Horrors of the Dancing Gods

by Jack L. Chalker

  "I do not know. I was compelled to come this far, but I feel nothing in terms of a specific action at the moment except that I must somehow get to a strange place that exists only in a mind picture of a great mountain out of which has been carved a massive gatelike structure that can open to let people enter its darkness. I know what it looks like but not where it is, save that it is in Yuggoth somewhere."

  "Well, it's called the Dantean Gate, if that's any help. Dante was the first name of a man from long ago who wrote three books claiming to be accounts of his trip as a living person through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It was fiction but, like much fiction of this type, appears to have had its dream roots in a real place here. I think you're seeing in your mind where a lot of the poor souls chained below are headed—the gates to Hell."

  'The Dantean Gate ... Yes, it sounds right. I must go there and present myself, but I do not wish to go there. Is it by any chance close to where you are headed?"

  "I doubt it. If I remember the directions, we're heading straight toward the middle of the continent, then off to the south to a creepy volcanic range. The Dantean Gate is in the jagged mountain range to the far west. Still, you have nothing save the image? Nobody is with you or supposed to meet you?"

  "No one is with me. I have not been told of any others, but it would not surprise me if someone did meet me at the other end, at least to get me going. It has happened before in getting me this far. Their agents know what to do with me, or at least they can read and aid my geas."

  "Hmmm ... And there are folks aboard who know we're interested in you. Know enough to try and warn us off." She sighed. "Well, we're gonna be playing in their ballpark, but we're also obviously somebody they need for some reason. I don't think they're omnipotent, just clever. How much luggage do you have?"

  "Only what I can fit into a moderate backpack. There was little that I had in the first place, all things considering."

  "Uh huh. Okay, look—there's not much that can be done until we're off the ship tonight. Act normal, do whatever you would do if we weren't talking, and disembark as per normal. I'll be shadowing you. You might not see me, but I'll be there. Believe it. The guys will try and make contact with our prearranged guide and hopefully get settled for the night. We're not about to go off into the interior of a place like Yuggoth without supplies and information as well as whatever else we can get. We'll try and keep you in close proximity to us until we are ready to leave. Then we'll join up. In the meantime I should be able to keep some kind of contact with you, unless we get into full-scale in-person demons or heavy-duty sorcery here, in which case there isn't much chance in the first place. Understand? Just trust that I can get to you. You'll see."

  "You are not exactly invisible," Lame noted. "You stand out in any setting with your beautiful wings."

  "Don't worry. I have a few little secrets myself. I don't want to make this structured, because the more we improvise, the harder it is for anyone who wants to stop us to figure out what we're doing and counter it. You will have to trust me on this. We do know what we are doing."

  She hoped that she was telling the truth on this one. Hell, she still had to tell Poquah about this ...

  Poquah, however, was anything but surprised. "We should not have involved ourselves with her," he maintained. "What do we know about her? Enough to know that Hell does not want us interfering, in which case we make enemies in their own land, or, conversely, they want to unload her on us by this subterfuge, in which case she's their spy. I fail to see the gain in either situation."

  "The gain is that we do what is right in a land where that is rare, and we don't lose our timing or concentration regretting what we didn't do or worrying about who we might have helped but didn't," Marge responded.

  "Yes, but what earthly good is she? Does she handle weapons well? Does she have great magical powers? Has she any influence to help us in strange lands or any foreknowledge we lack? I can tell you right now that she does not."

  "Yeah? How do you know?"

  "Would you like an item-by-item inventory of her bag? Don't look surprised—the moment Irving laid eyes on her, I knew she'd be trouble. I tell you that she has a brush, a comb, some minor makeup and perfume, miscellaneous toiletries, and three essentially identical white cotton outfits of no use whatever in the bush. She also has a pair of exceptionally well made sandals but appears comfortable barefoot and a few pieces of jewelry of reasonable but not exceptional quality. No weapons, not even a penknife. One needs only look at her hands to see that she's done little manual labor, if any at all, and I seriously doubt if she can boil water. She carries neither anything negotiable nor any identification or official papers, and since her dresses have no pockets and she carries no purse, I assume she has nothing with her. I don't see a single way in which she is or can be made into an asset."

  "You're done?"

  "I could continue."

  "Well, don't bother. The point is, it doesn't make any difference. Irving is going to help her regardless, which means she's a real liability for us unless we go along with him, and she's so damned helpless-appearing, I can't help but feel she's got something up her sleeve we can't figure out. I'm also damned curious about her curse. If she proves a serious problem, we can always ditch her later, but for now she's coming."

  Poquah sighed. "Very well. I admit the magical skills evident in her burden of spells is intriguing. It is a totally different concept, a totally different philosophy than I've ever seen expressed in spells before. Almost as if the impossible were here—a different mathematics. Between Master Lothar's skills and what this minor demon laid upon her, it is most fascinating."

  "Really? Do you think you could break any of them?'

  "Don't be absurd! She is mortal; I am faerie. Perhaps I am the greatest general sorcerer in the history of my people, but there are real limits. It would take a Ruddygore to have a chance at untangling a Lothar, and as for those set upon one by a true demon—next to impossible. It would take mercy from a creature of Heaven to do that, after examining the will and the worthiness of a supplicant. I don't think she quite qualifies. No, it is an academic exercise, purely academic. Just to figure it out would be a triumph."

  Deep down Marge had always known that Poquah was something of a softy.

  ****

  It hadn't been a great day at sea. Thunderstorms had raged all around, the decks had been awash, waves had pounded the craft as even the kraken had trouble pulling it in this kind of surf, and some of the biggest waves had risen almost up to the wheelhouse and seemed to loom like monsters, only to crash and submerge the bow of the vessel, which then wriggled in all planes at once to get free and slowly rise up out of the water to do it all over again. It made walking almost impossible, and anything that wasn't fastened down inside was instantly transformed into something of a missile.

  Irving was excited to know that the girl was in with them, although the idea that she'd be just "one of the boys" hadn't really sunk in as such. Still, he was much more concerned with getting out of the rotten weather, at least for now. Although he wasn't as seasick as some of the others he'd passed in the corridors seemed to be, he certainly felt dizzy and a bit queasy. It was impossible to be anything close to human and not have this condition. He worried that the girl might well be sick in her cabin.

  There really wasn't much he could do about it, though, or about anything else right now. He certainly wasn't going to, er, eat, and besides, it might be a long night. He stayed in bed as much of the day as he could, even though that put him next to the totally zonked Marge, which was something of an unusual experience.

  Poquah might or might not have been affected by the storms, but he chose to demonstrate his mental command of himself by ignoring the situation when that was at all possible. He spent some time checking and rechecking his weapons as well as the copy of the map of Yuggoth they had secured from Macore.

  The map was certainly authentic in that it had been made by someone with skill who seemed to know the re
gion well. In fact, the level of detail was so impressive, it seemed almost as if it had been taken not from pieced-together ground explorations and by flying creatures going over it sector by sector, as with most maps of this world, but from some great but detailed height. Poquah had seen Earth satellite photos of continental masses and maps made from high-resolution orbital surveys of Earth's regions that were no better than this one, and who could go that high or get that kind of detail here?

  It was absurdly easy, though, to use it to plot a route, and the annotations in a fine handwriting showed a very definite approach to and location of the lair of the McGuffin. It would not be a good idea, the Imir decided, to follow this map so closely that they would head straight toward their goal along that route. If the minions of Hell knew of this, they might well decide that their little party was dispensable. Safer to waste probably close to a week to veer over to the seat of the king of this place and go through the motions anyway. Do the expected and save the unexpected for when it was most needed and when your enemies thought they had you cold.

  He carefully refolded and stored the map and then went out, his unnatural faerie balance keeping him on the deck as if all were smooth as glass even though the ship was moving in ways even he never knew a ship could move. Just so long as it does not move straight down, he thought, not a little nervous in spite of his appearance and demeanor. The Imir were masters of many things, but they had to breathe just as most other life did, and they could not breathe water.

  The crew didn't seem to be any happier about the ride than was the Imir, for what that was worth.

  "Usually smooth as silk," the watch officer assured him. "It's this new element trying to move in. You've seen it in the skies, I think, too. Drawing all the powers inward, trying to disrupt everything so much, they can blow a hole right through space-time and open a gateway to this world."

  "They are concentrating on a specific spot, then?"

  "Oh, sure. Somewhere in the southeast, close to Mount Doom. The attraction's pretty severe, too. They're getting a lot of our people under their influence and some of the normal types, too. Some free advice: you stay out of that area. I hear tell that nobody or nothin' can withstand goin' over to them if they get too close. We sent an entire cohort of demons, medium-powered types, good fighters, veterans of the spiritual wars. Not a one came back, but they're still very much around as the guardians of that damned place."

  "Really? That is interesting, and disturbing," Poquah responded. Now, for the first time, he understood why even Satan and the minions of Hell weren't directly battling these other dimensionly types who were moving into their turf. "Hell" was almost the very definition of evil in this world, as on Earth; there was little of virtue left in its followers, and even apathy fed their cause—fed it perhaps best of all—so what did Hell do when confronted with a new and alien concept of evil?

  In a sense, Hell was as biblical as Heaven; they recognized the same rules, the same morality, the same concepts of good and evil. It was essential that they do so, so that when they acted in the other's reality, they did the opposite of what would be expected of one loyal to that side. Torture, murder, pain, debauchery—these were only the "thou shalt nots" of the heavenly side. The system remained, which was why the Rules themselves worked.

  The ones attempting to come through near Mount Doom, though—those were outside the system, outside the Rules, outside any rules applicable to this world or even to Earth. Good and evil had a different meaning in their case, although in one way and one way only it was the same: what served them and their interests defined "good," and what opposed, inhibited, or impeded them was "evil" in their view. In such a situation those loyal to Hell didn't have a prayer, as it were. The fact their very natures were grounded in the concept of this world's evil made them gravitate to the power that seemed the strongest yet would have them.

  Only those not already of Hell might have any chance at all of withstanding such power long enough to do any good.

  Not for the first time, Poquah found himself silently but internally wondering about Ruddygore's judgment. It had always worked out before, but there had always been an underlying sense of the mathematics of magic and the comfort of the Rules guiding him no matter how odd his routes to goals. But now, in this quest ...

  A boy who had never even faced ordinary evil of the kind that terrified most men and sent the rest gibbering in the moonlight in helpless insanity; a Kauri with the strength of a small child, whose gifts were all for defense; a silent elfin warrior from a race of warrior-assassins who nonetheless had severe limits on his own powers and was more susceptible to the other side than he wanted to admit; and now added to this a girl no older than the boy, without skills, spoiled and defenseless, and on top of that cursed.

  This agent they were supposed to meet in Red Bluffs had better be the equivalent of a dozen legions of high-ranking demons, Poquah thought. Otherwise, how could they stand? How could they hope to do anything at all?

  The ship shuddered, then seemed to smooth out a bit, and slowly but surely the severity of the motion simply faded away and there was a steady and comfortable feel to it once more.

  "What happened?' Poquah asked the ghoul on duty. The creature shrugged. "It is sundown. The gaunts have risen and kept us steady above the ocean, and we should be coming in toward the harbor in a little while and protection from the elements. We are running late and will certainly not be getting in before four or five more hours, but it should be all right from this point."

  Poquah bolted past him, went out onto the deck, and looked out and forward. In the gloom he could clearly see a dark landmass in the distance, and the rain seemed to have slackened off to a steady but routine little disturbance. Away to the south could easily be seen clusters of lights, as if small towns or settlements along the coast were coming into view, and here and there he could see the unmistakable signal of a lighthouse.

  When he shifted to faerie sight, the land came in much more clearly, but in an eerie crimson outline and inky black on gray. This was a place of strong and powerful magic, of deepest sorceries and treacherous spells of a kind that made Husaquahr seem almost benign to look at. Here all the strings of magic were deep yellows and crimsons and dark purples and blacks.

  The ancient land of Yuggoth, from which it was said all magic had sprung, and from where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil had come and to where it had returned after being the instrument for betraying Earth's humanity, and from which all the nightmares sprang was there, now, in plain sight, and they were coming in at a fair clip to its dark shores.

  A few hours late, perhaps, but they were at last in Yuggoth.

  Chapter 9

  Not So Unfamiliar A Place

  The seat of the worst of evil shall have the face of comfort to the unwary.

  —Rules, Vol. XIII, p. 162(a)

  "So that's it, huh?" irving said, staring ahead as they came inside the breakwater and the Eibon made ready to land.

  Marge nodded, feeling a bit nervous for the first time. "Yeah, that's it."

  This harbor really didn't look all that different from the one they'd left, only a bit larger and more the size of a commercial port than that of a traditional recreational area. The town, more like a city almost, spread out in all directions before them and, from the lights and angles, appeared to be built back into some fair-sized hills. Streets and houses seemed to go right up those hillsides, and the population looked unexpectedly dense.

  The harbor had a number of exotic-looking craft in port, many of which were very large sailing ships of designs none of them had ever seen before. The single-masted square sailers could be dismissed as local coastal boats; you wouldn't have much to steer with if you got too far offshore in those things. Others, however, looked enormous, the size of old Spanish galleons in romantic swashbuckler movies, and still others looked like sleek men-of-war with catapults clearly showing and all sorts of unknowable armaments as well. They were in a variety of colors and finishes, ma
ny brightly painted, others almost camouflaged by their colors and patterns, but it was clear that they hailed from many lands and were there for a multitude of purposes.

  They were mostly human craft, but here and there could be seen fairy folk as well, again of unknown races and backgrounds, doing work on the craft and at the docksides as well. Many were of the same sort of elflike classes as were the most familiar ones of the north such as the Imir, but they had strange colors, often nearly luminescent yet somehow dark; blues and deep yellows and reds of all sorts abounded here. Now and again could be seen creatures that looked in some ways to be relatives of dwarves, and some crawled up and down the rigging with abandon and seemed almost insectlike.

  The effect was less one of coming into a port of evil than one of entering a port in some strange and foreign land, which was exactly what it was. The first ship to come into old Shanghai or Tokyo Bay in the nineteenth century or Bombay must have afforded its passengers and crew a similar sensation.

  "Wow!" Irving said, staring at the scene in absolute wonderment. "I didn't expect this!"

  "It certainly is, er, different than I anticipated," Poquah harrumphed, impressed in spite of himself. "These aren't all Yuggoth lands and races represented here, either. I see flags of several continents here, although none at the moment from Husaquahr, the largest and the mother of them all."

  "They kind of understate their names here, too," Marge commented, staring. "I sure would call this a fair-sized city, not 'Red Bluffs,' which sounds like a small town in Nebraska." She frowned. "Still, most of the faerie colors signify dark magic, and the few flying types I've seen are bat-winged. We mustn't forget where we are."

  "I concur," Poquah responded as they came slowly right into a form-fitting slip at the foot of a very broad street. He changed his tone and lowered his voice. "Now, if you are following the girl, you'd best get on it. You know the name of the hotel where we are booked, so we will meet there when you have something to say."