DG5 - Horrors of the Dancing Gods Read online

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  THE WEB OF THE CHOZEN

  THE DANCING GODS

  Book One: The River of the Dancing Gods

  Book Two: Demons of the Dancing Gods

  Book Three: Vengeance of the Dancing Gods

  Book Four: Songs of the Dancing Gods

  Book Five: Horrors of the Dancing Gods

  AND THE DEVIL WILL DRAG YOU UNDER

  A JUNGLE OF STARS

  DANCE BAND ON THE TITANIC

  DANCERS IN THE AFTERGLOW

  THE SAGA OF THE WELLWORLD

  Book One: Midnight at the Well of Souls

  Book Two: Exiles at the Well of Souls

  Book Three: Quest for the Well of Souls

  Book Four: The Return of Nathan Brazil

  Book Five: Twilight at the Well of Souls: The Legacy of Nathan Brazil

  THE RINGS OF THE MASTER

  Book One: Lords of the Middle Dark

  Book Two: Pirates of the Thunder

  Book Three: Warriors of the Storm

  Book Four: Masks of the Martyrs

  THE WATCHERS AT THE WELL

  Book One: Echoes of the Well of Souls

  Book Two: Shadow of the Well of Souls

  Book Three: Gods of the Well of Souls

  FOUR LORDS OF THE DIAMOND

  Book One: Lilith: A Snake in theGrass

  Book Two: Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold

  Book Three: Charon: A Dragon at the Gate

  Book Four: Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

  To Steven Lloyd Chalker, in spite of whose best efforts this book got finished anyway.

  INTRODUCTION

  I WRITE VERY FEW SERIES IN SPITE OF MY REPUTATION. OH, I write a lot of very long books, which publishers try to chop up into thirds and fourths and sell as "the latest series" but they're really not, and those who read them know it for the most part. The Dancing Gods books, however, are very much a series and so open-ended that even I have no idea when I start one if it's going to be my last.

  For those who don't remember and those who came in late, the Dancing Gods is set in an alternate universe separated from ours in which the realities of our myths, legends, fantasies, and phantasms exist along with humankind. Connected by an ethereal realm known as the Sea of Dreams, we are influenced in our thoughts, fantasies, and imaginations by reflections of this alternate reality. The framework is Judeo-Christian in terms of good and evil, right and wrong, and so on, and while Heaven continues to stay out of things directly—so far—Hell, as usual, cheats.

  This alternate Earth in fact was created as a reflection and in the backwash of the Genesis creation of our Earth, our universe, and God spent all His time, along with the time of the top angels, in setting ours up. Being merciful, He didn't destroy the other one, just assigned all minor angels and such to straighten it up. Being minor, of course, they weren't really up to the job and were prone to shortcuts. Magic, for example; it was more convenient than inventing a lot of physical laws. And how much easier to let the wood nymphs protect and keep the trees healthy, and the water sprites the seas, instead of actually having to deal with the complex sciences involved.

  In fact, all the natural laws and shortcuts were basic enough to fit into a fairly stock volume, the Book of Rules. The few details the book missed were left to the powerful magicians and sorcerers to tidy up, and they've been doing it ever since. In fact, they've been overdoing it ever since, acting just like a massive bureaucracy. Nothing is too minor for their notice; no cliché remains untouched or unmandated. My theory is that this is why it often seems that everybody's sword and sorcery epics are variations of the same book—after all, we know they are better writers than that, right?

  Under the Rule that mandates that all great adventures be at least trilogies, the Dancing Gods series was always intended to be at least three. This is, I believe, the fifth. In the fourth, Songs of the Dancing Gods, we resolved a ton of questions and polished off a lot more enemies, but we left one in the wrong state and another in the lurch, I'm here to get him out.

  I hesitated to take on the horror boom at its height, even though it probably produced the most hackwork since cyberpunk. Movements always tend to do that. Some folks who are really good do something new and original and creative, and then it's piling on the bandwagon and going to the Sea of Dreams to see what clichés and stock situations drift through. Still, I figured they'd have their day—everybody deserves one now and again—and I pretty much waited until the cycle crested and fell.

  This book is an excellent example of kicking people when they are down. I've limited my easily recognizable targets to the dead and the superstars (and been fairly nice to the latter lest their lawyer birds and Del Rey's lawyer birds have sky battles). The knowledgeable can pick out all the little items here and there that twit those who really deserve it. Have fun finding them.

  As with Songs, this volume departs from the first three in being a lot more serious for a long segment, possibly the first third of the book, then goes through occasional gags, broad throwaways, gratuitous slaps and kicks, and the like, until at the end we just throw everything down the tubes and go completely bananas. In here is both serious writing and the sword and sorcery equivalent of the Marx Brothers doing Hamlet; while I managed to talk myself out of introducing a character (for now) named Fungie, as in Fungie from Yuggoth, I have committed some puns so horrible that I feared I was getting cross-linked with Piers Anthony. The idea is to eventually have a lot of fun, get a little serious stuff in between the nonsense, and in general build to a point where the reader has a really wild ride. Since this is also the first book I have written since quitting smoking, anyone who thinks maybe it isn't up to the others should examine his or her conscience for the logic of that.

  Enjoy.

  —JACK L. CHALKER

  April 1994

  ENCOUNTER ON A LONELY ROAD

  The immortal hero/heroine doomed to wander the world until judgment shall always be placed in proximity to important damsels in distress.

  —Rules, XXVI, p. 234(k)

  A RELIGIOUS PERSON EXPECTED TO GO TO ETERNAL reward or punishment at death, but to be suspended indefinitely in limbo made even Hell seem attractive.

  It wasn't just the wood nymph part, although that was bad enough; it was all of it. She'd never even fully accepted becoming a she; the rest was just dung on the cow pie. That wasn't a matter of good and bad, either; it was just that a person was more than a collection of cells. A person was the sum of all the experiences from birth, too, and had an ego, an identity, a sense of self that defined that person, made that individual unique. No matter what anybody said, a body's sex was one hell of a determiner in that whole sense of who a person was, and to have it wrenched out made you culturally nothing at all.

  So if you hadn't started out as female, you were never going to get comfortable as a female. And everybody of course treated you as if that was the first defining thing you were—they couldn't help it. You didn't grow up that way, think that way, see the world that way, act and react that way. So you didn't really fit in comfortably with the ones who did, but you hardly fit in with the boys, either. Not when you looked and sounded like she did.

  She'd accepted her lot grudgingly for the sake of the boy and seeing the boy grow into manhood, but even that was not the stuff of dreams. You couldn't have a father-son relationship when Dad had been changed into a wood nymph. Somehow it just couldn't be the same. And since he had been separated from the boy for so long while the kid was growing up, there wasn't anything in the past to hang a really strong relationship on. Worse, having any kind of close relationship with a wood nymph when you were an adolescent boy was likely to create
a situation more embarrassing and downright distasteful than anything else.

  Because of that, she'd never gotten close to him—Irv—and had left his upbringing to other hands. As far as Irv was concerned, Dad was dead and gone in a hero's fight to the finish against the epitome of evil, the Dark Baron; both had been destroyed, consumed, in a fiery volcanic ooze, thus saving Husaquahr and the world beyond it from being overrun.

  Most times she felt as if it would have been better if it had really happened that way. Certainly it would have been better had she been able to die like the Baron rather than emerge as the wood nymph bound to the Tree of Life itself. Even the deities of High Faerie had at least one vulnerable spot—their powers were dependent on the number of believers. Remove the believers and you removed their powers. They wouldn't die exactly, but they would cease to exist for all practical purposes.

  Not her. She required no believers, no supplicants at all. Even if something unthinkable should happen to the Tree of Life, its juices flowed within her and made her totally, irrevocably immortal. She was the only wood nymph who didn't even need a tree, although there was this instinctual affinity with them. Wood nymphs had no need to eat; they made their energy from sunlight or could absorb it indirectly from plants. She didn't even need to drink like the others of her kind; the fluids of the Tree never evaporated and never wore out. Lack of carbon dioxide to breathe or prolonged cold might make her go dormant, but that was the extent of it, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience, as she'd discovered. It kind of felt, well, like death in slow motion, not quite asleep or awake but very definitely aware—and the nausea after coming out of it lasted what seemed forever.

  Sister wood nymphs weren't much company, either. They had rather boring and basic lives, had no major life experiences, and, unlike her, couldn't travel far enough not to get back to their trees by dusk. Even if they had great mental potential, which they didn't, this didn't exactly give them much of a chance to broaden their points of view. In fact, they weren't quite as smart as the bimbos they looked like, and emotionally they were something like thirteen. And frankly, that was all they needed to be in either area. Their entire function in life was to create a psychic group that could maintain their woods.

  That and one other thing. The wood nymphs had a symbiotic relationship with plants but not much with animals of any sort. Animal control and management, from the pest to the squirrel and bird and beyond level, was entirely under their male counterparts, the satyrs. Those lecherous half goats weren't much brighter then the nymphs, but they played their songs on their flutes, did their dances, ate leaves and grasses, and, of course, made it with the nymphs. If there was a need for any reason, that was the way you got new satyrs. Nymphs didn't reproduce that way—they budded. That's why they all looked and sounded and thought so much alike.

  Avoiding satyrs was one of her daily goals. The romance of faerie was more than overstated; rather, it was an existence suspended halfway between animal and human, with a mind that could think, could reason, could even learn, stuck inside a body even more constraining than the ones humans had, in which instinct and certain behaviors were beyond thought or resistance. She still didn't enjoy the process, but those flutes were hypnotizing and irresistible.

  It was scary to be in a situation that was totally irresistible, to be completely helpless and enslaved to the will of another. As much as ego and self-identity, that fear drove her to try to beat the system that had snared her in this nasty trap.

  There had been an Aladdin's lamp once, one that really could grant any and all wishes. Although it was gone, far out of reach—in effect wished out of existence—the mere fact that it had existed gave her hope. Given a nearly infinite amount of time, which she had, there had to be something else here, something beyond that one lone lamp that would restore her true form. She had the time; the real question in her mind was whether she'd lose her sanity and her memories before she found the key that she was convinced, against all statements by the magical hierarchy of this world, existed.

  She had been wandering some of the world of Husaquahr; it was too painful to remain back at the castle, watching a son grow up without parents but unable to get the nerve to tell the boy the truth. You just couldn't be much of a father when you looked like a teenage boy's bimbo dream.

  She'd been away quite a while, searching—or so she told herself—for that magic way back to "normalcy" once again. So far: lots of rumors, lots of legends, nothing real. Not that some of those legendary pieces of magic didn't exist; it was just, well, they weren't exactly on the scale of great devices their press had built them up as being or in any way the equal of the Lamp.

  The Stalk of Stavros, for example. Now, there had been one with real promise, a magical staff, they said, that could turn anything into anything. It had taken some effort to find it and get to it, only to discover it was useful mostly for giving long-distance hotfoots. And as for the Pincushion of Ptolemy—no, that was just too painful to think about, dud though it was from her standpoint. The Owl of Ozymandius had at least known something, but it had been the answer to the question all owls asked.

  The Owl of Ozymandius knew who was who. That hadn't done her much good, either.

  She had no idea how long she'd been out in the land seeking and not finding; she had long ago lost any sense of time beyond day and night. But the worst part was what some sages termed the Curse of the Gods.

  It was getting pretty damned boring.

  Oh, originally there'd been some excitement, but after a few adventures and risks and losing some life-or-death gambles only to discover that she couldn't really lose, the thrill had vanished. She couldn't die, she wouldn't get hurt, she didn't grow old. The hoariest monsters of the land were in the end helpless to do her harm. When you combined that with a total lack of need for anything—food, clothing, housing, whatever—there really wasn't much left. She'd never been much on school-type learning, and lately it just didn't interest her, anyway. She'd never been much of a collector, either, owning things for their own sake. Besides, where would she keep things if she had them? She could have the scents of any of the plants of nature, so why use artificial things? Even any jewelry would have to be organic so that it would not obstruct her if she chose to merge with tree or bush.

  And when you neither wanted nor needed anything at all and there was no risk, no sense of family or attachment, nothing—what was there?

  This sense of nothingness in her life, of a gray lack of meaning and purpose, along with the failure of her quest for a way out, was now bringing her back toward Terindell, back toward the only people who meant anything at all to her, now or ever.

  But there was also something more, something much harder to pin down, a kind of grayness seemed to be settling in, permeating Husaquahr, almost as if it were some strange sort of vampiric fog, draining the energy from the land. It really wasn't anything you could see or put your finger on; rather, it was something you sensed, felt, lurking there, all around, omnipresent yet just out of sight in the corner of your eye.

  It wasn't just faerie sense, or imagination, either. They all felt it, or so it seemed, mortal and faerie alike, although they could no more put it into words than she could. It was as if something ancient were stirring, something none of them had ever known before. Something impossibly old, unimaginably powerful, and of a nature that might be called evil but was something far worse.

  It was the kind of gray that made the whole world seem tired, made ambition seem not worth the effort and inhibition a sucker's play. People tended to be surly; violence was up, tolerance was down, and nobody really knew why he or she was feeling and acting this way.

  It gave whispered voice to thoughts she didn't want, too. If Joe survived the lava, no matter how transformed, then why not Boquillas as well?

  What about it? What did the damnable Rules have to say about that?

  She shook the dark thoughts from her mind and looked around. It was late; dusk was about to give way to total darkness�
�not a good time at all to be walking the trails and roads of Husaquahr alone even if life was not threatened. As a wood nymph, the only power she had was with the trees, so she made her way quickly toward a thick stand of massive tropical monarchs that probably was home to quite a colony of her kind. She never felt all that social toward her more limited sisters, but the forest certainly had room for one more, and she could use some rest.

  Suddenly, not far ahead, there came the sound of shouts and a woman's terrified scream and then the clang of metal against metal.

  It startled her more than alarmed her; she'd been walking half a day on that road and had barely met anyone who didn't live in and around the area of the road. Now she approached the sounds cautiously, carefully, straining to see if this was something she might avoid. With her greenish coloration and in her natural element, she could move with amazing quietness and near invisibility, at least to mortal eyes.