02. Empires of Flux and Anchor (5 page)

Now, one by one, they came up the aisle and removed their white robe, putting it in a container, and then went behind the altar rail and stood, totally naked, behind Kasdi. As each approached the altar and knelt once again, Kasdi pronounced a name. There was a whole department to choose the names of priestesses so that there would be no overlaps and no confusion. Henceforth, the name she gave them would be the only name they would respond to as their own or think of as theirs.

Midway through, the extremely beautiful young woman she'd talked to the night before approached, even more stunning unclothed, and Kasdi smiled and said, "Sister Marigail." She smiled back and took her place.

When they were all named, Kasdi turned to them. "Now see yourselves. All that you have, covet, or desire is what you have now." She removed her own robe and stood naked before them. "Now see all I have, covet, or desire. You are always my children, but you are now all my sisters. Through me the Holy Mother ordains you priestesses of Her Holy Mother Church. She confers upon you now the power to do work in Her name, to access the altar itself, to administer the holy services and the sacraments of the Church, all of which you may not violate no matter what the circumstances. I have given my blessing to each and every one of you. Now you may give me
your
blessing, if you wish, and depart as you came with all that you have now."

One by one they left, giving her the blessing as their first act of ordination and then walking naked through the door. Outside, the administrative people had undergarments, robes, and sandals for each, all in the yellow color of a novice priestess, and preliminary assignments to orders and training. They would also receive the basic kit, as it was called, out there—spare clothing, toiletries, a sacramental set so that they could perform the sacraments and say services anywhere, and a personal copy of the Basic Scriptures, as newly revised as the Codex project could make them. After this, they would be taken to the temple dining room for the best meal they'd had in two years and then given two weeks to a month's leave, depending on where they were from. After that, it was back to work.

Sister Kasdi was alone again and sighed at the altar. Looking into their faces, thinking of her own daughter, she had made her decision. Mervyn was right, of course. He usually was. If Spirit was in mortal danger, she had a right to know it and why. She had a compromise solution to the revelation now. She was very tired and felt very, very old right now, but she could not rest. She drew what strength she could from the Flux and exited the inner temple for her own office. There was no use in putting it off and no reason to remain now. Like those novices, she had a stringer train to catch.

3

HELL'S EARS

The stringer was a man named Gorondon—that is, that was the name he used, stringers always keeping their true names hidden so that none could ever have a hold on them. He was one of the hundreds of men and women who moved people, goods, and even ideas between Fluxland and Fluxland, Anchor and Anchor, and to all points in between. The stringer guild was a tight organization; one had to be born into it to get full stringer status, and their monopoly on commerce was jealously, even violently maintained. Still, they performed a service better and more efficiently than any other could, and so everyone tolerated them, even if they didn't quite like or trust them.

Gorondon was a huge, burly man with a full, bushy black beard, a broad, flat nose and big brown eyes. He looked much like an animated statue, chiseled from granite and given life by some magic spell.

Maintaining the train were his duggers, strange, often misshapen creatures who were once human men and women, as mad in the head as they were in form more often than not. Duggers were drawn mostly from the castoffs of conventional society; people who could not fit or were insane and had made their way into Flux, their madness made them appear like their own nightmares, but they were capable of working efficiently in the real world of the void under the direction of a stringer. They worked hard and were fiercely loyal, afraid only of being cast adrift with their madness once again in Flux. Still, they were well paid and secure as employees of the train, and they herded the animals, drove the wagons, loaded and unloaded the cargoes, and guarded against the infrequent but still present marauding bands of robbers and savages who roamed the Flux.

Only Gorondon had gone very far into Hope, to transact his business and pick up messages. There were only a few wide open Fluxlands where duggers felt comfortable, and most stayed with the train except for loading and unloading. Hope, in particular, was not a favorite stop, merely a necessary one. A matriarchal theocracy offended stringer types and made them more than a little nervous. Most saw little difference between being the slave of a mad Fluxland wizard and being a member of, much less a priestess of, the Church.

Knowing he had no less than fourteen passengers for Anchor Logh, the stringer had arranged for coaches, each of which held eight people in equal discomfort. Although the huge wheels were of wood and the facing bench seats inside barely upholstered, the void was smooth and the pace of a train was slow, so the only bumps and bounces were from the teams of eight horses pulling each, and even those bumps and bounces could be minimized by the skill of the dugger driver.

Kasdi climbed into the first coach and, because of her small size, soon found herself with three other companions across, and three more facing her. Whoever had referred to the coaches as eight-passenger vehicles had obviously been thinking of eight five-year-olds; even though all four on Kasdi's side were small women, none could lift a hand without hitting the person sitting next to them.

She was in her usual Flux disguise as a plain-looking, studious priestess in the black robes of the judiciary order. She had made herself smaller— barely one hundred fifty centimeters, as opposed to her normal height of one hundred sixty—with shoulder-length gray-brown hair, and a long, thin, unattractive middle-aged face that may not have been hard to look at but you wouldn't look twice. She had also smoothed out and raised her normally very deep voice. Nobody had ever penetrated the disguise, which was so complete that there were actually records on "Sister Janise" so complete that, if anyone checked, they would be certain that she was indeed a separate, real person.

Janise was a useful disguise, particularly when visiting Anchor Logh, and it was a guise known only to a precious few who would never betray it—Mervyn, Tamara, the Sister General of the Anchor Logh temple and her closest friend, her father, and her cousin Cloise, who was surrogate mother to her daughter.

Because stringers knew how uncomfortable it might be to have to ride with a bevy of priestesses, the dugger loadmaster had put the six sisters who were passengers in the same coach, and the one other had been at the school in Hope. Thus, to her amusement, even though she expected it, she found herself sharing a ride of several days with the new Sister Marigail and the girl she'd denied ordination, whose name was Mahta. Introductions and pleasantries were made, but conversation was minimal inside the coach, most of the comments being about the discomfort of the ride and the state of transportation even in this new age.

Gorondon wanted to make Anchor Logh in a bit over three days, so he worked his crew in shifts and planned stops only for water and meals and horse rotation. He was behind his schedule, planned out months ago for a half-year trip, and trying to make up as much of that time as possible. If he didn't make his scheduled stops before another stringer, he might have business stolen out from under him.

At the meal breaks, though, there were small clusters of conversation and socializing. Mahta, in particular, seemed fascinated to talk to Sister Marigail, with whom she'd shared a dormitory these past two years. Thanks to Kasdi's spell, Mahta was actually fairly attractive, although nothing like Marigail's beauty.

"I still can't understand why anybody who looks like you would enter the priesthood," Mahta said to Marigail. "Still, that's it now, I guess. Uh—how does it feel?"

Marigail shrugged. "Not really any different. At least, I don't notice anything different. Oh, well, maybe a little. Things I thought were real important just don't seem that way anymore. Like this trip home. Even a couple of days ago it seemed the most important thing in my whole life. You know, going home a real priestess, seeing everyone, all that. Now—it's just something that must be done before I can get to work. What about you? You think you're going to come back, or is this it for you?"

"I don't know," Mahta responded. "I enjoyed it all, and I like the Church, but it just doesn't seem like my whole life. Who knows? After two years in the mines I'm just going to relax and enjoy myself a bit, just like she said. Who knows? At any rate, if you'll let me, I'll come to your public ceremony."

"I'd like that very much. It'll be in Tonibar Riding, just north of the capital, the first Holy Day after I'm back. You know you'll be welcome."

Kasdi overheard, and smiled a bit to herself. Things would work out for both of them, she was sure. Later, she was amused to overhear a whispered conversation between them that was basically a less than totally complimentary impression of her. Marigail had described Kasdi as old and hard-looking, and seemed a bit disappointed at how ordinary the living patron saint of the Reformed Church seemed. It was far better and more charitable than Mahta's impression of an egomaniacal old crone. She didn't mind either impression, though. It kept her in her place and helped combat her greatest fight, the fight against her own blasphemous deification among the masses.

They pressed on through the static energy field that was the void towards Anchor Logh, following energy trails, or strings, that only stringers and wizards could see.

She was a lively, outgoing young woman. She was almost exotically pretty, a bit sexy and erotic, and she knew it. She had long, straight auburn hair almost to the waist, unusual large green eyes, a sensual mouth in an expressive face, and a trim, athletic figure that seemed put together just right. She was quite tall—one hundred eighty centimeters barefoot—but hadn't an ounce of fat nature didn't need or require. She was well aware of how attractive she was and liked to flaunt it in a teasing way.

She was also bright, if no genius, with good grades through school and a healthy curiosity about the world around her, but she preferred the outdoors to books and athletics to scholarship. She had always been spoiled as a child, and her beauty and athletic prowess had made her a center of attention as a teen as well. She had, ot course, lived a sheltered and pampered life, but was not really aware that it was so. If she lacked anything, it was a sense of ambition and a sense of direction. She had graduated now, and was working on the communal farm where she'd been raised, doing odd jobs here and there, but every time her future had come up, she'd changed the subject. She didn't really like to think much of the future; she liked it too much the way it was. There were colleges she might enter, but aside from a love of the outdoors she really had no strong drive towards one field or another. Nothing she really liked excited her, and she was aware that in any given field there were far too many with better aptitude and intelligence for her to rise very far.

Still, if she did not choose more education, she would be expected to apprentice to a trade, and none of those appealed much to her either. Marriage and kids also seemed unattractive. She had lost her virginity at sixteen, a fact that would still horrify her mother and the rest of the family, but she wasn't very experienced in that department. Three times, that was all, and while she'd found the last two at least pleasurable, they certainly weren't worth the risk of pregnancy and were, in a way, disappointing when looked back upon. Still, she was fairly inhibited regarding herself. She liked playing, teasing, and, yes,
using
the lust of all the boys best. It was more of a charge knowing that you were lusted after than actually taking them up on it.

What she really wanted, she knew, was an unlimited amount of credit to go off and see all of World, doing what she wanted when she wanted, and generally having a good time. Unfortunately, real life had a way of dashing romantic fantasies. Her mom called it her "stringer blood."

If there was one thing in her life that was empty, it was her parentage. She'd been told that her father had been a stringer killed in the Flux and that her mother had been a cast-out in the days when they used to draw lots to see which young people got sent into slavery in Flux and which got to stay and lead normal lives in Anchor. It was a sweet, romantic story—cast-out girl and stringer fall in love—but it had ended unhappily, with her father dead and her mother returning with the liberators here to Anchor Logh, only to die in an accident when she was very young. Those were mysteries, and mysteries she had found, after all these years, impossible to solve or even discuss with the few who knew anything. Nobody knew the stringer's name, since her mother hadn't said, or so they told her. Nobody was even positive that her father had really been a stringer, only that this was the story her mother had told.

As for the mother, there were no records and lots of names on the lists of cast-outs from those days. No pictures seemed to have been taken of her, and the one name they gave, Helaina, appeared on no official record except a formal death certificate. She had gotten the impression that nobody wanted to talk about her mother because she had not been formally married and had used her body to get out of slavery instead of her brains, but she didn't care about that. Still, she'd always had the urge to go into Flux and at least search for somebody who might have known, might remember and be willing to talk, as unlikely as that might be. But as much as the Flux fascinated her and called to her, it also frightened her. She'd seen it more than once, from the old walls, a glittering wall of nothingness stretching out forever, and it had seemed cold and empty and lonesome.