02. Empires of Flux and Anchor (23 page)

Kasdi stepped back and looked thoughtfully at the shield. "What I want to know is how they expect to get back
out.
They can't sustain this indefinitely."

"I suspect we couldn't stop the wizards," Krupe noted. "The shield doesn't need a top, nor could it have one. It's too high up for us to get over it, of course, but they could pick any point up there at a reasonable altitude and simply fly out. As for the others, it's unknown, but I'm sure they have something planned. If
I
were they, I'd simply have a good stock of uniforms like we use, put up some resistance, then fade and join our own troops. We'd never know if they were good at it. We have too many soldiers to sort them out. We'll work on covering that angle, of course—it'd be a simple matter to vary our own uniforms—but that is not the problem now. We have a battalion and some very good wizards covering the Hellgate in case they want to use the back door, by the way. Pity we can't use it."

"Years ago I could have, with the Soul Rider inside me," Kasdi noted. "But even if we could, only a few could go and there would surely be a nasty reception committee waiting at the other end."

"We could take care of that to a point," Matson said. "Send in a few good concussion and shrapnel bombs ahead of us. It'd clear the corridors and probably blow the power plant as well. Everybody would be equally in the dark. Then come up with automatic fire to establish ourselves. From that point, anybody who knew the temple could probably give 'em a good run for their money—providing they didn't stumble in the dark and kill themselves. I may be wrong, but I don't remember ever seeing a window in one of those things."

"You're right on that," Kasdi told him, "but the dark wouldn't necessarily be a problem. There are some easy spells for adjusting your eyes to the dark. I doubt if many of them would have the same ability, since it makes you oversensitive to light. And they wouldn't have a wizard to correct it, since they'd be in Anchor." She sighed. "But what's the use? We can't get in to begin with."

"Yes, we can," Mervyn replied softly.

She stared at him and immediately guessed what he was thinking. "Oh, no! That is definitely out! In the name of Heaven, she's so with child that it could come at any moment! You've got her and you've got me! Do you want to kill my unborn grandchild as well? What is
enough
?" She turned to Matson. "You can't go along with this!"

He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "I want Coydt in Anchor. If I could get in, I'd go. But Anchor Logh's nothing to me. I'll get him, sooner or later. If there's a way in, I'm going. But I'm not anxious to get at him now at anybody else's expense."

Kasdi turned back to Mervyn. "See? We absolutely forbid it!"

"Kasdi—your father's in there," Mervyn reminded her. "And so are your three sisters, five nephews, and three nieces. Not to mention Cloise and Drunyon, who raised Spirit, and all those other relations, as well as Sister Tamara and the rest of the Church personnel. They may be undergoing unspeakable tortures now."

"Or they might all be dead," she responded, "in which case, what you suggest will wipe out the whole line. Won't the Seven be pleased
then
!"

"We only need her to bypass the Guardian and reach the end of the tunnel," the old wizard reminded her. "Once we're through, she can return. The risk is there, true, but it's relatively small."

"So two or three of us get in. What good will
that
do?"

Matson was considering the problem. "In tactics they call it a beachhead, for reasons I've never understood. It seems to me that the problem's easy to state. We can't break this shield from outside, but we've got to break it. We can't get enough troops in that little hole to fight our way to the walls. But if some good fighters can get into that temple with some knowledge of it and decent weapons, we can secure it long enough to bring some top class wizards through. Then we get out to the countryside. A small number. Make it to a predetermined place on the border. Our wizards and our guns take out those holding that section, and a small part of the shield collapses. We come in and
they
are bottled up, and that's the end of that."

The wizards nodded. All of them were concerned with Flux power and politics; none were truly military people, and none had any real feel for the soldier on the ground with a weapon, although that was who always had to take the ground after they blasted a path. Now it was the opposite problem. Now they needed the soldiers to blast a path to the shield.

"General Hawney had something like that in mind," Krupe told them, "but it might not work. It's entirely possible that the temple part of that passage is so well booby-trapped that no one could survive. And if they did, there aren't very many ways out of that temple."

"If you have the right equipment, you can always make your own exit," Matson replied.

"Yes, and bring every one of the enemy in the capital running to you. Then it would be a crosscountry trip with nobody you could be certain was a friend and with the whole pack on your heels. Finally, the wizards' positions just inside Flux will be well protected and well defended, and none of those wizards will be pushovers either. There is simply too much that can go wrong. It's impossible!"

"What other suggestion do you have, Mister Krupe?" Matson asked him. "Wait here until they get tired and come out? Well, I'm here to tell you that they don't
ever
have to come out. You as much as admitted that you can't stop the wizards if they want to get out. The rest of 'em are false wizards, duggers, and Fluxers with no power at all out here to speak of. This here is their own Fluxland, sort of, under their rules. I lived these past years in a place where almost nobody could get out and nobody particularly wanted to."

That was sobering. It had never occurred to them to think of this as a permanent condition, but it would certainly have occurred to Coydt.

"These wizards will never sit still for it indefinitely. They'll want something more," Kasdi argued.

It was Tatalane who spoke now. "True, but whether it is a matter of days or weeks, they can be reinforced and replaced as need be. What is certain is that nothing will stop the Seven from doing this in the next cluster, and then the next, while holding here. They can spare many wizards if we must divide our forces in half, or thirds, or more. The longer they hold out here, the greater that danger will be. And when we are divided enough, and weakened enough,
then
the old order strikes full with its armies. Not just the empire will fall, but civilizations as well. The communications problem, if they have not yet solved it, can then be attacked at leisure. We
must
break this— now!"

Kasdi felt very little love for their empire or even human civilization at that point. But what kind of a world would her grandchild grow up in? Who in fact could stand against such evil totally triumphant?

And yet World was a big place, and there were many places to hide with no real chance of discovery. Flux wizards like she and Suzl could create their own impenetrable Fluxland in the wild north far from Anchor. The Seven would not pursue. Their goal was Anchor.

Their goal was to open the Hellgates.

"Only as far as the vortex," she said at last. "And then only if you can first somehow communicate the problem to her and if she is willing to help."

Getting the situation across to Suzl proved relatively easy in Flux, where images could be conjured up at will. The total lack of meaningful communication with Spirit had been due to the other parts of her spell and her mental state. It was Suzl's job to get that message across, and this she resolutely refused to do.

It wasn't that Suzl was unsympathetic to their plight, only that she had no more ties to Anchor Logh and it was a remote place filled mostly with faceless, nameless people. Kasdi had come home a hero; Suzl had come home half male and half female, had been called names, had been disowned by her own family and friends. The hurt she'd suffered then remained with her for her entire adult life, and she simply could not find it in herself to do for them what, in reverse circumstances, they would never do for her.

Spirit and the baby were a different matter. She insisted that no action be taken that would endanger them until the child came, and as they had no luck getting the situation over directly to Spirit, they finally had to gnaw and gnash their teeth and do it Suzl's way.

Attempts to break the shield were being made all the time, but so far it had weakened only slightly for short periods of total attack and then firmed up again. Coydt's skillful alliance forged with the Fluxlords had sustained itself over a period far longer than anyone would have guessed, and it showed no signs of abating.

They whiled away the time planning the expedition, knowing that every day's delay meant their chances were slimmer and slimmer. Only Matson, who knew Coydt from the old days, thought otherwise. "The longer time passed, the more secure they'll all feel. If we'd come through that hole right away, we might not have had a chance. Now I'll bet there's maybe two bored guards, both of whom are bein' punished for something."

Nobody knew how many people the Guardian would allow in with a Soul Rider, but it had to be few even for physical reasons, and with equipment and Suzl along at least as far as the vortex, that meant a small group indeed.

Matson would go, but Jomo could not. His great size would make him stand out anywhere, and he was instantly recognizable and certainly on Coydt's shoot-on-sight list. Kasdi would go, although she, too, had many liabilities and no real fighting will. She wanted Coydt in Flux as much as Matson wanted him in Anchor. She would go, she realized, because her family was there, because Matson was going and she could not bear to send him off again, and because she knew both the temple byways and the Anchor better than just about anyone else they had.

Matson chose two tough career soldiers, Captain Macree and Sergeant Zlidon, because both had fought in campaigns in Anchor. Macree was an explosives expert, and Zlidon was good at organizing and at automatic weapons. Both had been born and raised in Anchor Logh. But Kasdi was the only true wizard—Matson was a false wizard, good only at illusions, convincing though they were. Mervyn forbade any of the Nine from going; the wizards inside would certainly be of lesser caliber, except for Coydt and perhaps one or two others at the gates, and he simply didn't want to risk losing them to a bullet before they even had a chance to use their stuff. They finally found a number of powerful volunteers both from the Sisterhood and from the staffs of the major wizards.

It would be Matson's and the soldiers' job to get them into the temple. It would be Kasdi's job to get them positioned and moving through the temple so that they could command it. Little by little, then, more and more good soldiers would be ferried in a few at a time, and they would fortify the temple against the outside. At the same time, small teams of wizards led by Anchor Logh natives would move out and attempt to reach and breach the wall and the shield.

On the twelfth day everyone held their breath as Spirit delivered a 368.5-gram healthy-looking baby boy. The delivery was not effortless, but it was painless, thanks to the wizard powers of Flux. The child looked quite normal and human in every way, to the relief of all, but didn't really seem to look like either Spirit or Suzl—or Kasdi or Matson. He
was
cute, though, and both grandparents were pleased. As both parents were mute and illiterate, Kasdi, with Matson's shrugging permission, named him Jeffron, a diminutive form of her own father's name, and so it was recorded by Mervyn in the official registers.

Suzl was a bit put off when it turned out to be a boy. She had so expected a girl that the idea that it might not be hadn't even entered her mind. She was, however, relieved that it was over and that mother and baby were doing fine, and also relieved, as were Mervyn and Kasdi, that the Soul Rider this time had remained with the mother.

"Maybe it only likes or favors women," Kasdi theorized. "How do we know?"

Suzl warmed quickly to the child, however, particularly when she discovered that she could breastfeed as well as Spirit. Duty now called, however, and it was time for her to make good on her end of the bargain.

How much do you remember of your past?
she asked Spirit. It was sometimes unsettling to discover the lack of frames of reference when talking to the woman who had, after all, grown up normally.

But Spirit had put almost her entire past so far out of her mind that it might as well not exist. What was there was sometimes hard to dig out. With that last visit to Anchor Logh, Spirit, by spell or by psychology, had literally buried all that she had been.

Slowly, Suzl began to draw from her a present state of mind. She could not remember much, and what she
did
remember was impossible to grab hold of or build upon. To Spirit, it seemed, there was only the present, and her practical memory seemed to go back only to the time when she gave Suzl her powers to use. She could not remember life without Suzl, nor could she remember what Suzl had looked like before. She did, however, remember her mother—her real one—as her mother and a kindly, middle-aged man who she seemed to think might have been her father. Suzl recognized the vision as not her father, but her maternal grandfather, who apparently had made quite an impression on her. She did not remember Coydt.

Still, Suzl was able to put across the idea that a lot of people, perhaps the kindly man, were in trouble from evil others, and that she was needed to guide some rescuers to the place where she had surrendered her powers. She agreed to help, simply by following Suzl's lead and doing what was asked of her, whether or not she understood what she was doing.

Anchor Logh had been in the grip of the enemy for sixteen days when they returned to the Hellgate, hidden behind a shield that had revealed none of its secrets.

Spirit led Suzl, Kasdi, Matson, Zlidon, and Macree down the ladder to the long tube. Jomo took command of the caldera itself, to make sure that nothing went wrong at this end.