Charon: A Dragon at the Gate

by Jack L. Chalker

  We were more than a little cautious in approaching this time. She was certainly right—you couldn’t miss the place. Four jagged spires of hard rock rose a kilometer or more over the surrounding jungle, like four great arrows pointing to the sky. Near the base of the second spire from the left would be the meeting place—if it were not already “spoiled.”

  We approached slowly and cautiously from opposite directions, ready to take any action required, but there was no sign or sense of any stakeout If the location had been blown, the troopers were certainly far more professional than the ones back at the waterfall had been. It took a good two hours for me to satisfy myself that there were no dangerous troopers about, although when we linked up within sight of the rendezvous, we stayed just inside the woods. Having no timepieces, we could only settle back a little and wait, hoping for a pickup.

  It grew dark quickly as night overtook us. Every once in a while I’d check the radio, but all signals were either faint or very intermittent; Pinnacles was never mentioned.

  A bit after dark, we saw some movement in the area and froze. I drew one of the pistols and watched nervously. My night vision was extremely good—our eyes worked best in the murky twilight of the jungle, and were most sensitive to bright light—but it was by no means nocturnal vision. Therefore, I had difficulty seeing just who or what came into view. The Warden sense vaguely tracked the newcomer, but it was impossible to really tell much about its shape.

  Whoever it was crept cautiously to the center of the clearing, seemed to stop and look around, then whispered nervously, “There is thunder in the south.” That was ;the identifying phrase Darva had been told, but while ‘our hopes rose our caution did not let down. If Morah knew of one hideout from captives, he certainly knew many of the passwords.

  I looked at Darva and gestured at the pistol. She nodded, moved away from me, then approached the dark shape. “The Destroyer builds,” she whispered, giving the response.

  I heard a sharp sigh. “Thank the gods!” a female voice said in low but clear tones. “Who’s there?”

  “Darva. Who are you?” She walked closer to the dark shape.

  “I am Hemara,” the other responded, “from the Valley of Cloud.”

  “I am from Thunderkor,” Darva told her. “Come closer, so we may see each other clearly.”

  The other moved, and now I too could make out the shape. She was indeed a changeling, a large woman with a reddish yet very human face that differed only in that she appeared to have two large compound eyes of bright orange in place of the normal ones. She seemed to be carrying something smooth and round on her back.

  Darva turned and whispered to me, “All right, you can come out I think it’s safe.”

  I moved from my hideaway and approached them. Up close, I could see that far more in the woman was changed than I had first noticed. Her body was black, hard, and shiny, like an insect’s, and that round thing on her back was a huge black shell of some kind. She was standing on four of her eight legs—no arms—and these were also covered in a hard shell and had small pads at their tips ending in a single hard nail each. Still, she retained short-cropped humanoid black hair on her head.

  The newcomer turned, looked at me, then back at Darva, then back at me again. “There are two of you?”

  “Sort of,” I responded. “It’s a long story. Anyway, I’m Park and I’m the male.”

  Her very human mouth showed delighted surprise. “A pair! How wonderful!” There was a wistful note in that last, that I couldn’t help but catch.

  “Maybe,” I told her. “For now, what’s the plan to get out of here? I feel like a sitting duck.”

  She looked suddenly crestfallen. “I’d hoped that you ”

  Darva sighed. “Just another refugee. Well, join the party and we’ll wait some more.”

  She wasn’t really constructed for the jungle, but down flat, or almost so, she could blend in pretty well with the rocks. Time passed as we talked,’ explaining where the pistols came from and telling her a little about ourselves—very little, really. As for Hemara, she’d been caught poaching by her Company—a very serious offense. As punishment, she was given to a Company apt as an experimental being on whom to practice. When not a plaything she was on public exhibition near the Company headquarters as a deterrent, and they had outdone themselves in providing a really nasty example. Without hands or claws she couldn’t really manipulate much. Settling an interesting point, she said that the compound eye’s multi-images resolved into a single image in her brain, but that she could focus on only one point She could either see very far, but nothing close, or vice versa, and if she fixed on an object she could see only that object and its surroundings. That meant almost constantly changing focus to get a clear picture. She was a sad example of how far the cruel and insane minds that ran Charon could go, and yet she said she had seen and met worse. I probably had too, but the scene in that square after the fight had been so much of an overload that I found it hard to remember the shapes clearly.

  We were joined later that evening by three more changelings. One was a man whose face was a hideous devil’s mask and whose bent, winged body made him permanently bowlegged. His bat wings, however, were not functional. He was a good reminder of how volatile the Warden power could be. He’d been more or less stealing lessons, hiding himself and listening in while his local sorc instructed his apts. Then he tried experimenting on his own and had been doing very well, but one night he’d had a horrible nightmare …

  The second creature was part long, gray limbless worm and part human torso topped by a hairless man’s head. The body, perhaps five meters long, glistened and left a trail of ichor. He wouldn’t tell us how he’d gotten that way, but we discovered he ate dirt.

  The last one was surprisingly human, and decidedly uncomfortable with us. She was small, quite attractive, and had a distinctive pair of devil’s horns. She appeared to be a nervous wreck and I’m afraid our all-changeling group didn’t help her mood. Her name was Emla Quoor. She’d been in the group in the square, and she’d been terrified from that point on. There was little we could do to comfort her, except to point out that she must have some real guts and intelligence to make it this far undetected and in one piece. She looked like she’d been through hell, though, and I wasn’t about to press her further. Others could do that—if we ever got picked up.

  Suddenly a rumbling erupted all around us. “Oh, brother!” somebody swore. “You can’t go three hours out here without getting dumped on.” As the skies opened up for what promised to be the usual long deluge, everyone moved into the shelter of the trees. The way the wind whipped things up, though, there was no question but that everyone would be pretty well drenched.

  Lightning swirled around the Pinnacles, lighting up the area intermittently in what, I had to admit, was an impressive scene. I looked out into the little clearing which was brightly lit by a lightning flash, then dark again. Then came a second bolt, but this time there was somebody—or something—there, standing in the middle. “There’s somebody here!” I called to the others and drew my pistol.

  All eyes peered nervously into the clearing—it was empty. They glared at me, but I stood firm. “Somebody was there,” I assured them. “I do not see things.” I flicked the power on the pistol to full.

  Another lightning blast, and once again the figure appeared—a tall, thin human in a long black cloak and hood. Not a trooper, that was for sure. One of the others caught sight of it too, and mumbled confirmation of my sighting. All turned to look, nerves on edge.

  The figure was certainly standing there now in the rain for all to see. Slowly it approached us. It came right into our midst and looked around. The impression was of a very dark human face inside the hood, but little else. Finally a woman’s voice announced: “There is thunder in the south.”

  “The Destroyer builds,” returned the stranger in a very deep female voice. She turned and nodded. “Is this all of you?”

  “Us and the human girl over t
here,” the worm-man responded.

  “I am Frienta,” the newcomer introduced herself. “I’m sorry to have kept you all waiting, but there are heavy patrols on the road and I decided to wait and use the storm for cover.”

  “You are from Koril’s organization?” I asked.

  “Master Koril is certainly involved, although it is not entirely his organization, or anyone’s,” Frienta replied curtly. “However, we have to move you and hundreds more out of the region, and that is a massive logistical effort. More than half of our people have already been caught or killed in this region, and you are not out of danger yet yourself. We must now get you quickly to an assembly point.” She looked around. “Are you up to a long march in the-rain?”

  The human woman and the devil-man both groaned. Frienta took notice of them, then looked at our worm-man. “What about you? How fast can you travel?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he assured her. “The wetter it is, the better.”

  “Well, then, our success depends on the two of you.” She looked at Darva and me. “You’re the biggest. Do you think you could each carry one of these?”

  I looked at Darva, who shrugged. “Why not?” I replied. “But they’ll have to hang on tight.”

  The devil-man gave a grotesque expression which I hoped was one of gratitude. The human woman seemed extremely nervous and uncertain. “Come on—climb up and get as comfortable as you can,” I said, trying to sound as friendly and reassuring as possible. “I’m not poison, I don’t bite—not people on my side anyway—and riding beats walking in this stuff.”

  The devil-man had little problem getting on Darva’s back, but he apparently weighed more than he looked, given the expression on her face. Frienta went over to the human. “Come. I will help you.”

  She looked over at me. “I—I don’t know. Maybe I can walk …”

  “I have no time or patience for such prejudice,” the strange dark women said acidly. “You too are nonhuman, as those horns attest.”

  The woman stepped back, obviously upset by the sudden attitude of the one whom she’d considered her only ally. Abruptly I was aware of a flaring of the Wardens within the dark woman’s body, and I sensed complex message information flow from her outstretched arm to the scared woman. It was as if there were now thousands, perhaps millions of tiny weblike cords of energy linking the two.

  Then, somewhat jerkily, the human walked up to me, and with Frienta’s assistance, climbed on my back and clung tightly. Frienta nodded to herself, stepped back, and traced a few symbols in the air. “There!” she announced, satisfied. “You are bound there until I free you!” She turned to the rest of us. “Cornel Follow me quickly! This is not the time to stay in one place!”

  I was aware of the rigidity of the woman on my back, and said to Frienta, “You are an apt.”

  “A minor one,” she responded crisply. Then we were off into the rain-soaked jungle in the midst of the darkness.

  It was a long and arduous journey, taken at a good pace. Frienta, whose face I never could see clearly and whose body was masked by her black robes, proved extremely quick and agile—and apparently tireless. The extra burdens Darva and I carried soon proved to be wearing, but we had no choice but to go on. Worm-man and Hemara proved capable of some speed under adverse conditions, but none of us were cut out for this sort of thing. Frienta seemed to sense when one or more of us was spent and absolutely had to rest, and the breaks were well timed although not as frequent as we would have wished.

  We walked all night through a wilderness so complete that after a while none of us had any sense of where we were, how far we’d come, or in what direction we were going. We finally reached a small clearing in the jungle where Frienta proclaimed a complete stop. We would be allowed to forage for food, each according to our own needs, then get some sleep. It was not well, she told us, to travel much in daylight and we still had a long way to go—more than two nights’ march at the least.

  Even relieved of our burdens, Darva and I felt exhausted, but we knew we needed strength now more than ever. We picked no fights, settling for catching and eating a number of small animals that were no real challenge and supplementing this with what wild fruits we could find. Then we slept through most of the day.

  Frienta revealed no more of herself in light than in darkness—a fact that intrigued us all more and more. We felt certain she was some sort of changeling herself, but what sort we had no idea. We rotated guard positions while the others slept, but I kept the laser pistols. Most of the others didn’t know how to use them and a couple simply couldn’t. Besides, I didn’t really fully trust anybody except Darva, who certainly didn’t know how to shoot, and myself.

  The next night was much like the first, although we got a break in the rain which certainly helped me a little. My human passenger said next to nothing during the entire journey, and I was glad for that. I was too tired to be conversational. During the middle of the third night we suddenly broke out onto a wide, sandy beach. We had reached the coast—the south coast again, as it turned out, but more than a hundred kilometers west of Bourget.

  It was with relief that we realized that we were at the end of our journey. Our mysterious guide had taken us unerringly to the right spot through the jungle, avoiding all Companies and all but a very few roads—and also avoiding the worst of the jungle and swamps.

  “We are safe now,” Frienta assured us. “The encampment here is protected from interlopers by high sorcery.”

  I looked around. “Encampment?”

  “Come,” she beckoned, and we walked down the beach a little to where it curved inland, forming a small bay. It looked desolate, totally deserted, until we turned slightly inland on the bay’s south side. Suddenly we found ourselves in a very large if primitive village, with tents, even fires and torchlight. It was so surprising that several of us uttered sounds of amazement; I, for one, stopped, then turned and stepped back a few meters and turned again. Desertion and silence. Walk a few steps forward, and there it was—a true camp with hundreds of beings, both changeling and human.

  Frienta waved a ghostly arm. “Just find yourself a comfortable place and settle in,” she told us. “Ample food to your requirements will be provided, but we are out of tents and other shelters, I fear. If you can make no arrangements, you can use the jungle in the rear. The spell covers the entire south side of the bay but only to a depth of ninety meters from the beach—so if you go beyond, into the forest, take care.”

  Our little group dispersed quickly as our fellow travelers found others they knew among the teeming throng of creatures on the beach. Our nervous human joined a small group of her own kind with evident relief.

  Darva looked at me. “Well? What shall we do now?”

  I shrugged. “Sleep, I think. Tomorrow we’ll find out_ what comes next.” I looked around at the various kinds of creatures on the beach, some of which were the stuff of real nightmares. Charon had taken criminal minds, insane minds, and given them great power. Much of that insanity could be seen reflected in its victims on the beach as well as in our former company, I reflected. Koril might prove more sympathetic, I knew; but he was still a politician, a king dethroned who wanted his position back and was willing to go to any lengths to get it. This system had been in effect when he was in charge before, and even before that, and he’d done nothing then to stop it. And that, of course, was something most of these people, the changelings in particular, would simply overlook; almost all were natives, and that alone accounted for a certain naiveté to which was now added an exponential increase in trust borne of hope and desperation.

  How were we different from the aliens, Darva had asked me—and I really wasn’t sure of an answer. If I wasn’t, then perhaps Koril saw few differences either. He would be unlikely to eliminate an external alien menace only to allow another to fester here homegrown. There was no question in my mind that these people were being used, as always. Sooner or later I knew, something would have to be done.

  Darva had
wandered off for a few minutes to see if anybody was around and awake whom she knew. When I saw her talking to a small group near a large tent, I decided to join her.

  She looked over at me as I approached, smiled, nodded, and turned back to the trio by the fire—I saw one of them was frog-man, another the bird creature—and I strode right up to them. Before I could say anything, though, the flap of the tent behind me opened and I heard a familiar voice. “Why, hello, Darva! Hi, Park! My, you look stunning in your new suit!”

  I whirled about in total surprise, and looked into the face of Tully Kokul.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Koril’s Redoubt

  Tully and I walked along the beach. “Tell me,” I asked him, “are you Koril?”

  He laughed. “Oh my, no! I couldn’t hold a candle to him! I’m really a very simple man, Park. In ancient times I’d be the parish priest, a man looking for rest and place to contemplate and experiment with a minimum of interference. Bourget was like a dream come true for me. Nobody around higher up to give me all sorts of orders, a peaceful village filled with good, profit-minded simple folk, and a very distant government that left us all alone. I was extremely happy there.”

  “So how come you’re here, then?” I asked him. “Surely you didn’t just come along for the ride.”

  He chuckled. “Oh no, but I’m like the pacifist who stays home, locks himself in his house while the war rages, then suddenly finds the opposing armies marching and shooting through his living room. I’m only a fair sorc, but I’m a good politician, Park. I knew what was going on in and around the village. I knew too that eventually the idyll would end, although I put off all decisions until the last minute. It was painful to lose—but when Matuze took over it was only a matter of time. She’s a real nut case, Park. Morah keeps her protected from the Synod for his own purposes, and she’s able to indulge her every crazy whim. She’s sadistic, cruel, but very, very imaginative—and very ambitious. So when she took control, I more or less got my credentials from this group, although I kept a hands-off attitude almost to the last minute. It really wasn’t until Morah himself showed up that I knew the game was up.”