and the legs of a great bird. Some others were worse.”
“That’s just from walking on it? ”
“From melting even a small amount. So much is buried there, in such chaos, that any heat, any digging, anything that disturbs and melts what is below, is liberated but undirected. It is miles away before it starts, and always we feel it here. It goes almost to the palace itself—over fifty miles. It cannot be crossed.”
Joe felt very uneasy. “Well, that’s what I was sent to do. I realize that now. All the more reason to give me the prisoner as well. Unless you absolutely need another slave around here, and the little guy isn’t good for much except stealing stuff. Besides, you keep him, you won’t make him sane. You’ll still
have to put up with that stuff.”
“Not if we cut out his tongue as well as the other,” she responded, but clearly she was thinking it over. “You are really going to try it through the forbidden area?”
“I’m afraid that’s the job. From what you say, maybe the Master of the Dead didn’t like me, after all.”
“I would say so, too.” She looked at him and sighed. “What a waste,” she muttered, almost to herself.
She was so adamant and clearly so fearful of the place that he couldn’t help harboring similar thoughts himself. For the first time, he began to doubt if he would ever see his son again.
CHAPTER 11
DANCING IN THE DARK
Any Company which shall survive to reach the Ultimate Obstacle to the attainment of their Quest shall be able to secure what they need to complete the Quest. However, successful completion is not guaranteed, and there are no warranties, expressed or implied, in these Rules.
— The Books of Rules, XV, 304(a)
“Macore!”
The sleeping figure in the cell snored, paused in midsnore for a moment, then turned over but kept sleeping.
“Macore!” came a louder, more insistent whisper. “Wake up, damn it!”
The snore turned into a sort of piglike grunting, and the little thief muttered, “Huh? What?”
“Over here at the window.”
Sleepily he made his way up, grabbing his woolen blanket around him to ward off the chill of the night, and got to the window, standing then on tiptoes to see what was what. “Mary Ann?” he asked tentatively.
“No, you idiot! It’s Marge! You remember Marge, don’t you?”
He grew suddenly suspicious. “Yes, but I’ve been fooled before. There was a fellow in here today who reminded me of Joe, too. You might just be a dream sequence.”
She floated up so that her face was framed in the window. “Dream sequence my ass! That was Joe, under heavy disguise.”
“Well, if this is real, what the hell are you doing here?” He shivered. “Damn! It’s too cold to be a dream.”
“Ruddygore sent us on a quest to the palace out there on the ice. The same palace where they sent your tapes and video equipment.”
He was suddenly very wide awake, but not quite following. “Ruddygore is interested in Gilligan’s Island!”
“Afraid not. But your quest, at the moment, and ours come together. And if we do ours, Ruddygore will energize your equipment. Understand?”
“He wouldn’t do it before. He’s still mad because I beat his system on his vaults. That’s why I had to suffer like this!”
“He didn’t need something from you then.”
“Good point,” he admitted.
“Macore, how did you wind up here?”
“The gnomes tried playing all sorts of tricks on my head, but all they got were my memories of Gilligan’s Island episodes. Exposure to this magically transformed them from gnomes into a band of hostile critics. They tossed me out to these people.”
“No, no, I mean, what are you doing up here in the middle of nowhere to begin with?”
“I got a tip,” he told her. “They said that up here was this vast sea full of magic with a tropical island in the middle of it. Nobody mentioned that the sea was frozen. Naturally, I had to find out, you see.”
“Naturally,” she responded, not really seeing at all. “Well, part of what you heard is true. That sea of ice is filled with incomprehensible magic. On the other side there is a volcanic island, with a great palace in the middle of it.”
“That must be some powerful sorcerer,” he noted.
“The Master of the Dead, Sugasto, lives there sometimes. And it’s likely that’s where the Dark Baron is as well.”
He thought about it a moment. “Hold it! You’re telling me that you want to cross a place of unbelievable magical powers so you can get to where the Dark Baron and the Master of the Dead are? And they say I’m crazy!”
“Yeah, well, after looking the place over, I can go along with you on that, but it has to be done, if it’s possible. Surrounded by ice, patrolled in the clean areas by Bentar on nazgas, on the ground by an army of the dead, and by magical spells, the only way to reach it undetected is across that mean area. It’s so powerful in and of itself that there’s no way they’ll fly across it or put anybody in it or maintain any sort of spell of their own in that area.”
“I’d rather take my chances’ with the zombies and the Bentar and the rest,” he told her. “I looked that other place over and it made me dizzy.”
“You looked it over? When?”
“’Oh, I’ve got stuff—warm clothes, pikes, you name it-stashed all over this hick town.” He suddenly went into a Cagney impression. “They ain’t never built the prison that can hold Cody Jarrett!”
“That’s not Gilligan’s Island.”
He shrugged. “Would you believe that in the Disneyland Hotel that they only had one channel showing Gilligan’s Island at all, and then only once a day? I had to watch something”
“Yeah, well, I doubt if most people go to Disneyland to watch television. Never mind. You’re telling me you can walk out of there whenever you feel like it?”
“Sure. But they’ve been feeding me here, and pretty decently, too, and I wanted to get some strength. Besides, I leave before I’ve mapped out everything, they hit the alarms like mad.”
“Macore, you pushed your fabled luck to the limit on this one.” She told him their plans for him and the fact that the only reason it wasn’t already done was just chance.
He stood there, thinking about her words for a moment, then said, “Okay, you talked me into it. It probably wouldn’t matter to Gilligan and the Professor—all that time on that island with Mary Ann and they never once made a move on her—but it matters to me.”
“Good. Joe’s got them conned into believing he’s checking Sugasto’s security. He’s gonna try and spring you to help. It’s either get us to the palace or good-bye all that matters.”
“That would help. I’d like to look it over in daylight. You have any idea what any of that Fruit Loops spaghetti actually does?”
“I’ve gone as close as I dared to alone, and the only thing I can say is that the answer is, ‘almost anything.’ I think the old legend is true—this was a great battle between mighty forces of ancient times. But I don’t think they’re frozen in place down there, although that might have been the intent. I think everything and everyone in the battle was transformed into energy, magic energy, and then the whole mess was frozen in place. That’s why it’s so near the surface when it should be thousands of feet down in the ice. New snow and ice retain them in, but every once in a while melting of some kind liberates a spell which then turns back into whatever it was. That’s why they feel things from there trying to. get them once in a while. The trick is to cross that place without causing any melting of any kind.”
Macore whistled. “Tough trick if they’re close enough to melt out occasionally on their own. Let me sleep on it. But you make sure I get sprung before that last witch gets back!”
Even Joe suspected that it was the first surreptitious break-in to a major place in the world that had been performed before a live audience.
All thieves of Husaquahr had the power to see magic; those who did not generally were captured or died on their first job.
The witches of the station were more than convinced of his insanity when they watched the little man, bundled in furs, walk right out on the ice and then proceed for a good half an hour, until he was only a speck on the whiteness, right to the edge of what they called the Devastation.
They were prepared to counter him when he inevitably made his break for freedom; any sane man would. But even without his malady, Macore, once set upon a problem, became so absorbed in it that to flee simply wouldn’t have entered his head.
“What’s he doing out there?” one of the women asked, more to herself than the others.
“Well, he took a measuring stick, a
sharp saw, and leather thongs from the dog sled area,” the security officer responded. “You figure it out. I didn’t like giving him the saw, which can be a weapon, but I had to admit to both personal and professional curiosity. If he can actually just walk into the Devastation and return, he will indeed be the genius the big man, here, says he is.”
“He’s been out there in almost that spot for quite a long time,” Joe noted a bit worriedly. “I hope he’s all right. I really should have gone with him, but he insisted that for this sort of thing he worked best alone.”
One witch was watching with a telescope. “He’s doing something down on the ice. First he appeared to pack snowballs and throw them into the Devastation! Now he’s working feverishly in the ice just this side of it. Now he seems to be lifting something—and now he’s just sat down on the ice!”
“He’s mad. All these are are the actions of a lunatic,” the security officer said impatiently. “Best to haul him back.”
“You go out there, right on the edge of that, and haul him back,” somebody said. “This is as near as I want to get to it.”
“He’s up again!” the woman with the telescope said. “Now he’s turned, facing the Devastation, just standing there. No, he just—he just took a step toward it! And another! He’s walking very oddly, but—he’s inside!”
Joe could use his second sight to see the massive collection of spells, but Macore was too far away and relatively too small to make out inside it.
“Can you see him?”
“No. He’s been swallowed up in the mass. You couldn’t see the Grand Altar of Stet if it were fifty feet inside. Not from this distance, anyway.”
“It seems as if he’s been in an awfully long time already,” Joe said worriedly.
And it was even longer still, as they watched and waited, perhaps a half hour or forty minutes. Finally, the security officer said, “That’s it. He’s finished. If he comes out of there at all we’ll not even recognize him as human. It can’t be done.”
“I wonder,” Joe mused. “According to your own charts, it’s about forty-two miles across to the palace at the narrowest crossing. If whatever he did worked, he’ll want to do time tests.”
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