Horrors of the Dancing Gods

wouldn't keep out a decent burglar, but an average one might look at the trouble of undoing yours versus the lack of trouble going into your alarmless neighbor's and decide to burgle next door instead.

After all, the only people who really knew how good you were with any weaponry were ones who'd seen you in action. Until then, you were always a potential threat.

Crossing the great river wasn't nearly as easy. Despairing of finding a decent ferry that far down, Joe finally decided that the only way would be to take a river tramp, a small ship that went from port to port along the river, up and down, carrying local supplies and commerce. Many were little more than filthy barges with single rectangular sails, occasionally in league with some river faerie or having a few muscular oarsmen aboard for the hard parts.

Such was the Catarwahl, apparently last cleaned sometime around the expulsion from Eden and smelling like it, too, manned by the somewhat questionable and unquestionably boozy Captain Letchu, along with his wife and son, who could be told apart less by age than by the mustache the wife had. They were going downriver now, which meant they could mostly follow the slow but dependable currents in a kind of diagonal pattern, crisscrossing the river in a series of triangles until they reached the end. Going back upriver, if they had no wind, was a matter of contracting with some hippogryphs or other river faerie to give them a decent tow.

'I'll takes yer as fer as Azkim,' the captain told them. 'No more for that pittance.'

'You're a money-grubber of the first water,' Joe retorted. 'This is river robbery, and you know it. It just about cleans us out.'

That was by no means the truth, but it was more than a bargaining ploy. Letchu was in fact charging them about ten times what any other ferry would, and it wasn't a good idea to give people like that the idea that you perhaps had even more money or valuables. This drooling, filthy trio was nonetheless bigger than bears and looked twice as mean.

Alvi seemed entranced by the prospect of crossing the big river and oblivious to most of the unspoken parts of the deal, but standing on the rail near the bow as they pulled away from the dock, she seemed excited and relieved.

'It's a good thing you are a halfling and me a wood nymph, considering this,' Joe noted sourly. 'I have a good idea that if we seemed to have any value ourselves, we'd wind up being tied up and sold down in Yingling.'

'Really? They do that?'

'Sure. Back where I came from they called it 'Shang-haiing' somebody, after a city way off on the other side of the world where the ships would often be headed in ancient days. Unable to get sailors to go on those long and risky but very profitable voyages, they just hired men to find people in the bars, drug or knock them out, and they'd wake up well out at sea, where they either signed on as crew or got tossed overboard with lead weights. Most of 'em signed. The women, well, they were sold as domestics, field workers, prostitutes, you name it. Not much different here. There's still things like slavery here, too, handy if you have a need for planters and pickers and such back in those huge jungle plantations. That's why most of the good guys here travel in groups. The bad guys, too, come to think of it.'

'Well, all I can say is that I don't see the world as quite as nasty as you,' Alvi noted. 'I'm sure that's all part of it, but there's so much more. It's kind of pretty here on the river, with all those creatures in the water, all the boats big and small, the colorful costumes — I am really getting to like it in spite of how mean some of 'em can be.' She sniffed. 'I have to admit, though, its smells leave something to be desired right now.' She discovered that any exposed part of her that touched any part of the ship got covered in some thick, foul-smelling black stuff. Joe was not immune, either, but chuckled.

'It's peat, I think. They take it out of bogs up north, and it's burned for heat. It's cleaner than the dung, but it's no winner.'

'They cook with it?' Alvi was appalled.

'No, they don't usually cook with it,' Joe told her. 'They use wood for that, if and when they can find it in condition to be properly burned. Sometimes oils. It's used to heat their houses. It gets extremely cold up north, I can tell you.'

Alvi thought that over. 'I–I think I know what you mean, but I don't remember ever being so cold that I had to heat the inside of a place. Is that where they make the snow?'

'Well, it's not made, it just falls. Temperature gets cold enough, it snows instead of rains. It's all water. They pack a lot of snow and ice in special boats now and use preserving spells to sustain them all the way downriver here so the rich folks can have chilled wines and store meat and fish for several days or even weeks.'

'That's the only way I ever saw it,' Alvi acknowledged. Do you think we'll get to anyplace that's really cold on this trip?'

'Not for a while, I hope.' Joe laughed. 'We're in the tropics and heading south into more of them. Where from there, though — that's what we have to find out. I hope we stay warm. I can take the cold, but not for long periods, and it can slow me down. If I freeze, I can be stiff for years, centuries, maybe forever, until I'm thawed out. And if you freeze, you're dead. I had enough cold stuff the last time, in the place where I wound up like this. I think I'm owed the heat.'

It took about ninety minutes to make the full downriver crossing to the very small town of Azkim, and by that point and with scrambling to get out of the boat, both of them were black as, well, pitch.

'Now what?' Alvi asked Joe.

'First, I think we find a shallow river access and wash this crap off us. Then we'll find a place for you to buy something to eat, and we'll camp somewhere close. Too late to do much more today. Tomorrow we'll continue south, on this side of the river. Down to the Coast Highway, then west to the Leander border. If we can keep going at this pace more or less, we should make it to the jumping-off place for the Marmalade Islands and their resorts in maybe ten days to two weeks. If we're lucky, my old friend will still be doing three-hour tours…'

It was slow going once they veered off the River of Dancing Gods and took older, rarely used trails to the south and southwest, but that suited them both just fine. It made it easy almost to forget that Husaquahr existed, that there was hatred and bigotry and violence all around, and instead made it almost seem to be an extended and entertaining picnic.

It had been a long time since Joe had allowed herself to get friendly with, let alone close to, anybody else, and it was very strange: the longer they traveled together, the less odd Joe thought Alvi looked. In this world, where everybody seemed more than a little off, familiarity bred acceptance more than anything else.

Alvi, too, had the same reaction toward Joe, the first real friend and confidant outside of family members and close servants she'd ever known and somebody who seemed very wise and fascinating. The idea that Joe was a wood nymph hardly mattered; if Alvi had any prejudices toward the more elemental faerie, they surely didn't apply to Joe.

Several times they actually stepped behind cover when encountering parties of travelers, particularly humans; it was tough to know who was who and what was what in that unfamiliar region and whether anybody had yet caught on to who that six-armed halfling had been.

Joe did in fact try teaching Alvi a little of his fencing skills, but it wasn't anything serious. Alvi's body wasn't designed for finesse; clearly it would be better off with short swords, cutlasses, or possibly sabers, since a cut and slash would be most effective with all those arms. Joe wasn't that much better; the short reach, a lack of really fast reflexes, and easy tiring of the arm muscles just made swordplay ridiculous, and unlike mortals and perhaps halflings as well, all the exercising and workouts in the world wouldn't change a faerie body that was already predefined.

Shortly after reaching the coast, they came upon a small town sitting on a bluff above the wide ocean, and Joe was suddenly a bit wary. 'You never know what's happened when you're out of circulation awhile,' she commented. 'Let me go in alone and snoop around and see if there's any kind of hue and cry for you. If there is, we'll bypass as much as we can. If not, we'll use the main road here and make a little time. I also want to get an idea of how far we still have to go.'

Alvi didn't like it. 'We been partners since we started; I hate to see you go in there alone. I mean, there's no