Changewinds 03 - War Of The Maelstrom - Chalker, Jack L

by War of the Maelstrom (v1. 1) (mobi)

  Boolean nodded. "Do that." He turned back to the two sleeping forms, looked down at them, and gave a soft chuckle. "I really feel sorry for those four husbands," he muttered to himself. "Not that she'd enjoy herself like she did, moving back from oral to anal. I'd sure like to leave Charley here if I could. Be good for her, too, to find not just one but many men still wanting her no matter what her weight or condition." He sighed. "Well, can't solve everybody's problems, I guess."

  He didn't dare leave her anywhere near here or anywhere that anyone from the rebel camp was likely to spot her. The four guys would just have to suffer, but be made a mental note to make it up to them, if he could, at some point in the future. Decisions, decisions—that's all great power ever really brought you. Decisions without irreversible consequences or accountability.

  It was fun to be a sorcerer.

  Charley awoke slowly from a very erotic dream and turned slowly to one side. Suddenly she felt a shifting down in her abdomen and it unnerved her and she woke up. Somebody else—Sam—was waking up next to her. She looked over and was startled first to realize that she could see again, in the normal, colorful way, and that excited her. What she was seeing, though, bothered her a lot.

  She had never really seen herself properly and in full color with the chocolate brown skin and blue-black hair, and it didn't look right. In fact, Sam was right—God! She'd been skin and bones! Funny it hadn't felt like that…

  With a shock she suddenly realized that she was seeing her own body in full living color and three dimensions, yet as a third party. Somehow, deep down. she hadn't really believed it was possible, and certainly not like this. Hell, it was still tight out!

  She shifted uncomfortably and ran her hands over her own body as it now was. She remembered how fat Sam had been, but it seemed even more gross, if anything, now.

  She tried to get to her feet and found that it took something of a balancing act to do so. Dorion came over, put out his arms, and she took them and let herself be pulled unsteadily to her feet. Christ! It felt like she had a goddamned bowling ball in her stomach, and something in it shifted slowly when she did, but not in the right ways or at the right speed. She let go of Dorion and tried walking a few steps and it, too, felt awkward and weird,

  The weight and feel of the breasts also surprised her. They felt like they weighed a ton of dead weight each, shifting when she walked but complicating the balancing act required to maintain equilibrium with the bowling ball in her belly, and the extra padding wasn't any real help, either. Her thighs rubbed together tightly every time she took a step, and produced motion in her ass as well. God, she was gross!

  "God! This feels weird," she heard Sam say. "Jeez! I feel so light it's like I was eleven years old again! It just don't feel like I'm all here no more. I guess I got more used to that body than I thought I had. Wow! This is strange! I'm actually inside your body, just like it was mine! Uh, how you feelin', Charley?"

  "Like a beached whale. I think these tits are more like fifties than forty-fours. Jeez, when did you weigh yourself last?"

  "Back in Tishbaal. It was the last scale I saw. I could've done it on the mill scales here, but with bein' pregnant and all it didn't seem worth it. Boy, that's strange, seein' yourself like this, from a different pair of eyes or whatever it is I'm seein' with at the moment. It's different than a mirror. It's real and not backwards."

  "You went like this and didn't have screaming fits?"

  "Aw, you get used to it pretty fast. Not the kid—you always know that's there. But like Boolean said, you don't get sick, and you don't get clogged. Bigger lungs carryin' more oxygen, so you can't exactly do things fast but you can do 'em pretty good."

  "I gain three times my weight at least and I don't even have the fun of eating my way up to it. It's not fair!"

  "Yeah, well, at least you can eat whatever you want and all you want now," Sam noted. "Huh! These eyes are kind'a odd. You see like this when you was in this body?"

  "Unless it was something of magic or another plane all I saw was gray, unless I used Shadowcat," Charley told her. "Why? What do you see?"

  "Everything, but not quite. The colors are funny. Things look sorta' fuzzy and all, and all the colors are pastels or something, and there's a glow to most everything. Real strong from you and your buddy, there." She stared hard at Charley. "Hey! If I concentrate real hard I can see your insides! Wow! X-ray vision!" She hesitated and looked at Dorion. "Would it hurt the kid if I checked her out?"

  "No," Dorion told her. "You're not really using your eyes to see in the old pattern or old ways. You're not really seeing just with them at all. In fact, if you concentrate hard enough, you can see what's in back of you, too. It has a lot to say for it, but it's also limited in vital areas. Those of us with The Sight can't read ordinary books—takes a special kind of ink and paper to see right—and there's a lot of color shift, and a lot of blurring with much motion. You can see things others can't, but there are tradeoffs. You'll learn them. The glows are the auras or spiritual components of people and things. You get pretty good at recognizing specific things by their auras alone."

  Charley looked at Dorion. "Then why couldn't I see like that?"

  "You have to have the power as well. Just three percent of the Akhbreed have it, and they're born with it. You either have it or you don't, and, even then, you never find out unless you're subjected to the intense radiation from dealing with the nether-hells. Only ones with really strong natural power see it from the start."

  Sam looked now at Charley's distended abdomen and concentrated and, to her immense surprise, she could see the fetus in the womb. "Gee—looks just like the films in sex ed, only in three-D and living color," she commented. "This is neat! Kind'a gross in parts, though. And it glows real bright." She felt a sudden shiver run through her- "What the hell?"

  Boolean reentered the hut and saw what she was doing.

  "You felt it, huh? That's what the enemy feels as well every time some random part of the power is given off by the child, even though unborn. She can feel you, too, looking at her, and is reacting. I'd stop it for now." He turned to Charley. "And how are you making out?"

  "Awful," Charley moaned. "Like a ton of bagged water is inside me all shifting around, dead shifting weight below, slow and awkward, I can't even see my own feet."

  Boolean passed a hand in front of her eyes and suddenly Charley's face went blank, staring forward.

  "The more you move, the more you will learn about and compensate for the body's limitations and these will be automatically and subconsciously incorporated into your normal movements until, within your limitations, you feel totally confident and can walk, sit, stand, or lie without even thinking about it. When you reach that point you will think of it as your body, your child, and accept it as normal and not think much about it, accepting it and its limitations."

  "Jeez! Where were you when I needed you?" Sam muttered.

  He turned to her. "Just a simple spell, like hypnosis, only it won't wear off so rapidly, and by the time it does it'll seem natural to her. It's no panacea, but anyone who can adjust so well to blindness should have little trouble with this. More gradually, the biochemistry of pregnancy will begin to influence her thinking as well. Of course, I could cast a really fine spell so she'd be perfectly happy and all that and do all sorts of other things, but casting individual spells on human beings is kind of like making pacts with the devil. You never can be sure you've covered all the loopholes and the ones you don't are often doozies." He turned back to Charley, did another wave of his hand, and she came back to full consciousness and frowned.

  "Huh! Had a little dizziness there for a moment. It's okay now. Let me move around and do a few things and get the real feel of this. I'm not going to be much help, but if I'm going to survive the next couple of months, I want to be as self-sufficient as possible."

  While Boolean and Sam huddled over what was going to be done next, Charley was active, trying out all sorts of dungs, the ever-concerned Do
rion at her side should she need assistance. She even went out and managed to climb the ladder down and back up again, although not without some difficulty. At the end of an hour or so she reported, "You know, this isn't as bad as I thought at first. I guess my hormones are flowing or something, but I'm starting to get the hang of this. It's not like pregnancy is an abnormal condition or something—women's bodies are designed for it. it's just that I suddenly had to take it on in full bloom rather than grow into it gradual like."

  "Don't push yourself." Sam told her. "We don't want to lose the kid."

  Charley shrugged. "If we were really that delicate, then we'd never have gotten out of caveman days. I'll manage. I'm actually less dependent now than when I couldn't see, by a long shot, and I just picked up and moved that heavy chair over there without thinking about it. You got real muscles under all this fat. I couldn't have moved it before."

  Sam nodded. "I kept working out as best I could using weights. There's nobody else around here half the time to move the heavy stuff and do the lifting. I got pretty good around this place carrying heavy stuff around on my head, but first I had to lift it up there. I'm havin' the opposite problem now discoverin' how weak I suddenly am for anything. When I was with Crim I practiced with swords; now I don't mink I could lift one."

  "Compare notes later," Boolean told them. "Now we have to plot our move. It's already late afternoon and we can't dawdle here any longer or we'll begin to attract some visitors with real power."

  She nodded. "Nothing personal, Sam, but I think I want to be gone before your four husbands get back. I don't think I could explain this to them or maybe it wouldn't make much difference to 'em. But where are we going? And how? You think it's safe for me in one of those saddles?"

  "You'll be fine in the saddle, and I'll be watching out for you," the sorcerer assured her. "In fact, Sam's the one we'll have to watch for a bit. As to where, we are going to go briefly to a small town in Covanti hub where I need to contact some people and update them and see if there's anybody left out there with both brains and guts. After that I'm going to put you in some safe hands well out of the field of battle, and Sam and I are going north for a while."

  "Hey! Wait a minute!" Charley objected, suddenly hesitant. "First of all, I haven't any clothes! If we're going someplace where strangers are, I don't want to be like this! And, second, what about Boday? She's technically married to Sam but she'll think I'm Sam! This is bad enough without having to deal with that!"

  "Yes, and what about the other people here, and my own husbands?" Sam added worriedly. "They're good people. The boys may be a little rough but they're not really bad."

  Boolean thought for a moment. "Well, Charley, we'll get you some clothes when we need them. You didn't seem to mind being undressed before."

  "Yeah, well, I didn't have this body before."

  He ignored the comment. "As for Boday—well, Cromil has informed her of what we did. although I'm not sure she'll believe it until she sees it for herself. I can probably ease belief by simply separating out that simplistic marriage spell that caused so much trouble late in the game and transferring it over to Sam. Here I'll do that now." It took maybe ten seconds and a bit of odd gesturing, and Sam actually watched as he reached out and grabbed the slender red thread of a spell she'd never seen before as if it were a real thread and attached it to her. "There. Uh, Sam I hope you're ready for Boday now."

  "Yeah," she sighed. "If she'll accept me this way, sure, why not? I hate to admit it, but I actually missed her."

  "As for the locals here," he continued, "well, that's going to have to leave a void, that's all. There are, after all, suddenly far fewer men than women. They might miss you, but I don't think they'd understand how complicated the problem was. It's best you just, well, vanish. I wish I could do more. but time's wasting away."

  "But, won't Klittichorn eventually send other forces here? I really do care about them, you see. All of them. I don't think they should suffer any more."

  "Don't worry about them. They'll be okay unless Klittichorn wins. Then I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for anybody. You see, there's not much chance they'll send anything but supernatural forces the next time, and those will be looking for impulses from the child. They won't find them, and they will move on. Right now, they can't afford mindless vengeance with you again on the loose and in full power—the Storm Princess will know that, probably already does. They haven't the time."

  Sam wanted to believe it—hell, she had to believe it. She took one last look around the place, sighed, and walked out onto a porch, opened the netting, and climbed down the ladder. Odd how easy it was to do that all of a sudden. She was tending to overcompensate and almost turned her ankle at the bottom. Hav'ta get Boolean to do one of those adjustments on me, she thought. She had never been this thin or this weak. She felt tiny, and she wasn't sure she liked the feeling.

  She turned and saw Boday standing there a bit uncertainly. The artist sure looked different without the neck to toe tattoos, but, in a way, she almost looked, well, normal. No, better than normal. She was still tall and thin, but she was tight as a drum and look at those muscles!

  "Hello, Boday," she said, feeling a bit awkward.

  "Charley? You are seeing? Or is it… has he… ?" She grinned. "Susama!" And then there was a rush to her and Sam was picked up and hugged and damn near killed by Boday, who'd picked up real muscles herself and damn near crushed the now tiny Sam.

  "All right, all right! We've got to go!" Boolean called to them. "Dorion, you help Charley down and go over to the saddles where we parked them. Boday, you and Sam will ride together you'll both fit very nicely in one of the saddles now, I think—and can renew old times then. I've already mentally summoned Cromil and he'll bring Crim in. Probably Kira instead by the time we're ready to go. That may simplify matters…. Hmmm…."

  "He always does that—thinks aloud on the practical level," Dorion told them. "He can formulate a spell in his head that it would take a good magician a day just to read, but unless he does that he can't remember to put on his own boots."

  The saddles looked both more and less intimidating to Charley when she could see them. Just ordinary saddles, although when Boolean nodded towards one it rose into the air. It was clear right off that no matter what her and Dorion's preferences were, there was no way even Cromil, who was a foot high and weighed maybe twelve pounds, could fit on one with her as she was. Boolean lowered one to the ground, she got on and got as comfortable as possible, and then it rose maybe three feet in the air. She had some initial trouble with balance but managed to stay on and finally decided that she could handle it.

  Charley turned and was surprised to see a very pretty young woman, dressed in a tight black stretch pants outfit and pistol belt, walk in as Cromil scampered up, jumped, and perched on Boolean's shoulder. Boday, too, seemed startled by the strange woman's sudden appearance.

  "Oh, I forgot about Kira," Boolean said apologetically. "This is the master swordswoman who did in three of the raiders and dueled Zamofir to the death last night."

  Charley frowned. "Where'd she come from? And what about the guy with the sexy deep voice?"

  It was Kira's turn to look confused, and Boolean had to explain, "I had to make a switch in the interest of all concerned. That's Sam and that's her friend Charley, Probably the only two people in the cosmos who even share the same fingerprints. And that's Boday, about whom you've probably heard much over the past months."

  Kira gave a wan smile. "And people have problems with me sometimes. Well, glad to meet you. And, Charley, Oh! this is going to be very difficult for me! I'm so used to one being me other…."

  "You are!" Charley muttered.

  "Well, you'll meet Crim in the morning in the flesh. Right now you might say he's with us in spirit. Don't bother to figure it out. I am certain that if someone wants to explain, they will."

  Now that's the kind of body I would kill for, Charley thought, looking at Kira. She made Sam—or Sam in Charley's bo
dy—look positively plain. That woman would be glamorous in a pigsty. Seeing the way even Dorion was looking at this Kira suddenly made her self-conscious and jealous. Worse when Boolean said, "Dorion, you'll double up with Kira for now so I have one less saddle to juggle. Use hers over there—we're donating the horse, Kira. Hope you don't mind."

  "No, these people need all they can get. Well! I can't think of any time I had a ride with a naked man. You want front or back?"

  Charley fumed inside but couldn't really say or do anything- Any order she gave Dorion would be nullified by Boolean anyway, so what was the use? But he better damn well not get so much as a hard-on or he was gonna regret it later!

  All set, they rose high into the air, giving Charley some really bad moments, then set off in a line. After the first hours, Charley had the hang of it, but she sure wished Dorlon and that woman were in front rather than in back of her!

  She was actually somewhat surprised at her feelings seeing Dorion with the woman. She tried to dismiss it as simple jealousy based on what she looked like now as opposed to what she had looked like, or thought she had looked like. Good lord—was she really that thin? Somehow she always felt just a little fat, a little not right, no matter what. Maybe Sam was right—maybe she had gone overboard. Well, Sam could fatten up that body now. At least she didn't have to worry about it in this body, with that spell that would make any diet useless. Maybe, at least, she could enjoy the next two months pigging out, if she was anyplace she could pig out. Ice cream… chocolate. She hadn't had those since, well, since she'd been back home on her own world. If they lost, well, hell, why diet? And if they won. Boolean would eventually make her look great again with no strain. It was a no-lose period.

  But Dorion…. Well, he was kind'a cute, really. Overweight, yeah, but still with the tightest, cutest little ass…. He had a crush on her, sure, but in all mat time he'd never taken advantage of her. In his own way, he was kind of sweet and a little shy. If that slave spell of his came off, with her looking like this, though, what would be his feelings then? Maybe that was it. The insecurity of being this way. That's what it had been, she knew, all along. Being blind and dependent but beautiful and sexy had given her some measure of power and security. They could be appalled at her liking the old way to this, but in her old society, as well as in Akhbreed culture, looks outweighed anything else most every time. Nobody ever seemed to look beyond, look inside. That was even this hangup the Akhbreed had with the Changewind victims. Those Masalurians, at least according to Boolean, still had the same minds, personalities, souls, whatever. They just looked really bizarre now, but no more bizarre than the native colonials had looked, nor than the Akhbreed looked to the colonials.