Changewinds 03 - War of the Maelstrom

by Jack L. Chalker

  "How far is it?" somebody asked.

  "We are riding hard and light, but the village is out of the way and far outside me intersection point. Once we turn off the main road, it is unlikely that there will be any people at all between us and the village, so we'll be on our own but unimpeded. If we do meet anyone, kill them and go on. With consideration for the horses, it might well be seven or eight days to the village, depending on conditions. Once we get there, there is to be no quarter. Men, women, children, livestock—if it moves, it dies. Particularly all the women. If they surrender, we take their surrender, and then execute them. All are to die and all buildings and structures burned, and any boats, even so much as a rowboat, also burned. We want the place devastated, so that even if someone should escape, they would have no place to go and nowhere to turn."

  "Aw, can't we even have some fun before" somebody else started, but he cut them off.

  "Listen! We're working for a big-shot sorcerer who can reward us all handsomely or punish us beyond our wildest nightmares. If we fail, then killing ourselves before he gets the word of our failure will be the only way out. Likewise, we're in a race against another, equally powerful sorcerer. The only good thing is that he doesn't know exactly where our girl is and I do. He's got to do things the hard way, and that takes time. If we're not out of there, and I mean well out of there, before he finds the spot, then we'll get it from the other side. For almost the last two days' ride there's only a single road, in some places too narrow for two horses to run abreast, for most of the length, shut off on either side by a wall of dense and nearly impenetrable jungle. If we don't get in, do our job, and get out past that trap, we'll be caught in it. Understand?"

  They nodded soberly, and clearly a few were having second thoughts about this. Zamofir was quick to sense this and counter it.

  "There's only one reason for any of us doing this—the price. We go in, do it, get away with it, and get back safely, there is no price too high. Name your own ticket. Your own little kingdom with all the wine and honey and slave girls you want—and I mean for each of you. This is the first job I've ever had where the prize was worth any risk, and I've worked for these people a long time. They pay off for success. Nobody, however, fails them twice. Now, get your weapons, ammo, and gear and saddle up. We ride now, and go as far as we can, then get as short a sleep as we can stand, and ride some more."

  "What about the border?" one of the men asked. "Between the soldiers and the rebels it'll be hell getting through."

  "Not this one. The rebels are on our side, dummy—they won't block us. They have their orders. But there's no army, no pressures, on this side. We've drawn them all to the south and west. The most we'll have to deal with are a few officials and the usual border guards, and under these conditions we can dispense with the niceties and just blow them to hell."

  That didn't prove necessary. The border personnel weren't at all concerned with anyone going out, they were much too harried with the refugees and nervous ones from the colonies wanting in, and were more than glad to wave twenty Akhbreed through who wanted to go the other way.

  Even Zamofir was impressed with the huge numbers of people along the road, even the main road across the colony he and his men wanted. The crowds slowed his progress considerably, and in some cases stopped them dead for some time. They were in no mood for that sort of thing, but the fact was that, in this case, they were twenty against an endless stream, and many of these colonial types, even with their families, were tough and hard-looking people with plenty of fight in them as well. You could machine-gun a whole mob, but they'd just keep coming, and then there'd be a ton of folks after them and blocking the only exit. Even with all that firepower and the clock ticking, Zamofir's group simply had to wait and cope.

  The eastbound road was only slightly better, and it took them almost a week to finally make it to the final cutoff over to the sea. It was less a road than a tunnel through the jungle, dark, narrow, and forbidding, and they had better than two days on it to the settlement. At least, here, there weren't any crowds or refugees; indeed, there seemed to be no people, no habitation, at all.

  There was the sudden crack of a rifle shot, and one of the men fell backwards out of his saddle and onto the ground, where those behind trampled him. A second shot came and another man fell, and now they suddenly all pulled up and dismounted fast. The dense, forbidding Jungle was the only cover available aside from the horses, and none of the men really wanted to go into the jungle. It might be just what the shooter or shooters wanted them to do.

  "Where did it come from?"

  "I dunno! Over to the left, I thought, but the echoes made it hard to tell for sure!"

  "Is it many people or just one guy?"

  "One guy, I think. There were only two reports, both sounding the same and just about the time it would take to shoot and reload. We're like fish in a barrel on this damned road!"

  Zamofir hunched behind the horses and cursed. "Well, if you hear anything, you open up with the machine guns," he told them. Spray the whole damned area if you have to."

  "Who the hell's shootin' at us, anyways?" one of the gunmen asked him. "And why would anybody do it? They don't know who we are or what we're fixin' to do."

  "It's that damn' sorcerer, that's who!"

  "Don't be an ass," Zamofir told him. "Sorcerers have better ways to deal with us than shooting high-powered rifles. Maybe somebody who's working for the other side and is paid to delay us. But how'd he beat us here? Shit! More delays…."

  "Yeah," the man nearest him grumbled, "and we got at least another day and night in this trap of a road."

  "Well, he can't dog us all the way," the little man maintained. "There are no other roads, and even the natives here can't fly. I say we can get pinned down here and picked off one by one or we can ride like hell and leave him in our dust. When we're well clear, we'll drop one man and he'll give our pursuer the same treatment."

  "Yeah? Ever think that maybe his horse is ahead of us? That he's already gone, and maybe even now is mounted up and riding maybe an hour on and settin' up the next ambush? That's what I'd do."

  "Fuck it!" Zamofir snapped. "I'd rather be shot than face either Boolean or Klittichom. I say we spray all around, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, then we mount up, and ride as fast as we can. Either we outdistance him if he's behind or, if we're fired on again, we keep riding no matter what. If he had more than a rifle he'd have wiped us out by now. Our only chance is to get ahead of him, and if we overrun his horse so much the better. What say you?"

  "Beats hidin' out here," somebody muttered, and flicked off the safety on his machine gun.

  * * *

  After two days of being rained on, bitten by insects, and weakened by lack of food, the primitive life had lost its romantic appeal, even to Dorion. For Charley, it was about as bad as she could imagine, short of another round with those bastards back at the camp, but something that had to be endured.

  "Dorion, we will have to take chances while we're still strong enough to move," she told him. "We need food to survive."

  He nodded. "If we have to, we'll head back up towards the camp. It should be breaking down now as troops leave and as the rest move into the unchanged areas of the hub. And, if I remember rightly, there used to be a small town a few leegs in from the border, as usual. It's probably not much now, but they had orchards and stuff. If it wasn't picked clean to feed all those troops, there might be something."

  "Let's go there, then. We haven't much choice."

  It took them two hours to reach the road, and then they had to parallel it within the forest. There was a lot of traffic there, mostly wagons and such, almost all going away from the hub in steady streams. The conquerors were leaving the scene of victory now, taking what remained with them. For a victorious army who'd just done the impossible, they looked pretty damned grim.

  Much of the town had been destroyed; cannibalized for the wood and other materials to build the structures at the border, but some
of it remained. A small group of colonial natives remained; small, hairy humanoids with short, thick snouts and shiny yellow eyes the size of egg yolks, but it was hard to say whether they were the remnants of those who had lived there or if they were part of the force. Dorion did not remember seeing any of them at the campsite.

  A couple of hours reconnaissance convinced Dorion that they probably weren't part of the attack force or anybody official. Apparently they were scavengers; opportunists there at battle's end who made forays into the campsite and came back with whatever wasn't nailed down that they could get away with. There were only a dozen or so, but they were tolerated because they were the "host" race and this was, after all, their world and their region now. Too many to take on, particularly when one good yell or scream would bring some of the passing "allied" forces to their aid. And, as expected, the orchards and such nearby had been picked clean.

  There was, however, a mounting pile of discards out back, including a lot of soldier's kits—cold rations and the like. They were either quite choosy or quite wasteful, and Dorion was too hungry and in too much need to quibble. When it grew late, and the inhabitants of the town ruins bedded down and the procession halted or at least slowed to a trickle, Dorion led Charley across the road and to the back. They were not particular, and Dorion didn't give Charley the exact details and she didn't want to know. It was enough that the food was edible, that it filled, and that it wouldn't harm them. The fact that it was somebody's half-eaten garbage showed just how low they'd fallen so fast.

  "If we can get enough for a little journey, we'll head south again and off towards the west," he told her. "There's a bunch of groves and orchards down there, maybe two- or three-days' walk, that I'm sure the locals would have protected. They were parts of old plantations here, as I remember. I'll rig up some kind of shelter in the bush nearby there, and every night I'll go down and pick what we need so that they won't notice. We might be able to survive almost indefinitely."

  She sighed. "Indefinitely. Like animals. And how long would it be before we crack, Dorion? How long before we talk each other out and stop? How long before survival becomes the only reason for living? Maybe it's different with you, but you can see. The sheer boredom would kill my mind in weeks once we got set up and got a pattern established. I'd flip out, be nothing more than a naked chimp in the wild. We're not living any better than that now. No. I'd rather die than that."

  He shrugged. "What other choice is there?"

  "Dorion, we have to get out of Masalur. We have to go where they don't control things yet. Not back, though. Not where they're going. You lived here in the glory days. There must be decent colonial worlds that aren't a part of the rebellion. Ones with gentle people we might find some help from. You told me yesterday that Coleel hid out from his king and sorcerer and all for like fifteen years. We got to do that, too. You can still navigate, can't you?"

  "Yeah, sure, but…. What if I pick wrong? The only places that might be likely, and that's just by reasoning it out, are ones to the east. That was the side that they didn't attack from, probably because they didn't have enough allies there. Or we could guess at one right here—if they had to import folks from Covanti to fight, then there's got to be a lot of colonies who didn't want to join up."

  "Yeah, but you'd have to call it up from the null. I kind'a think that would draw attention. No, that east is best."

  He stared at her. "But that means going right through the camp, across'the whole null, and through part of occupied Masalur hub!"

  "Yeah," she agreed, "but it would scratch that itch in my head. It's gotta be a mess over there, and I can fend for myself in the null. Sam once did something like that. I say try it. If we're caught, we're caught. If not, we at least got a chance at some kind of life."

  "All right," he sighed. "Then we'd better eat good and cross in the dark tomorrow. And pray to whatever god you have that all the Stormriders are gone and that there are no magicians in range. Otherwise you'll go back to being a pet, and I'll be at hard labor until I drop."

  9

  Boolean

  THERE WERE STILL a of of people at the border, but a fair number seemed to be male Akhbreed slaves doing massive cleanup and even more massive burials. Apparently, with their furious working, the rebel magicians had created literally thousands of Akhbreed slaves out of both the survivors of the defending army and the locals who lived in the nearest unaffected hub areas. The slave spells were generic, and thus easy to do. They had to obey any order by just about anybody who was not Akhbreed, subject to the hierarchy of rebel rank.

  Clearly some order and better treatment was already initiated. Large numbers sprawled, asleep, on the grass where not many days before armies had waited, while others seemed to be feeding on the leftovers of the invaders.

  They appeared to be mostly males, and although some were very young, they all seemed at least past puberty. What women there were looked old, at least past menopause. Where the younger women and all the children were, Dorion couldn't guess, but he remembered the sentry's comments about breeding programs. The Akhbreed had never done much enslaving of the colonials, primarily because there were far too many of them and far too few Akhbreed, and that required subtler means. But if you could pick out just one race, known on sight by every intelligent being in Akahlar, you might well enslave it and breed it to serve. And all in the name of "justice."

  Charley shivered. "This place, this life, isn't fun any more. Thank god at least I can't have kids. Boday's potions killed off my eggs or something."

  "Sorcery can always undo alchemy if anybody takes a real interest," he responded. "Remember, the way you look was only streamlined by Boday; it was a product of sorcery at the start. Unravel that spell and the alchemy ceases to exist, like it never was. Don't feel too sure of yourself. You still want to go through with this?"

  She nodded. "It's just something I feel I have to do. Or, at least, try."

  "I can not disobey your wishes," he noted literally, but without any real enthusiasm.

  Getting across the almost half a mile of open area before the null wouldn't be easy; still, Dorion reasoned that the center along the main road was probably the really dense and active area and would remain so; further down, well down, there might be nobody at all.

  Indeed, they'd gone no more than a mile in the woods just off the border region when they were out of sight of apparently everybody. Oh, there were some tiny little dots very far off, too far for him to even make out what they were, but he wasn't as concerned with that. Taking her hand, and a deep breath, he walked her out into the open and down towards the null. He didn't rush or run; that might have attracted some attention from folks to whom they were just little dots, but his forced walk was brisk and steady and, to her credit, she kept pace with his reduced steps.

  Even so, it was about as tense a few minutes' walk as he'd had yet, and he felt tremendous relief when they reached the edge of the null itself. There appeared to be no super alarms, no complex spells or shields, along the border; why bother? The only place you could go was the hub, and that was by now crawling with rebel troops and magicians and would probably be next to impossible. It was something he preferred not to think about until he got there.

  Charley felt odd in the null mists; it gave her a sort of limited vision that was quite welcome, and it felt a bit cooler and cleaner, somehow, than the forest they had left. More, her presence in it had a certain tightness to it she couldn't explain, not to Dorion, not even to herself. Like, well, that she belonged here, doing this. That it was the proper thing to do—

  They were too weary and too apprehensive to hurry the crossing, though, taking it nice and leisurely. It was a good twenty miles across, and, while they'd slept, eaten, and drank, they had nothing with them.

  They were well out in the null, more than two hours out at least, with the fading "shore" of the colonies behind them looking far off and, now that they were within the hub, shifting and changing every few minutes. They finally decided t
o rest a bit. She was very tired, but had been waiting for him to call a break. It was only when she realized that he wouldn't call one, carrying out her command, that she called one herself. This mistress stuff was complicated.

  "Have you been thinking about where we might go, assuming we make it through?" she asked him.

  He nodded, although it was meaningless to her. "There are a couple of possibilities over on that side. Warm, good cover, and natives who didn't have as much of a grudge as many did. Boolean did a lot for Masalur—that's why they had to import troops from Covanti to supplement. He couldn't break the system, of course, but he introduced a large measure of self-government and administration in many of the worlds that had more advanced types, and even allowed colonial ownership on a limited basis of many of the commercial enterprises there. Most colonists hate their Chief Sorcerer; Boolean's probably the first to be more disliked by his fellow Akhbreed than by their subjects. Not that there weren't a few who spurned everything—you saw that type here. The Hedum, for one. But not many, out of hundreds."

  "I'm surprised the kingdom let him do any of it."

  "They didn't want to, but his power was enormous and they wanted to tap that. They let him try it in a couple of places just so they could prove to him how wrong he was, and, in the year or two after he allowed the natives to set up their own shops and keep a lot of their own profits, even from the quotas they furnished to the Akhbreed, productivity increased and unrest went down. When they all worked for the big companies or the government they worked the minimum; when they began working for themselves, on their own land, they worked like demons. They still fought extending it, but he was making headway. Now… well, I guess every colonist owns his own, huh? And all quotas abolished."