Finally they made it to the edge, only to find that a tall wire fence, with what looked like cowbells all along the top, had been erected around the whole town. It was simple and clever. Suzl looked at it glumly and asked, “What’ll we do now? It’ll be light in an hour or so.”
“We dig,” Matson replied, getting a small shovel out of Spirit’s pack. “We dig fast.”
After the top layer was gingerly removed, it proved relatively easy in the moist earth. Matson was largest, so he tried it first, barely slipping under. Suzl was next, and actually jiggled the fence slightly, but no one came running. Next came Kasdi, and then Spirit found she had to deepen the hole a bit to push the packs through. Finally, she, too, was under, just as the sky was starting to lighten.
They decided against the roads and took a crosscountry route through pastureland designed more to keep cows and horses in than people out. The area just southeast of the city was heavily wooded, and they headed there as fast as possible. Once in the relative safety of the trees, they relaxed as day broke gray and gloomy.
“Unless you women want to put on high heels and sexy panties, I’d say we rest all day,” Matson said. “I don’t much like stopping this close to town, since somebody’s gonna find that hole, but I don’t see any choice. At least right now there’s nothing to trace that hole to us.”
Spirit thought for a moment. “We could go down towards the farm. I think I can get us there without taking us out of the woods, and it’ll give us a clear view of the road.”
“Let’s do it, then,” he decided. “But slow and easy.”
This country just south of the capital was where all three women had grown up. It was not quite as easy as they’d expected, for they ran into countless nasty little booby traps and trip alarms planted in the woods, and Spirit got caught in a snare net and was left hanging there until the others climbed up and freed her. Matson was adamant that they not cut her free, and after she was out he reset the trap very professionally.
“These traps mean they run regular patrols through these woods,” he warned them. “We’ll have to be on guard every moment.”
Finally, though, before midday, they made it to the thick grove overlooking the road which had been the start of both Kasdi’s and Spirit’s lives, as well as providing a view out to the main road about a kilometer away.
Matson unclipped his binoculars and studied the scene. “Well, we know that some of the men aren’t getting off too well either,” he said softly. “See those poles set up along the edge of the farm road and the main one? They’ve got bodies stuck on ’em. Men’s bodies.”
“Oh, Goddess! My father!” Kasdi gasped, and reached for the glasses.
“You won’t tell anything from this distance about ’em,” Matson assured her. “Even up close they’d be pretty tough to identify now. They’ve been there for some time, I think.”
“Those vermin!” she hissed. “When we get through with them and I have the survivors in Flux, the living will envy the dead! Those men will find out what us ‘girls’ can do when we have all the power!”
“Take it easy,” Matson cautioned her. “Remember, I’m a man, and so’s your dad, your grandson, and all those poor devils out there.”
She sighed. “You’re right, of course. But if this is an example of the male ego in charge, I want none of it.”
“Let’s get some sleep,” Matson suggested. “I’ll take first watch, and anybody who snores even a peep gets second.”
Even at a distance and through binoculars, watching the new order go by proved to be quite an education. The main road was regularly patrolled at randomly timed intervals, although the longest gap was under fifteen minutes. There was, however, little other traffic, and all of the common folks seemed to be either walking or in open wagons. Only a few women were glimpsed on the road, always bare from the waist up, always walking a step or two behind a man.
More sights, sounds, and smells were closer at hand. The smell of cooked food wafting into their hideout was maddening as they munched their concentrated rations, but crews checked and replenished the cow troughs in the same old way, and there were sounds of work from the smithy and of horses being exercised in the corral. Every once in a while people could be seen walking between the farm buildings as well. This was strictly the livestock side, so it was far less populated than the administrative area several kilometers west, and farmers working in cultivated fields were also elsewhere. From the few closeups they saw, it appeared that men were being required to wear hats outside, for some reason, and all seemed to be growing beards.
“I have to know about my parents,” Spirit told them. “I have to tell them that I’m whole again and see that they’re not on posts somewhere.”
Kasdi felt a jealous pang, considering both her real parents were there, but she understood, too. Matson tried hard to talk her out of it, but on this she wouldn’t budge. Finally he said, “All right, but not all of us. If anything happens, we most likely won’t be able to pull you out of there, and the less they know of who and how many we are, the better it’ll be.”
“I’ll go,” Kasdi said. “Alone. I’ll deliver your message, Spirit, and give you a complete report. But there’s no use in risking two when one will go, and right now I’m the most expendable of the bunch.”
There was some argument, but finally it was agreed. Matson cautioned her again that they would leave on the first sound of trouble, and added, “We’re southwest. Let’s agree that if nothing happens on this journey to blow our cover, we head for the nearest one. If anybody gets separated, any time, for any reason, we’ll rendezvous at the closest place of concealment near the secondary target. Got it?”
They nodded, and Kasdi kissed them all and left. It felt very odd to be an armed individual sneaking into such a familiar and friendly place with the knowledge that discovery might mean death, but she took nothing and no one for granted. Darkness had fallen but the cloud cover had not lifted, so there was an extra measure of darkness for her, although a slight and slippery drizzle had also begun.
A mounted patrolman turned off the main road and came down all the way to the buildings themselves. He was pretty relaxed, and he rode past the blacksmith’s and right past Kasdi, stopping near the large cow barn. A figure there greeted the patrolman and walked out of the barn carrying a rifle. They talked and exchanged a few laughing comments, and then the patrolman turned on his horse and rode back. Kasdi was grateful for him; she would have missed the man in the barn without him.
Keeping to the shadows, she made her way to the apartment complex, a structure of cubes on top of cubes, each slightly offset from the row below, where those who worked on this side of the farm lived. She thanked heaven that Cloise and Dannon lived on the ground level. She stopped, facing the building while still hidden, and saw lights inside just about every apartment. It was particularly bright because, it seemed, they had had to take their front curtains down allowing anyone to peer inside at least the living room. She could see people moving about, although most seemed to have abandoned the living room as a usual place for very obvious reasons. It was a good thing, she thought, that the one-room studios were on the top—the sixth—level.
She saw no one, but did an extra-careful check, even tossing a few stones in different directions to see if there was any reaction. There was not, and she decided to chance it, although she hated being illuminated so well. Perhaps, she thought, my looks will get me confused for a man in the dark. It didn’t matter. If she was going, she had to go now, and there was no back door.
She approached the steps to the porch from the side and ducked low beneath the open windows. Finally she reached the familiar door and stood, peering in the window. She knocked softly, and in a moment Cloise came and opened the door. When she saw who it was, she gasped, pulled Kasdi inside, and shut the door fast. “Quick! Into the back bedroom before the patrolman sees you!” she hissed, and they went back.
Once there, they both relaxed a bit, although Cloise looked nervous. More than nervous. Also pretty odd in full makeup, ring-type earrings, bare to the waist, and below it wearing a very tight-fitting green body stocking that was see-through close-up.
“What are you doing here?” Cloise wanted to know.
“Delivering the mail, mostly,” Kasdi told her. “Boy! You look like one of the women on Main Street minus the bra.”
“It’s easy when everybody has to do it. They confiscated all our clothes and issued new ones. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t!”
“I got an idea from some of the people we captured and some of the proclamations we read.”
“We?”
She nodded. “Spirit’s here. And she’s well. She can speak and wear clothes and is almost back to normal.” She decided not to mention Suzl. It might be one shock too many for the poor woman.
Cloise sat down in a chair. “Well, thank somebody for that! But I wish it were anyplace but here.” She paused a moment. “Uh—you know about your father?”
Kasdi’s stomach did a turn. “No. Tell me. I have to know.”
“When they . . . came . . . not everybody just sat back. Your father and a number of others formed a group, jumped some of them, and stole their weapons. It didn’t do any good. They got them all pretty quickly and made examples out of them.”
Her heart sank. “Then one of those bodies out there is . . . him?”
She nodded, and named a long string of other men’s names, many familiar. Her fury, which she didn’t think could get worse, grew, but she remained calm. “Where’s Dannon, or is he . . . ?”
“Oh, no. In fact, he’s been promoted to chief mechanic. He has special permission to be out late on the farm to check on things. You had better be gone when he gets back.”
She frowned. “You sound like you’re cooperating with these butchers.”
“A fat lot you understand the situation! They have complete control. The government officials they didn’t kill or who didn’t see it their way were taken off and came back in uniforms as dedicated soldiers of the Kingdom. The enforcers carry a . kind of whip that is terribly painful and hurts for days but doesn’t leave a mark on you. They use it for the least infraction. But they reward cooperation handsomely. Everything is tightly rationed, but those who cooperate get more. People are seeing the light. They’re going along.”
“But—you? And Dannon?”
“Who are you to judge us? You brought this on Anchor Logh, but you don’t have to live with it. They’ve started classes now, separate ones for men and women. It’s a fast question and answer, and hesitation can cost you the lash. Pretty soon you realize that the only way to always answer correctly is to start thinking their way. It doesn’t take long, and it’s easier that way.”
Kasdi was appalled. This soon? This close? She was more than happy now that Spirit had not come.
“You’re going to cause trouble here, aren’t you?” Cloise asked her.
“We hope more than trouble. There’s a whole army waiting for the door to be unlocked.”
“Kasdi—don’t. Haven’t you hurt Anchor Logh enough?”
“What do you mean?”
“First the war, then Spirit, then this takeover. We’re peaceful people. We can’t stand another war, Kasdi. Particularly not of this kind. These men will fight to the last and will take us with them. You may win, but you’ll kill us all. If you just knocked out that guard out there—you didn’t, did you?—ten of us in this complex would be picked at random and shot. I don’t know how you got in, but please go the same way and quickly. I’ll not report this, even though Dannon would be tortured for it if they find out.”
“You would rather live with women reduced to slaves? Live out your whole life this way or worse?”
“Rather do it than what? Mass killing? Mass destruction? Total devastation? Yes! And you’ll find that almost all of Anchor Logh will agree with me. They won’t aid your army—they’ll fight it. We all want to live.” Cloise suddenly looked very tired. “Please don’t bring in your army. Things are levelling out now, easing up. People are getting used to the new ways. You destroyed so many lives. Don’t destroy us all. Now—go!”
Cloise went into the living room and pretended to be straightening up. She then turned out the light, as if she were going to bed, to allow Kasdi some exit darkness. As she slipped out of the door, she heard Cloise whisper, “Don’t come back, Kasdi.”
The drizzle had turned into a chilly rain, which matched her dark mood.
The others were still waiting for her, and as briefly as she could, she filled them in on the conversation as well.
“I can’t believe they would do it!” Spirit responded. “I just can’t believe it!” She wanted to go down there, but Suzl believed it and dissuaded her.
Matson thought things over a moment. “Trouble is, she’s probably right. This is a new angle, folks. One we better think about before going further. These guys have done a lot of meanness here. Cass, you yourself said what would happen to them when you got hold of them. They know it, too. In the time it takes us to march, they’ll blow the buildings, burn the fields and forests, and machine-gun all the people they can. And while we’re trying to pick up the pieces, the bulk of ’em will drop all shields and run like hell in all directions. They got no other choice. And Coydt wouldn’t care if he did make this place a burnt-out ruin. That alone would collapse the empire, and you know it, and it would maybe take the Church with it.”
Kasdi wished she hadn’t vowed never to curse. “I don’t care about the empire or the Church. They’re not mine. The real rulers just used me all these years. I thought I grew up when I found that out, but I was wrong. I just grew up now. I’m forced to make a choice between wiping out perhaps a million people and the land of my birth, or leaving it to an insane system where women are slaves and all men are like they’re in the army.” She looked strickenly at Matson, Suzl, and Spirit in turn. “What do I do?”
14
DEMON PRINCE
Coydt had kidnapped Spirit from the farm and made away with her into Flux in under five hours. Unfortunately, that meant he knew all the best getaways and had compensated for them. With individual horse use also restricted to specific farm use except for officials, even stealing four horses would only have raised a sign telling everyone where they were. So, two hours after Kasdi’s return, they were still threading their way southwest through the woods. On foot, through well-patrolled and booby-trapped country on a rainy night, the one thing they were not making was time. They did, however, continue to agonize over the choice they had not yet been forced to face.
“My feeling is, Coydt’s won no matter how it turns out,” Matson said as they made their way over rough, rocky ground about twelve kilometers from their destination. “By relegating women to property and forcing them into accepting public humiliation, he’s totally undercut the social and moral fabric that was supposedly divine law and broken the heart of the faith. Now, if we don’t invade, he and his apparently very smart officers here will have this new system so well dug-in that they can make it a base and demonstration for every half-baked crackpot with a grudge against the system as a better way of doing things back home. He’ll control the shield machines, and so he’ll control them as well.”
“Then they must be crushed regardless of the cost? Is that what you’re saying?” Kasdi asked him.
“That’s the trouble. If we manage to punch a hole from this side and establish our beachhead, they’ll have plenty of time before we can overrun the place from such a small entry. These officers and men are committed. There’s nothing for them in Flux. They’ll fight to the last man, just like your cousin said they would. They’ll burn the fields and the forests and blow up the buildings. They’ll machine-gun the population, if only to make it tougher on us. It won’t be easy going either, since faced with total destruction, the people of Anchor Logh will fight us, too. And if we win, along with enormous casualties we’ll inherit a ruined and brunt-out land with maybe sixty to seventy percent of its people dead. Coydt won’t care. He and his wizards will be long gone to do it somewhere else and leave the horror of Anchor Logh for everybody to look at as a warning. He wins.”
“But we can’t leave them to this insane system,” Suzl protested. “I mean, women suppressed and owned by man, while the men are all sort of like in the army, expected to obey every order no matter how nutty. It’s a horror.”
“Nevertheless, if this Cloise is typical—and from what we’ve seen so far sneaking around, it looks like she is—these people would rather live under a tyrant than lose their land and children and their very lives. People always were that way in Flux; I don’t understand why it’s such a shock to see it in Anchor, where folks are, pardon me, even more naive. That’s why we haven’t even been able to risk any contact at all. Most of them would turn us in in a minute.”
“Then you would leave them to this?” Kasdi asked, appalled.
“In quarantine. The knowledge of what happened here must be limited to a very few. Nobody will believe Coydt’s claims; they’ll be dismissed as outrageous and unbelievable. The empire will invent a good excuse for the quarantine. Empires are good at getting people to swallow what they want. But you won’t get a quarantine with Coydt and the wizards running the show.”
“Huh? I’m losing where you’re going.”
“I know this place is being run like the heads should all be locked up as crazy, and that’s probably true. But if you sat back, you’d see that all systems are crazy, some just slightly more crazy than others. In the empire, old or new, for example, the sexes are still divided. Men and women don’t dress for utility; they dress in totally different clothes. Oh, the underwear’s different because different places need to be supported, but why dresses for one and not the other? Why is a lot of makeup terrible on a man but flattering on a woman? Why are women well qualified for government and administration prevented from going into those areas? Why are men who are sincerely religious and want to serve through the Church forbidden to do so? Why does a woman, to have real power and authority, have to give up sex and property? Why does society consider the man the primary bread winner under the law, even if his wife earns more? To an outsider, it’s all insane.”
“And you’re an outsider,” Suzl remarked dryly.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I am. Men and women dress alike for utility in the guild. Position, power, prestige, money—they’re all based on your own intelligence, quick wit, and talents, and nobody cares whether you’re male or female on the job. In stringing, everybody’s equal until they prove themselves different.”
“And you have to be born into that guild and have the sight to see the strings,” Suzl retorted. “What works for a small, inbred family monopoly wouldn’t be practical on a big scale. It gets too complicated too quickly. You still need the power to really get anywhere, too.”
“I have very little power and I rode string for fifteen years,” he pointed out. “Power doesn’t mean that you’re smarter or quicker or cleverer than the one without it. It’s true, though, that anybody who struck at one stringer would bring all the stringers and stringer wizards down on them—if that strike were in the line of duty. We look after our own.”
“You’ve got something cooking in that brain of yours about this problem,” Kasdi said. “Let’s hear it completely.”
“We have to break this, or it’s good-bye to everything we know. World will be in continual revolution, and deaths will be massive, while the new systems the new rulers will cook up will make this one or a Fluxland look tame. We’re looking at the breakdown of society all over the planet here. Hell even with the gates closed. That’s why the stringers themselves participate in putting down these kind of things. So it has to be stopped, to prevent its spread. But you can’t invade and wipe it out, because you’ll also destroy an Anchor and its people and have all the other Anchors selfishly closing up and going into self-defense, and so you lose your empire anyway. So we deal. We punch our hole, establish our beachhead, and stop. We deal with the bosses here. They will be allowed to keep what they have and run it the way they want, but they will be technically within the empire. Everybody stays out, and they stay in, but their sovereignty is assured. They’ll go for it. They’ll fight to the death if we invade—remember, Cass, what you said you’d do to them? But they don’t want to die. They’ll buy it.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re a man,” Suzl noted. “Spirit can’t go back to Flux. Are you suggesting we apply for our tattoos and tights and find ourselves a good man to own us?”
“No, but you’re not that limited if I understood you right. There are four Anchors in the cluster, and it applies to all of them. Go back through the gate, but don’t enter Flux; go out to one of the other three.”
“I’m interested in this,” Kasdi put in. “What sort of terms do you think they’d accept?”
“Anything that guarantees their safety and positions. We’ll still dictate the other terms. We want those machines and we want control of them. The empire itself will keep them going. We will also control the temple as a garrison to protect the Hellgate access, but won’t otherwise interfere. Experts from all over, all of them approved by empire security, will study what happens here.”
“And Coydt will go for this?” Spirit asked, joining in herself.
He shook his head. “No. Co-opting this revolution here will be the one thing he won’t buy. Nor will the other wizards, but they’re only being held together by Coydt. To make it work, Coydt is going to have to be eliminated permanently.”
“Then we must face Coydt before we open the shield,” Kasdi said. “How do you propose to do that? Nobody even knows where he is.”
“Oh, he’s here, someplace. I can feel him. Smell him. His odor permeates Anchor Logh. How we’re
going to draw him out, though, is the real problem, I—”
Suddenly all were frozen as the sounds of many horsemen approached. Soldiers on horseback, carrying torches, seemed suddenly everywhere around them, officers and noncoms shouting instructions.
“Free ride’s over,” Matson whispered. “Looks like they know we’re here. We’re going to have to fight our way through from this point.”
“Remember,” they heard an officer shout, “no firing unless fired upon! We want them alive if possible!” They were spreading out forward, and the foursome could hear the sounds of more coming on foot through the woods in back.
Matson thought furiously as the human net formed. “We’re going to have to split in two sections. One will bulldoze its way through with all it’s got, drawing the rest. Then the other can slip through the hole.”
Suzl looked over at him. “Who takes the heat?”
“Cass and I will. It’s more important to get that Soul Rider to the border than either of us, but we’ll have a chance, too. Don’t you fire at all unless you’re seen and in danger of being taken. Give us half a minute after the shooting starts, then break for the best route.”
The two women nodded grimly but said nothing. Matson looked at Cass, who unshouldered her weapon, and they slipped off to the left and were soon lost to the woods.
As soon as they were well away of the others, Matson looked to pick his spot. He saw it and almost didn’t believe it. There were two mounted officers and four troopers walking in, all nicely illuminated by small burning torches that sizzled as the light rain hit. He looked at Kasdi. “You take the ones on foot; I’ll take the two horsemen. As soon as everybody falls, you run like hell through that opening. If those horses don’t bolt, we’ll take them, too.”