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

  They entered, primarily because there was no graceful way to back out, and found themselves in a cozy living room, with overstuffed chairs and a couch with flowery upholstery, a big, loud grandfather's clock that ticked away, and nigs of exotic and colorful designs on the walls in the Covanti fashion.

  Etanalon reentered from the rear of the house bearing a tray with a teapot and three teacups. She looked a lot like everybody's grandmother should look, seventies, perhaps, but in fine health, with thick gray hair and a cherubic face, round spectacles perched on her nose. She was wearing a long, baggy, print dress and looked nothing at all like any Second Rank anything. About the only odd thing about her was the glasses, which were consistent in fashion but looked to Sam as if they were entirely black and opaque.

  She put the tea down on an antique coffee table, poured, then got herself a cup and settled back in a padded rocking chair.

  There was a sense of unreality, sitting there in dim light in this Victorian setting with an old granny, sipping tea at two in the morning.

  "We are…" Kira began, but Etanalon stopped her. "I know who you are. I have been expecting you. When

  Amala contacted me and described you, I knew just who you must be."

  She saw Kira start at this, and raised a hand. "Oh, rest easy," the sorceress said reassuringly. 'If I were going to betray you there would be nothing you could do to stop me." "Then you are on our side?" Kira asked her.

  "I take no sides, dear, in such mundane conflicts. I withdrew from that a couple of centuries ago. Such mundane political maneuvering and bully boy contests are so boring after awhile, and they never settle anything except which new bully is going to be king of the hill. Since then I've been engaged in pure research, to expand knowledge, and I help out people now and again without regard to who or what they are if they come my way."

  Even Sam was shaken a bit from her lethargy by the attitude. "They say that if this one goes bad it will destroy all life everywhere. That doesn't bother you?"

  "Oh, pish and tosh! It is far more difficult to destroy all life than these petty materialistic bully boys think it is. Even if it did, the Seat of Probability would eventually reform it anyway. And if it doesn't, then it changes little in the basics, does it? A study of what really is gives one perspective after a while."

  She finished her tea, then sat back and looked at Sam through those dark glasses. "Ah, well, I see the problem, or, rather, problems," she commented. "It brings up an interesting question, though. Do you want to live, child? If you don't then there's nothing more I can do."

  Sam thought about that. "Yes and no," she responded carefully. "I want to live, yes, but not like now. Not alone and wandering around with everybody after me and no end to it. There has to be an end to it."

  "There is an end to everything," Etanalon told her. "Some of it is Destiny, predetermined by Probability, but some of it is our own choices, right and wrong. Your problem seems to be that you don't really know what end you desire. You think you were happiest when you had no choices at all and let destiny sweep you along, but that's not happiness. Mental oblivion isn't happiness. Drifting isn't happiness. It is turning oneself into a vegetable. Most vegetables are ignorant and happy as long as it rains enough and gives sunshine enough for them. But the end of a vegetable is stew, and even then it doesn't really care. So far you have been content to be a vegetable and let all the choices be in other's hands, lamenting those choices you were uncomfortable with and either blaming or accepting fate. And see where it has brought you to this state. Most people are like that, which is why they end up carrots or stew themselves. Excitement, energy, conies only to those with the courage to kick destiny in the rear end. take its thread, and shake it. They might end badly, or well, but at least they will have lived."

  "What kind of choices could I have made?" Sam asked her.

  Etanalon stood up. "What's done is done. What matters is where you go from here. If you really want to live, to grow, to make a mark, then you must undergo a trial that will not only give you those choices but compel them. It requires no strength of body but it does demand character and the courage to face a single enemy on the level of your soul, that enemy being yourself. You will either emerge strong and alive, or you will fall into the pit of your vegetative half and will consume yourself. This is your first choice. Take the treatment, as it were, or walk away, out of here, as you are. That pit will consume you if you do, but more slowly, and you will be absolved of any responsibility because you will be incapable of action."

  Sam grew uneasy. "What kind of trial?"

  Etanaton shrugged. "I can not say because it is never the same for any two people. There may be other methods, but this is mine. Even I have no idea what you will face since all that you will face is inside you right now. What do you say? Take a chance or walk away?"

  "You want me to decide on this now?"

  The old sorceress smiled. "Why not now? You can debate it endlessly and never resolve it. You have been moving more by night than by day of late, as I can see, so you should not be any worse off now than later. Call this your first test. Your first real decision as a newly independent person- Choose!"

  "I I" Sam was caught completely off guard by that. Choose some kind of unknown sorcery now. without even thinking it through? This wasn't fair! This wasn't the kind of choice she craved!

  "In life," said Etanalon, "you don't get to pick what choices are there, only from those that present themselves or ones you make yourself. You very rarely have time to think about the ones that count until after you have made them."

  Suddenly Sam realized why the sorceress was putting on the pressure. This was just what she'd been talking about. The choice at least was clear, a risky cure or walk out the door. Yeah walk out the door to what? More of the same? Hell, they were probably gonna blow her head off before this was through anyway.

  "All right I'll take your test," she told the sorceress. "Ah, good! Then something still burns inside you after all. Come and follow me. No, Kira, you remain here. Have some more tea. You can not be a part of this one."

  Sam expected them to go down into some great magician's den, with bubbling pots and eyes of newts and all that stuff, but instead Etanalon led her into a small but cozy bedroom that matched the living room in decor. About the only unusual thing in it was a large, thin object against a wall covered by a black drape.

  "Remove your clothing, any jewelry, anything else you might have on," the sorceress instructed. "Just lay it here on the bed. This little journey must be taken with nothing but yourself."

  Sam did so, then stood there, wondering. Etanalon went over to the thing masked in black cloth and carefully removed the cloth, revealing an antique full-length floor to ceiling mirror. It was quite beautiful, and for a moment Sam couldn't see why it was covered. Then she looked again. The reflection was odd. Brighter than it should be, but, more, it reflected back only herself and Etanalon, not anything else in the room, against a shiny mirror finish.

  "Step up to it and look at yourself in the mirror," Etanalon told her, while getting out of the reflection and back into the doorway. Everything will be more or less automatic from that point. Go on, there is nothing there that can hurt you externally. The only wounds that you can suffer will be self-inflicted, and that's always up to you, isn't it? Go onlook in. That's it. Just look into your own eyes."

  "The last time I did something like this I had a demon possess me," Sam commented dryly, but she did as instructed.

  There was a moment of contact — eye contact with her own reflection, and a sudden but very brief sense of disorientation, and suddenly she was no longer standing in the bedroom of the sorceress but instead within the mirror itself. She looked back but could see nothing but another mirrored wall. She turned again and looked ahead at her best reflection, such as it was.

  Now what? she wondered. Do f just stand here staring at myself or what?

  "What do you want to see?" her reflection asked her in that deep, gravelly voi
ce she'd been saddled with since childhood, a voice that had grown only deeper with age.

  She jumped, startled, and the reflection didn't.

  "Who are you?" she asked it.

  "You," the reflection replied. "I dwell here but I have no existence, no reality, until someone is reflected within me. Then I become the mirror image left-handed to your right, and so on. But only the image is reflected, inside and out, not the baggage you bring with you. Not the spells or potions or any external things. Still, I am you. I have your mind, your memories, all of it, for as long as you arc reflected in me. I am a separate entity, but I can exist, can live, only as another."

  "Well, you didn't get much of a bargain this time," Sam responded.

  "Oh, I don't know. When you have no body, no memories of your own, it is good to be alive. I would be quite happy to step out, to live your life, if I could. What do you see in your reflection that is so wrong?"

  Sam chuckled dryly. "Well, for one thing, I'm fat." "Yes. So? Why is being fat so terrible and thin so good?" "Well, people look at you different, treat you different, when you're fat. They make fun of you. Kind'a like you're cripple or something, only it's your fault." The mirror considered that. "Then why are you fat?" "You know, if you got all of me in you. It's a curse." "Did the demon make you fat?"

  Sam thought about that. She'd blamed that demon since the start, but it really wasn't. "No, 1 did it to me. Kind'a fast, too. Boday encouraged it. She drank that love potion so I'm always attractive to her, but she didn't want nobody else to feel that way, I guess."

  "Oh, so now Boday did it. Which of you drank that love potion?"

  "She did, of course!"

  "Uh-huh. So, after that, she was no longer a free agent in these matters, but you were. You ate out of boredom, perhaps, or perhaps it was just because you felt secure and didn't have to put on for other people. You have a family tendency towards overweight on both sides. Your father was heavy, and your mother was once very heavy, wasn't she?"

  Memories, forgotten until now, reaching around the blocking points in her mind, flooded into her. Her father— big, strong, built like a wrestler. Her mother— heavy, not obese but definitely well rounded during her early memories. Herself, at nine or ten, chubby, being teased by the other girls, coming home crying, hating herself. In her teens struggling to take off the weight, fighting to keep it off… She thought she was still fat then, but how she'd love to be that weight now.

  Back in Boston, that girl— Angela what's her name. Pigging out and nearly skeleton thin. One time walking into the lavatory after lunch and seeing Angie deliberately forcing herself to puke up the lunch she'd eaten so it wouldn't go down and make her fat….

  And then, after the breakup, how hard it had been to keep from eating and how her mother struggled with near starvation and every fad diet in creation to get down, so she would be "presentable" to get hired. Mom always on that, "You're too fat" kick and "Thick thighs" comments. Mom went nuts keeping it off, but not Sam. Sam got to a certain point and could, it seems, go no further.

  "Then why did you stay fat?" the reflection asked her. "That was the demon. It cursed me not to lose weight until I got to Boolean."

  "That curse ended when the demon was removed from Akahlar," the mirror told her. "And yet that spell remains. It remains because you didn't really want it vanquished. Tell the truth, now. You can not lie to me, because I am you, so tell yourself the truth. Don't you really like not worrying about it?"

  The truth, huh? Well, the truth was that the reflection was right. She was generally eating right, without denying herself some pleasures. She was no glutton, no compulsive over-eater, not in the past few months, anyway. Oh, she might like to be a little lighter than this, but she was sick of trying to be thin for other people or watching some girl eat two ice cream bars and stay thin as a rail while she gained walking past a bakery and smelling. Even thin, she never was gonna be no glamour queen. And, well, yeah. on her own, she liked big tits, she didn't feel all that awkward, and she thought she was kind's cute.

  "Yeah. I'd like to take off some pounds, but it ain't worth that kind of fight," she admitted, knowing that billions of women would groan and gnash their teeth at that comment.

  "So being fat is no big deal to you," the mirror concluded. "That means, then, that you're only unhappy with it because of the way other people treat you. Perhaps that would be true back home or under other circumstances, but what about here and now? You envied Charley her slimness because she didn't have to work at it. But, here and now, knowing how people never seem to look inside a person or past their skin, have you noticed that people here treat you as an adult, a social equal, where Charley is always assumed to be an airhead and a bimbo? And that is so transitory. We grow older. What demand is there for a fifty-year-old courtesan? Was she not always the smart one, always getting the best grades? Give her that curvaceous body and sweet face and look what she not only becomes but enjoys being. She would be more formidable in your body than in hers."

  Again, she had to admit that the reflection spoke the truth. She had envied Charley's looks because it was an idealization of her own self, but that's what it was— an idealization. Without magic and alchemy it could never have been truly attained. And it had both limited and imprisoned her friend.

  Hell, Charley's body really was designed for only one thing: attracting men. And that it did really well. As for herself, well, that wasn't what she wanted at all, although that, too, bothered her.

  "Accepting bein' fat is one thing," she told the reflection. "but I'm a fat dyke. Always an outsider in any society. It's against God and nature and it bothers me, but it's there."

  "Indeed? If there is a God or gods, perhaps it or they have lapses. There are far worse afflictions to bear. Birth defects, retardation, cerebral palsy, whatever. And if it is mental, it is certainly preferable to becoming a catatonic or a homicidal maniac, a beaten wife or a child abuser. It harms no one, forces no one else into it, and allows the person to become a productive member of society at peace with themself. Your tendency was reinforced by Klittichom while still on your way here, as a way of insuring that if you survived him you would remain childless and thus give the elementals who empower the Storm Princess and her double an additional one with whom to divide their powers and thus weaken his own."

  She was startled at that news. "You mean it wasn't just me?"

  "No. There is a point early in childhood where the unisexual bonds are strongest, when girls prefer playing only with girls and boys only with boys. Even in the teens these boy and girl groupings exist, with your closest friends and emotional bonds being with the same sex while your sexual urges draw you to the opposite one. There is a point where the barrier is crossed, where it is possible to be as close to a member of the opposite sex as to your own and where physical gratification between the opposites is strong as well. That insures children and a next generation. For some not a lot but a very large number in real terms that barrier is never crossed. For some it is physical, a minor birth defect, one might say, with the chemicals of the mind not dropping wholly into the right places. For others it is mental. For many it is only a combination of the two. You always thought you should like boys, and wished you did, and you even resigned yourself to marrying one day. but it wasn't what you felt, it was what society and family and other people expected of you. It was worse than being fat in a society that prized thinness; it was something society considered so repulsive they campaigned against it."

  More memories of the past. Of Daddy, idealized, heroic, wise, tough, strong, yet loving her always and spending all that time with her. It was Mom— cold, always clear that she was an intrusion; an unplanned, long-term inconvenience, slapping her around for the tiniest fault, taking all her frustrations out on her kid. Yelling, screaming, fighting all the time with Daddy, too. She remembered the pain, the hurt in Daddy's face after one of those bouts. And yet, when Mom finally got her degree and decided to split, she'd fought like hell for custody, and
when they'd awarded joint custody Mom took that job twenty-five-hundred miles from Boston just to spite him. And joined that Bible-thumping evangelical. Hell and Damnation church to boot. Trying to fix her up with all those dumb guys in suits who were weenies when compared to Daddy or even to normal humanity. Not that the guys at school were much better. All that pawing and strutting and shit they did that was so, well, juvenile. The only thing in their minds was to stick that thing of theirs up every girl's dress. She needed love, not that….

  "You can't really fight it any more, you know," the reflection commented. "You could have, once, even up to the point where Boday took that potion. You might still have tost the fight, but you might not have. It is hard to say. But the tendency was there, and the spelt forced a choice, and considering your background and how you felt. there realty was no option. It was there inside you, but you chose to fight it. Klittichom ended the battle; his spell compelled that you win the fight or stop it. You could never totally win, and conditions were always against any other way, anyway. Deep down, you have been so satisfied with that choice that the spell is hardly detectable; you have made it a part of yourself. The only thing you have never done, never faced, is acceptance of it. That is what tears at your mind. Not that you are this way and will be so, but that you still feel unnatural, an outcast, somehow wrong or deformed. You keep treating it like some kind of disease that will pass or waiting for a cure to be discovered. It hampers your actions, limits your freedom. It is killing you."

  "What the hell can I do? It don't seem right, somehow, that's all."

  "Forget that. What's right is what's right for you, not everybody else. It's not what could be, it's what is. You didn't pick it, and it's not your fault, and you can't change it now. You really don't want to at this point, it's not a crime, it's part of what you are. Who really cares? Society? Yeah, they'd rather see you miserable or trapped forever in a loveless, sexless marriage and getting so miserable you finally become a drunk or an addict or kill yourself. That would make them happy. If it wasn't your choice to be this way, then you're as natural as they are. You just scare 'em 'cause some of them are afraid maybe it's in them. too. That same society that doesn't blink an eye when young girls are sellin' themselves on street comers, or thinks it's too bad but not scary that other girls are rotting their minds with drugs and booze, or who can accept the idea of teenage girls havin' babies and rotting on welfare— yeah, they're the ones who say you're a greater evil than the others. They can forgive the others, right? But not you. You're not hurting nobody, not even yourself. Makes you think, don't it?"