Jack Chalker - Horrors of the Dancing Gods

Irving started to rush the creature and to hell with the consequences, but even as the soldiers brought up their weapons, the entity held up a hand casually and Irving found himself unable to push any farther forward.

The entity looked down and gave the boy a hideous smile. "Well, you're close enough now. I will think on the rest. It will be sufficient, I believe, for now to simply have your own father, such as she now is, cut off the one you were born with. Don't worry; you won't bleed to death. I'll see that it's quite clean."

"Who are you, you bastard?" Irving cried.

The creature paused, frowned, then gave that strange smile once more. "Oh, I'm sorry! I forgot to reintroduce myself, didn't I? We all seem to change so much these days. This used to be such a static place! I am Esmilio Boquillas, of course. Who else could I be?"

"You can't be the Dark Baron," Marge said at last. "He fell into a lake of lava, stabbed through the heart by a great sword whose destiny was to do just that."

"Precisely. Hurt like hell, too, but only for an instant," the creature replied. "You, however, leave out part of the story. Before I fell into that lava lake, surrounding a tree very much like that one over there, Joe here fell in as well. Fell in and was not consumed but instead was transformed. If Holmes survived the falls, why not Moriarty, eh? Even then I had more power in my little finger than any of you and more than sufficient power to have preserved my faerie soul."

"Come to think of it, you do look like Boquillas' soul would look," Marge agreed.

"I was forced into this form, for, you see, I was trapped, awakening in the Sea of Dreams itself. It took an incredible amount of nonstop salesmanship to talk the entities trapped there into aiding me."

"How did you get out, you monster?" Poquah challenged him. "Not even the alternate gods of that place can escape!"

"Not individually, no, but first of all, I was not a god. It's not nearly so much on the overhead, and I do match the mathematics of this world. The trick was to have them influence their vast and mostly hidden followers here — hidden until now — to become aware of me and to bring me through. In a sense, you can say I was prayed back into real existence. My soul was incorporeal, my faerie self was in flux, and it flowed into the vessel that they used for their prayers. This is a personification of a statue of a child-servant of Shub Niggurah, the Goat with a Thousand Young. It is quite imposing, is it not? Ah, I can see that you are impressed."

"What is with you, Boquillas? It's bad enough you won't stay dead, but you started off as a handsome, charming SOB who at least cared about people, who justified what he did as a rebellion against the system here and for the betterment of most." Marge felt she had nothing to lose, so why not say it all? "Now the only thing that's left is the SOB part."

"I finally learned the truth," Boquillas responded. "That it's all for nothing. That everything is, in the end, totally meaningless. That pleasure and power are the only things that matter, and then only because you should have what you will. Think of it! I have beaten all of you! I have beaten Hell itself! There is nothing I cannot do or have!"

"You haven't won a damned thing except a little petty revenge," Irving spat at him. "You're nothing, Boquillas. You're lower than whale shit, and that's on the bottom of the ocean! What have you accomplished? Revenge on a bunch of people who beat you at your own game several times when they couldn't have beaten a competent sorcerer even once? So you can be a big monster around here until those things you made the deal with show up. Then you're right down there lickin' their boots just like you would be if you'd stuck with Hell. And if you don't bring 'em through, Hell and the Council will just quarantine you here and eventually gang up and crush you unless the little creatures you betray around here get you first. You got nothin', Baron! Nothin' that means anything at all! You're still a loser! You'll always be one! That's your destiny. Troublemaker, misery maker, but endgame loser! And somewhere around there's the real black bird, 'cause there's got to be. Somebody — maybe Ruddygore or Lothar or somebody — is gonna get hold of it, and then you are really toast There ain't no way of gettin' around it. You got nothin'!"

"Perhaps, the Baron responded coldly. "But I have all of you."

That was a heck of a lot harder to argue with, Irving had to admit to himself.

"Now, I believe we will start with a bit of fun," Boquillas said almost to himself. "While the rest of you watch, I shall allow Joseph here to emasculate the son. Then a rather simple spell, and we can load an entire functioning vagina into the space thus vacated, using the same creative model of a curse visited upon the lovely lady here, only, of course, reversed. Then everyone — friends, companions, father — can watch as I none too gently rape the new daughter right here, then let you roam the forest for a while, with an unbreakable desire only for women, with even the thought of a man repulsive. As you can probably surmise, my impregnations always take, no matter what the condition of the mother or the time of the month, and they develop with astonishing speed. You can't go far. The birth pains will be excruciating, and then we will begin it all again. After that, we'll see to the lovely Marge here, who is not immune from the same sort of treatment, perhaps clipping her wings so she will stay around. And Poquah, I have a whole new mold for your faerie flesh, one that will keep you handy and in a cage nearby for years." He sighed. "Now, who am I leaving out? Ah, yes, the lady here with the wrong organ. I could restore you, I suppose, since that curse is tied to the authority of Hell, which touches not this wood, but this so appeals to me. It is so delightfully perverse. Hmmm…"

Boquillas was obviously having an enormously good time and was in no hurry at all. Not that they could do anything about it. Still, he was itching to demonstrate his total power over them and understood that anticipation was often torture of the worst kind.

He suddenly threw out his left hand toward Larae, and bolts of pure energy so strong that they seemed almost solid struck her. Irving cried out but could do nothing.

One by one the layers of spell upon her were neutralized, vaporized, until only Lothar's key spell was left, the one that had made her not a woman. Now, without radically changing her body and by sheer force of will, making up and implementing the complex magical equations in his head as if they were a child's arithmetic, he refashioned her, tweaked her, emphasized every feminine line, move, and curve, exaggerated the form in much the same way Marge's was exaggerated, and then actually enlarged the male genitalia at the same level of exaggeration. The result was obscene, a photo composite, of the ultimate woman and one major flaw.

"There! There is your girlfriend, boy, for as long as I choose her to be that way, and that may be until tomorrow or until Armageddon! Behaviorally the dream sex object, crazy about the boys, unable even to be turned on by a woman, yet like that, naked, displayed to the world, and on the make. Let us call it perfecting an imaginative concept." He turned back to Irving, whose expression of hatred was unbelievable, and bathed in it.

"All right, boy, it is your turn!" The clawed hand came out again, and Irving felt all the leather vanish, and every thing else as well, save the sword blade itself, which clanged to the ground.