There was the sudden sound of someone walking toward them from the direction of the palace, and they were immediately behind the hedges and in the bushes on both sides. Pretty soon a Bentar appeared, looking, as predicted, bored and sleepy. He was wearing a spiffier uniform than the regular troops, possibly a palace uniform, and wore a gold-encrusted sword and carried a bronze-tipped wooden pike, which he was using almost as an idle cane or walking stick. Joe’s hand went to Irving’s hilt, but he did not draw. One motion, he thought, directing that thought to the sword. There must be no unnecessary noise.
The guard walked past Joe, then stopped and looked a bit puzzled, his reptilian nostrils flaring. He turned, more curious than alarmed, away from the swordsman toward the opposite low hedgerow where Joe knew that Marge and perhaps Macore were. Joe did not wait; he drew and pounced with a single motion.
The Bentar turned at the noise and reflexively put up the pike to ward off the inevitable blow, but the great sword sailed right through it, splintering the wood, and continued on through the guard’s neck. There was that distinctive electrical crackling of fairy death, then the body, its head almost but not quite severed from the neck, sank to the path.
“Macore! Mia!” Joe cried. “Quickly! Help me with the body and stuff. We have to get rid of it! Marge—keep a watch!”
The inside of a Bentar both looked and smelled more foul than the living exterior did, but Joe and Macore got it, as well as the pieces of the pike, and Joe dragged the body by the feet well into the trees and against the bushes. Mia wasn’t immediately to be seen, but there was too much to do to worry about her yet. There was no guarantee that the body wouldn’t be found before it decomposed, although fairy bodies tended to decompose in a matter of hours, but it was at least completely out of sight of any of the paths. It would have to do, as usual, Joe thought sourly.
Mia ran up to him, looking pleased with herself. “The other’s throat is cut and he is behind the hedges over there, Master,” she told Joe. “It is so simple when they expect nothing.”
Joe wasn’t sure if he was pleased or not, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, in any event. “Okay, let’s get up there and inside as quickly as we can,” he told them. “Marge, I’d ask you to fly up and peer in the windows up there, but I’d swear some of those gargoyles around the ledges just moved.”
“I saw ’em,” she told him. “I think they’re night guardians, though, and likely going to sleep now, as I should be in normal circumstances. Let me take some care and see what I can see while you move up.” Noting their looks of concern, she grinned.
“Relax. If worse comes to worse lean make them think I Yn the sexiest female gargoyle they ever laid eyes on.”
They moved up, bush by bush, hedge by hedge, toward the huge stone patio. It was hot, even the ground, making Marge’s prediction true.
“I can’t figure out where the zombies are,” Macore whispered, puzzled.
“Huh?”
“Well, why use Bentar for duty like that when you’re the Master of the Dead? This is the perfect place to program zombies to capture or kill anybody who doesn’t have the password of the day. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m not going to complain,” Joe answered, but he admitted that he had wondered the same thing.
Marge came down and joined them again. “Most everybody’s still asleep, from the looks of it,” she told them. “There are two big towers—this one and the one opposite—and then a big, almost circular level in between, with guard walks on top and two, maybe three storeys below. You’ll never guess what’s in the middle of the circle.”
“A hole,” Joe responded. “What?”
“The crater. The opening to the lava. A bubbling, hissing lake of the stuff maybe twenty feet down below ground level. Right in the center is a single column of very hard, shiny-looking rock that comes up a little above ground level. And right in the center of it is growing this tree! A weird-looking type I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s magic, all right.”
“Any sign of what we’re after?” Joe asked her.
“Uh-uh. This side looked strictly royal, anyway. I’d guess we came in on the wrong side. I couldn’t get much of a look into the opposite tower, but I’ll tell you that it’s the center for this darkness. It’s got to be the place.”
Joe nodded. “Any way to go around?” “Not that I saw. At the extremes of that circle I talked about, it actually juts out and away from the volcano on both sides. The drop looks sheer. Unless you want to go back down and onto the ice and around, you’re stuck going through the building.”
“The hell with the ice,” Joe told her. “We came to break in here, so we might as well do it.” And, with a cautious look around, they made their way up the stone stairs, past the two inviting-looking pools, and into the palace proper.
“Want to check out this tower just in case, Master?” Mia asked him.
“Uh-uh. We may blow it, but the other one looks most likely, and I’d hate to run into any watch here.” He looked at two inner arches, each seeming to angle away from the tower hall. “Ma-core, you and Marge take that route, Mia and I will take this one. If Marge is right, we’ll meet in a hall similar to this one on the other side. If we meet anyone or are discovered, though, they’ll come to only one pair, not both.”
Macore nodded. “Anything as vital as my gear would likely be in the magician’s tower as well.”
They went down their corridor, Joe with sword drawn, Mia with knife at the ready. Joe was still puzzled; by this point after dawn, this place should be crawling with servants—slaves, most likely, knowing these folks—and guards and maybe the living dead, so that, when the masters of the joint finally got up, they’d have breakfast prepared and everything cleaned and secured and ship-shape. Where in hell was everybody?
When they got closer to the outer part of the circle, there were arches and windows looking out on what would normally have been the inner courtyard. They crept to it, looked out, and saw the narrow stone walkway around the steaming, boiling pit whose, tremendous heat even Mia could feel; in the center was the strange tree. It grew out of the top of a needle of pure obsidian, somehow immune to the forces, churning around it; a massive trunk indicating great age, its bark an odd purplish color, its limbs spreading out almost all the way over the fire pit. The thick frondlike leaves appeared to be made of pure polished gold, catching the sulfurous fumes from the pit; from the limbs, under the leaves, the tree bore a pearlike fruit of shining, reflective silver.
Joe tried to use his inner self to sense what might be in the tree, whether nymph or demon or imprisoned god, but there was no sensation of any consciousness there. Yet, in fact, it was a living tree, although of what alien origins it was impossible to tell.
He seemed almost hypnotized by it, and Mia had to jolt him back to reality. “Hurry, Master! Before we are discovered!”
They went on, and were two-thirds of the way to the other tower, when Mia, who’d taken the lead, suddenly raised her hand for him to halt. “Listen, Master! Strange sounds from just below!”
Joe stopped, trying to tune out the rumbling and hissing from the fire pit, and he heard what Mia was hearing faintly, through the background—the song from Gilligan’s Island.
“Macore?” he mused. No, that wasn’t possible. First of all, it was coming from perhaps the floor above theirs, and, also, there were the voices, the background music…