necessary formulae. Remember, exactly this time tomorrow on my mark.”
She frantically flipped the switch over to “talk.”
“Wait! Tell me who or what you are!”
“My mark is—
Suzl found herself withdrawing from the omniscience of the temple as if she were water flowing down a drain. She had understood every word said in both directions, but she hadn’t uttered any of them.
The creature, or whatever it was, withdrew, and suddenly she found herself standing back on the chalked-in gate once again. She looked down at herself and saw that she
“It’s the mute,” one of them called. “Something happened. I thought she was long gone.”
“Mute, my ass!” Suzl screamed back, then sat up, feeling numb. Suddenly she looked up at them and frowned. “Hey! I can talk again! How
The message had been heard through all the intercoms in the temple, although only Kasdi’s could talk back, and it wasn’t until she had answered that it had spoken. A fair number of higher-ups, including Matson, had already gathered in the refurbished gym to discuss it when Suzl was brought in.
She told them her story, sparing nothing. “I don’t know what it was,” she concluded, “but, damn it, Cass, it
“Not you,” Kasdi assured her. “We’ve already sent for Mervyn and some of the other experts. Let’s try and sort it out.”
The old wizard was totally fascinated by the account. “The best I can guess, and it’s only a guess, is that you are the first person to meet the Guardian face to face, as it were, and survive.”
“I almost didn’t. That was a
Using a lot of witnesses, they put the message back together and were reasonably satisfied that they had it right. Fortunately, the military mind being what it was, quite a number of people had checked the exact time on their chronometers at the “mark” statement. All but three of them said 2209. That was sufficient to order those three to check their chronographs.
“This fits with what I saw in the tunnel,” Suzl told them. “This and the other three Anchors are nothing more than Fluxlands stabilized by that gadget down there instead of by a wizard’s mind. You figure this Guardian is the mind behind it?”
Mervyn shook his head negatively. “I seriously doubt if a being like you describe would build a machine.
Kasdi nodded. “I remember nothing from being turned into that bird until I emerged as that flyer.”
“I suspect our Guardian was responsible there as well. It fits. We will have a lot of work ahead to consider all the implications of this.”
“But now is not the time for that,” Matson put in. “At 2209 tomorrow, this thing claims it’ll sort of turn off the whole square and all that firepower. Four of us will have exactly one minute to dash across to the other side and then be on our own. If we can believe it, the forces out there won’t know anything happened. Do you think we can trust that?”
Mervyn nodded. “We have no reason not to. And, of course, if it doesn’t happen, nobody has to make the dash. The real problem is who must make it. The Soul Rider would be necessary to neutralize Coydt’s machines, the thing said. Suzl, you know what that means.”
“Hey! Spirit would be screwed in this kind of set-up! And we got a month-old baby!”
“Nevertheless, she must come. And so must you. You are obviously the translator it spoke about. Can you still remember the language Spirit and the Soul Rider use?”
She thought a moment, then mentally shifted gears, using the linking spell as a guide—and found she couldn’t speak or understand the rest of them again. She thought consciously and hard and willed herself “back”—and suddenly she could understand the comments once again. “Yeah. But it’s total. One or the other, not both at once.”
“It is sufficient. The Soul Rider knows the complex spells needed to punch the hole, but obviously must first see what it’s up against to devise them. It will then feed them to you and any other wizards along, and you will use them.”
She shrugged. “I’m game, but, damn it, Spirit will never go for it. And what’s gonna happen the first time she stands up in plain view to follow a butterfly, even if she did?”
“You must convince her—and keep her under control. Otherwise, we must give this place, and eventually this world, over to Coydt and the others.”
Suzl had no choice in convincing Spirit but to trust to the Soul Rider. She took Spirit off where they could be alone, leaving little Jeffron with a nurse, and after the predictable failure to really explain the situation to her, she sat back and decided that what worked accidentally for the Guardian might work for the Soul Rider as well. Both were certainly kin, and both were apparently living, thinking creatures of pure energy, as hard as that was to grasp. They were not the same, certainly, but both could communicate with humans and understand them far better than humans could communicate with them.
She tried sending the story, the impressions, of her experience using what she called “Spirit language” to the Soul Rider through the linking spell, but didn’t seem to get anywhere. Finally she decided on a last measure, and together they walked into the Hellgate, which Suzl had requested be cleared temporarily of any traffic.
Bathed in the flow of massive energy emerging from the vortex, Suzl took hold of Spirit and fed that energy into the both of them. No one else could do this, she’d found, but the Spirit language was the key to it all. Suzl executed the spell that the Soul Rider had sent her that first day, the one she knew would have the desired result. She metamorphosized, changed back into what she had been, a creature of gross deformity, but a creature with what was necessary.
Emotion was the key, and intense emotion was the medium. Strong, overriding emotions blocked rational thought, concentrated all on one specific to the exclusion of all others, and, if strong enough, they blocked thought altogether while maintaining a direction—like love, or passion, or whatever focused the participants excusively on each other. Hate was also an equally strong focus, as were the other emotions taken to extreme. This, however, was the easiest and the most pleasurable route.
They joined physically, but also, thanks to the language, amplified by the proximity to the direct full flow of the gate vortex, they joined mentally as well on all the levels it was possible to join. The Soul Rider understood, and used that, as Suzl had hoped it would.
And then another joined them there in the Hellgate itself, a creature that looked as if it were an unbearable ball of light out of which fiery tentacles of pure, crackling energy whirled. The two humans did not see, nor were they now permitted to.
For all its history, which was the history of World, the Soul Rider had seen a Guardian only once before, when, riding the body of Cass, it had been plucked from imprisonment in Anchor by the creature. At the time it had acted but had not communicated. Now it reached out again, hoping against hope not only for communication but also to discover if this creature were the unknown source of its directives and commands.
The Soul Rider felt elation at the communication, coupled with disappointment that the creature was certainly not its unseen master, unless in total disguise.
