Horrors of the Dancing Gods

principalities and powers of the air. That does not, of course, mean that they wouldn't like to see us come over to their side and point of view and enter into their service or that they wouldn't get rid of us if they could triumph for sure without our help. Still, I will lose no sleep on this leg of the voyage from worry that some ghoulie or beastie or demonic form is going to get me. I believe we should all simply get as much rest as we can, for I can foresee many long and difficult times ahead.' He yawned. 'Indeed, I believe I shall nap right now.'

'Not me,' Marge told him. 'I'm in my prime time here. Irving?'

'I want to see the rest of the ship and how it moves,' he told her. 'No way I'm gonna sleep now.'

They left Poquah and went back to the hall, then forward and out one of the doors to the outer deck. Things were getting very busy very fast, and they could feel the boat shift against its moorings as people and things were loaded on board. Marge shook her head in wonder. 'Do you feel that this is strange somehow?'

'Those windows? And coffins in the rooms? Sure,' he admitted.

'No, that's not it. You kind of expect that. It's that most of this is not bizarre. There's no feeling of dread, of monstrous evil, blood and gore, all the rest. This could be any large, new luxurious craft going anywhere on the ocean. There's just something wrong about it.'

'You mean you think we're being conned or something?' he asked.

'No, no! I mean that this is pretty much what it is, that nobody's conning us, but it isn't what it should be. Demon ships to a horror continent that is the gateway to Hell? This?'

'So you think they get people over to their point of view by scaring them to death?' Irving asked her. 'Heck, I mean, you heard that demon. They're at war. They see all that evil power stuff, all that blood and gore, as striking at their enemy, but you wouldn't expect them to live that way. I bet you Satan's so beautiful, he'd make you cry, too.'

'Huh?'

'He was in charge of all the angels, right? And he controls all the organized evil in at least two universes, right? That's power. These little guys, these demons or bad angels, they're just ones that got conned or suckered or maybe just talked into going with the revolt. No big deal. But I bet you the big ones, the princes, are something else — and their chief the grandest of all. You figure he's gonna sit back with the best wines and the finest foods and all the stuff anybody can enjoy in spades, right? Everything your preacher ever told you not to do, and no penalties, no aging, no guilt or nothin'. I bet he don't need a ship to be anywhere, but this is the kind you'd build for your people, right? Not the suckers — we saw them all chained up back there. The ones who really run things.'

Marge sighed. 'Maybe. Still, it just doesn't seem right somehow. Not to me.'

Was it just her old cultural upbringing, she wondered, or was it the fact that she'd seen the evil those creatures could do and had learned of more? Hitler, Stalin, war, pestilence, disease, suffering — that was the business of those who owned and operated this craft. How terribly depressing to discover that they literally saw it as their business, nothing personal.

Still… 'If they're so powerful, why do they need us at all?' she asked him. 'You're so smart, kid, you answer that one. Why can't the big man who can corrupt nations and enslave whole worlds and chuckle over a nice Chianti about it, him and all his princes who run things, take care of this turf war with somebody else muscling in? What could a sixteen-year-old green kid on his first outing and two faerie do that all that power and glory and such can't?'

It was Irving's turn to shake his head. 'Sorry, I been thinking about that one myself. Maybe we'll find out if we make it.'

The ghostly, roaring sound of lost souls under amplification came from all around them.

'The H.P. Hovecraft Eibon will depart in five minutes. All ashore that is going ashore. All passengers and freight for Red Bluffs, Innsmouth, and points beyond should now be on board'

'Well, we might as well stick here and see how this thing works, anyway,' Marge noted. 'I still can't figure out why it's called a hovecraft or just how it moves. I don't see any masts, the huge inner tube that seems to surround it doesn't allow for oars, and nothing up front that seems to be used for pulling is broken out.'

They waited, hearing the clomping of inhuman feet below them and the shouts of many creatures in many tongues. There were also shapes, human and otherwise, on the docks and at the mooring lines. The gangplank aft and the loading ramp amidships were withdrawn, and they could hear the crew putting up the railings and bulwarks. There was a definite feeling of departure that quite abruptly struck both Irving and Marge in a way they hadn't expected.

'Abandon hope all ye who enter here…'

Since coming to this world, they had both traveled to many lands, seen many things of good, evil, and in between, and experienced both magic and nature, but it had all been in Husaquahr. Now, for the first time, both of them were leaving the great northern continent, the largest on the planet, whose heart was the River of Dancing Gods, and heading southward, past the equator, to a place that they didn't know but that was billed as all the bad things of Husaquahr and Earth, with none of the good.

Both felt suddenly very homesick, and Marge again had to suppress the urge to fly up and away, back toward home and familiar lands.

'Eibon now departing,' reported a somewhat spooky but far more solid and official-sounding voice. 'All passengers remain away from the rails and mooring lines. Let go aft. Let go amidships. Let go forward'

The huge boat drifted free of the dock, with the lines being pulled in from the lowest deck below them and secured. It didn't feel like it was powered by much of anything but rather was simply adrift, its pilot steering with a rudder, using only the outgoing tide to get well away from shore.

'False dawn's starting,' Marge noted, pointing. 'They won't have much night left.'

'Probably not,' Irving agreed. 'Just enough to get them out to where they can pick up the krakens, I'd guess. Still, he's making pretty good time with just the tide here. At least I think it's the tide.'

They were well away from shore, and the lights of the H.P. Lines dock seemed extraordinarily distant. Pretty soon they were far enough out to see the whole coast stretching before them for many miles in both directions, and to the rear and the right they could see the resort town and its crowded harbor as a collection of miniature radiances in a gaudily lit gloom.

Somewhere over there Macore was fast asleep, probably surrounded by his crew of nymphs, no longer exposed to the danger of yet one more quest.

There was a sudden bump and lurch of the whole boat, almost as if it had struck something, and then the sound behind them of massive things rising up, up into the sky and the breaking of the still air by great downward rushes in a regular sort of beat.

They were both almost knocked off their feet, and Irving grabbed the rail, leaned against it, and looked back and upward to see what was going on.

Two great black shapes, each perhaps a quarter the size of the entire vessel, had risen from apparent resting places on top of the boat, between the bridge and the aft pilothouse. Giant, thick, yet amorphous beasts, they now seemed to loom above the ship and cover it, yet they matched its position relative to themselves and to each other perfectly.

'What are they?' Marge shouted over the noise of their beating, great manta rays of the sky.

'I dunno. I think they're some kind of night gaunt, but I never saw or heard anything that big or powerful before,' the boy responded. He pointed. 'Look! They're attached to the ship!'

It was true; the two great beasts were linked by lines not of rope or chain but of the blackest magical forces so that each carried half the vessel. Now, very slowly but very deliberately, the ship seemed almost to come out of the water, suspended under the two creatures just above the waves.

There was a sudden, heavy beating now, and the ship began to move forward at a rapidly increasing speed, leaving the shoreline of Husaquahr behind, moving off with extraordinary haste away from the threatening light of