Empires of Flux & Anchor

does have to climb through them!” He and Macree quickly managed the feat and also threw the dead torches down. “Now let’s see who comes looking for them,” the stringer said.

But another five soldiers were in and there still was no sign of any newcomers. The bodies had given them something of a start, since the instant fear was that those were the bodies of Matson’s group, but Matson was able to detect movement and whisper the password before they started throwing nasty explosive things.

When the next five also arrived without incident, Matson began to feel secure. “Cass, you want to go back and give them the situation? I think I’m going to take a small party exploring here.”

“Why me? This is my temple, remember. I know my way around it better than anyone.”

“And you spent several days drilling it into us. You’re not a soldier, Cass; you’re a wizard. We need you later.”

“I’m coming along,” she said firmly.

“All right. Soldier—you know the route back. You don’t need the girl to get out. Tell ’em to bring ’em through as quick as possible. We’re going to sweep this level, then return and get more people to go up.”

And with that, the four who’d been there first started along the corridor. Cass passed the secret passage to the Sister General’s quarters and said, “We ought to put somebody on this.” Matson nodded, but he had no one to spare right now.

The whole area was mostly filled with old and stored furniture and other such material as they expected to find in the temple. Here and there a rat would scuttle by, and there were a record number of bugs, but no more people. They finally reached the far stairway, and Matson ducked in and listened, then returned. “Don’t hear anything, but even if nobody comes to investigate why those guys are missing, somebody’s bound to be down to relieve the watch.”

They made their way back along the corridor to the waiting soldiers. Now they were twenty-four. He formed a second five-person squad and sent them ahead. “Floor by floor, nice and quiet,” he told them. “If that security system is still on, they’ll know when you get one floor up. Throw a bomb if you have to, but when you’re discovered and can’t wipe them out, make enough noise to reach anywhere in the temple. At that point, you men use those explosives there and blow the power plant.” He turned back to Kasdi. “Now let’s go see who or what’s in the Sister General’s apartment.”

It bothered him, and the rest as well, that it had been so easy so far. Had complacency set in this quickly? “Consider the quality of the material he used,” Kasdi noted, but she was only hoping.

They climbed the dusty back stairs of the passageway single-file, rifles at the ready. Carefully, Matson pushed at the panel that opened into the large walk-in closet in the Sister General’s bedroom.

Matson listened, peered out, then walked out and into the bedroom, the rest following. He stopped there. The stench in the room was nearly unbearable.

There were five dead women in the room, and none had died a nice or quick death. All had been stripped, tied to objects, then slowly and brutally tortured. Butchered was a better word for it; butchered alive. Blood was everywhere.

One of them had been tied to the bed with some kind of wire, arms and legs bound spread-eagle. The expression frozen on her face was one of unforgettable horror. All of the bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition.

“Oh, Goddess!” Kasdi sobbed. “It’s Sister Tamara!” Matson barely recognized the strong-looking woman who’d died so horribly, but he remembered being told that the Sister General here was formerly one of the group from that last, fatal stringer train.

“Leave her!” he said curtly. “I don’t want any signs we were here until we’re ready to take this place. They may not have ever found out about that secret passage.” Kasdi gave him a terrible look, but it left him unmoved. “You wanted to come,” he reminded her.

The office had been ransacked, with papers all over the place, pictures torn from the walls, and furniture overturned and smashed. All of the religious objects of any value were gone.

They had blown in the security doors and apparently moved with lightning speed against the helpless women occupants. The walls showed a wavy line of bullet holes at about waist level, so they’d come in shooting.

Macree was thinking. “We’re two levels up, right? Then our other team has to be just below us, heading from the front back down this way. Offices on that level, if I remember your diagram, Sister.”

She nodded absently, hardly hearing, her face cold and immobile. Damn Suzl! she couldn’t help thinking. This might have been prevented if we had moved earlier! It was an irrational thought; the temple had to have been hit quickly and early, and certainly for the first two days it had been heavily defended, including down below. It might not have been possible before this to get this far. And she, too, had opposed using Spirit earlier. Those things were convenient to forget, for somebody had to be blamed.

The rifle suddenly seemed far lighter than it had, and friendlier. She just wanted to find them. Find them and kill them all.

They went carefully down the stairs and advanced up the hallway, checking each office as they did so. All showed signs of being ransacked and looted and there was much senseless vandalism, but little else. With a shock Kasdi recognized the very room where she’d gotten lost and blundered into the old Sister General fixing the Paring Rite with her priestess lover. The records were still kept there, but all of the equipment was smashed now. Matson, however, made an interesting comment. “This room doesn’t have all the papers spread around.”

“All the records were on film,” she told him.

“Yeah—for everybody in the Anchor. Where’s all that film now?”

She saw what he meant. Cabinet after cabinet had been overturned, but all were empty. “Every man, woman, and child living in Anchor Logh or who had ever lived here were in those records,” she noted.

“Nice,” he commented. “If they have a film reader somewhere, and I suppose they do, they have everything they need. Who owns what, who’s married to whom, whose kids are whose, who knows how to run or fix this or that—everything.”

“But why?”

“We’ll know when we can ask them,” he replied.

Shortly they met with the first squad. So far—nothing. Some shot up and badly decomposing bodies were in some of the offices, but nothing alive.

“Send one of your people back and get guard posts set up all along the access to this level,” he ordered. “Start wiring explosives all along as well. We’ll try the next level the same way.”

The next level was a chamber of horrors. Offices and small chapels, even cells, had been used to stack dead bodies, hundreds of them. The smell was sickening, and they could hardly stand it. Some sort of masks would be needed just to clean the level up, and the flies and maggots were well at work. They wanted off that level as quickly as possible, but the next level was the one below the inner temple itself and the street entrance. On the next level were street-level front and rear entrances and exits. Matson backed them off a level. The new soldiers were already establishing themselves, and it looked like they now had a fair force in there. Matson sent them up in squads to the deadly level above, so they would know just what kind of people they were dealing with. The point was well-made.

Progress was going very well, and that worried Matson more than a fight. “It isn’t like Coydt to leave his back door open. He knows the rules as well as we do. That opposition barely qualifies as token. The time to stop us was before we got established, not now. I don’t like it. We’re still bottled up in this one big building, and there’s always the possibility he’s just waiting to get the most of us with one big bang.”

“You mean blow up the temple?” Kasdi was appalled at the idea. “But—that would certainly block the Hellgate for him, too.”

“Yeah, and us. We’ll have the troops check for it. If it’s here, it’s got to be real big or it wouldn’t dent a solid joint like this.”

They prepared for the assault on the ground level. This time there was opposition—a lot of it, but it was disorganized. Men yelled and screamed, explosions went off, and the hallways were crisscrossed in automatic weapons fire. They finally managed to clear the hallways, but then it was room-to-room combat, with Matson’s men tossing in explosive grenades as they went. It took the better part of an hour to secure the level, at the cost of twelve dead or seriously wounded. The kicker was when somebody got word