Horrors of the Dancing Gods

A waitress came over and took their order. Irving couldn't help but notice her rather dull eyes and seemingly one-track mind and movements, almost as if she were some kind of automaton.

'Get used to it,' Poquah told him. 'Slavery, binding spells, all sorts of things are taken for granted here, particularly among the lower classes. This is an upper-class hotel. You will have to accept a lot of unpleasant things you may see here, but it's not as different as you may think. Many people find our system of having the masses of people poor and starving and willing to do almost anything for a pittance no different in the basics from having slaves and spells of servitude here. It just makes it easier for the Husaquahrian upper classes and freedmen to delude themselves into a sense of moral superiority. As I said, there is often less hypocrisy when Hell is in charge than when it is less obviously so. Your impulse to save every stray dog you see is admirable in the abstract but impossible in practice. You must learn that here if you learn nothing else.'

Irving didn't like that whole train of thought, but he didn't have to reach very far to change the subject. He couldn't help noticing that they were no longer being ignored.

'Fellow over there at the bar,' Irving whispered, gesturing slightly with his head. 'He's real interested in us.'

'The one in white? Yes, I've noticed him. Rather odd-looking, frankly. Round face, oval body, yet actually thin and slight of build. He carries himself more like a dandy than a fighter or magician, but such men can be deceiving.'

The small man seemed suddenly to become aware that he was being conspicuous and, instead of turning away or backing off, headed slowly over toward them, stopping at their table but not sitting down. 'Gentlemen,' he said in a thin, reedy, nasal voice with a pronounced foreign accent, 'I apologize if I am making a mistake, but I am to meet two of your description along with a young lady faerie with bright wings. Do I have the wrong two men, or is something amiss?'

He's got pointy teeth, Irving noted, fascinated. Not like a vampire but more like some kind of animal carnivore. It made him look both comical and menacing when he spoke.

Poquah stared at him. 'You are the one who we were to expect to contact us?'

'Yes. I am Joel Thebes. Um — may I sit down?'

'By all means, yes. We are waiting upon the young lady at the moment.'

Thebes looked uncertain. 'She is out there alone? At night?'

'She is a nocturnal and quite capable of taking care of herself,' Poquah assured him. 'We befriended a young woman on the trip over, and she's helping the girl make it here.'

'Not the Ngamuku girl!'

'You know about her?' Irving asked, startled.

'Of course. That's the trouble! Almost everybody knows that story. You might as well draw giant arrows to yourself at all times and say, 'Here we are!' '

Poquah looked over at Irving. 'I told you!'

Thebes sighed. 'Well, it is not a total loss, anyway. Once we leave the capital and His Majesty, we will be headed toward Mount Doom, where even the forces of Hell have diminished abilities or holds. If the King doesn't decide to give her over and lets her go on with you, she might turn from a liability to at least neutral. You are thinking of freeing her from the curse using the black bird, eh?'

'You know a lot about why we are here and what we are after,' Irving noted. 'I begin to think we're the headlines in the local paper.'

'Not really, but you are not much of a secret, either. Most do not know about the black bird, though. They think you are going because your destinies are still being worked out and cannot be resolved until you reach Mount Doom.'

'I have heard a lot about this destiny business but cannot see the relationship,' Poquah told him. 'How is my destiny, and the Kauri's, and the boy's here all wrapped up in this business? We were sent by our friend, our employer, or our guardian, as it were, but in a sense we all volunteered.'

'Don't be ridiculous! You mean you do not know who is behind the opening of the way to the Ancient Ones? Ruddygore did not explain to you just what all this is about?'

'Enough, I thought. Do you know something we do not but should?'

'I think I might. You see—'

At that moment, however, Larae and Marge entered the lobby of the Hotel Usher.

Irving jumped up in a moment. 'The girl's bleeding!' He leapt over the railing and ran to the two women, and Poquah instantly shifted gears and followed.

'What happened?'

'It's not serious,' Marge assured them. 'Got faked out almost at the last moment by a bastard who had one hell of a nasty dog. It's not a werewolf or anything — don't worry. There's no curse in the wound. I just slipped up, that's all.'

'How'd you get away?' Irving asked, examining the ugly wound on Larae's left arm, which was still bleeding.

'I'll show you the trick sometime. Let's just say that even big ugly dogs have things they're scared of.'

By that time some of the hotel staff had arrived, and Poquah asked a porter, 'Is there a hotel physician? The wound should be tended before there is infection. In the meantime, you might also find somebody with first aid or there are going to be very ugly bloodstains on your very plush carpet here.'

That seemed to get to them more than the sight of the wounded girl had.

'Dr. Trowbridge may be available tonight,' the porter responded. 'I'll send someone.' Others went into action, bringing a chair for Larae and a quick and temporary bandage and a bottle of whiskey.

Lane coughed, then muttered, 'You should have just let it kill me.' Then she passed out from shock.

Dr. Trowbridge proved to be a tall, distinguished-looking man with gray hair and muttonchop sideburns and a thick, bushy mustache that appeared to hide a rather kindly face.

He looked like somebody who'd stepped out of a nineteenth-century romance novel, but he seemed to know his stuff and was surprisingly modern for a world where sorcery ruled.

'She's not badly hurt, just totally disconsolate. Little wonder she passed out; she has no will to live in her at all, I don't think. Bizarre, although, considering the circumstances, somewhat understandable.'

'You know who she is, too?' Irving asked.

'Eh? No, nothing but what you told me. I refer to the curse and all that other stuff piled on her. Worst spaghetti I've seen in decades. That's why I treated her primarily with conventional medicine, as it were. Cleaned and treated the wound — it was luckily not that deep, and I think we can get by without stitches — and bandaged it, gave her an antibiotic and a sedative. She's most in need of rest. Two days and she'll be fine for most things, although she'll have soreness in that arm for a week or more, I'd say.'

Marge was fascinated by Trowbridge, who seemed out of another time and place and certainly not the sort of person anyone would expect there. 'Are you a native to these parts, Doctor?' she asked, curious.

'Oh, my, no! I just find myself here more of the time than I'd like, and since I have pretty well retired now back home, I have set up an arrangement for things like this with local hotels and such, since I have some medicines and skills little known here.'

'You're from Earth, aren't you?'

He looked surprised. 'Why, yes. There's not even a lot of folks here who know of Earth's existence. I am impressed, madam.'

'I'm from Texas myself. The boy here's from Philadelphia. Only the Imir and the girl are locals.'

'Well! Amazing! I must say you have to be a bit different than you were in Texas. A changeling, I take it.' She nodded. 'Where are you from?'

'A small town in New Jersey. I shouldn't even have been here or known of this sort of thing — the whole of this universe does terrible things to the logical mind of a man of science, after all — had it not been for my encountering and befriending a remarkable man who battles the forces of this place and has for many years. It is only with his knowledge that I can make this transition, and then only to this region. I have never understood why they let him come and go, but they do.'

'If he battles evil in New Jersey, he's no threat to Hell,' Irving muttered, but nobody paid him any mind.