"Great. So I'm an almost immortal guy who can never be lucky in love again, but if I do get potted with silver or burned to a crisp, I become a wood nymph."
"That's pretty much it," Ruddygore admitted. "I wouldn't take it all that hard. Fairies are immune from the Lamp. You knew that. If we'd brought you and the Lamp together early enough, we might have stopped it before your soul completely transformed, but by the time we did, it was already totally changed, and, of course, we also did it from a slight distance. The Lamp was faced with a dilemma and it did what it could. It formed the old 'you' as modified by Tiana's wish around the fairy core."
"Isn't there any way to unmodify it?"
"Fairy flesh? I sincerely doubt it. Even if your soul was removed by whatever trick Sugasto uses, it would still be fairy. But is it so horrible? Marge seems to enjoy it."
"Marge is not a brainless bimbo living in a tree!"
"Well, I can't do much about the tree, or the bimbo part whatever that is, but Tiana's wish at least insured that you won't turn brainless. She also wished your mind restored with all of its memories. The Lamp's magic supercedes the Rules of Husaquahr. That is why it is so dangerous."
"Wait a second. You're saying that even if my body were destroyed, I'd still have my memories, who I was and what I was, and be as smart as I ever was?"
"I guarantee it. In fact, even now, you're a very rare breed indeed. You're a hybrid. Your invocation of fairy sight shows that. The wood nymph is one of the most common creatures of faerie, and all will consider you one of them, since they see the inside first. If you really reach, you've probably got all the powers a wood nymph has, although there are, admittedly, fewer of those than with some races and the majority of those powers I'm sure you'd rather not invoke. Still, you should never reject something in the arsenal.''
Joe sighed. "Yeah, and the only one I can think of that might be useful isn't gonna be much good in the Cold Wastes. No trees."
"You'll do it, then?"
He looked at Ruddygore. "All right. Against all my instincts and better judgment, I'll try. But I have a very bad feeling about this one, and the last one was something of a disaster. Most of all, I hate leaving Irving, but he's not ready by a long shot to get into this sort of thing and, in a bad situation, he'd be a club over my head."
"I agree. But if he's in Gorodo's capable hands and learning how to be as great a fighter as his father, I think he'll be okay."
"Gorodo! Oh, he'll love Gorodo! On that son of a bitch's final exam, I got turned into a horse!"
"Oh, that Circe's a setup. Didn't you ever figure that out? Everybody winds up a horse or cow or pig or something. If you can't face that kind of problem and still make it back, then you're not going to make it in this world as a mercenary, are you?"
"Well I'd be damned!"
"Not before Judgment Day, if you're cautious and lucky."
Joe got up to leave, then hesitated. "What about Macore? I could use a master thief on this kind of job.''
Ruddygore sighed. "I'm afraid he's gone mad, and I'm not certain where he is now. Again, fallout from that last unpleasantness. It started that first night, when he was exposed for the first time to that infernal cable television and wound up watching one hundred and twenty-two consecutive episodes of Gilligan's Island."
Joe chuckled. "I remember."
"If there's a better argument for keeping technology out of Husaquahr, this is it. On the way back, he bought, or more likely stole, a battery-powered television, a battery videocassette player, and, somehow, he got all of the hundreds of episodes of that infernal show. Naturally, being from here, he never really understood about batteries, and it didn't take long for the batteries to run down. He was frantic! He offered all and sundry anything, slavery for life, any theft of anything, you name it— anything—for a battery recharge. I could have done it, of course, but I thought that, if it seemed impossible, he'd eventually give it up! Instead, he set out on a quest for someone, anyone, who could put more 'magic energy' into his batteries. When he was asked where he was going, he responded ..." Ruddygore coughed apologetically. ' 'He said he was going on a three-hour tour..."
****
Ti was very pleased with the way she had unpacked and laid out the room, although, truth to tell, there wasn't much to unpack. Well, traveling light made for easy work, and she never minded that.
She wanted to do her exercises, but she wasn't certain if she should. She'd been upset about something, although she wasn't sure what—oh, yes, they wouldn't let her clean up in the kitchen—and then that elf came to take her to the room and she had some kind of dizzy spell. Probably due to overeating that rich food after so long on short rations. It really screwed up the system. Well, she'd skip it one more day. After sleeping a night in a damp forest on wood chips, she felt as if she hadn't slept at all.
She went over and stared out the window. It was dark, but there were torches all along the outer wall reflecting eerily on the river below. It was kind of pretty, really. She imagined herself dancing along that wall, beneath those torches. It would be kind of neat to do it. She still felt a bit confused, almost as if she were two people, one Ti the slave girl that she felt was her true self, the other the grander figure of some other time and place and world, which she remembered but somehow could no longer quite comprehend.
Joe came in, looking tired and oddly bothered, and she said, "Is there anything I can get you, Master?"
He started to tell her never to call him "Master," always "Joe," then stopped. Even though it made him feel that he was trapped in an old episode of I Dream of Jeannie as much as Macore was hung up on Gilligan's Island, it was the proper slave response here. If he was going to be using an alias in enemy country, and if she was what she now was, it was far better if she did call him "Master" and went through the rest of the rigmarole as well.
Instead he said, "Yeah, Ti, it's fine. Come, sit here. I have to talk some important things over with you."
She came over and sat on the rug at his feet, looking up at him.
Briefly, but spelling out as much of the implications as he could, he told her the situation with their old bodies, Sugasto, and what Ruddygore was proposing. She listened attentively, but couldn't conceal from her face that she didn't like what she was hearing very much at all.
"Any comments?" he prompted. "Speak freely and honestly. It's your old body and your neck."
"My neck belongs to you," she noted, "along with the rest of me. But I cannot say mat the news that my old self still lives does not fill me with longing, and the idea that we are to destroy it, well, it is very hard. When I thought it dead, that was that, but to find that it is alive, and that we are to kill it. . . If it lives, there is always some hope. If it dies, then I am a slave forever.''
"I know. The odds are we won't get the chance anyway. We're taking a journey through lands we don't know, held by people we do know and who hate us as much as we hate them, toward a goal we really don't want to reach, and even if we do would most likely put us in the hands of our worst enemies." He paused. "You do not have to go, you know. I know you're not supposed to make big decisions for yourself, but this is one you must make. You can remain here, in service of Castle Terindell, and look after Irving for me."
"But you are going, regardless?"
"It was put to me in Ruddygore's usual democratic fashion, which is basically, 'You don't have to do this, it's your choice, but, remember, if you don't, evil will win, millions will die, and it'll be all your fault.' Yes, I have to go."
"Then I go."
"You're sure?"
She looked up at him. "If you go, and never return, then all of this was for nothing. If you go, and fail because I was not there when you needed me, it will be even worse. Perhaps this is why destiny has bound me to you. In the past, sometime, you have needed me before in such matters."
"We'll probably be killed. Or worse, caught by Sugasto."
"Then we go opposing evil, and that has meaning. And we might just bea
t them, as before, which would make everything worth it."
There was more of the old Tiana beneath this servile veneer than he'd thought or feared. It made him feel better.
"Okay, then. It means starting out again in just a couple of days. We have a long journey, and the clock is running, and we don't know how long the clock runs."
"This Sugasto is a coward at heart or he would not have stopped his war," she noted. "There are only two bodies that will do. He will not risk them until he is very, very sure of them."
"Good point," he agreed. He looked over near the window. "What's that on the floor?"
"A straw mat," she responded. "It is for me to sleep on."
"Bullshit! Blow out that oil lamp and come sleep in this big featherbed with me! Who knows when we'll get the chance to be this luxurious again?"
She grinned happily and blew out the light.
Joe was walking across the great hall on his way outside when a firm soprano voice suddenly said, in English, in a solid West Texas accent, "Hi, sailor! New in town? Want to have a good time?"
He stopped dead, turned, and there, sitting on a fur-covered stool, was a creature of faerie. She was small, perhaps a bit over four feet in height, and quite sexy; almost a deep red variation of a nymph, to whom her sort were closely related, but with big, varicolored wings that seemed to catch any light and throw back a beauteous, changing, yet butterflylike appearance.
"Marge!'' he shouted, and she ran to him and gave him a big hug. He hesitated to return it for a moment because of the wings, but she said, playfully, "You ought to know by now that these wings can't be damaged by hugs!"
"What are you doing here?" he asked her, happy enough to see her in any event. "Did Ruddygore send for you?"
"No, he doesn't have to. I'm kind of tuned in to you folks and I just sort of know when things are wrong and trouble's brewing, and that always brings me like a wildcatter to oil. So, how are you?"
"Not good," he replied honestly. "Everything's going the wrong way, as usual."
"Nasty job? I assume the Baron slipped the noose."
"How'd you know that?"
"I've just been around here long enough now to figure things like that out. The moment they brought that bastard back here I knew we'd eventually be in for it."
"Well, that's part of it, but not the main job. And there are— well, complications."
"C'mon. Tell Auntie Marge about them. She's a very good confessor."
Marge was a changeling, one of those very rare individuals who arrived in this world with just some long-unsuspected single gene or trace of ancient faerie in her that caused the Rules to change her outright to her ancestral race. A former English teacher in Texas who'd lost her job and wound up a battered wife, she'd been running away and contemplating suicide when Joe had picked her up as a hitchhiker on a lonely stretch of West Texas highway just before being picked up himself by Ruddygore. She had, in effect, unknowingly hitched a ride to Husaquahr, where she'd turned into what she was now: a Kauri, a flying fairy race with a rather unique function.
Like almost all members of the nymph family, the Kauri were natural, near compulsive seductresses, but, unlike most of the rest, who had some role in the management of one or another aspect of nature, the Kauri "weeded people" as they called it. Natural empaths, they could sense and were attracted to deep depression and other black moods in others, and, through seduction, they could take on and remove those heavy emotional loads, converting the energy into food. Because they had to absorb whatever came along, they tended to be the most intelligent of the nymph family, so Marge, in fact, had lost none of her memory or IQ; because part of their talents came in a sort of hypnotic hold over mortals, they could seem to look like any female the subject desired, so Marge had lost none of her personality and cunning. Like all nymphs, however, they were passive by nature, and rarely even able to defend themselves against an attack, although Marge had managed it, briefly, on one or two occasions. When you're being grabbed by a rotting corpse, even instinct can sometimes be overcome.
And, alone among the nymph family, they could fly.
Joe told her about Ti, and what they had been asked to do.
She whistled. "Wow! That's as mean a kick as this world's thrown yet."
"It's like a pact with the devil, though," he noted. "Don't destroy the body and she's still a slave but Sugasto wins. Destroy the body, and she's lower than nothing forever. They're not going to pull any more soul snatches with her even if they find out about her; being as she is would suit them just fine."
' "There's still more, though, isn't there? I can tell, remember. Your emotions are an open book here."
"All right," he sighed. "You alone would understand my problem. But I don't want anyone else knowing, not even Ti."
"My race always keeps its secrets."
"Use your fairy sight. Look inside me, down to my soul, and look very hard for something unusual."
"I can no more see a human soul than you can."
"That's what I mean. Look and don't just see what you expect to see."
She looked, and, for a moment, frowned, then saw it and gave a slight gasp. "You went fairy! I'll be damned! Even the Lamp can't change a fairy soul!"
He nodded. "So you have the package. Mum on that last part. Not only is it damned embarrassing to me, considering, but I don't want any enemy finding it out and getting ideas. Silver, the right sorcery, and burning could do it. And," he added hesitantly, "I particularly don't want Irving to ever know, I just don't think he could handle it."
Marge sighed. "Man, you're taking so much baggage on this trip you're half whipped before you start! It's a good thing I showed up when I did. No wonder you've been sending out those distress vibes!"
"Where we're going to wind up it's pretty cold," he warned her. "You sure you're up to that? You've never been in that kind of weather before.''
She shrugged. "We're a hot race; plenty of warmth to spare. Just keep that dwarf-forged steel sword of yours away and I'll be fine."
"You really don't have to go just for us, you know."
"For you? Don't forget, I'm the one who had that zombie horde sicced on me, and had to ignore that bastard's sniggering laugh. It seems like we're gonna have to endure that damned Baron to Judgment, but maybe we can send Sugasto straight to Hell!"
"Glad to have you as always. All we lack is Macore, but he's off somewhere searching for Gilligan's Island.''
"Oh, no! I always used to warn my students that TV could rot innocent minds, but I never really thought it went that far!" She paused. "Where's Ti now?"
"In Terdiera with one of Santa's elves getting together initial supplies and such for the trip. It's going to be a long journey and much of it could be ugly. We don't know what a Sugasto administration might be like, but I can guess."
She nodded. "We've heard all sorts of rumors. A lot of bad fairy folk have gravitated to him, not to mention people, and he's got a near lock on the dwarf kings, being able to blockade their trade if they don't play ball with him, as well as gnomes, trolls, you name it. And, of course, he's got two-thirds of the witches and warlocks in Creation with him and who knows how many overambitious magicians with real or imagined grudges. When a land comes under the control of evil here, it even takes on an evil life of its own. It's in the Rules, I think. This won't be any picnic, and you're the only sword arm we've got."
"Don't you think I know it," he told her. "Come on—I'm going to introduce Irving to Gorodo.''
"Oh, joy. He'll just love that," she responded, following him out.
Love, joy, awe, and all the other such descriptives did not begin to describe Irving's first reaction to Gorodo. Abject terror, perhaps, was closest.
For one thing, someone who is nine feet tall, about five hundred pounds of pure muscle, and also has nine-inch fangs and a body covered with blue fur wasn't exactly anybody's idea of a teddy bear.
Joe was never sure just what Gorodo was; a member of the troll family, most likely, but in
all his travels he'd never seen another like him. There were all sorts of stories about Ruddygore's Master Armorer, most contradictory, all totally unbelievable, and all admitted to by the huge creature, but he remained the meanest, solidest enigma in Marquewood.
A long, taloned finger pointed at Joe. "You've really let yourself go to seed since I last had you," the creature rumbled in a voice so deep it seemed to shake the ground. "You oughta let me get you back in real shape."
Irving looked up at his father nervously and said, "I think maybe being a farmhand's a real neat idea ..."
"Nonsense!" the blue giant roared. "Ain't nothin' free in this world, boy, or the next, neither! No pain, no gain! But you stick with me a few months and really work at it and I'll have you able to outrun and outfight anybody here. You stick with it, and there's no place in Husaquahr you'll fear to go and no enemy you won't vanquish, and all the turd-wallowers will rum and wish they was you!"
"His bark's worse than his bite, right?" Irving whispered hopefully.
"No, they're about the same, son," his father replied. "But he's right. You've seen Ti. You want to be a male version of her?"
"Hell, no! Ain't no way this boy's gonna be no slave!"
"Well, there's the only insurance you have right there. You know I've got to go away for a while, and why you can't come with me. Imagine armies of him, only not on your side but out to get you. You want to be free and independent in this world, there's the price of admission."
"You plucked me outa Philly for this?"
Joe thought of the neighborhood, the gangs with their cocaine runners and needles and the rest, the number of potentially good kids living in squalor and dead in their teens, born and raised to lose. "Yes, son, I did."
"Your father survived me and all I threw at him and came out a real man" Gorodo said. "Then he went out and eventually married a princess and took over an empire, then threw it away when he decided it wasn't no fun anymore. That's the kind of freedom I give, boy! The kind most folks only dream about. Lion or antelope, boy, there ain't but two kinds. Be a turnip— that's easy! Or be the one what eats turnips for lunch!"
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