But something in the back of her mind wondered if maybe she wasn't just as guilty of that. She'd never once put the make on Dorion, who was no worse-looking and better-looking than some or most of her old "clients" back on Tubikosa, but she'd fallen overboard for the handsome, sexy, romantic Halagar, Mister Macho, and look at what he'd been inside. Could that train of thought be right? Could she be Just as guilty of what she condemned others for behaving? It was a troubling thought.
They passed over the border once more, this time far easier than going the opposite way. Even the magic sight was gone; the null just glowed in the same way it had when she'd first seen it, but enough so she could see the rebel emplacements. There seemed a lot more of them.
The Covantian side seemed, paradoxically, smaller than she'd remembered it, although admittedly her memories were colored by her limited sight and condition at the time. It had just seemed that there had been wall to wall guys down there when they'd crossed the first time, and now it was the kind of makeshift, thin line like the rebels had back then. But the hub ahead was so dark that for a moment she thought she was going blind again.
For Sam, the whole place was alive with a glorious glow, and when they crossed into the hub itself the countryside was not dark, but lit with a dim but beautiful spectral glow. Everything, it seemed, had some kind of aura. and each was unique, both by class and by shape within that class. It was beautiful but where were the lights? There were vineyards and farms and whole towns down there. Even though it was growing late, there should be lights. Was it a limitation of this new vision, or was something very strange down mere?
"I think they're getting smarter than Klittichom gave them credit for," Boolean'? voice came to them. "At least, it seems so. Maybe, just maybe, somebody's gotten paranoid about Changewinds in the hub. There's only a few people and some animals down there. Probably civil guards making sure nobody gets any bright ideas about looting. Either Grotag got the shakes after all, or the kings and nobles did."
"But—you mean it's been evacuated?" Charley asked him. "If so, where would they go? And how?"
"Well, it's just a hunch, but the rebels didn't have enough to mass on every border and left only token forces on one before hitting Masalur. If the one opposite is uncovered, as it might well be, then we'll find they've moved the mass of people to the outer ring and into a safe and secure colony, a bit dispersed and with the bulk of the army to protect them. It's smart. If anybody hits Covanti they're going to cream the best vineyards in the cosmos. If it isn't hit, they'll eventually move back in only a little worse for wear. But to hit 'em in the colonies with precision like they used on my hub, they'd need a Second Rank man of their own on sight to aid in spotting, and they don't have enough to go around at all, let alone spare. If everybody's doing this, he's going to have a real empty victory. Of course, everybody won't, but it looks like the smart ones may get through this. Well, we have to pass very near the center of the city. If Grotag's still holding down the fort we'll know who's scared and who's stupid, and it's the loyal Second Rankers he's really after anyway."
The center city showed lights, but the population was far less dense than it should have been. Clearly a fairly large number of people had decided not to move, or to take the chance, or that the risk was in somebody's head, but, still, there couldn't have been more man ten or fifteen percent of the people left. The exception was the big castle in the center, which, to Sam, Dorion, and Boolean, blazed with a light so bright it was almost impossible to look at.
"So Grotag's still at home and holding fast," Boolean noted. "Well, thank the Lord for civilian government and some common sense. It goes to show how useless power is without brains. A few top adepts could hold that shield convincingly and Grotag could protect himself and his people at their side. What a jerk!"
Once beyond the city, there seemed to be far more activity and a lot more life, and it increased as they closed in close to the bolder. Clearly me evacuation was still in progress and this was me side possibly left undefended by the rebels. They weren't going quite there, though, but angled off to the north, skirting the border, and came upon a town that looked very normal and undisturbed and still with some life in it. The border towns would be the last to go in any event, of course, and might not, since they wouldn't be at Ground Zero or near it. The country areas of Masalur hadn't been touched by the Changewind except for one narrow swath towards the exit point. These people were just as safe at home.
Down now, not quite to the town, but to a small house on top of a hill overlooking that town, settling down right in the front yard, as it were. Sam and Kira recognized it at once, but it was strange to the others.
Boolean got off, and Dorion slid off his and came over and helped Charley up off hers. She made almost a tearing sound when she did rise, as if she'd been glued to or stuck to the thing.
There was a light on in the front window, and before anyone could approach the front door, it opened, and a pleasant, sweet-looking gray-haired little old lady toddled out and looked at them, then smiled sweetly.
"I've been expecting you," said Etanalon.
Etanalon looked around quizzically at the group. She nodded to Kira and said, "Her I know, but you" pointing to Charley, "you look like the one who was here but you are not. And you," she went on, pointing to Sam, "you I know as well. Oh, dear. Has the mirror erred? Have you starved yourself for months to get to that state?"
Sam laughed. "No, it's Boolean's tricks. We're kind'a twins, and Boolean switched our bodies around."
Etanalon sighed and nodded. "Ah, yes, that explains it. You, skinny one, should eat something. Anything. I have some find food and snacks in the kitchen." She looked again at Charley. "But you, my dear… I sense great conflict and unhappiness in you. Perhaps we might do something for you." She turned to Dorion. "And you, young man, should get some pants on!"
"No time now for all that should be done," Boolean told her. "I want to be out of Covanti entirely before a good search is launched. Anybody else?"
"Yobi will meet us en route," she told him- "It is cutting it close, but what can Klittichorn have up there? We know the rogues and mental midgets he employs in the field, so what sort of competition can he have on hand?"
"Probably adepts he elevated himself without going through the niceties," the sorcerer replied. "That makes them unknowns and thus more dangerous. The best guess I have is that he uses three of them on some kind of mock-up of Akahlar to triangulate and hold the position, then he opens the weak point and the Storm Princess captures and guides the storm. But that still leaves their four Second Rank against our three. Not good odds when one is Klittichorn and the other three are Klittichorn hand-picked and trained."
"Bosh. What kind of experience can they have? Those three have most certainly been concentrated in their training on the single goal of making this work. You have a mental hang-up on Klittichorn, though, which could prove our undoing. Are you certain you wouldn't like to face the mirror?"
Boolean gave a dry chuckle. "I'll handle him, don't worry."
Sam looked at Etanalon wide-eyed. "You are going to help us? I thought you were above this sort of thing."
"No one should be above crushing evil, dear," the sorceress responded. "I have been sitting here treating the individual ills of Akahlar so long, I seem to have temporarily lost my perspective. Just as I could no longer work for the system I found oppressive, so can I not sit idly by while whole masses of people are destroyed or driven mad. Some madnesses are such that they do not know they are mad and so will never seek treatment. Klittichorn is the sort of insanity that visits its madness on the innocent. The man is suffering but he is taking it out on everyone else. I can not sit idly by and let that happen. It was the two of you who made me doubt, but only when Masalur was so brutally assaulted did I realize that Boolean was right."
"I'm going to need to use your lab to get in touch with my people and make certain everything is set up," Boolean told her. "Sam, you come, too. We want to discuss
a few things. The rest of you just hang loose; raid the pantry if you want, but I'd suggest sleep."
Etanalon, Boolean, and Sam went into the back and down into the depths of the hill where the sorceress's laboratory was, leaving the rest.
"Yobi, too," Dorion breathed. "I can hardly believe it! She hardly ever moves from her lair for anything."
"I think Boolean's right," Kira told them. "I think we should pick some comfortable spots in here and get what rest we can. We don't know just when we'll have to move long, hard, and fast. I don't sleep nights so I can keep a sort of watch. I know this place and I'm used to it."
They gave Charley the couch, but she found it too uncomfortable to sleep, and felt a little too keyed up. The others, from Boday to Dorion, had no such problems, and Kira was back snacking in the kitchen. She hauled herself up after a while, feeling a need for fresh air, quietly opened the door. and walked outside.
It was a beautiful night and, with the town below, an almost picture postcard scene. The air was warm, with just enough of a gentle breeze to make it pleasant; the kind of atmosphere and setting that made the troubles seem as distant as home, and allowed you to pretend, if only for a few moments, that nothing was wrong.
A strange, small shape moved nearby, startling her and causing an involuntary cry.
"Sorry," said the strange voice of Cromil. "Didn't mean to make you jump, although sometimes it's fun scaring folks."
She relaxed. "That's all right. I'm surprised you're not down with them, though, and that you're talking to me."
The little green familiar spat. "Nothing but boring crap down there. No interest at all to Cromil. Just talking about ways to get themselves killed is all. Got to hand it to him, though. If anybody can pull it all off, Boolean can. Suckered you good, didn't he?"
She frowned and looked at the tiny shape in the darkness. "What do you mean by that?"
"You never figured out how his mind works, have you? So pleasant, so chatty, you'll hand over your jewels and beg him to steal the rest. Gets so complicated sometimes he crosses himself up almost did with the two of you. Had all this in mind from the start, he did. Surprised he actually got this far, though. The others all wound up bad."
"Others?"
"Sure. Your friend wasn't the only Storm Princess dupe he managed to snatch from Klittichom's grasp. Not many, but a few. Took bets on 'em, we did, only neither of us would bet that your friend would be the one to make it this far."
"Bets? What… what happened to the others? Where are they?"
The little green monkey shrugged in very human fashion. "Some dead. That's the easiest state to accomplish in this place. Others trapped, caught by Klittichom's men, or spells, or whatever. Started you all off pretty equal and pretty low, he did. Wound you all up and let you run. Put the pressure under you when he had to, otherwise just let you run. Set you far away from him and sit there and tell you to find him. Kick you in the ass if you sat down or gave up. A kind of race in the end. First one to reach Boolean wins."
Her jaw dropped a bit. "But why? You mean he could have pulled us to him at any time? That he caused all that we went through?"
"Not specifics. Bailed you out when he could, but mostly you were on your own. See, the winner gets to go up against the Storm Princess, right? Practiced, accomplished, one tough broad, driven by hate. Think of yourself when you got dumped here. Would your friend have been any match for the Storm Princess and sorcerers then? Would she even have understood the dangers or her own self? She'd have been a patsy. Chopped to pieces out of ignorance, hang-ups, you name it. Took education, see? Had to learn about Akahlar, about wizards and spells and all that stuff. All of you were naive, dumb. impractical airheads—typical teenagers. No good to go against them. You had to learn the rules, learn what evil really was, and to separate it from stupidity, which often looks the same. You had to fight some battles, get victimized, even abused. Not planned—we just knew it would happen. Could you cope? Could you survive? Help out when we could and you couldn't, sure, when we could, but that's all. You're the only two that made it."
She sighed. When she saw how close she and Sam had both come to buying the farm, it was even more sobering. Right up to the last minute…. She wasn't sure if she was elated or depressed as hell by the news. "I see," she answered. "Both of us had to be degraded, raped, tortured through spells, chased by gunmen, undergo fire and flood all as a test?"
"Not a test—an endurance contest. It wasn't totally random either. The more you progressed, the more the destiny threads pointed to your friend. Boolean took something of a chance when he ordered the Demon of the Jewel of Omak to make certain she got pregnant. He had to know it would start a chain reaction that would lead to this point. However, there were indications Klittichom was attempting to find the proper mate for the Storm Princess—strictly for the one purpose, of course, but satisfying the rebel's own sense of propriety and quieting disturbing rumors about her having a stable of female slave lovers, which was true but politically inconvenient and your friend, thanks to her weight and her unconventional mate and lifestyle, seemed safest at the time."
"The demon… made her get pregnant?" Charley was appalled.
"Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. It simply implanted in her mind a natural curiosity about the normal way of doing things and the fact that she could use the hypnotic powers to do it, so, at the point when she dropped an egg, as it were, at the exact prime moment, she did it with one of the wagon train crew. You remember that."
In a way, it was a relief, even though it galled her to think how Sam had been so manipulated. At least the child wasn't a child of one of those gang-raping monsters. It was rape, of course—by Boolean, sort of—but so long as Sam didn't know it and thought it was her idea, Sam wouldn't think it so. That didn't really help Charley's own feelings, that Boolean had treated Sam as a thing, a piece of meat, the same way Halagar had treated Charley, but facts were facts, and now she had the kid inside her. So had she been sort of raped by this third hand? It was too complicated an issue for a night like this.
"But almost immediately after we were all caught in the flood, most of the train was killed, there was the capture, the tortures and rapes, and then we were split up in the Kudaan. Some help Boolean was there in our survival."
"He didn't plan it that way, but who would have expected Sam to use her powers so soon? Or that the mercenaries under the Blue Witch would hit that particular train in their search for Mandan gold cloaks to sell to the rebels? The mess happened, and it took Boolean and Yobi to straighten it out, that's all. When the two of you surfaced at Yobi's without Sam, Crim was contacted to track her down. Until then he'd been tracking you, thinking you were all still together."
"Yeah, but we were only found and rescued because Dorion happened to see us and saw my resemblance to the Storm Princess. Lucked out is what you mean."
"Crim would have tracked you, most likely, in the end. Luck is simply an amateur's term for the threads of destiny that are woven at conception. It's why some people have 'miraculous' escapes and others die in freakish happenings. The threads can be aborted by conflict with others, but Boolean read Sam's and it was a long thread. He and Yobi intervened, got Sam out of Pasedo's, got her mind mostly back, and she'd learned a lot about herself during that period and so had you."
"So why didn't Boolean just order Crim to take us to Yobi so we'd be together again and then bring us to him, or him to us, right then?"
"Because you weren't ready. You were by now hardened survivors, but you were not ready. Sam was still at war with herself; she was still spending almost all of her time trying to escape her destiny and her obligations rather than facing them willingly. The same went for you, really, so together you would just reinforce each other. You both had grown hard, pragmatic, questioning, but neither of you looked at anyone else, not even each other. You were still turned inward, without a sense of obligation or any willingness to sacrifice for the common cause. It took Halagar to make you see what you'd r
eally become, to see what others perceived you to be. what you thought you wanted or could accept. For Sam, it was easier. She always felt an obligation to others, to her friends, but her lack of ego, of self-esteem, of self-acceptance. and self-worth was driving her mad. In desperation, we had a magician refer her here, to Etanalon. It made her accept herself and resign herself to her duty, but no more- We decided we had to go with what we had, but the unexpected diversion that allowed her to feel normal, turned out to be a blessing even though it panicked us and almost cost us the game."
"Normal? Four husbands in a jungle house in the sticks?"
"Normal to her. It gave her something besides a lifetime with Boday to fight for. It showed friends, people she was closed to, dying—and for her, basically. It put her in the position of seeing others do what was expected of her. It broke the last barrier. She's ready now. In many ways she has far more experience and toughness than her foe- And you were right there, also ready, to play your own part."
Her eyebrows went up. "Me? What part? I was a decoy, maybe, but if it wasn't for my own thinking I'd have drank a potion back in Tubikosa and become permanently a mindless courtesan, I practically did, anyway."
"Well, it was your body, not your mind, that was important in the plan. You were, after all, an add-in, a bonus, there to give Sam the body she needed when the time came, and take on hers and keep the child from harm. We needed only the receptacle, and with only the receptacle the transfer would have been easily done. That you remained mentally alive as well actually complicated matters. Had we not been able to keep an eye on you, so to speak, we might well have had to make other arrangements."
Changewinds 03 - War of the Maelstrom Page 33