Songs of the Dancing Gods

founders felt their job done and went on to some higher, perhaps angelic plane, themselves; their children now became the sorcerers. But, although sorcerers tended to live impossibly long lives, as each generation of them grew and the elders eventually tired and went on to wherever sorcerers went on to, the angelic blood was diluted more and more with humans. The powers of five generations before were only shadows of what their ancestors could do; those today mere shadows of that generation. And yet, each generation, generation after generation, kept on finding loopholes or specifics not addressed in the Rules and, as such, amended them. They couldn’t really change what their more powerful predecessors had decreed, but they could keep adding, keep ‘plugging in the holes’ as time passed. And the less power and the less wisdom that they had, the more holes they found and the more new Rules they wrote.

“By now, the sorcerous bureaucracy was incredibly well organized; it only remained for that huge assembly to get out the amendations and hair-splitting new Rules to all those magical folk and royal, temporal powers throughout the world so that they would know what was being done.”

“There’s probably a Rule in this batch regulating the length of nose hairs,” Joe muttered.

“Oh, no,” Tiana responded sourly. “They would have addressed something that major generations ago.”

Irv looked at the last wagon to pass and imagined the mountain of paper contained within. “Is there anybody who knows even half of what’s in them papers?” he asked.

“Probably not, not even among those that create them,” Tiana responded honestly. “It doesn’t make any difference. Once the Rules are properly distributed, they go into force and we’re stuck with them. They’re not like laws, you know. Those are made by governments, which we also have plenty of. Everyone, even nonhumans, will be bound by whatever is in there as if it is natural law, like breathing or what goes up usually comes down.”

“And you ain’t worried? I mean, that somethin’ buried in one of them wagons won’t suddenly change the way we look or talk or think or act?”

“I was born here,” she reminded him, “I sort of take it for granted.”

“You just learn to forget that it’s going on,” Joe told him. ” You can’t do anything about it anyway, and by this time everything really nasty that they could do has either been done or been stepped on by some prior rule so it’s canceled out anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

The boy frowned. “But if all them papers don’t make no difference, then why do it at all?”

“Oh, they might make some minor differences,” Tiana told him. “Still, you are right—it’s mostly harmless at this point. But, you see, constantly revising and perfecting the Rules takes a huge bureaucracy, larger than the kind that runs most governments. Thousands upon thousands of people and fairies, all employed in everything from proposing the additions to arguing for them or against them, helping adopt and implement them, printing and delivering them—it’s a massive undertaking.”

“And yet all them people do all that work and nothin’ much happens because of it?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Then why do they do it? Seems like a total waste of time.”

“Oh, their positions are essential,” she responded matter-of-factly. “If they didn’t do what they did, then all those masses would be unemployed, and, being bureaucrats, most of them couldn’t do anything useful. Why, they wouldn’t survive!”

“Or, worse, they might get together and try to do something really useful,” Joe added. “That would be a disaster. So, don’t worry much about it, and particularly not yet. You’re still not quite within the Rules. So long as you aren’t physically changed here by some magic, you’re still outside the more specific rules. Unless you’re a changeling, which I seriously doubt, since we’d have noticed by this time, you’ll just slowly come under more and more the longer you’re here, without even noticing it.”

“Changeling. Yeah, Like that sexy broad with the wings we melon the boat.”

“Uh-huh. Marge. She came over with me and at the time was as human as Tiana or me. She changed into one of the fairy races after she was here. It happens. But I doubt if you qualify.

I seriously doubt if your mother had that trigger in her genes, and I sure don’t. And, judging by the time she took to change, I think you’d have done it by now if you were going to, anyway.”

“What do’ya mean by trigger in my jeans? I ain’t got no jeans on.”

“In your blood,” Joe told him. “If you’d ever gone to church back home, you’d know that it wasn’t just here that angels mated with people. That was so long ago, though, back before Moses’ time, that it’s even more diluted back there than here. But some folks have a little of that blood, either from the angels or from demons, too, or early fairy-human matings, passed down in them. If you do, you become a changeling when you get here.”

“Jeaz… I think that’d be kind a neat,” the boy said. “Maybe growin’ wings and gettin’ magic powers and all that. Uh—did you say demons?”

Joe nodded. “There’s some pretty mean fairies, too. Pray you don’t meet them, believe me!”

“But being one of the fairy folk isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Tiana pointed out, glad mat the boy was at least interested in something. “Our souls are eternal; they do not die with our body. In the fairies, the soul is made flesh and is the body. They never really grow old, although experience gives them that look after a long time, but as they are flesh, they are mortal. Iron, for example, is deadly to most of them, except gnomes and a few other special races, and they are also subject to some forms of accidents and even murder. If they die, they’re dead. To kill a fairy is to kill its soul as well. They don’t even have the option of dying. Their only chance is to remain alive and well until Judgment.”

“Un-huh,” Joe put in. “And they’re sort of one-dimensional. Stuck. Remember, son, the fairies were shaped to do particular kinds of things and nothing else. They can’t change, can’t learn or do other things, outside what they were basically designed to do. They can’t quit and try something else. It’s got to become either boring or frustrating after a while, maybe after a few hundred years, no matter what you’re doing, particularly if you’re smart and curious and ambitious. They can no more change than a horse can decide one day it would rather be a cat.”

Tiana nodded in agreement with him. “Yes, sometimes I feel rather sorry for Marge. Even more, now that I have a similar if more mortal situation. Her changeling race was dictated by her own soul at the time and was what she needed to be at that time, but, now… I’m not so sure. She’s intelligent, educated, adventurous, and could have been someone really important.”

Joe looked over at Tiana. “Do you feel frustrated?”

“No, not really. I admit that some days I’m still not used to being this small and light, but when have you ever heard of a woman complaining of that!” Tiana’s original body had been as large as he was, and as massive. Thanks to the body and soul snatching techniques of the Master of the Dead, her soul had wound up first in the body of a mermaid, then this dancer’s.

“Yeah, but what about bein’ somebody real important?” Irv asked her.

She shrugged. “I was somebody important. A queen, in fact. And, by sorcery, your dad at the time looked like some northern barbarian instead of his old self.”

“And your body got stole?”

“Well, in the end, I could have had it back,” she admitted. “But, then, you see, I’d have to have come back to being Queen. And if your dad had gone back to the way he was most of the time here, he’d have been King.”

“Hey! What’s wrong with that? All the best, no work, and— wait a minute! That’d make me a prince!”

“It’s luxury, all right,” Joe agreed, “but it’s also a trap, a prison, and, believe me, if you think this is boring, you haven’t been a monarch. Your job is to cut ribbons and preside over boring meetings and stay apart from the common folks. That was the worst. Not even being able to walk down the street in my own city, go into a good pub and have a beer, talk to who I wanted, do what I felt like.”

“Yeah, maybe I’d hate it, but I didn’t even get the chance to try it. I mean—like, I thought kings and queens could do pretty much what they felt like.”

“Less than the stableboy,” Tiana told him. “You can’t change the system and you are what you are and you have to play the part. We couldn’t even sneak out for a night. The society detided we were demigods, half human, half divine. They erected thousands and thousands of huge statues of us in the nude in practically every public place. Everybody knew us—in the most intimate detail you can imagine. You’ve seen some in the towns we passed.”

The boy was thunderstruck. “Those two was you two?”