03. Masters of Flux and Anchor (4 page)

One day Mervyn sent word that a stringer named Sondra wished to meet both Cass and Spirit. Cass wasn't used to visitors and wondered what new trick Mervyn had up his sleeve to pry her from her seclusion, but he explained that Jeff had had enough of learning for a while and wanted to see the world. Sondra was willing to take him along as a wizard-dugger, and she had a long route in the northern Flux, far from Anchor. Cass decided she did very much want to meet this person.

When she arrived. Sondra proved to be a shock. She was stunningly beautiful, and the silver hair and eyebrows against the chocolate skin was even more stunning. Irreverently. Cass wondered if Sondra's pubic hairs were also silver, and finally decided they had to be. Flux magic had been used to color-coordinate horse and rider; even the saddle and butt of her shotgun were black embossed with silver.

Cass, who usually went nude, had dressed for the occa¬sion in a rumpled shirt, faded jeans with holes in them, and a very old and worn pair of boots. She felt overawed and inadequate. This was no stringer like those she'd seen before—most of the female stringers were flat and bald— and she couldn't resist the comment.

"You are a wizard, I see."

Sondra smiled and nodded, dismounting and letting her horse graze. "Yes. Mervyn says I blew my chance at greatness by going with the Guild, but I'm strong enough for my needs."

I'll bet you are, honey. Cass thought jealously, but aloud she said. "Well, I'm very strong and it didn't get me anywhere. I can see why Jeff would be eager to ride your strings, though."

The stringer laughed. "I like the effect. People remem¬ber me, and it's good for business. A little intimidating, too, I hope. If you knew what I really looked like, or the horse, either, you'd wonder why I ever left home."

It was a nice comment, although Cass didn't really believe it. Except maybe about the horse. Still, Sondra might be good for Jeff. Might teach him some humility, too, if she knew her stringers. Sondra had the same inner strength she admired in men, a toughness and resourceful¬ness that shone through any disguise. She knew she could come to like, even admire, Sondra, if she weren't so damned awesomely beautiful.

"Mervyn says that your routes are all way up north, past Anchor. How'd you happen to meet Jeff?"

"It was a set-up. I was brushing up on some technique at Globbus and Mervyn spotted me and suggested it. I took pains to look Jeff up—apparently he'd been talking about going out on a train lately anyway—and I liked him. If he learns some self-control, instead of going off half cocked at everything, he's going to be quite a man."

That was the right thing to say to a grandmother.

"Well, I can't see any way of preventing him from doing anything he wants to do. What is he, now? Seventeen?"

Sondra looked surprised. "Twenty."

Cass felt ancient. "Mind if I ask how old you are?"

"Thirty-four, and I don't mind a bit. But I've been riding string since shortly after Jeff was born. It's still a dangerous profession, but less so for a full wizard. Most of the stringers are false wizards, you know."

Cass nodded. False wizards could conjure up anything as convincingly as a true wizard could—only it wasn't real. Most stringers didn't need the full power; there were just enough like Sondra to make most folks nervous attack¬ing any stringer at all. "Uh—you say you're from up north. You ever run into an old retired stringer named Matson?"

"He's my father," Sondra said softly.

Cass's mouth dropped. "You're the little girl with the talent who was interested in the Guild?"

"I suppose that's how he'd have said it. That's why I'm here, really. Spirit is, after all, my half-sister, and I've heard a lot about you that doesn't make the rounds of history or gossip."

"I'll bet," she said sourly, recovering somewhat from her surprise. "So Jeffs actually your half-nephew, or something like that. Does he know?"

"No. I'm saving it for when he tries to put the make on me the first time on the trail. But if you think I should—"

"No, no! It's perfect! It'll take him down three pegs! Come on—I'll find Spirit, and then we'll talk a while."

They spent the day just talking and roaming around the small garden. Spirit didn't know who the stranger was, but was obviously as impressed by her appearance as Cass had been. Sondra was distressed by the woman's spell-enforced condition—although Spirit seemed happy enough—and she examined the spell. She had been doing some work with more advanced sorcercy, but this one was a beauty, so complex and riddled with traps that she could well under¬stand why no one had broken it. No one but one.

For Suzl, supercharged briefly by the energy flowing directly out of the Hellgate, had managed somehow to do it, aided by the mysterious creature that guarded the gate. But no one else had ever been able to achieve that energy level, and no one else had ever directly contacted one of the mysterious spirits—and Suzl hadn't known why.

Sondra felt relaxed and with family, but she was diffi¬cult to get to know or understand, as were so many stringers. She loved her work, that was clear, and was very good at it.

"You never think of settling down, having kids?" Cass asked her.

"No, not really. This may sound a little cruel or selfish, but I don't want the stuff that comes with kids. I was never very good with them, and they tie you down for years and limit your freedom. Some people are cut out for it and some aren't. I'm surprised you never found somebody else and had more, though. Seems to me you could just pick a good-looking wizard and have at it."

"No, I don't think so. Not now, anyway. I have to admit that there's a temptation to try and replace some of the lives I've cost, maybe to really experience the joys and pains of raising a child, but I can't bring myself to take that kind of responsibility anymore. We're totally different, Sondra, but in one way we're the same—we're wizards, different from other people. Wizards don't get sick, they never die of natural causes, and they live until some accident or attack kills them. Lite's not the same with us."

"I know. That's probably why there are so few wizard children. We once did as much of a trace as we could on Mom's family, and found she was related to most of the best-known wizards on World. They're mostly related, too, in one way or another. There's probably no more than fifty or a hundred families that have it."

"Not me—I was an Anchor girl."

"But you have it in the blood somewhere. It's passed down, sometimes full, sometimes diluted, sometimes skip¬ping a generation or two, but it's there."

Cass walked her back to the garden entrance, where the great horse still grazed. Sondra hugged her and mounted the horse, and Cass walked with them to the Fluxland border, which would open only to Cass or Mervyn or a few trusted aides of Pericles from either side. Cass walked through the barrier and into the void, and Sondra followed.

"You take care of him, Sondra—and yourself, too!"

"Don't worry—and thanks. I'll be back." And with that, the strange, dark, beautiful woman rode off into the void.

Cass sighed and watched her vanish, then turned to the garden once more.

She felt a sudden, tremendous shock and jolt, then collapsed in a heap.

Sounds were deadened in the void, but Sondra heard the sharp crack of some kind of weapon and immediately turned and rushed back, drawing her shotgun at the same time.

They were on her in a moment—horrid, drooling, yowl¬ing creatures of a dugger cult. She pushed them away and continued, and when others jumped up she fired both barrels of hard shot into the throng.

She didn't see Cass anywhere. Had she been somehow killed or taken, or had she made it back inside? Sondra halted, and her great horse reared on its hind legs and came down again. Now she charged straight at the densest part of the group, and before her swept a fierce wall of flame that caught those who could not retreat. There was another sudden loud crack, and a blue-white ray lashed out and missed her and her horse by several meters. She turned in the direction from which the ray had come and saw an ugly dugger dressed in tattered furs and jewelry made from human bones fumbling with a large device on a tripod.

She sent out a line of force that struck the projector and caused the dugger using it to cry out and fall back. She was about to close on the thing and make it tell what this was all about when she was suddenly struck by nausea and dizziness. She reined up short and looked back and saw immediately what was happening.

The Fluxland was dissolving!

She abandoned all thought of the duggers for the mo¬ment and stared at the phenomenon. A Fluxland was just a thought, a tiny world created out of a wizard's imagination and held together by the force of that will. Mervyn had created this place, but it was modified and fine-tuned by Cass, and now she knew that Cass was either dead or so nullified that not the tiniest thought or will concerning this Fluxland remained. Mervyn's structure should still have held, but it was under some sort of psychic assault from outside as well, taking advantage of Cass' incapacity.

She couldn't tell exactly where the assault was coming from, but she knew in an instant that its power was more than a match for hers. The beautiful setting was visible now; the trees, plants, and flowers seemed to be dissolving, like a watercolor in the rain.

She thought of Spirit, alone and with no substantial power, and headed into the decomposing mess.

She found the bodies, eventually, of several of Mervyn's people, but of Spirit or Cass there was no trace. Angry at whoever had done this, knowing that she had to track them down now and make them pay, she nonetheless set off for Pericles. Not only had they harmed kin, but the only way they could have found the place was by following her there. Well, they'd made an enemy who would give her life to apprehend them, but who was smart enough to know when she needed reinforcements.

4

WELCOME TO HAPPINESS

The men stood around the still, small body of the woman and examined it as if it were some sort of specimen. One was Zelligman Ivan, ever his dapper self, while a second was a tall, beefy-looking man with a thick black mous¬tache and the uniform of an officer in the New Eden forces. Looming over the figures was the black cubical shape of a full-blown Flux amplifier.

"Something is troubling you, old comrade," Ivan noted. "You stare at her as if she will suddenly rise and strike you down."

"She looks so tiny, so frail, so—vulnerable." the other man noted. "Not at all like one who toppled the old Church and gave us a real run for our money."

"Not to mention beating you in a head-to-head fight." Ivan retorted. "I fail to see why she makes such an impression. You have met before."

"Long ago and before we knew what we had," the big man pointed out. "She is the only one who ever bested me."

"And now you wish revenge?"

"No, no. That's not it. I have an innate respect for power. For those who have it and those who have the guts to use it. In a sense, that's us lying there, Zelligman. Somehow—I just don't know how to put it so you'd understand—it seems wrong to do this, particularly this way. To lose a fair fight is one thing, but there's some¬thing in this business that threatens us as well. These machines make us obsolete. Anyone with the tiniest bit of the power can best the strongest of us with one of those."

And Ivan did understand. World was a rough and brutal place, but it was based on power—power inherited and the skill and will to develop and use it. There was a certain honor and comfort in the system despite that, one which the amplifiers violated.

The little wizard sighed. "World as we know it is in its final days anyway, Gifford. You know that. New Eden is our tool and our weapon. Don't despair so much yet, my friend. It will take great knowledge, skill, and finesse to do what must be done here. This is using a cannon to trim a gnat's wings without killing it."

What they were attempting was in fact that sort of operation, and it had never been tried before. Ivan mounted the console command chair of the amplifier and trained the beam focus to its narrowest point, then concentrated on the still figure as Gifford Haldayne stood behind him looking nervous.

The first problem was the removal and memory storage of the spells Cass had on her. Many of these were protec¬tive in nature and self-imposed; others were placed there by ones with skills perhaps equal to or superior to Ivan's own, such as Mervyn. The amplifier certainly helped, but while the spells were far clearer and easier for him to read and understand, it required intense concentration, since the amplifier quite literally gave him a million times more details and information than he needed. It was simply not designed for this close work.

Ultimately, though, he sighed, sat back, and sipped a drink. "She is now devoid of spells of protections," he told Haldayne. "It would have been impossible to do without this machine. Impossible. They were that good. Now we can go in and, I hope, make the very small fine tuning adjustments required."

"I don't see why we just can't turn her into a Fluxgirl and be done with it," Haldayne groused.

"Subtlety was never your strong suit," Ivan said impatiently. "She is more than the sum of her parts. She is a symbol of strength and a role model. She must believe that everything that happens, every choice she makes from now on, is a free one, for that is the only way to convince others as well. The political shocks from it will then be enormous, as opposed to the heavy-handed way you pro¬pose in which she'll simply be a casualty and therefore a martyr."

"I still don't see how you can do it. We have never understood her, and these things can only go so far. You're not even a woman. How can you make those little turns in her mind?"

"I won't. She will do it for me." He sighed and put the helmet back on. Talk to me, he whispered to her through the medium of Flux. Tell me your regrets, your fears, your inner angers and desires.

It took several hours, but the pattern fell into place with greater ease than he'd expected. She felt tremendous guilt for those who'd died in her name, and some large resent¬ment for the Nine who forced her into that position. She had a curious love-hate reaction to Matson, whom she at once loved and wanted dearly and yet could never forgive for walking away. Matson's image was greatly intermixed with her near-worship of her late father, and some of the attributes she found most attractive in Matson were really those of a father-figure.