Masters of Flux & Anchor

440 Pages·1992·1.21 MB·English

by  Chalker Jack L

Page 1
He smiled.
Ivan knew that these were mere projections, a false wizard's convincing and
threatening show of his or her own imagination without real threat. He had a
rifle in his saddle but did not draw it, instead waiting for the attackers to tire of
this and show themselves.
They moved in on him slowly, warily, but with determination. A dugger cult, he
saw, fifteen or twenty of them; all misshapen by their own inner fears. All were
naked, howling savages, so deformed that it was impossible to tell their sex or
their original looks, save one, who was dressed in tattered hides. That would be
the leader. They all left no doubt that their intent was more than to rob; they
were quite ready to pounce on him and eat both him and his horse.
He traced a small circle with his hand, and the advancing creatures stopped. He
watched them strain against nothing, an invisible barrier he had simply decreed
into existence. Some gave up and turned to retreat, but found an identical barrier
to their rear.
Ivan surveyed them imperiously, then pointed at the leader. "You!" he called out,
in a thin, nasal voice that nonetheless had the confident ring of command in it.
"Come forward!"
The leader looked nervous, but realized that he was trapped and had to deal with
a new situation. He approached the invisible barrier and seemed almost surprised
to see that it gave way for him—but when the others tried to follow, they were
stopped cold.
Close in, the leader showed himself to be a creature with a round, ugly face that
had all the right features in distorted positions. The eyes were huge and bulging,
and the mouth sagged on one side, revealing sharp, pointed teeth. The leader
stopped before Ivan.
"Can you speak?" the man on the horse asked calmly.
"Oh, yes, sir," the cult leader responded. "Gody speak real good."
"I'm sure," Ivan commented aloud, mostly to himself. He noticed that the dugger
held a small object in his hands, almost fondling it. "You're not frightened of
me?"
"Gody fears none!" the creature responded. "Gody true wizard with this
!" He held up the object and looked at it, and from it sprang a powerful beam of
pure energy, racing straight at the rider.
Ivan had been prepared for it. He held up his hand and casually deflected the ray;
and suddenly, it was gone. Gody looked concerned, then puzzled.
"I know those toys," the rider said scornfully, "although goodness knows where
you picked one up." They were, in fact, small Flux power amplifiers created
from the models of the huge ones built years ago by his old associate, but they
were strictly rationed and carefully controlled.
"They are adequate for some things, but they have a weakness."
Gody looked down at the little cube, not quite understanding why it didn't work.
Suddenly the top flew off, and a huge number of paper streamers flew out in all
directions. The dugger chief yowled in fury.
"They are just machines," Ivan explained patiently. "A good wizard has no more
trouble with them than with guns and knives."
Gody knew when he was licked. "Sorry, sorry. Master. Will not trouble you
further. . . ."
Ivan thought for a moment. "You're not really hungry, if you had that box, so
this was just for the principle of it. Tell me—do you know this area of Flux
well?"
The dugger looked confused, but at the moment was willing to go along with
whatever the wizard said. "Yes, Master. Know from Anchor to Hellgate to
Anchor again. Can read strings, can
Gody, with. . . ." He looked down sadly at the box.
"I will restore your little toy," Ivan told him.
"Oh, thank you, Master! Kind Master!"
"I will give you even greater power than you have dreamed of. But for this, you
must perform a task for me."
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Gody was very interested now. "Anything, Master! Name it, Gody do!"
"Very well. Attend me, I will give you powerful spells, and yet another toy. The
task I set for you is very dangerous, so you must do it exactly as I say. I will tell
you how to capture a powerful wizard. You are to do so, and then take the
wizard where I say. I will know when you have done this, and I will give you
power."
"Tell! Gody and his people will do as you command!"
"I know you will," Ivan responded. "My spells will guarantee it. If you serve me
well, there are great rewards for you. I may have other tasks for even greater
rewards. But if you do this wrong, you and your people will die horribly. You
understand?"
"Gody understand. Master, oh, yes. But—what you doing out here, such
powerful wizard?"
"Fishing," replied Zelligman Ivan. "And I caught what I was after."

2

DYNAMICS OF DISTURBANCE

"In the old days, folks knew they were at war as soon as the first attack was
launched,"
launched,"
remarked Mervyn, high wizard of World, chairman of the Nine Who Guard.
"Now, it seems like we damn near lost the war before we even know we've been
shot in the back." He nudged his brown horse a bit to increase the pace.
His companion was a strikingly beautiful woman, dressed all in the black of
stringers, and wearing a gunbelt with two large and menacing black revolvers
perched one per hip. She was very tall and slim, but a flex of her muscles
showed strength in both arms and legs that few men could match. Her skin was a
smooth chocolate brown, her eyes large and jet black, her hair and brows a
striking silvery white that provided both a startling beauty and a stunning
contrast.
Unlike most female stringers, she wore her hair long, letting its silver gleam
down her back halfway to her very trim waist. Her horse, too, was of the
blackest black, but the mane of the large beast was the same silver as her hair.
Clearly she was a stringer wizard of some power, and, therefore, one to be
avoided by all sane people.
"Surely it is not as bad as all that," she responded to the old man's comments.
"Any plot unmasked before it is completed is a failure."
"Perhaps. I hope you're right. But a plot is only a failure when it fails. You're
good, and you've got much talent and experience, but I fear you are very young,
my dear. I am over seven hundred now. Seven hundred years of fight."
She looked at the small, frail-looking man in the green robe and sandals, the
wizened bearded face and long, scraggly strands of white hair flanking a bald
pate making him look every bit as old as he claimed to be. and shrugged. "A
winning fight," she noted.
He shrugged. "I can win a thousand times. Ten thousand.
They only need to win it all once. I'm getting very old for this, maybe too old."
"You only look that way because you like the image," she taunted. "You could
look and feel like anything or anybody you wanted, as can I—and I don't have
half your power over Flux."
"Yes you do. In fact, I'd say your potential is as great as anyone's I have ever
"Yes you do. In fact, I'd say your potential is as great as anyone's I have ever
known, but that's true of most genuine wizards. If you can handle the Flux, you
can handle it easily and in any way you want. It's the mind that makes the
difference—intelligence, experience, and knowledge, which are the keys to
anything. Your mind, for example, keeps you from such totality of control.
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Not your intelligence, certainly, but the way you see yourself and your place on
World. You are content in the Guild and with what it offers; you are not one to
sit for ages in study and practice as I have, perfecting your talents. You inherited
your looks and your power from your mother, but there is too much of the father
in your soul."
She chuckled. "He was never more than a false wizard, a conjuror of illusions
with no substance.
But he feared no wizard and killed the strongest. That tells me more about where
real humanity lies than creating my own little world and playing goddess so long
that I get to believe my own publicity."
He shrugged and changed the subject. "Have you encountered any Soul Riders in
your travels?"
She nodded. "Yes, three in fact. They seem to stick close, one to a cluster, or,
perhaps, one to a Hellgate."
"No, one to an Anchor. Twenty-eight in all, in fact. Tell me—what did you think
of them?"
"Very little, really. They rode inside wizards of varying types, with no clear
preference so far as I could see. The hosts gave off curious double auras, and
were difficult to truly focus on with magic, but the wizards did not seem
extraordinary or even very ambitious."
"Ambition comes when the masters of the Soul Rider command it, and not
before. I've studied one closely in my cluster the past century, and there is no
question that the Soul Rider is as much a tool of something or someone else as
the host is of the Soul Rider itself.''
"I shouldn't want one, then. Bad enough to have something influencing your life.
Worse to know that they, too, are but puppets of yet another. Who? The goddess
of the Church, or something greater?"
"Greater, I think, and lesser as well. The Riders are creatures of pure energy,
"Greater, I think, and lesser as well. The Riders are creatures of pure energy,
minds without bodies, that's for certain. Their number and their deeds are too
well ordered and well reasoned to be random, yet they are individualistic enough
that I cannot see them as conjured beings.
More than once I've touched their thoughts, and touched briefly as well the
orders from their masters, but it only compounds the mystery. The mathematics
of it is both very simple and very complex, as all of the messages consist of only
two distinct parts. There is only on and off, open and close, yet the messages are
impossibly complex and impossible, too, to translate or decipher."
"On and off," she mused. "Sounds like a machine."
"That was my very thought. If machines could think, this is what it would be
like. That has driven me to despair, that thought. If the gods are machines, then
where are they? Who built them? And to what purpose?"
"Perhaps to no other purpose than keeping the Hellgates closed," she suggested.
"I have thought of that, but it brings up unpleasant implications. If that is their
sole purpose, then their mission is to keep us down at all cost, to make certain
we do not interfere. We are learning now at a great rate, Sondra. The Codex has
given us much, and sooner or later we will find the missing books, those which
give the answers to the really big questions. What then? Will they turn on us as
the enemy and slap us down to barbarism as they might well have done before?"
"Don't worry so much. Those books probably don't even exist anymore."
"They exist," he said gravely. "Years ago one of the Seven, Coydt van Haas by
name, had collected enough of them to do wonders. With them he built the great
amplifiers that increased an ordinary wizard's power a thousandfold. With them
he created a demented revenge, and resurrected long-dead beliefs and attitudes.
With them he revealed enough to destroy the foundation of a revolution. And
that was only a smattering of what those books must contain."
"My father killed Coydt almost twenty years ago," she pointed out. "If they exist,
they're in the hands of the Seven."
"No. I know just where they are, and who has them, but it does neither me nor
anybody else much good. They are in the hands of the New Eden Brotherhood,
and they are hidden and Page 4
guarded well. Occasionally scraps are fed out to keep their alliance firm with
wizards they need, but that's about all."
She made an expression as if smelling a foul odor.
"
Those maniacs. Why do we stand for it? Half of World would unite to crush
them."
"Indeed. You find the Brotherhood distasteful, then?" She looked over at him
strangely. "Not merely distasteful—repugnant. Do you mean you approve of it?
Women treated as subhumans, as animals?"
"I neither approve nor disapprove, but I wonder how strong your dislike would
be if the sexual situation were reversed? No, don't get so angry—hear me out
first. World is dominated by those with the power, both political and Flux power.
You said it yourself—wizards who act like gods get to believe they really are.
Three out of five of the most powerful wizards are female. I can name you a half
a dozen that simply reverse the Brotherhood's philosophy, but ninety percent
specialize in dominating, limiting, and oppressing their populations, although not
in sexual ways.
Some are more benevolent than others, but all are no more than variations on
what the Brotherhood has done, perhaps substituting some other group for
women as the oppressed, or being democratic about it and oppressing everyone.
Are they as repugnant to you? Or do you even think about them that way?"
"But the Brotherhood is not in Flux; it's in Anchor!"
"And what difference does that make? Not too many generations ago a small
cadre of women in the Church decided who among the young population would
be sold as slaves in Flux, and carefully and completely controlled everyone left.
Their control was more subtle, but no less authoritarian or complete. When it
was finally rotting and begged replacement, it was a woman who did it, and the
control was no less complete for having nobler motives. The Reformed Church
was out to do what it said—reform the existing church to eliminate corruption. It
did not question the order of things."