Horrors of the Dancing Gods

dawn and toward the still-inviting darkness.

It was clear from the start that they would not beat the dawn, but they would make a game try of it.

Daytime was definitely not the most comfortable time of passage. Kraken power involved lashing the great sea behemoths to lines from the bow and having them pull with great muscular snakelike motions. That did the job but caused a fair amount of rocking and definite discomfort during heavy seas. While the forward motion was enough to allow them to make time, the comfort zone for the Eibon was definitely slated for dusk to dawn.

The dining room was everything the purser had promised, as well. The wines were superb, of legendary vintages, and whatever food you wished for, that mysterious never-seen kitchen could manage not only to come up with but to prepare it precisely the way you wanted it.

There were few eating or wandering the decks by day, even in warm sunshine, and that made Irving in particular more sensitive to the feeling that he was being watched, and not by members of the crew. It wasn't constantly, and it wasn't anything he could pin down, either, but he had the distinct sense of being checked up on constantly by someone or something that was never that far away yet never quite glimpsed save in shadow or out of the corner of the eye. It was always faster than he and cleverer as well, and it was no paranoid delusion. Once he thought he had caught the watcher and almost had, but while there was nobody there when he made the challenge, the doorway was still sliding shut and the inner door was swinging back and forth as if someone had just run through.

Both Marge and Poquah admitted to having the same sensation, although not quite as frequently and certainly with no better luck. 'At first I thought it was some fellow passenger who had designs on a neck or thigh,' Poquah noted, 'but I get no sense of menace from this. Imir are very good at this sort of thing — sensing threats. Whoever or whatever it is, while I cannot be certain that it is friendly, it is certainly not our enemy. This suggests someone paid to keep tabs on us or watch our backs. It will be interesting to see what comes of this — or who.'

'Great. Just what we need,' Marge grumped.

Beyond the luxury of the restaurant and bedrooms there really was little to do on the boat for the average passenger. They did have a nighttime casino, as promised, but it was a rather subdued affair for anybody, let alone Hell, and looked even more impossible to beat than a regular casino. The library tended toward honor novels and collections, many from Earth, together with volumes in many languages of both Earth and Husaquahr on black magic, sorcery, Satanism, and other cheery subjects. Irving did find the complete, bound set of Tales from the Crypt, but it provided only a couple of hours diversion at best.

It was more comfortable by night, when the giant night gaunts skimmed the ship over the waves regardless of seas or winds and kept things steady and very quick, but Irving in particular found that this was the best time for him to sleep. The constant pulsing and rocking from the two somewhat laboring and slightly out of sync daytime krakens were much easier to get used to walking about than sleeping in the cabin. That left Marge more to herself at night, which she didn't particularly like but had to accept, and Irving roaming around pretty much on his own during the day. Poquah was never a very convivial sort or great company and tended to use his time reading, studying, and meditating. Once or twice he did try to stalk Irving himself, hoping to catch the elusive shadowing figure in between them, but although he came close, the shadow proved resourceful and the most that could be gleaned was a small black-clad shape whose very race, let alone features, couldn't be determined by short glimpses.

And then there was the girl.

Irving first saw her in the restaurant at the second meal there, eating alone. She was striking in a number of ways, not the least of which was that she appeared dark-skinned and African-featured although quite different from his specific features in many ways. She also was dressed in a light cotton dress that seemed comfortable but hid little and was most remarkable because on Hell's dark ship it was the whitest of whites.

Who was she, this first person of African-type features Irving could remember seeing since leaving Earth? What was she doing here, traveling to Yuggoth on this ship, wearing the plain white that usually signified purity and chastity and all that, and awake by day rather than by night? At first he thought she might be a Succubus; those creatures, after all, did have a tendency to take the form in the beholder's mind of some kind of ideal human. But it was never the same for any two people, and Poquah saw her, too.

'There is a Moorish continent, but it is well west of our destination,' Poquah noted. 'Still, she certainly looks of that continent and place, and most likely the western delta region of that continent. I have no idea why she is here, but I can perhaps make some kind of nasty guess based upon what I see.'

'Yes?'

'Note the spell. Not all that different from your own. Chastity, celibacy — she is a virgin. The spell keeps her that way, but it is the power of that unspoiled virginity that shines through and is almost painful in faerie sight. White cotton, virginal, unadorned, and alone. There can be but one possible explanation for this.'

'I don't understand,' Irving said, frowning.

'She is a gift. Someone made a bargain with a demon back where she came from to provide a firstborn virginal daughter. There is much potential for both good or evil sorcery in such a one. We can safely assume that if she's headed to Yuggoth on the Eibon, she is headed for an evil master, a payoff that will almost certainly be a tragedy.'

'Huh? What? You don't mean…?'

'I fear so. She is intended as some sort of sacrifice to a power of the underworld. Whoever does it will gain something important, possibly vital protection or even power. The underworld prince will gain a soul that can be used against others like a weapon of iron. There is a whole volume devoted to sacrificial virgins in the Rules, you know.'

Irving was shocked. 'Hey! We can't let that happen! Particularly to her! I mean, it's not right!'

The boy seemed so mature and so much an adult that it was a surprise sometimes when the naive kid in him surfaced as it did now. Poquah sighed and said, 'Irving, we are on a ship owned by a principality of Hell heading toward, and I repeat, toward, the evil continent of Yuggoth. Aboard are a considerable number of lost souls as well as — almost certainly — demons in sufficient numbers that we could not stand against them if they decided they wanted all of us. To top it all off, we are in the middle of the ocean. Just what do you think we could do if indeed we had the right, the duty, or the obligation to intervene?'

The boy was somewhat taken aback by the catalog of their weaknesses, but deep down there was a moral sensibility that couldn't walk away from this. Still, he had to think pretty fast.

'I think we are supposed to,' he replied a bit hesitantly.

'Indeed? Why?'

'Because she's black like me, and I don't ever remember seeing another around here, so the two of us being on this ship this trip has to mean something in the destiny department or something, right?'

'Or it could be sheer coincidence. I suspect there are a hundred million or so of her race about, just not many that get to Husaquahr. And I'm unaware of any monopoly on dealings with Heaven, Hell, or the spirits in between by one race versus another. She is also brown, not black, and you are not only not black, either, you are only half- related to her in any genetic sense. Now, if she'd been a red Indian, I might well have agreed with you on the destiny business — we have some relatives here in a remote land but nothing all that close, and so someone of that type showing up would be highly unusual, if not unique. But a girl of one of the Moorish races — don't be absurd. A million times more common than an Int, for example.'

Poquah clearly could not be moved, but Irving wasn't the type to budge on that sort of thing, either. Much of the day he brooded over it, trying to figure out just what to do, what he might be able to do, and, if he could come up with something, what was needed to do it.

The first thing, he decided, was to talk to her. Poquah might well be right. Hell, she might even be there of her own free will or to save her family's life or something. He didn't think so. Not only was the racial link much more certain an indication of destiny linked to him than Poquah accepted, but the fact that she was also clearly not much more than his own age cinched it.

And if she didn't want to be here, then just to pretend she was never here would be as big a sin as bumping her off. If they refused even to check out somebody who might need help or refused to