Read Demons of the Dancing Gods for Free Online Page B

bright, bluish glow that illuminated everything and bathed
    it in its eerie light, she saw every object distinctly and without
    shadow. In many ways it was a clearer vision than normal
    sight, although a more colorless one.
    She knew that, somehow, she'd been delayed until darkness
    fell, that the magic was strongest then, and that the Kauri, as
    was the case with a majority of the fairy races, were more in
    their element.
    She heard all sorts of stirrings in the trees; once or twice,
    she thought she caught girlish laughter from above and sensed
    the sudden shift of mysterious bodies, but they kept too far
    28
    DEMONS OF THE DANCING GODS
    JACK L. CHALKER
    29
    away for her to tell who or what was making the sounds. She
    was beginning to regret leaving her bronze dagger and bow
    back at the river, though.
    And then, with a suddenness that startled her, she broke
    through the trees and saw the locus of Kauri power.
    The clearing was enormous, composed entirely of some gray
    lava base that seemed permanently rippled, as if built of a
    frozen river rather than a hard-rock base. It rose slightly for
    perhaps a half mile, forming a cone-shaped structure, and at
    its center was a perfectly circular opening through which bubbling,
    roaring sounds and heavy, sulfurous smoke billowed
    upward. The crater was not only the source of the radiation
    but also a source of tremendous heat, and she knew that, somehow,
    this was a perfect miniature volcano.
    Page 22
    Chalker, Jack L - Demons of the Dancing Gods
    Again she heard the girlish laughter, this time behind her,
    and she whirled and faced five of the Kauri.
    The thing that struck her first was that they were absolutely
    identical; some fantastic, fairy quintuplets. Their basic form
    was human; all were female and might be called by many
    voluptuous. Their rounded, cute, sexy faces were marked with
    large, sensuous lips and huge, playful brown eyes. Yet the
    faces had a quality that could only be described as elfin, and
    through short-cropped hair that was a steely blue-black color,
    slightly more blue than black, protruded two cute, pointed elfin
    ears.
    They were under five feet tall, but not by more than an inch
    or so. Their skins were a deep orange in color. Looking closer,
    though, she could see some familiar yet quite nonhuman differences.
    Their fingers were abnormally long and ended in
    clawlike nails; their toes, too, were a bit longer and more
    regular than human toes and ended in similar sharp, pointed,
    animallike nails, pointing slightly downward. Between digits
    on both hands and feet was the webbing that had first appeared
    on Marge back in the mountain town of Kidim. But their most
    distinctive feature was their wings, sinister and batlike, yet
    somehow less threatening in deep crimson than in demonic
    black, although, she saw, the crimson was only on one side;
    the back of the wings was a deep purple color. The wings were
    not merely attached to their backs but seemed to be woven into
    and between their arms and their bodies, so that, when an arm
    moved out or forward, the membranes fluttered and acted something
    like a natural cape. The Kauri just stood there, watching
    her, not so much with hostility, but with a sort of playful
    puzzlement on their interminably cute faces, and she sensed
    she was supposed to make the first move.
    "Are you the Kauri?" she asked.
    "We better be, dearie, to be here," one of them responded
    in a voice that was soft and somewhat childlike. "So what's it
    to you?"
    "I was told to come here," she explained lamely, trying to
    decide how best to put all this. First meetings were always a
    problem for her. "The sorcerer Ruddygore of Terindell said I
    was a Kauri changeling. I am supposed to complete the change
    here, rather than let it go in little bits and pieces."
    "A changeling!" another exclaimed, sounding exactly like
    the first. "Well, I'll be damned! Been a long time since we
    had one of them for a Kauri!"
    Suddenly there was a tremendous