01. Spirits of Flux and Anchor (16 page)

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gated a good five centimeters, giving her what could only be described as a pug-like snout. Finally, through her hair, rose two short, blunt goat-like horns.

"Behold the first of a new race," Roaring Moun- tain thundered. "This shall be the model for the future of all harlots of World!" He sounded coldly furious now, and stretched out both hands at the captive multitude. At the end he issued some commands, and the first row was released. All were helped to their feet, and all looked exactly like the first creature he had made.

Cass, in the third row, could only wait for it with mounting horror. Far worse than the trans- formation, for there was nothing permanent in the Flux and anything done could be undone, was the totally silent submissiveness of the newly made creatures who but moments before had been cap- tive girls just like she. The dark priest did the second row, and they became as the first. It was only when the first group came up to unbind the second that they were close enough for Cass to see the depth of the transformation. In one way. Roar- ing Mountain was right -- this was a whole new race, and she was next to join it!

Well, at least I'll finally have some tits, she thought inanely, her grip on sanity very, very thin.

"Hold!" commanded a deep, booming, authori- tarian voice behind them, and Roaring Mountain stopped, then turned and himself dropped to his knees, as did all the savages and transformees, following his lead.

The speaker and object of this worship walked into view. He was enormous, standing fully three meters high and fully proportioned with muscles to match. He also had a goat-like head with huge ram's horns, deep purple skin covering his human- looking body, and he wore a loose-fitting robe of

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crimson satin open at the chest but tied off with a belt at the waist.

"Oh, great Prince of Hell. we welcome thee," Roaring Mountain intoned.

"Oh, get up from there," the giant goat-man muttered disgustedly. "We have business to discuss."

"I was just in the holy process of -- " the dark priest began, getting up hastily.

"Of turning excellent raw material into mind- less savages. Yes, I know. I'm beginning to wonder about you, I really am. I fear the hangups that attracted us to one another may be too much for you to do a decent job. Well, we'll see." The crea- ture looked up at the dozen' or so girls still tied down. "You couldn't be satisfied with the one train. No, you had to go after another one without replac- ing your losses from the first attack." He sighed. "Sometimes, oh Roaring Mountain, I think I should transform you into a giant asshole."

The priest looked stricken. "Please, Master! I can explain!"

"Bullshit! I went and carved this homey pocket in a very convenient location and handed you the nucleus of an army. If you had any sense you'd have struck at the first train, forgotten the second, and now be well on your way to training that expanded force. Instead, here you are creating a new wild animal species with barely more than you had before! Worse, yet, you didn't take that second train. They'll be back in force, hunting for this pocket now."

The priest looked suddenly concerned- "Then hadn't we better do something?"

The goat-man cleared his throat impatiently. "Yes, I think we better. Any captives from that second train? I mean, any you haven't already transformed into mindless idiots?"

"One, Master -- no, two!" He looked up at Cass and pointed. "That one there, for example."

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The mysterious giant nodded his goat's head and walked up the rocky surface between the slabs and looked down at her. After what she had just witnessed and now expected to go through, she was anything but taken aback by this great appari- tion.

"What's your name, girl?" the goat-man de- manded to know.

"Cass," she told him. There was no use in being coy, particularly when she knew she was facing the power behind this little throne.

"Now, then, Cass -- you were with the second train?"

"Yes, sir."

"Whose train was it? What was the name of the stringer?"

"Matson, sir."

"Um. Damn. And I suppose he sent a dugger ahead to Persellus when he saw the remains of the first train?"

"Yes, sir. Straightaway."

He turned to Roaring Mountain. "Another stu- pid mistake. I don't suppose you left anybody to take care of that little detail?"

The priest shrugged. "How was I to know there'd be a second train by so soon? Besides, I lost a lot of troops there."

"Idiot." He turned back to Cass. "You don't seem particularly frightened by me."

"In the past few days I've been sold to a stringer, forced marched in the void, cleaned up after a massacre, been in a fight, and just now I witnessed a castration and the turning of a lot of good people into animals, and I was about to join them myself when you showed up. I'm sorry, sir master wizard or whatever you are. I just don't think I have any more fright left."

The giant was impressed. "Now this is some- thing special, priest. A hundred like this and we

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could rule World. And you were about to turn her into a slavish goat-woman!" He paused a moment, controlling his temper. "Do you know who and what I am?"

"A wizard. Isn't that what they call people like you?"

The goat man crouched down, and she could see that the goat head was not some sort of mask. Either it was all illusion or else the man had liter- ally changed himself into this whatever it was. She decided on the latter, noticing that he wore A ring with a serpent design on his right ring finger. She also noticed that he was most certainly left- handed.

"I'm one of the Seven Who Wait," the creature told her. "Does that bother you?"

"Not particularly," she answered honestly. "The church hadn't exactly impressed me for honesty and sincerity. I see no reason why your side should be much different."

He looked at her for a moment. "There is great power in you," he told her. "I can fee! it. Tremen- dous latent power that even now makes tentative probes at my defenses. Your very calmness, your intelligence, and your almost magnetic ability to get into the worst of situations makes me suspicious. I have seen this combination before, in many bodies, with many faces." He sighed and got up and turned to Roaring Mountain. "Come. Your fun here can wait. We must talk and soon, for I must be quickly gone from here. I warn you though not to try your tricks with that one. What she has within her is stronger than you. For your own sake, kill her."

Cass suddenly felt some fear return, particularly when the priest grinned and said, "I'll do it right now."

"No! Not until I am gone." Was that a worried tone in the master wizard's voice? What sort of power, she wondered, did she have that even one

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of the Seven, if that was who he was, would not like to take on?"

The two men of evil walked away, and Roaring Mountain went to the cave. Dar met him at the entrance just inside the waterfafl and they ex- changed a few words. Then Dar nodded, and the evil priest rejoined his master and they went off out of view. Dar hesitated a moment, then walked out and over to the slabs, then up to Cass herself- None of the savages or goat-women made any at- tempt to stop him.

Roaring Mountain had given Dar practically everything, she saw. His build, already considerable, was now totally filled and so muscular that you could see every flex or movement in them, and his already strong, lean, handsome face was somehow altered into near total perfection, set off by a crop of thick, black hair. If there were male gods, then he was the absolute perfection of them -- with one detail importantly missing. He was Roaring Moun- tain's pet joke.

"Come to gloat?" she asked him sourly. "Or cry on my shoulder, which isn't very good for that sort of thing right now."

"He ordered me to kill you," he told her. "AS soon as goat-face was gone."

She sighed. "Well, go ahead. Get it over with."

"I'm not going to do it, Cass." He reached down and freed the restraints binding her to the slab. She sat up uneasily, a little suspicious but feeling that she had nothing to lose.

"Now what am I supposed to do? Run and be eaten alive by those things over there?"

He shook his head slowly. "No- They won't hurt you. Look, I did a dumb thing. I did a lot of dumb things. I just kept thinking of Lani, and that she was out here, and then I saw you start acting like that stringer's partner and it all just sort of snapped. I kind of deserve this, I guess, but you don't."

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She suddenly felt a little uneasy. "Where's Lani now, Dar?"

"Dead," he said softly- "I killed her. I -- " his voice choked a bit -- "I put her out of her misery, really. That bastard made me a woman who looks ' like a man, thinks like a man, wants like a man. He made her all sex, frenzied like, and only for me -- and I couldn't do a damned thing. She was in torture from his games, Cass -- I gave her peace."

She was silent a moment, not wanting to de- sert him but fearful that Roaring Mountain, who couldn't be. far off, might return at any second. "What do you want me to do?"

"Look, they have to have a war party heading this way. I say we take our chances, get into the void, and wait. The odds ain't great, but even if we did it's better than staying here."

She was surprised. "We? You're coming, too?"

He nodded. "Oh, I thought about killing myself, but I got this real urge inside me to pay 'em back. Pay 'em all back, like you said back in the gym at the start. I want to get these bastards, and particu- larly I want to get the ones that caused this back in Anchor Logh. Will you come?"

She thought a moment. "What about the others here?"

"No time, and too big a risk. Either they'll be rescued or they won't, but if we take the whole mob they'll catch us sure."

"All right, then. Let's move."

They walked in back of the slabs and she found it a level area above the encampment, mostly more of the sheet rock with little growing. She could see the whole thing from up there and was shocked to see how tiny the place really was. They had less than twenty meters to reach the void, and they made it before any alarms were sounded, holding hands so they would not get separated.

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As soon as they were in the void itself she stopped him. "What's the matter?" he asked nervously.

"We don't want to get too far from the pocket or we'll just wind up lost and alone," she told him. "I say let's walk just a hundred paces in a straight line, counting from now. If we can't see the pocket from there, then we stop and wait there."

"Fair enough for a start," he agreed, and began the counting process. At a hundred paces they stopped and looked back. There was a very slight, almost imperceptible lightening of the void in the direction from which they'd come, but otherwise there was no way to know that anything was there. It provided the only orientation they had, so they decided to settle for it. There was nothing to do now but sit down on the soft, spongy, invisible ground and wait until they had to return or strike out blindly in search of food and water.

"I wanted to bring a canteen, at least," Dar told her, "but all that stuff was over by the mules and so were they." They sat in silence for a while, and Cass lay back and tried to relax as much as she could. Although they were most probably dead people at this point, the immediate terrors were out of the way and she found herself suddenly unable to stop shaking and crying a bit. She just didn't fight it any more, and let it come, and it was a long time flowing from her. Dar held her and tried to comfort her, and it was some time before she realized that he was crying, too.

Coduro had brought half the armed might of Persellus, from the looks of it, including two offi- cers of high rank that were real wizards, albeit of lesser powers.

"One of mine went nuts and defected, carrying off a girl," he told them. "We beat them off and cost them some lives, but with all the captives he's

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got this bastard has another army at his command. How many troops you got with you?"

The colonel, a bearded man in his fifties but in prime condition and looking ready for a fight, responded, "Fifty experienced soldiers, a chief noncom, and the captain and myself. But how are you going to Find a tiny pocket in all this space? They could be anywhere by now. We came as an escort, not a raiding party."

"Well, I'll lead you to his pocket," the stringer told him. "I don't know why except I kind of took a liking to her, but I put my string on the girl he carried off. It'll lead us right to them."

"Well! That's different! Tremendous stroke of luck, though."

Matson suddenly hesitated. It was an odd thing, him putting that string on the only one that was captured. He'd never done anything like that be- fore in his life, and he didn't know why he'd done it this time. He shrugged, went about his business. and didn't think much more on it as he recreated the strong defensive position. He didn't think the cult could possibly have turned all those captives into troops that could be used effectively in so short a time, but he didn't want to return here and find out he was wrong, either. Finally he remounted his horse and went over to the soldiers. "Let's go get 'em," he said enthusiastically.