Slowly, Suzl began to draw from her a present state of mind. She could not remember much, and what she did remember was impossible to grab hold of or build upon. To Spirit, it seemed, there was only the present, and her practical memory seemed to go back only to the time when she gave Suzl her powers to use. She could not remember life without Suzl, nor could she remember what Suzl had looked like before. She did, however, remember her mother—her real one—as her mother and a kindly, middle-aged man who she seemed to think might have been her father. Suzl recognized the vision as not her father, but her maternal grandfather, who apparently had made quite an impression on her. She did not remember Coydt.
Still, Suzl was able to put across the idea that a lot of people, perhaps the kindly man, were in trouble from evil others, and that she was needed to guide some rescuers to the place where she had surrendered her powers. She agreed to help, simply by following Suzl’s lead and doing what was asked of her, whether or not she understood what she was doing.
Anchor Logh had been in the grip of the enemy for sixteen days when they returned to the Hellgate, hidden behind a shield that had revealed none of its secrets.
Spirit led Suzl, Kasdi, Matson, Zlidon, and Macree down the ladder to the long tube. Jomo took command of the caldera itself, to make sure that nothing went wrong at this end.
Tatalane had come up with a reasonable compromise on the lighting situation, and all now looked slightly inhuman with their eyes adjusted. All now had eyes like those of a cat, eyes that adjusted for any available light and would be fine in all but total darkness. Texture, contrast, and distance ability were all quite good, although the laws of physics, which had to be obeyed for an Anchor situation, had rendered them colorblind, and there was a focusing problem they had to get used to. Either they could see far away or very close up, but not both at the same time.
It was the first time in a fearsome Hellgate for the three men, and the first time in many years for Kasdi, but while there seemed to be a flickering of some bright, ghostly spiderlike thing here and there in the tunnels, they were allowed to progress to the vortex.
Suzl could see the patterns clearly, and it was with some amazement that she realized that Kasdi could not. But the priestess had never forgotten the pattern needed to open that way, and she did not now. Matson reached into a pack on Zlidon’s back and removed three small devices, which he proceeded to set. “Now, when I tell you, you open that thing and these three things go through. I don’t think they’ll be expecting anything. We’ll give it a count of twenty, then I’ll go through and check to see what else is needed.”
“No,” Kasdi told him. “I will go. There will still be some Flux power on the emergence spot. You would not be able to draw the pattern and get back in time. I will be able to shield myself.”
He stared at her a minute, then nodded. “O.K. In, look around, and back. If all’s clear, we all go through. If not, we’ll give them a lot worse than these three, then go right in after. You’re sure Suzl understands her part?”
“I think so. She’s better.”
“O.K., as soon as we’re in, it’s back for the next group. When we get a minimum of a dozen or so, we’ll start to move out and explore the place. Now— let’s do it!”
Kasdi traced the combination, hoping that the devices would go through without a human attached. As far as she knew, it had never been tried this way. Matson tossed in the devices, and all held their breaths, hoping that they would not hit the wall and bounce back into the chamber. They went through, and Kasdi started counting down from thirty aloud. At “five” she traced the pattern again, and then held her breath and jumped in at “zero.” Jeffron, in Spirit’s arms, was crying, the sound reverberating up and down the tube. Instantly the sound was cut off and replaced with a far different one.
The room had been sealed except for a trap door at the top. The grenades had blown right through the floor and had also blown the trap door right out, sending it far into the hallway. The bloody bodies of three men, who’d obviously been sitting almost on top of the explosives playing cards, were about in heaps, as were the remains of their deck and their chips. The lights in the immediate area had been blown out, but the generator was still humming at the far end of the hall. She ducked back on the spot and traced the design. Jeffron’s cries suddenly picked up where they’d left off.
“Three men dead, big hole!” she shouted over the baby’s din. “Lights are smashed, but the power’s still on!”
Matson nodded “Let’s go,” he said coolly.
She traced the pattern, and they all went in except Suzl and Spirit and the baby, of course. Suzl watched them vanish, then nodded to Spirit and they made their way back along the tunnel There was a fair number of people to get through yet. After that, she’d sit up with Jomo at the top of the caldera and, with the big dugger, worry herself sick.
They all made it through safely and quickly heaved themselves through the hole in the ceiling. There were some shouts down the corridor, and the sound of a few people running. Somebody yelled, “Get some lights down here!”
They took their postions, and Matson handed Kasdi a semiautomatic rifle that seemed to weigh a ton. She took it anyway, getting a gun belt from Zlidon’s pack filled with ready clips. She wasn’t much of a shot, and killing this way wasn’t exactly her field, but she was prepared to do it.
“Want us to blow the generator?” Macree whispered.
“No,” the stringer responded. “Let’s see if we can keep it intact. If the power stays on, nobody will come running except those in the temple itself. Maybe we can take it as it is.”
“If they don’t have five hundred men in here,” Zlidon added worriedly.
There were some torches with the fire equipment on each level, and somebody finally thought of them. Two torches flared down the hallway, and after adjusting to the new light, they could see four or five men coming down the hallway. All wore pistols, but none had their pistols drawn. Clearly they were thinking less of an attack than of an accident, which meant they either had relaxed too much or weren’t that bright. Either way, it was a break.
They let the newcomers come all the way down, until they actually passed Matson and Macree. They saw the bodies of the three men and the huge hole in the floor, and hands went to their guns—but too late. They were mowed down so easily there wasn’t any challenge to it at all.
Matson waited for the noise to abate, then stamped out the torches. They held their breath, listening, but heard nothing more. Finally Matson said, “Dump the bodies down the hole. I don’t care if the next group does have to climb through them!” He and Macree quickly managed the feat and also threw the dead torches down. “Now let’s see who comes looking for them,” the stringer said.
But another five soldiers were in and there still was no sign of any newcomers. The bodies had given them something of a start, since the instant fear was that those were the bodies of Matson’s group, but Matson was able to detect movement and whisper the password before they started throwing nasty explosive things.
When the next five also arrived without incident, Matson began to feel secure. “Cass, you want to go back and give them the situation? I think I’m going to take a small party exploring here.”
“Why me? This is my temple, remember. I know my way around it better than anyone.”
“And you spent several days drilling it into us. You’re not a soldier, Cass; you’re a wizard. We need you later.”
“I’m coming along,” she said firmly.
“All right. Soldier—you know the route back. You don’t need the girl to get out. Tell ’em to bring ’em through as quick as possible. We’re going to sweep this level, then return and get more people to go up.”
And with that, the four who’d been there first started along the corridor. Cass passed the secret passage to the Sister General’s quarters and said, “We ought to put somebody on this.” Matson nodded, but he had no one to spare right now.
The whole area was mostly filled with old and stored furniture and other such material as they expected to find in the temple. Here and there a rat would scuttle by, and there were a record number of bugs, but no more people. They finally reached the far stairway, and Matson ducked in and listened, then returned. “Don’t hear anything, but even if nobody comes to investigate why those guys are missing, somebody’s bound to be down to relieve the watch.”
They made their way back along the corridor to the waiting soldiers. Now they were twenty-four. He formed a second five-person squad and sent them ahead. “Floor by floor, nice and quiet,” he told them. “If that security system is still on, they’ll know when you get one floor up. Throw a bomb if you have to, but when you’re discovered and can’t wipe them out, make enough noise to reach anywhere in the temple. At that point, you men use those explosives there and blow the power plant.” He turned back to Kasdi. “Now let’s go see who or what’s in the Sister General’s apartment.”
It bothered him, and the rest as well, that it had been so easy so far. Had complacency set in this quickly? “Consider the quality of the material he used,” Kasdi noted, but she was only hoping.
They climbed the dusty back stairs of the passageway single-file, rifles at the ready. Carefully, Matson pushed at the panel that opened into the large walk-in closet in the Sister General’s bedroom.
Matson listened, peered out, then walked out and into the bedroom, the rest following. He stopped there. The stench in the room was nearly unbearable.
There were five dead women in the room, and none had died a nice or quick death. All had been stripped, tied to objects, then slowly and brutally tortured. Butchered was a better word for it; butchered alive. Blood was everywhere.
One of them had been tied to the bed with some kind of wire, arms and legs bound spread-eagle. The expression frozen on her face was one of unforgettable horror. All of the bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition.
“Oh, Goddess!” Kasdi sobbed. “It’s Sister Tamara!” Matson barely recognized the strong-looking woman who’d died so horribly, but he remembered being told that the Sister General here was formerly one of the group from that last, fatal stringer train.
“Leave her!” he said curtly. “I don’t want any signs we were here until we’re ready to take this place. They may not have ever found out about that secret passage.” Kasdi gave him a terrible look, but it left him unmoved. “You wanted to come,” he reminded her.
The office had been ransacked, with papers all over the place, pictures torn from the walls, and furniture overturned and smashed. All of the religious objects of any value were gone.
They had blown in the security doors and apparently moved with lightning speed against the helpless women occupants. The walls showed a wavy line of bullet holes at about waist level, so they’d come in shooting.
Macree was thinking. “We’re two levels up, right? Then our other team has to be just below us, heading from the front back down this way. Offices on that level, if I remember your diagram, Sister.”
She nodded absently, hardly hearing, her face cold and immobile. Damn Suzl! she couldn’t help thinking. This might have been prevented if we had moved earlier! It was an irrational thought; the temple had to have been hit quickly and early, and certainly for the first two days it had been heavily defended, including down below. It might not have been possible before this to get this far. And she, too, had opposed using Spirit earlier. Those things were convenient to forget, for somebody had to be blamed.
The rifle suddenly seemed far lighter than it had, and friendlier. She just wanted to find them. Find them and kill them all.
They went carefully down the stairs and advanced up the hallway, checking each office as they did so. All showed signs of being ransacked and looted and there was much senseless vandalism, but little else. With a shock Kasdi recognized the very room where she’d gotten lost and blundered into the old Sister General fixing the Paring Rite with her priestess lover. The records were still kept there, but all of the equipment was smashed now. Matson, however, made an interesting comment. “This room doesn’t have all the papers spread around.”
“All the records were on film,” she told him.
“Yeah—for everybody in the Anchor. Where’s all that film now?”
She saw what he meant. Cabinet after cabinet had been overturned, but all were empty. “Every man, woman, and child living in Anchor Logh or who had ever lived here were in those records,” she noted.
“Nice,” he commented. “If they have a film reader somewhere, and I suppose they do, they have everything they need. Who owns what, who’s married to whom, whose kids are whose, who knows how to run or fix this or that—everything.”
“But why?”
“We’ll know when we can ask them,” he replied.
Shortly they met with the first squad. So far— nothing. Some shot up and badly decomposing bodies were in some of the offices, but nothing alive.
“Send one of your people back and get guard posts set up all along the access to this level,” he ordered. “Start wiring explosives all along as well. We’ll try the next level the same way.”
The next level was a chamber of horrors. Offices and small chapels, even cells, had been used to stack dead bodies, hundreds of them. The smell was sickening, and they could hardly stand it. Some sort of masks would be needed just to clean the level up, and the flies and maggots were well at work. They wanted off that level as quickly as possible, but the next level was the one below the inner temple itself and the street entrance. On the next level were street-level front and rear entrances and exits. Matson backed them off a level. The new soldiers were already establishing themselves, and it looked like they now had a fair force in there. Matson sent them up in squads to the deadly level above, so they would know just what kind of people they were dealing with. The point was well-made.
Progress was going very well, and that worried Matson more than a fight. “It isn’t like Coydt to leave his back door open. He knows the rules as well as we do. That opposition barely qualifies as token. The time to stop us was before we got established, not now. I don’t like it. We’re still bottled up in this one big building, and there’s always the possibility he’s just waiting to get the most of us with one big bang.”
“You mean blow up the temple?” Kasdi was appalled at the idea. “But—that would certainly block the Hellgate for him, too.”
“Yeah, and us. We’ll have the troops check for it. If it’s here, it’s got to be real big or it wouldn’t dent a solid joint like this.”
They prepared for the assault on the ground level. This time there was opposition—a lot of it, but it was disorganized. Men yelled and screamed, explosions went off, and the hallways were crisscrossed in automatic weapons fire. They finally managed to clear the hallways, but then it was room-to-room combat, with Matson’s men tossing in explosive grenades as they went. It took the better part of an hour to secure the level, at the cost of twelve dead or seriously wounded. The kicker was when somebody got word below, and the temple was suddenly plunged into darkness. The soldiers with their specially adapted eyes had the run of the place.
Kasdi had fired at the men in the corridors with the others, and although she had a sore hip from bracing the weapon and firing it, she felt much better.
The front and back entrances were well covered. Barricades and even some artillery had been brought up by the invaders, and weapons were trained on the front street-level entrance from temple square. The back exit opened on a narrow street, though, and all they could do was seal off the street and put firepower at both ends.
They examined the remains of some of the rooms on the street level and were surprised to see them pretty much outfitted as rooms with beds. They had taken no chances and gone after anything that moved, and some innocent had been killed with the invaders. They did find a few people alive, although none in any condition to talk, and took them back on a series of litters to the gateway and to Flux, where they could be treated and interrogated.
Some of the men had been in a state of undress, and there had been women in the rooms as well.
They turned over and examined the body of one young woman, killed by a grenade. The concussion had done it; her body was definitely lifeless, but seemingly unmarked. She was wearing heavy makeup, had been as heavily perfumed, and was naked from the waist up. From the waist down she wore some sort of fishnet-like pantyhose that concealed nothing and ended at the ankles, and she had on very high-heeled shoes.
“They turned this temple into a combination charnel house and whorehouse,” she said disgustedly. “This Coydt is beyond mere insanity. Look—what’s that on her behind, there?”
Macree pulled down the fishnetting, which was secured by elastic. “It’s a number and a word in purple. It’s a tattoo, like they used to have in the old days of the Paring Rite.”
It was, in fact, the same sort of tattoo, and after all these years Kasdi could still feel the sting of getting hers in this very temple and remember how she hadn’t felt truly free until her own sorcery had wiped it away. “She’s too young for that, and that would imply they were bringing in people from Flux. No, the number’s wrong. It’s not a Paring Rite number. By the angels! It’s a registry number!”
“Huh?”
“It’s the file system used for the master records in the temple. See? That’s the code for native born to Anchor Logh. You wouldn’t recognize it because it’s strictly temple code and confidential. And under is her name, see? Johbee 19. That would be her riding number in the files.”
Matson had gone off, but now he returned and listened to the conversation. Finally he said, “Well, we got over to the gym on the other side. It was pretty well guarded, too, but not inside. We finally have some live prisoners in good shape, but I’m not sure we’re gonna get anything useful from them.”
They followed him around and through a back hall to the other side where the huge gymnasium was. In the old days, this was where you got processed after being picked and enslaved in the Paring Rite, and now it was what it usually was in any era—a place to play and relax for temple personnel.
It was now filled with bedding and at least a hundred women, all made up and dressed in the same fashion as was Johbee, but these were very much alive. “Bear with me,” Matson whispered to Kasdi, then looked over at one of the closest women. “You! Come here!”
The woman smiled and walked very sexily over to him on her high heels. “Yes, sir?”
“What’s your name?”
“I am called Tabby, sir.”
“Well, Tabby, what is it you do? What’s your job?”
“To serve men, sir, and minister to their needs. We live only to serve as the Lord commands us.”
He nodded. “Which lord is that?”
“Why, the Lord High God who created World, sir.” She spotted Kasdi standing there. “You are dressed in a blasphemous manner, my sister.”
Matson turned. “Look around at them. Look at their faces.” She looked around, not quite understanding where he was going with this and feeling as sickened by this as she had from the dead bodies below. Suddenly she saw one face and gasped. It was an absolutely beautiful face, attached to a supernaturally gorgeous body. Matson saw Kasdi’s reaction and called the woman over. She was so beautiful that it was almost impossible to keep his mind on business, .but his job and his discipline won out. “They won’t answer to you, so—what’s your name, girl?”
She smiled and bowed her head slightly. “I am called Marigail, my lord.”
“Sister Marigail! Don’t you recognize me?” Kasdi cried out, but in response she only got, “You blaspheme in that rag, old woman.”
Matson turned to Kasdi. “Get it? These are all the priestesses in the temple who survived the initial attack. And they still are in a way. It’s just that their definitions have been changed.”
Kasdi frowned and shivered “Drugs?”
“I doubt it. They’re too knowledgeable, too alert for that. And, frankly, they’re uniformly better built than they should be. Besides their vows were bound by spell in their minds. Even a drug would have-trouble overcoming that. Those spells had to be broken or rewritten.”
“Marigail always looked this good, but I see what you mean. Flux, then. But how?”
“Well, as a guess, I’d say they marched each one down to the hole and did it in the Hellgate one at a time. It’s a lot weaker, of course, but they didn’t need much. A better guess is that they trucked the whole batch out to the Flux apron and had a job done on ’em en masse by a wizard in the space between the end of Anchor and the shield.”
“It’s disgusting!”
He felt a little ashamed of himself, but he had mixed feelings on that looking at Marigail. Still, it worried him. “You see what it means? First they march in and quickly secure each riding as a military district. Then they take the capital and chop up each little bit of resistance. The rest of them, mostly farmers and townspeople with no weapons and no real experience in this, give in and go along for now. Maybe they torture and exhibit the bodies of some of the smart mouths and rebels to give ’em a reminder. That was the first stage, and while it might still be going on in some places, it was probably mostly done in the first ten days. Now, little by little, using the records they got from the temple, they’re taking the people out into Flux where they’re being remade to order. Pretty soon the first riding’s all done, and they can move all their forces to the next. I’ve seen the pattern used when a young wizard took over an old wizard’s Fluxland.”
“And they’re turning everybody into—this?”
“Not hardly. If they plan to stay, they’ll need folks who know how to grow things, how to make things, and so forth. No, you won’t have to do it to everybody, just enough to create a real example. The rest of the folks will fall into line and fall all over themselves doing whatever they’re told to do. You forget these folks’ fear of Flux. They have all the records, too. They can hold husbands, wives, kids’ lives over ’em. No, they’ll go along because they’ll be afraid not to. And the longer the new way stays, the more normal it’ll feel. Folks don’t like to be different than everybody else, especially when it’s not healthy.”
The standoff outside continued, with the forces of the invaders sealing off the temple while not firing into it. They could blow the doors, but they’d still have to attack across open areas. Their artillery would do little to break down the tremendously thick and tough material from which the temples were made, a material that had not been duplicated, even in Flux, for there was no way to break off a piece and get it to Flux.
A sweep of the temple got some more prisoners, both transformed priestesses and even a few of the invaders, now rather meek and pretty scared in the dark, not daring to light torches. From them, and from those sent back to Flux, the story of the invasion of Anchor Logh emerged.
12
FEASIBILITY STUDY
There had been no warning. The entire thing had been carefully planned out to the last detail, with Coydt directly in charge. It was, he told his followers, a scientific exercise, a “feasibility study” of several new theories and techniques in war and political control, as well as social theories he wished to test out and demonstrate. Most of the men who joined with him didn’t really understand or care about all that, and he knew it. He promised them their own private Fluxland, all to themselves, and a safe haven for as long as they wanted it.
Whether he was mad or whether there was true method to it, he told each group he needed what they wanted to hear. He promised the Fluxlords that he would break the back of the Church, pull it back not only from expansion but even from their own domains, and show it demoralized and impotent. Their fears of the Reformation were far greater than their lifelong emnity towards one another. If Coydt could deliver, they did not want to be left out.
There were a bit more than a million people in Anchor Logh, divided into fifty-seven political subdivisions called “ridings,” each with a population of about eighteen thousand. This included the concentration around the capital, which was a riding all its own. Firearms, and even bows and arrows, were strictly illegal in Anchor Logh. Almost no one, except perhaps a few stringers and others trapped with the general population, would be armed or have access to arms beyond the rather weak border patrol.
The number of his forces had been underestimated by Mervyn and the rest; they failed to take into account the contributions of population from the participating Fluxlords, which swelled his ranks to perhaps ten thousand. All were extremely well trained and well drilled in secret camps in Flux, and the attack was perfectly planned and timed. At the same moment that soldiers were being introduced into the temple basement in the same manner as Matson and Kasdi had reclaimed it, both gates were hit and specific points in the old wall were blown completely out. Within the first hour, all of the arsenals were taken, and there was only scattered border guard resistance. The shields went up at that point, coordinated by the Fluxlords. The mass of them maintained the shields only for the first few days, though; they were replaced later by something new. They weren’t sure exactly what, but they had the idea that the shield was now being maintained by only a token force of powerful wizards and a lot of very strange machines.
The temple was taken in less than two hours, most of that time consumed in getting enough men into it to handle it all without the general population becoming alarmed. Small teams then went after the police, all of whom were unarmed except for “billy clubs” in the Anchor tradition. The small arsenal and almost all the police arms were taken with few shots being fired. All electrical power was cut off.
The forces divided along well thought-out lines, occupying riding centers, while a strong force rode in on the capital from both directions. They quickly took control of the waterworks and major buildings.
There was resistance. A number of invaders were literally beaten to death by an enraged mob that surprised and jumped them, but quick examples had been made, along with assurances. Those who showed any opposition were summarily shot. For every invader killed, ten people were picked at random and mowed down in the temple square. The rest were warned that the next time it would be a hundred for a life. However, everyone was also assured that cooperation and obedience to what were called “martial law liberation forces” would result in the people’s homes and families being safeguarded. There were even apologies made for the brutality, and excuses that it was necessary to avoid greater bloodshed.
Huge numbers of people tried to bolt out of Anchor Logh, but were stopped at the wall or at the shield itself. Again, examples were made.
It took Coydt and his ten thousand less than two days to secure full control over Anchor Logh. Local civil servants cooperated with them, knowing the alternative. All public roads were declared military, and anyone on them without a letter of permission from the local commandant would be tortured and then shot or hung. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was established, not just in the cities and towns but everywhere, and ruthlessly enforced. Within five days, all people of Anchor Logh were required to report to their local churches. There they were matched with records from the temple, churches, and government, were photographed and fingerprinted and given identity cards. They were also, to their indignation, tattooed, with machines not seen since the days of the Paring Rite. Women were tattooed on their left thigh or rump, men on their left arms. Resisters were simply forced to do it. Objectors were taken away and not seen again.
Local watch groups were established throughout the whole of Anchor Logh as a part of the processing. People in positions in every commune, town, and apartment were told that they would be held directly responsible for anything traced to their local area, and all of them were married and most had small children. By the tenth day, enough examples had been made that everyone was afraid to speak of anything but work or the weather.
By the end of the second week, hope for a quick rescue had faded, in some cases into bitterness. An astonishing number of officials and merchants began to cooperate openly, even enthusiastically with the invaders. Also, the new rules were being enforced.
These struck at the very social balance of Anchor Logh and most Anchors. The Church was dissolved as an institution. Priestesses, those who survived, had vanished early in the invasion, but were now back and being paraded out as “ministering angels.” Women in supervisory positions were removed, and it became illegal for a man to work for a woman. Women were restricted to their homes and work places only, unless escorted by a man at all times. Worse, women were forbidden to wear anything above the waist, something which caused much embarrassment and much protesting— which was dealt with in the usual manner. Reminders were made that a sufficient amount of Flux remained to remake anybody into anything the new rulers wished, and again examples were made.
Men were only marginally better off. They bore direct responsibility for everything, and they were accountable for it, including a woman in their company mouthing off or protesting. One of the invaders remarked that a man was probably asked for his I.D. four times just going to a public bathroom.
More, and nastier, changes were coming, that was for sure. There were already reports of a riding commandant freeing political prisoners, who were naked and dyed red, into a forest, then hunting them like animals. The killings had slowed to a trickle, as resistance had, but there were tales of torture, Fluxchanging, and other horrors all over. Tales of mass orgies by the occupying troops were rampant, and the ridings nearest the border were reported to be model and faithful citizens of the “New Empire” to a frightening degree. There were rumors that soon an emperor and lesser royalty would be established.
Coydt’s hang-ups over women were obvious in the plan and also his methods. He was showing how an Anchor could be taken and totally transformed into something else. He was proving that the kind of control exercised by Fluxlords could be done in Anchor and that the same kind of mad empires could be established there, based on fear and physical power rather than magical abilities. True, he was using Flux, but sparingly and as a weapon. The odds were that the “social” part of his experiment would result in greater absurdities on both men and women, of which the nothing-above-the-waist rule was just a taste. He would, in fact, see just how insane the rules could be that a population not bound by Flux magic would swallow. He was going to push them to the breaking point, and find out if there was one.
The rest of his “feasibility study” was more mechanical. He had machines that could draw upon and use Flux power. Where had he learned how to build them, and how had he done so? These machines were a threat to Flux as well, for they could create an impenetrable shield anywhere, as much bottling up perpetrators as keeping enemies away.
Finally, there was the temple takeover itself. Somehow, Coydt had managed to do the impossible —to walk into a Hellgate and come out unscathed, without aid of a Soul Rider. How? And if he could, then why couldn’t the others of the Seven? Was communications strictly the problem? Or, in fact, did Coydt feel so secure with his new discoveries that he really didn’t want to open those gates after all—and hadn’t told the others how he did it?
Coydt was emerging as more and more of an enigma, although a very dangerous one—on the surface, a brutal psychopath who viewed people as things to be used and objects of his curiosity as well as his odd social and sexual hangups; yet below, a coldly brilliant, analytical mind capable of finding out what others could not and understanding and applying principles others hadn’t even dreamed of. The two were not necessarily incompatible, and there was the tragedy for World and its people.
The temple was supposed to have been consistently well guarded, but Coydt had been away for more than five days—where, nobody knew—and in that time things had gone lax, as the best officers were concerned with putting all Anchor Logh under their control and the top brains were concerned with Flux and the shield. A good officer had been in command at the temple, but the quality of his troops was low. He had tried to keep them in shape and in line, and had become the early victim of an “accident.” Things had been much more fun after that, and that explained the ease of entry. Unfortunately, the military commander of the capital was neither lax nor incompetent. The empire had the temple, but they were totally sealed off.
Matson, Kasdi, and the generals fumed at the standoff, but whatever they tried seemed to fail. The old stringer’s glib assurance that they could blow an opening through the temple proved wishful thinking; while there was a thick inner layer of wood and then masonry, the outer walls, of that strange substance, would yield to no power. That left only the three exits, and those were death traps, as attempt after attempt failed. The only thing the empire had accomplished by all this was the denial of electricity to the city. Another maddening week passed, with no way to even get news.
The former priestesses had been passed back to Flux and examined by top wizards. The spells were consistent and insidious, clearly bearing Coydt’s personal handiwork. Stripping those spells off, layer by layer, brought them back, but at a great price. The memories, the horrors, of the first day of the invasion and the rape and perversion worked on them would drive most people mad; in addition, all of it had been done against their vows and binding spells—a mental conflict they simply could not resolve. No one had ever discovered a magical way to selectively erase memories. They could be suppressed, of course, but then they still were there and caused problems; or there could be wholesale erasure and replacement, but to bring them back to the point just before the invasion was beyond anyone’s power.
The generals began to worry about their backs. There were fifteen other Anchors to guard against a similar invasion, and nobody knew the whereabouts of Coydt or any of the other of the Seven. With at least one Guardian neutralized somehow, the other three Hellgates also had to be defended, and that took powerful wizardry as well as troops. They had a quarter of a million troops and reserves they could count on and about a thousand wizards powerful enough to matter. Concentrated around Anchor Logh and its Hellgate, they were the greatest power on World. Divided up into twenty divisions, each guarding an Anchor or Hellgate in the empire, they amounted to fifty wizards and twelve thousand five hundred soldiers per location. The enemy alone could easily put a hundred thousand soldiers and three hundred top wizards against any one of those locations, and the math, when put in those terms, was pretty grim.
Kasdi, in particular, was amazed at the situation. “How can we have so much power, so much population, so much of World and still be scared of the dark?”
Suzl couldn’t follow all the fine points, but all she needed were her eyes to see that things had gone nowhere. She itched to see what the situation in the temple was like, but Spirit was not anxious to enter a building she couldn’t get out of. She was aware of Suzl’s itch, though, and finally indicated to her that she could stand Suzl’s absence if she were careful and not away too long.
Nobody could stop Suzl, of course. She had the combinations and the codes. She traced the pattern as Spirit nervously watched, then stepped through. She had done it before with Spirit to Anchor Nanzee via this same Hellgate, and she knew that transmission was instantaneous, probably at the speed of light. She found the entryway lit and an actual stairway built up to the reinforced floor. There were military emplacements and lots of equipment, and quite a number of uniformed men and women who were less than thrilled to see the nude mute around poking into things.
Suzl had no intention of getting in the way; she’d seen the grim bodies pulled from here back to Flux through the gate, and she had recognized Nadya, who had become Sister Tamara. She had no idea why she thought she could do anything, but just sitting around that big hole was driving her nuts.
She spent the better part of an hour just exploring the place and saw nothing she didn’t expect. They did not let her near the doors, of course, but she was pretty sure that anybody who peeked out of those would peek no more. Finally, she walked back down, thinking about it all and trying to find a way around the problem. She knew she was kidding herself that she could come up with something the pros could not, and even if she did, she might never be able to get the plan across, but she had to try.
She walked back down the steps to the place now sketched in chalk and stepped on it, but she didn’t trace the pattern right away. Instead, she drew in the weaker Flux power emanating from it and tried to find out where it went. She had no idea why she thought of this, but it seemed an interesting line of thought. Let’s see, she thought. From the vortex to the entry gate, and from the entry gate to here. No, that wasn’t quite right. There was a tremendous amount of energy going in from the vortex and an incredibly weak amount coming out at this end. One of the immutable laws everybody knew in both Anchor and Flux was that there was just so much of everything, and that energy and matter might be transformed, even into each other, but not created where there wasn’t any—or destroyed. Where was the extra power going?
Well, she didn’t know much about electricity, but she knew that such power needed a transformer to make it weak enough to use in the capital by the electrical generators. She looked down, found signs of the flow going past the entry port and coming up just over from it. The stone and cement filler had buried both the point at which that energy came out and the transformer or other device used to capture it, but the thick cables emerged and then were routed through the floor to the power plant that took up most of the rest of the basement. The power flow going through that cable was very different from the pure Flux power, but she could still follow it and sense its amount. It was more than that which existed at the transfer gate, but the total was still only a small fraction of what was going in.
She cast mentally down to the original flooring and below it, trying to find the actual entry point for the pure power of the vortex. It wasn’t difficult to sense, nor the point at which it divided—perhaps through some sort of transformer built into the temple structure itself? There was the gate, and there was the electrical power line—no, it couldn’t be. The line did not come from the junction point as the gate’s did; it came from someplace else, someplace even further down. Down! That’s where most of the power was going! That’s why it hadn’t really been noticed before. She tried to follow it with her mind, seeing as a wizard saw, and suddenly found herself suspended in darkness.
There was no up, no down, no forward or back. No light at all showed anywhere, nor in fact were there any of the sensations—no sound, touch, smell, taste—nothing.
But she was not alone.