“What are you doing here?” Cloise wanted to know.
“Delivering the mail, mostly,” Kasdi told her. “Boy! You look like one of the women on Main Street minus the bra.”
“It’s easy when everybody has to do it. They confiscated all our clothes and issued new ones. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t!”
“I got an idea from some of the people we captured and some of the proclamations we read.”
“We?”
She nodded. “Spirit’s here. And she’s well. She can speak and wear clothes and is almost back to normal.” She decided not to mention Suzl. It might be one shock too many for the poor woman.
Cloise sat down in a chair. “Well, thank somebody for that! But I wish it were anyplace but here.” She paused a moment. “Uh—you know about your father?”
Kasdi’s stomach did a turn. “No. Tell me. I have to know.”
“When they… came… not everybody just sat back. Your father and a number of others formed a group, jumped some of them, and stole their weapons. It didn’t do any good. They got them all pretty quickly and made examples out of them.”
Her heart sank. “Then one of those bodies out there is… him?”
She nodded, and named a long string of other men’s names, many familiar. Her fury, which she didn’t think could get worse, grew, but she remained calm. “Where’s Dannon, or is he…?”
“Oh, no. In fact, he’s been promoted to chief mechanic. He has special permission to be out late on the farm to check on things. You had better be gone when he gets back.”
She frowned. “You sound like you’re cooperating with these butchers.”
“A fat lot you understand the situation! They have complete control. The government officials they didn’t kill or who didn’t see it their way were taken off and came back in uniforms as dedicated soldiers of the Kingdom. The enforcers carry a. kind of whip that is terribly painful and hurts for days but doesn’t leave a mark on you. They use it for the least infraction. But they reward cooperation handsomely. Everything is tightly rationed, but those who cooperate get more. People are seeing the light. They’re going along.”
“But—you? And Dannon?”
“Who are you to judge us? You brought this on Anchor Logh, but you don’t have to live with it. They’ve started classes now, separate ones for men and women. It’s a fast question and answer, and hesitation can cost you the lash. Pretty soon you realize that the only way to always answer correctly is to start thinking their way. It doesn’t take long, and it’s easier that way.”
Kasdi was appalled. This soon? This close? She was more than happy now that Spirit had not come.
“You’re going to cause trouble here, aren’t you?” Cloise asked her.
“We hope more than trouble. There’s a whole army waiting for the door to be unlocked.”
“Kasdi—don’t. Haven’t you hurt Anchor Logh enough?”
“What do you mean?”
“First the war, then Spirit, then this takeover. We’re peaceful people. We can’t stand another war, Kasdi. Particularly not of this kind. These men will fight to the last and will take us with them. You may win, but you’ll kill us all. If you just knocked out that guard out there—you didn’t, did you?—ten of us in this complex would be picked at random and shot. I don’t know how you got in, but please go the same way and quickly. I’ll not report this, even though Dannon would be tortured for it if they find out.”
“You would rather live with women reduced to slaves? Live out your whole life this way or worse?”
“Rather do it than what? Mass killing? Mass destruction? Total devastation? Yes! And you’ll find that almost all of Anchor Logh will agree with me. They won’t aid your army—they’ll fight it. We all want to live.” Cloise suddenly looked very tired. “Please don’t bring in your army. Things are levelling out now, easing up. People are getting used to the new ways. You destroyed so many lives. Don’t destroy us all. Now—go!”
Cloise went into the living room and pretended to be straightening up. She then turned out the light, as if she were going to bed, to allow Kasdi some exit darkness. As she slipped out of the door, she heard Cloise whisper, “Don’t come back, Kasdi.”
The drizzle had turned into a chilly rain, which matched her dark mood.
The others were still waiting for her, and as briefly as she could, she filled them in on the conversation as well.
“I can’t believe they would do it!” Spirit responded. “I just can’t believe it!” She wanted to go down there, but Suzl believed it and dissuaded her.
Matson thought things over a moment. “Trouble is, she’s probably right. This is a new angle, folks. One we better think about before going further. These guys have done a lot of meanness here. Cass, you yourself said what would happen to them when you got hold of them. They know it, too. In the time it takes us to march, they’ll blow the buildings, burn the fields and forests, and machine-gun all the people they can. And while we’re trying to pick up the pieces, the bulk of ’em will drop all shields and run like hell in all directions. They got no other choice. And Coydt wouldn’t care if he did make this place a burnt-out ruin. That alone would collapse the empire, and you know it, and it would maybe take the Church with it.”
Kasdi wished she hadn’t vowed never to curse. “I don’t care about the empire or the Church. They’re not mine. The real rulers just used me all these years. I thought I grew up when I found that out, but I was wrong. I just grew up now. I’m forced to make a choice between wiping out perhaps a million people and the land of my birth, or leaving it to an insane system where women are slaves and all men are like they’re in the army.” She looked strickenly at Matson, Suzl, and Spirit in turn. “What do I do?”
14
DEMON PRINCE
Coydt had kidnapped Spirit from the farm and made away with her into Flux in under five hours. Unfortunately, that meant he knew all the best getaways and had compensated for them. With individual horse use also restricted to specific farm use except for officials, even stealing four horses would only have raised a sign telling everyone where they were. So, two hours after Kasdi’s return, they were still threading their way southwest through the woods. On foot, through well-patrolled and booby-trapped country on a rainy night, the one thing they were not making was time. They did, however, continue to agonize over the choice they had not yet been forced to face.
“My feeling is, Coydt’s won no matter how it turns out,” Matson said as they made their way over rough, rocky ground about twelve kilometers from their destination. “By relegating women to property and forcing them into accepting public humiliation, he’s totally undercut the social and moral fabric that was supposedly divine law and broken the heart of the faith. Now, if we don’t invade, he and his apparently very smart officers here will have this new system so well dug-in that they can make it a base and demonstration for every half-baked crackpot with a grudge against the system as a better way of doing things back home. He’ll control the shield machines, and so he’ll control them as well.”
“Then they must be crushed regardless of the cost? Is that what you’re saying?” Kasdi asked him.
“That’s the trouble. If we manage to punch a hole from this side and establish our beachhead, they’ll have plenty of time before we can overrun the place from such a small entry. These officers and men are committed. There’s nothing for them in Flux. They’ll fight to the last man, just like your cousin said they would. They’ll burn the fields and the forests and blow up the buildings. They’ll machine-gun the population, if only to make it tougher on us. It won’t be easy going either, since faced with total destruction, the people of Anchor Logh will fight us, too. And if we win, along with enormous casualties we’ll inherit a ruined and brunt-out land with maybe sixty to seventy percent of its people dead. Coydt won’t care. He and his wizards will be long gone to do it somewhere else and leave the horror of Anchor Logh for everybody to look at as a warning. He wins.”
>
“But we can’t leave them to this insane system,” Suzl protested. “I mean, women suppressed and owned by man, while the men are all sort of like in the army, expected to obey every order no matter how nutty. It’s a horror.”
“Nevertheless, if this Cloise is typical—and from what we’ve seen so far sneaking around, it looks like she is—these people would rather live under a tyrant than lose their land and children and their very lives. People always were that way in Flux; I don’t understand why it’s such a shock to see it in Anchor, where folks are, pardon me, even more naive. That’s why we haven’t even been able to risk any contact at all. Most of them would turn us in in a minute.”
“Then you would leave them to this?” Kasdi asked, appalled.
“In quarantine. The knowledge of what happened here must be limited to a very few. Nobody will believe Coydt’s claims; they’ll be dismissed as outrageous and unbelievable. The empire will invent a good excuse for the quarantine. Empires are good at getting people to swallow what they want. But you won’t get a quarantine with Coydt and the wizards running the show.”
“Huh? I’m losing where you’re going.”
“I know this place is being run like the heads should all be locked up as crazy, and that’s probably true. But if you sat back, you’d see that all systems are crazy, some just slightly more crazy than others. In the empire, old or new, for example, the sexes are still divided. Men and women don’t dress for utility; they dress in totally different clothes. Oh, the underwear’s different because different places need to be supported, but why dresses for one and not the other? Why is a lot of makeup terrible on a man but flattering on a woman? Why are women well qualified for government and administration prevented from going into those areas? Why are men who are sincerely religious and want to serve through the Church forbidden to do so? Why does a woman, to have real power and authority, have to give up sex and property? Why does society consider the man the primary bread winner under the law, even if his wife earns more? To an outsider, it’s all insane.”
“And you’re an outsider,” Suzl remarked dryly.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I am. Men and women dress alike for utility in the guild. Position, power, prestige, money—they’re all based on your own intelligence, quick wit, and talents, and nobody cares whether you’re male or female on the job. In stringing, everybody’s equal until they prove themselves different.”
“And you have to be born into that guild and have the sight to see the strings,” Suzl retorted. “What works for a small, inbred family monopoly wouldn’t be practical on a big scale. It gets too complicated too quickly. You still need the power to really get anywhere, too.”
“I have very little power and I rode string for fifteen years,” he pointed out. “Power doesn’t mean that you’re smarter or quicker or cleverer than the one without it. It’s true, though, that anybody who struck at one stringer would bring all the stringers and stringer wizards down on them—if that strike were in the line of duty. We look after our own.”
“You’ve got something cooking in that brain of yours about this problem,” Kasdi said. “Let’s hear it completely.”
“We have to break this, or it’s good-bye to everything we know. World will be in continual revolution, and deaths will be massive, while the new systems the new rulers will cook up will make this one or a Fluxland look tame. We’re looking at the breakdown of society all over the planet here. Hell even with the gates closed. That’s why the stringers themselves participate in putting down these kind of things. So it has to be stopped, to prevent its spread. But you can’t invade and wipe it out, because you’ll also destroy an Anchor and its people and have all the other Anchors selfishly closing up and going into self-defense, and so you lose your empire anyway. So we deal. We punch our hole, establish our beachhead, and stop. We deal with the bosses here. They will be allowed to keep what they have and run it the way they want, but they will be technically within the empire. Everybody stays out, and they stay in, but their sovereignty is assured. They’ll go for it. They’ll fight to the death if we invade—remember, Cass, what you said you’d do to them? But they don’t want to die. They’ll buy it.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re a man,” Suzl noted. “Spirit can’t go back to Flux. Are you suggesting we apply for our tattoos and tights and find ourselves a good man to own us?”
“No, but you’re not that limited if I understood you right. There are four Anchors in the cluster, and it applies to all of them. Go back through the gate, but don’t enter Flux; go out to one of the other three.”
“I’m interested in this,” Kasdi put in. “What sort of terms do you think they’d accept?”
“Anything that guarantees their safety and positions. We’ll still dictate the other terms. We want those machines and we want control of them. The empire itself will keep them going. We will also control the temple as a garrison to protect the Hellgate access, but won’t otherwise interfere. Experts from all over, all of them approved by empire security, will study what happens here.”
“And Coydt will go for this?” Spirit asked, joining in herself.
He shook his head. “No. Co-opting this revolution here will be the one thing he won’t buy. Nor will the other wizards, but they’re only being held together by Coydt. To make it work, Coydt is going to have to be eliminated permanently.”
“Then we must face Coydt before we open the shield,” Kasdi said. “How do you propose to do that? Nobody even knows where he is.”
“Oh, he’s here, someplace. I can feel him. Smell him. His odor permeates Anchor Logh. How we’re going to draw him out, though, is the real problem, I—”
Suddenly all were frozen as the sounds of many horsemen approached. Soldiers on horseback, carrying torches, seemed suddenly everywhere around them, officers and noncoms shouting instructions.
“Free ride’s over,” Matson whispered. “Looks like they know we’re here. We’re going to have to fight our way through from this point.”
“Remember,” they heard an officer shout, “no firing unless fired upon! We want them alive if possible!” They were spreading out forward, and the foursome could hear the sounds of more coming on foot through the woods in back.
Matson thought furiously as the human net formed. “We’re going to have to split in two sections. One will bulldoze its way through with all it’s got, drawing the rest. Then the other can slip through the hole.”
Suzl looked over at him. “Who takes the heat?”
“Cass and I will. It’s more important to get that Soul Rider to the border than either of us, but we’ll have a chance, too. Don’t you fire at all unless you’re seen and in danger of being taken. Give us half a minute after the shooting starts, then break for the best route.”
The two women nodded grimly but said nothing. Matson looked at Cass, who unshouldered her weapon, and they slipped off to the left and were soon lost to the woods.
As soon as they were well away of the others, Matson looked to pick his spot. He saw it and almost didn’t believe it. There were two mounted officers and four troopers walking in, all nicely illuminated by small burning torches that sizzled as the light rain hit. He looked at Kasdi. “You take the ones on foot; I’ll take the two horsemen. As soon as everybody falls, you run like hell through that opening. If those horses don’t bolt, we’ll take them, too.”
She nodded and readied her weapon. She felt only the normal tension; she had faced down great wizards in their own lairs many times. The only difference this time was that she really wanted to shoot some of those men, wanted to see them die, for the first time in her life.
“Now!” Matson shouted, and both stood and opened fire on their respective targets. Matson shot high, the force of the slugs knocking the two mounted men off their horses. The horses neighed and bolted forward a bit, but seemed confused and didn’t run off. Kasdi opened up on the four infantrymen, and they seemed to simply fold and collapse like pricked balloons as more t
han sixty large caliber slugs fanned out in their direction in the space of less than a second.
And then they were running towards the horses. Both were experienced riders and mounted almost simultaneously; they were away as the others were just reacting to the sounds of the shooting. Scattered shots were fired after them, but they were wild and not in large numbers. The soldiers were unsure if their orders not to kill except in self-defense applied here, and most opted to chase rather than shoot.
After the firing began, the men nearest Suzl and Spirit turned and began to run towards the spot where everything was happening. They took the opportunity and ran out and across to the next grouping of trees, then continued to thread their way along the edge of the woods. Men were yelling and running about, some shooting wildly, and more horsemen roared into the gap and began shouting orders. Four horsemen took off after the already vanished pair, but at least one of the officers was taking no chances and started fanning out the infantry up and down the opposite side of the woods. Foot soldiers began to go into the woods where Spirit and Suzl were, forcing them deeper into the extremely dark and damp vegetation. The soldiers were coming in fast, and they began to run.
Suddenly Spirit tripped on a vine and went sprawling. Suzl, behind her, avoided the vine and ran to help her up. She started to get up, then grimaced in pain. “I’ve twisted the ankle, damn it!”
“Then get down in the brush!” Suzl hissed. “I’ll try and lead them away and circle back!”
She started off again, but did not go far before stopping and checking. It had been a vain hope anyway that they would overrun Spirit, and she saw a bunch of grim-faced men pointing rifles down at the woman.
“You in the woods!” somebody shouted. “You have five seconds to come back here unarmed, hands in the air, or I’ll shoot your pretty friend through the head here and now.”
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