Another skeleton detached itself from the phalanx and danced forward.
"I've got to stop this!" Orb said, handing the succubus her harp and striding along the back of the fish. Part of her mind remarked on the confidence with which she gave her invaluable harp to a demoness—but she knew the harp would not tolerate the touch of a deceitful or evil creature, and Jezebel was neither, despite being of demonic stock.
"Hey, don't!" Jezebel cried, following. "It'd only take one skeleton to convert you! I think they take out their own mass!"
Orb paused. Obviously there was justice in this notion. What could she accomplish, if she became an instant skeleton? Yet how could she let this horror proceed without even challenging it? She was afraid and angry.
"They're dancers," the drummer called, coming up behind them. "Orb, you know a dance that'd stop anything in its tracks."
Orb stiffened. But now a realization came: the huge fish had accepted her after she had danced the tanana for him. Was this the reason? Insurance against these awful dancers?
The second skeleton was approaching the tail. "Beat the cadence for the Song of the Morning," Orb said tersely to the drummer. "I'm going to dance to it."
"Got it," he said, scrambling to set up his drums again.
"I'll tell the others," Jezebel said, stepping down through the fish's flesh.
He started the beat, and it was good, but not good enough. "With the magic," Orb said, touching his shoulder.
As she did so, the magic came, her power transferring to him. "Got it," he repeated.
The beat took hold, and there was indeed magic to it, creating the semblance of the song. Orb began to dance. She was conscious now of her housecoat plastered to her body, and dragging at her legs. Impatiently she struggled out of it and threw it aside, wearing only her nightie. She was aware that this was clinging to her torso like a wrinkled second skin, worse in its fashion than nakedness, but she had no choice; she had to have freedom of motion.
She danced the tanana to the beat, addressing the skeleton. The thing paused, then matched her, switching from its hornpipe to the tanana. It coordinated with her motions, completing the dance. It leaped and spun and gazed sidelong at her with its bony sockets. There was no doubt that she had found the key to making the skeletons react. But where could this lead?
Well, if the others did not advance until this one was through, and she distracted it long enough, the storm might clear, and Jonah would be free to swim back into the sky, escaping the skeletons.
The beat of the drums intensified, seeming to pound against the entire universe. Boom, boom, BOOM, BOOM! The skeleton danced more wildly, matching the increasing emphasis—and then began to fall apart. The violence of this dance was becoming too much for it, and it was self-destructing!
The bones flew off randomly, leaving the skeleton without part of one arm, then part of the other, then its skull. Finally the rest of it collapsed and fell into the water, sinking out of sight.
Orb breathed a panting sigh of relief. They had done it! They had stopped the skeleton from touching Jonah!
A new skeleton detached itself from the phalanx and danced toward the tail.
Oops! The job wasn't finished! Orb set herself, the drumbeat resumed, and she began to dance again. She addressed the second skeleton, and it reacted as had the first. They danced together, and the skeleton was a marvelously fine dancer; she found herself picturing it as a handsome Gypsy man, strutting and posturing and turning on in the timeless manner.
Then the beat intensified; the man flew apart, and his pieces sank into the rain-wet waves, his magic gone.
But the storm had not abated, and the skeletons had massed until they were closing in on every side. Another emerged from the phalanx near the tail, but now others were stepping out from other phalanxes, to approach the large fins on either side and the head. Jonah's nervousness increased.
"We're in trouble," the drummer said. "You can't dance forever, and you can't go one-to-one with three or four at once."
Jezebel emerged with Lou-Mae on one hand and the organist on the other. "Maybe each of us can address one skeleton, and hold them off each section," she suggested.
They tried it, but the others did not know the tanana and the skeletons responded to nothing else well enough to make a difference. There was not time to teach them; it had taken Orb hours of practice, many days in succession, to perfect it. Even had there been time, she doubted that Lou-Mae could learn it; the dance appeared indecent to outsiders. Meanwhile, the skeletons were marching in on every side.
"We have to have stronger medicine," Lou-Mae said. "You said your friend Nat knew strong songs—"
"Natasha!" Orb called, hoping he could hear. The skeletons were about to touch on every side; if the man did not come. There was the distant sound of a sustained note, as of someone singing an extraordinarily powerful melody. The very surface of the ocean seemed to quiet as the music stroked it. The skeletons paused in their dancing, exactly as they were, canted to one side. Natasha had heard!
The note became a melody, growing louder. The song spread out to fill the region, beautiful and resonant and profoundly moving. "That man can sing!" Jezebel murmured. There was no response; the others were mesmerized by the song, human beings and skeletons alike, listening.
Natasha approached, still singing, his voice holding the horde in stasis. He appeared on the surface of the water, walking on it in the manner the skeletons did. He passed by them and stepped onto the skin of the fish, climbing the steep side until he reached the relatively flat back where Orb and the others stood.
He paused in his singing, standing before them. The skeletons resumed their dancing and advancing.
"They're trying to make a skeleton of Jonah!" Orb exclaimed. "Can you stop them?"
"With the Song of Power," Nat replied. "You may know it as the Song of Day."
"Quick, before they touch!" Orb urged.
"Give me a beat," he said, spotting the drummer.
The drummer settled down to his drums and started the beat. It was a standard pattern, as he did not know what was wanted.
Natasha resumed his singing. It was the same song as before, but more forceful; the sound seemed to make the very atmosphere reverberate. The night lightened, then became day, the sun riding high and striking through the mass of the storm cloud, vaporizing it and turning the black waves green. The light became intense, causing the white bones of the skeletons to shine.
Nat gestured to the drummer, and the beat picked up. The song became louder, the feeling in it so intense that Orb felt as if she were riding a muscular stallion through an endless fire. Her nightie dried and became diaphanous.
The skeletons felt it, too. They started to move, but not in their dance. They were trying to escape, but could not; the sun's beams bore pitilessly on them. They were rocking to the drum beats, as if shaken by some invisible hand. Then they were falling apart, their bones disassociating and dropping into the water with little splashes. In a moment, all the skeletons were gone.
Nat brought his song to a close. As he did so, the day faded, and the night of reality returned. But the storm was gone, and so were the skeletons; those abolitions had not been illusions.
Orb flung her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. "You rescued me again!" she exclaimed.
"It was my pleasure," he said gallantly.
Then Orb remembered her situation. She was in her scant nightie, on the back of a monstrous fish, and her friends were watching. She let go and drew back a little.
Somewhat awkwardly, she performed introductions. "Nat, this is Lou-Mae..." She went through the names; Natasha acknowledged them gracefully, and the others were polite.
"Maybe we should go inside and let Jonah swim back into the sky where he likes it," Jezebel suggested. Nat looked about. "Just how did you get up here?" he inquired.
"Jezebel brought us," Orb said. "She—"
"No secret," Jezebel cut in. "I'm a demoness. Take my hand; I'll l
ead you in."
Orb, knowing the succubus' suspicion about Natasha, kept quiet. Nat took her hand, and Orb took the other, and they walked down through the flesh and into the fish's comfortable interior.
Jezebel turned them loose and went back for the others. "Not to appear unduly critical," Nat said, "but are you sure you can trust a demon?"
"This one, yes. Demons vary as widely as do living creatures; they fit no single mold."
He shrugged. "I wouldn't know."
Abruptly, the scene froze. All sound and motion ceased, leaving Orb alone untouched. Natasha stood like a statue, three-quarters of the way through his shrug.
Then two new figures appeared. They did not enter; they simply became present. One was cloaked in black, the other in white.
"Let me guess," Orb said. She glanced at the black figure, then at the white. "Thanatos—and Chronos." Of course it was no guess for Thanatos; she had interacted with him before, when he put her together with the Livin' Sludge.
"Even so," the Incarnation of Death agreed, with a hideous smile on his skull-face. This time he did not lay back his hood, so the effect continued, but Orb now had no concern about it. Any person Luna trusted was worthwhile. "Chronos has stopped time so that we may converse. We fear you are being deceived."
"I hate being deceived," Orb said. "My mother warned me of a trap before, and even with that warning I barely escaped it. Is there more trouble coming?"
"There may be," Thanatos said. "It is our concern that this individual may be demonic, perhaps an agent of Satan. It is not safe for you to be involved with him if this is the case."
"Involved!" Orb exclaimed. But of course she was, in the general sense; for the second time, Natasha had saved her from a very bad situation. "What gives you the notion that Nat could be demonic? He was just saying that—"
"We believe that your objectivity is vital to certain future events," Thanatos said. "Satan is aware of this and may be trying to influence you by sending a minion. The realms of time on Earth and of the Afterlife may be subject to compromise. We would not want your future to be distorted by any agent of Satan."
"My future? If one of you is the Incarnation of Time, surely you can readily check my future and satisfy yourselves as to its adequacy!"
"Not readily," Chronos said, speaking for the first time. He looked like a normal living man, once allowance was made for his office. "The future is not fixed; it is multiple, and it is constantly changing. There are variants covering a spectrum of alternatives, some of which are positive, some negative. It is our interest to encourage the positive."
"But surely you can see whether Satan has any influence on many of those variants, and whether Natasha has any involvement," Orb protested. "Intact, you can follow Nat's life forward and back, and discover whether he is human or demon, can't you?"
"Not readily," Chronos said. "Satan is adept in his manipulations and can clothe reality with illusion so cleverly that it becomes almost impossible to separate the two. The real Natasha could have been replaced by a demon who emulates him perfectly, and I would have to devote far more of my attention to tracing this down than I can spare from my duties."
"Needle in the haystack," Orb said, seeing the problem.
It had not occurred to her that a real man could be replaced by a demon, but of course it was possible. "In that case, you, Thanatos, should be able to test this man and verify his nature directly. After all, you can read souls, and demons don't have souls, do they?"
"It is true that they don't," Thanatos agreed. "But for a deception of this nature, it would be relatively simple for Satan to provide a demon with the simulation of a soul. My tools for measuring souls are relatively crude; I am not God." He smiled grimly.
"You are saying that with all the powers the two of you possess, you can not tell whether a given entity is human or demon?" Orb asked incredulously.
"Ordinarily it would be no problem," Thanatos said. "In this case, it may be."
Orb whistled internally. Obviously she had overrated the powers of the Incarnations! "How then should I tell whether Natasha is human or demon?"
"I suspect you will have to fall back on the old-fashioned devices," Thanatos said. "Demons are not subject to certain limitations of human beings, such as their fixed forms, but do have limitations of their actions that living people lack, such as what they may touch or say."
"You mean the Christian Cross? A demon can't touch it?"
"And holy water, or any sanctified relic. Neither can a demon say the name of God or sing a hymn. He may undertake enormous convolutions to avoid exposure by such means, to divert the subject, perhaps to ridicule the necessity, but when directly challenged, he can not do these things."
"But not all demons are creatures of Satan!" Orb protested. "Some can be quite decent folk."
"The limits do not reflect decency," Thanatos said. "They reflect origin. We concede that a good demon may be a better friend than a bad human being—but the bad human can touch the Cross, while the good demon can not. The barrier is absolute. That is why such tests have been established; it is not possible to cheat such identification."
"So you want me to test Natasha? To see whether he is of human or demonic stock?"
"Correct," Thanatos said.
"And if I do, and he turns out to be a demon—what does that prove? As you said, a good demon may be better than a bad human being—and a bad man could be an agent of Satan, too."
"Unlikely, in this case," Thanatos said. "The original Natasha is a good man; Chronos has already checked his timeline and verified this. He would never align with Satan; indeed, he would oppose Satan with all his power. Only Satan could arrange to replace such a man with a demon simulacrum. Therefore, if this is a demon, it has to be Satan's minion. We hope this is not the case, but we believe it must be tested."
Orb sighed. Their logic seemed tight. "Very well; I will test him—in my own time. If he should turn out to be a demon, I certainly shall have nothing to do with him. But I'm sure this is not the case; after all, he has twice rescued me from severe distress and he has taught me part of the Llano."
"What he claims is the Llano," Chronos said, gesturing with his left hand.
Orb saw that there was a ring on one of his fingers. It looked just like the one Mym had given her: a tiny coiled snake.
"That ring!" she said. "How did you come by it, Chronos?"
He glanced at it, as if startled. "Oh, this charm? It is of demonic nature, but aligned with the forces of good. There are many of them, all very similar."
"Luna has some," Thanatos said. "I'm sure she would give you one, if you asked."
Disgruntled by this revelation of the commonness of a charm she had thought unique, Orb retreated. "No, of course not; I was just curious." For an instant she had almost had a bad vision of someone stealing the ring from her baby; but of course, that was impossible; the ring could not be stolen or taken by force; it had to be honestly given. Her daughter would keep her ring until reaching the age of discretion; then she could do with it as she chose.
Unless Tinka had not put it on Orlene's finger, but instead had sold it...
No! Orb knew her friend would never have done such a thing. She adjusted her emotion and addressed the present situation. They had been talking about the Llano—and there was another body blow to her certainty. "You mean that was not part of the Llano Natasha taught me? The Song of the Morning?"
The two Incarnations exchanged glances. Both shook their heads in perplexity. "I'm afraid neither of us knows that song," Thanatos said after a moment. "The Llano is a different kind of magic from that we utilize. Perhaps what he has taught you is valid. That would not necessarily exonerate him; if it is not a religious piece..."
"It's a—a natural piece," she said, lacking a proper description. "It makes the dawn come, and the day brighten, and it destroyed the dancing skeletons that threatened us. Would an emissary from Satan sing such a song?"
"That does seem doubtful," Thanatos
admitted. "You say it actually banished demonic creatures?"
"It actually did."
"I don't see how a creature of Satan's would do that." Thanatos shrugged. "But of course that is not my specialty. Mars would know the answer; he is the expert in combat, especially against demonic forces."
"Well, at such time as I encounter Mars, I will ask him," Orb said. "Meanwhile, I can certainly make the other tests; that should make the matter academic."
"We appreciate your cooperation," Thanatos said. Then Chronos lifted his other hand, which now held a large, glowing hourglass, started to tilt it—and abruptly the two were gone, and Natasha resumed animation.
Orb scrambled feverishly amidst her thoughts. What had they been talking about, before the stasis? She hated deceiving the man, but until she was sure of his nature. Ah—about demons. They had agreed that not all demons were evil. That seemed ironic, in view of the timing of the arrival of the visitors.
"I can show you how nice Jezebel is," Orb said. Then Jezebel reappeared, with Lou-Mae and the drummer at her hands.
"Jez, would you mind very much if I performed a test on you?" Orb asked, feeling embarrassed.
"Welcome," the succubus said. "Just let me fetch in the last pair." She disappeared through the wall and soon returned with Betsy and the organist.
They assembled in the main chamber. "What was this test?" Jezebel inquired.
"Well, I have been warned that—" Orb hesitated, but saw no diplomatic way to say it. "—that Natasha might be of demonic origin. So—"
Nat straightened. "How's that?"
"So I need to run a test," Orb continued doggedly. "But I need a—a control person, to verify that the indications are valid. That the test works."
"Who made such a suggestion?" Nat asked, becoming nettled.
Orb forced herself to face him. "Chronos and Thanatos. They told me that—well, never mind that. I hope you're willing to—"
"I hardly expected a reception of this nature," Nat said. "It would seem to me that—" But now he broke off, for the others were gazing at him.
"You know," Jezebel said, "if there is one thing that demon skeletons would respect, it would be an agent of Satan's."