Empires of Flux & Anchor

15 SHADOW PLAY

Coydt van Haaz stood there dressed in a loose flannel shirt, blue denim work pants, and boots; a slight smile played on his face. “You may go now, Captain. Remain on the wall. I may need you later.”

Weiz looked nervous, but he responded crisply, “Yes, sir,” and departed, leaving Coydt and Suzl alone in Flux. She stared at him, feeling the tremendous energy inside him and also real fear inside her.

“The captain really is fond of you,” Coydt told her. “He’s quite smitten, in fact. What about you? Is he the idea you had of the kind of men who took this Anchor?”

“No,” she responded, adding “sir” almost as an afterthought. “I do like him.”

“That’s nice. One wizard to another, open, honest. I like that.”

“I’m no wizard,” she responded.

“How very astute of you to realize that. One without power in Flux is a victim who finds a way to survive, to accommodate to power. But one with Flux power who has no knowledge or training in its use is in far greater danger from a real wizard, for only those with the power can take the binding spell.”

She nodded slightly but did not respond. All she could think of was that he was going to do something awful to her and she needed to buy time, any kind of time, if only to think of something to do.

“Take me, for example. Did you ever wonder how I wound up this way? What colored my attitudes, drove me on?”

“I’ve often wondered how anyone could wind up like you.”

“It was over four hundred years ago, in a place very much like that one back there,” Coydt began. “I was pretty wild as a kid, the youngest of eleven and always out to prove myself. Even then I liked the thrill of things, the danger, the risks. I’d take any bet, and, of course, boys being boys, they were always egging me on. One day, after getting a scolding from the local priestess for some minor mischief, the gang dared me to get back at the Church. I was fifteen, and I was clever. The appeal of sneaking into an all-women’s domain and stealing something was irresistible. I resolved to sneak into the temple itself and steal a personal artifact from some high-up temple priestess.”

“I can see you weren’t bothered by religion even then.”

“About as much as you or even old Mervyn is. I broke into the local laundry in the city where the temple robes were done, and I stole one that fit. Then I appropriated a pretty good wig and some sandals that basically fit from one of my sisters. And, one day, I just walked right into that temple and back to the living quarters. None of them gave me a second glance. In fact, my only mistake was that I really had no way of knowing where was where in there. I wound up in some office I shouldn’t have been in and got challenged. My falsetto was not all that convincing, I’m afraid, and close-up the deception was quickly unmasked. I almost didn’t mind getting caught then, because of the shock on their faces. I expected to be sent to the local jail, where they’d either cover it up to save embarrassment or make me a local hero to my peers. Instead, I was hauled up before a religious court in the temple that was strictly for priestesses and was presided over by the Sister General herself. I was charged with heresy.”

“Go on,” she encouraged him, interested in spite of herself.

Coydt seemed to enjoy telling the story, as if it was something bottled up inside him that needed to come out. “They were faced with an unprecedented situation, and they resolved it as best their little minds could. They could think of only one way to sponge out the heresy, and they did it. They took me to the temple clinic, filled me with all sorts of chemicals, and then performed agonizingly painful surgery on me. They castrated me, then used the scrotum to create a vagina. By more surgery and drugs, they smoothed my skin, changed my muscle tone, raised my voice half an octave—well, you get the picture. When they finished, months later, I was still very much a man inside, but outside I was an overly large, lunkish woman. Now the temple had not been violated, you see?” His tone grew suddenly bitter and seemed tinged with an insane anger. “I was fifteen years old!”

“I didn’t even know such a thing was possible in Anchor,” Suzl admitted.

“My parents were told, of course,” he went on, not really hearing her. “My mother said it was divine punishment. My father thought it was funny. Funny!” He struggled to retain control of himself, and finally got it. When he continued his tale, his voice was calm and rational once more, but his story was not.

“Using various hormones and hypnotics, they kept me around for a couple of years as the temple slave. I was property, and that was that. I was still masculine enough to be a pretend man to the horny bitches, too. But the old Sister General retired, and the new one was a real moral type. She told me that it was over, that I had the choice of joining the priesthood or being sold to Flux. Three guesses which one I gladly took, even though I had no idea what was out there. After what they’d done to me, what did I have to fear?”

“Believe it or not, I understand. I’ve had some sexual identity problems myself.”

“When they found out I had some of the power, they sold me to a wizard in Globbus who needed an assistant. He was a rather unpleasant fellow named Voryer, and he heard of my condition and thought it was very funny, too. The first spell he taught me was the binding spell. He said he liked his first lesson to be one his pupils never forgot.”

Slowly, all of Coydt’s clothing faded. He reached up to the side of his face and drew his finger down the side of his beard, and it and the moustache peeled away and fell to the ground. In most ways, his body was male and muscular. He had a tight ass and the sort of hip and other bone structure one would expect. In many ways, he reminded her of Dar, a huge farm boy who’d had a female organ, thanks to a spell, but there was a bit more to Coydt. The breasts were clearly breasts, although they were sized well enough that under a shirt they would just resemble overly large pectorals. Except for his hair, eyebrows, and pubic hair, he had less body hair than did Suzl or Spirit. Suddenly the carefully tailored clothing faded back in, and the false but very convincing beard and moustache jumped up, reformed, and reattached to his face. He looked now quite the normal, handsome man again.

“The voice broke and the breasts shrank when the hormones ran down and the male ones dominated,” he told her. “But you can see what I had become. I learned all I could from the old wizard, and when I had more power than he did, I killed him. For years I plunged into spell research, learning all I could and getting ever stronger. I tried to find a way to break that spell, and I couldn’t. I was a man who felt like a man and loved pretty women, but I couldn’t make love to them. Oh, I could make them think they had a good time, but I couldn’t have it. I hid my problem with cheap love spells, building a reputation as a hot lover. I worked so hard building up my muscles that I became very strong, and I liked to pick fights. I studied with the masters of every physical fighting form, and I mastered every weapon of Anchor and Flux.

“When I was ready, I hired on with a stringer who needed big-time protection, so I could get back into my old home Anchor. I strangled my mother, then cornered and beat the hell out of my father. When he was down and out, I took a knife and made him like me, only a little messier. When he didn’t laugh, I cut out his tongue and blinded him and left him there to bleed to death. One by one, I tracked down every priestess that had been at that temple during those times. All of ’em, including many who’d moved on or retired, who were still alive. Each one of them I could get into Flux I made into obedient whores. Those I couldn’t died, but they all died begging and on their knees. The authorities couldn’t catch me. Oh, not that I wasn’t collared now and then, but they couldn’t hold me. Now I had only this spell to break, and I went looking through all of Flux for the key.

“Eventually I signed on with a wizard named Grymphin, who had one hell of a library from the old days. He was also, it turned out, one of the Seven of that time. He was one hell of a math whiz, though, and he was devoting his life to breaking the codes used by the Hellgates and to stabilize Anchors. We didn’t know about the temple entrances then, not until less than twenty years ago, but he was determined to just walk into a Hellgate, right past the Guardian. Got so fired up convinced he had it one day that he tried it himself.”

“I take it he was wrong.”

“No, he was right. Only I changed one little number in a string that seemed five kilometers long. He got zapped; I won the resulting power struggle. And that’s how I got my present job.”

“But you never found the way to break it.”

“No. But you did. You or somebody. I figured by using that language on Spirit, considering who she was, they’d bend heaven and hell to figure it out. The basic spell is the same. I want to know how it was done. Tell me, and you’ll be fine and so will she. Come on—you don’t owe Saint Bitch anything, either one of you.”

“As a woman in your idea of Anchor?”

“Was it so terrible? Truthfully, now—could you see yourself as Madame Weiz?”

She thought about it, and the horrible truth was that she could. She made no direct reply, though.

“I thought as much. You don’t like to admit it, but my little demonstration was quite effective. Come, now—never mind the philosophical or ideological objections. What is your personal objection to living that way? Just yours?”

She thought a moment. “It’s demeaning.”

“Oh, come. Being the consort to a homosexual stringer is not demeaning? Looking like a bloated sexual nightmare wasn’t demeaning? Only a handful of people are ever truly free in any society, and that’s as much accident as design, even in my case. You’re a survivor, which is a valuable thing to be, but you are not a leader. Being his wife, the mother of his children, a ranking woman because of that and a privileged one as well—you’ll live a better, more satisfying life than you have ever lived. Tell me—have you ever been truly free?”

She thought about it. “Yes. Once. With Spirit after I got the power.”

Coydt laughed. “Don’t be absurd! The Soul Rider used you, cast its spell upon both of you, to bind you together, and not because it was a romantic soul either. It needed you to work the power it can command in Flux. I have dampened the spell chemically in Anchor, and now I remove it entirely. You may still love her, but you don’t need her.”

And it was true. She did love Spirit, and always would, but she did not crave her. More education. “Uh—Spirit. What have you done with her?”

“The same as with you, only more intensive. And we gave her a goal, something to strive for. We showed her a baby that looks exactly like hers. It didn’t originally, but that was no trouble. She is convinced it’s hers. She’s not really a survivor like you, you know. She actually needs other people. Her conditioning will proceed well because of the baby. It is an incentive and a threat. I cannot bring her into Flux without giving the Soul Rider opportunities, but perhaps in time I will risk even that, since she has no power. She will continue to love you, if it suits the Soul Rider, but she will love that child more. She will be a good wife to someone. Which brings us back to the big question. How did my binding spell get dissolved?”

“It didn’t,” she told him. “You’ve lost again, for all your power. Her spell is diverted to the Hellgate machine by the Guardian only if she stays in Anchor. You seem able to talk to the Guardian. Why not command it to do the same thing?”

“And be stuck in Anchor as well?” Coydt sighed. “I feared as much, I might as well tell you. All my science, all my research, all of it says that there is only one way to break a binding spell, and that’s to have someone of equal or greater power take it voluntarily in Flux. I have never found anyone my equal in power, not even those assholes that are the rest of the Seven. Perhaps I will, after all, have to teach them the machine language so we can open the Gates. If they don’t kill us, they will be able to do anything.”

She stared at him. “You know what’s behind those Hellgates, don’t you? You really do!”

“I know… some… of it. There are many gaps. I’m still not sure what the Soul Riders are, for example, or exactly how we came to be in this situation. But I know much. More than anyone else, certainly. I found it, in little bits and pieces over the centuries, from sorcerers I knew and some that I killed. Bit by bit I put the pieces together. I suspect that what I do not know, I lack the frame of reference to know.” He sighed. “But I’ve talked and dallied enough. Back to business.”

“What do you plan for me now?” she asked, terrified of the answer.

“Choices. I give you choices, that’s all. Despite all our efforts, your sainted friend is still at large in Anchor.”

She gasped. Where had they hid all this time?

“I’ve been sneaking around and eavesdropping on the empire outside,” he told her. “There were so many wizards that nobody noticed one more. The fools were bemoaning the fact that there was no way to selectively alter memory and personality in Flux. That is true, because of a little thing called the subconscious. But it is not true for those with the power. Not those who can accept the binding spell.”

She saw where he was leading. “What would be in this binding spell?”

“Very little. You would simply remember things, but differently. I stole the idea from a Soul Rider spell, in fact. You would remember Flux, and emphasize its bad points on your life. You would not remember Spirit, or the child, or how you came to be here, but you would simply never even ask that of yourself. The conditioning you underwent would be reinforced. The events leading up to it would seem irrelevant. You would be madly in love with Captain Weiz, bear and raise his children, and support him utterly. You would be a model wife.”

She thought about it. He was certainly leaving a few things out, of course. Illiteracy, perhaps, and a mathematical ability to count using fingers. Unquestioned obedience to Weiz and servility towards all other males went without saying. She tried to imagine herself compulsively worrying over lint on the carpet and the shine on her dishes and trading recipes. On the other hand, she’d have rank, thanks to Weiz’s status, she’d have a nice place to live with all the luxuries and amenities and, alluringly, a feeling of total security for the first time in her life. She began to realize that a search for security had been the most important, perhaps the only, objective in her life the past ten years or so. She’d had adventure, travel, thrills, danger—and what did she have to show for it? Still, there was that insolent playful spirit in her, too… Or was that just a mask for what she desperately wanted and never had?

“And the alternative?”

She saw the enormous, complex spell coming, but could not dodge it or deflect it. She simply didn’t know how. In an instant, it had her.

“You remember that little picture of your old self that you forgot when we accidentally met before? Well, I found it, saved it, and dreamed up several improvements on it.”

She was still her one hundred fifty centimeters in height, but her ample breasts were now blown to huge proportions, each as thick as her thigh and going out for a full meter. Additionally, she knew she again had a male organ, but this one was impossibly fat, like a banana, and went out from her an impossible thirty centimeters. She should have fallen over, but while the breasts and penis acted as if gravity was pulling them down, it was a sidewards pull. She felt an enormous, insatiable sexual urge.

“I do so love playing with what Anchor thinks of as natural laws like gravity,” Coydt told her. “Also, I’ve redesigned the bottom so that there’s not a scrotum in the way. It’s elsewhere. You have a vagina to match the rest, and that organ is virtually prehensile, moving up and out of the way if need be. You can be like that, and I’ll just leave you to wander this little area of Flux or return to Anchor with your memories. Any man who wants you, you will submit to. Any woman alone will be powerless against you. You’ll eat garbage and love it, and you’ll be so conspicuous that you’ll never get near Spirit or the temple. Once you’re in Anchor, we’ll find some drugs and burn out your mind. A pet freak, an example for Anchor.

“Which do you choose? A happy life—or this? I have little patience left. Here is the binding spell I spoke of. Take it, embrace it, and join your husband. Or refuse it, and stay that way until hunger forces you in.”

She saw the binding spell clearly in her mind, in Spirit language, but it was far too mathematically compex for her to follow. Why not take it? she asked herself. What choice do I have?

Matson and Kasdi jumped off the horses not too far from where they had gotten them and, slapping them on the rump, rolled into the brush. The pursuers, following the hoofbeats, rode right on by as fast as they could.

Matson had been forced to discard his pack, but Kasdi still had her rifle and gun belts, and Matson still had shotgun, whip, and knife. Water would be no problem, but food would.

They made their way cautiously overland to the southwest, on the lookout for more searchers. But the searchers, it seemed, had lost the trail.

“What now?” she asked him.

For a while he didn’t answer, because he didn’t know, but soon they reached a respectable stream flowing in the direction of their travel. He stopped and thought a minute. “If this thing goes all the way to the wall, it’ll either have to empty into Flux or flood. Any big lakes in Anchor Logh?”

She thought a moment. “Not that I know of.”

“Then we’ll follow along here as best we can, all the way to the wall. If it can get through, then we might be able to. There must be hundreds of drain outlets. It’s how many people sneaked in and out of Anchor in the old days.”

“Well, say we can get out. What then? We can’t escape.”

“We can get into Flux, no matter how little. And in Flux you can conjure up what we need to survive. You can change into a bird—a little one, this time, like Haldayne does—and scout our positions. Even a few square meters of Flux will give us some kind of breather and help.”

More than ever, she realized how a man with almost no Flux power had survived and prospered in a world of mad wizards for so long.

There were occasional patrols, but because the search was now over a far wider and less well-defined area, it was easy to avoid them and keep to the river. They reached the wall before daylight and saw that the water flowed through a series of huge drain pipes. There seemed to be no obstacle to passage, but they knew that could be deceptive. The great concrete pipes were all filled with a constant flow of water to almost eighty percent of their area. They studied the problem, noting the lack of guards on the wall at this point, and worried.

“I’m willing to chance it,” Kasdi told him. “I can’t see how they could have screens or mesh down there without all three pipes clogging up with silt and debris. But that water is fast and deep and that’s a long tunnel. Can you swim?”

“I can, as a matter of fact. You?”

She shook her head slowly from side to side. “There was never any place or reason to learn.”

“It won’t matter,” he assured her. “That current’s so fast that it’ll have you through before you can drown. Most of the drains I’ve seen from the other side are pretty level, often at ground level and rarely more than a meter’s drop. The trouble is, the water will spread on the apron, so it might be shallow and tricky, and there might just be a canyon worn into it with a river this fast. That could make the drop really nasty.”

“What choice have we got?” she asked him. “I mean, do we climb the wall? Surely that’ll bring people running. We aren’t all that far from one of the strong points of the shield.”

“I’d say we jump in, take our chances, and let you dry us and our powder out in Flux, not to mention fixing us up.”

She swallowed hard. “If I’m in any condition to do it. O.K. What do I do?”

“Take a breath, hold it, and jump in as close to the pipes as you can. Then hang on for dear life, and if you hit the sides, kick away.” With that he looked for signs of life, found none, and ran into the open towards the drain and jumped in. Kasdi waited a moment, summoned up her courage, and followed.

It was a nightmare that lasted only twenty seconds or so, but it seemed an eternity. Carried along, she was surrounded by endless water and total darkness and flung at high speed against a wall of the drain. She was totally at the mercy of the flow, but, suddenly, she was plunged back into outside air and then fell into a roaring pool. She panicked, but then felt strong arms around her and let herself be pulled by them. She assumed it was Matson, but right then she didn’t care who it might be.

And then, quite suddenly, the roar and the wetness stopped and they were flung and dropped onto a spongy surface. The water itself struck the Flux barrier and crackled, and was converted into energy itself and added to the void. Wracked with pain, she passed out.

When she awoke to the same formless void, it seemed almost a familiar friend. She tried to move, and found every single part of her body felt broken. She must have called out, because Matson heard and came over to her. The sight of him was almost unbearable, as he’d removed all his clothes and laid them out on the ground to dry.

“You all right?” he asked, concerned. “You had a pretty bad time in there. I got sort of banged-up myself, but not like that.”

She saw that there were huge bruises on his arms and on the right side of his chest. He also had a nasty swollen place over his right eye.

“I think you got several broken bones,” he told her. “You’ve been out a while. We’re in Flux, though, so you’ve got your power back.”

“Yeah, Flux,” she responded weakly. “But the pain’s tremendous! I need to do a thorough self-examination and construct—agh!—the proper… formulae and con… centrate. The pain… makes it… hard to… concentrate.”

He nodded. “Take it slow and easy and one step at a time. Those forces out there got no place else to go, and I don’t think anybody knows we’re here.” He paused a moment. “Just don’t die on me, Cass.”

She smiled, and drifted back into sleep. It was a turbulent, nightmarish sleep in which she was back in that roaring tunnel once again, only this time not alone. Suzl and Spirit were there, and they were drowning and she couldn’t save them; the whole of Hope opened before her, but all the priestesses turned away from her and began worshipping statues, laughing statues, of Mervyn, and Krupe, and the rest of the Nine, and of Coydt and Haldayne as well. Matson was there, too; she kept trying to reach him for help, but the closer she got to him, the more out of reach he became.

She awoke again, and the pain was worse, but her mind was clearer. She looked around and didn’t see Matson, but that was all right. She remembered the horror of the dream and feared she might have been calling out things best left unspoken. She tried doing a diagnostic on herself and found that she was in fact in pretty bad shape. Some of her internal injuries were serious enough that she might well have died from them, and would, if they were not corrected.

She took self-repair in slow stages, shutting off all pain from any but the area she was working on. After a few tries, she realized she just wasn’t going to be able to do a piecemeal approach. She brought up and constructed a spell for a whole new body based on the old, a spell that was tremendously intricate and difficult. She almost passed out several times in doing it, but finally managed and put the spell into effect. She felt relief flow through her and lay there for a while luxuriating in that feeling.

Matson returned. He’d put on his pants, but little else, and they were still slightly wet. “I assume that’s still you in there,” he said after a while.

She sat up and smiled. “Yes, it’s me. It’s a body I designed for visiting Spirit in secret. The only one I could manage on short notice. It’ll give me time to concentrate on reforming me as myself.”

He nodded. “Well, it’s not all that flattering, but if it lets you conjure up something to eat and a way to dry everything out, that’s fine with me.”

With no references, time had little meaning in the void, but they got their food and drink and dried not only the clothes but the weapons and ammunition as well, and she managed to get back somewhat to a normal appearance. Well, not quite normal. She had felt herself eighteen again, out here in the void with just Matson, and somehow she had come out looking eighteen in spite of her vows or herself. She could not have him the way she wanted him, but they were together now, alone, in Flux, and for the moment that was enough.

In a while, they decided to risk forays into Anchor to see what was going on. Borrowing a trick from Haldayne, one of the Seven she’d bested before, she turned herself into a normal-looking bird and flew out and over the wall. Matson, too, could and did become transformed by her power, and together they scouted the area.

It would have been easy if she had been able to change back in Anchor, but she could not, nor could she be some human-sized flying beast, for that would require either too much wing to remain inconspicuous or too much weight to stay aloft and remain in touch with the required physics. Still, they were able to map out the terrain and get a look at the guard post and the Flux machine itself. That had been the one risky point, since the wizard operating it might well have sensed her power, and any observer who saw two birds fly into the void would be instantly suspicious of them.

Both became intimately familiar with the town of Lamoine and the military post on the wall. The town disgusted her. The natives there had discarded ways and attitudes of generations very easily, and both men and women seemed to be acting under the new rules automatically and without threat or supervision. She had expected some laxity, particularly among women off by themselves, but she’d seen none. Of course, their proximity to Flux and a wizard would tend to make them model citizens, she reasoned. Otherwise, model citizens could be made. Her opinion of the human race in general took something of a beating.

There were some large, predatory species of birds in the area that had been imported from some far-off Anchor generations ago to control a rodent infestation. These had strength and speed, and she used their form to perch right on the wall near the emplacements. They used this not only to steal some more palatable food by snatching it with strong claws, but to snatch items occasionally from the emplacement as well. They didn’t need much; once in Flux with one of them, she didn’t have to know what it was to duplicate it.

Still, they kept planning and putting off any real attack. For one thing, they hoped for some time that Suzl and Spirit would eventually show up, and they undertook long searches for them to no avail. When they didn’t appear, and had to be assumed captive, another problem arose.

“The Guardian said we needed the Soul Rider to knock out the machine,” she reminded him. “It obviously amplifies Flux power. How can we do anything without Spirit?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he replied, “and I feel we have to try. I keep going over that Guardian’s message again and again.”

“It said we needed the Soul Rider to knock out the machine and its operator,” she recalled.

“Uh-huh. I know we’ve been over this a hundred times, but I knew there was something not right about that, and when you said it, it just hit me. It didn’t say the machine and its operator. It said the machine or its operator.”

“So?”

“If we knock out that guard post, the guy in Flux won’t know it right off. The sound’s dampened, as you know. I looked over that machine again and again, and that open operator’s cab is only a little over one meter into Flux.”

“So?”

“If I can get my back cleared, I can take him. He’s like most all the wizards; he doesn’t think that anything can hurt him in Flux without being in Flux, and maybe he’s right. But I got a trick I pulled over twenty years ago on the border of a Fluxland called Rakarah that might just work here.”

But it would take two to work it all, and she was still undecided as to what to do. She simply did not want the specter of her homeland devastated, and she certainly didn’t want it on her head. It was so nice and comfortable being here, just she and Matson, no stress, no responsibility, and nowhere to go. He was getting restless, yes, but he understood her agony and was willing to wait a while.

And then, flying over Lamoine, they’d spotted a carriage coming into town with some brown-uniformed officer and his lady driving. A close, curious inspection sparked some familiarity in that woman, and when the pair picnicked near the wall, she was able to get a closer and more positive view.

It was definitely Suzl! Suzl, decked out like all the others, and acting just like they did, and seemingly not minding a bit. She watched as they packed up and walked up to the gate, then to the wall, then down the other side, and then saw, as they approached Flux and the big machine, another figure, casually dressed and in no uniform, come out of the small temporary guard station on the wall and descend to the apron.

She and Matson returned to their Flux base and became human. “I’ve decided,” she said. “We have to pull her out of there. She’s already half gone, maybe with drugs or something. Now they’re taking her into Flux without Spirit, and she’ll be lost forever.”

He nodded, but said, “Are you sure about this? It seems kind of funny that they’d bring her here and parade her around and then Coydt shows up. I think they know we’re around. Suzl’s bait to get you out in the open for Coydt, Cass. It’s a trap.”

“Then it’s a trap we take. You’ve been itching to move. Let’s move now or forget it.”

Their weapons had been well prepared in advance and needed no more done to them. Practice was impossible; either it worked or it didn’t. Matson set the detonators; then Kasdi changed them into the great birds again and used her power to make the packs fit correctly. They could take off with them in Flux, but whether or not they would be able to handle the weight in Anchor had yet to be proven.

They flew in formation, one close behind the other, right down the roadway atop the wall. Matson gave a quick glance towards Lamoine and saw no massed troops and made the final decision. They swooped down on the emplacement and let go their loads, then quickly gained altitude and headed for Flux.

Captain Weiz had waited nervously for a bit at the emplacement, then decided he wanted to smoke. Rather than go further down the wall, he decided to go down into Anchor and see to the horse and carriage. He had barely reached the horse when suddenly the world exploded behind him. He turned and was knocked over by the blast and almost trampled by the panicked animals, but he was the only one able to see what had happened.

One set of high explosives had struck near the barrels where oil for the night torches and lamps was stored; the other fell on the other side of the small makeshift hut, near the ammunition. When the birds came in, there were only curious stares, but when they dropped loads that clanked metallically on the stone, they leaped into action, some starting to aim at the fast-fleeing birds, others jumping for what was dropped. All too late. Matson had perfect timing.

Suzl’s initial estimate of their vulnerability had been right. The two containers exploded within a fraction of a second of each other, one blowing the oil barrels and sending flaming liquid everywhere; the other blew up the concentrated boxes of ammunition. The whole post was bathed in a massive fireball; then individual explosives began to go off in all directions. Weiz, on the ground below, could only keep low and try and make himself as small a target as possible. One thing was sure—the wooden stairway was also aflame, and he could not reach the top now even if he wanted to. He looked up when the explosions diminished and made a run for it away from the wall and towards Lamoine. Coydt’s trap had been sprung, but in a way he hadn’t expected.

Kasdi quickly restored Matson in Flux, then kissed him. “Good luck!”

“You, too,” he responded softly, giving her a hug.

Both reentered Anchor east of the machine and saw the remains of their work. Kasdi quickly ran down well past the machine to where they’d seen Suzl and Coydt enter Flux; Matson gave one brief check of the wall to make sure that anybody alive wasn’t going to shoot him, then stood on the apron looking directly at the machine, barely visible despite being so close.

The machine had its own protection against Flux magic, but he had no Flux magic. He had studied this problem over and over again, and he knew he’d better be right.

Carefully, he uncoiled and tested his four meter bullwhip, then walked right up to the Flux boundary and stuck his head in. He saw the wizard sitting there, relaxed in a comfortable chair, reading something. “Hey!” he shouted. “Trouble on the wall! We’re under attack!”

The wizard jumped up, revealing the two small probes on his head, and looked puzzled for a moment.

The whip cracked out, wrapped around the wizard’s neck, and as it did so Matson pulled and was back in Anchor, still pulling. The action was so quick and unexpected that the wizard literally flew off the machine’s cab deck and landed, with a pull, in Anchor.

Matson cooly walked up to him, leveled his shotgun, and blew the wizard’s head off.

He unclipped two timed explosive charges, walked into Flux and attached one to the cab area of the machine and another to a random spot on the smooth cube of the basic machine itself. Then he ran back for Anchor, unsure of just what the hell was going to happen when they and that thing blew.

Kasdi entered Flux and immediately saw Suzl, grotesquely deformed, frozen there about five meters from Coydt. The evil wizard was talking to Suzl.

“Which do you choose? A happy life—or this? I have little patience left. Here is the binding spell I spoke of. Take it, embrace it, and join your husband. Or refuse it, and stay that way until hunger forces you in.”

That spell! Suzl was going to accept it! “Suzl! Wait! Don’t do it!” Kasdi screamed.

Coydt looked over at her, turned, and smiled. “How melodramatic,” he commented softly. “Friend saved in the nick of time from a fate worse than death by the timely arrival of—Sister Kasdi, is it not?”

“I am Sister Kasdi. And you are Coydt. I have been looking forward to this for a very long time now.”

He grinned. “That is certainly mutual. Would you care to step over here a bit? I wouldn’t like to get out of range of our audience here, but I wouldn’t like to injure her either.”