Songs of the Dancing Gods

CHAPTER 13 THE END OF THE WORLD BLUES

The small ring in Tiana’s nose suddenly crackled a bit, and she felt an irritating, slightly painful tingling there that soon passed.

Boquillas stared out the window at the sight she’d just witnessed, unable really to believe it. “He’s dead,” she muttered, amazed to her core. “He really killed himself.”

“Noooo!” Tiana cried, even though she knew from the reaction in her nose ring that it was true, and tears began flowing down her face.

Boquillas sighed, turned away from the window, and came back to Tiana. “Somehow,” the sorceress said, almost to herself, “I never thought he was the martyr type. Stupid! I would have made him a demigod.”

“He’d already been a demigod,” Tiana reminded her defiantly through her tears. “And he hated it.”

Boquillas sighed. “Well, when Plan A goes a little off, you have to improvise a bit.” She reached out and touched the slave ring in Tiana’s nose in the same two-fingered manner Joe had used. “You’re mine, now, and you’re all I’ve got, so you’re going to have to do, my dear. A bit of a letdown for me, but a considerable come-up for you. He’s gone, so you’ll have to replace him. Same script, just different parts, that’s all. At least you won’t blow it by killing yourself, too. The little bit I just added there compels obedience. You’re my property now, all legal and proper, and you cannot act against my interests.”

It killed Tiana to call Boquillas by any term of respect, but she had no choice. “Then, Mistress, you will restore me to my old body and rule as Joe?”

“No, no. Joe had no magical powers. Never did. Were I inside him, the whole Council, with Ruddygore leading the pack, couldn’t give me what I need, and that cursed sword would never accept me in any event, which would queer everything. No, my dear, it’s obvious. I shall still become Tiana; now it is you who will become Joe.”

“I? Joe? Mistress, it would be obscene!”

Boquillas grinned. “I know. That’s why I like it. At least you’re easier to do. That protective spell Sugasto gave you includes what I call a soul-puller mechanism. My own powers aren’t up to creating one, but since he’s kindly provided one, it should be simple. We’ll still need Sugasto to complete the process with me, of course. Until he returns, you shall attend me as my slave and not leave my side, and you shall begin telling me those details I need to know. And stop that confounded blubbering! You’re going to have to learn to be a man, not a swishy wimp!”

Tiana obeyed, but she couldn’t stop the tears. Joe was dead, and, no matter who she was, she loved him. Even now, knowing the truth, her memory fully restored, she knew that she’d remain this way forever if she could only have him back.

This wasn’t the way things were supposed to work out, not at all. Joe was gone, she was a helpless captive of the powers of Darkness, the chief villain immune to harm or malignant sorcery herself by virtue of tying her fate to the survival of the world. This just wasn’t the way things were supposed to be.

But hadn’t Joe been magnificent in that final fight! If love meant anything, if sacrifice meant anything, and if evil could be that sloppy, there had to be same way, somehow, to stop this foul plan.

“I don’t believe it!”

Macore nodded sadly. “I saw it myself, from my perch in the tower room. He went out fighting like the greatest heroes of old, and when hundreds of them surrounded him, he got a bunch more by hurling the sword and then jumped in. Even the villains will tell stories of that great fighter to their grandchildren!”

“I thought—somehow, this time, I had that feeling, but I thought it would be me,” Marge said, feeling empty inside and fighting back tears.

Neither Macore nor Marge were caught yet and there was a question as to whether or not anyone even suspected they were there. Everybody had gone after Joe and Mia, as Joe had predicted, should one side be exposed.

Macore had spent the better part of the day asleep under one of the already made-up beds in the royal tower; Marge had used her own resources to do the same. Neither had abandoned his or her friends, although both felt as if they had. When it was clear that the other two had been caught, they retreated to the empty part of the palace and decided that there was no chance of their doing anything in the way of a rescue until nightfall. Macore had heard the commotion and wound up with a windowseat on the great fight and sacrifice. Marge had already been out somewhere and only now got the details.

“So what do we do now?” Macore asked her. “Joe’s dead, which means Mia’s enslaved to somebody, probably the Baron, and beyond being just plucked out. We’d have to kill the Baron to free her now. There’s nobody left now capable of destroying the bodies, either. And, to top it all off, I can’t get my gear back because I’d have to fight off dozens of enraged zombies!”

“There’s got to be something we can do for her,” Marge told the little thief. “If I know Boquillas, he’s vamping right now, picking her brains to get all the details he can. She still knows an awful lot about palace routine, palace personalities, and Tiana’s own habits and quirks. Maybe enough.” She started thinking furiously. “Where’s his sword?”

“Still out there in the center court. It seems to have a life of its own for real. It won’t let anybody pick it up. It’s stuck partway into the rocks itself and just won’t budge.”

“Excalibur,” she responded.

“Huh?”

“The Sword in the Stone—an old Earth legend about another such sword. It won’t budge until it accepts a new owner, and that’s the only one who’d have the right and ability to pull it out.”

“Who would that be?”

“Beats me. Irving, maybe. Poor kid. If it’s true, he’s not only gonna be stuck here with no dad, he’s gonna wind up the great mercenary Irving with his great sword Irving.” She sighed. “Normally I’d think that was humor; but under the circumstances, I don’t feel all that funny.”

“Neither do I. They almost certainly know how we got in here now, so I’m not at all sure how we get out,” the thief commented. “One thing’s for sure—we can’t do anything, not to help her, not to help ourselves, unless we have a lot more information. Even if we somehow get out of this, which looks unlikely, what’s the use, except temporarily to save our own necks? If there’s any information that we could take with us, that would make at least some of this trip meaningful. Right now, the only thing we’ve got is bad news and worse news, and one of those items is that the Baron was throwing spells right and left out that window.”

“Is that the bad or the worse?” she asked. “Wait a minute! I’m thinking!” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe there is a way. Suppose there’s some way for me to talk to Mia.”

“So what? You’re now the enemy, right? She couldn’t do anything against the Baron’s interests, and that would include helping you. At least she doesn’t have to volunteer information, or they’d be scouring this dump for us now.”

Marge nodded. “Sure. But doing something against a master’s interest is a knowing act. Suppose she didn’t know she was giving us information?”

“How you gonna do that? Your mind-tricks work only on guys, right? And both the Baron and Mia are girls.”

“No, for short periods I can make anyone see me as I wish, so long as I’m female in the illusion. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to move around on Earth, let alone move around this place. You know that. I have no power over women, it’s true, but if she thought she were talking to someone else, maybe unburdening herself, it might work.”

“Risky. If Boquillas has her powers back, it’s not gonna fool him or her or, what the hell, I’m getting dizzy with all this!”

“You work on an exit,” she told him, “and stay close to here and out of sight so I can find you again. I’m going to try something. It’s better than just sitting here.”

It wasn’t unusual to see the various female slaves who serviced the place at any point in the palace, day or night, and neither the human guards nor the Bentar gave a particularly small, very young-looking slave the slightest notice as she walked into the magician’s tower and scampered up the stairs.

Boquillas had kept Mia close to her, but there were times when the slave was alone and miserable on the living quarters floor, told to wait while her mistress went to tend to something or other.

The very young slave waited, pretending to clean something in the hall, men went over to Mia, who sat, looking miserable in one corner of a sitting parlor.

“You are new here,” the very young slave commented. “Do not take it so hard. After a while, you come to accept things, and you find it isn’t so bad.”

Mia looked up at her, her eyes still red, but all cried out at this point. “It is for me. I was not bom a slave, but high, and the master whom I loved and served is now burned in the fire pit.”

“High?”

She nodded. “I did not know myself until today. It was hidden from me. Once I was a mighty ruler, Queen to the one who is gone. Now I am less than you, for I am to become him in a mad scheme of my new mistress. Yet I would remain this way forever if I could but bring him back.”

I knew it! Marge thought triumphantly. She is Tiana!

“That is very strange,” Marge responded. “You are to become the man who died today? How is that, if he is dead and his body burned?”

“There is another body above. Already my mistress commands me respond only to the name of Joe.”

Marge thought a moment, hoping to plant a thought. “But if you are put in this man’s body, you will no longer be a slave.”

“No. But I can do nothing or try nothing. To kill my mistress is to destroy the world.”

“What? How?”

“I do not know. Somehow, if she dies, the volcano goes off, melts the horrible place out there, and unleashes an evil worse than she.”

“When will you become him?”

“Tomorrow. When the Master of the Dead returns.”

Marge sighed. “I must go now. I would not like your mistress to find me here and know you have told anyone so much.”

“Yes, thank you. It helps to talk about such things to one who is as powerless as I, but I would not like you to suffer because of it.”

Marge got up and quickly walked down the stairs again, hoping she could maintain the slave illusion long enough-to get back in the clear.

So it was Tiana after all! That devil Ruddygore! Still, she stopped and looked out at the volcanic pit. No matter what had caused it, or what fed and maintained it, if it were for all intents and purposes no more than a volcano, she could go down into it. The Kauri cleansed themselves by lava swims in their native forest. There was always the risk of iron in that soup, of course, but if it were molten and liquid, and if she swam fast enough, it couldn’t get in to poison her.

She made her way back up to Macore, who waited anxiously in the shadows of the empty room.

“I’ve got more than enough! She was in such an emotional state I was able to draw out precisely what we needed,” she told the thief, proceeding to summarize the information.

Macore whistled. “Okay, now we know. That’s Tiana so we’re still in business, sort of.”

“I thought you were only interested in your precious tapes.”

“I am, I am,” he responded, irritated. “But if they have that kind of effect on zombies, any world ruled by these people will be a world where all tapes will be forbidden. I’ll never get to see them again!”

“Look,” she told him, “I’m going to go into that volcano and see just what sort of trap is rigged down there. It’s possible we may be able to pull off all of it yet!”

She zoomed out the window, went up at some speed, curved, and dove straight down into the crater in front of the lava tree, even to Macore’s trained eyes nothing more than a reddish streak.

She was down quite some time, and he began to worry, but, eventually, the streak rose again, then angled and darted into the window. She looked very excited.

“Macore! I think I’ve got it! It’s a series of simple, unstable spells that would cause moderate explosions around the edges of the lava pool nearest the Devastation. It wouldn’t erupt as such, or I don’t think so, but, rather, flow out toward the frozen valley. It’s certainly bush-league spell stuff; Boquillas sure hasn’t got all those powers back. Probably put there by some sort of fairy in her employ or some demonic-type who still owes her. The spells, though, would be impossible for Sugasto to divine or reach without using the same sort of stuff, and he can’t take the chance that the act of doing just that wouldn’t set it off—and it might! It’s held to Boquillas by some very fragile magical threads. Break the threads, boom!”

“So where’s that get us? Can you defuse it?”

“If I knew what I was doing, I could, but the only people around here likely to have the knowledge wouldn’t be much better to deal with as winners than Boquillas. There’s a flaw, though, because of its primitiveness. If Boquillas were to fall into that pit, the strings would not detach, they’d simply become embedded in the new rock. Later on, somebody with better motives could get some fairy, immune to it like me, to go down there with exact directions and untie the damned thing.”

“Great. So all we have to do is to get Boquillas to stroll out there, where it’s hot enough to burn your feet, and somehow ward off any spells she might throw, and push her in. Easy.”

“Save the sarcasm. Now, look. The only way Boquillas can possibly pull this off is to convince Tiana, who will be Joe, that she’s Joe and that Boquillas is really Tiana. Get it?”

“No. I got as far as Tiana as Joe, then my head started spinning.”

“That sorcerous hypnosis, like what Ruddygore used, won’t be possible. The magicians of Marquewood would read it in a moment. You can’t have a demideity under an enchantment. Not right away. That means some kind of love potion. One that’ll make her so giddy that she’ll buy any kind of irrationality her so-called true love sells.”

“So?”

“So we let them go through with it. All the way. But when Ti’s in Joe’s old body, she’ll be a man. She might not feel totally at home, but her were experiences will have her adjust pretty quickly, like it or not. Macore, take it from me: there isn’t a love potion ever made, or a love spell ever woven, that a Kauri can’t manipulate, if the one who has it is a human mortal male. And if I can get through, then it’s Ti’s job to take a stroll with her love to see the lava tree. If Ti really loved Joe as much as I think she did, then we’re gonna drive a Texas-sized truck through Esmilio Boquillas!”

“Uh—yeah. I’ll take that. Sure,” the little thief muttered. “And all that’ll leave us with is Sugasto, currently one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world.”

“Don’t be such a grump! One thing at a time, damn it! Right now we just have to keep out of sight and undiscovered until tomorrow night.”

“Don’t they look nice? I’ve been putting them through exercises regularly and they are in tiptop shape.”

“Yes, Mistress.” Tiana looked at the two figures standing there in naked splendor before them. There she was—her body, just as it had always been. And there, too, was the Joe she’d met and loved, or the shell of him. Her heart ached just to see the shell.

A tall man dressed all in black robes entered and saw them. Boquillas turned and shouted, “Suggy! Baby!”

The Master of the Dead was in a foul mood and having none of it. “A bit sloppy as usual with that business, aren’t you, Boquillas? And what the hell is that with all my zombies shorted out by that—that abomination!”

“Oh, calm down. We’ve got Tiana and we’ve got me and you, so nothing’s really changed. By spring, Joe and Tiana will still be perfect to the last detail. As for the zombies—well, I didn’t cause it! I figured that, once you got here, you could figure out how to shut it off.”

“I’ll blast those machines to the bottommost pits of Hell from whence they obviously came,” he growled.

“Suggy! You have to stop worrying over unimportant things! After all, I look at the slave and what do I find but your own signature spell on her! You had them both in your hand! According to her, you had them to lunch!. And then you handed them safe conduct and patted them on the head and sent them on their way! None of this would have happened if you’d just fingered them then and there!”

“It’s that damned hair-shearing,” Sugasto grumbled. “Makes her look like a ten-year-old boy. Besides, who would have imagined that somebody that highborn could be reduced to this—and by her own people! As for the man, well, the beard threw me. You said he couldn’t grow one!”

“And you, who can grow mustaches on tomatoes with a wave of your finger, got taken by a beard! Well, never mind. We can blame each other for our errors or we can say the hell with it and resolve to make no more. There is too much at stake for us to fall out now.”

The Master of the Dead calmed down, seeing her logic. “All right. So when do you want to do this?”

She shrugged. “No time like the present. We may as well start in. It will take a fair amount of time before everything is nailed down straight, you know.”

“Well, all right. What do you want me to do with the bodies? I can’t get the slave ring out of that one, you know, and, as for yours, it would be almost wasted as a zombie.”

“Oh, preserve them, by all means. Particularly mine. It can be a zombie for the duration, until and unless we find someone suitable to stick in it. I’ve grown rather fond of it. As for the other…” She went over to Sugasto, who bent down slightly as she whispered, “There will come a time when we won’t need her anymore. Then you can move into Joe, and she can return to what she is and serve us.”

Sugasto nodded. “I like it. Very well.” He pointed to the body of the tall, muscular woman. “You! Come here!”

The body of Tiana the demigoddess moved, shuffling a bit, woodenly, more like a puppet than a real person, and stood, blankly staring, beside Boquillas.

“It’s a good thing the sound of that crap in the courtyard doesn’t reach up here or we’d have them down there, too!”

“Oh, I thought of that immediately,” Boquillas told him. “That’s why I put a cone of silence on this chamber.”

Tiana watched with horror as the Master of the Dead stood facing both women’s bodies, and placed one hand on Boquillas’ head, the other, with a reach, on her old, original head. It hurt to see that body as much as it hurt to see Joe’s; to be this close, to be in the same room, only a few feet away, with someone with the means to put her back, and know that she might as well have been on the moon…

There was no sound, no magical pyrotechnics, no sensation at all, yet, suddenly, Mahalo McMahon’s old body stiffened and the eyes glazed over, while, at the same time, the body of Tiana seemed to be filling up with life, animation, and motion.

It had taken Sugasto no more than thirty or forty seconds. No incantations, no nothing. That, perhaps, was the scariest thing of all.

At the same moment the Tiana body came fully to life, intelligence flooding the eyes and the movements becoming natural, the real Tiana felt her nose ring crackle once more. The body whose code the ring, had borne, McMahon’s body, was now technically dead. Suddenly, she realized, for just a fleeting moment, she wasn’t anyone’s property at all.

With a kick from her runner’s legs and a leap from her dancer’s skills, Tiana made the doorway almost as her old body shouted, “Stop her, you idiot!”

Sugasto whirled. Even though Tiana was already out of sight, he did not give chase. Instead, he simply raised his right hand, cupping it slightly, then pulled it back, as if grabbing a ball and pulling it toward him.

In the hall, Tiana suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, suffering tremendous vertigo. Then, slowly, she felt as if she were rising, going up, out and away from her body, then floating back down the hall. Yes, she could see her body! See it just standing there!

The pull continued, and she went right through the stone wall and back into the sorcerer’s room. Sugasto smiled, hand now toward her, and she felt herself moving, being guided by an unseen but irresistible force. Now she saw it! Joe’s body, standing there, wooden, lifeless yet alive! Something was drawing her toward it, and it was swallowing her, merging with her…

She staggered, blinked, and shook her head which seemed full of cobwebs. She felt… different. Strange.

Sugasto chuckled. “You see, Boquillas? I wasn’t the total fool when I first met them. She’s always been mine any time I wanted her.”

“What—?” Tiana managed, but the voice sounded low, deep, and hollow, alien to her. “You—you put me in Joe’s body!” She didn’t want to be in Joe’s body—she wanted Joe in there.

“And in there you’ll stay, until I say otherwise,” the sorcerer told the new man. “And, remember, I can pull you out again at any moment, no matter where in Husaquahr you might be. And even as a soul, I can hold you and cause you unimaginable torment. Don’t even think of moving until I tell you. You just saw what I can do!” He turned to the new Tiana. “You want to bind him temporarily with spells, or should I do it?”

“Eventually, yes,” she told him. “We want him an objective critic of me and very well trained by the time we slip him the potions. Uh! This is such a different body! I think I’m taller, perhaps larger, than I was when I was a man! In heels, I’d be taller than he is!”

“So, what do you want to do, other than explore your new self?” the sorcerer asked her. “And, I assume, donning one of the outfits we had the slaves make up.”

Boquillas turned to the new man. “All right—Joe. For the moment, we have to have an understanding. I’ve just thrown a spell on you, and I won’t be careless enough again to remove it. You can move, you can walk and talk and get used to that body. But you cannot harm me, and you cannot harm anyone else, not even yourself. You could even make love to me, but you cannot harm me.”

“I would sooner make love to a horse,” he responded. “It would be obscene to make love to you. Incestuous. It would be like making love to myself.”

“That will pass,” Boquillas assured him. “Over time, the Rules will settle. You may always wish you were me, but you’ll be you, as you are, and you’ll operate normally like that, even naturally, as you became a dancer and a slave. And I, too, will assume the Rules regarding the blood royal, with which, of course, I was already comfortable, having been born into it.”

“Why go through all that?” Sugasto grumbled. “Why not just stick a good hypnotic spell on him right now and be done with it?”

“Patience! Patience! Dear Suggy!” She had a good four or five inches in height on him now, and it felt rather neat. “For one thing, at this moment, and for the first time outside that puny body, we have a relatively ‘clean’ Tiana in that body, unsullied by any spells other than the one I just put on and can thus factor out. I want to see how it moves, how it talks, how it thinks. The words he chooses, the manner of managing a large, muscular body. Those things will fade after a while as the old male mercenary prince pattern re-emerges and takes command. True, I could make him think he’s Joe now and be a fair critic, but there are things even we are not aware of in our movements and actions. Little things. The major stuff can come later. There’s no rush. But this education is priceless.”

“Why didn’t you just put her in that body of yours, then, and observe?” Sugasto asked her. “Then you’d have an exact model.”

“True, true, and I considered it, but I know the Rules all too well. Put her back in here and everything would return full almost immediately. Symmetry would be restored. I don’t know her capabilities yet, and I won’t risk losing our only other original. I can’t explain it, but something just told me that if I put her in this body things would go wrong. Call it—women’s intuition.”

Sugasto shrugged. “I never understood women and I doubt if you do, either, for all your playacting at being one. But, as one with the Power myself, I’ve also learned that you don’t easily ignore such feelings. Very well. But if anything happens to him, anything, I’ll stick you in that damned slave body there, and you’ll lick my feet and kiss my ass for a thousand years!” With that, he stalked out.

“He’s always so cross when he’s tired,” Boquillas commented, seemingly unconcerned.

“It sounds to me as if you have to take as much care of me as you do of yourself,” Tiana noted. “Your death threat against the world does not mean much if you are still alive, but in that body.”

“Anything worthwhile involves risk. My! But you’re the swishiest barbarian I’ve ever seen! Come, we should dress before doing much else, and I’m starved. We don’t feed these bodies right.” She walked out, and suddenly Tiana almost jerked forward, as if on a chain, and had to double-time it to catch up.

“Another of your ideas?” he asked.

“Just a part of the spell, dear. We’re such a devoted couple now that we can’t even bear to let each other out of our sight.”

“That is going to be a lot of fun in the ladies’ room,” Tiana commented, and Boquillas laughed a very un-Tiana laugh.

They were passing the inside tower windows; outside, the inner courtyard glowed with the ever-present fire of the liquid rock. Oh Joe! Joe! I’d join you now, if I could, and end this eternal torture!

And somewhere, deep within her mind, came a voice, a thought, that she wasn’t certain was hers or from some other, perhaps supernatural, origin.

“Bring her to my dying place,” it said. “Bring her there and it will end.”

Even compared to abject slavery, it was the worst evening Tiana ever spent. With Joe gone, nothing seemed to mean much anymore, but she might have been able to learn to live with it, sooner or later, if not for the fact that she was now in Joe’s remaining body and almost umbilically attached to the body of her birth and the one in which she craved to live again.

Boquillas had dressed fit to kill, with about everything in the feminine arsenal of Husaquahr, including makeup, jewelry, and heels, which she negotiated quite well, but which made her tower over everyone else and even somewhat dominate his own large body. He had been given a rather deluxe loincloth, some sandals, and, most painfully of all, Joe’s swordbelt and scabbard, minus the sword. It didn’t really matter; the spell prevented him from using the sword anyway, although he had to wonder. That sword always had a curious fairylike life of its own, as if it were some sort of creature that fed upon those it killed. Joe had often spoken as if he had no control over it and that when it was in his hand, he seemed a mere observer.

Tiana had to wonder if the sword would respond to him in this body. If it did, would it be bound by this spell? Or, in fact, was that a moot point? Suppose he could kill Boquillas with the sword. What then? The volcano blows, the battle resumes, and that’s it.

It would present one hell of a moral dilemma. Risk the destruction of the world or at best its enslavement by powers from a forgotten age; or allow Esmilio Boquillas to paint Tiana, not Boquillas, as the tyrant goddess?

And then, again, could he do it? Could he, in effect, destroy his own body?

He didn’t particularly like being a man. Oh, there was nothing horrible about it, but it wasn’t as much fun. It didn’t feel right, and men carried such different mental baggage, such different interests and outlooks. He’d been a man during one of the early were episodes, just to see what it was like, and definitely decided that, at least for Tiana, girls had more fun. Hell, just look at how boring he dressed!

Dinner was a rather uncomfortable affair, with Boquillas constantly twitting him and making comments about the Tiana body as well, but the food was damned good. One of the serving slaves, who might or might not have been the one from the previous day who had listened so kindly, poured the wine and whispered in his ear, “Get her to the pit. If she dies there, we can stop the action.”

Tiana stiffened. So he wasn’t crazy. Who, then, was behind this?

With a start he realized that it had to be Marge. No mention had been made of either Marge or Macore since their capture, and it was another of Boquillas’ lapses not to have asked about it when, as a slave, Tiana would have had to tell.

Marge was a Kauri. The goddess of Kauris, she’d said, lived in a volcano! In a volcano! Of course!

“Uh—Tiana?” The name stuck in his mouth and was hard to get out.

“Yes, Joe, darling?”

“Could I—could we—after eating, I mean—go down there for just a minute? I would like, just once, while I am still thinking straight, to see where he died.”

Boquillas thought about it. “It wouldn’t do any good, you know. You cannot do yourself any harm.”

“No tricks. We were together a very long time, though.”

“Hmmm… If I did, would you lie with me tonight? Would you lie there and pretend that you are Joe and that I am Tiana? Do it with me and make me believe it?”

“I—I don’t know if I could. I can try.”

“All right, let’s try. If I’m pleased, we’ll go down in the morning. If not, well, then, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“No. Let me at least say good-bye to him before I can do any thing new.”

Boquillas gave that wicked smile. “Joe, darling, we’ve got to start training you properly. In all cases, from how on, what I want comes first. There are no exceptions.”

“All right,” he sighed. “But bring me much stronger drink than this! I’ll need quite a lot to forget who and what I was and who and what you are!”

It was fortunate that hangover cures were easier for witches than even love potions, because he needed one badly the next morning. He’d gotten himself so sloshed he could hardly remember the night, and he knew he didn’t want to remember any more than he did.

Still, Boquillas seemed in very high spirits. “Come, my love, now that your head is clear and your stomach is settled, we will go down and honor your request.”

It was startling to see how Boquillas had changed just between night and morning. He hadn’t had a truly accurate idea of how he looked and acted as Tiana—who did have that kind of self-image?—but the sorcerer’s look and manner were far less exaggerated and more natural, the sort of way the original Tiana would do something, and her speech was changing as well, taking on more of Tiana’s own speech patterns and even gaining a hint of the accent acquired by spending so much time growing up on Earth. Was he really that revealing, in spite of efforts to hide it, or was Boquillas really that good?

“I’d intended to go down there today, anyway,” she told him. “The empty scabbard must be addressed, and we have an acid test to make while you are still relatively unencumbered. Come.”

They walked down the stairs, across the lobby area, and into the left courtyard ring. At the first arch they went through, with him preceding her, and then down the steps to the narrow walkway around the boiling pit.

Both of them stopped suddenly at the sounds of Gilligan’s Island and stared at that second level. “Hasn’t Sugasto blown that thing to smithereens yet?” Boquillas said, irritated.

“Perhaps he’s experimenting, now that he’s got the situation,” Tiana suggested. “I would say he is probably quite concerned that something exists that can negate his best spell.”

“You may be right. If he goes on too long, though, I will want to trigger this volcano just to stop that moronic nonsense.”

They walked around to almost the very spot where Joe had stood on the wall, taking on all comers. About twenty feet away, the sword Irving still stuck out halfway in blood-stained rock, although someone had at least cut free and hauled away the impaled bodies during the night.

Tiana went over and looked down at the bubbling mass. It looked like cooking pudding or an asphalt mixer and smelled of rotten eggs and worse. Only clever design kept that odor from permeating the palace—most of the time.

Joe’s body was part of that now, burned, melted, to become one with the rock, the fluids boiled away in a flash.

He turned away, feeling sick.

“Listen,” Boquillas said, “what is done is done. You are Joe now. You are all that is left of him. I did not want him dead, remember. We should never have been standing here like this, now. Cooperate with me. Become Joe willingly and accept me as I am. Help me to pull this off. You saw Sugasto’s horrid vision, all those soulless bodies, shaved and mutilated slaves, police-state brutality. I don’t want that. I would not want to be the goddess of a world like that. We need not be lovers, but we do not have to be enemies.”

“Empty talk, empty promises,” he responded. “Your slick tongue and fast mind have gotten you through everything, yet you still stand here, short of your ambitions. Against your talk, there is the certainty that Joe, the real Joe, jumped from here into that, rather than aid you. I cannot stop you from using me, from using magic, potions, whatever. But I can never surrender willingly, for to do that would be to spit on Joe’s grave and call his sacrifice a lie. I would never do that. I could not.”

She sighed. “Then we do it the hard way. In the end, it does not matter. It just means that instead of enjoying the benefits of being consort to a god, you will instead wind up sooner or later cleaning her toilets.”

“There is no dishonor in being a slave,” he said softly. “It is necessary work.”

High above, from the window of the empty room, Macore and Marge looked down on the pair, and the little thief frowned. “You think you can get her in there?”

“If she’d just lean a little more against that low wall I bet I could deliver a sudden, flying kick.”

“Yeah, from the front. She’ll see you and stop you with a spell.”

“It’s a risk I have to take. There is no other way.”

Macore looked out, gasped, and suddenly grabbed Marge’s arm. “Look! Maybe there is!”

Marge stared down at the scene and gasped herself. The pair stood there on the walk, facing away from the pit, and could not see it.

Slowly, carefully, but absolutely, a great golden limb of the lava tree was moving, almost like an excruciatingly slow tentacle, extending with every little movement. A new branch sprang out at its tip and seemed, as they watched, to grow smaller branches, almost like…

“Like a hand,” Marge breathed.

“But it’s too short and too slow!” Macore said. “There’s no way it can reach her before they move!”

“Maybe, maybe,” she breathed. “Oh, remember it’s iron!”

Down on the courtyard, Boquillas sighed. “Well, try and get the sword, anyway. You cannot use it on me, and even if it tries on its own, I can numb your arm in plenty of time. Go ahead-call it. Call it the way he used to call it.”

“All right, “Tiana said wearily. Even if the sword responded, even if it flew to his hand, could he in fact will it to cut off the neck of his birth body?

The “hand” on the lava tree turned, lining up perfectly. There was the sword in the rock, then Tiana’s stately body, then the “hand,” all in a row. Just a tiny fraction more to the left…

Tiana held out his hand. “Irving! To me!” he called.

The sword remained in the rock.

“Irving! To me!” he tried again, and again the sword stayed put.

And then came a soft, sexy, deep female voice, as if from a great distance, and echoing all up and down the pit. “Irving! To me! “it said.

Boquillas, startled, turned slightly to her right and said, “Wha—?”

The sword flew from the rock like a rocket, striking Boquillas with tremendous force right in the chest, bowling her over on its unstoppable way to the limb. She was knocked back against the wall, stunned, and for a moment seemed to totter, but not fall back.

The sword struck the handlike end of the limb, crackling when it touched, but the limb pushed back with tremendous force, directing the sword, blade first, exactly back in the direction from which it had come at the moment Boquillas tried to straighten up. The great sword struck and penetrated right below the neck, knocking her slightly forward.

At that moment, Tiana suddenly felt all constraints lifted and acted almost without thinking, the emotions at Joe’s loss and the hatred for Boquillas overwhelming any and all other thoughts but one.

“I will never fail you, Master. ”

With enormous strength, he seized the screaming Boquillas, lifted up that huge female body, and tossed it into the pit below.

“Yippee!” Macore cried from the window.

“Son of a bitch!” Marge swore. “I think she tore one of the strings loose on the way down! I gotta fly!” She leaped out, then down directly into the lava.

Tiana stood there, looking down at that same lava, and began shaking like a leaf, and then started to cry.

Macore suddenly felt the whole building start to shake a bit, and things began dancing around of their own accord. Good grief! he thought, suddenly panicking. Earthquake! I gotta get out in the open! Com’on, Marge!

Tiana was suddenly aware of the shaking as well, and looked around curiously, drained of emotion. Boquillas was dead. Really dead. And now someone else would inherit Husaquahr as a result.

He looked back down at the lava pool, oblivious of the shaking, oblivious of the cornices beginning to crack, of the crash as television, VCR, and stacks of videotapes went flying, leaving packs of suddenly enraged zombies loose.

The lava level was falling in the crater!

Tiana was still confused, stunned, and somewhat in shock by what had happened. Had the sword flown and killed Boquillas? What was that woman’s voice? Marge? What had they rigged up?

It no longer mattered. Clearly, no matter what else happened, nothing was going to matter for anybody in this palace before long, and that included him. Oddly, that didn’t disturb him, but he was seized with a sudden urge to see just what was happening out at the Devastation, and just what would emerge from that horrible place.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake stopped. He turned again and saw, or thought he saw, the lava level stabilizing. Not really rising—it had lost a good fifteen or twenty feet— but it no longer seemed to be draining out.

Marge came shooting out of it, then landed on the wall. “Close call!” she exclaimed, sounding winded. “I got it tied off, but not before one tube flooded and blew. I’m not sure what’s gonna happen, but I think the majority of them are still in the deep freeze. No guarantees about the closest point, though.”

He looked at her, shaking his head. “Marge, I think we better get away from here anyway. Now that it’s stopped shaking, Sugasto is going to be fit to be tied.”

“Whoops! Forgot about him! Head for the royal side. Pick up a weapon if you can. Meet you on the garden porch!”

Tiana nodded. “At least we don’t have to listen to Gilligan’s Island anymore!”

“Yeah. Poor Macore. Watch out for the zombies!” And she was off.

He looked around, then made a run for the far stairs. There was pandemonium all over the place, and things were still falling and crumbling from the after-effects of the quake. Soldiers, Ben-tar, everybody was running all over the place, and nobody was paying the least bit of attention to him.

He looked back briefly across the center courtyard and saw why everybody was going his way. The topmost part of the main tower was cracked clean through, and seemed almost to be leaning precipitously. Even the gargoyles were leaving their perches there, flying around aimlessly and screeching obscenities.

He didn’t see Marge on the porch, but the whole place was a mob scene as it was, and he couldn’t blame her. At the moment, it was everybody for him or her or itself, and the safest place to be was out there, on the ice.

Suddenly there was the sound of doom, like horrible drums from the depths of the earth, beating an awful time. It seemed not to be coming from the Devastation, which now had its own jet of furious steam, but from behind, from the direction away from the battlefield. Kicking away some panicky people, Tiana climbed up on the wall and looked out, trying to see what was making the eerie, rhythmic sounds. And when he did see, he knew indeed that this was all some horrible nightmare, that he’d gone totally and completely insane.

Either that, or a Danish naval coast guard icebreaker was coming toward the palace, propelled by the furious slashing of massive oars sticking out of holes cut in the hull.

“It’s Ruddygore!” Marge shouted in the air above Tiana with undisguised glee.

Sure enough, there was the huge sorcerer, resplendent in his Grand Master’s robes, sitting in something like a throne right at the bow.

The ship stopped, and the entire thronelike chair rose into the air and deposited itself, and the sorcerer, gently onto the ice.

Throckmorton P. Ruddygore looked over at the smoking area of the Devastation and muttered, “Oh, my! This might well be ugly!” Then he got up and began walking regally over the snow and ice toward the black island and its palace.

The fleeing castle personnel, whether human, Bentar, or something else, soldier and slave alike, gave way before him, keeping a fearful distance. Tiana suddenly found himself alone atop the wall.

Ruddygore spotted him. “Hello! Where’s Sugasto?”

“Haven’t seen him since last night,” Tiana called back.

“Ruddygore!” Marge screamed, practically flying into him and bowling him over. “Late, as usual!”

“Not at all,” the sorcerer replied. “Until either the bodies were destroyed or Boquillas died, or both, I was powerless to alter events. Even I couldn’t do them in, you see. But now, now that the Baron is ashes, it’s no longer your business to close this affair, but mine. Mine—and Sugasto’s.”

“He’s the new young gun, Pard,” she responded. “You think you can take him?”

Ruddygore always looked to her like Santa Claus, but the expression on his face now was anything but cheery or merry. It was the kind of look that froze brave men, and sent everyone running.

“There’s only one way to find out,” he said softly. “The Baron is dead. The Council will back only one of us now.”

He walked up the black slope and into the garden area. As he reached it, an idol like a great hooded cobra suddenly wriggled, as if corning to life, and hissed at him.

He hissed back at it, and it was engulfed in fire.

“Sugasto! ” he called in his booming voice, the call echoing throughout the complex. “Sugasto! Come! It is finally our time!”

“Over here, fat man!” came a response, and they all looked and saw the Master of the Dead in his full black robes, standing on the far side of the porch.

“What say we meet on the ice?” Ruddygore suggested calmly. “Less chance of debris and more open space. Besides, we might have to tend to a bit of other business over there before we square off.”

Sugasto nodded. “The ice it is. But I fear nothing coming from that pit. The horrors frozen there fought my sort of fight.”

Marge felt exhausted, but she wasn’t about to miss this. As the assembled soldiers and staff stepped back to watch, forming almost an audience, Tiana got down from his perch and walked up to Marge, now standing at the other end of the porch looking out at the ice.

“What are they going to do?” he asked the Kauri.

“Wizard’s battle,” she responded. “It’s required by the Rules, I think, anyway, to end this sort of stuff.”

“He will win, will he not? Ruddygore, I mean.”

She shook her head. “I dunno. I keep looking at that steam over there. You can’t see it—yet. But magical strings are forming shapes behind that mist, ugly shapes. And Ruddygore lacks the killer instinct. Remember Boquillas.”

Between the wall of steam and the palace island was the broad expanse of ice. Now the two figures, both looking rather small against its plain backdrop, faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet, like two gunfighters in some bleak frontier showdown.

“I didn’t teach you everything, Sugasto,” Ruddygore noted.

“All that time in the madness of the djinn where you sent me wasn’t wasted, either, old man,” the Master of the Dead responded. “As you have already seen.”

“Your zombies are of little use to you now,” the big man said. “And you’ll not find my soul so easy to pluck.”

Sugasto’s hand went up, and an enormous ball of the blackest magic flew toward Ruddygore. Ruddygore responded with a massive, almost blinding flash of light that banished it.

“I saw that!” Tiana exclaimed.

“They’re just warming up, feeling each other out,” Marge told him. “I’m more worried about something else. I just figured out why Sugasto was so pleased to have this fight where it is. Every time they hurl something, either one, more power builds behind the mist, more incredible magic rushes in and solidifies.”

Now both sorcerers let loose huge spells that met in the middle, and the entire area between them was awash in color, like a giant, jagged splotch of varicolored paints, the colors mixing and swirling and oozing around, forming shapes. Fierce, lion-like things, and things like some horrible nightmare of bears, against demonic shapes, ugly, serpentine, and gargoylelike, all roaring their fury and going at each other as the two men, like puppeteers, kept moving their hands and arms in fantastic, gyrating motions.

“I wonder what it seems like to them?” Tiana breathed.

Upon a vast plain of crackling, multicolored energy, the two protagonists stood not as people but as thoughts or expressions, each with his own distinctive colors. Thrust, parry, thrust again, done with the speed of thought, and with any of the weapons the imagination could supply; this was the plane of the wizard’s battle.

“The djinn prepares you well for this, old man,” Sugasto taunted. “Planes of madness, without rules, without form, until you give it thus.”

An enormous demonic monster materialized, pouncing with a horrible roar upon Ruddygore. The big man became a massive mouth, all teeth and gullet, swallowing the creature and not resisting a very large burp!

“True, my boy, but I’ve been there since last you were!” Ruddygore responded.

Massive energy, all blues and greens and bright orange for strength, flashed out from the big man and took form; a great squidlike horror whose tentacles reached out and threatened to grab the brilliant will-o’-the-wisp that was Sugasto.

The man in black became a giant, whirling blade, cutting the tentacles like salami, stacking them up in uneven piles.

“You’re every bit as good as the potential I saw in you when you were just a lad,” Ruddygore noted. “You still lack imagination, though.”

“Imagination! Fine talk from a man who plays the game so incessantly that he has forgotten why the game is played at all!”

“You never understood, Sugasto, and that was your tragedy,” the big man responded. “The lust for power, the god complex, has consumed you. You would be a god or the devil himself, yet those are the worst jobs in all Creation, for they are the loneliest. Let us stop this childish playing, Sugasto. Let me show you your victory! Let me give you your vision of the new world!”

There was blackness, blackness all around, and the man in black was falling, falling down an endless hole. There was no top, no bottom, no sides, only blackness, falling forever. There was no one to catch him, no one to save him, no one even to sympathize. He was utterly, completely alone, falling forever.

No! There were others around him! Almost in terror, he reached out for them, drew them to him with his mighty power. Yes! Lots of people! They whirled with him, falling in the darkness, and he could see them, millions of them; men, women, children, all with glazed eyes and vacant stares, all without minds, without souls…

Sugasto screamed.

From the porch, Marge pointed to the figure of the man in black. “He’s staggering! He’s down! Way to go, Ruddygore!”

But at the moment of victory, there came an ominous rumbling from the still steaming edge of the Devastation. Suddenly, the ice trembled, and huge fissures opened, coming outward in the direction of both sorcerers, the crack coming between them.

It was so unexpected that Ruddygore was knocked off his feet and off his concentration, allowing a weakened Sugasto some breathing room.

And then, suddenly, rising from the ice between the two wizards, emerged a monstrous head, with huge, glaring eyes, nostrils that snorted smoke and fire, and fangs dripping with the ichor of doom. Dragonlike, it was more than a dragon, it was the horrible face of all that was feared in dragons.

A second opening, then a second head, even more frightening and hideous than the first, appeared, snorted, and looked around. Now, yet a third appeared, and a small part of the body as well, showing the monster, fully thirty feet high, its three heads taking in the scene, looking as if it could devour them all. The castle crowd, once an audience, began running over the ice, away from the three-headed nightmare from the Devastation, but the sorcerers could not run.

Sugasto looked up and saw it, and smiled evilly. Getting to his feet as best he could, he pointed to Ruddygore who was still down, but struggling to get up.

“Creature of evil from times past, I charge thee destroy in the name of our same master whose reign from Hell is secure. Devour him who would stop our master’s plan!” the man in black intoned, pointing at Ruddygore.

For a moment all three heads looked slightly puzzled, although they appeared to have understood; then, suddenly, long necks turned as one toward Ruddygore, just getting to his feet, and three sets of horrible, gaping jaws whose fangs were larger than the white-bearded sorcerer, came down for him.