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—