DG5 - Horrors of the Dancing Gods Read online

  It had been three against two: three big, swarthy bearded men with the look of brigands or worse against a well-dressed and handsome middle-aged man and a chubby-looking young girl horrendously overdressed in a long brown cloak and full dress. It must have looked like easy pickings to the men, but the older fellow had put up quite a fight. One of the attackers lay, possibly dead, along the trail, and another had a torn jerkin and a spreading bloodstain on the right side of his chest, although it was clearly a superficial wound.

  There were, however, too many of them; the one with the wound had grabbed the girl, who might well have gotten him with a dagger of some sort; he held her firmly while she futilely struggled to break free of him. The man who'd been untouched had beaten the old man to the ground with his heavy sword and now brought the blade down hard on the defender's neck.

  The girl screamed again, then seemed to lose all will to resist further as blood spurted from the certainly fatal wound to her companion.

  Joe looked around, trying to think of some way to help. Physically no longer a match for the pair, although her old self ached to pick up a sword and have at them, she was not without power and resources here.

  "Put her down!" Joe shouted as menacingly as she could. "Let the girl go!"

  Both of the surviving attackers froze in the deepening darkness; the one with the small wound frowned but kept his grip on the girl.

  The other one looked around, trying to get a make on the newcomer, grinning as he thought things through. "Come on out yourself, darlin'! We got enough for two of you!"

  "Take what you want but leave the girl here and go," Joe responded, moving around the periphery of the trees and bushes. This would be tricky, but it was makable.

  "Well, now, I don't think we kin do that," the grinning man said. "See, we think we want her, too. We got real plans for her, y' see. What's she to you, anyways? You got to be a nymph from the sounds. Hell, this is what you's built for! Plenty of room for more!"

  The girl, too, was suddenly paying attention. She looked desperate and her eyes were more than a little wild, but clearly she was looking for some kind of opening. Touching the great trees just in back of the man holding her, Joe decided that this wasn't something she couldn't provide.

  Vines suddenly shot out from the tops of the trees and grabbed the man who held the terrified woman, wrapping themselves around his neck. While not thick or strong enough actually to do him in, they were enough to cut off his wind and give him a sudden and direct choice between letting his captive go and letting the vines keep wrapping around his neck. There wasn't even a contest; reflex made him let go of the girl and grab for his neck.

  The girl dropped to the ground, spied the dagger she'd dropped after stabbing her captor, picked it up, and rushed toward her assailant, who was just pulling the last vines free, his head leaning back so he had room to grab them and break them loose. It was almost as if he were offering his throat, and with a desperate reach and a slashing motion the girl shoved the dagger right into his Adam's apple.

  He went down with a gurgling sound, pulling out the dagger as he fell to his knees, but by then the blood was filling up his air passages, strangling him. He knew it and could do absolutely nothing to stop it.

  "You bitch!" the remaining attacker screamed, grin now gone, and he ran to where the girl was just turning away as if to flee. As she turned, he struck her hard on her back and shoulder with the flat of his sword. She cried out once more and fell, crumpling from the force of the blow.

  The man stepped back, not wanting to get trapped by vines as his companion had been but also unwilling to abandon either his prize or the possibility of revenge from the still not clearly seen attacker.

  He stepped over the girl's still body and put his sword down on her. "All right," he growled menacingly. "Show yourself! Show yourself or I start on the girl here. She's not much, but it can be a little hard to watch, especially if'n she comes to! First a foot, maybe? Then the other'n? So's she won't walk away on us? Then the hands, arms, legs, that sort of thing. What do you think? What should I start with? Maybe this here leg? You got five seconds to try'n stop me!"

  The bastard was good; Joe had to give him that. This was no common robber or cutthroat; he knew his business too well. He also had picked a stance and a position where it would be next to impossible to get him with vines, and there wasn't much else around, either, except maybe throwing rocks and sticks—and Joe knew just how little arm strength she had for that sort of thing.

  "What would it get you?" Joe tried, hoping to stall while she thought of something.

  "Satisfaction," the man responded. "In fact, I don't think I like stalling. You've used up your time, girlie." The sword arm came up a bit, the muscles tensed, and Joe, familiar with the stance and the move, had no doubt what was coming next.

  "All right," Joe said, stepping into the clearing but away from the swordsman, out of easy reach. "So now what?"

  The man obviously had some faerie sight; he didn't seem at all bothered by the nearly pitch darkness around them, and he stared carefully at the wood nymph. The kind of bravado and guts she was showing, as well as quick thinking, was beyond most nymphs of any stripe, but aside from this one being a bit taller and having if anything an even more inhumanly exaggerated set of proportions than the usual, she didn't look all that different.

  "I guess you didn't hear me," the man growled with a kind of confident, even smug tone. "I didn't ask you to come out. I said you had to stop me."

  The sword hand moved, and Joe sprang at him without even thinking, leaping over the distance and hitting him in the chest. Since he stood maybe five-ten and weighed a hundred seventy pounds or so, he was a brick wall to her four-foot-eight, perhaps eighty-pound bulk, but it was enough to knock him back and break his sword motion.

  To him it had been a solid punch; to Joe it was that whole brick wall and it hurt like hell, and she fell onto the ground, slightly dazed.

  He was over her with the sword before she got back her bearings.

  He put out the tip of the sword and touched her left shoulder, and there was a hissing sound where metal met faerie flesh, as if the sword were not solid at all but some kind of horribly caustic acid, and an acrid smell of boiling flesh and a tiny whiff of white smoke came from the wound.

  "You know, it's gonna be a shame to kill you," he said, almost sounding as if he meant it. "Never saw a nymph with this much guts. Can't have you doggin' me and threatenin' my back, though, or callin' in some damned army or the cops. Good-bye, girlie," he added, and plunged the iron sword deep into her, making a horrible gash along her entire breastplate, probably all the way down to her back.

  The hissing and smoking and smell were terrible, and the nymph screamed in pain and then went still.

  The man pulled the sword out, satisfied that he'd done the job, and returned to the fallen girl. She was coming to, but there would be some time to go, and he didn't like this particular forest, not at all.

  He put down his lethal short sword, reached into a small knapsack he had brought with him, and removed two very delicate sets of bronze cuffs. No iron here. He rudely grabbed both of her wrists, brought them in back of her, and put on the smaller cuffs. Then he pulled off her boots and brought the ankles together, clearly with the intent of cuffing them as well.

  Suddenly he felt a horrible, burning pain in his back, and he cried out and straightened up, dropping the cuffs on the ground. He stood, frantically trying to reach between his shoulder blades and remove the dagger that had been driven in between them, but he could not reach it.

  He looked around, totally confused, wracked with pain, yet desperate to see who had gotten him, only to see the wood nymph standing there, looking at him in grim satisfaction, the ugly gaping scar on her chest blazing but already beginning to somehow heal and disappear.

  "But—but—that was iron!" he managed. "How ... ? It's not ... possible!"

  He then pitched forward, shuddered, and was still.

  "T
his is Husaquahr, bub. They got a rule for everything here and an exception to every rule," Joe commented.

  She was probably the only one in all faerie—save the dwarves—who could not be killed by iron. But it really did hurt like Hell.

  The girl groaned, tried to get up, found she couldn't put a hand out to steady herself, and didn't quite make it.

  "Try getting yourself into a sitting position," Joe told her. "I can check and see if he has a key to those cuffs on him."

  "No, no," the girl managed, feeling the bruise of that blow. "These are held by spell. I can feel it." She managed a sitting position, and Joe went over and looked at them. There were tiny little bands of color, like spiderwebs of varicolored light, all over the things.

  "You're right," the nymph said, sighing. "Unless you've got the knowledge to untangle that mess, I guess you're stuck until we can find somebody who does."

  "I probably could, if I could see it, but I cannot," the girl responded. "It's all right, though. It is not as important as it seems." She paused a moment. "My father—he is dead?"

  Joe was startled by the question; somehow the idea that this might be a father-daughter pairing just hadn't occurred to her. She went over to the well-dressed man and scanned him.

  "I'm sorry. He's gone," the nymph told the girl. "I think it's just you and me right now. And an audience of stunned fairy folk of all sorts peering out from the bushes."

  The girl sighed but resisted breaking into tears. "I—I suppose I knew that the moment I saw him fall. He—he was a good man."

  "I'm sorry I wasn't here to help him when you first got attacked, but I didn't even know anybody was ahead of me until I heard the sounds of battle."

  "It—it's all right. I owe you a great deal for what you did do. More than I can ever repay. My father—he'd been a knight and a soldier once, and I think this is the way he would have wanted to go, if it hadn't been for me, anyway." She stared at her savior in the darkness, so obviously using faerie sight "My goodness! You really are a wood nymph!"

  Joe smiled. "I, too, was a knight and a soldier once, and this is definitely not the way I wanted to go, but I'm stuck. Call me Joe. I use other names now and again, but that's the one I prefer."

  The girl ignored or hadn't comprehended the oddity of a wood nymph stating that she'd once been a knight and a soldier and concentrated on the pragmatic. "All right—Joe. I am Alvi. Short for Alvida Zwickda of Month Keep, which is too big a name for anybody, anyway, and never really did fit me, I guess."

  "Morath Keep? That's not anywhere I've heard of before."

  "It is a land beyond the Western Dark, as it's called here. A very long way away by land and sea." She sighed. "Not far enough away, though."

  "Farther than I've yet been, and I thought I'd really seen this world. Huh! Who were they? The other two seem like common cutthroats, but that leader there, he was a pro. And they weren't out to ravish you like I thought at first. He was taking you somewhere and to somebody."

  "Yes. We've been running, you might say, for a very long time."

  Joe didn't press, not right then, but looked around to see if there was anything else of hers to be gathered up. She spotted the boots, carelessly tossed to one side by the chief attacker, went and got them, then brought them back. "At least we can put you back together," she began, then suddenly noticed the girl's feet. They weren't like any feet the nymph had seen before, not on anything or anybody. Long and somewhat broad, with downward-curving claws for nails; more like the feet of some animal than any human.

  "You're faerie!" Joe exclaimed.

  "No, I—oh, what's the difference now? I'm so sick of hiding and pretending anyway. The truth is, I'm pan faerie." Joe suddenly understood. That certainly explained the long cloak and hood in this climate. "A halfling! Well, don't worry. You're among friends here."

  Halflings were the offspring of humans and faerie, two groups not really intended to mate but in some cases close enough that it was possible to do so and have offspring. Such creatures were of both worlds and neither and tended to be what might charitably be called monsters. The laws of most lands said they were to be killed at birth, but it was very hard to kill your own kid, no matter how misshapen or distorted it might be. The vast majority were caught when very young, anyway, or died in infancy, unable to sustain themselves in a form not intended to be sustainable, but occasionally one was not only stable enough but also resourceful enough to stay hidden among society and grow to adulthood, where at least halflings were no longer subject to death.

  Still, they had little status and few rights and tended to live lonely and often bitter lives.

  Alvi sighed and nodded. "I have spent my whole life disguising my curse. As a child, my life would have been at stake; as an adult, I might have to forfeit any inheritance. Not that any of that matters now."

  Joe arose and checked the dead. Her father had quite a purse on him, which Alvi perhaps would need; there was also a large signet ring on his right hand that she pried off. Something to remember him by, perhaps.

  The highwaymen had less of interest. A few coins to be added to the small treasury, little else of value. She did retrieve the bronze dagger and a folded sheet of paper from the knapsack of the head man that contained mostly the chicken-scratch type of writing used there that Joe had never learned and almost certainly wouldn't, but that also contained a fairly decent sketch of both father and daughter.

  It certainly was no official "wanted" poster; there were no official seals, symbols, or such on it. This was a private matter; someone had hired mercenaries to track them down.

  "Can you get to your feet?" Joe asked her. "We'd be better off moving into the trees and away from here a bit, if only because of what these bodies will attract in short order."

  Alvi managed to get to her feet rather handily, almost as if somebody had pushed her from behind. Joe was becoming curious at just what she did look like under all those clothes.

  Still, this wasn't the place or time for details. It was best that they move well away from there, and Joe led Alvi off into the very dense, dark grove of woods.

  When they were well enough in, protected and away from the likelihood of discovery, Joe found a soft area well protected by trees and broad leaves and, very much in her own most comfortable element, told the stranger to settle there.

  "Thank you," Alvi said sincerely. "It has been a very hard day. Let me rest here for a little while. Then ..."

  Joe nodded and replied, "Rest all you need. I will be here when you wake up."

  After all, there certainly wasn't anything better for her to do or any hurry to do much of anything at all. The day had proved to be dangerous and very painful but also very interesting.

  It was the most fun she'd had since she'd wound up in this situation.

  Alvi slept well into the morning, and Joe only tried to ensure that they were undisturbed. Someone had found the bodies and the remains of the fight; that much was certain from the commotion off toward the trail, but she didn't bother to investigate. It didn't sound like much that couldn't have been expected, and they wouldn't know about the girl, anyway.

  It was enough to discuss the situation with the local faerie, who would do little or nothing to save or protect a halfling but had just as little to gain from doing it harm, either; also, they were willing to give a little to Joe. In fact, all the creatures, no matter what the race, seemed to hold the strange wood nymph in mixed fear and awe; a faerie immune to iron was not someone you wanted to cross.

  Alvi looked quite ordinary in her dress and cloak and hood, with a pretty heart-shaped face that seemed very innocent and very sweet with just a tuft of straw-colored hair peeking out from the center. She seemed taller than Joe, perhaps five-one or -two to Joe's four-eight, more toward average for a mortal woman of the land, and there was certainly nothing in her face or hands that said "faerie" to any onlooker. But her face was too thin and too normal for that bulk.

  The hands, though, did tell a few things about her.
They were quite smooth, unblemished, the nails not so much shaped and polished as professionally manicured. Likewise, her facial complexion was perfect, without blemish and with little sign of weathering or stress. Whoever she'd been, she'd been brought up in a wealthy household and protected against all elements both natural and sentient.

  Joe guessed her age as no more than the mid-teens—perhaps sixteen, certainly not much older than that—and certainly still a virgin. No faerie or one with' faerie sight could fail to sense that right off. Virginity was in fact a handy condition in civilization but pretty dangerous out here, a red flag that would draw predators like flies to honey.

  Alvi finally stirred, yawned, stretched out her body, and brought herself awake. Only when she tried to bring her arms out for a full stretch—to find them still cuffed behind her—did she suddenly become fully alert. She looked startled, perhaps a bit scared, and sat up. She spotted Joe sitting on an exposed tree root and sighed. 'Then it wasn't a horrible dream."