Jack Chalker - Songs of the Dancing Gods

Now both sorcerers let loose huge spells that met in the middle, and the entire area between them was awash in color, like a giant, jagged splotch of varicolored paints, the colors mixing and swirling and oozing around, forming shapes. Fierce, lion-like things, and things like some horrible nightmare of bears, against demonic shapes, ugly, serpentine, and gargoylelike, all roaring their fury and going at each other as the two men, like puppeteers, kept moving their hands and arms in fantastic, gyrating motions.

“I wonder what it seems like to them?” Tiana breathed.

Upon a vast plain of crackling, multicolored energy, the two protagonists stood not as people but as thoughts or expressions, each with his own distinctive colors. Thrust, parry, thrust again, done with the speed of thought, and with any of the weapons the imagination could supply; this was the plane of the wizard’s battle.

“The djinn prepares you well for this, old man,” Sugasto taunted. “Planes of madness, without rules, without form, until you give it thus.”

An enormous demonic monster materialized, pouncing with a horrible roar upon Ruddygore. The big man became a massive mouth, all teeth and gullet, swallowing the creature and not resisting a very large burp!

“True, my boy, but I’ve been there since last you were!” Ruddygore responded.

Massive energy, all blues and greens and bright orange for strength, flashed out from the big man and took form; a great squidlike horror whose tentacles reached out and threatened to grab the brilliant will-o’-the-wisp that was Sugasto.

The man in black became a giant, whirling blade, cutting the tentacles like salami, stacking them up in uneven piles.

“You’re every bit as good as the potential I saw in you when you were just a lad,” Ruddygore noted. “You still lack imagination, though.”

“Imagination! Fine talk from a man who plays the game so incessantly that he has forgotten why the game is played at all!”

“You never understood, Sugasto, and that was your tragedy,” the big man responded. “The lust for power, the god complex, has consumed you. You would be a god or the devil himself, yet those are the worst jobs in all Creation, for they are the loneliest. Let us stop this childish playing, Sugasto. Let me show you your victory! Let me give you your vision of the new world!”

There was blackness, blackness all around, and the man in black was falling, falling down an endless hole. There was no top, no bottom, no sides, only blackness, falling forever. There was no one to catch him, no one to save him, no one even to sympathize. He was utterly, completely alone, falling forever.

No! There were others around him! Almost in terror, he reached out for them, drew them to him with his mighty power. Yes! Lots of people! They whirled with him, falling in the darkness, and he could see them, millions of them; men, women, children, all with glazed eyes and vacant stares, all without minds, without souls…

Sugasto screamed.

From the porch, Marge pointed to the figure of the man in black. “He’s staggering! He’s down! Way to go, Ruddygore!”

But at the moment of victory, there came an ominous rumbling from the still steaming edge of the Devastation. Suddenly, the ice trembled, and huge fissures opened, coming outward in the direction of both sorcerers, the crack coming between them.

It was so unexpected that Ruddygore was knocked off his feet and off his concentration, allowing a weakened Sugasto some breathing room.

And then, suddenly, rising from the ice between the two wizards, emerged a monstrous head, with huge, glaring eyes, nostrils that snorted smoke and fire, and fangs dripping with the ichor of doom. Dragonlike, it was more than a dragon, it was the horrible face of all that was feared in dragons.

A second opening, then a second head, even more frightening and hideous than the first, appeared, snorted, and looked around. Now, yet a third appeared, and a small part of the body as well, showing the monster, fully thirty feet high, its three heads taking in the scene, looking as if it could devour them all. The castle crowd, once an audience, began running over the ice, away from the three-headed nightmare from the Devastation, but the sorcerers could not run.

Sugasto looked up and saw it, and smiled evilly. Getting to his feet as best he could, he pointed to Ruddygore who was still down, but struggling to get up.

“Creature of evil from times past, I charge thee destroy in the name of our same master whose reign from Hell is secure. Devour him who would stop our master’s plan!” the man in black intoned, pointing at Ruddygore.

For a moment all three heads looked slightly puzzled, although they appeared to have understood; then, suddenly, long necks turned as one toward Ruddygore, just getting to his feet, and three sets of horrible, gaping jaws whose fangs were larger than the white-bearded sorcerer, came down for him.

Serpentine heads from the three-headed gorgon loomed nightmarishly over the suddenly very small, frail figure of Ruddygore. One of the heads licked its chops with a horrendous forked tongue and made to go down for the figure. Suddenly, it stopped, its eyes wide.

“Why, it can’t be!” the left head exclaimed. It swooped down and examined Ruddygore almost like a specimen in a jar. The right head followed.

“It is! It is!” the right head cried. “Look! It’s young Muloch, all grown up and become a real sorcerer!”

“No!” the middle head exclaimed. “And yet—yes, you just might be right!”

The heads jerked around in rare unison until three sets of flaming, flaring nostrils were right in front of Ruddygore as he struggled to his feet.

“Hello, boys!” he managed. “Good to see you! It’s Ruddy-gore these days.”

Sugasto stood, wide-eyed, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. “Destroy him! Eat him!” he screamed.

“Who’s that boorish little prick?” the left head roared.

“He’s very loud,” the center head noted.

“And most uncivil,” the right head chimed in.

“An old student of mine who got ambitious,” Ruddygore told it or them. “The sort who wonders too early why he should be taking lessons from an old fart when he knows, or thinks he knows, more than his teacher.”

“Can we eat him?” the right head asked.

“Oooh! Let’s!” the left head responded.

The center head looked at Ruddygore, who turned up his arms in an exaggerated “I-don’t-care” shrug.

“All right, lads! At him, then!” the center head cried.

Sugasto unfroze and started running for the palace and solid ground.

“Oh, what fun!” the left head said.

“Yes, it’s always much more fun when they run!” the right agreed.

Sugasto made it to the black, warm earth and scrambled up, the gorgon not far behind him. He reached the top not far from Marge and Tiana, and suddenly froze again.

Legions of blank-eyed zombies blocked his path.

Macore was singing the Gilligan’s Island song to them from the wall. He pointed. “There he is! There’s the one who broke it! Com’on, little buddies! At ’em!”

Sugasto stared and raised his hand. “Back! Back! I am the Master of the Dead! Obey me!”

But they continued to stare vacantly, blocking his way up, and, from behind him the center head of the gorgon came down and seized him in its jaws, then lifted him, screaming, by its mouth.