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
212 jack L. Chalker
that takes time. If we're not out of there, and I mean welt 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 sec-
ond 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 weap-
ons, 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. "Be-
tween 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
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 233
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
i better ways to deal with us than shooting high-powered rifles.
i. Maybe somebody who's working for the other side and is
214 Jack L. Chalker
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 main-
tained. "There arc 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
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 215
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 victori-
ous 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 remem-
ber 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.
236 fack L. Chalker
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 pro-
tected. They were parts of old plantations here, as I remem-
ber. 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 be-
comes 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!"
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
217
"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 liter-
ally thousands of Akhbreed staves 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 initi-
ated. 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 alt 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 breed-
ing 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
218
229
WAR OF THE MAELSTROM
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