Songs of the Dancing Gods

“Yeah, well, after looking the place over, I can go along with you on that, but it has to be done, if it’s possible. Surrounded by ice, patrolled in the clean areas by Bentar on nazgas, on the ground by an army of the dead, and by magical spells, the only way to reach it undetected is across that mean area. It’s so powerful in and of itself that there’s no way they’ll fly across it or put anybody in it or maintain any sort of spell of their own in that area.”

“I’d rather take my chances’ with the zombies and the Bentar and the rest,” he told her. “I looked that other place over and it made me dizzy.”

“You looked it over? When?”

“’Oh, I’ve got stuff—warm clothes, pikes, you name it-stashed all over this hick town.” He suddenly went into a Cagney impression. “They ain’t never built the prison that can hold Cody Jarrett!”

“That’s not Gilligan’s Island.”

He shrugged. “Would you believe that in the Disneyland Hotel that they only had one channel showing Gilligan’s Island at all, and then only once a day? I had to watch something”

“Yeah, well, I doubt if most people go to Disneyland to watch television. Never mind. You’re telling me you can walk out of there whenever you feel like it?”

“Sure. But they’ve been feeding me here, and pretty decently, too, and I wanted to get some strength. Besides, I leave before I’ve mapped out everything, they hit the alarms like mad.”

“Macore, you pushed your fabled luck to the limit on this one.” She told him their plans for him and the fact that the only reason it wasn’t already done was just chance.

He stood there, thinking about her words for a moment, then said, “Okay, you talked me into it. It probably wouldn’t matter to Gilligan and the Professor—all that time on that island with Mary Ann and they never once made a move on her—but it matters to me.”

“Good. Joe’s got them conned into believing he’s checking Sugasto’s security. He’s gonna try and spring you to help. It’s either get us to the palace or good-bye all that matters.”

“That would help. I’d like to look it over in daylight. You have any idea what any of that Fruit Loops spaghetti actually does?”

“I’ve gone as close as I dared to alone, and the only thing I can say is that the answer is, ‘almost anything.’ I think the old legend is true—this was a great battle between mighty forces of ancient times. But I don’t think they’re frozen in place down there, although that might have been the intent. I think everything and everyone in the battle was transformed into energy, magic energy, and then the whole mess was frozen in place. That’s why it’s so near the surface when it should be thousands of feet down in the ice. New snow and ice retain them in, but every once in a while melting of some kind liberates a spell which then turns back into whatever it was. That’s why they feel things from there trying to. get them once in a while. The trick is to cross that place without causing any melting of any kind.”

Macore whistled. “Tough trick if they’re close enough to melt out occasionally on their own. Let me sleep on it. But you make sure I get sprung before that last witch gets back!”

Even Joe suspected that it was the first surreptitious break-in to a major place in the world that had been performed before a live audience.

All thieves of Husaquahr had the power to see magic; those who did not generally were captured or died on their first job.

The witches of the station were more than convinced of his insanity when they watched the little man, bundled in furs, walk right out on the ice and then proceed for a good half an hour, until he was only a speck on the whiteness, right to the edge of what they called the Devastation.

They were prepared to counter him when he inevitably made his break for freedom; any sane man would. But even without his malady, Macore, once set upon a problem, became so absorbed in it that to flee simply wouldn’t have entered his head.

“What’s he doing out there?” one of the women asked, more to herself than the others.

“Well, he took a measuring stick, a sharp saw, and leather thongs from the dog sled area,” the security officer responded. “You figure it out. I didn’t like giving him the saw, which can be a weapon, but I had to admit to both personal and professional curiosity. If he can actually just walk into the Devastation and return, he will indeed be the genius the big man, here, says he is.”

“He’s been out there in almost that spot for quite a long time,” Joe noted a bit worriedly. “I hope he’s all right. I really should have gone with him, but he insisted that for this sort of thing he worked best alone.”

One witch was watching with a telescope. “He’s doing something down on the ice. First he appeared to pack snowballs and throw them into the Devastation! Now he’s working feverishly in the ice just this side of it. Now he seems to be lifting something—and now he’s just sat down on the ice!”

“He’s mad. All these are are the actions of a lunatic,” the security officer said impatiently. “Best to haul him back.”

“You go out there, right on the edge of that, and haul him back,” somebody said. “This is as near as I want to get to it.”

“He’s up again!” the woman with the telescope said. “Now he’s turned, facing the Devastation, just standing there. No, he just—he just took a step toward it! And another! He’s walking very oddly, but—he’s inside!”

Joe could use his second sight to see the massive collection of spells, but Macore was too far away and relatively too small to make out inside it.

“Can you see him?”

“No. He’s been swallowed up in the mass. You couldn’t see the Grand Altar of Stet if it were fifty feet inside. Not from this distance, anyway.”

“It seems as if he’s been in an awfully long time already,” Joe said worriedly.

And it was even longer still, as they watched and waited, perhaps a half hour or forty minutes. Finally, the security officer said, “That’s it. He’s finished. If he comes out of there at all we’ll not even recognize him as human. It can’t be done.”

“I wonder,” Joe mused. “According to your own charts, it’s about forty-two miles across to the palace at the narrowest crossing. If whatever he did worked, he’ll want to do time tests.”

“Wait! What’s that over there?” someone shouted, pointing to an area perhaps half a mile from where Macore had entered. The telescope swung, refocused.

“It’s certainly a manlike shape,” the woman said, peering through the eyepiece. “Too early to tell much more at this distance.”

But, as the figure grew closer, it clearly was Macore, and he didn’t seem to be any worse for the experience.

He got a cheering reception when he reached them, all but the security officer amazed at what the little man had done and forgetting his actual condemned prisoner status. The security officer cared not at all about the little thief, but she saw the potential if indeed someone had learned to cross the Devastation.

“Well,” Macore sighed, “it works, but I’m not sure it’ll do the job.”

Joe was surprised. “You walked in and around for quite some time.”

The thief nodded. “Sure I did—but I never went all that far in, and the kind of speed involved is very slow. I’d say two miles an hour if we’re doing okay. And that’s no rest, no sitting down on me job, for—what? Over twenty hours? That’s a pretty long time not to stop or even sit down. I’m not sure I could do it. I’m not sure anybody human could do it.”

Joe leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Consider the alternative.”

He nodded. “The sanest way, the way any good spy would do it, would be to walk around just this side of it, always prepared. When anybody came along, or any spell was sighted, they could then duck in there and continue around the problem, then re-emerge. The trouble is, walking around the stuff by that route, even at the southern end, is like a hundred and eighty miles.”

“I could make forty-two miles of relatively flat terrain, even with snow, in less than twenty hours, weather willing,” Joe told him.

“Uh-huh. With a couple of pounds of ice strapped to your boots?”