Songs of the Dancing Gods

windows up there, but I’d swear some of those gargoyles around the ledges just moved.”

“I saw ’em,” she told him. “I think they’re night guardians, though, and likely going to sleep now, as I should be in normal circumstances. Let me take some care and see what I can see while you move up.” Noting their looks of concern, she grinned.

“Relax. If worse comes to worse lean make them think I Yn the sexiest female gargoyle they ever laid eyes on.”

They moved up, bush by bush, hedge by hedge, toward the huge stone patio. It was hot, even the ground, making Marge’s prediction true.

“I can’t figure out where the zombies are,” Macore whispered, puzzled.

“Huh?”

“Well, why use Bentar for duty like that when you’re the Master of the Dead? This is the perfect place to program zombies to capture or kill anybody who doesn’t have the password of the day. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m not going to complain,” Joe answered, but he admitted that he had wondered the same thing.

Marge came down and joined them again. “Most everybody’s still asleep, from the looks of it,” she told them. “There are two big towers—this one and the one opposite—and then a big, almost circular level in between, with guard walks on top and two, maybe three storeys below. You’ll never guess what’s in the middle of the circle.”

“A hole,” Joe responded. “What?”

“The crater. The opening to the lava. A bubbling, hissing lake of the stuff maybe twenty feet down below ground level. Right in the center is a single column of very hard, shiny-looking rock that comes up a little above ground level. And right in the center of it is growing this tree! A weird-looking type I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s magic, all right.”

“Any sign of what we’re after?” Joe asked her.

“Uh-uh. This side looked strictly royal, anyway. I’d guess we came in on the wrong side. I couldn’t get much of a look into the opposite tower, but I’ll tell you that it’s the center for this darkness. It’s got to be the place.”

Joe nodded. “Any way to go around?” “Not that I saw. At the extremes of that circle I talked about, it actually juts out and away from the volcano on both sides. The drop looks sheer. Unless you want to go back down and onto the ice and around, you’re stuck going through the building.”

“The hell with the ice,” Joe told her. “We came to break in here, so we might as well do it.” And, with a cautious look around, they made their way up the stone stairs, past the two inviting-looking pools, and into the palace proper.

“Want to check out this tower just in case, Master?” Mia asked him.

“Uh-uh. We may blow it, but the other one looks most likely, and I’d hate to run into any watch here.” He looked at two inner arches, each seeming to angle away from the tower hall. “Ma-core, you and Marge take that route, Mia and I will take this one. If Marge is right, we’ll meet in a hall similar to this one on the other side. If we meet anyone or are discovered, though, they’ll come to only one pair, not both.”

Macore nodded. “Anything as vital as my gear would likely be in the magician’s tower as well.”

They went down their corridor, Joe with sword drawn, Mia with knife at the ready. Joe was still puzzled; by this point after dawn, this place should be crawling with servants—slaves, most likely, knowing these folks—and guards and maybe the living dead, so that, when the masters of the joint finally got up, they’d have breakfast prepared and everything cleaned and secured and ship-shape. Where in hell was everybody?

When they got closer to the outer part of the circle, there were arches and windows looking out on what would normally have been the inner courtyard. They crept to it, looked out, and saw the narrow stone walkway around the steaming, boiling pit whose, tremendous heat even Mia could feel; in the center was the strange tree. It grew out of the top of a needle of pure obsidian, somehow immune to the forces, churning around it; a massive trunk indicating great age, its bark an odd purplish color, its limbs spreading out almost all the way over the fire pit. The thick frondlike leaves appeared to be made of pure polished gold, catching the sulfurous fumes from the pit; from the limbs, under the leaves, the tree bore a pearlike fruit of shining, reflective silver.

Joe tried to use his inner self to sense what might be in the tree, whether nymph or demon or imprisoned god, but there was no sensation of any consciousness there. Yet, in fact, it was a living tree, although of what alien origins it was impossible to tell.

He seemed almost hypnotized by it, and Mia had to jolt him back to reality. “Hurry, Master! Before we are discovered!”

They went on, and were two-thirds of the way to the other tower, when Mia, who’d taken the lead, suddenly raised her hand for him to halt. “Listen, Master! Strange sounds from just below!”

Joe stopped, trying to tune out the rumbling and hissing from the fire pit, and he heard what Mia was hearing faintly, through the background—the song from Gilligan’s Island.

“Macore?” he mused. No, that wasn’t possible. First of all, it was coming from perhaps the floor above theirs, and, also, there were the voices, the background music…

The background music?

“There’s an arch out there,” he told her. “Keep a watch and out of sight. I’ve got to find out what’s going on up there.”

She didn’t approve, but didn’t have a say in the matter. A steep stone stair led up to the next level from each archway. Keeping close to the wall and hoping that nobody was looking out the other side, he went up, halted just before the top, then cautiously peered into a huge area and gasped.

Well, there was Macore’s equipment, all of it. The tiny television had been recharged or was getting some kind of magical charge its transformer could handle, as was the small portable video tape recorder. The room was full, almost densely packed, with dozens, maybe many dozens, of the same sort of soulless, brainless living dead they’d seen on the plateau what seemed ages before.

Here, then, was the entire missing zombie staff, standing there, motionless, transfixed, watching Gilligan’s Island.

He made his way back down to Mia and told her what he’d seen.

“But, Master—they have no souls or wills of their own! How can they possibly be watching a show!”

“I don’t have an explanation for that, and I don’t think I want an explanation for that,” he told her. “Maybe there’s some weird frequency in the thing that scrambles the spell. Maybe it’s just that the show has finally found its perfect audience.” He shook his head in wonder. “It’s enough for now to know where those creatures are and not have to worry about them. Let’s get going! People are going to start waking up and be all over here any time now, no matter what!”

Still, Joe was worried about just how easy it was to get in, and just how empty the passages were. True, here and there they had been required to flatten themselves to the wall or crouch behind something, or duck outside or in, but the place overall seemed ominously deserted, as if everything and everyone of importance had moved elsewhere, leaving nothing but a maintenance staff. That idea disturbed him more than a dozen sword- fights and magicians—that, after all they had gone through, they were too late or, almost as bad, were in the wrong place.

In the main hall of the second tower, Mia turned to him as if to say, “Now what?” and he motioned for her to go cautiously up the stairs.

The first tower level proved to be sleeping quarters, and in the halls were both Bentar guards and some female slaves going back and forth, all as naked and shorn as Mia. That gave her an idea.

“They won’t know one female slave from another, particularly the Bentar, Master,” she whispered. “Let me just see who’s here by pretending to be one of the staff.”

He nodded, figuring he could cover her, and also figuring that, at this point, they had little to lose. Again, he had to admire her guts, handing him her knife and simply walking brazenly down the hall. As she’d suspected, the Bentar gave her not a second glance, all humans probably looking alike to them, anyway, and if the handful of slaves there noticed a stranger they did not react. The odds were that there were a fair number of slaves here, if only to feed the egos of the masters, and quite often new ones would turn up these days.

Joe remained in the stairwell, nervous that someone would come down or come up, but Mia managed to