DG5 - Horrors of the Dancing Gods

by Chalker, Jack L

  "Yeah, well, that might be true, but there's got to be some point at which you take responsibility for your own actions. My ex was beaten and abused growing up as well, but I knew men who also had been and who were determined that they would never be like that to others. Most poor people don't commit crimes, either. The majority of the people here are dirt-poor; but every time I hear poverty given as an excuse for evil, I have to laugh. I'm real sorry for Irving, but I didn't do it."

  "Well, there's no getting around it, honey. That brat's gonna decide the fate of all our asses, so you got the job. I will give you some armor against his charisma, and Ruddygore can give you the keys to his fetters. Do I have to command you to go?"

  Marge sighed. "No. I'll go on my own, but for the sake of you and my sisters and to rescue Joe if I can. Not because Irving needs an education."

  "Start from down here near where Macore lives," Ruddygore instructed. "It's quite a long sea journey, and you will be dependent on ports in the region anyway for passage. As you might suspect, there isn't a whole lot of traffic, at least of the commercial sort, between Yuggoth and the rest of Husaquahr, and it's not the sort of spot folks go for holidays. Try to talk Macore into coming along—I think he'll be his usual great asset. In any event, he's the last person on this continent to have seen and spoken with Joe."

  Marge, Poquah, and Irving all stood around, nodding at the instructions. Until then the boy hadn't evidenced much interest in getting to know Marge or the details of the trip, but now at least he seemed to realize that he couldn't just walk blindly off a cliff.

  "I'd say it wouldn't be much on the usual shipping lanes," Marge noted. "Are you sure we can even get there in any reasonable time?"

  "Oh, yes. That's the one thing about evil places. If you actually want to go there, there's always a way open to do so. The problem is never finding evil, it's getting away from it."

  "All right, assuming we can get there in reasonable order, what then?" she pressed, feeling uncomfortably the leader of this mess. Damn it! 1 was drafted—they don't draft generals!

  "Once you're off, I'll know where your first landfall will be and I will arrange for you to be met. Still, remember, once you're inside, you cannot trust anyone or anything on Yuggoth. The good people there are the ones who wouldn't stab you in the back for no reason at all, just if they had something to gain by it. Still, the agents we can use for this are primarily changelings like yourself, although of a darker nature. People whose absolute fanatic and uncompromisable lust for the McGuffin has taken them across the Sea of Dreams to Yuggoth but not completely to their goals. They will help you because you will facilitate them in attaining what they most desire. In general, you can trust them to get you there, but not once you get there or are clear to the goal. And if it looks like some other player can help them if they betray you, they'll have no hesitation in doing so."

  "Sounds chummy," Marge noted glumly.

  "You will be unable to find the McGuffin on your own; its concealed hiding place is known only to the King. He has agreed that if any of our representatives get to him, he will make that location known to them."

  "Why not just tell us outright so that we may head straight for it?" Poquah asked, frowning.

  "Well, for one thing, he doesn't want it known to others, and this decreases the chances of that happening," the sorcerer explained. "Second, if you can't make it to him, you can't make it there. And third, since you'll have native guides who also want the McGuffin—if they know, well, then, they won't need to be with you anymore, will they?"

  Poquah was unconvinced. "But if we reach the King, assuming we do, and gain this information, won't the effect be the same?"

  "Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm sure he'll have something in mind to guard against that. He always has the most arcane ideas for accomplishing things, but those things get done because nobody else can figure them out."

  "How far will we have to go in this land before we reach His Majesty?" the Imir asked. "From the port city, that is."

  "Yuggoth is roughly three thousand kilometers across by perhaps twenty-four hundred north-south. The King runs things from almost dead in the middle, atop some high mystical but natural formation called Castle Rock. That's where you must go."

  "How big?" Marge was appalled. "Ruddy, that's something like fifteen hundred plus miles! That's longer than Texas is wide! And all filled with horrors and dark powers and creepy-crawlies, and all hands, tentacles, and whatnot against us! It can't be done!"

  "Oh, I assure you that it can," the sorcerer told her. "Absolutely guaranteed. That is not to say that you will do it, but it is certainly possible with who and what you will have. What makes it more difficult than it is, is that this McGuffin must be in my hands—in my hands, not yours—in less than six months' time. If it is not, the fissures will be opened and the only option then will be a hasty escape for the powerful few. If the denizens of the muck beneath the Sea of Dreams actually make it through to reality, any reality, it is all over. If that happens, nothing, not even the McGuffm, will have the power to save us."

  GETTING UP TO DATE

  As a satisfactory motivator for actions of a Company, there must always be a McGuffin.

  —Rules, Vol VIII p. 27(e)

  "HE CERTAINLY HAS BEEN ONE FOR STUDY, THAT'S FOR certain," Poquah noted to Marge as they began their journey down the River of Dancing Gods to the sea and beyond in a private barge owned by Ruddygore. He was talking about young Irving, who seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time sitting on deck studying a particularly fat book.

  Marge nodded. "That's one of the Rules, isn't it? I wonder if Ruddygore knows it's missing."

  "Oh, it's of no consequence," the Imir assured her. "We have several dozen sets around."

  She had managed to control her less than rational reaction to Irving, but he still set off a peculiar mixture of emotions inside her ranging from animal attraction to severe distaste. It wasn't a good mix, but she felt she had to try to at least forge some kind of friendly business relationship with him if he'd allow her to do so.

  She walked over to him and looked over his shoulder at the book, which appeared to have three parallel columns per page of markings resembling what would be left by a flock of wild birds in heat. This was not a language she related to any from back home.

  "You can read that?" she asked, looking for an opening but also impressed in a very real sense. It was more than she could do after a lot longer there.

  "It was tough at the start, but it's no big deal now," he responded. "There are a lot of words I still have trouble with, but you can usually figure them out by finding something inside that's familiar."

  "Why so intent on this particular volume?' she asked him.

  "It's the one on Yuggoth, of course," he said with a bit of impatience in his voice. `They got their own volume, believe it or not. I been trying to figure out what makes it so much worse than what anybody can meet here. I mean, we've got evil spirits, demons, zombies, vampires, and other kinds of things in the here and now, and ghosts are a dime a dozen. So what can be so special about this place?"

  It was something she'd wondered about, too. "And do you know yet?"

  "I think I'm getting the idea. Think of every horror movie, creepy story, you name it, that you ever heard. Put them all together. Now take out any good folks—that is, good races, good ghosts, good anything. That's Yuggoth. It's the place where bad dreams come from and where the bad guys go to learn how to be really bad."

  "So how are we even supposed to survive this trip?" she asked him.

  "Oh, I don't think they want to kill in Yuggoth. Too simple. They want to corrupt you, bring you over to their side. That's the real trick. Being good and honorable in Yuggoth? They can't even figure that out. They can't handle it. Giving in to temptation, to corruption—that's what they're after. Then it's payback time. That's gonna be a lot rougher than just fighting or sneaking around or something like that. No matter what, we've got to keep being the good guys." />
  She considered that. "I'm not so sure I like the sound of that. You can at least die and get out of it, but Poquah and me—we're already in as much of an afterlife as we get."

  She also wondered if it was going to be as easy for the boy as he thought it might be. All that youthful, suppressed sexuality unleashed at once—who couldn't be corrupted, and fast?

  And then there was Joe. Poor Joe. In that nymph's body, tied to the trees to some extent and also to the flesh, how pure could he stay down there?

  It took almost a week to get downriver, and it wasn't wasted time. In addition to getting to know the maps and layout of Yuggoth as much as possible, the three began to get to know each other a bit better. She got the impression that Irving was deliberately cool to her less because she was a woman than because she was a friend and defender of his father. Finally, one evening, she decided to press it a bit and see just how deep that went.

  "Do you really hate your father, Irving?' she asked him, deciding that directness was the only approach that would work with the boy. "I mean it: is `hate' the right word?"

  "Maybe. I'm not sure," the boy admitted. "But I have no love at all for him. In fact, I think I'd rather have been left with Mom on the streets back home."

  "From what I heard and from where you were living, you'd have been dead by your late teens, maybe addicted before that," she noted. "That's what he was scared of. It was partly drugs that split your parents up or at least kept them split, I think. He didn't want you going in that direction. He was really almost obsessed with saving you, Irving. He named his sword after you just so he'd always remember what he had left and what he was fighting for."

  "But then he brought me here and left me! So now I got to go and maybe get killed or worse savin' his neck and hide to boot. And you're tellin' me it's better here than back home? That I'm better off? Mom had problems, sure, but she was gettin' clean. I know she was."

  It was a point she couldn't press even though Poquah had pretty much clued her in that the boy's convictions were less that than they were the hopes and naivete of a young son who loved his mother far more than she loved him. In point of fact, Mom didn't have much use for her son at all; she just wanted him around because that denied the boy to Joe.

  How did you tell a kid that, no matter what age he'd grown to be? And how did you make him believe it when there was nothing else to fill that hole with?

  "When a marriage splits, the two people who loved each other turn that old love to hate as often as not," she told him. "It was because your mom wouldn't let your dad even see you that a lot of this happened. Poor kid, you were just a football in a lot of this, I think, like a lot of kids get to be in these cases."

  "You were human once. You ever have a kid?"

  "No. I don't know if I couldn't or if it just didn't happen, but in the end it seems a good thing I didn't. If I had, I'd probably have stayed and taken it, and my husband would have gotten so drunk sooner or later, he'd have killed me or the kid and I'd have killed him." She sighed. "Kid, that's the one thing about this world. A select group of unhappy people from Earth get to try again here. Some make it, most don't, but they get the chance. You had no chance where you were. I'm not sure what chance you have now, but it's more up to you than it would have been had you stayed."

  "Maybe. But my dad took a kid out of his own comfortable world—a world that might not have been real nice but was one I knew—and plopped him down here in the middle of Fairyland. Then he went off to fight a war and didn't come back. Only he coulda come back. That's what I hold against him. If he'd lost an arm or a leg or been scarred or burned or something, he'd still have come back, and you know it. Come back and been a dad. But oh, no! He got turned into a Greenie, a girl. Can't have that. The boy'll get screwed up if I'm not macho, right? Heap big Injun chief became a squaw. That was something I could have accepted—I didn't know him much, anyway. But it wasn't something he could accept or deal with. It was still Dad inside, though, in the mind, in the head. Like that, well, maybe if he really cared more about me than about himself and his big image, he coulda spent some time raisin' me and teachin' me and givin' me a little love and whatever else I needed in that big, lonely place. But uh uh. The kid might not respect him now as just a nothin', a girl. So he ran away and left me to grow up without anybody. I can forgive all the rest, but I can never forgive him for that. In the end he was more scared of bein' what he was than he cared about me."

  "You're probably right on all that," she admitted, "but the fact is that being incredibly dumb in this area doesn't make him a bad guy, or girl, or whatever. He was raised in a very different way than either of us. I just don't think he could accept it. Maybe the other way, but the way it was, it was a kind of honor thing with him. I'm a little pissed off myself that he considered it a step down, but I wasn't raised his way. As dumb as it sounds or maybe is, I think he decided that you'd have no respect for him at all if he just showed up and told the truth. Somehow he really believed that if you could just be convinced he died a hero in that last battle, you'd somehow turn out better than if he showed up as a wood nymph. I don't know. Neither of your family ethnic cultures held women on a high plane. I think the real tragedy is that everybody just assumes. Nobody ever asks the kid what he thinks would be best."

  Irving shrugged. "Well, I know one thing from reading this stuff. Either he's as brave as or braver than he ever was or he's even stupider than you say he is. I mean, Dad and one other girl went into Yuggoth cold turkey, without even the knowledge or powers we got, and that's not all that great."

  She nodded. "Still, if you feel this way, why risk yourself to maybe try and save a perfect stranger, anyway?"

  He gave a wan smile and said, "Because I'm not about to do to him what he did to me. If I don't at least make the attempt to save him, am I any better than he was by not coming back and being a parent to me? Besides, I got to know a little about myself. I want to know if I've got the guts I think he should have had or if cowardice and stupidity run in the family."

  "I think you might be very surprised," she told him. She was. Deep down, if she could keep him in that kind of mood, there almost seemed somebody she could actually like down there.

  "Um, Irv, are you also aware of the effect you have on women?"

  He gave a dry chuckle. "Yeah. What a waste, huh?"

  "You don't find them attractive? At all?"

  "Oh, I guess, sort of. I don't understand women much. I've talked to you as an equal longer and more seriously than I think I've talked to any other woman since I left Earth. I understand on an academic level, I guess, but not personally. I know it's partly a spell—I have the knack for that myself, remember—but it's still not something I know firsthand. I'm not even sure I want to."

  "Huh? Oh, I can tell you, there's a lot of fun in it."

  "Fun? Yeah, maybe. Feel-good stuff, too. I know. But at what cost in self-control? You asked me if I hated my father. I'm trying very hard not to. I'm trying not to let any emotions overcome me other than maybe a sense of humor and a sense of tragedy. The spell itself isn't difficult, you know. It's a common spell used by adepts to keep themselves from being tempted during magical training. I see no profit in lifting it, particularly not now."

  "Scared you couldn't control it?"

  "Perhaps. Maybe I'm scared because I see how those girls react to me and how my mom and others reacted to their men. I don't think I want that. Not now. It's too much of a diversion. Better for now I stay where I am until I can control all of my mind and body."

  Marge stared at him and sighed. "You're right, kid. What a waste."

  Macore was still a few days away.

  Quinom was an old and somewhat seedy but still very popular ocean resort on the southern coast of Leander. Although the town itself had obviously seen better days and the upkeep on a tropical tourist trap was a bit higher than the locals had been willing to pay, it still had a harbor crowded with small pleasure boats, fishing vessels, and all sorts of recreational craft.<
br />
  Just beyond the pier was what Marge would accept as an obvious boardwalk area, a long line of shops, stalls, games, and whatnot that stretched in back of a wooden walkway that divided town from beach.

  "The last I heard, Macore was talking about a nice, quiet, peaceful retirement," she noted. "This looks like a circus."

  "It is suited to his temperament," Poquah responded dryly. "One suspects that the phrase 'quiet, peaceful retirement' means in Macore's world view a place where he is not wanted by the authorities."