Jack Chalker - Charon - A Dragon at the Gate

Aeolia Matuze looked genuinely concerned. “Tell me—the burns. Do they hurt much?”

He shrugged. “Not so bad. More stiff than anything else. I think I’m still in a little bit of shock, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

She nodded and appeared satisfied. “You know, I loved you for years, but never more than today. What you did was impossible, Toolie. No other man alive could have made it up here.”

“You knew I’d come back.”

She nodded. “I knew that if anybody could, you would. Tell me, how did you get by the Synod? They could rip iron bars, shoot into space—why, you wouldn’t believe it And they still had all their powers!”

“That was your problem,” Koril told her, taking another sip of wine. “If they didn’t keep their wa power, they were valueless as Synod members. If they did, then they had to have the wa in their molecules as sure as you and me. And wa is wa.”

“But they are virtually impervious!”

He chuckled. “Know what we’re made of, Aeolia ? Chemical. Know what rock is made of? More chemicals. The rule is that if you’re matter you have to be made of something. Chemicals. A specific mix of chemicals. And once you know how something’s put together, and you know there’s wa in each molecule; that stuff, whatever it was, was no different than natural flesh. No different.

And I happened to have a sample of the stuff ahead of time. I had it analyzed. It actually surprised me. The movement of just one little atom in its basic material caused it to change into another equally bizarre substance—but one that burned and melted quite nicely. Isn’t it nice, Aeolia, to know that even sorcery is nothing more than basic chemistry?”

She laughed, seemingly delighted with his explanation.

“How clever of you! I’ll bet the reception room’s a mess.”

“It’ll need a little more than mere redecorating,” he agreed. “At least I’m happy now you got those paintings out of there.”

Darva shook her head wonderingly. “They’re talking like they’re old buddies! Wasn’t he here to kill her?”

“Perhaps,” Morah replied. “But they were married for twenty-seven years.”

Both Darva’s and my own mouth flew open but no sound came out.

“…two left alive down there,” Koril was saying. “They’re in worse shape than I am. They’re backstage, but I told them not to come up just yet.”

Matuze looked satisfied. “Tell me, Toolie—why now? I thought you’d be stuck forever down there in your desert hideaway, particularly with all those delicious toys we allowed to get through.”

That startled the sorcerer. “Allowed?” She smiled sweetly. “Toolie! Who knows you better than I do? Do you really think you could have gotten all that stuff from off world all this time without our help? It was far cheaper and easier to keep you occupied at what you love best than to try any all-out fight. In a few more months’ time, your return would have been academic anyway. Our delicious little war is well underway.”

Koril looked absolutely devastated by the obvious truth of what she was telling him. He had as much as admitted his failings to me. I now more than suspected that Dumonia had caught onto the plot and that had been why he’d finally decided to push. But Koril wasn’t about to mention the Cerberan, I’ll give him that.

“It has to do with evil, Aeolia. Evil.”

She laughed. “ Evil? What in the world are you talking about?”

And, once more, he repeated the words that seemed to have haunted him since they were first uttered by the hapless Jatik.

She listened intently, but without any obvious reaction. Finally, when he’d completed his story, she said, “That’s the most utter and complete nonsense I’ve ever heard! They’re—odd—I admit, but they’re not evil. What is evil, anyway, except somebody’s arbitrary idea of what’s wrong? Isn’t that what you fought the Confederacy about? Aren’t our ideas evil by everyone else’s standards? Do you feel evil, Toolie? I don’t.”

But Koril did not reply. Slowly he seemed to stiffen, then relax. The wineglass dropped from his fingers and bounced on the rug, spilling a little of the remainder.

Toolie?” she inquired sweetly. Toolie?” Getting no response, she stood up and went over to him, then bent down and examined him carefully. Satisfied, she nodded and looked around the empty room.

“Morah!” she snapped, her tone suddenly cold and imperious. “I know you’re spying around here someplace! Clean up this mess and get this garbage out of my living room!”

“She poisoned him!” Darva gasped. “All this way and he lets her poison him!”

“No,” I told her. “He surrendered. When he got all the way up here he just couldn’t do it—and she knew it. She sure knew him, all right!”

Darva just shook her head sadly. “So simple. So powerful, so smart a man.”

“Oddly enough, those are exactly the qualities in humans that are worth preserving,” Morah added enigmatically. “You’ll see. But—wait. The play isn’t over yet.”

Aeolia Matuze was up and striding around the room like a mad woman. “Morah! Somebody! Attend met It will be necessary to arrange the executions of those below and those troops who failed me! Where the hell is everybody?”

“Here.” A cold, female voice came from behind her. She whirled and looked very surprised and not the least bit annoyed.

“Who the hell are you? ” Aeolia Matuze snapped.

“We’re the new Queen of Charon,” Zala/Kira replied as she shot Aeolia Matuze three times. The Lord of Charon toppled and fell, a look of total surprise and bewilderment frozen forever on her face.

I looked at Morah. “She expected you to guard her.”

He nodded. “She never could get it through her head who I worked for,” he replied, as we watched the woman we both knew walk over, check Koril first, then Aeolia Matuze.

Yatek Morah sighed and turned away from the window. We did the same. “What now?” I asked him.

He smiled. “That depends on you. The remainder of Koril’s surviving Class I’s will pretty well fill out the Synod.”

Darva turned and pointed back at the glass. “But she’s not qualified to run Charon! Zala’s a helpless wimp and Kira’s a mechanized assassin!”

“I’m aware of that,” Morah replied. “Think of this, Lacoch. You’re the Confederacy’s assassin. Don’t bother to deny it. Nobody else in your batch showed any real promise. I arranged that whole sideshow at Bourget on that assumption.” He made a backhanded gesture at the glass. “Her type is now obsolete. It has served its purpose. I’ve called the few surviving ones to the Diamond. The robots are better, more reliable, and harder to kill.”

“Koril thought you wanted to be Supreme Lord of all the Diamond,” I told him.

“That ambition had crossed my mind when I had my agents on Takanna keep a small version of this bioagent project going many years ago,” he admitted. “However, that prospect no longer interests me. It has become rather—small. Petty, even. No longer worth going after. It has been so for quite some time.”

“And Zala?”

He chuckled. “That’s up to you. Kira is extremely good at what she does, but that’s ah she does. Zala—well, she trusts you. And she’ll need the help of a lot of people she trusts to put things back together and get the government straightened out once more. You’re an assassin. She’s an assassin. It will be interesting to see who, in the end, is the better.”

“You’re offering me a shot at being Lord of Charon,” I said, a little in awe of the possibilities. I tinned to Darva. “Remember those dreams we had? Of changing things for the better, of a virgin continent for the changelings?”