Changewinds 03 - War of the Maelstrom

by Jack L. Chalker

  My god! He is totally mad! was the only thought Boolean could make before the onslaught of sheer, brutal power struck him, and the battle was joined. It was, right off, a battle he knew he must lose, for he faced fanaticism and madness along with brilliance and power, while he defended weakly and from a position of guilt. No! Purge the guilt! Don't think of Roy Lompong! Think of those bombs, those millions of people….'

  The Storm Princess tightened the ring some more, although she could sense no life forms within the Maelstrom not inside the stage circle. Klittichom was locked in battle; the others seemed weak, irrelevant, and not near enough to her. Her battle was not with the likes of them, but with the Usurper battling quite strongly from afar. No suddenly there was one, quite close, just opposite her. For a moment she look her mind off the Maelstrom and looked with her eyes.

  It was like looking into a mirror, and she was startled at the sight in spite of herself. Sam was not at all startled; she saw just what she expected to see, and she didn't like it one bit.

  "So, little decoy, they send you at last as if to frighten me," the Storm Princess muttered between clenched teeth. "In a way I almost feel sorry for you, as insignificant as you are."

  Sam smiled grimly at her and began walking slowly towards her. Their eyes met, and there was something in Sam's eyes that suddenly caused doubt, even fear, inside the thoughts of the Storm Princess. She took a step back as Sam continued to advance, oblivious of the Maelstrom around them.

  "Mother protect me!" the Storm Princess muttered. "You're not the decoy.' You're…."

  Back around the side of the great spinning globe, Sam pressed on and the Storm Princess retreated. They made a quarter of the circuit, and then the Princess found her back to die wizard's battle and stopped, with no way out except through the storm, and that would be no out. The storm and its most terrifying effects were as nothing to either of them. But what lay beyond now? Not the building, certainly, and possibly not the mountains, either. Cold. no matter what, for that would require changing the whole planet's position and tilt to alter, but what? A chasm hundreds of feet deep? A glacier? Some alien horror?

  Sam knew now what she had to do. "We must touch, sister. You know what that does? It cancels us both out. We cease to exist, to the betterment of this and many other worlds, maybe. I ain't afraid no more, 'cause it'll mean something. Nothin' I ever done or hoped to do ever really meant somethin' before." She stepped forward, and the Storm Princess looked panicky for a way out.

  Suddenly something snakelike seemed to come out of nowhere and wrap itself around the Storm Princess's throat. It wasn't hard enough to strangle her, having partly caught the collar, but it surprised and held her, and she was pulled with some force to a strangely familiar dark shape just beyond.

  So sudden was the whole action that it startled Sam and stopped her dead in her tracks, only a few feet from the Princess. She stared, confused, and then saw who it was.

  "Boday! What the hell…?"

  Boday had slipped the whip off the confused woman's neck but held her now in a sort of wrestling grip, forcing the Storm Princess's mouth open and her head back, and then stuffing a small vial into her mouth. The Princess swallowed it involuntarily, then cried out and sank, unconscious, to the cement floor of the stage area. Boday bent down, picked her up, and grinned at Sam.

  "Don't you worry about her," Boday said with a smile. "She'll never do anybody any harm again. Let me past and you go help out Boolean. I think he's losing bad. Just remember when it's done to leave me a way out of here!"

  She stepped back and let Boday go by to the far side of the globe, confused as hell but not questioning it.

  She was at Klittichom's back, but she could easily tell that he knew she was there and also that he was winning. In fact, the magical sight was a sea of crimson, with only a small glow of green left that was even now contracting more and more.

  "Soon he'll be smaller than me," she heard Cromil's amused voice near her. She turned, furious, and a wisp of Changewind lashed out from the Maelstrom like Boday's whip and caught the little creature dead on. He screamed and then vanished into the storm, whether dead or simply banished back to his own strange universe she couldn't know.

  Still, her fury had caused that, and without even thinking about it. She turned again and brought just the nearest side of the Maelstrom wall inwards, touching but not harming her, and engulfing the brightly shining orange mass.

  Klittichom, an inch from victory, seemed to sense it and suddenly whirled. "No! Not yet!" he screamed, and it was on him. She held it there, just where it was, then rolled it back to see if she had caught anything but the sorcerer in the mess. Where Klittichom had stood was now a mass of solid ice. Pink ice. If it was random, it was certainly appropriate. Just beyond was the little left of the stage area, and on it lay a green robe, collapsed like an old rag doll.

  She rushed over to him, heedless of the cold, almost slipping on the ice, and bent down. He looked horrible, more like that walking skeleton he'd faced down outside than anything like the man he'd been. Still, as she could see by the very tiny glow still within him, he was not dead yet, but he was dying and he knew it. Still, somehow, he saw her or senses her, and he tried to speak.

  "A-bombs," he gasped, sounding like a voice from beyond the grave. "He put A-bombs in all the hubs he didn't change!"

  She looked up at the globe, still incredibly spinning around on its theoretical axis. "Is there any way I can get rid of them? There's still a lot of Changewind energy here."

  "Not focused," he managed. "Need the others. No way out. Yobi… gone. Etanalon… gone. I go now myself. Millions will die…. Horrible nuclear waste…. He thought … he was… already… a god."

  "Oh, my god!" she breathed, and then something snapped inside her. "No, damn it! Don't you die on me now, you bastard! Join me! Join me in the Wind!"

  She let it wash over them as she clung tightly to him, but this time she didn't ward off its force. "Join with it," she told him softly. "Join me and join with it. Mate with me and the Wind!" And she kissed his skull of a face and picked his brittle body up and clung tightly to it.

  She held his pitiful shell in passionate embrace, a passion she did not feel but knew somehow was not really necessary, and let the wind take them both, melding them together within the Maelstrom. She felt the clothing dissolve, their very bodies seem to melt and meld into new forms, and she felt him understand and accept her and she accept him, and together they merged with each other and with the wind.

  Her mind and his mind exploded and joined, creating something new, something unique, something great, but something only her half could shape. It was all so clear to Her now! Everything!

  And the irony was that Klittichorn's pitiful, mad dream of godhood would not have been his to claim, but that of the Storm Princess, who alone was the Shaper of What Was. It was the feminine who gave birth, even to gods.

  In Sam's own, simplistic way, she had guessed the key. Chaos created gods and goddesses like snowflakes, each different, each unique, each the protector as well as the ultimate ruler of their worlds. But even that was a random process, the fifty million monkeys creating into infinity produced not the works of Shakespeare but a system by which the man and the works might be created. But not every snowflake was perfect, and not every copy of Shakespeare was, either. In some worlds, perhaps for physical reasons, perhaps for no particular reason but chance, the process had stopped short of the final creation. Stability had been achieved, regulation established, short of local godhood.

  There the elements had not merged, the opposites that created. The being with the power to call the Winds had to mate with the being who could command them, and the two had to merge with the wind and become something newer and greater than any of the three. How early had it been, in the other planes? In the trees or in the oceans, perhaps? Simpler gods for simpler times and more rational development.

  But not just any god would do. It had to be a fusion of opposites, the cerebral an
d emotional, the male and the female, the old and the young, and countless other variables and elements had to merge. This did not necessarily make a perfect local god, nor even a great or wise one, but the patterns created by the order formed from the creation out of Chaos did not mandate that.

  Akahlar had been created out of that first great explosion, but not as it was now, nor even the way the others had been formed at the time. It had been a vast, empty place upon which the other realities, the other universes close at hand, had fallen, compressed by the pull of the Seat of Probability after the great explosion's force had passed. Its compressed and compacted state had ground out the nulls and created the overlaps with countless worlds around the few untouched areas, the hubs, and it had been populated from the out-planes long after things had settled and developed for billions of years.

  The ironic thing was that those who became its masters had come from worlds where the gods were created by the minds of men, not the patterns of Chaos. Violent, fierce people unregulated and untempered by anything above them. In them, the elements to form the gods did not truly exist, although the need for them did and took form in ancestral yearnings for such beings. In their worlds, and perhaps only in their worlds, the prototypes for the gods continued to be fashioned and born as the patterns dictated, but never to understand, never to unite, never to form the whole that was required. And there was a reason for this.

  They were from the far out-planes, the last of Creation, where the Changewinds weakened into shadows of themselves and their power was greatly diminished. Humankind multiplied and occupied their Earths, further separating and making unlikely that the elements, any of the elements, would ever meet, unite, or comprehend what the patterns urged. For it was always the female element who sought out and chose her lovers, and the pattern had gone slightly awry; for the woman always took their lovers from their complements, not their opposites, rarely uniting with a male at all and even rarer with the Changewind.

  Yet there was a kind of stability imposed, as even apart the separate elements maintained an automatic, unconscious regulation, keeping the worst of the Winds at bay, and only when they died or were removed before the patterns forced another element to be born, somewhere, in their world, did the Winds have true free reign, producing the improbable elements that might give the world an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon, or a Hitler, or, conversely, a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Gandhi.

  Only here, in Akahlar, where the magic was real and accepted and taken for granted, had the line of the female become institutionalized, mother choosing mate for all the wrong reasons and bearing another and yet another version of herself, and using the powers of the Winds while ignorant of her own place or the meaning of things, believing themselves goddesses while actually being but an element of the divine.

  She looked down upon the ruins of Klittichom's fortress and saw that there were in fact survivors down there, survivors whom She recognized and identified. She reached out a spectral hand to them and created for them an avenue and an ice bridge to safety beyond. She was about to do more but She felt a sharp and painful disturbance within Her, one She did not fully comprehend, being above pain now, or so she had thought. The survivors would get out; she would have to come back to them later.

  At the speed of light she was at its source, a great, horrible explosion sending horrible thunder and searing fire outwards over a vast radius, obliterating, even atomizing, much of what its blast touched. She dampened it, pulled it upward, kept it from doing further harm, but now there was a second, and She knew what She was facing.

  Too late on the first. She froze the second as it was forming its mushroom shape, suspending it there, then went methodically from hub to hub, pulling the power of the Winds to render the other bombs useless junk. Only then did She return to the first, and discover that there were in fact limits to Her powers. Even this universe was vast, and She was but the Goddess of Akahlar. She could not roll back time, but She could undo much of its effects.

  Frightened people, frightened armies, frozen in the vision of that second bomb, were now unfrozen; the great, irregular mushroom shape stopped billowing upwards and instead seemed to them to solidify. On a shaky, bent foundation stem the structure could not stand; it toppled over and fragmented as it hit the ground over hundreds of square miles, burying the hub and its defenders and attackers knee-deep in chunks of true mushroom.

  For the first hub there was less hope; it was already a blackened plane, with the bare charred remnants of what had once been a great kingdom and great seat of empire. There she could do some things; within limits even raise the dead, as little was truly impossible now, but she could not spin it back, could not take that explosion back, and far too much of it had gone. Better now to simply contain the damage and limit its effects to what had already occurred, spinning the dust and radiation outward into the nether-hells between the out-planes where they would hardly be noticed. Let this burned, dead hub become then a place of pilgrimage, a grim reminder to the millions who survived through the bravery of a few as to what great power can really do, and what price might be paid for turning one's back on evil.

  For they could have stopped this; the high and mighty Akhbreed sorcerers in their towers and in their lairs, but they had chosen to believe what they wanted to believe and to compromise with evil, succumb to evil, or turn their eyes, ears, and brains away from it, and ignore it until it was too late. They had shown how weak and fallible their power was, how they misunderstood the fullness of their charge to protect their people. They had let their sense of power replace their common sense, and so had failed both their people and themselves, and now they sat smug and fat in their castles, congratulating themselves that all was now well and that someone had done for them at great sacrifice what just a few of them could have done with no sacrifice required at all.

  She reached down to them, as they sat in their towers as before, ignorant of just what horrors they and their people had been spared, and touched them with the breeze they could not control, the one power to which they were subject. The office of Chief Sorcerer was herein abolished; now they were revealed by their loss of power as just the pitiful old men and women, frail and scared and very ordinary, as they always were, but now stripped of their cloaks of invincibility and forced to appear with their minute souls bared to their people.

  The shield came down. There would never again be shields to keep subject populations separate and in check, coordinated by the masters of the hubs. She knew that this would cause much death and suffering, that the wars would now rage for a while, and that the Akhbreed and the most militant of the colonials would be a long time finding a peace, but they would be forced eventually to an accommodation, for they needed each other, and the vast majority of colonial races understood that as well. If the Akhbreed would let them, some of those races would fight at its side in the defense of a broader, freer organization, less kingdom than interdependent commonwealth. The Akhbreed who refused alliance would die, or be overthrown by those who saw survival and the future as overwhelming prejudice.

  She cried for those who would die and those who would never learn, and most of all for the innocents caught between, but this was the sort of hard decision that her other half could make and the only long-term solution. She would be able to help, to guide them, to perhaps minimize the appalling losses, but the War of the Maelstrom might take a generation to sort out the world of Akahlar.

  When She had time to learn all Her powers and Her limits, to study what could be done and how best to do it, some provision might be made for the innocents. Nor was She still naive enough to believe that the system She envisioned for Akahlar would evolve on its own. Something would have to be done to give them a guide, a nudge in the right direction. Prophets and teachers might be quite useful to develop here, and perhaps a book to guide them and give them the plan.

  For a moment, She wondered if this was the way it always worked out, that others suddenly thrust into Her position had not done much the same
.

  But there had to be one place of safety, one point of shining sanity upon Akahlar, if only as an example. A holy city within a centralized hub, perhaps, to train those not only of the Akhbreed but also of the natives to carry the message and the plan, safe from wars and revolutions and barbarism, so that no matter how ugly things got there was one source for putting it right.

  Masalur! Astride the equator, near the center of the greatest kingdoms. Masalur, who had known both the horrors of war and subjugation and the wrench of the winds; who had an almost unique core population that remained intact, a bridge between the opposites, between the changelings and the whole, between the rebels and the Akhbreed, between the male and the female, and whose old government had allowed, however reluctantly, the experiments with native self-government and self-sufficiency and whose colonial populations as a result had, in the main, eschewed the fight and caused Klittichom to have to import dissident armies to help.

  Its magically charged hub, with its swampy core and its large and strange population, surrounded by a ring of Akhbreed, would be a holy place. In this hub, the weapons would not work, the spells would not hold, and judgments might be rendered directly by Her until such time as a new form of government could evolve, a multiracial government, to teach and give example to the world.