Empires of Flux & Anchor

From atop the wall came a large and professionally made rope ladder. Zekah scrambled up first, while Yorek covered Spirit. When the adept was atop the wall, he looked around there and on the other side and then came back to the edge. “O.K.! Let’s move!” he shouted back to them.

“All right, girl—start climbing. Make it fast, or I’ll break that pretty nose of yours and we’ll carry you. Move it! Now!”

She hesitated a moment, could see no way out, and so did as instructed. Once at the top, Zekah took her arm and pointed. “Now down the other side. Better move quickly. He’s in a bad mood.”

She hardly had a chance to look at anything before she was on another rope ladder, this one leading down to the ground outside the wall. Only then did she have a chance to stop and get her wits about her. Two monstrous, horrible shapes waited on the other side, one on either side of her and about three meters away. They were grotesque—caricatures of human beings with faces that looked like the leering living dead. Surely, if Coydt’s soul showed his true self, he would look like their brother. She shuddered, and abandoned any hope of running right now. The idea of one of those things even touching her was horrible.

She stood on the Anchor apron, a bit of solidity that extended past the wall and in the old days had presented a barren buffer through which an attacking force would have to pass to get to the wall. Beyond the apron, perhaps a hundred meters at this point, loomed the Flux.

It looked like a solid wall of some translucent material, somewhat of an amber shade, stretching from the end of the apron as far up as the eye could follow. There were no features of any sort discernible in it, but the Flux seemed alive, somehow, with thousands of tiny firefly-like sparkles going off at any given moment. She had gaped at this sight from the wall as a student and again as a visitor to a border town, but it still gave off a cold and forbidding chill.

Coydt and Yorek came down the other side, while Zekah continued to cover them from the top of the wall. It had been four hours since the abduction.

Yorek ran unhesitatingly into the void and quickly returned, leading three horses. They must have been waiting just inside the Flux, but they had been totally invisible until they emerged into Anchor.

Coydt’s foul, hurried mood seemed to pass quickly now, and he visibly relaxed, looked at her, and grinned. “You like my little creatures, I see.”

“They’re horrible,” she muttered.

“They were normal people once, but they went off in the void by themselves for one reason or another. Both have some Flux power—not much—and it turned on them. Alone, out there, with power, but no skill at using it, and with no wizard’s protection, your own nightmares become real; you go nuts, and your outer form reflects your inner fears. You think about that as we go. Take the spotted horse there. Once inside, you’ll be lost. You’ll never find your way anywhere except by luck, even back here. I’ll have my string on you, so you’ll leave a trail I can follow no matter where you go or how you twist and turn. But if you get away, I’ll leave you out there a while before I come and get you. Let you have a taste of what they went through. You think about that, and them. Once inside, I’m the only protection you’ve got.”

It was not a comforting thought. Zekah had pulled in the rope ladder on the Anchor side and now was down on this one. It was unlikely that their crossover point would be undiscovered for long, but they didn’t need much time now. Once in Flux, Coydt’s powerful wizardry made him essentially an all-powerful god, and he was one of the best trained and most powerful wizards on World.

They mounted, and then she, and rode off towards the void. It loomed ahead of her, until it filled her entire vision, and she could not resist glancing back for one last look at Anchor Logh, its greenery barely discernible over the top of the wall. Then they were through—and into the eerie realm of the Flux and the Void.

There was literally no sound in Flux, not even from the horses’ hooves, and just seconds into the sparkling energy field all sense of direction and reality seemed to vanish. The void was everywhere. Even the horses’ breathing and the occasional shout of one man to another seemed oddly muffled and subdued, as if the vast, shimmering void was trying to smother all that entered it.

Coydt barked an order and they all stopped. He frowned and stared at Spirit for a minute. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed. “This complicates matters a bit, but only a bit. Looky there! See the kind of doubling aura around her? Our Spirit’s got herself a Soul Rider!”

4 SOUL RIDER

It was a totally unexpected thing, unprecedented in all my long experience and in the experience of any of my brethren. We, the Spirits of Flux and Anchor that men call Soul Riders, join with and reside inside human beings, sharing what they share and seeing what they see. We have no choice as to whom we ride; that is determined by the unseen master of our fates whose identity and, indeed, very nature is shielded from us.

It is our mission to foil those who would open the Gates of Hell; to track down current members of the Seven Who Come Before, known also as the Seven Who Wait, and destroy them if possible. As we have no corporeal existence, our knowledge of the power of Flux and the laws of Anchor must be of use only when fed to a living being within. All of my hosts have eventually crossed paths with one or more of the Seven. How our unseen controller can know this so well in advance is incomprehensible, but it is always so.

It is possible that our hosts are chosen for their inherent power or intellect, since it is true that we cannot use more than what our hosts have to offer themselves and true that those hosts are then pushed or compelled, even as we, into the way of the Seven, but that is not something we can know.

Still, every host I have had I have stayed with for a long period of time. Usually they die, unnaturally and prematurely, but sometimes they become major figures themselves, and I remain for decades, even after the apparent mission is accomplished, perhaps to guard the host or make certain he or she accomplishes great things.

Certainly I expected this with my host Cass of Anchor Logh, whose Flux power is enormous and who has become the most important figure of political and military power on World in all my long memory. And yet, for the first time, the pattern was not to repeat but to change in a most radical way, one which I am at a loss even now to understand.

I was irresistibly drawn to Cass when she was but eighteen and an innocent farm girl, fearing that she might be chosen to be sold to a stringer and cast out into Flux in the Church’s ancient method of keeping Anchor populations stable. I was with her when she inadvertently discovered how corrupt that lottery was, and she was included in it, being thrown, naked and abandoned, into captivity in Flux. I rode her soul as the forces of Hell attacked the train and dragged her off into captivity, and because of this I was able to use her inborn Flux powers to effect an escape. Through her own impressive adaptability, intelligence, and resourcefulness, she managed to unmask the evil wizard Haldayne, one of the Seven who would open the gates of Hell, and obtain freedom and a position with Matson’s stringer train. Together we participated in the attack on Persellus, which Haldayne controlled, as part of an unprecedented force of Flux and Anchor led by three of the most powerful wizards of the Nine, an attack which was difficult indeed, and together we witnessed Matson fall from his great horse, a gaping wound in his chest, her employer and only lover lost before her eyes.

And yet I was able to turn her shock and grief into power, unleashing the full force of her abilities against Haldayne, for strong emotion is the greatest of all amplifiers, so that she alone took on Haldayne and routed him, once again foiling Hell’s plots and revealing the safe back way to the gates through the temples of Anchor.

Emotionally powerful and with a strong sense of duty, I was in her when she joined the priesthood as the leader of a true and needed Reformation. In the ruins of Persellus she established her new Church in Flux and called the place Hope. And so revolution came to World.

But her tryst with Matson had produced one unexpected and unanticipated result, one which complicated things and produced the wonder which still awes and confuses me.

My host had a girl child in Anchor, and I underwent with her the pain and agony attending such births, although I had been through it many times before and could sublimate the most unpleasant aspects. It was