He nodded. “Sort of. I don’t necessarily want out of life, though—I’ve got a son, after all, and somebody I love. I just want out of the game.”
She nodded. “I just wish I could shake the feeling I’ve had since Ruddygore’s place that the buy-out is pretty damned heavy.”
“You’re Little Miss Gloom and Doom this morning, aren’t you? Now I’m really not looking forward to this!”
The system did work, and when the sun was nearly overhead, they awoke the sleepers, detailed their own problems in watching over them, then tried it themselves. By dusk, all of them had at least some decent sleep and without real incident, although Mia had to admit quietly to Joe that it was well that she was a slave devoted to her master; otherwise, she would have killed Macore long before he got to recounting Episode Forty-One.
Although all of them still felt tired and physically wrecked, they made the other side shortly before dawn the next morning, to find that they were less than three miles south of the palace complex. Shrouded in clouds and mist, it was an imposing place, less a palace than a true island with a massive building at its center. It rose, black and forbidding, out of the ice, a massive volcanic cinder cone, with hissing fumaroles and geysers occasionally shooting from its flanks. It wasn’t all that much above the ice pack—perhaps twenty or thirty feet—but it was a clear oasis.
“Odd. I always thought of volcanoes as two miles high and snow-capped,” Marge remarked. “Still, Hawaii is a bunch of volcanoes and much of it seems fairly low. That’s because you’re only seeing the top of the volcano; the other couple of miles are underwater. It might be that much of that is really under the ice.”
Macore nodded. “I keep wondering about its relation to the Devastation. It’s so close, yet its great heat stops at the ice. It’s as if all the heat that was removed from that great inland sea to freeze it was somehow stored up here.”
Joe pointed through the mists of dawn at towers rising from the fog-shrouded island. “Well, there’s the palace. Tons of magic in there. God! You try it with fairy sight and all you get is night time again!”
Mia looked around. “I am more curious as to why there are no guards, Master, or terrible traps.”
Macore shrugged it off. “Nobody,” he said, “is supposed to get this far. When you build a fortified wall and fill it with every defense imaginable, you don’t also stick alarms and forts all over the inside. We’ve bypassed their impregnable defensive rings, which, I’ve no doubt, are nearly that. But the Rules always provide a blind spot. Don’t get cocky, though! Joe’s right—that place is black as pitch on the magical level. It’ll have its own internal security staff and gimmicks. Trip one and it’ll bring the full powers of both sword and sorcery down on us with nowhere to escape.” He looked at the place. “I wonder where they’d put my video gear?”
“Gear second, Macore,” Joe told him. “The bodies first. If we don’t get the bodies, the rest, your gear, our necks, won’t matter. The odds are, too, that those bodies will be inhabited by somebody and those bodies will have the capabilities we had, so they’ll be excellent fighting machines and well-guarded to boot. Once we finish them, then we’ll try for your gear.”
“Uh-uh. You do your business, I do mine. Once you do in those bodies, all hell will literally break loose, and I’ll have no chance. Once we’re inside, we’re no longer a company. You three go your way, I’ll go mine. If I can help, I will, but that’s as far as it goes.”
There was no reasoning with him on that, and Joe was frozen stiff. Taking advantage of the clouds of steam and fog and the cover that the time just before dawn still gave, they moved toward the massive black region.
The moment they stepped onto it, they knew they were in a different realm. Surrounded by ice, the island, perhaps a half mile around, felt as warm and tropical as back home in a Marquewood summer. For the first time, Joe and Macore both felt the effects of painful frostbite on their faces. They forced themselves to ignore it as much as possible, and Joe, at least, knew that healing would be rapid, thanks to his were curse. He still had a bloody area in his coat and under it where the crossbow bolt had struck, but already there was no sign of a puncture at the skin.
“We’re gonna have to stash these furs,” Macore noted. “I’m starting toward ‘well done’ already, and they slow me down. I’d say we pick a spot in these rocks and try to conceal them. We may need them again, if we have to take the backdoor out of here.”
Everyone was surprised to discover that, under it all, Macore wore his gun-metal gray thiefs outfit. It was patched and well worn, but it looked like the old Macore once more.
“I stole it back, too,” he explained. “I wouldn’t feel exactly me without it, and it’s a bit of a walk to the nearest tailor’s.”
“I wish I’d thought of that,” Joe admitted. “It looks like I’m going to make my play wearing just a sword and swordbelt. I don’t even think the boots are a good idea. For one thing, they’re getting very soggy now that they’re warm and, for another, they’ll make noise and give little traction up here. Still, I’m gonna be pretty damned embarrassed if I get into a fight.” He looked at Mia and grinned. “Now we are a pair, aren’t we?”
Clothing secured, they began moving up the slope, quietly, low to the ground. Marge signaled a halt, then flexed and un-flexed her wings. “Stay here a couple of minutes,” she whispered. “Let me check out what’s” around.”
“Be careful!” Joe warned. “They see or detect you and it’s all over.”
She nodded, then rose into the air, circled around, and was gone into the mist. She was gone only a minute or two, then came back beside them. “Feels like a Turkish bath on the top there. From the humidity, I can guess the heat. Up top are formal gardens of some kind all organized around thermal pools. It’s very pretty, really. There’s some statues of various Hypbor-eyan gods in the gardens and I’d watch out for ’em. They all felt magically ‘hot,’ as it were. The gardens lead to the palace itself, first to a kind of porch with some fancy pools that seem built like Jacuzzis. Beyond those are arches that take you right inside the place.”
“Any guards?” Joe asked.
“Two bored-looking Bentar. Not like soldiers—just sort of wandering around like night watchmen. Careful, though. They have swords on, and, remember, only iron can hurt them. I’d steer clear if I could, though. The sounds of a swordfight this early will bring lots of folks running, and the Bentar can screech like mad if they’re hurt.”
Mia had her knife in her hand, but as they moved over the top and onto the gardens, she held it for a while in her teeth. The blade was an iron alloy; it would harm Bentar, but not easily.
The gardens truly were beautiful, a tropical Eden surrounded by the ice just beyond. Exotic trees and bushes were planted all over in a masterwork of royal gardening that obviously supplied the palace and also was in its own way a work of art.
If the gardens were Eden, then the statues placed here and there through them were Hell. Ugly, monstrous gods, on pedestals, each with its own small altar. Demonic figures, some reptilian, some ghastly distortions of the familiar, some with bat wings, and a few just indescribably loathsome. A statue for each main tribal god of any of the Hypboreyans, obviously, all gathered here for equal homage before the ruling family in a grotesque symbol of national unity.
Joe stared at one particularly vicious-looking doglike thing and thought, Now at least I know where the Hypboreyans get their sunny dispositions.
Still, Hypboreya was supposed to be a harsh land, requiring a particularly tough and ruthless breed to tame and keep tamed. Such people bred their own gods in their own images. They all felt what Marge had felt looking at the things. It was as if those grotesque miniatures were somehow alive, aware of them, and looking at them with malice. They gave them a wide berth.