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The speaker and object of this worship walked into view. He was enormous, standing fully three meters high and fully proportioned with muscles to match. He also had a goat-like head with huge ram’s horns, deep purple skin covering his humanlooking body, and he wore a loose-fitting robe of SOUL RIDER: SPIRITS OF FLUX AND ANCHOR 127
crimson satin open at the chest but tied off with a belt at the waist.
“Oh, great Prince of Hell. we welcome thee,”
Roaring Mountain intoned.
“Oh, get up from there,” the giant goat-man muttered disgustedly. “We have business to discuss.”
“I was just in the holy process of” the dark priest began, getting up hastily.
“Of turning excellent raw material into mindless savages. Yes, I know. I’m beginning to wonder about you, I really am. I fear the hangups that attracted us to one another may be too much for you to do a decent job. Well, we’ll see.” The creature looked up at the dozen’ or so girls still tied down. “You couldn’t be satisfied with the one train.
No, you had to go after another one without replacing your losses from the first attack.” He sighed.
“Sometimes, oh Roaring Mountain, I think I should transform you into a giant asshole.”
The priest looked stricken. “Please, Master! I can explain!”
“Bullshit! I went and carved this homey pocket in a very convenient location and handed you the nucleus of an army. If you had any sense you’d have struck at the first train, forgotten the second, and now be well on your way to training that expanded force. Instead, here you are creating a new wild animal species with barely more than you had before! Worse, yet, you didn’t take that second train. They’ll be back in force, hunting for this pocket now.”
The priest looked suddenly concerned- “Then hadn’t we better do something?”
The goat-man cleared his throat impatiently.
“Yes, I think we better. Any captives from that second train? I mean, any you haven’t already transformed into mindless idiots?”
“One, Masterno, two!” He looked up at Cass and pointed. “That one there, for example.”
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The mysterious giant nodded his goat’s head and walked up the rocky surface between the slabs and looked down at her. After what she had just Page 86
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witnessed and now expected to go through, she was anything but taken aback by this great apparition.
“What’s your name, girl?” the goat-man demanded to know.
“Cass,” she told him. There was no use in being coy, particularly when she knew she was facing the power behind this little throne.
“Now, then, Cassyou were with the second train?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Whose train was it? What was the name of the stringer?”
“Matson, sir.”
“Um. Damn. And I suppose he sent a dugger ahead to Persellus when he saw the remains of the first train?”
“Yes, sir. Straightaway.”
He turned to Roaring Mountain. “Another stupid mistake. I don’t suppose you left anybody to take care of that little detail?”
The priest shrugged. “How was I to know there’d be a second train by so soon? Besides, I lost a lot of troops there.”
“Idiot.” He turned back to Cass. “You don’t seem particularly frightened by me.”
“In the past few days I’ve been sold to a stringer, forced marched in the void, cleaned up after a massacre, been in a fight, and just now I witnessed a castration and the turning of a lot of good people into animals, and I was about to join them myself when you showed up. I’m sorry, sir master wizard or whatever you are. I just don’t think I have any more fright left.”
The giant was impressed. “Now this is something special, priest. A hundred like this and we SOUL RIDER: SPIRITS OF FLUX AND ANCHOR 129
could rule World. And you were about to turn her into a slavish goat-woman!” He paused a moment, controlling his temper. “Do you know who and what I am?”
“A wizard. Isn’t that what they call people like you?”
The goat man crouched down, and she could see that the goat head was not some sort of mask.
Either it was all illusion or else the man had literally changed himself into this whatever it was.
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She decided on the latter, noticing that he wore A ring with a serpent design on his right ring finger.
She also noticed that he was most certainly lefthanded.
“I’m one of the Seven Who Wait,” the creature told her. “Does that bother you?”
“Not particularly,” she answered honestly. “The church hadn’t exactly impressed me for honesty and sincerity. I see no reason why your side should be much different.”
He looked at her for a moment. “There is great power in you,” he told her. “I can fee! it. Tremendous latent power that even now makes tentative probes at my defenses. Your very calmness, your intelligence, and your almost magnetic ability to get into the worst of situations makes me suspicious.
I have seen this combination before, in many bodies, with many faces.” He sighed and got up and turned to Roaring Mountain. “Come. Your fun here can wait. We must talk and soon, for I must be quickly gone from here. I warn you though not to try your tricks with that one. What she has within her is stronger than you. For your own sake, kill her.”
Cass suddenly felt some fear return, particularly when the priest grinned and said, “I’ll do it right now.”
“No! Not until I am gone.” Was that a worried tone in the master wizard’s voice? What sort of power, she wondered, did she have that even one 130 Jack L. Chalker
of the Seven, if that was who he was, would not like to take on?”
The two men of evil walked away, and Roaring Mountain went to the cave. Dar met him at the entrance just inside the waterfafl and they exchanged a few words. Then Dar nodded, and the evil priest rejoined his master and they went off out of view. Dar hesitated a moment, then walked out and over to the slabs, then up to Cass herself-None of the savages or goatwomen made any attempt to stop him.
Roaring Mountain had given Dar practically everything, she saw. His build, already considerable, was now totally filled and so muscular that you could see every flex or movement in them, and his already strong, lean, handsome face was somehow altered into near total perfection, set off by a crop of thick, black hair. If there were male gods, then he was the absolute perfection of themwith one detail importantly missing. He was Roaring Mountain’s pet joke.
“Come to gloat?” she asked him sourly. “Or cry on my shoulder, which isn’t very good for that sort of thing right now.”
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“He ordered me to kill you,” he told her. “AS
soon as goat-face was gone.”
She sighed. “Well, go ahead. Get it over with.”
“I’m not going to do it, Cass.” He reached down and freed the restraints binding her to the slab.
She sat up uneasily, a little suspicious but feeling that she had nothing to lose.
“Now what am I supposed to do? Run and be eaten alive by those things over there?”
He shook his head slowly. “No-They won’t hurt you. Look, I did a dumb thing. I did a lot of dumb things. I just kept thinking of Lani, and that she was out here, and then I saw you start acting like that stringer’s partner and it all just sort of snapped.
I kind of deserve this, I guess, but you don’t.”
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She suddenly felt a little uneasy. “Where’s Lani now, Dar?”
“Dead,” he said softly- “I killed her. I” his voice choked a bit“I put her out of her misery, really. That bastard made me a woman who looks ‘ like a man, thinks like a man, wants like a man.
He made her all sex, frenzied like, and only for meand I couldn’t do a damned thing. She was in torture from his games, CassI gave her peace.”
She was silent a moment, not wanting to desert him but fearful that Roaring Mountain, who couldn’t be. far off, might return at any second.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Look, they have to have a war party heading this way. I say we take our chances, get into the void, and wait. The odds ain’t great, but even if we did it’s better than staying here.”
She was surprised. “We? You’re coming, too?”
He nodded. “Oh, I thought about killing myself, but I got this real urge inside me to pay ‘em back.
Pay ‘em all back, like you said back in the gym at the start. I want to get these bastards, and particularly I want to get the ones that caused this back in Anchor Logh. Will you come?”
She thought a moment. “What about the others here?”
“No time, and too big a risk. Either they’ll be rescued or they won’t, but if we take the whole mob they’ll catch us sure.”
“All right, then. Let’s move.”
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of the sheet rock with little growing. She could see the whole thing from up there and was shocked to see how tiny the place really was. They had less than twenty meters to reach the void, and they made it before any alarms were sounded, holding hands so they would not get separated.
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As soon as they were in the void itself she stopped him. “What’s the matter?” he asked nervously.
“We don’t want to get too far from the pocket or we’ll just wind up lost and alone,” she told him. “I say let’s walk just a hundred paces in a straight line, counting from now. If we can’t see the pocket from there, then we stop and wait there.”
“Fair enough for a start,” he agreed, and began the counting process. At a hundred paces they stopped and looked back. There was a very slight, almost imperceptible lightening of the void in the direction from which they’d come, but otherwise there was no way to know that anything was there.
It provided the only orientation they had, so they decided to settle for it. There was nothing to do now but sit down on the soft, spongy, invisible ground and wait until they had to return or strike out blindly in search of food and water.
“I wanted to bring a canteen, at least,” Dar told her, “but all that stuff was over by the mules and so were they.” They sat in silence for a while, and Cass lay back and tried to relax as much as she could. Although they were most probably dead people at this point, the immediate terrors were out of the way and she found herself suddenly unable to stop shaking and crying a bit. She just didn’t fight it any more, and let it come, and it was a long time flowing from her. Dar held her and tried to comfort her, and it was some time before she realized that he was crying, too.
Coduro had brought half the armed might of Persellus, from the looks of it, including two officers of high rank that were real wizards, albeit of lesser powers.
“One of mine went nuts and defected, carrying off a girl,” he told them. “We beat them off and cost them some lives, but with all the captives he’s SOUL RIDER: SPIRITS OF FLUX AND ANCHOR 133
got this bastard has another army at his command.
How many troops you got with you?”
The colonel, a bearded man in his fifties but in prime condition and looking ready for a fight, responded, “Fifty experienced soldiers, a chief noncom, and the captain and myself. But how are you going to Find a tiny pocket in all this space?
They could be anywhere by now. We came as an escort, not a raiding party.”
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“Well, I’ll lead you to his pocket,” the stringer told him. “I don’t know why except I kind of took a liking to her, but I put my string on the girl he carried off. It’ll lead us right to them.”
“Well! That’s different! Tremendous stroke of luck, though.”
Matson suddenly hesitated. It was an odd thing, him putting that string on the only one that was captured. He’d never done anything like that before in his life, and he didn’t know why he’d done it this time. He shrugged, went about his business.
and didn’t think much more on it as he recreated the strong defensive position. He didn’t think the cult could possibly have turned all those captives into troops that could be used effectively in so short a time, but he didn’t want to return here and find out he was wrong, either. Finally he remounted his horse and went over to the soldiers. “Let’s go get ‘em,” he said enthusiastically.
Rory Montagne, he thought as he rode. A minor real wizard, able to make changes in individual human and animal bodies but that was all. He certainly wouldn’t have the power to create a pocket on his own. The one he’d used for years down near Anchor Dowt had been an old one created by some wizard traveling the void long ago, or so the story went. He remembered when Montagne ‘was still leading a double life out of Haratus, a Fluxland near there, acting as a scenic designer for the local wizard while kidnapping a number of local women, 134 Jack L. Chalker
one by one, and hauling them off to this pocket of his for who knew what purpose? Finally the bastard had picked on a woman who happened to be a drill instructor at the local military school and he’d damn near had his balls kicked off and was lucky to escape with his life.
What was he doing here?
The tiny, thin energy trail left by Cass was ragged but not hard for him to follow, since it had his personal frequency. They did not have a long ride before he suddenly raised his hand and brought the troop to a halt.
“What’s the matter?” the colonel asked him, hand going to his pistol.
“See that slightly lighter area over there? That’s got to be it. The trail goes right to it. I’d like to take a few troopers and scout it first. Best to know what we’re getting into.”
The colonel nodded and turned. “Fiver! Mihies!
Godort! Fall in over here and dismount’”
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tough and smart enough. Matson loaded his shotgun and dismounted with them. “Stay ready,” he warned the officer. “Montague’s range is pretty limitedhe has to be looking at you to do anyr thingbut he’s too much for me to handle.” With that he and the soldiers started cautiously forward.
“Sir!” one of the troopers hissed when they were almost to the pocket’s border.
“Huh? What’s the matter?”
“Over there to the left. One, maybe two shapes.
Guards, perhaps.”
He looked in the indicated direction and was impressed by the senses of the trooper. These were good soldiers. The figures were barely blobs at this distance, but they fanned out and moved slowly to close the net. At the point where they could finally make out the figures, though, Matson stopped, held up his hand again, and stood up, then pointed his SOUL RIDER: SPIRITS OF FLUX AND ANCHOR 135
shotgun at the pair. He knew one of them, but the other was a stranger, and he didn’t know what they might have done to the one he did know by this time.
“All rightboth of you! Stand with hands raised, facing me!” he commanded sharply.
They both jumped at the voice, then did as instructed. Cass suddenly recognized the lean figure in black. “Matson! Thank heaven!”
“Or somebody. You understand I don’t know who’s been messing with your mind, so I have to be cautious. There’s three more guns on you two, so come forward and don’t make any sudden moves.”
They did as instructed, and soon were facing him across less than two meters. Matson reclipped his shotgun and walked up to them, staring at the larger of the two. “I’ll be damned! I thought you were a man!”
“I used to be,” Dar responded glumly.
Matson stared at him. “Don’t I know you?”