“So I’ve got to watch out for silver and iron.”
“No, it’s more complex than that. Iron is only a threat if it kills at the same time both body and soul. Silver is fatal to the body; it will release the soul which will form its husk. Then you would be vulnerable to iron alone. The were curse goes when the body goes. In effect, the odds are that you’re as close to unkillable as anything short of angel or demon.”
“Great. So I’m an almost immortal guy who can never be lucky in love again, but if I do get potted with silver or burned to a crisp, I become a wood nymph.”
“That’s pretty much it,” Ruddygore admitted. “I wouldn’t take it all that hard. Fairies are immune from the Lamp. You knew that. If we’d brought you and the Lamp together early enough, we might have stopped it before your soul completely transformed, but by the time we did, it was already totally changed, and, of course, we also did it from a slight distance. The Lamp was faced with a dilemma and it did what it could. It formed the old ‘you’ as modified by Tiana’s wish around the fairy core.”
“Isn’t there any way to unmodify it?”
“Fairy flesh? I sincerely doubt it. Even if your soul was removed by whatever trick Sugasto uses, it would still be fairy. But is it so horrible? Marge seems to enjoy it.”
“Marge is not a brainless bimbo living in a tree!”
“Well, I can’t do much about the tree, or the bimbo part whatever that is, but Tiana’s wish at least insured that you won’t turn brainless. She also wished your mind restored with all of its memories. The Lamp’s magic supercedes the Rules of Husaquahr. That is why it is so dangerous.”
“Wait a second. You’re saying that even if my body were destroyed, I’d still have my memories, who I was and what I was, and be as smart as I ever was?”
“I guarantee it. In fact, even now, you’re a very rare breed indeed. You’re a hybrid. Your invocation of fairy sight shows that. The wood nymph is one of the most common creatures of faerie, and all will consider you one of them, since they see the inside first. If you really reach, you’ve probably got all the powers a wood nymph has, although there are, admittedly, fewer of those than with some races and the majority of those powers I’m sure you’d rather not invoke. Still, you should never reject something in the arsenal.”
Joe sighed. “Yeah, and the only one I can think of that might be useful isn’t gonna be much good in the Cold Wastes. No trees.”
“You’ll do it, then?”
He looked at Ruddygore. “All right. Against all my instincts and better judgment, I’ll try. But I have a very bad feeling about this one, and the last one was something of a disaster. Most of all, I hate leaving Irving, but he’s not ready by a long shot to get into this sort of thing and, in a bad situation, he’d be a club over my head.”
“I agree. But if he’s in Gorodo’s capable hands and learning how to be as great a fighter as his father, I think he’ll be okay.”
“Gorodo! Oh, he’ll love Gorodo! On that son of a bitch’s final exam, I got turned into a horse!”
“Oh, that Circe’s a setup. Didn’t you ever figure that out? Everybody winds up a horse or cow or pig or something. If you can’t face that kind of problem and still make it back, then you’re not going to make it in this world as a mercenary, are you?”
“Well I’d be damned!”
“Not before Judgment Day, if you’re cautious and lucky.”
Joe got up to leave, then hesitated. “What about Macore? I could use a master thief on this kind of job.”
Ruddygore sighed. “I’m afraid he’s gone mad, and I’m not certain where he is now. Again, fallout from that last unpleasantness. It started that first night, when he was exposed for the first time to that infernal cable television and wound up watching one hundred and twenty-two consecutive episodes of Gilligan’s Island.”
Joe chuckled. “I remember.”
“If there’s a better argument for keeping technology out of Husaquahr, this is it. On the way back, he bought, or more likely stole, a battery-powered television, a battery videocassette player, and, somehow, he got all of the hundreds of episodes of that infernal show. Naturally, being from here, he never really understood about batteries, and it didn’t take long for the batteries to run down. He was frantic! He offered all and sundry anything, slavery for life, any theft of anything, you name it— anything—for a battery recharge. I could have done it, of course, but I thought that, if it seemed impossible, he’d eventually give it up! Instead, he set out on a quest for someone, anyone, who could put more ‘magic energy’ into his batteries. When he was asked where he was going, he responded…” Ruddygore coughed apologetically. “He said he was going on a three-hour tour…”
Ti was very pleased with the way she had unpacked and laid out the room, although, truth to tell, there wasn’t much to unpack. Well, traveling light made for easy work, and she never minded that.
She wanted to do her exercises, but she wasn’t certain if she should. She’d been upset about something, although she wasn’t sure what—oh, yes, they wouldn’t let her clean up in the kitchen—and then that elf came to take her to the room and she had some kind of dizzy spell. Probably due to overeating that rich food after so long on short rations. It really screwed up the system. Well, she’d skip it one more day. After sleeping a night in a damp forest on wood chips, she felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.
She went over and stared out the window. It was dark, but there were torches all along the outer wall reflecting eerily on the river below. It was kind of pretty, really. She imagined herself dancing along that wall, beneath those torches. It would be kind of neat to do it. She still felt a bit confused, almost as if she were two people, one Ti the slave girl that she felt was her true self, the other the grander figure of some other time and place and world, which she remembered but somehow could no longer quite comprehend.
Joe came in, looking tired and oddly bothered, and she said, “Is there anything I can get you, Master?”
He started to tell her never to call him “Master,” always “Joe,” then stopped. Even though it made him feel that he was trapped in an old episode of I Dream of Jeannie as much as Macore was hung up on Gilligan’s Island, it was the proper slave response here. If he was going to be using an alias in enemy country, and if she was what she now was, it was far better if she did call him “Master” and went through the rest of the rigmarole as well.
Instead he said, “Yeah, Ti, it’s fine. Come, sit here. I have to talk some important things over with you.”
She came over and sat on the rug at his feet, looking up at him.
Briefly, but spelling out as much of the implications as he could, he told her the situation with their old bodies, Sugasto, and what Ruddygore was proposing. She listened attentively, but couldn’t conceal from her face that she didn’t like what she was hearing very much at all.
“Any comments?” he prompted. “Speak freely and honestly. It’s your old body and your neck.”
“My neck belongs to you,” she noted, “along with the rest of me. But I cannot say mat the news that my old self still lives does not fill me with longing, and the idea that we are to destroy it, well, it is very hard. When I thought it dead, that was that, but to find that it is alive, and that we are to kill it… If it lives, there is always some hope. If it dies, then I am a slave forever.”