Soul Rider #01: Spirits of Flux and Anchor

by Jack L. Chalker

  "What I can do I can also undo, punk," Matson told him. "You give me no more trouble and I might be able to remember what your head used to look like and give it back to you. Any time you make threats in the Flux to anybody you be sure you can back 'em up all the way. There's worse things than being dead." He moved forward on his horse and looked again at the girl whose fall had precipitated it all. "Now, little lady, if you can't hack the pace, I can always use another pack mule. That's how I got most of the ones I'm using now anyway. Time is money, and I don't have much use for somebody who can't make the grade." With that he raised his bugle, gave his command notes, and the train started forward once more through the void.

  "It's impossible," somebody muttered, and it was what the others were thinking. "It can't be real! It just can't be!"

  "It's magic, that's what it is," a girl said worriedly. "He's an evil wizard back in his own foul home."

  Matson was all the way forward again before he allowed himself a self-satisfied grin. The challenge had come very early this time, and he was glad of it. The earlier you acted, and the earlier you used your little bag of parlor tricks, the less trouble you had later on. That mule-head alone would hold them for a while. Like most stringers he was a false wizard, a weaver of totally convincing illusions, but they were good enough for kids like this. He liked to imagine what it would be like to be a real wizard, but he always had doubts. He liked to think that he'd still be a stringer, but you never could tell what that kind of power would do to any human-

  8

  CULT

  After a while, the monotony of the void replaced any sense of fear or awe in their minds over the Flux. Their fear was still real, of course, and focused partly on their unknown fates and partly on their fear of Matson's frightening powers.

  Every few hours they would break from their slow but steady pace and get something to eat. One of the wagons in the rear had a sort of mini-kitchen in it, and while the meals were not very tasty nor varied they were nutritious and filling, and everyone, Matson included, ate the same thing. The other wagon contained an enormous quantity of hay in small bales which were apportioned out to the mules by the ever-doting Jomo. It was clear that part of Matson's mania for a schedule once they started out was due to a tight supply allowance.

  There was little trouble with the group after the initial episodes with Matson. If anybody had any rebellious thoughts they had only to look at the poor fellow trying to get the stew down his mule's throat to think the better of it.

  Once she'd gotten over the initial shock of the magical transformation, however, Cassie could see some hope in it as well. "Look," she pointed out to Nadya and Suzl, "if he can just wave his hands and make somebody half-mule, then nothing is permanent here. Nothing. That means we might have hair again, for example, and those poor girls with the body tattoos might one day look as good as they ever did. Maybe better."

  "Or worse," the gloomier Nadya responded. "All we've seen coming out of this Flux are monsters of one kind or another. These duggers, the mule head, that sort of thing. Maybe our new masters, whoever and whatever they are, just want us as raw material for animals or something. Matson, remember, said some of his mules were once human."

  "Maybe," Cassie admitted, "but I think it can work both ways. All we can do is hope right now."

  "I just wish we'd get somewhere," Suzl put in. "I'm sick and tired of this march, march, march. Good or bad, I want to just get it over with. A day or two more of this and I might turn into one of those drooling slobberers myself."

  They all pretty much felt that way, but the train's progress was slow and steady, the sleep periods seemingly dictated by Matson's feeling of how tired the marchers were and Jomo's feel of when the horses and mules needed rest. Time seemed to have lost its meaning for them all, although Matson, who carried an elaborate pocket watch, seemed to know exactly when as well as where they were. For the rest of them, the "days" were measured only by sleep breaks and were broken down by feeding periods. It never seemed to get completely dark or completely light in the Flux, so there was no way at all to guess what it might be in "real" time.

  They were five "days" into the Flux when' the first break in the monotony came. They were proceeding normally after a meal break when suddenly a horse and rider appeared ahead of them and closed on Matson. He ordered the train to a halt and waited as the rider neared and stopped. It was the animal-like Kolada.

  Kolada rode the "point," which meant she was often well ahead of the train, perhaps half a day ahead, following some sort of route mark that stringers had laid down but which few were given the power to see or read. Whatever the news it wasn't good, for there were sudden bugle signals of a type they had not heard before and the duggers whipped into action with a frenzy. All strings on mules and people were suddenly dropped, and the mules themselves were led into a circular pattern with the wagons at opposite ends closing each circle. Cinches were loosened, so that the packs formed a crude outer barrier around the mules. The duggers took out their weapons and checked them. then set up patrols both inside and outside the circle. The human cargo was loosed inside the circle and told just to sit.

  Jomo took charge of the entire party, moving very fast for a huge man and giving orders in a combination of words and gestures to the other duggers. Matson took one of the duggers with him, leaving ten mounted and one afoot to guard the train, and the three of them went off at full gallop in the direction from which Kolada had just come.

  None of the duggers would pay any attention to the fifty-four confused and frightened young people unless they got out of line, in which case the offender was rudely struck with fist or rifle butt. In more than one way this frightened them still more, if only because, no matter what Matson's disposition or powers were, he was human and a known quantity. Now they were completely at the mercy of these animalistic creatures.

  They spent a nervous hour or more sitting there, talking low and speculating a lot, until there was a sudden shout from one of the duggers ahead and they heard bolts slide into place and the whole crew tense up-

  It was Matson, though, and they relaxed. He rode up to Jomo and talked for some time, and they could see from the look on his face that there was something up ahead that had considerably shaken the iron man. His face looked almost dead white, and, if anything, he looked twenty years older,

  He talked in low, clipped sentences to Jomo, who nodded and then gave a series of signals. Rapidly, the train was reassembled in a loose manner, with the duggers spacing themselves out and keeping guns at the ready. Although they ran the strings back along the mules, they only ran one string on each side back from the mules to the wagons, leaving the young people free inside this makeshift boundary. With a few quick bugle blasts, the train began to move.

  It was a good hour or more before they reached the spot, but this was a different sort of march, tinged with danger and excitement. Many of the young people actually welcomed the diversion, but Cassie, along with many others, did not. It was like approaching an accident on the main highway from a distance. You wanted to see what was going on but you knew that when you got there you would find nothing good.

  The scene was one of almost inconceivable carnage, the most horrible sight any of them had ever seen. Clearly the mess, spread out almost as far as the eye could see, had once been a stringer train not unlike their own, but one that had been hit with a deadly ferocity by some overwhelming force. There was blood all over, human blood mixing with that of animals, and dead bodies strewn all over the landscape. If you looked hard enough, it was possible to see that this had once been a formation similar to the one they'd assumed back a ways, but it had proved totally inadequate for whatever had hit them.

  Matson had recovered some of his composure and came back to the group. He took a deep breath, then said, "All right. Now you see it. I told you this was a rough place, and now you see how rough it can get. I'm telling you this because I'm going to need your cooperation to go through that mess and see what, if an
ything, can be salvaged and what we can leam about the bastards who did this. You're going to need a strong stomach for two reasons, so anybody who just can't handle it can remain here or come back here when it gets too much for you. One reason is that it's even uglier than you can tell from here. Some of the animals and people have been partly—eaten." The group stiffened almost collectively at this. "The second reason is that this was—oh, hell, it was the other train from Anchor Logh that should have been a day or more ahead of us. You will know or recognize some of those bodies."

  Some gasps, chokes, and sobs began from various parts of the group at this news. Matson didn't wait for it to subside.

  "Now, not everybody is here, that's clear. That's one reason I need your help. If there's anybody you know who was in that train whose remains aren't there now, I want to know about it. We're only another hard day's ride from help, and if we know who to look for we might be able to save them. Also, whoever did this is still around. This happened only a matter of hours ago at best, from the state of the remains— We have to act fairly quickly, because the Flux tends to break down dead organic matter pretty quickly. I need to keep the duggers armed and on guard, so it's up to you. Volunteers?"

  A dozen or so hands went up, including Cassie's, and he nodded and told them to come forward. They did, and walked straight into Hell itself.

  Assuming the same size train, more than half the mules had been killed, the rest run off with the attackers. All of the remaining packs had been thoroughly ransacked, with the unwanted part of their contents just strewn about haphazardly. Both wagons had caught fire and been rendered useless, but it was clear that some of the contents there had been salvaged and probably loaded on the remaining mules—and, perhaps, on the backs of the survivors.

  All of the human bodies were stripped naked if they hadn't been to begin with, but it was easy to tell the duggers from the other group of exiles by their shape if nothing else. It was a stomach-churning chore to gather up all those bodies and lay them out so they could be potentially identified and counted. Several times members of the party suddenly felt sick; a few threw up, a few more finally ran back to the rest, but were quickly replaced by others whose curiosity or consciences now prodded them.

  Most of the victims had been shot, some several times, but others were run through with arrows or spears. Some who had obviously been only wounded when the train was overrun had been put to death, most often by beheading but occasionally by slow dismemberment, the horror still on their faces— Many of bodies had been chewed, with huge chunks of flesh just ripped from them, but it was unclear just what had done the chewing. What was clear was that whoever had overrun the train had been human, and probably in numbers far larger than the train's defenders.

  Still, laid out, the bodies included some that could not be accounted for by duggers or exiles. These, too, had been treated just as harshly as the others, but they were clearly from some different place entirely.

  For one thing, they resembled duggers but had some regularity to their dehumanizing aspects. They were mostly very tall, chunky females reminiscent of the kind that became Temple wardens, but all had undergone animalistic metamorphosis that might show madness on the part of the perpetrator but at least showed some conscious planning.

  The most obvious thing was that they all had thick heads of hair that apparently hadn't been cut in years. The shortest hair length was below the waist. Their fingers seemed unnaturally long, too, and terminated in very long, thick, sharp claws. Some of the bodies seemed covered from the waist down in very short fur with animalistic patterns and colorations, almost horse-like in texture and appearance, and all of these had tails resembling various animals—rabbit, horse, cat, they were all represented. Perhaps the most striking thing was their faces, though, with bushy, oddly upturned brows, and pink animal-like noses over mouths that seemed abnormally wide and which contained oversized, slightly protruding canines.

  Although in a state of shock over the carnage, Cassie couldn't resist questions. "What—what are they?" she asked Matson.

  "People," he responded dryly. "Members of a cult. Looks like they got a fair number, too." This last was said without any sense of exhilaration or pleasure. Matson had been curiously more cold and withdrawn since they began, but there was no trace of meanness, authoritarianism, or any other emotional mannerism. He was either holding something in very deeply or forced upon himself a remarkable detachment for the scene.

  "Cult?" she prompted, treating him less like the slave master than as just someone else to talk to.

  He nodded. "Say you get a dugger type with some talent for the Flux who not only gets out here but can survive. He or she goes nuts, of course, but it's a crafty sort of nuts. Eventually these kind of people pick up other lost balls out here, maybe one day stumbling across a stringer train and catching a few escapees, something like that, or getting people trying to flee a Fluxland. This person gets 'em and imposes his particular kind of madness on them. They become his followers, his worshippers, his slaves—his playthings. If there's enough power available in the leader or in the collection they form a pocket in the Flux. A place where they can live and feed themselves. A real tiny little worldlet. They're around, usually near stringer trails, so they can sneak up and collect our garbage. This one is a lot more than that, though. There are few of 'em that can have the power to take on and lick a stringer train, and those few get known, we switch routes, and they wind up isolated. That's what's so weird about this one."

  "Huh?"

  "Arden was the best stringer I ever knew, bar none. It would take an army to do this much damage to one of her trains, and she had the biggest, meanest duggers you ever saw. That's them over there. Any cult big enough and smart enough to take her is big or smart enough to take a Fluxland. It just couldn't remain hidden this long, then show up here, on a trail with no previous trouble. Something smells here. Smells bad. _I_ want these bastards!"

  That last was said with such sudden force and emotion that she stepped back from him. Inside him, not too far from that totally businesslike surface, was an explosion she would not like to see directed at her, even unthinkingly.

  She went over to where the bodies were being laid out. It was almost complete now, but she had to force herself to look at them. It was a sight that no church vision of Hell could equal. Those dead warriors from this strange cult—how animalistic were they inside? More than they were outside? If so, could they or their kind have ripped out those pieces of flesh with their jaws? It was horrible to contemplate, but there seemed no other conclusion. What kind of sickness could breed ones like those?

  Jomo, ugly and primitive as he was, was the only dugger she didn't fear. He came over to her and frowned, the effect producing hundreds of ripples in his broad hairless forehead. "Saw you talkin' to Master Matson. Best you not if you know what good for you."

  "Why? He didn't seem to mind."

  Jomo looked over at the mass of corpses. "You see any you know in this bunch?"

  She nodded— "Several."

  Jomo pointed a stubby finger at one off by itself, the figure of a woman, head shaved—or what was left of it. Most of the body was a bloody mess. "That one not like you. That one Missy Arden. Great woman."

  "Oh, I see…"

  "No, you not see at all! Missy Arden carry Matson child!"

  Suddenly she understood, and felt foolish. Of course, it made sense, only she had not, frankly, thought of stringers as having sex, let alone children— They were like doctors, teachers, priestesses— when you met them in a store in town or maybe saw them in a public bathroom it was, somehow, shocking and unusual, as if they didn't do the sort of things real people did.

  If Jomo was right, and he had no reason to lie, then Matson right now was at his most dangerous, and that could be as fearsome as these cult members.

  "Coduro!" Matson bellowed, and a dugger on horseback reigned up, turned, and came over to him.

  "Yeah, boss?"

  "I give you my stri
ng," he said flatly. "Can you see it?"

  The dugger looked startled. "Yeah! I—can!" It seemed to awe him, although the others had no idea what was going on.

  "You take the string to Persellus. We'll have some time because this cult or whatever it has to stash its booty. Maybe enough time for us, maybe not, but if you start now you should be able to avoid them. They might have a sentry or two just up the string, though, so be careful."

  The dugger grinned, a sight that was in itself pretty gruesome to behold, and lifted his rifle. "I think maybe I like that."

  "Well, don't let 'em bog you down, either. I want you in Persellus even if you have to kill your horse to do it, and you give the first important official you can meet the whole story. Tell 'em we're coming in, but also tell 'em the size and description of these bastards. We need protection to get in, even if I speed it up, and we better get this pest hole and eliminate it before they get strong enough and bold enough to make a try on Persellus. You tell 'em it's somebody with real wizard power. Tell 'em anything you want, but get them here with a big force as soon as you can!"

  "Got'cha, boss. Rolling!" the dugger responded, then reared back on his horse and took off into the void which rapidly swallowed him up.

  Matson walked back over to the mass of now neatly laid out bodies, and counted— Eleven of the beast-women, twelve duggers, Arden, of course, and twenty-nine refugees from Anchor Logh who would grow no older. He looked that last group over, then frowned and walked up and down between the bodies, nodding and mumbling to himself, then looked up and saw Cassie. "You!"

  She was startled. "Yes, sir?"

  "Notice anything funny about this group? Anything particular strike you?"

  She frowned, coming over although she really didn't want to come near that terror again. Absently she looked down at one of the bodies and suddenly could not suppress a sob— "Oh, Holy Angels! It's poor Canty!" she managed.