Horrors of the Dancing Gods by Chalker Jack :L

Author:Chalker, Jack :L. [Chalker, Jack :L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: “harry potter” “George r. r. martin” rowling “wells world” “watcher at the Wells” “three kings”
Publisher: Phoenix Pick
Published: 2013-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

NOT SO UNFAMILIAR A PLACE

The seat of the worst of evil shall have the face of comfort to the unwary.

—Rules, Vol. XIII, p. 162(a)

“So that’s it, huh?” Irving said, staring ahead as they came inside the breakwater and the Eibon made ready to land.

Marge nodded, feeling a bit nervous for the first time. “Yeah, that’s it.”

This harbor really didn’t look all that different from the one they’d left, only a bit larger and more the size of a commercial port than that of a traditional recreational area. The town, more like a city almost, spread out in all directions before them and, from the lights and angles, appeared to be built back into some fair-sized hills. Streets and houses seemed to go right up those hillsides, and the population looked unexpectedly dense.

The harbor had a number of exotic-looking craft in port, many of which were very large sailing ships of designs none of them had ever seen before. The single-masted square sailers could be dismissed as local coastal boats; you wouldn’t have much to steer with if you got too far offshore in those things. Others, however, looked enormous, the size of old Spanish galleons in romantic swashbuckler movies, and still others looked like sleek men-of-war with catapults clearly showing and all sorts of unknowable armaments as well. They were in a variety of colors and finishes, many brightly painted, others almost camouflaged by their colors and patterns, but it was clear that they hailed from many lands and were there for a multitude of purposes.

They were mostly human craft, but here and there could be seen fairy folk as well, again of unknown races and backgrounds, doing work on the craft and at the docksides as well. Many were of the same sort of elflike classes as were the most familiar ones of the north such as the Imir, but they had strange colors, often nearly luminescent yet somehow dark; blues and deep yellows and reds of all sorts abounded here. Now and again could be seen creatures that looked in some ways to be relatives of dwarves, and some crawled up and down the rigging with abandon and seemed almost insectlike.

The effect was less one of coming into a port of evil than one of entering a port in some strange and foreign land, which was exactly what it was. The first ship to come into old Shanghai or Tokyo Bay in the nineteenth century or Bombay must have afforded its passengers and crew a similar sensation.

“Wow!” Irving said, staring at the scene in absolute wonderment. “I didn’t expect this!”

“It certainly is, er, different than I anticipated,” Poquah harrumphed, impressed in spite of himself. “These aren’t all Yuggoth lands and races represented here, either. I see flags of several continents here, although none at the moment from Husaquahr, the largest and the mother of them all.”

“They kind of understate their names here, too,” Marge commented, staring. “I sure would call this a fair-sized city, not ‘Red Bluffs,’ which sounds like a small town in Nebraska.

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