Marge was shocked. "Six years! My God! I had no idea! So little Irving—"
"Is not so little anymore," Poquah finished for her. "No, madam, I fear he's anything but that. And no end of trouble, too. After all this time you would think that he would have assimilated into the world here as one or another thing, but so far he's resisted. He's a good swordsman but not a great one, and more than capable with the basic weapons yet not of the warrior or mercenary class. No self-discipline. He's learned to read the Husaquahrian tongue to a remarkable degree yet has no feel for the language, nor a general interest in trade and commerce or in politics, which he holds in deep contempt. In some things he's quite brilliant—he applied himself for weeks to learning a specific set of spells, then, when he got so he could cast them, he did so and was done with more than mere 'puttering' around with occasional magic, all for mischief. He's also a passing fair pickpocket and thief, although I think he brought those talents with him when he came."
"Spells? What did he cast? And on whom?"
"On what is more like it. Turned the Master's entire collection of precious lawn jockeys white as snow."
Marge cracked up, and it was a couple of minutes before she could get complete control again. Ruddygore was wonderful and sophisticated in so many areas, but he had a bizarre fixation on the idea that cheap, tacky plaster statues, lawn jockeys, pink flamingos, and other total junk from the Earth of her origin were somehow great and unappreciated works of art.
"What did Ruddygore say about that when he found out?' she asked the Imir.
"He was initially not pleased, but then it occurred to him that the act was done not out of mischief but out of a sense of personal offense. Frankly, I do not believe that the Master ever considered that the objects might be considered offensive to or by anyone, and this brought home to him the fact that they offended very much indeed. It was the violence of the spell as much as its nature that gave it away. I must say, once his anger cooled, he did not undo the spell, nor has he added to that particular collection since. I believe that in some strange way the Master feels he actually learned something new, and for one of his great age and experience that is more valuable than anything else."
"Maybe it is, Poquah." She nodded. "Maybe it is. What about Joe? What does she say about this?"
The Imir sighed. "I'm afraid that the question is without meaning. Joe remained here only a few days after returning from the north, then departed, stating that she had to learn to deal with the situation before she could be of any value. The Master has kept track of her travels but has never called her back."
"What about the kid, then? You mean Joe just hauled the poor kid over, left him here, and bugged out?" She was appalled. "No wonder he's got no self-discipline! Who's been raising him, anyway?"
"We all have, to a degree. In a sense, he's the young prince of Terindell."
"But—what about him and his father? I mean, Irving at least knows what happened, doesn't he?'
Poquah shrugged. "I don't know. Sometimes I think he does; sometimes I think he does not. All the time I believe he thinks of it as irrelevant to him. It is not easy for anyone to fully understand another, but for an elf to understand humans to that degree—I fear not."
Marge shook her head sadly in wonder. "So what was I called here for, then? The old boy just wants to talk over old times or what?"
"I'm not certain, but I rather think it is more serious than that. You have certainly felt it."
"The dark chill, you mean. I think everybody can feel it, even the most nonmagical of humans. It's ugly and pervasive."
"And it is growing stronger," Poquah added.
"Yeah. But I hardly think it's anything I can do much about. Lord knows it's driving me to exhaustion, though. Everybody's so down, so depressed, I often have to cleanse myself every third or fourth person. There are times even now when I've felt fat, bloated, and too dense even to fly right. But hey, I did my bit. More than my bit. Besides, what could I do now against even the old enemies? Our company's long disbanded, and things aren't like they were. None of us are like we were."
"Less who we were than even we think," Poquah responded a bit cryptically. "Still, we are no more self-piloting than before, either. Our destinies run a strange race through the Law, the Rules, instinct, intellect, and destiny. Something is unfinished. I cannot explain it any better than that, but it has been constantly there. A sense that there is something among our own threads that remains undone. Until we do it, we cannot pass the burden to the next generation. That's the Rules."
"I never did like the Rules all that much," she muttered.
"They are excessive," Poquah agreed, "but they are also necessary. Without the Rules, it is unlikely that any of us would be alive today or a stone of this castle standing. The Rules, like any good body of law, are good not because they are all necessary—indeed, most are quite silly—but because they are so mathematically evenhanded. Neither good nor evil can ever gain absolute victory so long as the Rules exist, and so long as they provide opportunity, the cleverest will come out on top. So long as the Rules exist, we tend to be guaranteed a tie, given an equal force on each side. With no Rules, with no margins built in, I, as a mathematician, wouldn't give a gold bar for good's chances."
They were now inside the inner castle and up the winding stairway to the Great Hall on the second floor above the arch. This one great room had changed the least; various suits of armor from countless periods—including some built for nothing remotely human—stood all around, great portraits of dour-looking nobles and sorcerers and the like stared down, and great fireplaces and wonderful great tables and chairs with arms and legs carved into fantastic shapes of gargoyles, wild animals, fairy folk, you name it, graced the hall.
Against the far wall was a massive bookcase running floor to ceiling and along the entire expanse without break, filled with huge heavy-looking tomes all bound in red buckram with gold-embossed spines. Hundreds of volumes, going off to both sides and up and down in a sea of blood red, the Books of Rules Existent under which the whole of this world, this universe, was governed.
"I will go and tell the Master you are here," Poquah said, bowing slightly. "He's been quite tired of late, what with this evil essence, so be prepared for a less than vital man. He is still quite strong, though."
"You didn't tell me he was ill!"
"It is not—exactly—illness. You will see. I'll fetch him." And with that, he left her standing there.
She stared at the books with a mixture of awe and apprehension, as always, knowing that within those pages were the very Kauri defined and limited, and also up there, in some form or another, were the Rules for almost all that had happened to them over the year since she and Joe had first been brought here to battle the Dark Baron.
What a grand campaign it had been, too! For all the horrors and slipups and nasty surprises, it had been in many ways a remarkable experience, the kind few people got a crack at in their lifetimes.
She'd always promised herself that she'd learn the Husaquahrian written tongue and read those Rules someday, but she never had. Why not? She couldn't really say, but somehow it just hadn't seemed important for her to do so.
It hadn't seemed important to do much of anything, in fact.
That bothered her, although she was having trouble even determining why it should bother her.
In fact, until Ruddygore's summons had brought it all back, even those past exploits had faded into memories that she barely considered anymore. For the first year or so after the final showdown in the cold wastes she'd been pretty faithful in keeping in touch here, checking on Irving, dropping in to talk over old times with the likes of Poquah and Ruddygore, and even keeping in some sort of contact with Macore.
Over time, though, things hadn't so much stopped as faded out. The visits had become fewer and farther between; the conversations—when they did come—more basic, less substantial; and, finally, it had just stopped altogether. She couldn't remember the last time she'd e
ven dreamed in English or thought much in that language. It wasn't that the old Marge wasn't there anymore, it was just that she had been, well, filed away somewhere under old times and rarely was brought out except for infrequent reunions.
Was that bad? She didn't really know. She was a Kauri, pretty well indistinguishable from all her sister Kauris and doing what Kauris did. Not only was that not going to change, she enjoyed it. Was the price, the loss of individuality, too great? She wasn't sure. It didn't seem so, yet something in her old prechangeling Texas upbringing said it should be.
Throckmorton P. Ruddygore always made an impressive appearance even when he was feeling off. A huge man, well over six feet in height and impossible to guess in girth, he always reminded Marge of Santa Claus living the good life in the off-season. His thick but carefully managed flowing white beard and long, snow-white hair only added to the impression, and even in the worst of times his eyes seemed to twinkle with the suggestion that he was enjoying some cosmic joke at everyone else's expense.
"Marge! How good it is to see you again!" the sorcerer exclaimed, sounding both sincere and delighted. "I'm very glad that you could come." He went over, took her hand, and, bending down, kissed it softly. It was a very nice gesture, but it also served as a reminder of just how huge a man he was compared to her or, frankly, almost anybody else.
"I'm glad to be back for a bit," she responded, smiling. "But let's face it, when you're the one calling, it's not like I'm going to ignore it!"
He grinned and pulled over a huge, high-backed padded chair and then sank into it. The chair, made of the hardest woods and of ancient lineage that had borne the weight of sorcerers and kings, nonetheless sagged and almost seemed ready to scream in protest.
"You'll pardon my manners," he said more softly. "I'm sure that Poquah has already told you that I'm well off my feed of late."
"You do look and sound unusually tired," Marge admitted to him. "This new pall seems to sap the very energy out of folks."
"It's worse than that for sorcerers. The thing is, it is so pervasive, we spend much of our energy just keeping things up to snuff. With no chance to renew or get away, it takes its toll."
"I assume it's why you called me here, or at least part of your reason."
He nodded. "More or less. It's not the pall itself so much as the cause and object of it. It is slowly, incrementally, almost particle by particle, draining the free magic out of Husaquahr."
"But that's impossible! I mean, the faerie, alone account for a great deal of it."
"True, but it is less of a drain on the faerie, for you are essentially defined as much by your powers as by your form. That is not free magic energy. You feel it, certainly, but not to the extent that someone like me feels it. I call upon the energy, I gather it, I weave it into the patterns we call spells. That is free magic, and that is what is slowly being sucked out. At this rate it's not going to be a terrible blow to us today or tomorrow, but sooner or later it will be. And since it puts pressure on all of us who use free magic, it drives us closer to exhaustion. When we can't fight it anymore, it will accelerate. I think that's the idea. Collapse those of us who can guard Husaquahr, and anybody can move in and take over. And whoever controls the free magic in the end controls the faerie as well, since you are subject to it as much as to your own predefined limitations."
She gave a low whistle. "Then this is serious."
"Indeed. Very much so."
"Do you know who's causing it?"
He nodded. "I think so. He took great pains to disguise himself, but the concerted efforts of the whole Council were brought to bear, and we've rooted him out. The thing is, we can't do much about him. The only member of the Council who could act refuses to acknowledge or recognize the problem. Whether it's because he's been bought off with promises of even greater power or has been deluded, I can't say. Either way, under his protection, if only by his inaction, this continues."
"The rest of you can't stop it? I mean, you wrote all those Rules and you're stuck with something like this?"
Ruddygore sighed. "That really is part of the problem. We wrote those Rules and we're stuck with them. Oh, I suspect that the whole of the Council could combine in single unitary purpose to dislodge our recalcitrant brother and perhaps get to this evil source he protects, but that won't happen. We can't even change the damned Rules until every single sorcerer has a copy—that alone takes years!"
"Seems to me you dealt with Boquillas right off, at least in stripping him of his powers and exiling him to Earth," she noted.
"Indeed. Stripping powers. Exiling. With Boquillas right in front of us. But what if he hadn't been in our custody? We would have been helpless. We still needed the bunch of you to go off and pull him out to where he was vulnerable, and even then, he was only temporarily so. Finally Joe sent him to Hell, but the bastard still didn't go there—instead he sought out the enemies of all creation, consorted with them, and is mounting a rather effective takeover bid."
Marge was startled. "Takeover? Boquillas is alive—and he's actually trying to conquer Hell?"
"And other things. There seems to be no stopping that man."
Marge began to see where this was going. "You are telling me that the Dark Baron, last seen in the body of a pretty woman stabbed through the heart with a sword and falling headfirst into volcanic lava, is somehow behind all that's happening now. You really are saying that, aren't you?"
"I'm afraid so. Things are still unfinished with him."
She blew up. "How the hell can they ever be settled? Jeez! We've exiled him, stripped him of his powers, stabbed him, dissolved him in molten rock . . . ! If all that didn't work, then what the hell can?"
"I assure you that this is not exactly normal even for such ones as Esmilio and myself. The Lamp of Lakash could have done it—its magic overrides natural law, the Rules, you name it. I—I thought he was gone, though, and that the Lamp had been shown to be more of a danger to us than a protection for us. I got rid of it. It was a very stupid thing for me to do. The whole reason why it was here, why it had been allowed to be here, was that it was the ultimate weapon against the ultimate attacks. Nothing could stand against it. Nothing save God and perhaps the Devil. That's why it was so dangerous. Like all ultimate weapons, defensive or not, it was always a two-edged sword."
"Great! You know what we went through to get you that thing? Can't you get it back?"
"Impossible. That route is gone."
"Then what are we talking about here? After all that stuff, all those adventures, all those fights and spells and wars and personal tragedies and sacrifices—after all that, the bad guys win?"
Ruddygore sighed. "What can I say to the first charges? That acquiring great knowledge and tremendous power makes one feel almost godlike? That you begin to forget that you are not truly a god and that the very last thing you are is infallible? Guilty. As to the second—not so long as the Rules prevail in Husaquahr."
"Huh?'
"Remember the one that got Joe in his fix but nonetheless saved both your tails more than once? That, no matter what, there has to be one out available? At least one? That nothing, not even certain doom, can be inevitable even if it is the most likely outcome?"
"Um, yeah. But—"
"That's why I've been studying here and racking my brains for so long. I am as much subject to the Rules as you are. It hit me after a fashion that the Rules would no more permit such an absolute action as I took with the Lamp than they would permit you to be executed without somehow providing a way of escape whether you discovered and took it or not. Like you, my first thoughts were on reversing the dismissal of the Lamp, and I wasted a lot of precious months trying to figure out a way around the action before I finally accepted that I had done too good a job. The Lamp is out, and there is no reversal of that—of this I am now certain. That meant, however, that under the Rules there had to be some sort of backup. Perhaps not as effective, but something had to exist beyond the Lamp, something here in this world a
nd accessible, although perhaps not without great cost, that will at least do the job."
She thought it over but wasn't all that thrilled by the concept. "I remind you, sir, that many years ago now I was one of those who came to this world because of just such a problem. The Baron and his demon allies were beating up everybody and everything, and not even the great powers of this world could stop them, so off we went to find the Lamp and wrest it from its ten-foot-tall killer-bunny guardian. That deal brought Sugasto into the picture, and it was more than Hell to pay before we got rid of him, never mind the Baron. Okay, we got rid of them, and we got rid of the Lamp so it couldn't be stolen and do irreparable harm. Great. Now here it is, a few years later, there's some new evil spreading over the land, nobody can stop it or deal with it, and we have to find some kind of supermagic thingie nobody else knows about and steal it and round and round and round we go."
Ruddygore let her go on and get it out of her system, but he ignored her weary sarcasm. "Marge, there is no such thing as 'new' evil. There is only evil, eternal and vicious, and it is never new. Creative certainly, but it is very old indeed. It is the same evil that crept into the Garden, the same evil that sunk ancient Atlantis, that brought fear and war and horrors to two universes and more. It has many names. War, pestilence, genocide, hatred, intolerance, torture, fear—all those and more. But it's universal, it's been there almost since the beginning, and it will be there until the end. It varies mostly in degree and in its capacity to reinvent itself. Indeed, did you know that there is actually an entire continent devoted to evil right here in this world? Has no one ever told you of Far Yuggoth?"
The name had a familiarity and perhaps a slightly chilling tone to it. "I have heard it mentioned," she admitted, "but not often and never directly. I thought it was a myth, like the Boogeyman."
"Those who know of it don't want to think about it. Those who have ever known of it or been close to it never wish to think of its existence again. When you consider the amount of evil we have here even in quiet times, let alone when ones like our old friend the Baron was at large, and Sugasto, and the rest—well, a continent of concentrated evil is best left mythological. It is not, however. It is very real."
Horrors of the Dancing Gods Page 8