02. Empires of Flux and Anchor (2 page)

"You are no god,"
the whispers said derisively,
"nor is your power anything like absolute. You are a mere man, a mortal man who can be killed by this woman and this thing creeping towards you, creeping, creeping. . . . Even your godlike body is a fraud, as your life is a fraud, a show, a thing not of majesty but of props and scenery, like theater. Even your power is illusion .
. . ."

He fought back the whispered doubts, knowing their origin, but he could not shut out the insults, the taunts, the claims, the—the blasphemy of it. And because he could not, he knew, in some corner of his mind, that it must be true.

The ball crept closer, millimeter by millimeter.

Summoning every ounce of divine fury and will, he lashed back at it, and when it retreated, he laughed aloud and his eyes blazed with the look of true madness, his confidence renewed as the ball retreated almost to the center once again.

Suddenly the laughter died on his lips and he looked around, momentarily confused. It was hard to breathe now. He opened his mouth to suck in air, but there seemed no air to come in. His disorientation was brief, but it was enough.

Suddenly there was air again, and he drank it in, concentration wavering. The ball suddenly rushed in upon him, enveloped him, held him in horrible pain. He had lost! But he couldn't lose! He was Gyasiros Rex, God of Yalah, a creature of perfection whose power was omnipotent! But if he could not lose, then what was this?
Transcendence!
The ball did not consume, but filled him with power beyond imagining! He drank it in, more, more. . . .
Not God of Yalah, but God of all Creation! He was now supreme!

Kasdi broke with him and followed the string back to the lines, hoping it would be far enough.

Even now, still close to a hundred kilometers out, they saw the tremendous flash and, seconds later, heard and felt the mighty roar of the explosion.

A shaken soldier near her turned, ashen-faced, and asked, "What in the name of all that is holy was
that?"

"Overload," she responded tiredly. "I gave him all the power of the battle and ninety percent of the remainder. He took it in, unable to control himself any longer. There is only so much energy that can be concentrated in one point. Beyond that, nothing can control it. When that point passed, he could no longer hold it nor would it be held, so it ran from the point, dispersing in all directions. It also dispersed him, of course."

"I just can't believe it could happen," he breathed.

"It was he who gave me the idea. I simply applied it literally. You see, all these powerful Fluxlords are unstable."

2

DESTINY'S SAINT

It was hard being a saint, not only in being regarded as one by a large mass of people but also, quite literally, being forced to be one. It was a self-inflicted wound that had been compounded more and more over the years, but, as much as she disliked it, she believed more and more in the necessity of it.

She sat in her office in the temple of Hope. It wasn't much of an office, really. An old wooden chair whose finish was worn creaked with her every movement, although she was small and thin. Her desk was a table in barely better repair, atop which sat a battered-looking old oil lamp, various papers, and a pen and inkwell. Other than that the place was barren and quite small, totally undecorated, its stone walls and floor more reminiscent of a monastic cell than the seat of power of one of the most powerful people on World.

Although the temple and, indeed, the entire Fluxland of Hope was her creation, she spared little of that power on herself. Although there were far less spartan offices and quarters, she disdained them, and the only sop to her comfort was a small window behind her that allowed her to look out on the temple grounds and the lands beyond.

She knew as well as anyone that all this was due less to a total act of faith than to the shock and revulsion at seeing Matson fall in the battle for this place. Emotion was the trigger to the power of the Flux, the raw motivator that multiplied a wizard's energy exponentially as the intensity of it rose. Still, she felt,
knew,
that all of it had been a part of a divine plan and that she was the key player anointed to carry that plan out.

The Church had been corrupted beyond any point of redemption, that she knew. It had turned from its holy mission of salvation to one of repression, the alter-ego of the wizards of Flux. They had perverted their entire faith into a massive and effective dictatorship and had held humanity in the grip of their corrupt power for centuries, even rewriting Holy Scripture to support all their moves. That had been one of her first and most important acts—the gathering of Scripture and all other ancient and suppressed documents from the vaults of the Church and from sanctuaries in Fluxlands, and then the appointment of a board of the finest scholars and translators to sort, evaluate, and codify all of that material. It was a massive undertaking, and the Codex was still years away from completion, but not from use.

Her mentor, Mervyn of Pericles, who was more than six centuries old and one of the powerful Nine Who Guard, called what was being done a revolution, but it was true in only the most literal sense. What she was doing was less revolution than restoration, putting humanity back on the path from which it had been diverted.

To do this, she required a true and honest clergy, one immune to the sort of corruption the old Church had fostered, and this had to be accomplished by magic. Ordination was more than a commitment; it was the acceptance of spells binding one for life to those vows.

Because of this, she'd realized from the start that she had to set the example, had to
be
the saint, for it was she who imposed those lesser but still binding restrictions on the vows. As the highest, if she were not also the lowest, living a life that was far harsher than theirs, they could not be expected to make the sacrifices and keep to them. Her life and actions had to make their own burdens seem trivial by comparison, and it certainly did. Even Mervyn, who had taught her the one unbreakable spell that could only be imposed freely on one's self, believed she had gone too far and that the pressures of living such a life would eventually drive her mad. She had disagreed, and over the seventeen years since those first vows she had in fact added to them whenever she perceived a loophole.

The vow of poverty, of course, did not mean that the Church was poor. Far from it. It needed the tithe to spread its word, support its temples, churches, and missions, its charity and its holy works. The priestesses who did the work owned nothing, but had unlimited use of church buildings, clothing, food, and the rest. They were not living like the rich and the wizard monarchs, of course, but they were comfortable. She did not allow herself even that.

She quite literally had no possessions of any sort. No mementos of her past, no pictures or souvenirs or keepsakes. She slept, in whatever random empty monastic cell she found, on a bed of straw or, occasionally, on the stone floor. She had no aides or assistants; she cleaned out the cell every morning, using common cleaning materials from the temple stores and scrubbing on her hands and knees. She ate only the plainest of foods from the communal kitchens, along with all the others, and she even washed her own dishes. Undergarments and shoes required a special size and fit, so she had dispensed with them. She generally borrowed a comb and brush from whoever was around, high or low, and returned them cleaned, and bathed either in the river or in the communal showers used by the acolytes, the not-yet-priestesses who studied here. Her simple robe was a worn-out cast-off of the temple which she washed each night. When it wore out, she would hunt through the trash for another that would do. Even the desk, table, and lamp in the office she had found in Anchor trash dumps and repaired herself as much as she could for use.

She allowed no one to wait on her, and she accepted no charity, although she would accept an offer of dinner or such in Anchor or Flux if it were truly offered in friendship and without expectations. She did not smoke, drink, or even swear—the spell prevented it. And her chastity was absolute, so much so that even simple self-stimulation was beyond her. This didn't mean she didn't feel the need for such things—she often did, particularly in the early days—but she had made it impossible for her to violate her way of life. By now, though, she hardly gave any of it a thought. It was the way it was, the way it had been for most of her adult life, and the way it would always be.

She had not just done this to create an example and remove all temptation from her, though. In a very real sense, it liberated her from all the pressures of daily life and from its temptations as well. She desired nothing she did not already have, save an end to these wars and the total reformation of the Church; she had nothing at all that anyone else might want except, perhaps, her wizard's power, which could not be transferred in any event. She knew that, while many might covet high Church positions, none wanted her job—not with the living conditions that came with it.

She took no part in the day-to-day affairs of running the Temple or the Church as a whole. She knew she was not temperamentally suited to be the administrative type. Her jobs, her only jobs, were spreading the reformation throughout World and purifying and restoring the faith and keeping it pure.

The only time she used her powers for her own gain, other than to ward off starvation or desperate thirst, was when she went out alone across the void to Anchor. There was an inevitable tendency for people to mistake the agent for the boss; she was virtually worshipped by many as some sort of deity herself, a fact that made her uncomfortable, but which had proved impossible to stamp out completely. To go out alone, particularly on personal business, she required a disguise, and transformed herself, for that purpose only, into the guise of a low-ranking priestess of far different appearance. It allowed her a measure of temporary anonymity, although she was still bound to her lifestyle.

For she did have one thing that might be used against her if known. She had a daughter, it was true, and she had done all she could to keep that fact and her daughter's identity a deep secret. She had once considered a vow of truthfulness to match her vow of honesty, but had rejected it. That much corruption she had to allow, for a good cause. The official story was that her child had been stillborn. She could hardly hide the signs in those early days, and although she'd used her powers to eliminate the stretchmarks and other signs, it was known she'd borne a child in Anchor.

Had the child been born in Flux, it would have been a painless and effortless birth, though also one that could hardly be a seat of deception. Ironically, the lying powers of Flux would not permit an imperfect birth to a wizard; only in Anchor could the child "die" as it had to. In fact, the child had been born perfectly in any event, and those involved had voluntarily submitted to changes in their memory to conform to the official version, those changes made by Mervyn in Flux. Only four people knew that the child lived and who she was: Kasdi, of course, and her cousin Cloise, who had taken the child and raised it as her own in Anchor Logh, as well as the wizard Mervyn and the Sister General of Logh, Tamara, her oldest and closest friend.

The child had been named Spirit—it was her one conceit, and seemed inevitable. She knew that she was adopted, of course—the records of Anchor were more likely to trip them up than hide them in their scheme if they had pretended otherwise— but believed that her parents had died in the conflicts raging back at that time. Nor did Spirit look anything like either Kasdi or Matson; that had been a part of it, too, as any enemy might well look at Kasdi's native land and her large family there in its search for things to use against her.

Spirit had grown into a young woman now, and it was a shock to see her these days. Olive-skinned and curvaceous, well-built as Kasdi herself never was, with a beautiful face and long, black hair and huge, soft brown eyes, she was the heartthrob of every teen-age boy in Anchor Logh.

Sister Kasdi ached every time she thought of Spirit, which was all the time she wasn't preoccupied with matters of duty. She was proud of her daughter in every way, for Spirit was also exceptionally bright and at least shared her real mother's love for animals and nature, but there was much guilt there, too. Although Spirit had been well brought up in an atmosphere and surroundings not unlike her mother's, the girl had been raised by others. Although she had kept close track of her daughter's progress, she'd really had no input into anything not genetic in her only child's upbringing. Oh, she'd visited Spirit when she could, under the guise of a priestess who was a cousin of her late mother's, but that was about it.

She was lost in such thought when she suddenly became aware of a throat clearing and snapped out of it for a while. Sister Karla, the administrative priestess for the level, stood there looking apologetic. "Sorry I must disturb you, Sister, but the wizard Mervyn is here to see you."

Kasdi brightened a bit. "Send him in! And don't hesitate to disturb me. It is not good when I think too much."

The priestess frowned a moment in puzzlement, then turned and walked back out the door. A moment later Mervyn entered, stopped, and looked around. He had the look of a very old man with flowing white hair and beard and a floor-length robe of cream-colored silk embroidered with gold trim. It was not a church robe, of course—only women could be priestesses—but one more in keeping with the image he liked to project. Only his bright, piercing eyes that seemed to look everywhere at once revealed the strength hidden in that baggy robe and those ancient features.

"
Hmph!
No furniture for guests yet, I see." He made a quick pass with his hand and then sat—in a comfortable, padded chair which simply appeared behind him. He studied her face for a moment. "You look lousy," he told her.