Empires of Flux & Anchor

may be wrong, but I don’t remember ever seeing a window in one of those things.”

“You’re right on that,” Kasdi told him, “but the dark wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. There are some easy spells for adjusting your eyes to the dark. I doubt if many of them would have the same ability, since it makes you oversensitive to light. And they wouldn’t have a wizard to correct it, since they’d be in Anchor.” She sighed. “But what’s the use? We can’t get in to begin with.”

“Yes, we can,” Mervyn replied softly.

She stared at him and immediately guessed what he was thinking. “Oh, no! That is definitely out! In the name of Heaven, she’s so with child that it could come at any moment! You’ve got her and you’ve got me! Do you want to kill my unborn grandchild as well? What is enough?” She turned to Matson. “You can’t go along with this!”

He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I want Coydt in Anchor. If I could get in, I’d go. But Anchor Logh’s nothing to me. I’ll get him, sooner or later. If there’s a way in, I’m going. But I’m not anxious to get at him now at anybody else’s expense.”

Kasdi turned back to Mervyn. “See? We absolutely forbid it!”

“Kasdi—your father’s in there,” Mervyn reminded her. “And so are your three sisters, five nephews, and three nieces. Not to mention Cloise and Drunyon, who raised Spirit, and all those other relations, as well as Sister Tamara and the rest of the Church personnel. They may be undergoing unspeakable tortures now.”

“Or they might all be dead,” she responded, “in which case, what you suggest will wipe out the whole line. Won’t the Seven be pleased then!”

“We only need her to bypass the Guardian and reach the end of the tunnel,” the old wizard reminded her. “Once we’re through, she can return. The risk is there, true, but it’s relatively small.”

“So two or three of us get in. What good will that do?”

Matson was considering the problem. “In tactics they call it a beachhead, for reasons I’ve never understood. It seems to me that the problem’s easy to state. We can’t break this shield from outside, but we’ve got to break it. We can’t get enough troops in that little hole to fight our way to the walls. But if some good fighters can get into that temple with some knowledge of it and decent weapons, we can secure it long enough to bring some top class wizards through. Then we get out to the countryside. A small number. Make it to a predetermined place on the border. Our wizards and our guns take out those holding that section, and a small part of the shield collapses. We come in and they are bottled up, and that’s the end of that.”

The wizards nodded. All of them were concerned with Flux power and politics; none were truly military people, and none had any real feel for the soldier on the ground with a weapon, although that was who always had to take the ground after they blasted a path. Now it was the opposite problem. Now they needed the soldiers to blast a path to the shield.

“General Hawney had something like that in mind,” Krupe told them, “but it might not work. It’s entirely possible that the temple part of that passage is so well booby-trapped that no one could survive. And if they did, there aren’t very many ways out of that temple.”

“If you have the right equipment, you can always make your own exit,” Matson replied.

“Yes, and bring every one of the enemy in the capital running to you. Then it would be a crosscountry trip with nobody you could be certain was a friend and with the whole pack on your heels. Finally, the wizards’ positions just inside Flux will be well protected and well defended, and none of those wizards will be pushovers either. There is simply too much that can go wrong. It’s impossible!”

“What other suggestion do you have, Mister Krupe?” Matson asked him. “Wait here until they get tired and come out? Well, I’m here to tell you that they don’t ever have to come out. You as much as admitted that you can’t stop the wizards if they want to get out. The rest of ’em are false wizards, duggers, and Fluxers with no power at all out here to speak of. This here is their own Fluxland, sort of, under their rules. I lived these past years in a place where almost nobody could get out and nobody particularly wanted to.”

That was sobering. It had never occurred to them to think of this as a permanent condition, but it would certainly have occurred to Coydt.

“These wizards will never sit still for it indefinitely. They’ll want something more,” Kasdi argued.

It was Tatalane who spoke now. “True, but whether it is a matter of days or weeks, they can be reinforced and replaced as need be. What is certain is that nothing will stop the Seven from doing this in the next cluster, and then the next, while holding here. They can spare many wizards if we must divide our forces in half, or thirds, or more. The longer they hold out here, the greater that danger will be. And when we are divided enough, and weakened enough, then the old order strikes full with its armies. Not just the empire will fall, but civilizations as well. The communications problem, if they have not yet solved it, can then be attacked at leisure. We must break this—now!”

Kasdi felt very little love for their empire or even human civilization at that point. But what kind of a world would her grandchild grow up in? Who in fact could stand against such evil totally triumphant?

And yet World was a big place, and there were many places to hide with no real chance of discovery. Flux wizards like she and Suzl could create their own impenetrable Fluxland in the wild north far from Anchor. The Seven would not pursue. Their goal was Anchor.

Their goal was to open the Hellgates.

“Only as far as the vortex,” she said at last. “And then only if you can first somehow communicate the problem to her and if she is willing to help.”

Getting the situation across to Suzl proved relatively easy in Flux, where images could be conjured up at will. The total lack of meaningful communication with Spirit had been due to the other parts of her spell and her mental state. It was Suzl’s job to get that message across, and this she resolutely refused to do.

It wasn’t that Suzl was unsympathetic to their plight, only that she had no more ties to Anchor Logh and it was a remote place filled mostly with faceless, nameless people. Kasdi had come home a hero; Suzl had come home half male and half female, had been called names, had been disowned by her own family and friends. The hurt she’d suffered then remained with her for her entire adult life, and she simply could not find it in herself to do for them what, in reverse circumstances, they would never do for her.

Spirit and the baby were a different matter. She insisted that no action be taken that would endanger them until the child came, and as they had no luck getting the situation over directly to Spirit, they finally had to gnaw and gnash their teeth and do it Suzl’s way.

Attempts to break the shield were being made all the time, but so far it had weakened only slightly for short periods of total attack and then firmed up again. Coydt’s skillful alliance forged with the Fluxlords had sustained itself over a period far longer than anyone would have guessed, and it showed no signs of abating.

They whiled away the time planning the expedition, knowing that every day’s delay meant their chances were slimmer and slimmer. Only Matson, who knew Coydt from the old days, thought otherwise. “The longer time passed, the more secure they’ll all feel. If we’d come through that hole right away, we might not have had a chance. Now I’ll bet there’s maybe two bored guards, both of whom are bein’ punished for something.”

Nobody knew how many people the Guardian would allow in with a Soul Rider, but it had to be few even for physical reasons, and with equipment and Suzl along at least as far as the vortex, that meant a small group indeed.

Matson would go, but Jomo could not. His great size would make him stand out anywhere, and he was instantly recognizable and certainly on Coydt’s shoot-on-sight list. Kasdi would go, although she, too, had many liabilities and no real fighting will. She wanted Coydt in Flux as much as Matson wanted him in Anchor. She would go, she realized, because her family was there, because Matson was going and she could not bear to send him off again, and because she knew both the temple byways and the Anchor better than just about anyone else they had.

Matson chose two tough career soldiers, Captain Macree and Sergeant Zlidon, because both had fought in campaigns in Anchor. Macree was an explosives expert, and Zlidon was good at organizing and at automatic weapons. Both had been born and raised in Anchor Logh. But Kasdi was the only true wizard—Matson was a false wizard, good only at illusions, convincing though they were. Mervyn forbade any of the Nine from going; the wizards inside would certainly be of lesser caliber, except for Coydt and perhaps one or two others at the gates, and he simply didn’t want to risk losing them to a bullet before they even had a chance to use their stuff. They finally found a number of powerful volunteers both from the Sisterhood and from the staffs of the major wizards.