Songs Of The Dancing Gods

by Jack L. Chalker

  "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 the 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 kno
w 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."

  "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?