"Who told you about the advanced schedule?''
Macore looked positively rhapsodic. "Mary Ann! She came to me, Joe, as if in a vision, saying she loved me!"
Joe looked at Marge and gave a slight pig grunt. She smiled and shrugged sheepishly, but she sure wasn't weak anymore.
In point of fact, Joe felt damned good himself; wide awake, alert, excited, adrenaline flowing, the darker thoughts and-fears that had been so close to the surface with him receding into the background. The Kauri were not true parasites; what they took from you was in the main stuff you wanted taken. Still, there was the present worry.
"I hope Mia's okay," he said. "We ought to get going."
"Here she comes," Marge noted. "You know, you're right. She makes me feel cold to look at her and I'm not wearing anything more than she is."
"Conditioning," he told her. "We feel what we expect. Ah! Mia! Any problems?''
"A little, Master. The dog harness was a problem. I have my own knife as well. My lord Macore, the best I could find for you was a butcher knife."
"It'll do," he replied. He stared at her in the semidarkness. "You know, I could almost swear you look familiar. I must say I don't like the way they shave their slaves up here, though, although you look quite pleasant, my dear."
"You remember her from Earth and the boat, Macore," Marge told him. "Don't worry about it. And the poor girl can't help the way she looks. Mia, you're gonna have to carry a real load out there and not drop with it. You think you can do it?"
"It is necessary, and so I must, my lady. I will not fail you all."
"Grab all the gear and let's get away from here and well out on the ice fast," Joe ordered. "Sooner or later somebody is going to come looking for one of us and not find us. When they see Macore's gone, too, they'll put two and two together."
"You think they'll come after us?" Marge asked him. "I mean, you sort of showed them how it's done."
"I doubt it, but even if they do, they won't be able to close on us, if we're well away," Joe replied. "And if they come in after us on their own ice blocks, they're not going to think about all the things we did, and it'll eat them alive."
"One or two of 'em will come," Macore predicted. "They won't want to raise the alarm or report us missing, because it'll go against them that they let us escape. They'll want to bring us back, dead or alive."
"Can't they catch us with the dogs, Master?" Mia asked, concerned.
Macore chuckled. "Dogs won't go near that place. Dogs got more sense."
"Let's go. We'll organize this stuff on the edge before we go into the Devastation," Joe told them. "Marge, since you're way too small and light to carry much of anything, stay behind and check on pursuit. We'll wait for you before we go in. Might as well make use of those fairy wings and all that excess energy while we can."
She grinned. "Will do, boss. Now, in the words of my great grandpappy, 'Git!' "
They got.
The moon had risen just at dusk, and was slowly rising in the sky. It was still almost full, of course; not enough for wereing, but enough to give them some light across the dangerous ice pack.
"I kinda wished it would be a bit darker,'' Macore remarked. "I know we're damned hard to spot out here under these conditions, but I feel like a backlit target."
"Where do we go, Master?" Mia asked.
"Right where all those colors—" Suddenly he realized that, of all of them, she was the only one who couldn't see the place. "Do you see anything at all over there, where I'm pointing?"
"The ice seems to look a bit different, Master, a bit more moonlit as if it is glowing slightly.''
"Good girl! That's enough. For now, just follow me."
They walked for quite some time, their boots crunching eerily in the dead silence of the cold. Joe turned back to Mia. "How are your feet feeling?"
"Sometimes it feels like hard, rocky ground, sometimes like walking on sand, Master," she responded. "But I do not feel this cold."
"Good. Not much farther to go."
"Are you sure this is the narrowest point, from here?" Macore asked him.
"There's not much to use for landmarks, but it's close. Four point two miles northwest of the town, if their map is right. The area's ragged, but basically oval in shape and pinched just above its middle. In the pinch, it's supposedly forty-two miles. It broadens to about sixty-five, so I hope we're right. The palace would be a mile north and about a quarter-mile in from the pinch on the other side."
"If we miss, we're gonna have everything from zombies to invader spells up the ass," Macore noted. "We better hit this one dead on."
Since the pinched oval of the Devastation was angled from the shore, he had been forced to guess on the pinch without being really able to see much of it, but he felt sure he was correct.
"Here," he told them, putting down the pack for a moment. "This is as good a guess as any. Better start cutting our ice blocks now. Mia, we'll cut your ice load large and heavy and then trim it down to something you can handle. You don't need to walk on this stuff, but we'll need what you carry to sit on."
"Yes, girl, but even you must remember that, if you have to relieve yourself, it must go in the sack here," the thief put in, already starting to cut his own blocks. "It'll be as warm as ours. Once it's cold, and that won't take long, then we can dump it. We won't have to carry our crap, at least."
The great sword Irving cut through the ice as if it were butter, and soon Joe was trimming a block into two smaller, lighter, slabs with flat faces.
"We might well not need these," the thief admitted, tying his own blocks on, "but we can't chance it unless we have to. If we lose the blocks, or they splinter, or prove too cumbersome, then we'll have to experiment. By that time the soles of our boots will be at ice temperature, anyway."
Joe finished, and practiced a little walking. It was stiff, but he felt comfortable. He went over and helped Mia prepare his pack, then, after putting it on, they put together her harness and checked out progressively smaller rectangles of ice until she proclaimed that it was okay. What she could manage wasn't huge, but it would do.
She slipped off the harness for a moment and started doing some of her stretching exercises. Joe watched her, then went over to her. "Mia," he said gently "we've explained what's in there, just below the top. You know that nobody's ever been known to cross this thing and come out anything but a hideous monster."
"Yes, Master. I know. But we will make it."
"There are a couple of things I want to say before we go in there, just in case we don't. The first is, if, somehow, I don't make it, and you do, and Macore does as well, let him touch the ring and then finish what we set out to do. Understand?"
"Yes, Master."
"If not, avoid anyone touching it and try and do it anyway if you can."
"I will, Master."
"Don't let anything stop you, not even regard for me. No matter what you feel, remember those living dead back there and your own slavery and the way the slaves were back at that camp and think of all Husaquahr under those people—and all in Tiana's name and mine. I swear I'll die before I let them do that. Will you swear it, too?"
"I will, Master."
"In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that I'll sacrifice any life, including ours, to stop them, I want you to know something. I know you are just my slave, and that you were never my wife, and that you're Mia, not Ti. But I want you to know, truthfully, that, as yourself, just as you are, and here and now, I love you more than I've loved any other woman." And then he grabbed her and held her and gave her another of those kisses, only even deeper and more passionate than before.
Marge descended. "Break it up, you two!" she said sharply. "The posse's hot on my tail and tryin' to head us off at the pass!"
The pair broke, reluctantly, and quickly helped each other with their packs.
"Okay, gang! Let's do it!" Macore shouted. All of them took deep breaths, paused a moment, then stepped into the Devastation.
The first thing that hit them was that the Devastation was neither desolate nor even quite quiet.
"It sounds as if you were really way, way, aways, and yet . . ." Marge said, fascinated.
"It sounds like Sorrow's Gorge," Joe completed. "My god! How long has this been here? Thousands of years, perhaps?"
Marge nodded. "And yet, somehow, you get the feeling that even the freezing didn't so much stop the battle as freeze it. It's as if the last second of that battle was being played, over and over again, like some broken record."
"That was my impression when I was in here earlier," Ma-core admitted. "I think the soundtrack changes a bit as we go, though. I think we are hearing the battle, or what was happening here on each spot, at that fatal moment back then. Kind of gives you the creeps, doesn't it?"
"I hear it, too, Master," Mia told Joe. "The sounds of armor and horses and men yelling and screaming and even the sounds of magic. You could almost see the whole thing in your mind from those sounds.''
"Well, we'd better get a different part of the program,'' Marge noted, shaking herself out of it. "We've got a very long way to go, and, right now I bet, there's at least a couple of Hypboreyan women's guards cutting out ice blocks not far behind us."
"Oh, don't worry so much," Joe told her. "We can take care of them in a fight."
"Oh, really? And what good is even a great sword like yours against a crossbow? What's next? Bare hands against automatic rifles?" Marge began walking, looking down at what to her was an incredible kaleidoscope of colors glowing just below the snow. "Huh! Why do I feel that under this snow is the dance floor from Saturday Night Fever?''
"Put a little of your inborn fairy warmth on those spots and you'll do a dance, all right," Joe told her.
"Hey! Take it easy! I have to do three steps to your two, remember, and I wasn't built for forty mile hikes. I was never built for forty mile hikes. Ai yi yi! How do I get myself into these things?"
"You've had more rest than any of us," he pointed out. "And probably a better meal, too."
Macore looked around. "I just wish we could erase these tracks in the snow. We're not gonna be real hard to track."
Joe looked at Marge. "You just remember that, no matter what, you've got to suppress that panic reaction of yours. No flying and no running."
At that moment there was a sudden pop.' near them and from the lighted ground under the snow quickly came a ghostly visage of a skeletallike horror mounted on a nightmare steed, rushing toward them, only the head and torso of the rider and the head and neck of the steed visible. It was transparent, but it screamed a ghastly scream and came toward them—and was gone.
"What was that!" Joe asked.
Marge stood stock still. "See? I didn't panic. I was too petrified. At least Husaquahr's now got a space program."
"Huh?"
"My heart's in orbit."
"What was it, Master?" Mia asked. "It was—horrible."
"Oh, yeah," Macore said calmly, "I forgot to mention those. They happen every once in a while. I don't think they're anything to worry about, just something being liberated briefly because of the settling in the ice or whatever.''
"Uh—Macore. Anything else you forgot to mention?" Marge asked dryly.
"Uh—not that I can think of. Say! This boring walk needs some livening up. Anybody want me to sing the entire Gilligan's Island theme song, complete with the end verse everybody forgets?"
"No," Joe and Marge responded in unison.
"Okay, okay. Sheesh! Everybody's turning into a critic on this damned world!"
They walked some more in silence. The cold was really getting to Joe in spite of the borrowed furs and fur lining stuffed in his boots. They couldn't really cover their faces very well, and, although there was no wind, it really did begin to bother him, and possibly Macore as well.
Equally troubling were the occasional manifestations that arose suddenly, each preceded by a cracking sound. They kept telling themselves and one another that they'd get used to it, but the farther in they went, the more horrible and gruesome the apparitions became. You just didn't get used to it; you merely dreaded the next crack!.
"Jeez! Weren't there any good guys in this fight?" Marge asked.
"Probably. Almost certainly," Joe responded. "My best guess is that we're either on a lightly defended part of the field or we're inside the battle lines of one side. What's more interesting is that we haven't seen any human apparitions. Lots of dark fairy types, and some mean-looking monsters that might be fairy or mortal, a practical difference only to them, but no people."
"I also wonder just how long ago this battle was," Macore commented. "I mean, it's ancient enough to have passed into legend, and I Ve yet to recognize any creature as something I've met, but the armor and the weaponry and things like saddles and such look very up to date. In fact, a lot of it looks better than what we have now."
"Some races might have died out right here," Marge noted. "Others might well have been transformed or scattered to the four comers of the world by any power strong enough to do this. As for the men, their souls might well be long gone and only their bodies remaining locked in the ice. We fairies, on the other hand, don't have that luxury. I think that what we're seeing are actual fairy souls, ancient ones, freed of their husks, unable to dissipate, rising in the cracks into the air and then dispersing to the air before a new husk can form. It's pretty depressing, if you're fairy."
Joe sighed. "The only thing I can say is that everything I've seen so far is something I don't mind having dissipated. I keep thinking that we might not have it right, though. I keep remembering Quasa's tale of seeing the one-time humans turned into a collection of bestiary after being in here. I know there's even supposed to be frozen spells in this crap, but that wouldn't explain that sort of stuff. Nobody throws spells that give the enemy goat heads or fish tails.''
"Fairy blood was probably stronger then, like the magic," Marge guessed. "There are fairies even today with goatlike heads, and others with fishlike tails. Suppose you were standing right on one of those openings when the fairy spirit rose? The instinctive thing would be to find cover, to find a temporary husk. If pieces of those souls had time to get to mortal flesh, they might produce that sort of thing."
"The odds of being on top of one of these cracks when it goes is pretty slim," Macore responded, thinking. "But if you added heat, you might get a whole bunch in full strength at once balding for the flesh. What do you bet that they peed themselves into monsters?"
After walking for what seemed like hours, at least, although there was no reliable way to tell time, they broke for a rest. The bag was well used, and they knew it would be a total discard by the time they were done, and the block of ice for a seat was barely big enough for Joe, with Macore almost sitting on his lap. The little thief looked up at the big man, grinned, and said, "Daddy."
"You be good or I'll throw you off!" Joe threatened. . Marge and Mia sat wearily in the snow, knowing that their body heat, at least, would not transfer without action on their part, and action was the last thing either of them wanted.
Mia looked back at their tracks. "Do you think they are still following us, Master"?" she asked nervously.
"If they haven't peed their own selves into oblivion or worse by now, yeah," Macore answered before Joe could. "Most of 'em are kind of bored and not real energetic, but that Quasa is a tough, hard-nosed bitch who would pursue you to the City-States and beyond, if you forgot to fill out a form."
Joe looked around. "If there was any kind of cover I'd almost be tempted to wait for them. If they do catch up, Mia and I will handle them, understand? Just stay behind us and don't make yourselves targets."
"But the crossbows!" Marge objected. "And you don't dare run at them in here!"
"Don't have to," he told her. "It might be a little bloody and painful, but all the bolts I saw in there were wood or bronze-tipped."
"Whatever you do, don't bleed on the snow!" Macore warned. "Blood's warm."
"I'll try not to, if it's necessary. But if one of them goes down, it could be hairy."
"We may find out after all," Marge said. "If that's not two figures of flesh and blood coming, I don't know what they can be."
Joe sighed tiredly and got up. "And it was always my experience that women seemed to be always going to the bathroom. Bad luck."
"Perhaps not, Master," Mia responded, getting up as well and pulling her knife from the pack, then walking slowly away from him. "I, for one, would rather meet these two than an assemblage of those horrors we've been seeing."
Marge used her extraordinary vision. "Crossbows for sure. I doubt if there's much hope of you not taking one in the chest, Joe."
"Just remember where not to bleed!" Macore emphasized helpfully.
"And watch out for a chain reaction," Marge warned. "If you get one of them and she falls and bleeds, it's sure as hell gonna raise something."
The two women stopped about twenty or twenty-five yards from them, crossbows now at the ready. They weren't going to allow themselves to get close enough in to take a sword or knife.
"You're coming back!" Quasa told them in a firm, businesslike tone. "All four of you. I don't know where you came from, nymph, but you can't fly here and you sure as hell can't run."
"Nymph! I'm a Kauri, you little broom-ridin' boot-lickin' daughter of a bitch!''
Joe drew his sword, which hummed in excitement of having its own feast. Below, the colored lights seemed to change and shift, as if reacting to the sword.
"Your crossbows won't save you," Joe told them flatly. "They'll cause us a little pain, but that's the way it goes. Your plan to amputate a part of me wouldn't have worked, either. It would have come back. The only thing you could have done to me physically was make my hair fall out, and I kind of like my hair."
Quasa seemed confused about the reply. Never before had she had someone in this position, where she could drop them with one well-placed shot but they couldn't possibly get to her, when they didn't surrender.
"What do you think you are? Demons? Sorcerers? You have no protective spells. I can see the spells you have. And the bitch is a slave. That's plain to see!"
Songs Of The Dancing Gods Page 27