Jack Chalker - Songs of the Dancing Gods

He looked back down at the lava pool, oblivious of the shaking, oblivious of the cornices beginning to crack, of the crash as television, VCR, and stacks of videotapes went flying, leaving packs of suddenly enraged zombies loose.

The lava level was falling in the crater!

Tiana was still confused, stunned, and somewhat in shock by what had happened. Had the sword flown and killed Boquillas? What was that woman’s voice? Marge? What had they rigged up?

It no longer mattered. Clearly, no matter what else happened, nothing was going to matter for anybody in this palace before long, and that included him. Oddly, that didn’t disturb him, but he was seized with a sudden urge to see just what was happening out at the Devastation, and just what would emerge from that horrible place.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake stopped. He turned again and saw, or thought he saw, the lava level stabilizing. Not really rising—it had lost a good fifteen or twenty feet— but it no longer seemed to be draining out.

Marge came shooting out of it, then landed on the wall. “Close call!” she exclaimed, sounding winded. “I got it tied off, but not before one tube flooded and blew. I’m not sure what’s gonna happen, but I think the majority of them are still in the deep freeze. No guarantees about the closest point, though.”

He looked at her, shaking his head. “Marge, I think we better get away from here anyway. Now that it’s stopped shaking, Sugasto is going to be fit to be tied.”

“Whoops! Forgot about him! Head for the royal side. Pick up a weapon if you can. Meet you on the garden porch!”

Tiana nodded. “At least we don’t have to listen to Gilligan’s Island anymore!”

“Yeah. Poor Macore. Watch out for the zombies!” And she was off.

He looked around, then made a run for the far stairs. There was pandemonium all over the place, and things were still falling and crumbling from the after-effects of the quake. Soldiers, Ben-tar, everybody was running all over the place, and nobody was paying the least bit of attention to him.

He looked back briefly across the center courtyard and saw why everybody was going his way. The topmost part of the main tower was cracked clean through, and seemed almost to be leaning precipitously. Even the gargoyles were leaving their perches there, flying around aimlessly and screeching obscenities.

He didn’t see Marge on the porch, but the whole place was a mob scene as it was, and he couldn’t blame her. At the moment, it was everybody for him or her or itself, and the safest place to be was out there, on the ice.

Suddenly there was the sound of doom, like horrible drums from the depths of the earth, beating an awful time. It seemed not to be coming from the Devastation, which now had its own jet of furious steam, but from behind, from the direction away from the battlefield. Kicking away some panicky people, Tiana climbed up on the wall and looked out, trying to see what was making the eerie, rhythmic sounds. And when he did see, he knew indeed that this was all some horrible nightmare, that he’d gone totally and completely insane.

Either that, or a Danish naval coast guard icebreaker was coming toward the palace, propelled by the furious slashing of massive oars sticking out of holes cut in the hull.

“It’s Ruddygore!” Marge shouted in the air above Tiana with undisguised glee.

Sure enough, there was the huge sorcerer, resplendent in his Grand Master’s robes, sitting in something like a throne right at the bow.

The ship stopped, and the entire thronelike chair rose into the air and deposited itself, and the sorcerer, gently onto the ice.

Throckmorton P. Ruddygore looked over at the smoking area of the Devastation and muttered, “Oh, my! This might well be ugly!” Then he got up and began walking regally over the snow and ice toward the black island and its palace.

The fleeing castle personnel, whether human, Bentar, or something else, soldier and slave alike, gave way before him, keeping a fearful distance. Tiana suddenly found himself alone atop the wall.

Ruddygore spotted him. “Hello! Where’s Sugasto?”

“Haven’t seen him since last night,” Tiana called back.

“Ruddygore!” Marge screamed, practically flying into him and bowling him over. “Late, as usual!”

“Not at all,” the sorcerer replied. “Until either the bodies were destroyed or Boquillas died, or both, I was powerless to alter events. Even I couldn’t do them in, you see. But now, now that the Baron is ashes, it’s no longer your business to close this affair, but mine. Mine—and Sugasto’s.”

“He’s the new young gun, Pard,” she responded. “You think you can take him?”

Ruddygore always looked to her like Santa Claus, but the expression on his face now was anything but cheery or merry. It was the kind of look that froze brave men, and sent everyone running.

“There’s only one way to find out,” he said softly. “The Baron is dead. The Council will back only one of us now.”

He walked up the black slope and into the garden area. As he reached it, an idol like a great hooded cobra suddenly wriggled, as if corning to life, and hissed at him.

He hissed back at it, and it was engulfed in fire.

“Sugasto! ” he called in his booming voice, the call echoing throughout the complex. “ Sugasto! Come! It is finally our time!”

“Over here, fat man!” came a response, and they all looked and saw the Master of the Dead in his full black robes, standing on the far side of the porch.

“What say we meet on the ice?” Ruddygore suggested calmly. “Less chance of debris and more open space. Besides, we might have to tend to a bit of other business over there before we square off.”

Sugasto nodded. “The ice it is. But I fear nothing coming from that pit. The horrors frozen there fought my sort of fight.”

Marge felt exhausted, but she wasn’t about to miss this. As the assembled soldiers and staff stepped back to watch, forming almost an audience, Tiana got down from his perch and walked up to Marge, now standing at the other end of the porch looking out at the ice.

“What are they going to do?” he asked the Kauri.

“Wizard’s battle,” she responded. “It’s required by the Rules, I think, anyway, to end this sort of stuff.”

“He will win, will he not? Ruddygore, I mean.”

She shook her head. “I dunno. I keep looking at that steam over there. You can’t see it—yet. But magical strings are forming shapes behind that mist, ugly shapes. And Ruddygore lacks the killer instinct. Remember Boquillas.”

Between the wall of steam and the palace island was the broad expanse of ice. Now the two figures, both looking rather small against its plain backdrop, faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet, like two gunfighters in some bleak frontier showdown.

“I didn’t teach you everything, Sugasto,” Ruddygore noted.

“All that time in the madness of the djinn where you sent me wasn’t wasted, either, old man,” the Master of the Dead responded. “As you have already seen.”

“Your zombies are of little use to you now,” the big man said. “And you’ll not find my soul so easy to pluck.”

Sugasto’s hand went up, and an enormous ball of the blackest magic flew toward Ruddygore. Ruddygore responded with a massive, almost blinding flash of light that banished it.

“I saw that!” Tiana exclaimed.

“They’re just warming up, feeling each other out,” Marge told him. “I’m more worried about something else. I just figured out why Sugasto was so pleased to have this fight where it is. Every time they hurl something, either one, more power builds behind the mist, more incredible magic rushes in and solidifies.”