Empires of Flux & Anchor

face, and a permanent, insane grin, while his skin seemed all mottled and full of discolorations. In many places he would have been the object of horrible fascination and some fear, but not in Hjinna. Lots of retired duggers and those taking a break between six-month-long stringer routes were always about. In fact, although this one was a stranger to almost all of them, only one, an elderly man who’d been drinking pretty heavily, eyed the newcomer with recognition and then growing fear. He got up and made his way quickly to the back of the bar and then stepped out into the alley behind, still clutching his bottle.

The alley seemed clear, and so he turned left—and suddenly came up against a solid wall that hadn’t been there a moment before. He cried out, turned, and started the other way—and ran into another wall. In fact, he was now in a high box, the only outlet being the door back into the bar.

The door opened and a figure dressed all in black stepped out. He was a big man with a long, drooping handlebar moustache. He was dressed in stringer fashion, complete with whip and sawed-off shotgun. He was not a young man—his hair was gray and his face worn and aged, with wrinkles around the eyes—but he was in pretty good shape.

“You!” the old man croaked. “But—you’re dead! A hundred saw you fall nigh on to twenty years ago!”

“Eighteen,” the man responded. “Eighteen years, three months to be exact. So if I’m a ghost, Gilly, then what’s that make you?”

“Hey! Wait! I always liked you!” The old man paused for a moment. “This is a trick, isn’t it? Who are you— really?”

“Does it matter? I want Coydt, Gilly. I want him bad, and I want him in Anchor.”

Gilly took a swig from the bottle to steady his nerves. “Coydt? You nuts? Nobody can take Coydt; you know that!”

“I’ll take him, Gilly, because he won’t know who’s after him even when you tell him.”

“I don’t talk to Coydt. Oh, sure, we was cozy once, but nobody’s really cozy with him for long. You wind up dead—or worse.”

“You know, Gilly. You keep track. I haven’t got all night either. You know where they are. You know where they all are. You’re too scared of them not to know.”

Gilly drained the bottle, but it didn’t help. “He’s down near Anchor Logh. Half a world from here.”

“Yeah. He pulled a job down there, Gilly, and he doesn’t know it yet, but he pulled the wrong one. He woke up the dead with that one, Gilly, and now I’m going to get him.”

“What was that business to you?”

“She’s my kin, Gilly, though I didn’t even know about her until this. I can’t let people do that to kin. You know the code. You put the word out. You tell any dugger along the route that’s going out. It’ll get to me. If it’s good information, I’ll make it good with you, Gilly, I really will. Cross me, and you’re dead, too.”

Gilly laughed. “How can I cross you? Who’s gonna believe after all these years that a dead man’s out stalkin’ Coydt?”

“You give him the word if you want. He’s so puffed up and egomaniacal that he’s liable to set up a meet just to see for sure. You go ahead, Gilly. You tell him Matson’s back from the grave.”

7 SIDEBAR STRINGING

Stringers did not usually ask for Sister Kasdi when they called on Hope, so it was with some curiosity that she decided to go down to the reception hall and see these who had. For lots of personal reasons she loved the taciturn loners who plied the trade routes between Anchors and Fluxlands, not the least of which was her envy of their freedom.

Two figures waited in the temple reception room. One was a small, thin young man barely Kasdi’s height and almost as thin, although he wore the black of his profession. The other was an even shorter individual, perhaps one hundred and fifty centimeters, who was very fat, although her ample stomach was not nearly matched to her enormous breasts. She had long, thick black hair that fell down her back almost to her waist, wore unusual dark blue denim pants that seemed quite baggy, and a white tee shirt, obviously made for a very large man, but necessary to keep her enormous frontage covered.

“Suzl!” Kasdi almost screamed, and ran to the small, fat woman, hugging and kissing her. Finally, they stepped back and looked at each other.

“Cass, you look lousy,” Suzl told her.

Kasdi laughed. Of all those on World, friend and foe, only Suzl refused to call her by anything but her original name—and was probably the only one who could get away with it. “You seem to have made up for what I didn’t eat,” she shot back. “You’re fat!”

“Well, I enjoy life. Oh, uh, Cass, this is Ravi. He’s my boss, so to speak, and, well, sort of my husband.”

That caught the Sister off-guard for a moment. “Husband?” She was well aware that, as a result of a misfired spell long ago, Suzl was physically female only to a point; she had a male sexual organ and was, despite appearances and manner, really a man.

Ravi looked a bit nervous for a stringer, but said nothing.

“Yeah. I keep him respectable. We both have what each other wants most, but I have two big bonuses.”

Kasdi got the drift, and wasn’t sure whether to be shocked or understanding and tolerant. Suzl had always gone both ways sexually and was unashamed of the fact—even before her strange spell. But she had been born and raised a woman and grown up that way, and could hardly be impugned for being attracted to men. Ravi, on the other hand, was obviously a lifelong homosexual, and that was a different moral problem. It was tolerated in Flux but suppressed in Anchor, and the Church frowned on it as interfering with the prime mission of procreation. Still, Kasdi was not one to make preachments now. She was very glad to see Suzl, the only person alive who could and would tell her to her face exactly what she was thinking, no matter how blunt or uncomplimentary it may be.

“Come! Both of you! Sit down over here and talk a while!” Kasdi invited, and they took chairs in a corner of the room. “How long has it been?”

“A couple of years at least,” Suzl replied. “We were through once about ten months ago, but you were off conquering someplace or other. Actually, we’re a little off the route here, but when we heard about the ugly business, I just had to come by.”

Kasdi nodded, some of the euphoria fading as reality was brought up. “Yes. So it’s spread through the network.”

For the first time, Ravi spoke, in a thin, reedy voice that was somewhat grating. “It has spread through all of World, and not merely from this source. There is every evidence to show that Coydt’s own people are also telling the tale to get maximum effect.”

“He would,” Kasdi said angrily. “Some day we’ll meet, he and I, and he’ll learn the price of his work.”

“You’re not the only one gunning for Coydt, Cass,” Suzl told her. “Somebody else has the whole stringer network out trying to track him down.”

“Oh? Who?”

“You’re not gonna like this.”

She felt an odd chill. “Why? What do you mean?”

“Well, those that have seen him say he looks like and claims to be Matson.”

Somehow she both expected and feared those words, words she had somehow suspected to hear despite all evidence and experience for eighteen years. “You know Matson’s long dead. He died in my arms from a hole in his chest the size of a grapefruit. You know. You were there, too, that day.”

Suzl nodded. “I know, although I never saw him. You and lots of others did, though, and I don’t doubt anybody. He’s officially dead, that’s for sure. But whoever this is has taken his form and knows all the stringer codes. Anybody with power can seem to be anybody else in Flux, you know that, but one thing’s sure. Whoever he is, he has Jomo with him.”

The huge, misshapen dugger came immediately to mind, so brutal and grotesque on the outside, but so very gentle and understanding on the inside. Jomo had been Matson’s chief driver, the train boss, and fiercely loyal to his