Such potential leaders come very rarely in human civilization, and even more rarely are they in the position to act to change history forever. Mervyn had known that, had understood that there was no one else who could rally a revolution and keep its fires burning. And when she had assured him that she was committed, that Matson’s survival would not change her, he’d known it was a lie, even if she herself did not at the time.
You can’t lie to a wizard. . . .
But a wizard can lie to a wizard.
“Where have you been for all these years?” she asked him, still staring out at the beauty of the Fluxland.
“I retired from the business, basically. I didn’t want to go back to it on the other side of World under some phony name and face. I didn’t really want to go back at all. I’d really survived in that game longer than most and I figured that hole in my chest was telling me that I’d used up the last of my luck. I have to admit that having a pack of powerful wizards anxious to retire me was part of it, too. I got the real strong feeling that they’d be real nice to me if I went along, but that it would be nothing at all to make me really dead if I didn’t. I went up to Strongford, a nice Fluxland up north that’s full of retired stringers and folks who were either dead or missing for one reason or another. Jomo declared me dead, then paid off the rest and came up to a dugger’s haven near Strongford. Got a job and a fat account.”
Strongford was very exclusive, and by design. The shield, maintained by powerful retired stringers in concert, was incredibly strong and selective. It admitted everyone, with the exception that it kept out any wizards who were not members of the stringer’s guild, but you could leave only by special permission. A lot of people with a lot of ill-gotten gains took advantage of that, and the place had a lot of money and was something of a pleasant, benign pleasure palace where no questions were asked—and a rake-off of the enormous profits went to the guild. Matson described himself as “in the hotel business,” but since a place you couldn’t leave except to be thrown out to the wolves hardly needed a hotel, it was pretty obvious that the place was not the usual sort of rental hotel. He was also a deputy there, helping to keep things right and peaceful and to teach newcomers the rules.
“Why did you come back, then?” she asked him.
“You know why. We got word of the snatch, and it was pretty easy to put two and two together. I mean, you didn’t have time for Spirit to have been anybody else’s kid, although she was something the wizards in Globbus sort of forgot to mention in all this. She’s my daughter as much as yours, and I couldn’t stand by and let that bastard get away with this, even if I’d never seen her. Old man Stankovitch—the head stringer wizard in Strong-ford—agreed with me, and I put on the old outfit, picked up Jomo, and we headed south. I didn’t want to cross old Merv, though, so I got in touch with him, and he’s been my protection.”
And mine, too, Kasdi thought, growing more bitter. He knew he couldn’t keep word of the reappearance of Jomo and Matson from her, so he diverted her. No wonder he was so annoyed to see her here now, when Matson was here, but because of the emergency with Spirit and Suzl, he couldn’t deny her entry. No wonder he was so anxious to get rid of her!
And now, here he was, coming up the stairs to them, looking resigned. He stopped and faced her. “So now it’s out in the open. In a way, I’m almost glad. It’s been quite a burden for me to carry.”
“You hypocrite!” she snapped. “You spout platitudes about the purity of the Church while you live in this echo of some pagan fantasy. You lie whenever it suits you. You don’t believe in the Church or its teachings one bit. You’re just a more subtle version of Coydt and Haldayne and the rest. You want power. You wanted more power than you could get on your own, all nine of you, so when I came along, I was your perfect patsy. And I trotted off and gave you your empire.”
Mervyn looked genuinely stung by the remarks. “I wish things truly were as simple and as cut-and-dried as you see everything. After all this time, you still see the world through a little girl’s eyes. In one way that’s a help, because it’s allowed you to bear your burdens, but in a situation like this it serves you ill. No one is all evil or all good. That has never been the nature of the conflict with the Seven. Not Coydt, certainly—the man is truly evil by any definition. But the rest are as sincere in what they believe as we are in opposing them. But it is not necessary to be evil to be wrong. They are wrong, and you are wrong now. We had a dying civilization and a dying race. You revived it. You made it live again.”
“You stole my life!”
“Nobody asked you to be a saint; we wanted merely a leader. You imposed all those conditions on yourself—against my will, if you’ll remember. That little girl side of you couldn’t deal with anything other than absolutes. You looked at yourself and you saw the face of Diastephanos, the Sister General who’d gone over to the other side. You stole your life, because you were so afraid to be human.”
“You gave me no choice, no chance to grow up! You manipulated me from the start, and you manipulated Matson, too, for that matter. I am exactly what you wanted most. I am your ultimate lie!
“You’re worse than that. Because of all this, you stole Spirit’s life, too. She should be training for a trade, romancing the boys, facing a solid future and a normal marriage and life. Now she’s a pregnant mental cripple worshipfully married to a thirty-seven-year-old woman who’s always been a social and sexual deviate. Coydt didn’t do that because she was Cassie and Matson’s daughter. He did it because she was the daughter of a monument you created, something she didn’t even know until almost when it happened! You robbed me of her all the way along, you know. I never even was able to say one word to her without pretending to be somebody else! You took my daughter, my chance for love and a normal life, everything—and gave me what in return? A chance to wear a rag, to age fifty years in eighteen, to sleep on stone and straw, unable to even keep a lock of my daughter’s hair or ever be loved by anyone except as some kind of angel or demigod. It’s more than my life! You took mine and Spirit’s humanity!”
Jomo looked down at her sadly, and there seemed to be a tear in one of his bulging eyes. Matson leaned back against a pillar and lit a cigar, looking a little sad. Down below, Suzl watched the thing play out, not understanding the words but totally understanding them all the same. Her first look at Matson, alive and well, had told her just what was coming. She didn’t need to know the words, for she knew the situation and she knew Cass.
Poor Cassie, she thought sadly. All that power, all that influence, all that force—and it’s nothing. Welcome to the real world, Cass. I’m sorry you had to finally make the trip.
“Are you finished?” Mervyn asked her.
“I’m only starting,” she snapped. “It’s the only thing I can do and you know it. I can’t live any other way. I can’t kill myself, because I can’t violate my vows. But I’ll fight no more for you, old man. I’ll make no more pious speeches. I’m no good to you in any way anymore—no good to anybody. I’m a priestess, and I will remain one, even if my faith is weak and I feel like I’ve been raped. But I resign my sainthood. The Church and the empire sink or swim without Sister Kasdi. I’ve retired. I will do no more killing for you. Do it yourself from now on.”
“You’ve paid a big price, Cass,” Matson said finally, “but it hasn’t been a waste. The old boy’s right in one thing. We’re moving again. Thinking again. The change I saw in the people during this business, going through those Anchors, was amazing. But I can’t really talk about this. After all, I didn’t have to pay the bill.”
Mervyn sighed. “Well, if you will fight no more for empire, even to protect it, will you fight for personal reasons?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I came here not just because I received word that you two had met. I came here primarily because the three of you were here. Word has come that Coydt has made his move. He has taken Anchor Logh, and we are powerless to do anything about it.”
“What!”
“Somehow—I don’t know how, and won’t until I get there, I suspect—there is a wizard’s shield of tremendous force around the entirety of Anchor Logh. No one has been able to penetrate it. And Coydt and at least fifteen hundred insane killers are inside that shield right now, doing whatever they wish.”
11
EXPLORATORY MISSION
“Why Anchor Logh?” Kasdi asked them as they studied the situation in the map room. “There are twenty-eight Anchors. Why is it always Anchor Logh?”
“It isn’t, really,” Mervyn replied. “There have been attacks on many Anchors, and our forces had to fight street-to-street taking some of them. It boils down in this case, I’m afraid, to you again. Coydt is feeling the pressure and he doesn’t like it. Obviously he planned this operation carefully with the rest of the Seven. If they can get away with it once, here, they need take not twenty-eight Anchors but only seven to access the gates from within. If they can take, and hold, a single Anchor for a matter of days, or weeks, or whatever, it will show that it can be done. Then they will only have to solve the communications problem to unlock all the gates within the requisite one minute period. Considering the other obstacles, they will solve that one,too.”
“So this is their demonstration,” she said sourly. “To the others and to me. He knows that all the people I hold dear are there. He knows I will have to come to him.”
Mervyn nodded. “Yes. And he’ll have you in Anchor, where his might will overwhelm your power. He wants you, too, Matson. He doesn’t know who or what you are, but you’ve cost him the heart of his own personal organization. He’ll meet you in Anchor, but on turf he totally controls.”
“First,” the old stringer commented practically, “we have to figure out how to get the hell in.”
It was agreed that Mervyn and Kasdi would fly to Anchor Logh and assess the situation. Others of the Nine and some of the top wizards on the side of the empire were already flocking to the border, and troops had been mobilized and were moving in. Should the shield lift, Anchor Logh would be instantly under a siege more powerful than any force seen since Balacyn.
The whole of Anchor was invisible to those not blessed or cursed with the wizards’ Flux power. There was only an indistinct grayness, a solidification of the void into a barrier none could pass.
The big names in wizardry were already there. Here now was Tatalane, the green, elfin wizard only one meter tall with the shell-like ears and piercing emerald eyes. Here, too, was Krupe, the fat, balding wizard who was never far from his wine. Also present were the beautiful wizard MacDonna, all two-hundred-fifteen centimeters of her, with flaming red hair and piercing blue eyes, and the tiny, dark-skinned Kyubioshi, her shaved head and quiet presence making her seem almost a life-sized statue. Five of the Nine, then, were present here, the other four holding back lest this terror be but a diversion for some other less obvious plot.
“The shield is multilayered and extremely thick,” Tatalane told them gravely. “This is no work of some major sorcerer; it is most certainly the combined and practiced work of an entire team of enormous power.”
Kasdi shook her head in wonder. “But how can they do it? Anchors can’t have shields. The magic doesn’t work there!”
“The shield isn’t in Anchor,” Krupe explained.
“It’s so simple I’m surprised no one ever thought of it before. It is by our measurements exactly five meters into Flux around the entire Anchor boundary.”
“It’s simple why it was never tried before,” Mervyn put in. “Nobody has ever been able to make, let alone sustain, a shield that is roughly three hundred kilometers by one hundred around. I’ll hand this to Coydt—he’s the first man in the history of World to get so much power to cooperate for so long.”
Kasdi stepped back and looked thoughtfully at the shield. “What I want to know is how they expect to get back out. They can’t sustain this indefinitely.”
“I suspect we couldn’t stop the wizards,” Krupe noted. “The shield doesn’t need a top, nor could it have one. It’s too high up for us to get over it, of course, but they could pick any point up there at a reasonable altitude and simply fly out. As for the others, it’s unknown, but I’m sure they have something planned. If I were they, I’d simply have a good stock of uniforms like we use, put up some resistance, then fade and join our own troops. We’d never know if they were good at it. We have too many soldiers to sort them out. We’ll work on covering that angle, of course—it’d be a simple matter to vary our own uniforms—but that is not the problem now. We have a battalion and some very good wizards covering the Hellgate in case they want to use the back door, by the way. Pity we can’t use it.”
“Years ago I could have, with the Soul Rider inside me,” Kasdi noted. “But even if we could, only a few could go and there would surely be a nasty reception committee waiting at the other end.”
“We could take care of that to a point,” Matson said. “Send in a few good concussion and shrapnel bombs ahead of us. It’d clear the corridors and probably blow the power plant as well. Everybody would be equally in the dark. Then come up with automatic fire to establish ourselves. From that point, anybody who knew the temple could probably give ’em a good run for their money—providing they didn’t stumble in the dark and kill themselves. I may be wrong, but I don’t remember ever seeing a window in one of those things.”
“You’re right on that,” Kasdi told him, “but the dark wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. There are some easy spells for adjusting your eyes to the dark. I doubt if many of them would have the same ability, since it makes you oversensitive to light. And they wouldn’t have a wizard to correct it, since they’d be in Anchor.” She sighed. “But what’s the use? We can’t get in to begin with.”
“Yes, we can,” Mervyn replied softly.
She stared at him and immediately guessed what he was thinking. “Oh, no! That is definitely out! In the name of Heaven, she’s so with child that it could come at any moment! You’ve got her and you’ve got me! Do you want to kill my unborn grandchild as well? What is enough?” She turned to Matson. “You can’t go along with this!”
He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I want Coydt in Anchor. If I could get in, I’d go. But Anchor Logh’s nothing to me. I’ll get him, sooner or later. If there’s a way in, I’m going. But I’m not anxious to get at him now at anybody else’s expense.”
Kasdi turned back to Mervyn. “See? We absolutely forbid it!”
“Kasdi—your father’s in there,” Mervyn reminded her. “And so are your three sisters, five nephews, and three nieces. Not to mention Cloise and Drunyon, who raised Spirit, and all those other relations, as well as Sister Tamara and the rest of the Church personnel. They may be undergoing unspeakable tortures now.”
“Or they might all be dead,” she responded, “in which case, what you suggest will wipe out the whole line. Won’t the Seven be pleased then!”
“We only need her to bypass the Guardian and reach the end of the tunnel,” the old wizard reminded her. “Once we’re through, she can return. The risk is there, true, but it’s relatively small.”
“So two or three of us get in. What good will that do?”
Matson was considering the problem. “In tactics they call it a beachhead, for reasons I’ve never understood. It seems to me that the problem’s easy to state. We can’t break this shield from outside, but we’ve got to break it. We can’t get enough troops in that little hole to fight our way to the walls. But if some good fighters can get into that temple with some knowledge of it and decent weapons, we can secure it long enough to bring some top class wizards through. Then we get out to the countryside. A small number. Make it to a predetermined place on the border. Our wizards and our guns take out those holding that section, and a small part of the shield collapses. We come in and they are bottled up, and that’s the end of that.”
The wizards nodded. All of them were concerned with Flux power and politics; none were truly military people, and none had any real feel for the soldier on the ground with a weapon, although that was who always had to take the ground after they blasted a path. Now it was the opposite problem. Now they needed the soldiers to blast a path to the shield.
“General Hawney had something like that in mind,” Krupe told them, “but it might not work. It’s entirely possible that the temple part of that passage is so well booby-trapped that no one could survive. And if they did, there aren’t very many ways out of that temple.”
“If you have the right equipment, you can always make your own exit,” Matson replied.
“Yes, and bring every one of the enemy in the capital running to you. Then it would be a crosscountry trip with nobody you could be certain was a friend and with the whole pack on your heels. Finally, the wizards’ positions just inside Flux will be well protected and well defended, and none of those wizards will be pushovers either. There is simply too much that can go wrong. It’s impossible!”
“What other suggestion do you have, Mister Krupe?” Matson asked him. “Wait here until they get tired and come out? Well, I’m here to tell you that they don’t ever have to come out. You as much as admitted that you can’t stop the wizards if they want to get out. The rest of ’em are false wizards, duggers, and Fluxers with no power at all out here to speak of. This here is their own Fluxland, sort of, under their rules. I lived these past years in a place where almost nobody could get out and nobody particularly wanted to.”
That was sobering. It had never occurred to them to think of this as a permanent condition, but it would certainly have occurred to Coydt.
“These wizards will never sit still for it indefinitely. They’ll want something more,” Kasdi argued.
It was Tatalane who spoke now. “True, but whether it is a matter of days or weeks, they can be reinforced and replaced as need be. What is certain is that nothing will stop the Seven from doing this in the next cluster, and then the next, while holding here. They can spare many wizards if we must divide our forces in half, or thirds, or more. The longer they hold out here, the greater that danger will be. And when we are divided enough, and weakened enough, then the old order strikes full with its armies. Not just the empire will fall, but civilizations as well. The communications problem, if they have not yet solved it, can then be attacked at leisure. We must break this— now!”
Kasdi felt very little love for their empire or even human civilization at that point. But what kind of a world would her grandchild grow up in? Who in fact could stand against such evil totally triumphant?
And yet World was a big place, and there were many places to hide with no real chance of discovery. Flux wizards like she and Suzl could create their own impenetrable Fluxland in the wild north far from Anchor. The Seven would not pursue. Their goal was Anchor.
Their goal was to open the Hellgates.
“Only as far as the vortex,” she said at last. “And then only if you can first somehow communicate the problem to her and if she is willing to help.”
Getting the situation across to Suzl proved relatively easy in Flux, where images could be conjured up at will. The total lack of meaningful communication with Spirit had been due to the other parts of her spell and her mental state. It was Suzl’s job to get that message across, and this she resolutely refused to do.
It wasn’t that Suzl was unsympathetic to their plight, only that she had no more ties to Anchor Logh and it was a remote place filled mostly with faceless, nameless people. Kasdi had come home a hero; Suzl had come home half male and half female, had been called names, had been disowned by her own family and friends. The hurt she’d suffered then remained with her for her entire adult life, and she simply could not find it in herself to do for them what, in reverse circumstances, they would never do for her.
Spirit and the baby were a different matter. She insisted that no action be taken that would endanger them until the child came, and as they had no luck getting the situation over directly to Spirit, they finally had to gnaw and gnash their teeth and do it Suzl’s way.
Attempts to break the shield were being made all the time, but so far it had weakened only slightly for short periods of total attack and then firmed up again. Coydt’s skillful alliance forged with the Fluxlords had sustained itself over a period far longer than anyone would have guessed, and it showed no signs of abating.
They whiled away the time planning the expedition, knowing that every day’s delay meant their chances were slimmer and slimmer. Only Matson, who knew Coydt from the old days, thought otherwise. “The longer time passed, the more secure they’ll all feel. If we’d come through that hole right away, we might not have had a chance. Now I’ll bet there’s maybe two bored guards, both of whom are bein’ punished for something.”
Nobody knew how many people the Guardian would allow in with a Soul Rider, but it had to be few even for physical reasons, and with equipment and Suzl along at least as far as the vortex, that meant a small group indeed.
Matson would go, but Jomo could not. His great size would make him stand out anywhere, and he was instantly recognizable and certainly on Coydt’s shoot-on-sight list. Kasdi would go, although she, too, had many liabilities and no real fighting will. She wanted Coydt in Flux as much as Matson wanted him in Anchor. She would go, she realized, because her family was there, because Matson was going and she could not bear to send him off again, and because she knew both the temple byways and the Anchor better than just about anyone else they had.
Matson chose two tough career soldiers, Captain Macree and Sergeant Zlidon, because both had fought in campaigns in Anchor. Macree was an explosives expert, and Zlidon was good at organizing and at automatic weapons. Both had been born and raised in Anchor Logh. But Kasdi was the only true wizard—Matson was a false wizard, good only at illusions, convincing though they were. Mervyn forbade any of the Nine from going; the wizards inside would certainly be of lesser caliber, except for Coydt and perhaps one or two others at the gates, and he simply didn’t want to risk losing them to a bullet before they even had a chance to use their stuff. They finally found a number of powerful volunteers both from the Sisterhood and from the staffs of the major wizards.
It would be Matson’s and the soldiers’ job to get them into the temple. It would be Kasdi’s job to get them positioned and moving through the temple so that they could command it. Little by little, then, more and more good soldiers would be ferried in a few at a time, and they would fortify the temple against the outside. At the same time, small teams of wizards led by Anchor Logh natives would move out and attempt to reach and breach the wall and the shield.
On the twelfth day everyone held their breath as Spirit delivered a 368.5-gram healthy-looking baby boy. The delivery was not effortless, but it was painless, thanks to the wizard powers of Flux. The child looked quite normal and human in every way, to the relief of all, but didn’t really seem to look like either Spirit or Suzl—or Kasdi or Matson. He was cute, though, and both grandparents were pleased. As both parents were mute and illiterate, Kasdi, with Matson’s shrugging permission, named him Jeffron, a diminutive form of her own father’s name, and so it was recorded by Mervyn in the official registers.
Suzl was a bit put off when it turned out to be a boy. She had so expected a girl that the idea that it might not be hadn’t even entered her mind. She was, however, relieved that it was over and that mother and baby were doing fine, and also relieved, as were Mervyn and Kasdi, that the Soul Rider this time had remained with the mother.
“Maybe it only likes or favors women,” Kasdi theorized. “How do we know?”
Suzl warmed quickly to the child, however, particularly when she discovered that she could breastfeed as well as Spirit. Duty now called, however, and it was time for her to make good on her end of the bargain.
How much do you remember of your past? she asked Spirit. It was sometimes unsettling to discover the lack of frames of reference when talking to the woman who had, after all, grown up normally.
But Spirit had put almost her entire past so far out of her mind that it might as well not exist. What was there was sometimes hard to dig out. With that last visit to Anchor Logh, Spirit, by spell or by psychology, had literally buried all that she had been.