Songs of the Dancing Gods

Ruddygore sighed. “Well, boys, the Lakes are that way and the River still flows. I’m over at Terindell now, right on the river. Let me know if you need anything, but I’ve still got a bit of the aftermath to deal with here. We’ve ended an entire epic today, and it’s been a while since anyone did that. You know how many loose ends those leave.”

“Oh, indeed, yes,” the right head agreed.

The left head looked at the figures of soldiers and the rest still well away on the ice. “Can we eat them? After all this time, we’re starved!.”

“Well, the Bentar are all yours, and any fellows with the black and gold uniforms. Let the rest be. They’re mostly innocent victims.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you!” the three heads cried together, and they sank beneath the ice once more, to come up, it was suspected, somewhere beyond the still fleeing forces.

Throckmorton P. Ruddygore sighed and made his way over to the porch area.

“Ruddygore! Are you okay?” Marge called.

“No!” he snorted. “When I fell on that ice I think I skinned my knee. Hurts like hell! Tore a perfectly good robe, too!”

“You’ll live.” She laughed.

He stopped halfway up the side, and Tiana gave him a mighty hand to assist him to the top.

“Good heavens! Is that Tiana in there?”

“I am afraid so,” Tiana replied. “Boquillas decided to be me, and, well, planned on me teaching her how.”

“Yes, I see.” He looked down. “Macore! Will you stop playing with those poor unfortunates?”

“I can’t!” the thief wailed. “They won’t let me stop recounting the stories!”

Ruddygore laughed. “Let’s leave him there awhile. I’m certain we can extricate him later, but it’s about time he got what he deserved with that mania of his.” He looked around. “Where is Joe?”

Tiana’s face fell. “I think you had better hear the story from the start,” he said.

“Yes, indeed. Tell you what—I’m going to soak this knee in that thermal bath over there. You can tell me while I do so.”

Marge slipped away from them and walked back in through the now deserted and litter-strewn royal entry hall, then out to the crater. It and the lava tree were still there, although the sorcerer’s tower still tottered precipitously, and there were cracks all over and chunks of rock here and there. It was already beginning to give the place something of the look of a ruin.

“It’s all right, Joe,” she said in a conversational tone. “There’s nobody here but me.”

The purplish trunk of the lava tree seemed suddenly to expand slightly, and from it emerged a small fairy form. “I had a hunch you’d get it,” the figure now under the lava tree said. “I was hoping Tiana wouldn’t.”

“Well, she’s not much happier than you are at the moment, you know,” the Kauri pointed out. “Either one of you would be better off and happier as the other.”

“Yeah, I know,” Joe said. “Those damned Rules! You always have a way out, but when I stood there on that wall, surrounded, seeing those silver-tipped piles and bolts, I knew that there was only one way open, just what the Rules required. I looked at them, then I looked back at this tree, and I figured, hell, a tree’s a tree, and it would free me of Boquillas’ power and give me some freedom of action. It was surrender, die, or this. As much as I didn’t want this, I have to tell you I would have taken death easily, even oblivion, except mat it would have left my enemies victorious and Tiana in their hands. I remembered what we’d discussed about sacrifice and unhappy endings and all that. If this was to be the end of our great battles, then it was also somebody else’s beginning, too. I hadn’t taken Irving out of the mean streets of the inner city to have him grow up under Boquillas’ or Sugasto’s vision of Husaquahr. If that meant this, then it was a price I had to pay.”

“Hey! It’s not so awful!” Marge responded. “I think you made a pretty good Kauri.”

“Well, it’s okay, but I didn’t want a career out of it. Even so, Kauris fly, and very well, and can interact with regular society to a degree. Maybe I could take that. But wood nymphs—hell, I can’t even figure out how to get off here! I could slide down, I guess, but even if I found some solid rock to stand on down there I’d never make it back up the outer wall. That’s why I’ve been here all this time. I’m stuck!”

Marge smiled. “Well, let me see if I can find a rope or something and fly it out to you. Then I’ll fill you in on all you missed. Ruddygore’s here.”

“Yeah? Well, unless he’s broken the secret code, that doesn’t do me much good at all.”

“I fear the secret of such effortless soul-switching died with Boquillas and Sugasto.” Ruddygore sighed.

They—the sorcerer, Macore, Marge, and Tiana—sat in Sugasto’s old banquet room, sampling his wares. Since Ruddygore seemed unconcerned about the top of the tower felling down, they were at least less nervous about it themselves.

“You mean I am stuck like this,” Tiana said.

“Well, not exactly, but there are few options. I can’t fool around with that body, since I helped design it, as it were, with bound demons. The theory of the switching spell is easy enough to divine; the problem is that each and every individual is different. Thus, you need complementary mathematics to switch anyone that is unique to each individual. The question we have no answer for is, how did Sugasto and the Baron figure out the unique complementary equation for each and every individual they switched, therein detaching both soul and consciousness and placing it elsewhere? I don’t know. Reattaching on other than a random basis provides the same problem for the host.

Thanks to Sugasto’s easy lifting addendum, I know your code, and, of course, I know the codes for your slave body and for Mahalo McMahon, whom we had to care for after she was stuck in the Baron’s wrecked body. We used the Lamp to cure Ma-halo—she’s the High Priest of an Amazon cult in the southern jungles right now and apparently loving every minute of it.”

“You could use the Lamp on me, then.”

“No.” Ruddygore sighed. “I’m afraid not. You see, after Macore stole it the last time from a vault I would have said was the most secure in the whole of the universes, I realized that as long as it was accessible and known, it would be a magnet that could never be properly secured, as handy and seductive as its power was. I couldn’t destroy it—it was of djinn manufacture-but I sent it flinging, out into space. I have no idea where it is now. Mars, possibly, if it hit anything.”

Tiana sighed. “Then this is it?”

“That body gets you back an undisputed royal exalted position,” he reminded her. “You were sort of deified, you know. We could easily sell you as Joe and Tiana merged, a single godhead, both male and female in one, and you could help provide stability to this land in these days of aftermath. The alternatives are that I can return you to the slave body from whence you were plucked, since I know that one, or to the empty shell previously used by the Baron, McMahon’s body. It’s not a bad body, but I have no idea of what you’d wind up as. You saw what the hormone levels in that body did even to such a staid fellow as Esmilio Boquillas. Most likely, whoever gets it will become a very sexy witch.”

“What do you mean, ‘whoever gets it’?” Marge asked.

“Well, we have all those zombies—thousands upon thousands of them. Not the reanimated dead, they collapsed with Sugasto’s death, but the ones whose souls were taken and stored. Those souls are mostly stored here and almost all survived the quake. Alas, they are coded by a private spell, so there is no way of ever telling who’s what. There could be faerie in there, as well as countless men, women, and children. We can put the souls back in the bodies, but we can’t tell whose soul is which, so it’s going to be totally random. You are by no means alone in your predicament, Tiana, and at least you have choices. But we’ll use every body we have, I’m sure, saving, of course, the slaves for last. It’ll be a mammoth job as it is.”

“I do not like being a man, even though I like men,” Tiana replied. “It is different relating to them as a woman, instead of being one of them. I enjoyed being a woman, always have. I do not believe even the Rules cover this sort of thing, although, goodness knows, they cover almost everything else. Oh, I know the hormones will act, I will get used to it, more comfortable with it, but I am positive that the Baron was wrong. I think my own sense of who and what I am would keep me a woman trapped in a man’s body no matter