“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 Hypbor-eyan 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.
The guard walked past Joe, then stopped and looked a bit puzzled, his reptilian nostrils flaring. He turned, more curious than alarmed, away from the swordsman toward the opposite low hedgerow where Joe knew that Marge and perhaps Macore were. Joe did not wait; he drew and pounced with a single motion.
The Bentar turned at the noise and reflexively put up the pike to ward off the inevitable blow, but the great sword sailed right through it, splintering the wood, and continued on through the guard’s neck. There was that distinctive electrical crackling of fairy death, then the body, its head almost but not quite severed from the neck, sank to the path.
“Macore! Mia!” Joe cried. “Quickly! Help me with the body and stuff. We have to get rid of it! Marge—keep a watch!”
The inside of a Bentar both looked and smelled more foul than the living exterior did, but Joe and Macore got it, as well as the pieces of the pike, and Joe dragged the body by the feet well into the trees and against the bushes. Mia wasn’t immediately to be seen, but there was too much to do to worry about her yet. There was no guarantee that the body wouldn’t be found before it decomposed, although fairy bodies tended to decompose in a matter of hours, but it was at least completely out of sight of any of the paths. It would have to do, as usual, Joe thought sourly.
Mia ran up to him, looking pleased with herself. “The other’s throat is cut and he is behind the hedges over there, Master,” she told Joe. “It is so simple when they expect nothing.”
Joe wasn’t sure if he was pleased or not, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, in any event. “Okay, let’s get up there and inside as quickly as we can,” he told them. “Marge, I’d ask you to fly up and peer in the windows up there, but I’d swear some of those gargoyles around the ledges just moved.”
“I saw ’em,” she told him. “I think they’re night guardians, though, and likely going to sleep now, as I should be in normal circumstances. Let me take some care and see what I can see while you move up.” Noting their looks of concern, she grinned.
“Relax. If worse comes to worse lean make them think I Yn the sexiest female gargoyle they ever laid eyes on.”
They moved up, bush by bush, hedge by hedge, toward the huge stone patio. It was hot, even the ground, making Marge’s prediction true.
“I can’t figure out where the zombies are,” Macore whispered, puzzled.
“Huh?”
“Well, why use Bentar for duty like that when you’re the Master of the Dead? This is the perfect place to program zombies to capture or kill anybody who doesn’t have the password of the day. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m not going to complain,” Joe answered, but he admitted that he had wondered the same thing.
Marge came down and joined them again. “Most everybody’s still asleep, from the looks of it,” she told them. “There are two big towers—this one and the one opposite—and then a big, almost circular level in between, with guard walks on top and two, maybe three storeys below. You’ll never guess what’s in the middle of the circle.”
“A hole,” Joe responded. “What?”
“The crater. The opening to the lava. A bubbling, hissing lake of the stuff maybe twenty feet down below ground level. Right in the center is a single column of very hard, shiny-looking rock that comes up a little above ground level. And right in the center of it is growing this tree! A weird-looking type I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s magic, all right.”
“Any sign of what we’re after?” Joe asked her.
“Uh-uh. This side looked strictly royal, anyway. I’d guess we came in on the wrong side. I couldn’t get much of a look into the opposite tower, but I’ll tell you that it’s the center for this darkness. It’s got to be the place.”
Joe nodded. “Any way to go around?” “Not that I saw. At the extremes of that circle I talked about, it actually juts out and away from the volcano on both sides. The drop looks sheer. Unless you want to go back down and onto the ice and around, you’re stuck going through the building.”
“The hell with the ice,” Joe told her. “We came to break in here, so we might as well do it.” And, with a cautious look around, they made their way up the stone stairs, past the two inviting-looking pools, and into the palace proper.
“Want to check out this tower just in case, Master?” Mia asked him.
“Uh-uh. We may blow it, but the other one looks most likely, and I’d hate to run into any watch here.” He looked at two inner arches, each seeming to angle away from the tower hall. “Ma-core, you and Marge take that route, Mia and I will take this one. If Marge is right, we’ll meet in a hall similar to this one on the other side. If we meet anyone or are discovered, though, they’ll come to only one pair, not both.”
Macore nodded. “Anything as vital as my gear would likely be in the magician’s tower as well.”
They went down their corridor, Joe with sword drawn, Mia with knife at the ready. Joe was still puzzled; by this point after dawn, this place should be crawling with servants—slaves, mos
t likely, knowing these folks—and guards and maybe the living dead, so that, when the masters of the joint finally got up, they’d have breakfast prepared and everything cleaned and secured and ship-shape. Where in hell was everybody?
When they got closer to the outer part of the circle, there were arches and windows looking out on what would normally have been the inner courtyard. They crept to it, looked out, and saw the narrow stone walkway around the steaming, boiling pit whose, tremendous heat even Mia could feel; in the center was the strange tree. It grew out of the top of a needle of pure obsidian, somehow immune to the forces, churning around it; a massive trunk indicating great age, its bark an odd purplish color, its limbs spreading out almost all the way over the fire pit. The thick frondlike leaves appeared to be made of pure polished gold, catching the sulfurous fumes from the pit; from the limbs, under the leaves, the tree bore a pearlike fruit of shining, reflective silver.
Joe tried to use his inner self to sense what might be in the tree, whether nymph or demon or imprisoned god, but there was no sensation of any consciousness there. Yet, in fact, it was a living tree, although of what alien origins it was impossible to tell.
He seemed almost hypnotized by it, and Mia had to jolt him back to reality. “Hurry, Master! Before we are discovered!”
They went on, and were two-thirds of the way to the other tower, when Mia, who’d taken the lead, suddenly raised her hand for him to halt. “Listen, Master! Strange sounds from just below!”
Joe stopped, trying to tune out the rumbling and hissing from the fire pit, and he heard what Mia was hearing faintly, through the background—the song from Gilligan’s Island.
“Macore?” he mused. No, that wasn’t possible. First of all, it was coming from perhaps the floor above theirs, and, also, there were the voices, the background music…
The background music?
“There’s an arch out there,” he told her. “Keep a watch and out of sight. I’ve got to find out what’s going on up there.”
She didn’t approve, but didn’t have a say in the matter. A steep stone stair led up to the next level from each archway. Keeping close to the wall and hoping that nobody was looking out the other side, he went up, halted just before the top, then cautiously peered into a huge area and gasped.
Well, there was Macore’s equipment, all of it. The tiny television had been recharged or was getting some kind of magical charge its transformer could handle, as was the small portable video tape recorder. The room was full, almost densely packed, with dozens, maybe many dozens, of the same sort of soulless, brainless living dead they’d seen on the plateau what seemed ages before.
Here, then, was the entire missing zombie staff, standing there, motionless, transfixed, watching Gilligan’s Island.
He made his way back down to Mia and told her what he’d seen.
“But, Master—they have no souls or wills of their own! How can they possibly be watching a show!”
“I don’t have an explanation for that, and I don’t think I want an explanation for that,” he told her. “Maybe there’s some weird frequency in the thing that scrambles the spell. Maybe it’s just that the show has finally found its perfect audience.” He shook his head in wonder. “It’s enough for now to know where those creatures are and not have to worry about them. Let’s get going! People are going to start waking up and be all over here any time now, no matter what!”
Still, Joe was worried about just how easy it was to get in, and just how empty the passages were. True, here and there they had been required to flatten themselves to the wall or crouch behind something, or duck outside or in, but the place overall seemed ominously deserted, as if everything and everyone of importance had moved elsewhere, leaving nothing but a maintenance staff. That idea disturbed him more than a dozen sword-fights and magicians—that, after all they had gone through, they were too late or, almost as bad, were in the wrong place.
In the main hall of the second tower, Mia turned to him as if to say, “Now what?” and he motioned for her to go cautiously up the stairs.
The first tower level proved to be sleeping quarters, and in the halls were both Bentar guards and some female slaves going back and forth, all as naked and shorn as Mia. That gave her an idea.
“They won’t know one female slave from another, particularly the Bentar, Master,” she whispered. “Let me just see who’s here by pretending to be one of the staff.”
He nodded, figuring he could cover her, and also figuring that, at this point, they had little to lose. Again, he had to admire her guts, handing him her knife and simply walking brazenly down the hall. As she’d suspected, the Bentar gave her not a second glance, all humans probably looking alike to them, anyway, and if the handful of slaves there noticed a stranger they did not react. The odds were that there were a fair number of slaves here, if only to feed the egos of the masters, and quite often new ones would turn up these days.
Joe remained in the stairwell, nervous that someone would come down or come up, but Mia managed to make the circuit, looking as if she were on a real task for somebody, and come back before anyone did.
“All sleeping quarters, Master. They are simply cleaning up.
I do not like to say so, but this level does not look very used. At best, there was one or two rooms that appeared slept in.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m beginning to get a real sinking feeling about this. Let’s move up.”
The second tower level seemed deserted, but there were only a few doors on either side, so they made their way cautiously down on both sides, then opened the doors. One proved to be a sort of sorcerer’s laboratory, but with almost everything looking closed and put away, not used for some time. The other was some kind of meeting or briefing room. Joe was about to signal a move up again when there came the sounds of heavy boots ascending the stairs. He and Mia quickly ducked into the meeting room and shut the door, hoping that this wasn’t the morning guard showing up for a briefing right there.
The bright light of day pouring through the windows along the far wall made Joe suddenly realize how late it was getting. “We might have to hide in here most of the day,” he told her in a low tone. “Moving around until dusk is going to be more and more difficult, no matter how empty this place is.”
“Uh-Master?”
“Yes?”
“Do you notice that the room seems to be getting darker?”
He turned and tensed. Sure enough, in spite of the light from outside, it did seem to be getting significantly darker inside.
There was a sudden sound from above and in back of them, metallic yet not like a sword, and suddenly, from overhead, an enormous bright light shone down, the product of a candle set inside an assemblage of mirrors to form a basic spotlight aimed at the small stage in front.
Tense, sword drawn, Joe turned back to where that spotlight shone.
“Ta tata, ta tola, ta ta dah dah dah dee!” a sexy woman’s voice hummed playfully from the stage. From stage left, the spotlight caught just a leg, curved suggestively, and then, from behind, the woman stepped out.
The soul inside and the amount of time that had passed made the same body look far less like the old Mahalo McMahon; this was a gorgeous, sexy sex kitten, at once playful, sensuous, erotic as hell, and, for all that, dangerous. Then big brown eyes darted momentarily over in their direction, and just for a moment a wicked, playful smile came to her face, and Esmilio Boquillas shone through.
In a soft, sexy voice, she sang, “I enjoy bein’ a guy bein’ a girl like me.”
She looked down at the pair, and the smile broadened. “Sorry, but I do so like a good entrance.”
Joe didn’t wait, starting a spring right toward the stage, but she lifted up a hand and a series of yellow magic strings sprang from it and held both him and Mia fast. He couldn’t move forward. He stopped struggling and relaxed.
“You’ve got your powers back!” he said, amazed.
“A mere shadow of my former powers,” she responded
, “but enough for the likes of the two of you.”
“How long have you known we were here?”
“Why, darling, I’ve been simply mad waiting for you to arrive! I knew the moment we discovered that the little thief had been captured over on the other side that you would have to follow. In fact, I’ve been waiting ages, ever since I let that little spy escape with the news that we had your old bodies here. Good old Ruddygore! I just knew he wouldn’t fail me!”
“It will be Judgment Day before Ruddygore helps you, and you know it!”
“Oh, but he has helped. More than I could ever have done on my own. In fact, I owe it all to him. First, his silly little ego that made him think he could control Boquillas like a puppet and that a Boquillas with enough foresight to have prepared this soul transfer as a last resort into this marvelous body wouldn’t also prepare defenses against the sort of control spells he’d use. Second, not realizing, as I would not have, that he’d done what the whole Council couldn’t, given me some power again on my own. More than enough with my mind to unravel his leashes.”
“How did you get those powers back?” Joe asked, testing occasionally die spell that kept him where he was and to no avail. “They said when the Council lifted somebody’s power it was impossible ever to get it back.”
“Oh, do struggle, my dears! The tighter you struggle, the tighter it holds.” She sat perched on the side of the stage, the smile on her lips impossible to erase.
“It is true, my old powers are gone,” she admitted. “But you’ve heard it said that there’s a little witchcraft in all us girls. I wouldn’t have believed it myself until I became one, but once I realized there was real power there after becoming one myself, I knew instantly how to use it. Mahalo McMahon, as it turned out, was better than that. She was high priestess of the Neo-Primitive Hawaiian Church or some such thing. I also realized that I had it only so long as I remained female. That was no hardship; I decided I liked being a girl! I liked particularly the way men looked at me, the way they’d get all silly and fall all over themselves just because I batted an eye at them or swiv-eled a hip. It was a whole new level of power and control. And because I again had some power and the knowledge of how to use it, I could walk without fear, which is what keeps most women down. As a man, I’d never had much use for sex, except as a tool in my work, as powerful as it was. I began to discover how much I’d missed over all that time, how much fun it was to be a real person. The Rules decided that I was a witch, which was fine, but, thank the fates, I didn’t have to be the Dark Baron or the Dark Anything anymore.”
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