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 appar- ently 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 220 fack L. Chalker 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 de- cided to 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, as- suming 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 me quotas they furnished to the Akhbreed, productivity in- creased 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." She nodded. "He sounds like an interesting man." "Well, interesting has several connotations. He's as nutty WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 221 as they come, only in his own unique ways, and sometimes he's not at all easy to take, but. ..." He stiffened and she sensed it. "What's the matter?" "Head down and quiet! Somebody or something's coming mis way and I can't tell who or what it is." They hunched down so that the mists covered them and almost held their breaths. Charley could hear now what Dorion had heard, but it sounded odd, like muffled footsteps rather than the steady beat of horses or other beasts. Just a couple of people, very close, although she was certain there had been no one near only minutes before. The footsteps stopped, and a man's voice, very near them, said, in English, "Well, it's about time! A few more hours and we would have been forced to give you up. I was beginning to doubt Yobi's competency, or yours." Dorion knew that voice; even in English it was hard to forget it. He poked his head up and saw a man standing there wearing the buckskin outfit of a Navigator and for a moment it threw him. Then he saw the face and said, "Holy shit'" "And the same to you, Dorion. Get up. Charley. You've been itching to meet me for quite some time so you might as well do so. You can't run from me." She felt herself rise and turn towards him even though she hadn't really willed herself to move, sort of like a slave spell interacting, and then she saw the speaker with her magic sight, all deep crimson, but not like Dorion's rust-red aura; this was intense, and a churning, throbbing mass. All but a little blob of emerald green that seemed to be perched on his shoulder or someplace like that. and move a little on its own. That part confused and bothered her. "Come on, you two. Why, Dorion! That's the filthiest I think I've ever seen you, and out of uniform, too. Come on, you two. Boday is waiting for us and we have wasted too much time now. Also, I don't want to run into old Rutanibir, who's lurking all over here of late trying to find me. He's the same old incompetent asshole he always was, but I can't afford any more delays." Charley found herself following the man and yet terribly confused. Dorion sensed her total befuddlement and said, 222 fack L. Chalker "Charley—we don't have to go any farther into the hub. That's Boolean. We found him—or he found us." Boolean! Here! Alive! And with Boday! It seemed too good to be true, coming out of the blue as it was. And yet, after this, this was the great Boolean, the wizard of wizards, sorcerer of sorcerers? He sounded so, well, ordinary, more tike her old high school English teacher. She wondered just what he looked like. Then an unsettling thought hit her, and she whispered to Dorion, "Arc you sure? Remember how the adept fooled Boday and me." Dorion shrugged. "Fairly sure. Might as well accept him, anyway, since if it isn't him, then there's nothing we can do about it." "You're going to have to tell me how you wound up a slave with a ring in your nose without first being defrocked, Dorion," Boolean said as they walked. "You know the rules of the Guild. You defrocked yourself when it happened. Can't have anyone with the power enslaved." He paused. "Save it for now, though. We have a long journey and a lot of time for stories once we're under way." Dorion hadn't thought of that angle to slavery. No wonder nobody had spotted him as a magician back at the camp. He wasn't one any more. It was a small loss, but it stung his ego greatly. Still, he wasn't going to admit that to Boolean, particularly within earshot of Charley. *'H—How'd you find us? And why not sooner if you could?" Boolean chuckled dryly. "Same old impertinent little twerp, aren't you? Well, you know it was kind of a crowded mess over there, and it was no mean feat keeping myself out of sight and undetected as I watched their little show. I knew where you were and I figured I could just pick you up when I was done. I knew you were there because my spells at the kingdom's borders told me so, and I had one of my associates unobtrusively there to sort of invisibly suggest to Coleel a few courses of action. But Charley vanished in that mess, and then you vanished after her while I was over surveying the damage, and I barely got Boday out of there before Rutanibir was called in. So, with all hell breaking loose and our appear- ance urgently needed elsewhere. 1 had to cool my heels and pray that Yobi's spell—which mandated that if anything went wrong Charley was to come to the capital and find me— WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 223 would lead you into the null. Glad I got you, too, Dorion, but, frankly, you weren't on my priorities list. Once Charley got into the null, though, she was in my element, so to speak. I knew immediately and got here as fast as I could." "Damn it, she'd just been raped! You expect complete recovery and cold logic from somebody who'd just been through thai?" Boolean sighed. "Well, no, but I'm not omniscient, Dorion. I really thought that fellow was far loo possessive to allow it. All right, score one for your side. I apologize to the lady, but tilings were getting critical fast." Dorion's anger was mollified somewhat by the unexpected concession, but he was still confused about the details. "But— how could you know? That she was in the null, that is?" "The spell, you poor excuse for a magician! She's keyed to me! That ring makes her mine, right? I sensed it as soon as she entered. I've been looking for it for a couple of days now. Oh—I'm sorry, my dear. Feel free to speak your mind and say what you please. Sorry for the lack of nice introductions, but time is wasting. I'm James Traynor Lang, Ph.D., al- though here I call myself Boolean. It's one of their silly customs that sorcerers have to have ridiculous trade names." "I—I hardly know what to say. What name did you say?" "James Traynor Lang, winner of the Nobel Prize in phys- ics and formerly a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You've heard of it?" "Of the college, yeah. Of you—I'm sorry." "Well, I'm not surprised. I don't think I won the prize in your world, just in mine. Our worlds are close by, but they're not identical." "Your world! Then you're not from here?" He laughed. "My dear, almost none of the Second Rank sorcerers who amount to much are bom and raised here. You've got to be a genius to be a native and a power. No, we're mostly mathematicians, a few physicists, even one engineer, god help me! Different worlds, of course, but all from the upper outplanes. For a while, most all of 'em here had German accents, but in my time English has been the language where much of the big work in math has gone on and it's displaced German as the dominant tongue of the Second Rank—thank heavens. In English we just appropriate 224 )ack L Chalker whatever local words are handy and invent new ones if needed. In German you have to mn together old words to make new ones and it gets unwieldy as hell in this environ- ment. We still have a smattering of old Germans, plus a couple of Italians, a Dane or two, a couple of Russians and even one Japanese—he's the engineer. Ah—there's Boday!" So that's why English was so popular among the sorcerers! she thought excitedly. Suddenly she didn't feel so alien and alone any more. "Charley!" Boday screamed—her only English word, really—and ran to her, picking her up off the ground and hugging her. "Boday is so happy to see you! That you are all right! We were afraid we would have to desert you here in this desolate place!" "All right! Calm down!" Boolean shouted. "I wish I could give you time to sleep and feed you filet mignon and get you bathed and rested and all that, but. first of all, my old quarters have been kind of blown to heaven in little particles or changed into tree-lined swamps. Second, in spite of my getting to Boday first, they know where our missing Sam is. She's in a Covantian colony and the only lucky part is that she's stuck in the middle of nowhere in a place that's damned hard to get to, and I had somebody there to slow the bastards down. But time is wasting and it's a long trip, and we still have to beat them or she's dead and probably this was all for nothing. Crim can't keep a whole horde down forever—he's got the same problems with geography they do." "They've got Second Rank sorcerers," Dorion pointed out. "How come they can't get there by the quicker routes that only sorcerers use well ahead of us?" "Because they don't know where she is. Without Boday, they're at the mercy of a mercenary bastard free-lancer named Zamofir who's been dogging her the whole way. He found her the same way Crim did, but Crim can't break that damned spell she's under so there was no use in him rushing to her first. He was better used guarding the door. Zamofir's going for the big payoff, biggest of his career. He tells them where and they don't need him any more. Of course, if he fails, he'll be enslaved to the demons in the netherhells for a few thou- sand years of torture, but he's going double or nothing for the big payoff and he knows it." WAR OF THE MAELSTROM 225 "Zamofir," Charley repeated. "The little man with the moustache? The bastard who joined up with the raiders on the train?" "That's him. He's very good at what he does, which is anything at all that pays handsomely. No morals, no scruples, nothing. This is a rare time when he's doing his own dirty work instead of hiring it done, but since he took responsibility he also takes the blame or the reward. Now—Charley, you can ride with Dorion, since you make such an interesting couple. Dorion, lash her down and hold her tight. We're going to have to make real speed here. Boday, you take the point in front since you're my confirmation that we're going correctly, and we'll take the rear. Don't worry about guidance—