The Soul Rider’s plan—or its master’s plan, whoever that was—would continue. Spirit was pregnant by Suzl, and had been for some time. She was so lean and trim that it was already starting to show, but it just hadn’t been noticed yet. And then the contact was broken, and Suzl slept.
She slept for three full days.
9
WEDDING GIFTS
Kasdi looked pale. “Even when I heard, I could hardly believe it. I mean, how often does your best friend fall in love with your daughter? And
“You know age isn’t what’s bothering you,” Mervyn responded accusingly. “You love Suzl, and you love duggers, but she’s a dugger and a freak and she’s gone and taken
She stared at him, but knew that he spoke true. “All right, I admit it, but Heaven help me, I can’t get rid of it. I had hoped for some strong, handsome wizard. That may have been the mother talking or a girlish fantasy, but nothing in Spirit’s background says this is even remotely thinkable. The list of boys she turned down is amazing, and the ones she went out with were all big, handsome, virile types.”
“But her circumstance and her way of looking at things have changed. Ever see the way she looks at a flower? As if she can see right through the surface to some inner beauty and complexity? She sees everything, and everybody, that way. I think we’d all be better off if
“But Suzl’s always been so impulsive and irresponsible!”
“Not now. Oh, to everyone else, yes. But not towards Spirit. After all those years and all those ugly people and spells, she needed somebody badly—and she got that somebody. She always put on a big front, and she still does, but it was an act. She was miserable and she hated herself and almost everything else. She doesn’t, not anymore.”
“I still want to see them—right away.”
Mervyn grinned. “Suzl predicted you would, and said they’d wait. Um—Kasdi. Don’t muck it up. I doubt if you could, considering the nature of that spell, but don’t muck it up. They’re really happy.”
“I just want to talk to them.”
“Go then. But take care. Coydt has dropped out of sight of late, and there are rumblings that whatever those evil ones are planning is close at hand. Also, there is more to this Spirit and Suzl business than was at first apparent. It may be connected. I know that we have some divine intervention at work here, and it’s working in its usual mysterious fashion.”
She stared at him. “You mean the Soul Rider?”
He nodded. “It is interesting, but the new spell linking both of them is organized in much the same way as the language Coydt imposed on Spirit, but it does not bear her signature. I begin to suspect that the spell that Spirit has is only superficially the spell that Coydt designed for her. It looks right, smells right, tastes right, even to me and certainly to Coydt who must have checked the work, but I think he got took. I think that language is Soul Rider language—the pure mathematics of Flux married to the human brain, a brain in which it was designed to ride as a supplement and observer, but which now thinks just that same way. Our Soul Rider, I think, has plans for Spirit and for Suzl, too—and perhaps as well for our friend Coydt.”
There was nothing to say to that, so she let it pass. “Anything new on this Matson business?”
“No. He’s been effectively disposing of Coydt’s agents in Anchor, including some of the best, while keeping out of sight himself. He lets Jomo draw the flies, then traps them, milks them for information, and disposes of them. He’s getting closer—or was, until Coydt dropped out of sight. Since then, our mysterious “friend dropped out as well. The fact that Coydt chose to go underground rather than face down his foe is uncharacteristic. It means the evil one has something more important to do. It all begins to sound ominous.”
“Let them try their worst,” she replied. “I don’t fear it—I welcome it. Let’s get it out in the open so we can deal with it. I respect their power and the deviousness of their minds, but I don’t fear their attempts. But now, I suppose I should fly. It is not every day that your best friend takes up with your daughter and fathers her child.”
To Suzl it was like being reborn. She was happy, truly happy, and very excited about life. She didn’t care what anyone else thought about the way she looked, and she liked things just fine. In fact, she’d fight the whole world and spit in its eye if it didn’t like her, or Spirit, or anything else they liked or did. And that went for dear old Cass, too, who, she knew, was inevitably coming.
Wizards traveled conventionally only when it suited their needs. Otherwise, they transformed themselves into birdlike creatures and sped to places perhaps weeks of travel away in a matter of hours.
When she arrived in Pericles and reformed into her familiar self, she went immediately to where the two were. She found Suzl sitting on a rock playing a tune on the octarina as a bunch of satyrs danced. Spirit lounged lazily beside her, stroking her a bit. It was disconcerting to Kasdi to see the affection.
Suzl stopped playing and got up. “Hi, Cass. We knew you’d be along sooner or later.” The satyrs looked miffed, but stopped and wandered off.
She was somewhat shocked by Suzl’s appearance. Although Mervyn had prepared her somewhat, it was not the same person she’d known. The face was more than ever the old, cute Suzl she’d known, but the body was extremely bizarre and unsettling. She was a head shorter than Kasdi now, no more than one-hundred-forty centimeters. Her arms were short and stubby and barely reached her waist—or, rather, where her waist should have been. Two enormous, impossibly firm breasts stretched out a full thirty centimeters, and while she had a short, fat stomach, it seemed as if her thighs began just below the breasts and were certainly more than half her body, and her back curved into it, giving her an almost birdlike gait. The male organ, which seemed to have grown to about fifteen centimeters, rested on a leathery forward scrotum in a state of permanent semi-erection, but it did allow her freedom to walk. Spirit seemed to have a preference for long hair, though. Both her lush auburn hair and Suzl’s thick black hair reached like capes almost to their ankles.
Spirit was as lovely as ever, but her breasts were obviously enlarged and below them was an extremely prominent and obvious bulge. She looked as if she’d swallowed the world’s largest melon. And she looked very content and very happy. “Want to tell me how all this came about?” Suzl shrugged. “It just… happened, that’s all.”
“But you’re old enough to be her mother. Father, anyway,” she said, repeating her lame argument that had not worked on Mervyn.
Suzl grinned. “Yeah, I’m the same age as you, but I don’t look it or feel it like you do. Come on—you know the age isn’t bothering you, nor even who I am. It’s
She started to reply, then closed her mouth, wondering if Suzl had given the comments to Mervyn or if it had been the other way around. Nevertheless, what Suzl said was still true, but she had felt forced to say it, and although she felt a little ashamed of herself, it didn’t change the gut feeling of wrongness inside her, however much her vows kept her from acting on the prejudice. “All right,” she said finally, “I accept that. But—do you two really love each other?”
“You can’t know how much,” Suzl replied, and Kasdi was both surprised and shocked to see Spirit nod and smile.
“Can she understand me now?”
“Not in the sense you and I can. Actually, not you at all, except through me. We can’t talk, but we know each other better than any two people I ever heard of. Call it reading emotions or feelings or whatever, but it’s got most conversation beat to Hell, I’ll tell you that.”
“But—what about you? Particularly in Anchor. How do they react?”
Suzl grinned. “More shocked than with any dugger I ever saw, of course. But I love it, and you know the rules. You wrote ’em. If it’s the result of an involuntary spell, standards can’t be applied against a Fluxer in Anchor.
