Empires of Flux & Anchor

Matson, Kasdi, and the generals fumed at the standoff, but whatever they tried seemed to fail. The old stringer’s glib assurance that they could blow an opening through the temple proved wishful thinking; while there was a thick inner layer of wood and then masonry, the outer walls, of that strange substance, would yield to no power. That left only the three exits, and those were death traps, as attempt after attempt failed. The only thing the empire had accomplished by all this was the denial of electricity to the city. Another maddening week passed, with no way to even get news.

The former priestesses had been passed back to Flux and examined by top wizards. The spells were consistent and insidious, clearly bearing Coydt’s personal handiwork. Stripping those spells off, layer by layer, brought them back, but at a great price. The memories, the horrors, of the first day of the invasion and the rape and perversion worked on them would drive most people mad; in addition, all of it had been done against their vows and binding spells—a mental conflict they simply could not resolve. No one had ever discovered a magical way to selectively erase memories. They could be suppressed, of course, but then they still were there and caused problems; or there could be wholesale erasure and replacement, but to bring them back to the point just before the invasion was beyond anyone’s power.

The generals began to worry about their backs. There were fifteen other Anchors to guard against a similar invasion, and nobody knew the whereabouts of Coydt or any of the other of the Seven. With at least one Guardian neutralized somehow, the other three Hellgates also had to be defended, and that took powerful wizardry as well as troops. They had a quarter of a million troops and reserves they could count on and about a thousand wizards powerful enough to matter. Concentrated around Anchor Logh and its Hellgate, they were the greatest power on World. Divided up into twenty divisions, each guarding an Anchor or Hellgate in the empire, they amounted to fifty wizards and twelve thousand five hundred soldiers per location. The enemy alone could easily put a hundred thousand soldiers and three hundred top wizards against any one of those locations, and the math, when put in those terms, was pretty grim.

Kasdi, in particular, was amazed at the situation. “How can we have so much power, so much population, so much of World and still be scared of the dark?”

Suzl couldn’t follow all the fine points, but all she needed were her eyes to see that things had gone nowhere. She itched to see what the situation in the temple was like, but Spirit was not anxious to enter a building she couldn’t get out of. She was aware of Suzl’s itch, though, and finally indicated to her that she could stand Suzl’s absence if she were careful and not away too long.

Nobody could stop Suzl, of course. She had the combinations and the codes. She traced the pattern as Spirit nervously watched, then stepped through. She had done it before with Spirit to Anchor Nanzee via this same Hellgate, and she knew that transmission was instantaneous, probably at the speed of light. She found the entryway lit and an actual stairway built up to the reinforced floor. There were military emplacements and lots of equipment, and quite a number of uniformed men and women who were less than thrilled to see the nude mute around poking into things.

Suzl had no intention of getting in the way; she’d seen the grim bodies pulled from here back to Flux through the gate, and she had recognized Nadya, who had become Sister Tamara. She had no idea why she thought she could do anything, but just sitting around that big hole was driving her nuts.

She spent the better part of an hour just exploring the place and saw nothing she didn’t expect. They did not let her near the doors, of course, but she was pretty sure that anybody who peeked out of those would peek no more. Finally, she walked back down, thinking about it all and trying to find a way around the problem. She knew she was kidding herself that she could come up with something the pros could not, and even if she did, she might never be able to get the plan across, but she had to try.

She walked back down the steps to the place now sketched in chalk and stepped on it, but she didn’t trace the pattern right away. Instead, she drew in the weaker Flux power emanating from it and tried to find out where it went. She had no idea why she thought of this, but it seemed an interesting line of thought. Let’s see, she thought. From the vortex to the entry gate, and from the entry gate to here. No, that wasn’t quite right. There was a tremendous amount of energy going in from the vortex and an incredibly weak amount coming out at this end. One of the immutable laws everybody knew in both Anchor and Flux was that there was just so much of everything, and that energy and matter might be transformed, even into each other, but not created where there wasn’t any—or destroyed. Where was the extra power going?

Well, she didn’t know much about electricity, but she knew that such power needed a transformer to make it weak enough to use in the capital by the electrical generators. She looked down, found signs of the flow going past the entry port and coming up just over from it. The stone and cement filler had buried both the point at which that energy came out and the transformer or other device used to capture it, but the thick cables emerged and then were routed through the floor to the power plant that took up most of the rest of the basement. The power flow going through that cable was very different from the pure Flux power, but she could still follow it and sense its amount. It was more than that which existed at the transfer gate, but the total was still only a small fraction of what was going in.

She cast mentally down to the original flooring and below it, trying to find the actual entry point for the pure power of the vortex. It wasn’t difficult to sense, nor the point at which it divided—perhaps through some sort of transformer built into the temple structure itself? There was the gate, and there was the electrical power line—no, it couldn’t be. The line did not come from the junction point as the gate’s did; it came from someplace else, someplace even further down. Down! That’s where most of the power was going! That’s why it hadn’t really been noticed before. She tried to follow it with her mind, seeing as a wizard saw, and suddenly found herself suspended in darkness.

There was no up, no down, no forward or back. No light at all showed anywhere, nor in fact were there any of the sensations—no sound, touch, smell, taste—nothing.

But she was not alone.

Something touched her mind, something at once very frightening and very powerful; yet it seemed more curious than threatening. For a moment she feared that she’d gone the wrong way and touched those in Hell itself, but she was powerless to do anything about it. Little probes seemed to tingle all over her mind, unlocking memories and sensations long dormant or unused, and she knew that whatever it was, it was finding all it needed to know, but she had no way to talk to it or to even ask any questions. She had the distinct impression that it could not have answered her if she’d had that ability. This was something new, something totally alien.

Suddenly there was a blaze of light, and she knew she was back in the temple once again, yet not quite a part of it. She seemed to float above the floor and was not conscious of having any physical form at all, but that seemed irrelevant as she had no control over her movements anyway. She entered the generating system and flowed with it forward, until she was the electrical system of the entire temple. Power had been restored inside when experts had figured out a way to decouple the temple’s power from the city’s, and everywhere that energy flowed Suzl was, sensing all of the great building and its contents at one time. Despite being very frightened by it all, she still thought the whole thing was neat.

In one room, Cass was sound asleep over a bunch of papers. There was one of the temple intercoms nearby, and suddenly it began to buzz irritatingly, awakening the sleeper. She reached up groggily and flipped the switch. “Yes?”

“Exactly this time tomorrow night I will turn off the sector known as Temple Square,” said an eerie, electronic voice that was somehow still familiar. “This condition can be tolerated for only one minute exactly or the structure of Anchor itself will be endangered.”

“Who are you?” Kasdi shouted back, flipping the switch. “Who is this?”

“This sector condition will resemble what you call the void, but it will not be. It will be raw energy. All in the square will have to be suspended, and I will retain control. Because of the intricacy of the action, I can sustain no more than four of you. Move from this center straight forward until you reach Anchor as quickly as possible, for when sector stability is restored, all will be as it was, but none in the square will be aware that any time at all has passed. This is the best I can do without endangering the lives of everyone in my district.”

The voice was strange, oddly distorted, but she suddenly realized why it was familiar. “Suzl?” she asked wonderingly.

“The remote operative, which you call the Soul Rider, will be needed to fully act against the shield. It must be along. Destroy any one of the devices or its operator to create a necessary thinness. The translator will give you the