Changewinds 03 - War Of The Maelstrom - Chalker, Jack L Read online

  Changewinds 03:

  War of the Maelstrom

  Jack L. Chalker

  PREFATORY NOTE

  This is the climactic book in the Changewinds saga, which began with When the Changewinds Blow (Ace, 1987) and continued with Riders of the Winds (Ace, 1988). Unlike a series, this is the final part of a single continuous narrative, and is intended to be read after the first two to create a single novel in three volumes.

  In the second volume, concessions were made to provide a measure of recap and rationale for those who came in late; little such is provided in this volume, since it would at this point take a very long time to explain. If you have not read the prior volumes, buy this one now, so you'll have it, then check where you found it and buy the other two. A good, intelligent, businesslike bookstore or newsstand will have them; if not, order them or change bookstores. If you found this at a small newsstand or rack that simply can't have the space to put everything, buy it here and then drop by the nearest bookstore for the others, which the nice folks at Ace have tried to insure will have them.

  If you must, be aware that you're going to be thrown full-blown into the long and involved climax of a major plot. You might still have a good time, but you'll never get it all reading just this one. Those of you who have been reading right along with us will pick it up rather easily I've provided enough for you to get back in the groove, I think. You've been lulled for over two hundred thousand words into a rather small and private story of two people caught in another world at just the wrong time, but now that which has only been hinted at is to be fully seen, the questions fully answered, and now the Changewinds will truly Mow. It is the time for armies and swords and sorcery and much more, for literally anything might happen when die Changewinds blow….

  Jack L. Chalker

  PROLOGUE

  Seizing Destiny's Threads

  She was a short young woman, in no more than her early twenties but far older in the eyes, where it revealed damage to the spirit. She was not conscious of what her eyes showed, although it drew the attention of all others, she was dressed in a full-length blue satin robe without belt to conceal the chubbiness that only she thought was important.

  She stood on the balcony of the castle looking not at the vast forests and high mountains beyond, but rather at the sky, where clouds seemed to swirl and dance in unnatural combinations for her amusement, as indeed they did. They had always done her bidding, first with her mother's help, and then, after the Akhbreed bastards had slain her mother, fully in command herself of the weather and storms that most others, even powerful wizards, found impossible to control.

  Her mastery over these clouds and this weather and the strangeness with which the sky moved terrified most who could see it, even those who lived in the region and were now used to her experiments, pranks, and moods, but, to her, at least, something was very wrong.

  The clouds suddenly stopped their wild movements and began to sort themselves out into more normal patterns as the natural conditions were allowed to reassert their influence upon the patterns. She uttered a mild curse of frustration under her breath, turned, and stalked back inside her rooms, but she did not remain there. Instead, she went to the door, where guards with beaked faces and hands resembling birdlike travesties of her hands stood guard in crimson uniforms, pikes at the ready.

  She went down the winding stairs as rapidly as her robe, slippers, and dignity would allow and then stalked down a hallway that was the only unguarded one in the entire castle. It had no need to be; he who lived and worked on this level was one to be protected from rather than the other way round, and only she of any of them would dare even enter this one level without first asking permission.

  Klittichom, Horned Demon of the Snows, master sorcerer of the Akhbreed, was in his study working as he usually did on his magic box. No one else there understood what the box was or what it did; it was one of those great magical things that only the Akhbreed sorcerers had or understood, although it looked somewhat like a mechanical device, with a lot of little buttons all clumped together, on each of which was a different magical symbol none but the Akhbreed could decipher, but which Klittichom used with rapidity to create his spells and do whatever else it was that sorcerers of his rank did.

  The magic was in the square, barely the thickness of a hand, on which strange symbols like those on the buttons but grouped almost as if they were, well, words occasionally with small pictures of unknowable things would appear in bright blue against a metallic gray background.

  A tiny little alarm sounded and a small red light wept, on just above the buttons, and Klittichom cursed and sighed, and for perhaps the millionth time since he himself had arrived unexpectedly on this strange world of Akahlar, he wished at least he'd had an extra battery charger. It had taken him a good two years after setting up here just to rig a way to adapt the localized and unstable current used in the Akhbreed castles for basic electricity so that it would recharge the damned thing.

  The woman burst into the room at just that moment always the worst moment, he grumbled to himself, when he was in the foulest mood. She alone could get away with it and know he would check his considerable wrath, although he had fried people with a glance or turned them into stone for less effrontery than this. It wasn't out of any love or respect for the woman, or any relationship, either. She wasn't all that bright, really, which was to his advantage, but he needed her as he needed his magic box and all his other tools of power, and she knew it.

  "You might try knocking," he said acidly.

  "This is serious," responded the Storm Princess sourly, in a surprisingly deep, almost mannish voice. "It has happened again. First the dizziness, then the sudden weakening of power and control. It was intermittent, but stronger than any of the last times. I have not felt such a lack of control since control passed to me upon the murder of my mother. Something is very, very wrong, wizard. Dangerously wrong at this stage."

  He tried not to betray the fact that he was as concerned about this as she was by maintaining a calm and clinical tone. "Yes, I have been increasingly concerned about these lapses of yours and I have been trying to analyze what is causing them."

  "It's that girl! The one you have failed after all this time to locate, let alone kill. She invades my sleep and creeps in comers of my mind."

  "Your twin, in fact," he responded, nodding. "1 agree that she is at the root of this, but not in the way you think. She has the same power as you, but it is untrained, armed only by emotion, and would be no match for you. No, it's something else- A new factor has been added to the equation, and. yes, you are right, our inability to nail her hide to the wall is the root of our problem. Somehow she, or fate, or, more likely Boolean, has come up with something we failed to anticipate, some new equation that is challenging the neat and ordered set we were dealing with. Do not be too hard on me, my dear. I have killed you in a hundred worlds a hundred times; it was inevitable that I'd miss at least one of you. The problem was that there were too many of you in various worlds of the out plane; our very attempt at insurance drew attention to what we were doing and allowed Boolean to finally figure it out. Forget recriminations. We must now deal with what conditions we have."

  "And just what are those conditions?" she demanded to know. "Am I losing my powers or what? And, if so, what comes of all our planning, all our schemes, all the blood and hopes of our vast but fragmented army and the oppressed people all this would liberate?"

  He sighed. "You aren't losing your powers, but they are being diluted, almost as if yet another version of you was"

  He sn
apped his fingers. "No! Blast me for a fool! It's so obvious that it never once occurred to me! In spite of my precautions the worst happened anyway! Blast!"

  He was clearly angry as hel! with himself, and even she grew a bit nervous when he was this way. He didn't like to show that he still had a human side left to anyone. Under normal circumstances she might have left him for a while to coot down, but this was a unique circumstance. It was her powers that were in question here, and her powers were all she had.

  She would never have believed that she had a near total immunity from his true rages; at least, she would never have believed why she did. He needed her very much, simply because he needed someone he could talk to, rant and rave to, just interact with, who wasn't so terrified of him that they were clearly play-acting. The fact that she was neither smart enough nor sophisticated enough to understand much of what he discussed was actually a plus. Ignorance was often the safest confidant.

  "You know what is causing this?" she prompted him, trying to divert him from his anger.

  "Yes, yes! It's obvious now! And Boolean probably had nothing at all to do with it. I have kept you too sheltered, my dear. Had I considered this threat I could have dealt with it, but no more. That girl out there Boolean's Storm Bitch she's gone and gotten herself pregnant!"

  The Storm Princess looked surprised. "That is all it takes to cause this? that she be pregnant? Why did I not hear of this before? Out there, on her own, it was almost inevitable sooner or later."

  He sighed. "I thought not. When I sucked them down to Akahlar I had them in the Maelstrom you created for me. I was about to shove them into the storm when Boolean appeared. He took me completely by surprise. I had no idea until that moment that even he suspected what was going on, nor certainly that he would have the skill, let alone the guts, to tempt the Changewind. I had to draw my attention away from the girls in order to block him. He actually challenged me in there, knowing that if either of us so much as touched the walls of the Maelstrom we would be consumed by the Changewind. It took more skill and concentration to just remain there than even I thought possible. I refused, but realized that so long as he was there and the danger so real I had no chance to make a stab at the girls, who were being drawn down and past me. I could have removed them, but to take my concentration off Boolean would have given him the opening to destroy me. Still, with Boolean in the act, I knew that there was at least a slim chance that our quarry might elude us in Akahlar, where they could not be so easily located. The flow of air from the storm is always an upward spiral, as you know. I risked a small spell, down, below all of us, figuring that Boolean would not notice such a minor thing directed elsewhere than at him or the girls and he did not. The spell caught in the spiral and came up, lost in the overwhelming blast of power coming from the storm's walls."

  "Just what did you do?" she asked him, not quite following all this.

  "They looked so similar I couldn't tell which girl was which," he replied. "Two terrified teenage girls pouring out every emotion possible it was confusing. As the resemblance struck me, though, I knew it would also strike Boolean. I know how he thinks now. I knew what he would do, and I knew that one had to be in so many ways your duplicate. He would inevitably make one look just like the other to carry on the confusion, but it would be merely physical. I knew that at their age and stage they would not be certain of their own minds and feelings, and so I made them choose and harden the extremes which conflicted within their natures. A yin and a yang, as it were, so that they could be differentiated. Our target would become a lover of women and gain no pleasures from a man; the other, the false one, would tilt to the other extreme. A simple system, and, yet, one Boolean could do nothing about without negating the duplication as well, and one that would make our quarry stand out in our society and, not incidentally, would prevent the natural experimentation that might have resulted in a pregnancy."

  "With all that I have undergone I am yet a virgin, although I do not know why I was not violated in those early days. I have chosen celibacy, which she certainly has not."

  "You weren't violated because it was your power that interested everyone, and there was a great deal of fear that virginity was a part of it. Needless, as it turns out. You are celibate by choice because your nature makes you incapable of desiring a man and you hide, as she did, from your attraction to other women by denial. Yet your mother was like that, and hers before her. It is a part of it."

  "How could my mother have been thus?" she demanded angrily. "She had me and her mother had her, and we were not products of virgin births!"

  "They carefully picked the fathers in elaborate rites, and then stood for it in order to bear their heirs," he responded. "The gift, or curse, of the Storm Princess included this always, because one of such powers must be apart from society, both above and different from its rules and conventions, so as to never compromise that position of power. In the absence of a Storm Prince, who does not exist, it was the way to distance the paranormal from the normal, and as a part of the gift itself it is an essential part of a Storm Princess's makeup. But she had not yet fully realized or accepted her different nature and was still experimental. I thought by freezing it I would preclude a child."

  She frowned. "Well, consider it now, because it is done. Boolean must be laughing at you now. You can not deceive the master deceiver."

  "Boolean!" he spat. "He has a damnably charmed destiny! Head to head Boolean is easy to deceive. His brilliance may be equal to mine, but he lacks both talent and imagination. He is the brilliant thief, the master trickster, bright enough to comprehend what the greatest minds come up with, and steal it and make it his own, but incapable of coming up with it himself. Why, right now I have him convinced that four Akhbreed sorcerers await his exit from Masalur; four who together could crush him or keep him for me to finish. That is what imprisons him there that belief. It was easy enough to fake convincingly. We sorcerers have certain procedures for checking for dangers. It was enough to show him that danger clearly lurked in sufficient force by all the signs. Would that I truly had four such allies!

  "Still," he added, "it is a trick more in his style than my own, which is mostly why it worked. He has preyed upon me for a decade because of my naivety in such things, but I am capable of learning a lesson well."

  "And yet she is pregnant anyway, and possibly by Boolcan's own machinations."

  "Nonsense!" He spat. "The failure was mine, so easy to see in retrospect. I, who have sent thousands to Hell, somehow never considered rape. And by our own agents, too! Those bestial idiots with Asterial's band were dumb enough to probably gang rape the lot of them. Blast! And probably the only time she was or ever will be penetrated by a man happens to be the time she is most fertile' Destiny fights my attempts at meddling with it!"

  She shook her head in puzzlement. "Still, how can this matter? It only incapacitates her and makes her more vulnerable. Another one who can control the storms I can understand, but a baby? An unborn one at that!"

  He sighed and looked at her as if she were a small and not overly bright child. "You are the only daughter of an only daughter who herself was an only daughter, and so on, as far back as your line goes. That is the only way to pass along the powers of the Storm Princesses, and that is why it is such an exclusive club. The power connects the child to the mother. That power is not within you; it is, rather, drawn to you. You are a magnet, a lightning rod, for it. The power is finite, and connects you to her and her to you as well in a nebulous way. That is why you dream sometimes of her and she must of you. But now there is a child and it grows within her and is physically connected to her. You are magnets, all three, but together those two are a larger magnet and therefore a stronger one. Whenever she draws power in, the power draws also to the unborn child. You get less. The older the child grows, the more power she will draw as well as the mother, and you will be the loser. Do you understand?"

  The Storm Princess felt like she wanted to sit down and fast. "You, you mean that the
mother and child together will draw so much power to them that eventually I will get none?"

  "Well, not none you will always attract that part that is closer to you and far from them since you will be a stronger relative magnet but it is true that you are being slightly weakened now, on an intermittent basis, and it will get worse- It is also true that the two of them together, even one as a babe in arms guided by her mother, would be able to totally draw your power were they in the same sector. This is very dangerous, and may just be what Boolean is counting on. Time, which has always been on our side up to now, has become our enemy and Boolean's friend. We can wait no longer." He strode over to a massive and mystical red tapestry-covered wall and pulled a bell rope.

  "Then the solution is obvious," she said, steeling herself. "No matter what, I, too, must arrange to conceive a child."

  He sighed. "My dear, there can be only one heir to the powers in all Akahlar. If we fail to eliminate her before the child is born, there will be no other. The moment she conceived, your own capacity for conception ceased. No, we must act pragmatically now with what is possible."

  The Executive General of the Annies entered in response to the bell pull, his toad-like face and bulging eyes seeming strangely incongruous atop the resplendent blue, gold-braided uniform and shiny boots. He stood there and bowed slightly to both of them.

  "General, we have two problems and we must now advance our timetable to meet them," Klittichom told him. "We must have the duplicate. It's the fat one we want, and there is no reward too high to pay for her dead. I no longer need to see her. The one who kills her need only bring me evidence of the deed and he can name his own price."

  A snakelike tongue ran around the upper lip of the toad-faced general. "Very well. Do you still want the decoy? I ask although it appears they both lead extraordinarily charmed lives."

  "No, don't capture the pretty whore, but put people on her and keep them with her. She and that crazy artist both. They are the magnets that may draw our quarry out from wherever she is. Just do not allow them to get all the way to Masalur hub and Boolean. Take them alive if possible at that point but not before, and hold them for me. Something in the back of my mind keeps telling me that they are the key to locating the duplicate but I can't put my finger on just how yet, so keep them ready. I want to know where they are and be able to put my hands on them if it comes to me."