Horrors of the Dancing Gods

by Jack L. Chalker

  That was a vision worth holding on to, if she could.

  Chapter 3

  The Path Of The McGuffin

  Mysterious all-knowing strangers with mystical powers may be used only to ensure that heroic types remain in conformance to other Rules in terms of behavioral choices.

  —Rules, Vol. CXI, p. 67(c)

  "Don't get too cocky with this new freedom stuff," Joe warned Alvi as they made their way down to the Great River Road

  . "Remember, a lot of people will hurt what they don't like, even kill it, and we need some cooperation."

  Alvi nodded, but she was really gaining confidence fast, even to the point of altering her long-used straight-up pose, letting the tail extend out stiffly, and bending forward while walking, which appeared to increase her stability vastly and give her not only a strong and confident forward gait but an easy way to break into a run. Joe hoped she wouldn't, though; wood nymphs weren't built for speed, and Joe had not found any reason to rush.

  On the River Road

  even Alvi's odd appearance was a matter of culture and knowledge more than anything else, considering the vast number of very strange faerie races that were all around as well. There were ones with butterfly wings, ones with gossamer wings, ones with little birdlike wings, and a lot with no wings at all. Near the bank were hippogryphs, mermaidlike Virgans, powder-blue water nymphs with their transparent skin flaps like lace and the somewhat unsettling illusion that if you stared at them hard enough and close enough, you could see their insides, and lots, lots more. More faerie folk, in fact, than humans, who were there in good numbers as well, both on the river in small sailboats and barges and along the shores.

  The humans themselves were a variety of their own races, with skins from near black through all the shades of brown and tan and orange-yellow, very tall and extremely short, covered in every conceivable color and style of hair or with no hair at all. In and around them were various elves, their colors and tunics showing their origins and tribal natures. The more elemental the creature, the less the fashion; nymphs tended to be unclad, needing little, while many other fairies were even more costumed than the humans.

  "Get outta the road, you halfling freak!" a gruff man's voice shouted, and Alvi turned and saw a big, bearded man on a horse-drawn cart right behind her. She stuck her tongue out at him and made a face, but when he moved his hand to the whip, she suddenly thought better of it and gave way.

  Lesson one, Joe thought.

  But she was undeterred generally, and one fellow, perhaps only partly in jest, shouted out a job offer—if she could handle three sets of oars at once. She smiled but declined.

  Finding a ferry across the River of Dancing Gods at that point wasn't easy. There weren't that many, since the river here was so wide that only a free-sailing vessel could handle it and so meandering that there was little demand for crossings when you'd have to travel so far along the other side just to cover a relatively short straight-line distance. They had to go south anyway, though, so they kept on, hoping that they'd be able to do it by Yingling, where the river took a wide eastward bend that would take them not only in the wrong direction but toward the major City-States and their very dense and potentially hostile populations.

  Alvi, in spite of the attitudes and looks, was having a ball out in the real world without playacting or being weighted down in a massive costume for the first time in her whole life.

  "You said you knew the skills of war," the halfling noted to Joe as they went along.

  Joe nodded. "Yes, although it's been a long time, and at this weight and balance and with these muscles, I probably couldn't wrestle a two-year-old and win. Once, long ago, I fought one of the legendary battles of modern history on this floodplain, maybe twenty, thirty kilometers west of here. A war of armies, human and faerie, and demon princes, dragons—the whole works. Scared the wits out of me then, but it's great to look back now that it's so far in the past. I think that's the way with most great battles and the people who fight them. A time of killing, carnage, death, and terror with you crapping in your pants becomes more and more a glorious and wonderful heroic experience over time. I wonder if I was nearly as good as I think I was."

  "You did pretty well against those guys."

  "Yes, but that was improvising with what I had. Why do you ask, anyway?'

  "I was just wondering if you'd train me."

  "Huh?"

  "My upper arms are pretty strong, really, 'cause they've done all the work. I often wondered what would happen with maybe a saber or sword in my top right hand, maybe a fencing foil or short sword for the middle, and even a rope or whip for the bottom."

  Joe laughed. "Could you really handle all that at once if you had them? I mean, you're talking about doing three different things at once with your hands."

  "No problem. It was one of my kid's games I used to practice in my room. I'd play a kind of catch, bouncing a ball and alternately catching and tossing or dropping it hand to hand to hand to hand and so on. Found that on my top and bottom set I'm right-handed and with the middle pair the left works best. You figure that out. I never did. I guess it's just the way it's wired. I always wondered if I'd be good in a duel, but I never had the chance, 'cause nobody was supposed to even know about the other sets, right? And training me with those kinds of weapons wasn't on Daddy's list of priorities. I can do pretty fair with a bow, though, and I wanted to learn the rest."

  Joe considered it. "Well, I suppose I could teach you the basics, but it's years to get really good with any of them, you know."

  "So? If I can get some decent training up front, I'll get better. How long did you have to train to get to be expert?'

  Joe coughed, a bit embarrassed by the answer. "I didn't—much. A few months, really, with a good teacher. My edge was mostly the fact that I had a magic sword that knew more about the business than I did."

  "Yeah? Where'd you get one of those? And what happened to it?"

  "It was given to me by a powerful sorcerer, and where he got it from I have no idea. It—and me, too, I think—was to finish off the most evil sorcerer of our time, and it did. We did—but at the cost of me winding up as a wood nymph and the sword being consumed by volcanic fires. Since then I've been trying to get back to my old self somehow, and you can see the result. Heck, I often wonder if we were bound together, that sword and me, and if neither of us could live as we were without the other. It sure seemed like I lost something inside when it fell, impaling the body of the Dark Baron, Esmilio Boquillas, and consuming him as well."

  "Lost something? Like what?"

  "I don't know. I thought I knew, but I'm beginning to wonder if I haven't been wrong, that what I lost wasn't my big hero mode so much as my reason for being around at all. I mean, you're right, it's not all that bad being a wood nymph in Husaquahr if you were born one and raised one and that's all you ever were or were going to be. But it's pretty damned dull and limited if you've been other things and wind up one. I wasn't sure what I had of the old me left until that business in the woods back there. It stirred up something I thought was long dead."

  "If it did, then you must have wasted a lot the past few years."

  "Huh?"

  "Well, if you found that feeling of fun, of accomplishment, again, then it was there all the time, right? So maybe if you'd been looking for some adventure and people who needed help and helped them instead of moping around and feeling sorry for yourself and trying to undo what was done, you'd have had a happy few years. Well? I mean, it sure sounds like it."

  Joe thought it sounded like time to change the subject again. "Never mind about me. What makes you so bloodthirsty all of a sudden?'

  "Freedom. This. All my life I've been told what kind of horrible existence I'd have if I ever got discovered and was forced out into the world. Well, maybe I don't know much yet, but I do know that most folks don't give a damn if you don't bother them, not around here, and that what you really need to get along is both a skill or skills and a way t
o defend your own self and whatever you own. The sword, the bow, the whip—these are the things that give people the feeling of power over others around here. If I have them and know how to use them, maybe that'll give the others pause about making comments or worse about me. I also have faerie sight and some small abilities with minor spells as well as a fair amount of book learning. Put them all together and maybe I stay free."

  It was a real thought.

  "All right," Joe agreed, "tell you what—if we can find an old, serviceable pair of fencing foils, we can start with that. I think even I can handle one of those, and rusty as I am on skills and totally unconditioned for any such use in this body, I still could probably hold my own for teaching. If you learn to fence reasonably, handle a rapier well, you're one up on a lot of people who only know brute strength defense with a saber or short sword. We'll see how long the money holds out and what we can afford here. Still, it's not a bad idea if you can handle it, and I've seen your nerve in action. I mean, if we go on any kind of adventure together, somebody is going to have to protect me!"

  ****

  It wasn't that difficult to find a vendor in one of the towns along the Great River Road who had such a set; secondhand weapons were quite common in the region, particularly well-used ones pawned or lost in gambling by students at the civil and military institutions of the southern City-States. Finding them in any decent condition, well balanced and with the safety caps still present, was a bit harder. Joe also found that her very rusty and virtually never used knowledge of fencing foils wasn't really all that good, either. With the great sword, you just heaved and let it do the work. At Joe's best, as the person she'd once been, there wouldn't have been much of a contest with such weapons—Joe could put up a decent front and show but wasn't really all that good. Compared with someone who knew nothing and had never had any training, however, Joe was an expert.

  They were able to make a decent deal on both an older set and a fair bow and quiver of arrows. It actually made Joe feel a little better that they had something to use, no matter how inadequate. This was still a fairly dangerous land and a primitive one, and in much of it life was very cheap. Just having weapons on display kept a bit of the threat away. It was sort of like putting a top burglar alarm on your house. The alarm wouldn't keep out a decent burglar, but an average one might look at the trouble of undoing yours versus the lack of trouble going into your alarmless neighbor's and decide to burgle next door instead.

  After all, the only people who really knew how good you were with any weaponry were ones who'd seen you in action. Until then, you were always a potential threat.

  Crossing the great river wasn't nearly as easy. Despairing of finding a decent ferry that far down, Joe finally decided that the only way would be to take a river tramp, a small ship that went from port to port along the river, up and down, carrying local supplies and commerce. Many were little more than filthy barges with single rectangular sails, occasionally in league with some river faerie or having a few muscular oarsmen aboard for the hard parts.

  Such was the Catarwahl, apparently last cleaned sometime around the expulsion from Eden and smelling like it, too, manned by the somewhat questionable and unquestionably boozy Captain Letchu, along with his wife and son, who could be told apart less by age than by the mustache the wife had. They were going downriver now, which meant they could mostly follow the slow but dependable currents in a kind of diagonal pattern, crisscrossing the river in a series of triangles until they reached the end. Going back upriver, if they had no wind, was a matter of contracting with some hippogryphs or other river faerie to give them a decent tow.

  "I'll takes yer as fer as Azkim," the captain told them. "No more for that pittance."

  "You're a money-grubber of the first water," Joe retorted. "This is river robbery, and you know it. It just about cleans us out."

  That was by no means the truth, but it was more than a bargaining ploy. Letchu was in fact charging them about ten times what any other ferry would, and it wasn't a good idea to give people like that the idea that you perhaps had even more money or valuables. This drooling, filthy trio was nonetheless bigger than bears and looked twice as mean.

  Alvi seemed entranced by the prospect of crossing the big river and oblivious to most of the unspoken parts of the deal, but standing on the rail near the bow as they pulled away from the dock, she seemed excited and relieved.

  "It's a good thing you are a halfling and me a wood nymph, considering this," Joe noted sourly. "I have a good idea that if we seemed to have any value ourselves, we'd wind up being tied up and sold down in Yingling."

  "Really? They do that?"

  "Sure. Back where I came from they called it 'Shang-haiing' somebody, after a city way off on the other side of the world where the ships would often be headed in ancient days. Unable to get sailors to go on those long and risky but very profitable voyages, they just hired men to find people in the bars, drug or knock them out, and they'd wake up well out at sea, where they either signed on as crew or got tossed overboard with lead weights. Most of 'em signed. The women, well, they were sold as domestics, field workers, prostitutes, you name it. Not much different here. There's still things like slavery here, too, handy if you have a need for planters and pickers and such back in those huge jungle plantations. That's why most of the good guys here travel in groups. The bad guys, too, come to think of it."

  "Well, all I can say is that I don't see the world as quite as nasty as you," Alvi noted. "I'm sure that's all part of it, but there's so much more. It's kind of pretty here on the river, with all those creatures in the water, all the boats big and small, the colorful costumes—I am really getting to like it in spite of how mean some of 'em can be." She sniffed. "I have to admit, though, its smells leave something to be desired right now." She discovered that any exposed part of her that touched any part of the ship got covered in some thick, foul-smelling black stuff. Joe was not immune, either, but chuckled.

  "It's peat, I think. They take it out of bogs up north, and it's burned for heat. It's cleaner than the dung, but it's no winner."

  "They cook with it?" Alvi was appalled.

  "No, they don't usually cook with it," Joe told her. "They use wood for that, if and when they can find it in condition to be properly burned. Sometimes oils. It's used to heat their houses. It gets extremely cold up north, I can tell you."

  Alvi thought that over. "I—I think I know what you mean, but I don't remember ever being so cold that I had to heat the inside of a place. Is that where they make the snow?"

  'Well, it's not made, it just falls. Temperature gets cold enough, it snows instead of rains. It's all water. They pack a lot of snow and ice in special boats now and use preserving spells to sustain them all the way downriver here so the rich folks can have chilled wines and store meat and fish for several days or even weeks."

  "That's the only way I ever saw it," Alvi acknowledged. Do you think we'll get to anyplace that's really cold on this trip?"

  "Not for a while, I hope." Joe laughed. "We're in the tropics and heading south into more of them. Where from there, though—that's what we have to find out. I hope we stay warm. I can take the cold, but not for long periods, and it can slow me down. If I freeze, I can be stiff for years, centuries, maybe forever, until I'm thawed out. And if you freeze, you're dead. I had enough cold stuff the last time, in the place where I wound up like this. I think I'm owed the heat."

  It took about ninety minutes to make the full downriver crossing to the very small town of Azkim, and by that point and with scrambling to get out of the boat, both of them were black as, well, pitch.

  "Now what?" Alvi asked Joe.

  "First, I think we find a shallow river access and wash this crap off us. Then we'll find a place for you to buy something to eat, and we'll camp somewhere close. Too late to do much more today. Tomorrow we'll continue south, on this side of the river. Down to the Coast Highway

  , then west to the Leander border. If we can keep going at t
his pace more or less, we should make it to the jumping-off place for the Marmalade Islands and their resorts in maybe ten days to two weeks. If we're lucky, my old friend will still be doing three-hour tours ..."

  ****

  It was slow going once they veered off the River of Dancing Gods and took older, rarely used trails to the south and southwest, but that suited them both just fine. It made it easy almost to forget that Husaquahr existed, that there was hatred and bigotry and violence all around, and instead made it almost seem to be an extended and entertaining picnic.

  It had been a long time since Joe had allowed herself to get friendly with, let alone close to, anybody else, and it was very strange: the longer they traveled together, the less odd Joe thought Alvi looked. In this world, where everybody seemed more than a little off, familiarity bred acceptance more than anything else.

  Alvi, too, had the same reaction toward Joe, the first real friend and confidant outside of family members and close servants she'd ever known and somebody who seemed very wise and fascinating. The idea that Joe was a wood nymph hardly mattered; if Alvi had any prejudices toward the more elemental faerie, they surely didn't apply to Joe.

  Several times they actually stepped behind cover when encountering parties of travelers, particularly humans; it was tough to know who was who and what was what in that unfamiliar region and whether anybody had yet caught on to who that six-armed halfling had been.

  Joe did in fact try teaching Alvi a little of his fencing skills, but it wasn't anything serious. Alvi's body wasn't designed for finesse; clearly it would be better off with short swords, cutlasses, or possibly sabers, since a cut and slash would be most effective with all those arms. Joe wasn't that much better; the short reach, a lack of really fast reflexes, and easy tiring of the arm muscles just made swordplay ridiculous, and unlike mortals and perhaps halflings as well, all the exercising and workouts in the world wouldn't change a faerie body that was already predefined.