Jack Chalker: Horrors of the Dancing Gods

Sister wood nymphs weren't much company, either. They had rather boring and basic lives, had no major life experiences, and, unlike her, couldn't travel far enough not to get back to their trees by dusk. Even if they had great mental potential, which they didn't, this didn't exactly give them much of a chance to broaden their points of view. In fact, they weren't quite as smart as the bimbos they looked like, and emotionally they were something like thirteen. And frankly, that was all they needed to be in either area. Their entire function in life was to create a psychic group that could maintain their woods.

That and one other thing. The wood nymphs had a symbiotic relationship with plants but not much with animals of any sort. Animal control and management, from the pest to the squirrel and bird and beyond level, was entirely under their male counterparts, the satyrs. Those lecherous half goats weren't much brighter then the nymphs, but they played their songs on their flutes, did their dances, ate leaves and grasses, and, of course, made it with the nymphs. If there was a need for any reason, that was the way you got new satyrs. Nymphs didn't reproduce that way — they budded. That's why they all looked and sounded and thought so much alike.

Avoiding satyrs was one of her daily goals. The romance of faerie was more than overstated; rather, it was an existence suspended halfway between animal and human, with a mind that could think, could reason, could even learn, stuck inside a body even more constraining than the ones humans had, in which instinct and certain behaviors were beyond thought or resistance. She still didn't enjoy the process, but those flutes were hypnotizing and irresistible.

It was scary to be in a situation that was totally irresistible, to be completely helpless and enslaved to the will of another. As much as ego and self-identity, that fear drove her to try to beat the system that had snared her in this nasty trap.

There had been an Aladdin's lamp once, one that really could grant any and all wishes. Although it was gone, far out of reach — in effect wished out of existence — the mere fact that it had existed gave her hope. Given a nearly infinite amount of time, which she had, there had to be something else here, something beyond that one lone lamp that would restore her true form. She had the time; the real question in her mind was whether she'd lose her sanity and her memories before she found the key that she was convinced, against all statements by the magical hierarchy of this world, existed.

She had been wandering some of the world of Husaquahr; it was too painful to remain back at the castle, watching a son grow up without parents but unable to get the nerve to tell the boy the truth. You just couldn't be much of a father when you looked like a teenage boy's bimbo dream.

She'd been away quite a while, searching — or so she told herself — for that magic way back to "normalcy" once again. So far: lots of rumors, lots of legends, nothing real. Not that some of those legendary pieces of magic didn't exist; it was just, well, they weren't exactly on the scale of great devices their press had built them up as being or in any way the equal of the Lamp.

The Stalk of Stavros, for example. Now, there had been one with real promise, a magical staff, they said, that could turn anything into anything. It had taken some effort to find it and get to it, only to discover it was useful mostly for giving long-distance hotfoots. And as for the Pincushion of Ptolemy — no, that was just too painful to think about, dud though it was from her standpoint. The Owl of Ozymandius had at least known something, but it had been the answer to the question all owls asked.

The Owl of Ozymandius knew who was who. That hadn't done her much good, either.

She had no idea how long she'd been out in the land seeking and not finding; she had long ago lost any sense of time beyond day and night. But the worst part was what some sages termed the Curse of the Gods.

It was getting pretty damned boring.

Oh, originally there'd been some excitement, but after a few adventures and risks and losing some life-or-death gambles only to discover that she couldn't really lose, the thrill had vanished. She couldn't die, she wouldn't get hurt, she didn't grow old. The hoariest monsters of the land were in the end helpless to do her harm. When you combined that with a total lack of need for anything — food, clothing, housing, whatever — there really wasn't much left. She'd never been much on school-type learning, and lately it just didn't interest her, anyway. She'd never been much of a collector, either, owning things for their own sake. Besides, where would she keep things if she had them? She could have the scents of any of the plants of nature, so why use artificial things? Even any jewelry would have to be organic so that it would not obstruct her if she chose to merge with tree or bush.

And when you neither wanted nor needed anything at all and there was no risk, no sense of family or attachment, nothing — what was there?

This sense of nothingness in her life, of a gray lack of meaning and purpose, along with the failure of her quest for a way out, was now bringing her back toward Terindell, back toward the only people who meant anything at all to her, now or ever.

But there was also something more, something much harder to pin down, a kind of grayness seemed to be settling in, permeating Husaquahr, almost as if it were some strange sort of vampiric fog, draining the energy from the land. It really wasn't anything you could see or put your finger on; rather, it was something you sensed, felt, lurking there, all around, omnipresent yet just out of sight in the corner of your eye.

It wasn't just faerie sense, or imagination, either. They all felt it, or so it seemed, mortal and faerie alike, although they could no more put it into words than she could. It was as if something ancient were stirring, something none of them had ever known before. Something impossibly old, unimaginably powerful, and of a nature that might be called evil but was something far worse.

It was the kind of gray that made the whole world seem tired, made ambition seem not worth the effort and inhibition a sucker's play. People tended to be surly; violence was up, tolerance was down, and nobody really knew why he or she was feeling and acting this way.

It gave whispered voice to thoughts she didn't want, too. If Joe survived the lava, no matter how transformed, then why not Boquillas as well?

What about it? What did the damnable Rules have to say about that?

She shook the dark thoughts from her mind and looked around. It was late; dusk was about to give way to total darkness — not a good time at all to be walking the trails and roads of Husaquahr alone even if life was not threatened. As a wood nymph, the only power she had was with the trees, so she made her way quickly toward a thick stand of massive tropical monarchs that probably was home to quite a colony of her kind. She never felt all that social toward her more limited sisters, but the forest certainly had room for one more, and she could use some rest.

Suddenly, not far ahead, there came the sound of shouts and a woman's terrified scream and then the clang of metal against metal.

It startled her more than alarmed her; she'd been walking half a day on that road and had barely met anyone who didn't live in and around the area of the road. Now she approached the sounds cautiously, carefully, straining to see if this was something she might avoid. With her greenish coloration and in her natural element, she could move with amazing quietness and near invisibility, at least to mortal eyes.

It had been three against two: three big, swarthy bearded men with the look of brigands or worse against a well-dressed and handsome middle-aged man and a chubby-looking young girl horrendously overdressed in a long brown cloak and full dress. It must have looked like easy pickings to the men, but the older fellow had put up quite a fight. One of the attackers lay, possibly dead, along the trail, and another had a torn jerkin and a spreading bloodstain on the right side of his chest, although it was clearly a superficial wound.