Horrors of the Dancing Gods

one, but when they discover that you are a monster with money, some things will be possible. Right now we clean up and find you something to eat. I'm afraid it's going to be all fruits and veggies around here for now, but we may be able to do better on the road.'

'That will be fine,' she assured Joe. 'I–I only hope that I can do it.'

That, of course, worried Joe as well. Hell, it'd been weeks before she'd had the nerve to go out by herself, and that had been after a lot of unknowing preparation as a were in the time before the old body and its curse had been destroyed in the lava fires. Alvi could use a little were curse now, but it wasn't exactly something you picked up at the market.

Finding a good meal for Alvi, however, was even easier than going to the market — for a wood nymph. In fact, within a wood nymph's narrow range were some astonishing built-in abilities, including being able to communicate and in many cases use plants the way she'd used the clinging vines against the knife wielder and a kind of instinctive knowledge about plants and plant capabilities — even about plants she'd never seen before, in places she'd never been. She had known instantly which of the surrounding plant juices would make dyes and had been able to extract what was needed without harming the plants themselves. Similarly, there were drugs that could be extracted from others, drugs that healed, others that made you high or were anesthetics, all sorts of things like that. Once she identified them, she needed only merge with the plant to extract a safe amount, then hold it within her until she wanted to excrete it.

There were, of course, limits. Wood nymphs were hardly biologists, let alone biochemists; she had no idea how to mix anything if the raw stuff wasn't there. And it might be that Alvi's constitution wasn't nearly as human as she assumed. But the odds were that it was.

Now, was there anything possibly around here that might help the halfling over the initial jitters? Self- confidence would be important to her disguise; with a hue and cry out, they could hardly wait long or people would start looking more closely into things, and maybe those Consuls would start describing Alvi a bit more fully.

There seemed to be nothing around that was in the nature of a really strong hypnotic, although such plant substances did exist and always seemed to be handy when the bad guys needed them. The best she could find was a kind of mild substance that dulled the mind and made you a little euphoric but also uninhibited and open to a degree of suggestion. Risky in that it might cause Alvi to do something that might betray her, but it was better than nothing. It would be easy enough to remove from the leaves and place within the fruit, although finding the dose that was needed would take experimenting.

After Alvi ate, they got rid of the clothes as Joe had suggested — not without some regrets from Alvi — and, using some vines, Joe made her a kind of belt with loops that would allow the purse and the dagger to be attached and easily carried.

'What now?' Alvi asked the nymph.

'Overland, I think. If we can head west for a while, we should come to a secondary trail going pretty well south, which is where we want to go, and intersecting the great River Road. Come, my beautiful spider. Put your hand and hand and hand in mine and I'll lead you through the back country. No pain yet.'

Alvi laughed. 'Your what?'

'Beautiful spider. Eight limbs, all the colors of the world, a walking work of art!'

The halfling laughed again. 'I like that! Why don't you call me that, then? It'll be a name between us.'

'Huh? What?'

'Spider. You can't very well keep calling me Alvi, or what's the good of all this?'

'Hey! Why not? Joe and the spider lady off through the jungle! Sounds pretty good to me. Sounds like the start of another great adventure long after I'd decided that there'd be no more great adventures for the likes of me! Yes, indeed. This could very well be the start of a be-you-fi-ful friendship!'

The trail was just where Joe had said it would be and about the right distance. Alvi was impressed. 'How do you know this area? Are you from here?'

'No, just a knack. You memorize all the main routes when you haul freight.' But it was more than that, although the rest was beyond easy explanation. Somehow the trees always knew where they were in relation to every other growing thing on the planet, and if they knew, she could find out. Put that on top of the memorized routes, and she almost always knew where she was to a matter of a few yards.

Alvi was fine until they heard some traffic coming the other way. Then she suddenly froze, and Joe could see and feel the tension in her.

'Come on, let's break for a snack over there,' she suggested, and Alvi put up no argument. It was, Joe thought, time to see if this stuff worked and test it out before they got into heavy traffic as they neared the great river.

There was no apparent effect, at least not in the few minutes after eating, and Joe wondered if she'd vastly underestimated the dose needed to do much of anything. However, when Alvi started to get up, she seemed suddenly dizzy and a little uncertain, then gave a silly laugh. 'Must be tired, or my tummy's upset. Got a little dizzy.'

'Come, Pretty Spider, let us be off. There's a fair amount of daylight yet today, and we want to get into a better area by nightfall.'

'Pretty Schpider. I love it when you say that.' More tittering, but they walked out side by side.

'You just tell yourself that's who and what you are, over and over,' Joe prompted. 'Just think like that and enjoy the walk.'

And, interestingly, after some initial slight hesitancy, Alvi did manage actually to face and then pass a small party of humans heading north. It wasn't that hard to do; one look at her and they gave ground and just stared, and Alvi acted as if they were staring in admiration rather than being totally appalled.

Joe relaxed a bit. Maybe by the time something hypnotic was available, it wouldn't be needed.

Traffic was quite light most of the day on the trail, which was not one of the major mutes in any event and basically serviced some feudal estates and small plantations in the legion, linking them with the river. It was in fact what folks back in Joe's native world and land had once known as a 'rolling road,' designed to be fairly straight and basically downhill and just wide enough so that barrels or sledges could be transported from the places where they had been harvested to the river piers.

Alvi was a bit tipsy but somewhat emboldened; at least she didn't shrink when they met the occasional person or take offense at some of the muttered curses, exclamations, and religious exorcisms performed as she passed, either. She was basically oblivious, and there weren't enough people to really worry about.

Near the end of the day they emerged from the jungle and looked out over a vast floodplain and the monstrous meandering river that was the land's heart and soul as well, the River of Dancing Gods.

By that time Alvi's intoxication had pretty well worn off, and she gazed out at the tremendous display in front of her, set off in a combination of light and shadow from the low sun in the distance, and gasped. 'Wow!' she breathed.

'You've seen the river before, surely,' Joe commented.

'Not really. Not like this. I mean, we came in from the cast and went through these big cities on the ocean and along this dirty flat region. Nothing like this.'

'Well, that 'dirty flat region' and that plain out there are the reason so many creatures can live here,' Joe pointed out. 'All the good stuff that makes things grow and all the fresh water from countless rivers and streams far off to the north all come together here, washed down and deposited. You can look out from here and see all the river traffic, all the faerie colonies and such, and all the human towns, cities, and settlements as well. The really big cities are still to the south, but even from here we're probably looking at between a half million and a million souls as well as many times that in plants and animals. Thousands of kilometers north to here — that river is Husaquahr.'

She was surprised at her own feeling at the scene and the sense of the great river as somehow hers and a part of her as well. Maybe she was getting more assimilated than she thought.

'It's so wide! How are we going to get across it?'

'Too wide to swim or bridge,' the nymph agreed. 'We'll have to be ferried across. We've got money, and there are many such boats along here, almost all run by some sort of faerie. We'll have to go down to the Great River Road, then walk south until we find someone who will take us. Not today, though. We've done enough for