Which at least saves me from your witchcraft, he thought.
“You said you’ve seen people who were out there?”
She nodded. “Only you cannot call them ‘people’ anymore. Most are madder than that one back there, but with reason. I saw one with a goat’s head, a woman’s breasts, a fish tail, and the legs of a great bird. Some others were worse.”
“That’s just from walking on it? ”
“From melting even a small amount. So much is buried there, in such chaos, that any heat, any digging, anything that disturbs and melts what is below, is liberated but undirected. It is miles away before it starts, and always we feel it here. It goes almost to the palace itself—over fifty miles. It cannot be crossed.”
Joe felt very uneasy. “Well, that’s what I was sent to do. I realize that now. All the more reason to give me the prisoner as well. Unless you absolutely need another slave around here, and the little guy isn’t good for much except stealing stuff. Besides, you keep him, you won’t make him sane. You’ll still have to put up with that stuff.”
“Not if we cut out his tongue as well as the other,” she responded, but clearly she was thinking it over. “You are really going to try it through the forbidden area?”
“I’m afraid that’s the job. From what you say, maybe the Master of the Dead didn’t like me, after all.”
“I would say so, too.” She looked at him and sighed. “What a waste,” she muttered, almost to herself.
She was so adamant and clearly so fearful of the place that he couldn’t help harboring similar thoughts himself. For the first time, he began to doubt if he would ever see his son again.
CHAPTER 11
DANCING IN THE DARK
Any Company which shall survive to reach the Ultimate Obstacle to the attainment of their Quest shall be able to secure what they need to complete the Quest. However, successful completion is not guaranteed, and there are no warranties, expressed or implied, in these Rules.
— The Books of Rules, XV, 304(a)
“Macore!”
The sleeping figure in the cell snored, paused in midsnore for a moment, then turned over but kept sleeping.
“Macore!” came a louder, more insistent whisper. “Wake up, damn it!”
The snore turned into a sort of piglike grunting, and the little thief muttered, “Huh? What?”
“Over here at the window.”
Sleepily he made his way up, grabbing his woolen blanket around him to ward off the chill of the night, and got to the window, standing then on tiptoes to see what was what. “Mary Ann?” he asked tentatively.
“No, you idiot! It’s Marge! You remember Marge, don’t you?”
He grew suddenly suspicious. “Yes, but I’ve been fooled before. There was a fellow in here today who reminded me of Joe, too. You might just be a dream sequence.”
She floated up so that her face was framed in the window. “Dream sequence my ass! That was Joe, under heavy disguise.”
“Well, if this is real, what the hell are you doing here?” He shivered. “Damn! It’s too cold to be a dream.”
“Ruddygore sent us on a quest to the palace out there on the ice. The same palace where they sent your tapes and video equipment.”
He was suddenly very wide awake, but not quite following. “Ruddygore is interested in Gilligan’s Island!”
“Afraid not. But your quest, at the moment, and ours come together. And if we do ours, Ruddygore will energize your equipment. Understand?”
“He wouldn’t do it before. He’s still mad because I beat his system on his vaults. That’s why I had to suffer like this!”
“He didn’t need something from you then.”
“Good point,” he admitted.
“Macore, how did you wind up here?”
“The gnomes tried playing all sorts of tricks on my head, but all they got were my memories of Gilligan’s Island episodes. Exposure to this magically transformed them from gnomes into a band of hostile critics. They tossed me out to these people.”
“No, no, I mean, what are you doing up here in the middle of nowhere to begin with?”
“I got a tip,” he told her. “They said that up here was this vast sea full of magic with a tropical island in the middle of it. Nobody mentioned that the sea was frozen. Naturally, I had to find out, you see.”
“Naturally,” she responded, not really seeing at all. “Well, part of what you heard is true. That sea of ice is filled with incomprehensible magic. On the other side there is a volcanic island, with a great palace in the middle of it.”
“That must be some powerful sorcerer,” he noted.
“The Master of the Dead, Sugasto, lives there sometimes. And it’s likely that’s where the Dark Baron is as well.”
He thought about it a moment. “Hold it! You’re telling me that you want to cross a place of unbelievable magical powers so you can get to where the Dark Baron and the Master of the Dead are? And they say I’m crazy!”
“Yeah, well, after looking the place over, I can go along with you on that, but it has to be done, if it’s possible. Surrounded by ice, patrolled in the clean areas by Bentar on nazgas, on the ground by an army of the dead, and by magical spells, the only way to reach it undetected is across that mean area. It’s so powerful in and of itself that there’s no way they’ll fly across it or put anybody in it or maintain any sort of spell of their own in that area.”
“I’d rather take my chances’ with the zombies and the Bentar and the rest,” he told her. “I looked that other place over and it made me dizzy.”
“You looked it over? When?”
“’Oh, I’ve got stuff—warm clothes, pikes, you name it-stashed all over this hick town.” He suddenly went into a Cagney impression. “They ain’t never built the prison that can hold Cody Jarrett!”
“That’s not Gilligan’s Island.”
He shrugged. “Would you believe that in the Disneyland Hotel that they only had one channel showing Gilligan’s Island at all, and then only once a day? I had to watch something”
“Yeah, well, I doubt if most people go to Disneyland to watch television. Never mind. You’re telling me you can walk out of there whenever you feel like it?”
“Sure. But they’ve been feeding me here, and pretty decently, too, and I wanted to get some strength. Besides, I leave before I’ve mapped out everything, they hit the alarms like mad.”
“Macore, you pushed your fabled luck to the limit on this one.” She told him their plans for him and the fact that the only reason it wasn’t already done was just chance.
He stood there, thinking about her words for a moment, then said, “Okay, you talked me into it. It probably wouldn’t matter to Gilligan and the Professor—all that time on that island with Mary Ann and they never once made a move on her—but it matters to me.”
“Good. Joe’s got them conned into believing he’s checking Sugasto’s security. He’s gonna try and spring you to help. It’s either get us to the palace or good-bye all that matters.”
“That would help. I’d like to look it over in daylight. You have any idea what any of that Fruit Loops spaghetti actually does?”
“I’ve gone as close as I dared to alone, and the only thing I can say is that the answer is, ‘almost anything.’ I think the old legend is true—this was a great battle between mighty forces of ancient times. But I don’t think they’re frozen in place down there, although that might have been the intent. I think everything and everyone in the battle was transformed into energy, magic energy, and then the whole mess was frozen in place. That’s why it’s so near the surface when it should be thousands of feet down in the ice. New snow and ice retain them in, but every once in a while melting of some kind liberates a spell which then turns back into whatever it was. That’s why they feel things from there trying to. get them once in a while. The trick is to cross that place without causing any melting of any kind.”