01. When the Changewinds Blow (45 page)

"This grows interesting," the sorceress muttered to herself, too interested in the potential new powers of this thing to think beyond it at the moment. "I wish that you will forget Boolean or even that he exists and will instead become by abject and obedient slave, willingly and joyfully serving me as your only reason for living, and that this will be so permanent that no spell or potion may change it."

Suddenly there was a strange, hollow voice in Asterial's head, one she neither expected nor was able to cope with.

Command inconsistent with prime directive. I am not going to stay forever sealed in this fucking thing until the end of time!

Suddenly the jewel seemed to transform, growing in an instant from a tiny bauble to a huge, amorphous, sinister shape that was dripping both power and evil. It was unlike anything Charley had ever dreamed even in her wildest nightmares and she felt repulsed, unclean; she wanted to turn away, to run, but she could not. She had to watch.

Waves of amber-colored energy both enveloped and outlined the thing, and it reached out with a horrible, monstrous roar and took hold of the blue-clad sorceress, the energy waves growing to envelop her as well.

Asterial screamed and threw off her blue cloak, and Charley's mouth dropped. The sorceress
was
beautiful, but it was the beauty of the new dawn against the millions of tiny scales over her body reflecting every color and hue. The head and upper torso were human, but the rest of the body was like a giant insect, the two human arms the forelegs and the other six thin and spiny, and from her back suddenly emerged great sets of wings which began to unfold and begin a terrible buzzing.

My God! She's a six-foot-tall dragonfly!
was all Charley could think.

Both figures rose into the air now, several feet off the ground, and the sounds from the two of them were horrible, the energy flowing through, around, and out from them like some fantastic lightning show.

There was a sudden great roar as Asterial expended the last of her acquired energy and all those bullets into the
thing
that had sprung from nowhere, but to no effect. It simply absorbed them and roared with a horrible ferocity and enclosed the insect woman in an ever-tightening embrace. There was a sudden brilliant, blinding flash, and both figures shimmered a moment and seemed to blend, then they simply faded out.

Quite suddenly there was a dead silence in the amphitheater, and, a moment later, something small dropped from a height and clattered against the rock floor, rolling near Sam's feet. It was the Jewel of Omak.

Sam began to sway a bit, then collapsed on her knees and went down on all fours, shaking her head as if waking up from a deep steep. The others began to groan and shift, the two girls still bound and Boday's feet still held by the rope and stakes.

Sam looked up, appearing both haunted and confused, and suddenly saw Charley standing there looking at her. "Charley?" she called weakly, "My God! Charley!" And then she suddenly started to cry hysterically.

Charley rushed over to her and just held her and rocked her back and forth for a while. Boday, seeing the scene and having her hands free, managed to undo the knots around her ankles and then retrieve Charley's knife and free the two girls. For a while they were all stunned, all in shock of one kind or another, but suddenly Sheka, the cute nine-year-old, spotted the body of Halot, grabbed the knife where Boday had put it down, rushed over to the body with a cry and started stabbing Halot's still form again and again and again.

Sam got hold of herself, and Charley was able to get free enough to reach down and pick up the Jewel of Omak. "It must'a been tough," she said as calmly and sympathetically as possible. "Maybe you should use this to give her a little bit of peace."

Sam stared at the incessant stab, stab, stab, as the child cried and cried, and she shook her head negatively. "No. One day, yes. She'll need more help than this stupid demon can give anyway. Maybe we all will. But, right now, she should hate. If she hates, she might yet survive."

Charley started to respond, but she couldn't think of anything to say. Finally she managed, "You okay-otherwise?"

"I'll live." Sam was starting to think clearly again for the first time in the whole day of terror. She suddenly looked around at the dead bodies, the jewel back in her hand, the new carnage, and she was acutely aware that only she and the four others seemed to still be alive. "My God, Charley! All this- how'd you do it? Where's your army? And that-thing. That bitch. She was
evil,
Charley. I've seen a lot of bad people, but I never before saw pure evil." She was suddenly awed. "You did all this-yourself?"

"I had a little help. He's dead now. I-" But Charley could say no more. Suddenly she felt land and sky heave and she passed out cold on the rocky floor.

Things were different when Charley came to, not the least difference being she herself. She ached all over and she felt more tired than she ever had in her life. She was also incredibly thirsty, and everything was so damned blurry. She made out a figure sitting nearby and tried to call to her but only a croak came out.

Boday jumped at the sound, then rushed to her with a canteen. "Drink slowly," the alchemist cautioned; "There is plenty of water but too much at once will make you sick."

In fact she had to be forced to stop, then had a fit of coughing and dizziness, but her voice loosened a bit and she feh a slight bit better. "What-what happened?" she managed.

"We have been near dying to ask
you
that question. Even Boday had her doubts, it must be admitted. Captured, a night of horror, then put out by the jewel in the midst of a powerful and evil changeling and her cohorts, and suddenly-they are all dead or gone and here you ace. But rest, relax now. Boday will not press you. We have been waiting almost two days for the story; it will wait a bit longer."

Charley felt her mind reel.
"Two days!
You mean I've been out for two days?"

Boday nodded. "You performed miraculously, my beauty, but you were not designed for this. Climbing, hiking shooting, and who knows what else, with no rest and nothin to eat or drink from the looks of it. Boday wishes she had her kit to give you some help but it is all gone. You will feel this for some time. You pushed yourself well beyond your limits and we are all blessed that you are not dead because of it.'

She
felt
half dead, anyway, and sank back on the cot. How the hell
had
she done all that? My God, it was like some kind of weird dream. She couldn't believe it herself.

Using the canteen some mote she splashed water on her face and rubbed her eyes. God, she needed a bath! A nice, warm, extra-long bath. . . .

By the time she was in reasonable shape to talk and feel some degree of normalcy returning, Sam was there, and they hugged and talked until morning and filled each other in on just what had gone on.

The flash flood had been more devastating, more likely, than Asterial's machine gun might have been to the train. It wasn't like an old-fashioned Earth flood which would have taken far longer to build, but it might well have been typical of what to expect in the Kudaan Wastes. Still, even with little warning, there had been some time to get ready for it and a fair number of survivors managed to swim to dryer high areas. It wasn't until later, when the waters receded, that the gang went into real action.

With Asterial as a spotter from her high perch, the quartet of henchmen was easily able to spot a number of living and dead and they had the expertise and equipment to get to them. The dead were stripped and left to rot; five male survivors in varying degrees of shock and injury were hauled out along with the four of them. Boday had clutched Sam with tremendous force and even the action of the flood hadn't separated them, but by the time they made it to a rocky butte they were all in and simply collapsed until found and taken captive. The other two girls had an even more miraculous escape, being washed straight through the narrows and onto the sides of the bowl-shaped canyon. All the captives had been stripped and tied with their arms behind them linked to a rope collar. If they struggled or failed to keep up, they might well have strangled themselves.

But they had some time to recover because their rescuers, Halot and the one called Tatoche who'd been later killed by Serkosh, had gone scavenging over miles of valley terrain, foraging for everything they could find. Some of the discoveries were astonishing-two wagons intact, although their covers had been torn off, and even some live horses and nargas. They put all the loot they could find in the wagons, then began their march around to the camp at the arch. Waiting there for them were Asterial and the two others who'd helped get her gun and equipment out of the ambush spot. It was unlikely that Asterial needed any help herself; Charley, from what she saw, was convinced that somehow the changeling could fly, at least for short distances.

Then, well after dark, when they had stowed away all they really wanted to keep and broken down and burned the rest, the night of horror had begun. Asterial encouraged it like some demonic queen; she seemed to take a perverse pleasure in torture and mutilation, although she did not participate-she presided.

The men-two paying passengers, three trail crew-were brutally questioned about almost everything they knew, then tortured, mutilated for sheer fun, and eventually killed. One man took a very long time to die. The women expected much the same, but while they were horribly brutalized, tied up, made to do most anything imaginable, and ultimately repeatedly raped, they were by Asterial's expressed command not mutilated or killed. She was a creature of some magic and so felt the magic in the jewel taken from Sam; she had experimented with it and in the process, of course, knocked them all mercifully out cold.

"What about Moustache?" Charley asked. "Zamofir, I think his name is."

"He was here and in pretty good shape," Sam told her. "He seemed to know them and they seemed to know him and he sure wasn't treated bad, but he looked real uncomfortable at their blood orgy and stayed back in the cave. You didn't see him?"

"No, not at all, but Serkosh said he was there and he hadn't seen him leave, either. He didn't even come out when the fire started. He's not there now? You looked?"

"Nowhere. Some signs that he was there but nothin' else. I guess you were right about him, but he didn't seem to have nothin' to do with
this. I'm
pretty sure he had nothin' to do with the trap and didn't even figure on it."

"No difference. He works for the same master as they do. He's just the more genteel, brainy, sly kind of monster. The kind that don't care how many folks get murdered or raped or enslaved or anything like that but who can't stand the sight of it themselves. Instead they pay somebody else and order it done out of their sight and mind. I don't like the fact that he's disappeared so well here, either. He could'a answered a ton of questions for us and given us the lay of the land. More, I sure as hell would like to know
when
he split. He could paint a big target right on my butterfly eyes, you know. And if he knows any English he might know how to turn me off and on at will. Say-will you do me a favor? Use that damned thing and get rid of that? It's like a sword over my head. If Asterial hadn't been so damned arrogant in bringin' me back we'd all be slaves now."

Sam sighed. "I can't. I tried the jewel-it doesn't answer. There's not even any little beam of light. It stays closed and silent, like so much junk jewelry. That-
thing
you saw come out of it-could it have been the demon?"

Charley shuddered. "Could be. I hadn't thought of that. If it is we're well rid of it even if it was powerful and on our side. The damned thing-you said Asterial was pure evil, but she wasn't. She was just an evil creature, like a lot of others we've met this trip. This thing was. Pure, unadulterated, undiluted evil of a form and kind I just can't describe to you. I dunno. Maybe it figured a way to spring itself on its own. Maybe Asterial drew it out. Maybe they're both still alive." That gave her another chill. "If so, my neck's had it. Asterial will spend all eternity hunting me down and she knows just how to nail me, damn it."

Sam sighed. "I'm sorry. It was the demon who suggested it. Did it almost on its own, really, although I went along. All that power . . . You just can't not use it."

Charley sighed. "Well, it's done. At least we showed we're no pushovers. You looked for any more survivors?"

"Yeah. The girls went out. We couldn't stop 'em, so one of us would stay here with you and the other would go with them. Not much left even now down there, but well up the canyon past where we got-and we was the leaders, I thought-I swear there were wagon tracks. And somebody'd dug several graves. It could be that some of the train not only managed to escape Asterial's boys but actually put together enough to push on. Hard to say. They sure as hell pushed on without
us.
Trouble was, they wasn't much useful to us, neither."

"What have you got?"

"Well, we got five horses, if that's anything. I guess it is. All the wagons pretty much burned or blew up. Nothin' that could be done about that. We got lots of guns but only a few boxes of ammo that were in the arch. Plus some assorted knives, swords, spears-that kind of shit. Nothin' much for clothes. A few blankets, maybe, that kind of thing, and a couple of bedrolls. Saddles, too, if we can manage to get 'em on the horses. They're
heavy
sons of bitches. Took all of us to saddle up and go back down there today. The kids ride good, though, and I'll manage. Also six or seven of them Mandan gold blankets. Talk about
heavy.
They looked like dyed wool but they ain't, I'll tell you. Plenty of water here-there's a natural spring back there-and lots of these rock-hard biscuits. Could be worse."

Charley nodded. Daylight had broken by the time they'd finished, and she struggled up and insisted on getting to her feet. She still felt like every bone in her body was broken, but she knew it wasn't. In the end, it would go away, and she'd return to some semblance of normalcy. What worried her most was that the sun was up new and it was quite bright, but everything was still pretty damned blurry to her. Real clarity lasted only inches beyond her outstretched arm; after that the world just dissolved into blurry, indistinct shapes that, after ten or fifteen feet at best, became a nothingness. That one frantic night she'd seen with a clarity she hadn't remembered for years, but this was far worse than her usual nearsightedness now. It could be that her eyes were just like the rest of her- pushed by will beyond their limits, overused, overstrained, and that this would pass. She hoped it was so, but she had to wonder if that supernatural bout she had witnessed on top of it all hadn't given off more damage than it seemed. Right now, from maybe ten or twelve feet, she couldn't tell short, fat Sam from tall, painted Boday. They were just blurry, indistinct shapes.