Free 02. Empires of Flux and Anchor by Jack L. Chalker Page B

hour's ride, he'd picked the point he had judged most difficult to reach and had confederates waiting there. When the great wall came into view, there was no sign of any opposition force on the Anchor side.
    Someone was atop the wall, flashing a short signal with some sort of lantern and mirror device, and they pulled right up to the wall, stopped, and dismounted.
    From atop the wall came a large and professionally made rope ladder. Zekah scrambled up first, while Yorek covered Spirit. When the adept was atop the wall, he looked around there and on the other side and then came back to the edge. "O.K.! Let's move!" he shouted back to them.
    "All right, girl—start climbing. Make it fast, or I'll break that pretty nose of yours and we'll carry you. Move it! Now!"
    She hesitated a moment, could see no way out, and so did as instructed. Once at the top, Zekah took her arm and pointed. "Now down the other side. Better move quickly. He's in a bad mood."
    She hardly had a chance to look at anything before she was on another rope ladder, this one leading down to the ground outside the wall. Only then did she have a chance to stop and get her wits about her. Two monstrous, horrible shapes waited on the other side, one on either side of her and about three meters away. They were grotesque— caricatures of human beings with faces that looked like the leering living dead. Surely, if Coydt's soul showed his true self, he would look like their brother. She shuddered, and abandoned any hope of running right now. The idea of one of those things even touching her was horrible.
    She stood on the Anchor apron, a bit of solidity that extended past the wall and in the old days had presented a barren buffer through which an attacking force would have to pass to get to the wall. Beyond the apron, perhaps a hundred meters at this point, loomed the Flux.
    It looked like a solid wall of some translucent material, somewhat of an amber shade, stretching from the end of the apron as far up as the eye could follow. There were no features of any sort discernible in it, but the Flux seemed alive, somehow, with thousands of tiny firefly-like sparkles going off at any given moment. She had gaped at this sight from the wall as a student and again as a visitor to a border town, but it still gave off a cold and forbidding chill.
    Coydt and Yorek came down the other side, while Zekah continued to cover them from the top of the wall. It had been four hours since the abduction.
    Yorek ran unhesitatingly into the void and quickly returned, leading three horses. They must have been waiting just inside the Flux, but they had been totally invisible until they emerged into Anchor.
    Coydt's foul, hurried mood seemed to pass quickly now, and he visibly relaxed, looked at her, and grinned. "You like my little creatures, I see."
    "They're horrible," she muttered.
    "They were normal people once, but they went off in the void by themselves for one reason or another. Both have some Flux power—not much— and it turned on them. Alone, out there, with power, but no skill at using it, and with no wizard's protection, your own nightmares become real; you go nuts, and your outer form reflects your inner fears. You think about that as we go. Take the spotted horse there. Once inside, you'll be lost. You'll never find your way anywhere except by luck, even back here. I'll have my string on you, so you'll leave a trail I can follow no matter where you go or how you twist and turn. But if you get away, I'll leave you out there a while before I come and get you. Let you have a taste of what they went through. You think about that, and them. Once inside, I'm the only protection you've got."
    It was not a comforting thought. Zekah had pulled in the rope ladder on the Anchor side and now was down on this one. It was unlikely that their crossover point would be undiscovered for long, but they didn't need much time now. Once in Flux, Coydt's powerful wizardry made him essentially an