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It came like an iron-shod giant striding through a nest of snakes. It came
like all the winds of all the stars blowing at once upon the smog and fog and
illness of little Earth. It came like the turning wheel of the universe
itself, descending upon the eggshell of a merely man-made prison.
The voice of the Mass, unbarred, unmetered, roared through Chaz' body and mind
as it had roared once before; and the effect of the drug was swallowed,
quenched and drowned utterly. Like a leaf in a tor-nado but a clean leaf,
now Chaz was snatched up and whirled away.
For a while he let the Mass-force fling him where it would. But, gradu-ally
the memory of Eileen speaking to him returned, along with the de-sire and need
to hear her speak again; and for the first time he began to try to ride the
tornadic force that had saved him.
It was like being an eagle whose wings had been bound from birth, and who was
only now learning at last to soar, in the heart of a storm. There was no
teacher but instinct; no guide but the waking of dormant re-flexes; but slowly
these two took over. It was what the faculty of chain-perception had been
meant to be all along but what Chaz had not really understood it to mean until
now. The true definition of the choosing by which useless and wrong actions
were discarded, and the use-ful and true caught, to be linked to-gether into a
cable reaching to a de-sired conclusion.
So, finally, he came to control the force of the Mass or at least, close
enough to control so that he was able to form his own image of it. That im-age
was of a massive dark mountain of whirling wind, emerging from the great
crystal he imagined growing in the nutrient solution of the Mass it-self. He
had ridden the various cur-rents of that wind, now safely up from its base
where he might have been blown to tatters, or whirled away forever; and he
still had a far way to climb to its peak. But the dis-tance yet to go did not
matter. He was on the way; and by making use of as much of the Mass-force as
he already controlled, he could reach Eileen easily.
He rode the force, reaching out with his concern for her.
"Eileen?" he called.
"You're back! Chaz, are you all right?"
He laughed with the exultation of riding the Mass-force.
"I am now," he said. "I just got a good grip on the horse I'm riding, here. It
almost bucked me off at first."
"What? I don't understand you."
"Didn't you ever read those old western never mind," he said. "It doesn't
matter. What matters is, we're back in touch."
"But what happened, Chaz? You were in trouble, weren't you?"
"Somebody rigged the airsuit I'm wearing out on the Mass. It gave me a shot of
some hallucinogen.
But the Mass helped me counteract it. I'm fine. What about you? Where are you,
Eileen?"
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"In the Citadel. But I'm all right too. They're even going to let me go, soon,
they say."
" the Citadel? You mean it's a place? I thought it was an organiza-tion."
In
"It's both. An organization first, and a place second, even if the place
is well, never mind that, now. I've got something I want to tell you, Chaz "
"But just a minute. What did you start to say just now about the Cita-del, the
place? Where is it, anyway? What's it like? Finish what you started to tell me
about it."
"I meant even if it is something like a real citadel. I mean, a fortress. The
name of it is the
Embry Towers, and it looks like any big con-dominium-office building from the
outside. Inside, it's different. And it's somewhere in the Chicago area, I
think."
"Where's Tillicum? Is the wolver-ine there with you? Have they got you locked
up, or what?"
"No, Tillicum's not here,"
her voice answered.
"I could have him if I wanted him, but I don't.
I've given him to another witch in my coven for a while. I said they were
going to let me go. Now, Chaz, listen. Let me talk. This is important."
"You're what's important," he said. "Anything else comes second "
"No, I mean it. I want you to know about me and the Citadel. Look, I told you
the truth. I
don't belong to it. But all the members of our coven did deal with it. The
Citadel could help us stay hidden and be left alone by other people. We were
always used to dealing with some kind of
organization well, never mind that. The thing is, the Citadel made a deal with
me to do something for them. I was to move into your condominium, get to meet
you, and try to block your talent with mine put a hex on it, in the old
terms when you tried to use it to pass the test for work on the Mass."
"You?" he said.
"Yes I'm sorry, Chaz. I'm so sorry; but I didn't know anything about you,
then. It wasn't until
I ar-ranged to meet you that night in the party rooms, that I began to
understand you, and what you believed in. You weren't drunk that night,
really. I made you drunk and not even with craft, but with drugs. I wanted you
to talk, because the more you told me, the more hold I'd have on your talent.
Dear Chaz, you shouldn't even tell a witch your name, don't you know that?
Much less tell her everything you believe in."
"It didn't do any harm," Chaz said. "I'm here on the Mass, any-way."
"But I meant harm then," she an-swered. "I wasn't any different from the
people in the
Citadel; I was just as deadly toward you as that sick, exiled man the Citadel
must have bribed to blow up your train when I couldn't stop you. But never
mind that. What I want you to know is that you didn't get away from the
Citadel just because you were shipped out to the Mass. There're
Citadel people there, too."
"After what just happened," he said grimly, "you don't have to tell me. Who
are they, out here? And what is the Citadel, anyway? Every-body talks about it
as if it was a name and nothing else."
"That's all it is," she said. "A name for the few people on top of things,
with a lot of power and a lot of connections. Does it really even mat-ter who [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]