SOUL RIDER II: EMPIRES OF FLUX AND ANCHOR BY JACK L. CHALKER

“The captain really is fond of you,” Coydt told her. “He’s quite smitten, in fact. What about you? Is he the idea you had of the kind of men who took this Anchor?”

“No,” she responded, adding “sir” almost as an afterthought. “I do like him.”

“That’s nice. One wizard to another, open, honest. I like that.”

“I’m no wizard,” she responded.

“How very astute of you to realize that. One without power in Flux is a victim who finds a way to survive, to accommodate to power. But one with Flux power who has no knowledge or train­ing in its use is in far greater danger from a real wizard, for only those with the power can take the binding spell.”

She nodded slightly but did not respond. All she could think of was that he was going to do some­thing awful to her and she needed to buy time, any kind of time, if only to think of something to do.

“Take me, for example. Did you ever wonder how I wound up this way? What colored my attitudes, drove me on?”

“I’ve often wondered how anyone could wind up like you.”

“It was over four hundred years ago, in a place very much like that one back there,” Coydt began. “I was pretty wild as a kid, the youngest of eleven and always out to prove myself. Even then I liked the thrill of things, the danger, the risks. I’d take any bet, and, of course, boys being boys, they were always egging me on. One day, after getting a scolding from the local priestess for some minor mischief, the gang dared me to get back at the Church. I was fifteen, and I was clever. The appeal of sneaking into an all-women’s domain and steal­ing something was irresistible. I resolved to sneak into the temple itself and steal a personal artifact from some high-up temple priestess.”

“I can see you weren’t bothered by religion even then.”

“About as much as you or even old Mervyn is. I broke into the local laundry in the city where the temple robes were done, and I stole one that fit. Then I appropriated a pretty good wig and some sandals that basically fit from one of my sisters. And, one day, I just walked right into that temple and back to the living quarters. None of them gave me a second glance. In fact, my only mistake was that I really had no way of knowing where was where in there. I wound up in some office I shouldn’t have been in and got challenged. My fal­setto was not all that convincing, I’m afraid, and close-up the deception was quickly unmasked. I almost didn’t mind getting caught then, because of the shock on their faces. I expected to be sent to the local jail, where they’d either cover it up to save embarrassment or make me a local hero to my peers. Instead, I was hauled up before a religious court in the temple that was strictly for priestesses and was presided over by the Sister General herself. I was charged with heresy.”

“Go on,” she encouraged him, interested in spite of herself.

Coydt seemed to enjoy telling the story, as if it was something bottled up inside him that needed to come out. “They were faced with an unprece­dented situation, and they resolved it as best their little minds could. They could think of only one way to sponge out the heresy, and they did it. They took me to the temple clinic, filled me with all sorts of chemicals, and then performed agoniz­ingly painful surgery on me. They castrated me, then used the scrotum to create a vagina. By more surgery and drugs, they smoothed my skin, changed my muscle tone, raised my voice half an octave— well, you get the picture. When they finished, months later, I was still very much a man inside, but outside I was an overly large, lunkish woman. Now the temple had not been violated, you see?” His tone grew suddenly bitter and seemed tinged with an insane anger. “I was fifteen years old!”

“I didn’t even know such a thing was possible in Anchor,” Suzl admitted.

“My parents were told, of course,” he went on, not really hearing her. “My mother said it was divine punishment. My father thought it was funny. Funny!” He struggled to retain control of himself, and finally got it. When he continued his tale, his voice was calm and rational once more, but his story was not.

“Using various hormones and hypnotics, they kept me around for a couple of years as the temple slave. I was property, and that was that. I was still masculine enough to be a pretend man to the horny bitches, too. But the old Sister General retired, and the new one was a real moral type. She told me that it was over, that I had the choice of joining the priesthood or being sold to Flux. Three guesses which one I gladly took, even though I had no idea what was out there. After what they’d done to me, what did I have to fear?”

“Believe it or not, I understand. I’ve had some sexual identity problems myself.”

“When they found out I had some of the power, they sold me to a wizard in Globbus who needed an assistant. He was a rather unpleasant fellow named Voryer, and he heard of my condition and thought it was very funny, too. The first spell he taught me was the binding spell. He said he liked his first lesson to be one his pupils never forgot.”

Slowly, all of Coydt’s clothing faded. He reached up to the side of his face and drew his finger down the side of his beard, and it and the moustache peeled away and fell to the ground. In most ways, his body was male and muscular. He had a tight ass and the sort of hip and other bone structure one would expect. In many ways, he reminded her of Dar, a huge farm boy who’d had a female organ, thanks to a spell, but there was a bit more to Coydt. The breasts were clearly breasts, although they were sized well enough that under a shirt they would just resemble overly large pectorals. Ex­cept for his hair, eyebrows, and pubic hair, he had less body hair than did Suzl or Spirit. Suddenly the carefully tailored clothing faded back in, and the false but very convincing beard and mous­tache jumped up, reformed, and reattached to his face. He looked now quite the normal, handsome man again.

“The voice broke and the breasts shrank when the hormones ran down and the male ones dominated,” he told her. “But you can see what I had become. I learned all I could from the old wizard, and when I had more power than he did, I killed him. For years I plunged into spell research, learning all I could and getting ever stronger. I tried to find a way to break that spell, and I couldn’t. I was a man who felt like a man and loved pretty women, but I couldn’t make love to them. Oh, I could make them think they had a good time, but I couldn’t have it. I hid my problem with cheap love spells, building a reputation as a hot lover. I worked so hard building up my muscles that I became very strong, and I liked to pick fights. I studied with the masters of every physical fighting form, and I mastered every weapon of Anchor and Flux.

“When I was ready, I hired on with a stringer who needed big-time protection, so I could get back into my old home Anchor. I strangled my mother, then cornered and beat the hell out of my father. When he was down and out, I took a knife and made him like me, only a little messier. When he didn’t laugh, I cut out his tongue and blinded him and left him there to bleed to death. One by one, I tracked down every priestess that had been at that temple during those times. All of ’em, including many who’d moved on or retired, who were still alive. Each one of them I could get into Flux I made into obedient whores. Those I couldn’t died, but they all died begging and on their knees. The authorities couldn’t catch me. Oh, not that I wasn’t collared now and then, but they couldn’t hold me. Now I had only this spell to break, and I went looking through all of Flux for the key.

“Eventually I signed on with a wizard named Grymphin, who had one hell of a library from the old days. He was also, it turned out, one of the Seven of that time. He was one hell of a math whiz, though, and he was devoting his life to breaking the codes used by the Hellgates and to stabilize Anchors. We didn’t know about the tem­ple entrances then, not until less than twenty years ago, but he was determined to just walk into a Hellgate, right past the Guardian. Got so fired up convinced he had it one day that he tried it himself.”

“I take it he was wrong.”

“No, he was right. Only I changed one little number in a string that seemed five kilometers long. He got zapped; I won the resulting power struggle. And that’s how I got my present job.”

“But you never found the way to break it.”

“No. But you did. You or somebody. I figured by using that language on Spirit, considering who she was, they’d bend heaven and hell to figure it out. The basic spell is the same. I want to know how it was done. Tell me, and you’ll be fine and so will she. Come on—you don’t owe Saint Bitch anything, either one of you.”

“As a woman in your idea of Anchor?”

“Was it so terrible? Truthfully, now—could you see yourself as Madame Weiz?”

She thought about it, and the horrible truth was that she could. She made no direct reply, though.

“I thought as much. You don’t like to admit it, but my little demonstration was quite effective. Come, now—never mind the philosophical or ideo­logical objections. What is your personal objection to living that way? Just yours?”

She thought a moment. “It’s demeaning.”

“Oh, come. Being the consort to a homosexual stringer is not demeaning? Looking like a bloated sexual nightmare wasn’t demeaning? Only a hand­ful of people are ever truly free in any society, and that’s as much accident as design, even in my case. You’re a survivor, which is a valuable thing to be, but you are not a leader. Being his wife, the mother of his children, a ranking woman because of that and a privileged one as well—you’ll live a better, more satisfying life than you have ever lived. Tell me—have you ever been truly free?”

She thought about it. “Yes. Once. With Spirit after I got the power.”

Coydt laughed. “Don’t be absurd! The Soul Rider used you, cast its spell upon both of you, to bind you together, and not because it was a roman­tic soul either. It needed you to work the power it can command in Flux. I have dampened the spell chemically in Anchor, and now I remove it entirely. You may still love her, but you don’t need her.”

And it was true. She did love Spirit, and always would, but she did not crave her. More education. “Uh—Spirit. What have you done with her?”

“The same as with you, only more intensive. And we gave her a goal, something to strive for. We showed her a baby that looks exactly like hers. It didn’t originally, but that was no trouble. She is convinced it’s hers. She’s not really a survivor like you, you know. She actually needs other people. Her conditioning will proceed well because of the baby. It is an incentive and a threat. I cannot bring her into Flux without giving the Soul Rider opportunities, but perhaps in time I will risk even that, since she has no power. She will continue to love you, if it suits the Soul Rider, but she will love that child more. She will be a good wife to someone. Which brings us back to the big question. How did my binding spell get dissolved?”

“It didn’t,” she told him. “You’ve lost again, for all your power. Her spell is diverted to the Hellgate machine by the Guardian only if she stays in Anchor. You seem able to talk to the Guardian. Why not command it to do the same thing?”

“And be stuck in Anchor as well?” Coydt sighed. “I feared as much, I might as well tell you. All my science, all my research, all of it says that there is only one way to break a binding spell, and that’s to have someone of equal or greater power take it voluntarily in Flux. I have never found anyone my equal in power, not even those assholes that are the rest of the Seven. Perhaps I will, after all, have to teach them the machine language so we can open the Gates. If they don’t kill us, they will be able to do anything.”

She stared at him. “You know what’s behind those Hellgates, don’t you? You really do!”

“I know . . . some . . . of it. There are many gaps. I’m still not sure what the Soul Riders are, for example, or exactly how we came to be in this situation. But I know much. More than anyone else, certainly. I found it, in little bits and pieces over the centuries, from sorcerers I knew and some that I killed. Bit by bit I put the pieces together. I suspect that what I do not know, I lack the frame of reference to know.” He sighed. “But I’ve talked and dallied enough. Back to business.”

“What do you plan for me now?” she asked, terrified of the answer.

“Choices. I give you choices, that’s all. Despite all our efforts, your sainted friend is still at large in Anchor.”

She gasped. Where had they hid all this time?

“I’ve been sneaking around and eavesdropping on the empire outside,” he told her. “There were so many wizards that nobody noticed one more. The fools were bemoaning the fact that there was no way to selectively alter memory and personal­ity in Flux. That is true, because of a little thing called the subconscious. But it is not true for those with the power. Not those who can accept the binding spell.”

She saw where he was leading. “What would be in this binding spell?”

“Very little. You would simply remember things, but differently. I stole the idea from a Soul Rider spell, in fact. You would remember Flux, and em­phasize its bad points on your life. You would not remember Spirit, or the child, or how you came to be here, but you would simply never even ask that of yourself. The conditioning you underwent would be reinforced. The events leading up to it would seem irrelevant. You would be madly in love with Captain Weiz, bear and raise his children, and support him utterly. You would be a model wife.”

She thought about it. He was certainly leaving a few things out, of course. Illiteracy, perhaps, and a mathematical ability to count using fingers. Un­questioned obedience to Weiz and servility towards all other males went without saying. She tried to imagine herself compulsively worrying over lint on the carpet and the shine on her dishes and trading recipes. On the other hand, she’d have rank, thanks to Weiz’s status, she’d have a nice place to live with all the luxuries and amenities and, alluringly, a feeling of total security for the first time in her life. She began to realize that a search for security had been the most important, perhaps the only, objective in her life the past ten years or so. She’d had adventure, travel, thrills, danger—and what did she have to show for it? Still, there was that insolent playful spirit in her, too. . . . Or was that just a mask for what she desperately wanted and never had?

“And the alternative?”

She saw the enormous, complex spell coming, but could not dodge it or deflect it. She simply didn’t know how. In an instant, it had her.

“You remember that little picture of your old self that you forgot when we accidentally met before? Well, I found it, saved it, and dreamed up several improvements on it.”

She was still her one hundred fifty centimeters in height, but her ample breasts were now blown to huge proportions, each as thick as her thigh and going out for a full meter. Additionally, she knew she again had a male organ, but this one was impossibly fat, like a banana, and went out from her an impossible thirty centimeters. She should have fallen over, but while the breasts and penis acted as if gravity was pulling them down, it was a sidewards pull. She felt an enormous, insatiable sexual urge.

“I do so love playing with what Anchor thinks of as natural laws like gravity,” Coydt told her. “Also, I’ve redesigned the bottom so that there’s not a scrotum in the way. It’s elsewhere. You have a vagina to match the rest, and that organ is virtu­ally prehensile, moving up and out of the way if need be. You can be like that, and I’ll just leave you to wander this little area of Flux or return to Anchor with your memories. Any man who wants you, you will submit to. Any woman alone will be powerless against you. You’ll eat garbage and love it, and you’ll be so conspicuous that you’ll never get near Spirit or the temple. Once you’re in Anchor, we’ll find some drugs and burn out your mind. A pet freak, an example for Anchor.

“Which do you choose? A happy life—or this? I have little patience left. Here is the binding spell I spoke of. Take it, embrace it, and join your husband. Or refuse it, and stay that way until hunger forces you in.”

She saw the binding spell clearly in her mind, in Spirit language, but it was far too mathematically compex for her to follow. Why not take it? she asked herself. What choice do I have?

Matson and Kasdi jumped off the horses not too far from where they had gotten them and, slap­ping them on the rump, rolled into the brush. The pursuers, following the hoofbeats, rode right on by as fast as they could.

Matson had been forced to discard his pack, but Kasdi still had her rifle and gun belts, and Matson still had shotgun, whip, and knife. Water would be no problem, but food would.

They made their way cautiously overland to the southwest, on the lookout for more searchers. But the searchers, it seemed, had lost the trail.

“What now?” she asked him.

For a while he didn’t answer, because he didn’t know, but soon they reached a respectable stream flowing in the direction of their travel. He stopped and thought a minute. “If this thing goes all the way to the wall, it’ll either have to empty into Flux or flood. Any big lakes in Anchor Logh?”

She thought a moment. “Not that I know of.”

“Then we’ll follow along here as best we can, all the way to the wall. If it can get through, then we might be able to. There must be hundreds of drain outlets. It’s how many people sneaked in and out of Anchor in the old days.”

“Well, say we can get out. What then? We can’t escape.”

“We can get into Flux, no matter how little. And in Flux you can conjure up what we need to survive. You can change into a bird—a little one, this time, like Haldayne does—and scout our positions. Even a few square meters of Flux will give us some kind of breather and help.”

More than ever, she realized how a man with almost no Flux power had survived and prospered in a world of mad wizards for so long.

There were occasional patrols, but because the search was now over a far wider and less well-defined area, it was easy to avoid them and keep to the river. They reached the wall before daylight and saw that the water flowed through a series of huge drain pipes. There seemed to be no obstacle to passage, but they knew that could be deceptive. The great concrete pipes were all filled with a constant flow of water to almost eighty percent of their area. They studied the problem, noting the lack of guards on the wall at this point, and worried.

“I’m willing to chance it,” Kasdi told him. “I can’t see how they could have screens or mesh down there without all three pipes clogging up with silt and debris. But that water is fast and deep and that’s a long tunnel. Can you swim?”

“I can, as a matter of fact. You?”

She shook her head slowly from side to side. “There was never any place or reason to learn.”

“It won’t matter,” he assured her. “That current’s so fast that it’ll have you through before you can drown. Most of the drains I’ve seen from the other side are pretty level, often at ground level and rarely more than a meter’s drop. The trouble is, the water will spread on the apron, so it might be shallow and tricky, and there might just be a can­yon worn into it with a river this fast. That could make the drop really nasty.”

“What choice have we got?” she asked him. “I mean, do we climb the wall? Surely that’ll bring people running. We aren’t all that far from one of the strong points of the shield.”

“I’d say we jump in, take our chances, and let you dry us and our powder out in Flux, not to mention fixing us up.”

She swallowed hard. “If I’m in any condition to do it. O.K. What do I do?”

“Take a breath, hold it, and jump in as close to the pipes as you can. Then hang on for dear life, and if you hit the sides, kick away.” With that he looked for signs of life, found none, and ran into the open towards the drain and jumped in. Kasdi waited a moment, summoned up her courage, and followed.

It was a nightmare that lasted only twenty sec­onds or so, but it seemed an eternity. Carried along, she was surrounded by endless water and total darkness and flung at high speed against a wall of the drain. She was totally at the mercy of the flow, but, suddenly, she was plunged back into outside air and then fell into a roaring pool. She panicked, but then felt strong arms around her and let herself be pulled by them. She assumed it was Matson, but right then she didn’t care who it might be.

And then, quite suddenly, the roar and the wet­ness stopped and they were flung and dropped onto a spongy surface. The water itself struck the Flux barrier and crackled, and was converted into energy itself and added to the void. Wracked with pain, she passed out.

When she awoke to the same formless void, it seemed almost a familiar friend. She tried to move, and found every single part of her body felt broken. She must have called out, because Matson heard and came over to her. The sight of him was almost unbearable, as he’d removed all his clothes and laid them out on the ground to dry.

“You all right?” he asked, concerned. “You had a pretty bad time in there. I got sort of banged-up myself, but not like that.”

She saw that there were huge bruises on his arms and on the right side of his chest. He also had a nasty swollen place over his right eye.

“I think you got several broken bones,” he told her. “You’ve been out a while. We’re in Flux, though, so you’ve got your power back.”

“Yeah, Flux,” she responded weakly. “But the pain’s tremendous! I need to do a thorough self-examination and construct—agh!—the proper . . . formulae and con . . . centrate. The pain . . . makes it . . . hard to . . . concentrate.”

He nodded. “Take it slow and easy and one step at a time. Those forces out there got no place else to go, and I don’t think anybody knows we’re here.” He paused a moment. “Just don’t die on me, Cass.”

She smiled, and drifted back into sleep. It was a turbulent, nightmarish sleep in which she was back in that roaring tunnel once again, only this time not alone. Suzl and Spirit were there, and they were drowning and she couldn’t save them; the whole of Hope opened before her, but all the priestesses turned away from her and began worship­ping statues, laughing statues, of Mervyn, and Krupe, and the rest of the Nine, and of Coydt and Haldayne as well. Matson was there, too; she kept trying to reach him for help, but the closer she got to him, the more out of reach he became.

She awoke again, and the pain was worse, but her mind was clearer. She looked around and didn’t see Matson, but that was all right. She remem­bered the horror of the dream and feared she might have been calling out things best left unspoken. She tried doing a diagnostic on herself and found that she was in fact in pretty bad shape. Some of her internal injuries were serious enough that she might well have died from them, and would, if they were not corrected.

She took self-repair in slow stages, shutting off all pain from any but the area she was working on. After a few tries, she realized she just wasn’t going to be able to do a piecemeal approach. She brought up and constructed a spell for a whole new body based on the old, a spell that was tremendously intricate and difficult. She almost passed out sev­eral times in doing it, but finally managed and put the spell into effect. She felt relief flow through her and lay there for a while luxuriating in that feeling.

Matson returned. He’d put on his pants, but little else, and they were still slightly wet. “I as­sume that’s still you in there,” he said after a while.

She sat up and smiled. “Yes, it’s me. It’s a body I designed for visiting Spirit in secret. The only one I could manage on short notice. It’ll give me time to concentrate on reforming me as myself.”

He nodded. “Well, it’s not all that flattering, but if it lets you conjure up something to eat and a way to dry everything out, that’s fine with me.”

With no references, time had little meaning in the void, but they got their food and drink and dried not only the clothes but the weapons and ammunition as well, and she managed to get back somewhat to a normal appearance. Well, not quite normal. She had felt herself eighteen again, out here in the void with just Matson, and somehow she had come out looking eighteen in spite of her vows or herself. She could not have him the way she wanted him, but they were together now, alone, in Flux, and for the moment that was enough.

In a while, they decided to risk forays into An­chor to see what was going on. Borrowing a trick from Haldayne, one of the Seven she’d bested before, she turned herself into a normal-looking bird and flew out and over the wall. Matson, too, could and did become transformed by her power, and together they scouted the area.

It would have been easy if she had been able to change back in Anchor, but she could not, nor could she be some human-sized flying beast, for that would require either too much wing to re­main inconspicuous or too much weight to stay aloft and remain in touch with the required physics. Still, they were able to map out the terrain and get a look at the guard post and the Flux machine itself. That had been the one risky point, since the wizard operating it might well have sensed her power, and any observer who saw two birds fly into the void would be instantly suspicious of them.

Both became intimately familiar with the town of Lamoine and the military post on the wall. The town disgusted her. The natives there had dis­carded ways and attitudes of generations very easily, and both men and women seemed to be acting under the new rules automatically and with­out threat or supervision. She had expected some laxity, particularly among women off by themselves, but she’d seen none. Of course, their proximity to Flux and a wizard would tend to make them model citizens, she reasoned. Otherwise, model citizens could be made. Her opinion of the human race in general took something of a beating.

There were some large, predatory species of birds in the area that had been imported from some far-off Anchor generations ago to control a rodent infestation. These had strength and speed, and she used their form to perch right on the wall near the emplacements. They used this not only to steal some more palatable food by snatching it with strong claws, but to snatch items occasionally from the emplacement as well. They didn’t need much; once in Flux with one of them, she didn’t have to know what it was to duplicate it.

Still, they kept planning and putting off any real attack. For one thing, they hoped for some time that Suzl and Spirit would eventually show up, and they undertook long searches for them to no avail. When they didn’t appear, and had to be assumed captive, another problem arose.

“The Guardian said we needed the Soul Rider to knock out the machine,” she reminded him. “It obviously amplifies Flux power. How can we do anything without Spirit?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he replied, “and I feel we have to try. I keep going over that Guardian’s message again and again.”

“It said we needed the Soul Rider to knock out the machine and its operator,” she recalled.

“Uh-huh. I know we’ve been over this a hundred times, but I knew there was something not right about that, and when you said it, it just hit me. It didn’t say the machine and its operator. It said the machine or its operator.”

“So?”

“If we knock out that guard post, the guy in Flux won’t know it right off. The sound’s dampened, as you know. I looked over that machine again and again, and that open operator’s cab is only a little over one meter into Flux.”

“So?”

“If I can get my back cleared, I can take him. He’s like most all the wizards; he doesn’t think that anything can hurt him in Flux without being in Flux, and maybe he’s right. But I got a trick I pulled over twenty years ago on the border of a Fluxland called Rakarah that might just work here.”

But it would take two to work it all, and she was still undecided as to what to do. She simply did not want the specter of her homeland devastated, and she certainly didn’t want it on her head. It was so nice and comfortable being here, just she and Matson, no stress, no responsibility, and no­where to go. He was getting restless, yes, but he understood her agony and was willing to wait a while.

And then, flying over Lamoine, they’d spotted a carriage coming into town with some brown-uniformed officer and his lady driving. A close, curious inspection sparked some familiarity in that woman, and when the pair picnicked near the wall, she was able to get a closer and more positive view.

It was definitely Suzl! Suzl, decked out like all the others, and acting just like they did, and seem­ingly not minding a bit. She watched as they packed up and walked up to the gate, then to the wall, then down the other side, and then saw, as they approached Flux and the big machine, another figure, casually dressed and in no uniform, come out of the small temporary guard station on the wall and descend to the apron.

She and Matson returned to their Flux base and became human. “I’ve decided,” she said. “We have to pull her out of there. She’s already half gone, maybe with drugs or something. Now they’re taking her into Flux without Spirit, and she’ll be lost forever.”

He nodded, but said, “Are you sure about this? It seems kind of funny that they’d bring her here and parade her around and then Coydt shows up. I think they know we’re around. Suzl’s bait to get you out in the open for Coydt, Cass. It’s a trap.”

“Then it’s a trap we take. You’ve been itching to move. Let’s move now or forget it.”

Their weapons had been well prepared in ad­vance and needed no more done to them. Practice was impossible; either it worked or it didn’t. Matson set the detonators; then Kasdi changed them into the great birds again and used her power to make the packs fit correctly. They could take off with them in Flux, but whether or not they would be able to handle the weight in Anchor had yet to be proven.

They flew in formation, one close behind the other, right down the roadway atop the wall. Matson gave a quick glance towards Lamoine and saw no massed troops and made the final decision. They swooped down on the emplacement and let go their loads, then quickly gained altitude and headed for Flux.

Captain Weiz had waited nervously for a bit at the emplacement, then decided he wanted to smoke. Rather than go further down the wall, he decided to go down into Anchor and see to the horse and carriage. He had barely reached the horse when suddenly the world exploded behind him. He turned and was knocked over by the blast and almost trampled by the panicked animals, but he was the only one able to see what had happened.

One set of high explosives had struck near the barrels where oil for the night torches and lamps was stored; the other fell on the other side of the small makeshift hut, near the ammunition. When the birds came in, there were only curious stares, but when they dropped loads that clanked metalli­cally on the stone, they leaped into action, some starting to aim at the fast-fleeing birds, others jumping for what was dropped. All too late. Matson had perfect timing.

Suzl’s initial estimate of their vulnerability had been right. The two containers exploded within a fraction of a second of each other, one blowing the oil barrels and sending flaming liquid every­where; the other blew up the concentrated boxes of ammunition. The whole post was bathed in a massive fireball; then individual explosives began to go off in all directions. Weiz, on the ground below, could only keep low and try and make himself as small a target as possible. One thing was sure—the wooden stairway was also aflame, and he could not reach the top now even if he wanted to. He looked up when the explosions di­minished and made a run for it away from the wall and towards Lamoine. Coydt’s trap had been sprung, but in a way he hadn’t expected.

Kasdi quickly restored Matson in Flux, then kissed him. “Good luck!”

“You, too,” he responded softly, giving her a hug.

Both reentered Anchor east of the machine and saw the remains of their work. Kasdi quickly ran down well past the machine to where they’d seen Suzl and Coydt enter Flux; Matson gave one brief check of the wall to make sure that anybody alive wasn’t going to shoot him, then stood on the apron looking directly at the machine, barely visible de­spite being so close.

The machine had its own protection against Flux magic, but he had no Flux magic. He had studied this problem over and over again, and he knew he’d better be right.

Carefully, he uncoiled and tested his four meter bullwhip, then walked right up to the Flux boundary and stuck his head in. He saw the wizard sitting there, relaxed in a comfortable chair, read­ing something. “Hey!” he shouted. “Trouble on the wall! We’re under attack!”

The wizard jumped up, revealing the two small probes on his head, and looked puzzled for a moment.

The whip cracked out, wrapped around the wizard’s neck, and as it did so Matson pulled and was back in Anchor, still pulling. The action was so quick and unexpected that the wizard literally flew off the machine’s cab deck and landed, with a pull, in Anchor.

Matson cooly walked up to him, leveled his shotgun, and blew the wizard’s head off.

He unclipped two timed explosive charges, walked into Flux and attached one to the cab area of the machine and another to a random spot on the smooth cube of the basic machine itself. Then he ran back for Anchor, unsure of just what the hell was going to happen when they and that thing blew.

Kasdi entered Flux and immediately saw Suzl, grotesquely deformed, frozen there about five me­ters from Coydt. The evil wizard was talking to Suzl.

“Which do you choose? A happy life—or this? I have little patience left. Here is the binding spell I spoke of. Take it, embrace it, and join your husband. Or refuse it, and stay that way until hunger forces you in.”

That spell! Suzl was going to accept it! “Suzl! Wait! Don’t do it!” Kasdi screamed.

Coydt looked over at her, turned, and smiled. “How melodramatic,” he commented softly. “Friend saved in the nick of time from a fate worse than death by the timely arrival of—Sister Kasdi, is it not?”

“I am Sister Kasdi. And you are Coydt. I have been looking forward to this for a very long time now.”

He grinned. “That is certainly mutual. Would you care to step over here a bit? I wouldn’t like to get out of range of our audience here, but I wouldn’t like to injure her either.”

16

SAINT DEVIL

“Cass! Watch out for his hate!” Suzl called to her. “He was castrated by the old Church and stuck with it in a binding spell! Power’s the only thing he’s got and hate’s his only fuel!”

“She’s right, you know,” Coydt told her. “In a way, we have things in common, you and I. Both of us were abused by the system, and both of us are trapped in binding spells that leave power as the only outlet. Power for its own sake.”

“Yes, we’re probably a pair made for each other, but you’ve become so foul that it’s impossible. What you have done to me and mine cannot be excused.”

“Excused?” He laughed. “I don’t ask to be excused! It amused me to do it. It proved out many of the theories I’ve read in the old books and fragments, the old records. Power needs no excuse! Power exists, and those who have it make the rules! Look what I’ve made them swallow in An­chor Logh! Your birthplace, the start of everything you’ve done—and the ending of it. The end of your empire, and the beginning of a new one, one based on reality. They were sheep under the old Church, willingly sending off their children to slavery and death! Actually thanking the Church for its tyranny! Then they followed you, built monuments to you, called you a liberator and denounced the old ways, not ever once thinking that by doing so they were denouncing themselves.

“And all they had done was changed mistresses, substituting one rule for another. You were the Fluxlord to whom they gladly sent their daughters, and you bound those daughters to absolute obe­dience, and then you sent them back to unquestiona­bly enforce whatever rules you and your empire thought up.”

“I gave them their freedom,” Kasdi responded.

“What freedom? To happily send the best of their young off to die in distant wars for a cause you decided? And how did you free them, make their life better? Was it really different in any way?”

“Science is once again open to them.”

“Ah! Science! And I thank you for that. As long and hard as our research teams worked to develop the amplifier machines, it wasn’t until your own bright ones came up with the new transformers capable of handling an Anchor’s power and the internal electronics needed to feed them that we had the answers. The scientists thought they were working on a means of inter-Anchor communication, which is what attracted us in the first place. Per­haps they will invent that, but mine is of more immediate practicality. Science is always a two-edged sword like that. That’s why it was suppressed and feared by the old Church.”

“You’ve killed thousands in Anchor Logh,” she accused. “You killed my father.”

“Oh? I hadn’t known. But, no matter, it will simply add spice to your attack. And how many have you killed, or caused to be killed, I wonder? Ever add it up? I’ll bet you’ve got me beaten by at least hundreds of thousands. And for what?”

“To keep scum like you from opening the Hellgates! To save World!”

“I would open the Hellgates only as a last resort. The rest are, in their own way, self-deluded fanat­ics like yourself. They, too, are idealists; only they will go to any length for those ideals. Me, now, I know that there’s nothing mystical about it and that the chances of your vision of Hell on World is about even with theirs. If you were caught and trapped for over twenty-five hundred years in a terrible place, cut off from your own and from any life at all, would you be grateful to those who released you? Or would that hate be so refined as to destroy all human life? Perhaps, one day, I’ll be bored enough or disgusted enough to find out. Right now I would rather not take the bet, and they can’t do it without me. You see? I’m the best friend either Church has!”

She thought for a moment. “Suppose I took your binding spell? I have already, in a sense, castrated myself. Being superficially male wouldn’t bother me. What would you do then?”

He chuckled. “I’d hardly reform and start prais­ing the Goddess, but it would be worth a great deal to me. It would be worth Anchor Logh and the researches I and my teams have compiled over the centuries. It would be worth the truth about World and Hell. It doesn’t really matter what I offer. Eternal slavery. Anything. You see, it can only be assumed by one of equal or greater power than myself. That’s the real curse, don’t you see? There is no one equal to me.”

“You seem pretty sure of that. Want me to try?”

He shrugged. “What have I to lose?”

She reached out and found the binding spell. It was absurdly simple and direct, in no strange lan­guage and with no traps for the unwary. How it must have frustrated him, galled him, all these years to have godlike power unlike almost any other and yet not be able to break this one simple little spell! She was quite sincere in her offer, and she reached out and voluntarily seized it, took hold of it, and reached to bring it to her.

The spell remained in Coydt.

He laughed, but it was a strange laugh, half triumphant and half sad. “Not even close,” he told her. “I’ve had it hurt. You have a great deal of power, but I have more. You have much training and experience, but I have more, for I know what it is and what it is for. I will not kill you, if it can be avoided. No, I will take you into Anchor as my bride, and you shall serve me gladly, worshipfully. Your binding spells are easily accommodated by ones I will place upon you. Sex, needless to say, I will not require. With you as my servile slave, I will own your empire.”

Tremendous energy emerged from his body and lashed out at her. She quickly brought up her own personal shields and drew upon Flux to push it away. Both of their bodies and the three meters separating them crackled with raw electrical en­ergy so clear and blinding it could have been seen and felt even by one without the power.

She strained against his massive onslaught, and perspiration broke out all over her body. She held him in check, but barely, and she could not hold his thoughts.

“Do you know what you’ve been worshipping all these years? A giant bag of poisonous gasses! A world, just like this world, but so huge it keeps us in its gravity as a natural captive. A world so foul and poisonous nothing could live there. The stars are but other worlds, more distant than our own.”

She had already lost her faith, but there was underneath still a bedrock that sustained her, told her she knew her place in the universe. The empire had been a device for powerful men to rule indi­rectly what they could not directly have. They had wanted Anchor, and she had delivered the Church to them while sacrificing all. Now Coydt was saying that even the faith had been a lie, that there was nothing out there but science and nature. The thought of the Soul Rider came to her.

“But I have seen the supernatural, had it in my body, had it guide me here to this place!”

He was unmoved. “Machines and unnatural and artificial life, or life perhaps left over from the time before men were here! There are no gods and goddesses except those here on World! Those with the power are the gods! There is nothing else!”

The energy from him intensified, and she found it more and more difficult to counter it. She thought fast, knowing that she could not sustain it long, that her defense now was being sustained only by her contempt for him and for what he had done to her family. She reached out to Suzl, who sent her the power, and for a moment the combined as­sault staggered him.

But only for a moment. Suzl’s power was raw, untrained, unformed. A shard of crackling yellow-white light came from his side and joined the link with Suzl, then traveled up it, overwhelming it. Suzl cried out in sudden pain, and the link was diverted. Now her power, despite all her efforts, was flowing not to Kasdi but to Coydt. He burned with a new fury, a new sense of triumph, and he attacked with renewed force and vigor. “I am the way, the truth, the light!” he trumpeted. “On your knees before me and worship me!”

A tremendous force, like a giant’s hand, pressed on her, and she fell to her knees. “This is the man who crippled Spirit and killed my father!” she kept repeating to herself over and over, trying to drown out his force and his will. Her clothing burned away from her, and the force pushed against her head, bowing it down.

“It is meaningless to resist further,” he argued. “I am the god of World, and my name is Power. I can grant any wish, or visit any calamity, when, where, and how I choose and on whomever I choose! Fight me no more! Surrender control of your power to me, and be the priestess of my Church! You shall have your daughter and grandson and friends, and you will have no worries, no cares, no pressures upon you. I will take away those things and give you peace. Otherwise you shall die, and as you truly know in your heart, you will be dead forever.”

The vision of her father, bleeding, rotting, hang­ing from a pole came to her, and she summoned enough strength to raise her head and look him in the eye. It was, she realized, the last thing she had to throw at him. Already his visions of her as she would be were creeping into her mind, looking desirable, alluring, and she was having more and more trouble casting them out. Her head drooped again, and she felt so tired, so sick of it all. . . . “No!” she cried. “No!” And drew her last ounce of strength.

There was a loud explosion, and suddenly Coydt cried out and fell forward. She barely had the strength to move out of his way, but she saw in his back an enormous hole, a tremendous outpouring of blood, and she heard him scream and moan as she felt the power weaken as he withdrew it into himself.

He almost won it back by her confusion and hesitancy, but she saw his bloody back and drew on what reserves she couldn’t possibly know or guess that she had. He screamed again, but the pain and damage were so great, the shock and loss of blood so severe, that he could sustain his life or fight off her attack.

A tall, dark figure behind her lowered his shot­gun and broke it, inserting two more shells. Coydt managed to turn himself over onto his side and see the man standing there. “Matson,” he croaked, blood running from his mouth. “Why?”

“You shouldn’t have done that to the girl, Coydt. She was kin.”

Kasdi had not the strength to attack or to do much of anything, but she had enough to keep Coydt from coming up with any kind of repair spell. But he wasn’t through yet, and he managed to chuckle, coughing up blood and phlegm as he did so.

“Done in by a man with the power of a shotgun. My own fault. First time I got careless in four hundred years.” He coughed again, as his life poured onto the spongy Flux surface. He still had enough strength to stem the flow, but he knew that too much of his insides were messed up. He had the power to heal himself, but if he took the concentration and time to do the spell, Kasdi would have a free hand to do with him as she willed. He knew it, and he made his decision.

“You think you’ve killed me, but you haven’t. You haven’t begun to kill me yet. You must kill a million before you kill me. I’ve still got your empire. All you have done is guarantee that at some point in the future the Hellgates will be opened.” He coughed some more and seemed to fade for a moment, but Kasdi was on guard and knew he was still alive. Any less powerful man, in Flux or Anchor, would be gone long before.

He opened his eyes and managed a smile. “And now I will make you mine,” he said softly. She realized what he was doing, but he put so much force of will into it and she was so weakened she couldn’t stop it.

Coydt took upon himself her binding spells. His body twitched and shimmered, and lying there was a mannish-looking woman, still big and power­ful, and still dying. And he/she started laughing, then laughing and choking. There was a sudden convulsion of the whole body, and then the life force simply went out of it.

Coydt van Haaz was dead.

A dull explosion was heard, followed by a second, and then off to the south the whole of Flux seemed to flare into blinding power, but only for a brief instant.

The power was distributed in all directions, but was more intense because it was limited by and deflected from the Anchor boundary. They all felt a brief burning sensation, and then it was gone. With a start, Kasdi realized that her skin had turned a deep brown.

“I guess I put the things where they should’ve gone,” Matson said dryly. She turned and looked up at him, and saw that he was burned, too, on his face and hands. She had neither his clothing nor facial hair, and had taken it evenly all over. She looked back down at Coydt’s dead body.

“He finally found the way to break his binding spell,” she said softly.

17

HARD CHOICES

Cass made her way over to Suzl, who hadn’t moved much in the whole affair. The gross malformation was the worst Suzl had ever been and among the worst that Cass had ever seen. The woman was unnaturally balanced and grossly obscene.

“Let’s see what we can do for you, Suzl,” Cass said, and started examining the spell. She frowned. This was no spur-of-the-moment spell; it had been prepared in advance and custom-tailored to Suzl. It was in Spirit language and monstrously com­plicated.

“Don’t fool with it, Cass,” Suzl warned. “I may not understand a spell from a bill of lading, but I know curses when I see them. This thing has a million traps in it for anyone trying to take it out, and you don’t know this language. I do. I’ve been looking at it this way and that for a little while.”

Cass sighed. “Well, Mervyn and the others should be here soon. They might have better luck.”

Suzl chuckled mirthlessly. “Yeah, he’ll have a lot of nice psychology spells that will make me think this is just wonderful to be this way. He couldn’t even lick the old curse, and that was child’s play compared to this one. Coydt had everything planned out from the start. Everything but Mat-son’s shotgun. At least I owed him that. He never knew Matson was here, and that was his only mistake.”

“Perhaps if you can link with the Soul Rider—”

“Fat chance. Even if I could, it would revert Spirit. And Coydt knew the Soul Rider’s langauge, too. I’ll bet that somewhere in this spell there’s a nasty little thing that would add on to Spirit’s curse. She has enough trouble in Flux without turning into a thing like I am.”

Cass sighed. “But what’s the alternative?”

“Cass, Coydt had a very evil mind. I doubt if I have ever known anybody more totally evil and yet so damned smart. Whatever he touched he corrupted, and that’s still true. I have a way out that he gave to me. I think it’s the only way out for many, many years.”

Cass was shocked. “Not that binding spell! Suzl! It would turn you into a different kind of thing, one just as unpleasant.”

Suzl sighed. “I’m tired, Cass. Real tired. All my life I’ve been owned by somebody and took orders. Every time Flux touched me, it was to turn me into something more strange, more grotesque. I was owned by the Church, then owned by stringers, then owned by the Soul Rider. None of ’em ever gave a damn about me. Even Spirit was a lie, just the Soul Rider hyping both of us up because it needed somebody to do its dirty work for it.”

“I’m tired, too, Suzl. I’ve been as much a victim and a pawn as you have, but I didn’t really realize it until just a little while ago. Now I’m free, for the first time. I don’t know why he did it, but he freed me.”

“You really think so, Cass? I think I know why he did it, and I think Matson does, too. Tell me, Cass—could you take back on yourself all those binding spells and restrictions right now?”

“No. Never again. Even if there was a real need. Even if life depended on it. I could never bring myself to do it.”

“Then he’s got you, too, just like me. He’s under­mined the whole Church with what he did to Anchor Logh so quickly and easily. But the Church, and the empire, could stand that. You see, he’s also taken away its foundation, the rock on which your Church and revolution sit. They won’t march off to fight any more if their own homes are in such mortal danger, and they don’t have the symbol, the example, to lean against and be inspired by. They don’t have you anymore.”

“I made my sacrifices! I deserve some reward!”

“Yeah, you have and you do. But that’s not the way it’ll be seen by others. They’ll march for a saint, Cass, but not for a Fluxlord. And with noth­ing to keep your power, your temper, your wants and your needs down, that power will corrupt you just like it did all of them, Coydt included. He trapped you just as sure as he trapped me.”

“Suzl—promise me you won’t do anything rash until the wizards get here and I can sort this out. Will you at least do that?”

She nodded. “For a little while.”

Relieved, Cass looked around. “Where’s Matson?”

A fairly strong force had been waiting on standby north of Lamoine, but Coydt had ordered them well back and it had taken some time for Weiz to make it back to the town and then send a runner with the news. Now they rode forward to the wall. The fires were out, but it was still a smoking ruin up there.

General Shabir, chief administrator of the riding, looked disgusted. “I told him that it was a pushover. You know what he said? ‘I want a pushover, but a convincing one.’ ”

Weiz nodded. The steps were in ruins, but were still serviceable for about three quarters of the distance. It wasn’t easy, but a crew managed to get up with hooks and ropes and lower down net­ting for the troopers to climb up. One of the first to survey the apron from the top turned and shouted back, “Sir! There’s a lone civilian standing there just below us! Looks like a stringer! He says he wants to talk to you!”

“Don’t shoot!” Shabir ordered. “Tell him I’m coming up. Keep him covered, but that’s all!” He turned to Weiz. “Want to come with me?”

The captain nodded.

The stairs on the side leading to the apron had been blown out about a meter, but they had some­how escaped catching fire. They were singed, but serviceable, and were easily drawn back and se­cured with hooks. With a hundred guns trained on him, Matson stood calmly and waited for the brass to show up.

The military men approached him cautiously but correctly. He had dropped his weapons belt and was clearly unarmed. “My name is Matson,” he told them, not offering his hand. “Coydt van Haas is dead. Your wizard is dead over there, and I’ve blown up your pretty machine. If we can’t come to some agreement fast, in an hour or so an awful lot of power is going to burst right through that area right there.”

The military men swallowed hard at the news. Dimly, in the void, they could see where the ma­chine should have been, and there was nothing.

“One of you wouldn’t happen to have a cigar on you, would you?” the stringer asked. “I’m dying for a smoke.”

One of the infantrymen looked to the officers, who nodded, then handed Matson a cigar and a safety match. He lit it and seemed much more content.

“If what you say is true,” the general said slowly, “then it is the end of Anchor Logh. Many of my men are scum, I freely admit, but they’ve been made that way. They’ve marched and died on com­mand in other people’s armies for nothing. The Fluxlord I once served, and deserted for this, is a particularly nasty sort. The military leadership here is experienced and superior. They were given a chance to take their own land, and they did it. They will not return to the way they were, and they will leave this place a costly hell.”

The stringer nodded. “I figured as much. That’s why we have to take this time to make a deal. We have to keep all this quiet from the rest of Anchor Logh, or the other wizards will panic and let the shields drop as they run, and everybody will be primed for the last stand. Then it might be too late.”

The general frowned. “Too late for what?”

“A deal. Suppose there was no invasion outside of this small area? Suppose we let you keep An­chor Logh and run it without any interference? What would you say then?”

Both officer’s mouths fell open in surprise. Finally, the general recovered. “At what price?”

“The empire controls the machines, and the tem­ple becomes a sort of embassy. We need to insure that it’s not a free and easy passage to the Hellgate. Beyond the temple, no one leaves or enters with­out the permission of your government and the empire’s. The stringer guild will deal with you at east and west gate. I’ve seen a thousand Fluxlands, General, and so have most of the others. We’ll keep your trade open, and we’ll be the intermediar­ies between the empire and your people. It makes no sense to cost a million lives and make this a wasteland. No sense at all, for either side. They want to keep this contained. If you’re here, run­ning the place, they can do so. They do it by co-opting you into the empire. Making it legitimate. Anchor Logh is restored, but has total internal self-government. Everybody benefits and nobody else dies.”

“If we could only trust the empire on that,” Weiz put in. “But it’s a theocracy. How can we trust it?”

“Guarantees can be worked out. You and the Church have both been working with an illusion. The empire isn’t the Church; the Church serves the empire. Nine wizards set policy and control every­thing that it does, and none of them are in the least bit committed to the Church. The war has bled off the surplus population so far, but that won’t last forever. Flux will absorb the surplus, though, as it always has in one way or another. The ones with the power, the Nine Who Guard, are really mostly concerned with securing those Hell­gates. Secondarily, they went as far as they could in learning. They needed a mechanism to break the control of the wizards, each of whom had some piece of old knowledge that usually meant nothing to them until fitted into the whole. They needed a way to pry the ancient stuff out, and they needed Anchors, with fixed laws, to experiment with what they learned. I think they can spare Anchor Logh.”

“It seems reasonable to me,” Weiz noted. “But it’ll have to be sold to higher-ups, in secret, while everything is contained here.”

“Just keep your men on the wall. I’ll stop them and explain the conditions there, too. I think the head of the Nine will be among the first through. You sell it to your side; I’ll sell it to mine.”

“It’s a tough job,” the general noted. “Still, I agree, for what that’s worth, and I’ll cooperate so long as there are no tricks. But no empire forces are to cross the wall or extend more than a kilome­ter in either direction. If they do, it’s all off.”

“These are hard choices you’re handing both sides, Matson,” Weiz noted. “You’re the only one free and clear in all this. You don’t give a damn.”

“Life is all hard choices, Captain,” the stringer replied. “I’ve had more than my share. But most folks never get any choices at all, and hard as they are, I’d rather be the one making the decisions.”

Weiz stirred. “Did you see a woman in Flux? Short, chubby, kind of cute?”

“Yeah, Suzl’s alive. Why? What’s she to you?”

“I . . . sort of married her.”

Matson chuckled. “On orders, of course.”

“Well, yes, on orders. But I find her a little special.”

“You can hardly even know her!”

Weiz shrugged. “I’m a gambler.”

“Well, we’ll see if she is. Do your job first, Captain. The rest is academic if we fail.”

It had been kind of imposing, even threatening, to stand in front of a point in Flux and try to talk an invading force into not going into Anchor. Fortunately, the initial shield opening was quite small, and there were few soldiers to work with— and a wizard. The wizard had contained the as­sault and sent for Mervyn.

Weiz was a glib talker, and it had been a surpris­ingly easy sell on the Anchor side, although, of course, it would be years before the military gov­ernment felt safe enough to relax and remove its martial law organization designed mostly to fight a tough war. On the empire’s side, there was al­most a feeling of relief at Matson’s offer. Many of them were appalled at legitimizing such a terrible and repressive sexist regime, but when you had the Fluxlands for an example, the bizarre could be made palatable and the unthinkable allowed. The people of Anchor Logh knew the hard choice. All-out war to the death or the system they had now. Most hardly liked the system, but they were terri­fied of the alternative. They consoled themselves that such a rigid system would have to bend someday, and slowly reforms would return. They would wait, making a characteristically human decision that none not in their place could com­prehend.

They had seen the burned-out and desolate future, and they had decided no more, no more. They would accept the system, with faith that it would eventu­ally change from within, if not in their lifetimes, then in their descendants’. Slavery and repression, in the end, only ever existed with the consent of the slaves and the repressed, who preferred their condition to death. On a mass basis, there was no other way for such systems to survive.

Mervyn had called in a whole crew of top wiz­ards to examine the spell on Suzl and found it fully lived up to her expectations. Its traps were based on her own Flux power; automatic spells that would trigger when the one before was touched. Such was the way of curses. They could see the traps, but there were so many of them, and all of them so subtle, that there was no way to disarm them without exploding them, to the detriment of any wizard—and innocent bystander—who tried. Coydt had made good use, too, of the linking spell between Suzl and Spirit, now inoperative. Through that, Coydt had engineered a system which would backfire on Suzl when she disabled the spell, send­ing it along via the linking spell to Spirit and attaching it to the binding spell. To free Suzl would send the curse intact to Spirit, making her curse even more grotesque.

There was always a chance, of course, that the Soul Rider could work it out, but they wouldn’t know until it was tried. As far as the Soul Rider was concerned, Suzl was convinced that her part in all this was done. The Soul Rider had stuck with Spirit. It would not risk her, particularly when Suzl could still use the power through the Soul Rider’s spells. From the Soul Rider’s point of view, Suzl, as translator and spell receptor, was still just fine the way she now was.

“And the binding spell Coydt handed me?” she asked the spell doctors. “What would it do?”

“He was as good as his word,” they replied. “You would remember, but your perspective will have changed. You would see your previous life as a waste, a miserable emptiness. You would see this system of theirs as perhaps not right for others, but just what you’ve always wanted and needed. Once in place, you would consider it natural and normal. You would know all the rules, and you would embrace them. It would dampen your aggres­sive streak, and pump up your hormones, and freeze your sexual orientation, and focus your interests on what your new life demanded. There would be no regrets.”

“And the body?”

“Physically and emotionally, you would be sev­enteen or eighteen again and would be somewhat frozen there.”

“So it’s this forever or that forever.”

“Perhaps not. When we get to really understand the power amplifiers, we can perhaps reform and refocus them. Technology and our knowledge will advance. What one person created, another can surely uncreate one day.”

“One day.”

Cass was appalled that she was even considering the binding spell. “For whom? A guy who was ordered to marry you and parade you around to draw me in? A man you’ve known for maybe a day?”

“Or somebody else. What does it matter, Cass? I told you a while back that you just can’t relate to what kind of life I’ve had.”

“But you’ve always been the clever one, the big mouth who’d always point out the truth. You fig­ured out how to reach the Guardian and made it all possible! You’ve always been the independent free spirit!”

“It was an act, Cass. An act to convince every­body, even myself, that I wasn’t a freak, wasn’t owned, wasn’t property. But I was. The only time I felt really genuine, really free—with Spirit—turns out to be phony as well. My absolute master was the Soul Rider. My mind’s been messed with by the wizards of Globbus, by Ravi, by Mervyn, and by the Soul Rider. I’m not even sure what’s really me anymore.”

“But that life back there—treating women as objects! Even you made fun of it! It’s repulsive!”

“Why? Because it’s only women and not both who are objects? Who are you kidding, Cass? You’re arguing ideology. A place where they oppress and degrade women is bad, but a place where they oppress and degrade both men and women, like ninety percent of the Fluxlands, is O.K. or at least acceptable. Sure, I know it’s stupid to oppress and retard half the human race, but it’s just as stupid to oppress and retard all the human race. You know what I’ve got, Cass? The same old thing I’ve had ever since they threw me out of Anchor Logh. Never mind the principles and the masses—all I’ve got is my choice of oppressors.”

“Suzl—live with it a while. There’s a beautiful and private Fluxland waiting for you that you’ve never seen, and there’s a child out there as well, one who now has no parents.”

“I’m going to be just great raising a child like this. Just look at me, Cass!” She paused for a moment. “Are you ready to prove your commit­ment?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Make love to me, Cass. Right here and now. I’m totally turned on, and I’m having to repress the urge to leap on you.”

Cass was suddenly taken aback. She looked at the gross breasts, the enormous male organ, the whole sexually misshapen body, and she was revolted. As much as she wanted to prove her points, she knew that there was no way she could possibly do what was asked. No way at all. No spell prevented her, nor any moral qualms—it would have been moral, in a sense, to shut her eyes and allow it for Suzl’s sake—but she just couldn’t. She just wasn’t a self-sacrificing saint anymore, and all she could do was turn, run, and cry it out.

She did not, however, cease her assault on the kind of agreement they were sealing. Finally Mervyn lost his temper and angrily snapped, “What’s all right one way is wrong the other, huh?”

She was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Coydt recruited his men mostly from Fluxlands ruled by female Fluxlords. Crazy, nasty Fluxlords. Matriarchies, and worse. They were the objects there, fighting when told, prevented from any real authority or position, doing the heavy, dirty work. Coydt freed them and fed their lifelong resentments. His system reversed the roles and fed their egos. Some of those Fluxlands—most, in fact—are within the empire. Lands you allowed to continue.”

“If it was wrong for it to have been done to them, and it was, then it’s just as wrong the other way.”

“Human nature seldom operates like that. Even its loftiest principles tend to become excuses for doing what the powerful want to do. In Anchor, crippled and deformed male babies were put to death by the priestesses. Female counterparts were taken to Flux with the aid of stringers, made whole, and returned. They were good children, model students, and virtually all of them went into the priesthood. The argument went that those girls didn’t increase the population and they filled the need for priestesses painlessly. Most everyone knew about this and accepted it. Since the mothers of killed male children were convinced the births were stillbirths or that the causes were natural, they took it hard but accepted it. World is a rotten place, but it’s what we made it, and we can hardly judge them and not ourselves.”

Slowly, Cass was losing whatever faith she had left in human nature and whatever hope she had for the future. It seemed like blow after blow was coming down on her, and she was powerless to change it.

She went to find Matson and found him prepar­ing to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” he answered. “It’s all done now, Cass. I beat the odds again, and that’s that.”

She felt sudden emotional turbulence. “What about me?”

He sighed. “Cass, so long as you were a priestess, it wasn’t worth the telling, but I been married more than fifteen years to the same woman, a tough ex-stringer like me. We got three kids of our own, and it looks like my oldest daughter, who’s fourteen, is leaning to both the power and to stringing.”

She felt shocked, hurt, even somehow betrayed by that. She began to tremble with anger and emotion.

He looked at her. “What’d you think? That I was sitting up there pining for you? You made your choice to go one way, and it looked permanent to both of us. You’re a good woman, Cass. You’d have made a hell of a stringer and there’s no bigger compliment I can give. But I love my wife and I love my kids and they’re probably all in a panic that I’m lyin’ dead someplace. I have to go back.”

It suddenly all burst out in a fury. “I’ll make you stay!” she screamed at him. “I’m a wizard and I can make you love me and forget all about them!”

He tensed, but kept his self-control. “Yeah, sure. You could make me your pet lover and slave. You been goin’ all over this camp telling people how lousy it is what they’re doin’ to women in Anchor Logh. How immoral it is. But it isn’t immoral if you do it to me, is it? No, because Coydt was right, and those guys in Anchor are right, aren’t they? If you have the power and you want something, you just take it and the hell with the others! I could be the star of a whole Fluxland of men worshipping you, couldn’t I? It’d be O.K. because it’d be you on top and me on the bottom, and the hell with me, right? The hell with my family, right? Go ahead— use your damn Flux spells to make me what you want. Then you’ll be just like all the rest of ’em, and you’ll have no kick coming. Do it now, ’cause if you don’t I’m gettin’ on that horse over there, picking up Jomo, and goin’ home!”

The spells needed came easily to her mind in her hurt and anger. And somewhere, off in a corner of her mind, she heard Coydt’s voice whisper, “Go on! Do it! You got the power and that’s all you need. I’m not dead. I’ll never die. Go on and take him . . . and I’ll be you next time around.”

Matson checked his packs, got on his horse, and rode slowly away into the void.

And now she had nothing at all. That had been Coydt’s intent and his revenge upon her. He had removed the spells and the way of life that had insulated her from truth and allowed her to use them as a convenient excuse to hold on to her fantasies. He had stripped all that protection away, protection she realized now she’d put on herself to protect those fantasies. Coydt’s final, cynical les­son was that power meant nothing to the wielder unless it was used on other people and at their expense.

Mervyn found her, sulking and alone, the evi­dence of many angry fits and many tears abounding. “They’re bringing Spirit to the apron,” he told her. “We’re bringing Jeffron.”

She did not look at him or change her facial expression. “She’ll probably stay in Anchor Logh with him,” she sighed. “And I might as well stick on tights and heels and go with them. I don’t want to live in this ugly world any more.”

“She might surprise you. She’s stronger than you think, considering how much she went through with no preparation and how well she came out of it. Her idealistic world has collapsed, too, you know.”

She turned and looked at him. “She’s with her Mom and Dad. She can’t have Suzl, although I suspect the Soul Rider has already begun readjust­ing her from that. It still has power in her, and it’ll protect its host if it doesn’t conflict with its own objectives.”

Mervyn scratched his beard. “Let’s see. Oh, by the way, that bronze color is a sort of skin tan from the radiation given off when the amplifier exploded. It looks good on you. Perhaps you should make it even and keep it, perhaps lightening vour hair.”

She gave a dry laugh. “For whom?”

“Who knows? You’re alive, you’re powerful, and you’re one of the very few people now who are completely free.” He paused and said, gently. “It wasn’t a waste, Cass. We contained a great evil, and we made a better life possible for those who can do nothing for themselves. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. That’s an accomplishment worth some pride.”

She just stared after him as he walked away.

“I’ve come to say goodbye, Cass,” Suzl told her. “I’m going to do it.”

She nodded. “I can’t ever understand living in that place as it is now, but I think at least I can understand why you have no choice.”

“No, you can’t. I doubt if you ever will. You’re strong by nature. A leader type, Coydt called it.

I’ve been strong by necessity. You retired, and now I’m ready to retire. Good-bye, Cass. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“I—I hope you do, too, Suzl.”

The great, misshapen creature that was Suzl was helped by duggers, many as strange and gro­tesque as herself, into a wagon and she rode off. They rode down to the end of the perimeter and lifted her off, then drove away. She looked around the void, and there were tears in her eyes, not just for herself, but for Cass and Spirit and the others as well. None of them really understood, but, oddly, Coydt would have. She was a terrible freak with the power. If she remained this way, she could survive and even learn to use that power. Eventu­ally she would dominate and make others like herself, and others like she wanted to be would be forced to worship her. She would be yet another child of Coydt’s, and she knew it. World had too many Coydts now. Hard choices. No more hard choices. . . .

She engaged the spell. She felt momentarily dizzy and lost her balance, but her mind cleared quickly. She sat up and looked down at herself. She was normal again! If anything, a little slimmer, a little shapelier. It was odd. She didn’t feel any different. She remembered everything clearly, the good and the bad. Mostly bad, though, she knew. A depressed, unhappy, unnatural and abnormal life that had accomplished very little. Flux had been cruel to her, and she hated it. Still, she had the power, and, interestingly, she now knew a couple of spells. She got up and gestured at the void, and a shining mirror appeared. No taller, but she was shapelier, sexier, better proportioned. The breasts were still big and sensual, but after what she’d been cursed with, they were just fine. Big and sexy—not de­formed.

She made her hair longer, so that it came down on both sides of her face and, pushed forward, kind of hung down sexy-like over the breasts. She gave the image a sensual kiss. Big eyes and sexy lips. She liked what she saw there. The earrings with the tags had returned, but nothing else. She used the power instead. Rosy lips, shadow, eye­brows . . . everything. She created clothing by us­ing very fine black mesh that hugged tight and hid nothing, not even the tattoo. To this she added open-toed shiny black shoes with thin eighteen-centimeter heels, very high, but they made her seem taller and gave her such a walk!

Lengthen and paint the fingernails and color the toenails to match; set things for no unwanted body hair—and she decided she was ready. It was, she thought, the first and only positive help the power had been.

She turned and faced the Anchor border, and something inside her whispered that, even now, she could turn around. Some ghostly link, perhaps with the Soul Rider or the Guardian, or some corner of her mind the spell had missed? She knew she could, realized that there was a certain chance here at freedom, but if she walked back into Anchor, it was for keeps.

She walked into Anchor with a strut and a wig­gle that was worthy of any Main Street entertainer. There was a new temporary set of stairs there and two soldiers standing guard at it. Their eyes looked at all of her in a way she had never been looked at before, and she found she loved it. She walked up to them and waited.

“What do you wish, lady?” one of them asked.

“Sir, my husband, Captain Weiz, is somewhere in this area. I would appreciate it ever so much if you could take me to him,” she said in a voice that was high, yet soft and sexy, and rather helpless-sounding.

“We’ve been told to expect you,” one of the soldiers replied. “Allow me to help you up the walk­way here.”

She allowed it, even enjoyed it. She had seen other women do this and be treated this way, but she had never been. The trick, she decided, was in never letting men know what suckers they were for this sort of thing. This is what I’ve always wanted, she realized, and didn’t even trouble herself about whether it was the spell or her real self thinking. Whichever, it was true, and she neither looked back at the void nor had any regrets.

Dannon and Cloise brought Spirit to the apron with them. Cass watched them come, and still she felt nothing but contempt for the pair she’d en­trusted Spirit to all those years. Dannon was wear­ing a military-style uniform with second lieutenant’s bars sewn on. Cloise walked behind him, looking just as ridiculous in her hooker’s outfit as she had before, but also looking very strong-willed and confident. Behind them was Spirit, on whom the same sort of outfit looked absolutely stunning. She, however, did not look happy about the whole thing.

Cass had taken Mervyn’s advice, with the advice and help of a few others. She had filled herself out a bit, trimmed off those boyish edges and flattened chest, kept the smooth bronze color on her skin, and made her hair a light brown streaked with blond. She wore a light tan pullover shirt, blue work pants, and a pair of riding boots. She had smoothed her faced and skin a bit as well, and made herself look attractive but thirtyish. She wanted to give the onlookers, particularly those on that wall, a look at a strong, independent woman who was in every way their match. It was the only blow she had left to strike.

They came up to her and stopped. “Hello, Sister Kasdi,” Dannon said, clearly not happy to be there. “You look quite different now.”

“Not Sister Kasdi, just Cass,” she responded coolly. “I no longer represent the Church or the empire. I’m here as a concerned mother and grandmother.” She paused for a moment then looked at Spirit. “No drugs or hypnos, and she’s been told the truth?”

They both nodded.

“Spirit, how do you feel?” Cass asked her.

“Sick,” the woman replied, and Cloise and Dannon both looked startled.

A man came out of the void behind Cass with Jeffron in his arms. That, too, had been a little rub in the noses of the onlookers. The boy wasn’t crying, just sucking his thumb and looking around wide-eyed.

“Here is your son. Spirit,” Cass told her, taking the baby from the man and walking up to her daughter, whose height, with the shoes, was tower­ing in proportion. “My grandson. The real one.”

She took the boy and held him close. Then she said, “They told me Suzl was dead. Is that the truth?”

She thought a moment. “Yes.”

Spirit looked around at all of them. “What am I to do now?”

“Choose,” Cass told her. “Remain here if you wish. Or we will arrange to take you through the temple and into one of the other three Anchors and get you and the boy settled in.”

She stepped forward and looked at the two whom she’d loved and thought of as her parents almost all her life. “You make me sick,” she told them, and they both looked shocked. “Most of the people I can understand, but not you. I loved you and you betrayed us! Out there in Flux I thought how nice it would be to be back in normal, loving Anchor Logh. I felt cut off, lonely, insecure. But not nearly as cut off, lonely, and insecure as I felt this past two weeks. There’s more love out there than in all of Anchor Logh.” She handed the baby back to a startled Cass, kicked off her shoes and removed the rest of her clothing. She was still a lot taller than Cass. “Coming, Mother?” she asked the woman with the child.

All of a sudden they all realized what she was going to do, and all for reasons of their own yelled out, “Spirit! Wait! Don’t!”

Cass looked at her, feeling not a little pride and admiration for her courage, but she wasn’t sure if the result was right. “You don’t have to. There are three other Anchors. It’ll hurt them, certainly, but it’s for keeps. They’ll recover. You won’t.”

“I’ve been there before,” Spirit replied. “The first time I wasn’t prepared for it, mentally or emotionally. I am now. Hard as I’ll try, I won’t be able to forget what happened this time. But, you know, maybe I’m better off not understanding what you people are saying and doing. Maybe it’d be a lot nicer if everybody saw the beauty in a butterfly’s wing or the wonderful patterns in a blade of grass and if everybody spent a lot more time on love and had no more time for fear and hatred.”

“I could lift that spell, you know,” Cass told her. “I could take it on myself. It would be far better than what I had all those years.”

“No. Jeffey’s got to know both worlds. He needs a wizard’s protection, and he needs experience and guidance I can’t give.”

“There’ll be no men in that little Fluxland, you know.”

“Oh, World’s full of men, just as nice and just as rotten as the ones we’ve known so far. If we need them, either of us, I’m sure we can find them.”

Cass felt everything drain away to be replaced by new and far different emotions. She wanted to hug Spirit, but couldn’t because of the baby. Well, there would be plenty of time for hugging later.

Dannon and Cloise still seemed in a state of shock. They could no more conceive of Spirit’s choice than she could of theirs. Cass grinned at them and looked back at Spirit. “If you ever want out, just let me know, somehow, and I’ll switch with you. I owe you that.”

Spirit smiled back at her. “You just want in,” she replied, took little Jeffron and stepped into Flux.

Cass turned back to the gaping pair, stiffened, clicked her heels together and saluted. Then she turned and followed her daughter and grandson. She’d just been offered a very nice job, and this choice wasn’t hard at all.

18

WITCH’S SABBAT

“He’s dead,” Gifford Haldayne told the other five. “The-son-of-a-bitch is truly dead.”

Romua Togloss, the former Queen of Heaven, President of the Council and Haldayne’s half-brother, smiled and nodded.

There were smiles and nods all around. They were all there, in a rare gathering in a small, remote Fluxland all their own. Here was Chua Babaye, the beautiful self-styled Witch of the South­ern Wastes, and Ming Tokiabi, the tiny, brilliant head of the technical department, and Vrishnikar Stomsk, the lean, gaunt, goateed mathematical wizard, and Zelligman Ivan, the huge, gruff mili­tary expert. Although now only six, they were the Seven Who Come Before, the Seven Who Wait, the most powerful wizards dedicated to opening the Hellgates.

“We must add a new member and select a new President,” Ivan pointed out. “As much as we are relieved to be rid of that madman, we owe him a debt of thanks. In one series of strokes he demoral­ized the empire, eliminated Sister Kasdi as a symbol and a threat, sowed fear in enemy Anchor, and halted the relentless military progress. The empire is in discord, each little group and area preoccupied with its own selfish interests. It is exploitable discord!”

Haldayne nodded. “Indeed it is. And as the Politi­cal Affairs Minister here, I will take full advantage of it. We must, however, continue to encourage and fund scientific research and cooperation. Coydt knew more than any of us. We must locate and unify his research teams, know what he knew but withheld from us. With a knowledge and under­standing of the Guardian’s language, the Gates are open to us. Taking all seven Gates will not be easy, but I feel it will come. Licking the communications problem is the major obstacle.”

“You underestimate the Nine if you think taking the Gates no problem,” Gabaye commented. “To take and hold one Gate, two, even four or five, perhaps. But all seven at the same time will not be easy.”

“I didn’t say it was easy, just attainable,” Haldayne snapped back irritably. “But the amplifi­ers don’t work well around the Gates, and the Flux damps out any wireless signals, even if we could find some way to curve them around the whole of World’s surface.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll let them solve it,” his sister soothed. “We have had to be patient for so long, so very long. What are a few more decades even, if we all live to see our dream come true?”

They murmured and nodded assent. An assis­tant came in and poured drinks all around. Hal­dayne rose and raised his glass. “To our certain victory and to a Utopian world!”

“To power!” responded Zelligman Ivan.

The Soul Rider saga continues with

Masters of Flux and Anchor