Horrors of the Dancing Gods

NOT SO UNFAMILIAR A PLACE

The seat of the worst of evil shall have the face of comfort to the unwary.

— Rules, Vol. XIII, p. 162(a)

^'SO THAT^'S IT, HUH?^' IRVING SAID, STARING AHEAD AS they came inside the breakwater and the Eibon made ready to land.

Marge nodded, feeling a bit nervous for the first time. 'Yeah, that's it.'

This harbor really didn't look all that different from the one they'd left, only a bit larger and more the size of a commercial port than that of a traditional recreational area. The town, more like a city almost, spread out in all directions before them and, from the lights and angles, appeared to be built back into some fair-sized hills. Streets and houses seemed to go right up those hillsides, and the population looked unexpectedly dense.

The harbor had a number of exotic-looking craft in port, many of which were very large sailing ships of designs none of them had ever seen before. The single-masted square sailers could be dismissed as local coastal boats; you wouldn't have much to steer with if you got too far offshore in those things. Others, however, looked enormous, the size of old Spanish galleons in romantic swashbuckler movies, and still others looked like sleek men-of-war with catapults clearly showing and all sorts of unknowable armaments as well. They were in a variety of colors and finishes, many brightly painted, others almost camouflaged by their colors and patterns, but it was clear that they hailed from many lands and were there for a multitude of purposes.

They were mostly human craft, but here and there could be seen fairy folk as well, again of unknown races and backgrounds, doing work on the craft and at the docksides as well. Many were of the same sort of elflike classes as were the most familiar ones of the north such as the Imir, but they had strange colors, often nearly luminescent yet somehow dark; blues and deep yellows and reds of all sorts abounded here. Now and again could be seen creatures that looked in some ways to be relatives of dwarves, and some crawled up and down the rigging with abandon and seemed almost insectlike.

The effect was less one of coming into a port of evil than one of entering a port in some strange and foreign land, which was exactly what it was. The first ship to come into old Shanghai or Tokyo Bay in the nineteenth century or Bombay must have afforded its passengers and crew a similar sensation.

'Wow!' Irving said, staring at the scene in absolute wonderment. 'I didn't expect this!'

'It certainly is, er, different than I anticipated,' Poquah harrumphed, impressed in spite of himself. 'These aren't all Yuggoth lands and races represented here, either. I see flags of several continents here, although none at the moment from Husaquahr, the largest and the mother of them all.'

'They kind of understate their names here, too,' Marge commented, staring. 'I sure would call this a fair- sized city, not 'Red Bluffs,' which sounds like a small town in Nebraska.' She frowned. 'Still, most of the faerie colors signify dark magic, and the few flying types I've seen are bat-winged. We mustn't forget where we are.'

'I concur,' Poquah responded as they came slowly right into a form-fitting slip at the foot of a very broad street. He changed his tone and lowered his voice. 'Now, if you are following the girl, you'd best get on it. You know the name of the hotel where we are booked, so we will meet there when you have something to say.'

She nodded. 'Don't worry. Fliers can keep track of people a lot easier than ground huggers.'

'You watch yourself! There are creatures here that would eat a Kauri for breakfast or turn her dark. Don't think it can't be done to you!'

'I'll be careful. Don't worry.'

She took off, up into the darkness. Irving turned to Poquah and saw in the always impassive elf something he'd never really observed there before — concern. It was very subtle, almost impossible to notice unless, like the boy, you'd been around the Imir for many years, but to Irving it was as startling as Mr. Spock having a crying fit.

'You really are worried about her, aren't you?'

'About all of us,' the Imir responded. 'But yes, I believe she is particularly vulnerable to the temptations of this place. For one thing, she does not believe that she is, and that makes her far more of a target, and secondly, she sees the threats primarily as external, coming from creatures of the night. That better fits the Ancient Ones for all the legends and terror stories. Hell works best from inside and with one's own cooperation. You remember her reaction to the Succubi?'

'Yeah, sure. She didn't like them at all.'

'They are the same, really. Not enough difference to matter in the composition department. The difference is that the Kauri cleanse souls and the Succubi devour them. Either is capable of doing the other's work. We faerie are living creatures, and all living creatures must eat. Marge has been faced with a clientele of late that is almost too much of a good thing — a forced banquet, as it were. In Husaquahr she could get rid of it before it became too much a part of her. Here — I don't know.' He paused for a moment, looking out at the dock. 'Ah! The gangplank is out! We may go ashore! It will be good to get some solid land under us again, eh?'

Irving followed Poquah down to the disembarkation point, looking around for any sign of the girl, but he didn't see her at all. He didn't like that, but there wasn't much he could do about it. Either Marge could link up with her and, he hoped, steer her away from harm and toward them, or she couldn't. There just wasn't anything the two of them could do right now.

As a small child back on Earth, or 'back in the real world' as Irving still tended to think of it even though this was by far the more familiar one to him by this point, he remembered seeing a picture that they seemed to run every Christmas. He never remembered all the details, but he remembered that this good guy got real down on Christmas Eve and wished he'd never been born, and Heaven granted his wish to show him how important he was. When he'd gone back home, his nice, peaceful white-bread town had become a wide-open strip of bars, gambling joints, and all the other stuff they thought was awful back then before somebody discovered real drugs. It still had looked pretty mean and ugly, particularly to a little kid, compared to what had been there before.

He flashed back instantly to that scene in that picture as he followed Poquah off the boat and walked down into the town in spite of not having thought of it in so many years that the memory's very existence was a surprise. It was, however, exactly the effect of walking off the ship and into the town of Red Bluffs.

The whole place was lit up in every kind of gaudy way; wild music and laughter came from dingy-looking joint after joint up the broad main street, and when he could see in the windows, he saw women, mostly in the wildest imaginable underwear and stuff and in weird poses, and occasionally faerie of the same sort. Well, no, not just women — there was a whole set of guys just as wild-looking and posed like, well, Irving wasn't certain just what to make of it, but he had the general idea.

There were sidewalk barkers trying to get passersby into the shops and shows with all sorts of loud and boisterous claims and promises, some of which were clearly impossible without sorcery of a most perverse sort. They also offered other kinds of recreational pleasure, from the wildest of drugs to the weirdest of drinks and potions; all this was wide-open and unconcealed. It was like the most outrageous elements of every bar, burlesque, and red-light district in all the world or worlds.

Shops near the places, sandwiched between, or on narrow side streets offered all sorts of roots, potions, drugs, sexual paraphernalia, weapons, you name it, both conventional and magical. There were also promises of all sorts of cures, curses for sale or rent, curses lifted, fortunes told, and so on and so on. Here and there an occasional boisterous fight would burst from inside one of the establishments into the street, and there would be screams of both delight and terror coming from the various upstairs windows.

Irving absolutely loved it.

Poquah sighed and shook his head sadly at the sights and sounds. He had thought it might be ugly and mean,