There was literally no sound in Flux, not even from the horses’ hooves, and just seconds into the sparkling energy field all sense of direction and reality seemed to vanish. The void was everywhere. Even the horses’ breathing and the occasional shout of one man to another seemed oddly muffled and subdued, as if the vast, shimmering void was trying to smother all that entered it.
Coydt barked an order and they all stopped. He frowned and stared at Spirit for a minute. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed. “This complicates matters a bit, but only a bit. Looky there! See the kind of doubling aura around her? Our Spirit’s got herself a Soul Rider!”
4
SOUL RIDER
It was a totally unexpected thing, unprecedented in all my long experience and in the experience of any of my brethren. We, the Spirits of Flux and Anchor that men call Soul Riders, join with and reside inside human beings, sharing what they share and seeing what they see. We have no choice as to whom we ride; that is determined by the unseen master of our fates whose identity and, indeed, very nature is shielded from us.
It is our mission to foil those who would open the Gates of Hell; to track down current members of the Seven Who Come Before, known also as the Seven Who Wait, and destroy them if possible. As we have no corporeal existence, our knowledge of the power of Flux and the laws of Anchor must be of use only when fed to a living being within. All of my hosts have eventually crossed paths with one or more of the Seven. How our unseen controller can know this so well in advance is incomprehensible, but it is always so.
It is possible that our hosts are chosen for their inherent power or intellect, since it is true that we cannot use more than what our hosts have to offer themselves and true that those hosts are then pushed or compelled, even as we, into the way of the Seven, but that is not something we can know.
Still, every host I have had I have stayed with for a long period of time. Usually they die, unnaturally and prematurely, but sometimes they become major figures themselves, and I remain for decades, even after the apparent mission is accomplished, perhaps to guard the host or make certain he or she accomplishes great things.
Certainly I expected this with my host Cass of Anchor Logh, whose Flux power is enormous and who has become the most important figure of political and military power on World in all my long memory. And yet, for the first time, the pattern was not to repeat but to change in a most radical way, one which I am at a loss even now to understand.
I was irresistibly drawn to Cass when she was but eighteen and an innocent farm girl, fearing that she might be chosen to be sold to a stringer and cast out into Flux in the Church’s ancient method of keeping Anchor populations stable. I was with her when she inadvertently discovered how corrupt that lottery was, and she was included in it, being thrown, naked and abandoned, into captivity in Flux. I rode her soul as the forces of Hell attacked the train and dragged her off into captivity, and because of this I was able to use her inborn Flux powers to effect an escape. Through her own impressive adaptability, intelligence, and resourcefulness, she managed to unmask the evil wizard Haldayne, one of the Seven who would open the gates of Hell, and obtain freedom and a position with Matson’s stringer train. Together we participated in the attack on Persellus, which Haldayne controlled, as part of an unprecedented force of Flux and Anchor led by three of the most powerful wizards of the Nine, an attack which was difficult indeed, and together we witnessed Matson fall from his great horse, a gaping wound in his chest, her employer and only lover lost before her eyes.
And yet I was able to turn her shock and grief into power, unleashing the full force of her abilities against Haldayne, for strong emotion is the greatest of all amplifiers, so that she alone took on Haldayne and routed him, once again foiling Hell’s plots and revealing the safe back way to the gates through the temples of Anchor.
Emotionally powerful and with a strong sense of duty, I was in her when she joined the priesthood as the leader of a true and needed Reformation. In the ruins of Persellus she established her new Church in Flux and called the place Hope. And so revolution came to World.
But her tryst with Matson had produced one unexpected and unanticipated result, one which complicated things and produced the wonder which still awes and confuses me.
My host had a girl child in Anchor, and I underwent with her the pain and agony attending such births, although I had been through it many times before and could sublimate the most unpleasant aspects. It was different this time, as I felt the message come, the mathematical command which drove me to alter my present state. Even as the child entered the world, I was drawn to her and inside her, so that she and I were in a sense born together.
This was a totally new experience for me, and one that I still find both fascinating and chilling, for it proves as little comfort to be born as to give birth. During the boring first years I took the time to reflect on this whole unprecedented incident and to try and understand the logic of it, although I confess that I have never understood the logic of any host assigned until the crisis actually came to reveal the reason. Still, to experience the joys and pains of human childhood proved, after the first years, to be endlessly fascinating, although hauntingly familiar, as if, some time in the remote past, I, too, had been born and had grown up this way. If, indeed, we are the spirits of cleansed warriors at the temporal apex of reincarnation, then this makes some sense.
Those early years also allowed me the luxury of probing the entire body of the new host, cell by cell, even molecule by molecule. Never have I understood a host so well, either physically or psychologically. Never have I had such an opportunity to suppress the negative and accelerate the positive where possible. I could cleanse build-ups in the blood flow, divert and eliminate toxins, and exercise some measure of mental control. Not that I ran her life, or wished to, but I could protect, inhibit some destructive behavior, and by very mild stimulation of pleasure and pain centers condition certain activities.
Nor, in fact, was she unaware of my presence, although she never really thought about it. It simply never occurred to her that everyone did not have such a duality of spirit, an internal guardian, although she theorized that few were aware of it. She has never resented me, but considered me a part of her, for she has never known my lack.
Now she is in most ways a woman, young and fresh and beautiful. We have been together these many years, and while I suspected a guardian role, there has been no need up to now to do anything at all. I have no idea of her Flux potential, as she has never been permitted out of Anchor where she was bom, but her father was a strong false wizard and her mother has the most power I have ever seen within one person of so normal a lifespan, so it is possible that my host is strong indeed, if untrained. Certainly her mother has had no more need of me, such is her current power, that power trained and honed under the tutelage of the master wizard Mervyn of Pericles.
Certainly the start of the true mission is at hand, for I feel in the very air a changed energy, a tension that builds towards a nearly unbearable point. The ancient struggle continues, and perhaps, this time, the answers to all my questions may lie at the end of it.
5
BLACK MAGIC
They rode for some time in silence, Coydt deep in thought. Their pace was not fast, just deliberate, and she had no more doubts that what he had spoken about the Void was true. She had no idea how far they had come or how long they had been riding, for there were no landmarks of any kind. She was feeling nearly starved, but hesitated to mention it, fearing that it would betray some sort of weakness to these hard, strange men of Flux. She had the idea that any weakness demonstrated would lower their opinion of the one showing weakness a good deal, not to mention please them enormously. These were people who worshipped only power and liked it, no matter how small the crumb. She resolved that, no matter what, she would give them the smallest pleasure she could in that department.
There were many romantic stories and fantasies by Anchor folk of what the Flux was like,
but nobody ever thought of it as unremitting boredom. Her three captors had totally relaxed upon entering Flux and getting some distance in, and now they barely paid attention to her, but she no longer felt like attempting an escape. The idea of wandering this terrible nothingness until you died of hunger or thirst, or were driven completely insane by it, was so terrifying that such an idea was unthinkable.
She had resigned herself to this captivity, at least for now. She didn’t know what they planned, but so far she’d not been harmed or even threatened, except with the consequences of escape. Some of it still had the quality of dream, as if this really couldn’t be happening to her, but she knew it was real and that these men were dangerous.
Finally they called a halt—the two adepts and she stopped and dismounted, while Coydt went on, either to check out what was ahead or to prepare something.
She looked around and saw only the nothingness. The horses looked tired and thirsty, as was she, but there were no packs, no saddlebags. Zekah, a thin young man she would have considered “cute” in another context, came over to her. “So—hungry and thirsty?”
She nodded. “No more than you or the horses.”
“Watch, then,” he told her, and turned away. He made a couple of hand signs and then pointed to a spot a few meters from them. A hole opened up—no, a cavity, perhaps four meters wide, and it filled very slowly and dramatically with clear water. He went over to it, knelt down, scooped up some in cupped hands, and drank. “Pretty good,” he decided at last. “Yorek—bring the horses over. You, too, girl. Take a drink.”
It was her first experience with Flux magic and she was impressed. She took her drink, then said, “That’s pretty impressive.” Maybe the aides could be buttered up a little, although she was being truthful.
“That’s nothing,” Zekah responded, turned back and waved his hands some more. Instantly a small table appeared with three chairs, and on the table was a veritable feast of food, hot and cold, as well as carafes of wine. She walked over to it in wonder, then hesitantly touched it. “It’s real!”
“Sure, it’s real. Come on—let’s sit down and eat before the boss comes back.”
It was the most bizarre dinner she’d ever had, a luxury feast in the middle of nothingness with two youthful kidnappers. Still, she ate with relish, not knowing from where and when the next meal would come.
Once satiated, the two adepts seemed in a good mood and she tried to pump them for some information. It was difficult to imagine these two as the brutal killers in the church, although it would never be possible to forget Coydt that morning.
“You just… wave your hand and it’s done?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Yorek responded. “Actually, it’s all math. The better you are with math in your head and the better your memory, the more you can do. Nobody can give you the Flux power—you either have it or you don’t. But if you have it, and the math skills and the memory skills, you have real power, and that’s what it’s all about out here.”
“Money means nothing—obviously,” Zekah put in. “Nothing means anything in Flux except power. The more you have and can use, the higher up you go. Now, the boss—he’s got power. More than anybody, I think. If he wants a castle with servants, he just wishes them up.”
She thought about it. “I would think that after a while being a god would get boring, too. I mean, what do you do after you have everything you want?”
“You’ve got the idea,” Yorek agreed. “That’s really the key to figuring the boss out. The only fun he gets is showing off his powers to others. We—we’re along to learn what we can from him, but he don’t think of us that way. People to the boss are just things—stick figures or cartoons drawn for his own amusement. Playthings. Even us.”
“I’d think you’d be a little nervous about that.”
“Not really. You see, we’re the one thing he needs in the whole world. We’re his audience. No use in power if you don’t have people around who can appreciate it. No, the only people he might think of as people are those with as much or more power than he’s got, and if he finds ’em, he takes ’em on. So far, nobody’s been stronger. That’s why the Flux bores him. He likes to spend most of his time in Anchor, where the power isn’t in the magic but in the head. He likes to win at anything, and he almost always does. Any time he doesn’t, he gets mean and nasty. Everybody’s scared stiff of him, even the rest of the Seven, mostly, I think, because he doesn’t believe in anything but himself.”
“He doesn’t believe in Hell, then? But I thought that’s what the Seven were about.”
Zekah smiled. “They are, and so’s he. But not like them. He says there’s nothing supernatural about Hell. It’s just another place filled with a lot of different kinds of creatures who think. A long time ago we and they fought a war over this place, and they lost, sort of. Maybe it was a tie. Anyway, the other side’s been stuck someplace, kept there by the gadgets on the Hellgates, and that someplace isn’t home. We’re in the way to where their home is. They want to go home now, but they can’t do it without coming through here. Since they invented the Flux, they know just how to work it, so there’s supposed to be a deal. Unlock the gates, let them go home, and in payment they’ll show the ones who let ’em out just how to fully use the Flux on a worldwide basis. That’s ultimate power.”
She shivered. “Even if it’s true, I don’t see why anybody should trust them. If I’d been locked away in prison for thousands of years, I sure wouldn’t be nice to the children of the ones who put me there.”
“That’s a good point,” Yorek agreed, “but you got to remember that the Seven are wizards like Coydt. They’re all tremendously old, hundreds of years, and they’re all very bored. They figure a gamble on something new is better than living forever like this. Maybe they’re right, I don’t know. As soon as it’s done, if they get the power, all of ’em will set out to wipe out the others and become sole god of World. That’s the only reason Coydt hasn’t taken them on. That and the fact that to unlock the gates you need a code, and each of ’em only has part of it.”
It was an unreal conversation, part fairy story and part nightmare. Sitting there at a sumptuous dinner in the middle of a void, the victim and her kidnappers were having friendly, casual conversation.
“What am I doing in the middle of all this?” she asked them. “I don’t know the math, and my mother’s surely not going to ransom me for anything. My opinion of her is actually closer to your boss’s.”
Zekah shrugged. “They’ve got something big cooking. Something that’s taken years to set up. Your momma is the only thing standing in their way. The boss is willing to take her on, one-on-one, but she would never be alone. It’d be ten to one, and that’s suicide. Just what the whole thing’s about we don’t know, but you’re important to it, that’s for sure. Better keep this in mind, though. He uses people, that’s all. He don’t think much of men, but he thinks even less of women. Thinks they’re kind of inferior to men. You better be ready. Best your mom would’ve had a boy.”
She thought about it, and didn’t like the implications at all.
Coydt returned just then and looked down on the scene from horseback. “Charming. I trust the boys have been keeping you amused? After all, you are our guest.”
“I’m not your guest; I’m your prisoner,” she shot back. “I don’t know what your game is, but it’s not going to work. My mother wouldn’t do anything to get me back.”
“You might be surprised. Still, it really doesn’t matter if she does or she doesn’t. Don’t overestimate your importance either. You are not the game, nor even close to it. You are merely a diversion, some useful window dressing, nothing more. In fact, your most interesting challenge was something we didn’t even suspect until we got you in Flux. Mount up. We have a short ride left to go, and then we can relax.”
The news had hit Kasdi like a shot to the heart, and it brought up all the guilt to the fore. It had also triggered a massive manhunt through Flux a
nd Anchor. Messengers, transformed into swift creatures who could fly in Flux, took the news and the descriptions to all the other Anchors and Fluxlands and even to stringer trains within the vast area under the control of the Reformed Church. Not that it would probably do much good. Coydt’s powers in Flux were such that he could easily escape detection and get them all away to the relative safety of the old Church’s domains or the wilds as quickly as she could spread the news.
Mervyn arrived in Anchor Logh within hours of getting the word of the kidnapping. He had much information, but no news.
“Coydt grew up in Anchor, the youngest of five children,” he told her. “When his older brother was chosen in the Paring Rite, he turned on the Church and all its works with a vengeance, practically inviting expulsion himself. His parental situation is the stuff of psychology studies, but suffice it to say that he was the worst person on World to discover he had tremendous doses of Flux power and the ability to use them. He hates the Church, old or new. In fact, he hates all religious equally, and believes that there is nothing supernatural in anything. He believes that women as a group are intellectually and psychologically inferior to men and that they should be obedient, subservient, totally passive people serving men. He is worse than immoral, he is amoral in the extreme—he no more thought about killing that poor priestess than you would think about brushing aside a fly. He is, unfortunately, also coldly brilliant, as witness his plan here.”
Kasdi shuddered. “He makes Haldayne sound like a saint. And Spirit is in his hands…”
He nodded. “Indeed. But there is more afoot here than mere toying. This is the start of an organized campaign of some sort. I’m afraid we will simply have to wait and see what this first move is all about.”
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