Well of Souls

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “And then,” said Pahl, his whispery voice lilting in a singsong chant, like a lullaby, “my mother took my hand. She turned to me and held out her hand, and I reached for her. I touched her, and her skin was cold like stone, and I looked into her face, and she was crying, but they were tears of blood.”

  “Blood?” Jase’s voice was hushed. “Blood?”

  “Yes,” said Pahl. “And I should have been scared. But I wasn’t, and then I couldn’t pull away either, and it seemed to me that all those cold white cloud-things had circled round us, tighter and tighter, like a rope, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Jase, I knew I was going to die.”

  “Pahl…”

  “No!” Pahl’s voice came in an urgent whisper. “I need to finish. I need to say this.”

  Pahl stopped and, turning away, put his forehead upon the viewing portal. Jase looked down and saw the surface of a planet slide into view: gray, pocked by meteor strikes. No trees, no water. Cold. Lifeless.

  “Pahl,” he began, “Pahl, maybe you need to stop, maybe you need…”

  “My mother,” whispered Pahl, “she took my hand, and then…then she jumped.”

  Mind spinning, Jase focused on Pahl’s breath steaming, condensing against the tensor-glass, and then evanescing. Like the ice cloud-creatures, like the woman with the wings of a bat and the body of a snake.

  “She jumped,” Pahl said, “and then we were falling through the air, only it wasn’t air, I knew then. It was something thick and black and evil. But we fell through it, tumbling and falling, like the way you read about birds shot down from the sky. Then we hit the silver water, and then I was under the water, and I held my breath. I held my breath for as long as I could, and I remember I looked up and saw the underside of the water, bright and silver, and I knew that I needed to get away. I knew that as much as I wanted to be with my mother, I needed air. Only I couldn’t get away. She was in the water, and she dragged me down, down, down like a stone. And when I looked over at her, her skin seemed to peel away, little by little, until I saw bone and her teeth and…”

  “Pahl,” said Jase, not able to bear hearing this anymore. Below, on the planet, he saw a ring of ruddy-colored mountains—not gray, but red like old blood—and then saw a wide, black chasm gaping like a huge mouth. A crater? Jase’s mind snagged on the thought, the way a drowning man grasps a slim branch that can’t possibly support his weight. Maybe a dried-up sea, or a meteor strike…Jase felt his mind spiraling, as if he were caught in a black whirlpool, being dragged deeper and deeper.

  “Pahl,” said Jase. He brought his hands to his head, felt his fingers dig into his scalp. “Pahl, don’t. Stop.”

  “But you see, I couldn’t,” Pahl rasped, his voice ragged, “I couldn’t stop her, and I couldn’t get away, and then I knew I couldn’t hold my breath anymore. So I opened my mouth and all my air rushed out in silver bubbles that burst in front of my face, and then the water, so cold and dark, filled my mouth and gushed down my throat, and I was dying, I knew I was dying….”

  “Stop!” Crying out, Jase ducked his head, screwed his eyes shut. He was choking, drowning, he was going to die…. “Pahl, stop, please, let me go, let me go!”

  With an effort that was almost physical, Jase wrenched his mind free, not even knowing that this was what he did. Dimly, he heard Pahl’s tortured cry. But there was nothing Jase could do for his friend at that instant. He felt a great ripping and tearing in his mind, as if his brain were made of fabric and had been held, too tightly, between fingers as un-yielding as steel, and so had simply shredded in two.

  Reeling, Jase slammed back against an exposed conduit. The metal bit into his side, and Jase arched, cried out again as pain shivered down into his pelvis. But the pain was good, because then he had something to focus on instead of the throbbing in his head, the sense of something alien slithering into his mind. Jase’s knees folded and his back slid down the bulkhead until he felt metal beneath his thighs and knew he sat on the deck. Jase gulped air. His head spun with vertigo, and he blinked away the blackness edging his vision. After a few moments, when his breathing had slowed and he felt better, Jase let his head fall back against the bulkhead. He looked over at his friend.

  Pahl had slumped to the corridor alongside Jase. His face had gone ashen, and his ice-blue eyes were so dark they looked like sapphires.

  “Pahl,” said Jase. His brain hurt. A line of sweat beaded his upper lip. He swiped at it with the back of his hand. “Pahl, are you all right?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I don’t know what…” Pahl closed his eyes. His frills trembled. “I’m sorry.”

  Jase swallowed back a wave of nausea. “What was that? What happened?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know…”

  “That was awful.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, I don’t know…”

  “Your dream, what happened just now…”

  “No, no, that’s just it. It’s no dream; it’s not a dream. Jase, Jase, my mother killed me, she killed me, and I…”

  “No, Pahl,” said Jase, putting up his hands as if to ward off something physical. “No, don’t say it, if you say it…” It comes true.

  “And I was glad.” Pahl’s voice came out as a tortured, anguished whisper. “I was glad.”

  Chapter 9

  Batra pressed close to Halak as they slipped in and out of shadows inked along Tajora Street by large, blocky warehouses. Tajora Street was a curling boulevard that ran around the northeast corner of Maltabra City and along the Galldean Sea for nearly three kilometers. She glanced at the illuminated dial of her chronometer: an hour shy of midnight. They’d left Dalal’s two hours before, slipping down a rear stairwell and out into a back alley. The alley ran diagonally northwest, and when they finally reached the end, they’d had to circle back, heading for the north end of Tajora Street. Halak said that Arava’s apartment, like Tajora Street, was in Qatala territory, almost dead center.

  Batra’s nerves were a jangle of exhaustion and adrenaline-pumped fear. So far they’d been lucky. They hadn’t run into any of Qadir’s men, not that Batra had the faintest idea what those men might look like anyway. Knowing what she did now, she suspected that their three attackers had been Qatala, though she couldn’t be sure and she wasn’t going to ask Halak now. There’d be plenty of time for questions if they got to Betazed.

  Batra’s grip tightened around Halak’s hand as he limped, splinting his right side. No. When we get to Betazed. Stay positive.

  They headed south, keeping the sea on their left. Now and then the alleys and streets echoed with the low growl of a ship taking off from the spaceport to the north. Farius Prime had two moons, though neither was up, and so the sea was just a black wavering expanse: a sense of movement punctuated by the slap of water against concrete and metal posts, and the single solitary moan of a foghorn a kilometer from shore, perched on the end of a rocky quay. The smell was all wrong, though. Not salty: Batra sniffed a sea breeze whistling down the canyons formed by the warehouses that ran east to west, and recoiled. The sea had a nasty, sour, metallic odor, like old clotted blood and boiled fish.

  The street was so quiet, the sounds of their footsteps scraping concrete sounded like rocks over sandpaper. The day’s heat had gone, though Batra felt residual warmth leaking through the soles of the slippers Dalal had given her. Squares of light speckled the monoliths of apartment buildings to her right; to her left, lining the piers were warehouses, their fronts bathed in fans of reddish-orange light from floodlights that perched above large cargo doors. When Batra raised her eyes to look overhead, the night sky wasn’t black but glowed a burnt orange color: reflected glare from the lights clustered at the city’s center and diffused by smog and mist rising from the chill sea.

  Dark, and yet not dark at all. Batra shivered. Either way, a lot of things could happen, even in a darkness that wasn’t.

  Halak must have thought she was cold because his right arm slipped around her shoulders. “Not too much farther.”
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br />   “It’s not that,” murmured Batra. “It’s just…I wish this was over with already.”

  He tightened his grip. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Ani. I didn’t know…”

  “No.” Abruptly, Batra stepped out of his embrace but kept her voice low. “No, that’s just it, Samir. You did know. A man doesn’t bring an unregistered phaser along, slink off a ship…you knew there’d be trouble, and you knew what type of people you were dealing with. And don’t tell me otherwise, please. I may be naïve, I may have lived in more luxury than you…”

  “Dalal didn’t mean…”

  “This isn’t about Dalal!” Batra paused then resumed in a tense whisper. “It’s not even about Farius Prime. It’s about us, Samir; it’s about a man I’m in love with and thought I knew.”

  They faced one another. The light from a nearby warehouse was behind Halak, and his face was in shadow. Batra couldn’t read his expression, though she caught the glint of his eyes. His voice came out of the darkness. “What do you want to know, Ani?”

  Such simple words: yet behind them were volumes left unspoken. And what did she want? For him to clear up all the discrepancies she’d caught at Dalal’s? To tell her why the hell people were trying to kill them? To explain how he could know, in such detail, a place as awful as this? Batra was so close she heard Halak’s quiet breathing, and she knew that if she put out a hand, she would feel the strong beat of his heart. Yes, here was the man she loved and was willing to sacrifice her career for, and what did she want?

  “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “Everything. And nothing. Because I’m afraid, Samir, I’m afraid to know.”

  Now Batra let Halak pull her close with his good arm. Sighing, she rested her left cheek against his breast. She heard the thud of his heart; the feel of his arm and his familiar scent comforted her. “But even though I’m afraid, I need to know. Whatever you’ve done, I can handle it.”

  “You can’t know that, Ani. That sounds good, but you can’t predict something like that. Sometimes love isn’t enough.”

  “Enough for what, Samir? Forgiveness?”

  “No, acceptance. There’s a big difference between acceptance and forgiveness.”

  “Samir, I can accept a lot. I can forgive you almost anything.”

  “There are conditions to everything, Ani, even love.”

  “Samir,” she said. She slid her arms about his waist, felt the bulky roll of his bandage beneath his tunic. “Samir, please, what’s going on? Are you in trouble? Have you been?”

  He laughed: a hopeless sound. “Trouble’s what I’m trying to avoid. Ani, if I thought it would help…”

  His voice cut off. Puzzled, she pulled away and opened her mouth, but Halak put up a warning finger. Batra concentrated. Because she had turned back to Halak, the sea was off to her right, and she was conscious of the water lapping against stone, and then the call of the foghorn, a long lowing like an animal. Then, as the foghorn’s groan sighed away, she heard it: the clap of shoes upon stone.

  From her left. Batra jerked her head around to scan the walk directly across Tajora Street. She spotted two figures: one tall and broad, the other in what looked like a hooded cloak, and much shorter. Coming straight for them.

  Halak eased her to one side—out of the line of fire, she realized—and then she saw his hand hover at the small of his back, over his phaser. He said nothing, and his face was still in shadow, but Batra could feel how alert he’d become. How focused.

  “If I tell you to run,” he said then, his voice very soft, “don’t argue and don’t stop to help. Just do what I say.”

  Batra never did get a chance to ask Halak just exactly where she was supposed to run because the two figures crossed into a slant of light, their faces flickering briefly, and Batra heard Halak’s breath catch.

  “Arava?” he whispered, starting forward. “Arava?”

  Endangering Batra had been the last thing Halak wanted. Even when the knife had ripped into his side and pain shot through every fiber, what he’d thought about was keeping Batra safe. When he folded her into his arms, he marveled at how tiny she really was, how fragile her bones: like a bird. And then she’d shivered—perhaps from cold but maybe from fear, too—and he felt his resolve harden. No matter what the cost, or how things fell with Arava, he’d keep her safe.

  Now, he watched as two figures melted out of the darkness and hurried across Tajora Street. On the alert, he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. His eyes darted into the shadows. No one else there. Still, if Arava was working for Qadir, he didn’t know how much she could be trusted.

  He stood his ground as she approached on the run, her cloak snapping, her footfalls crisp, staccato counterpoints to the loping, heavier strides of the larger figure which Halak saw now was a huge, blue-skinned Bolian male.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Arava kept her hood up so her features were in total darkness, and Halak got more of an impression of her face than a good look. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Hello, Arava,” said Halak. His tone was calm, but he was conscious of his phaser against his back, as if the weapon had gotten white-hot and branded his skin. “Good to see you, too.” A quick glance told Halak that the Bolian had two weapons, one on either hip. “Nice toy. Is he new?”

  “My bodyguard,” Arava said fiercely, “not a toy. You know that, Samir, and you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Maybe the question should be, who doesn’t?” Arava gave a laugh that wasn’t. “I was practically the last person to hear.” A jerk of the head toward Batra: “Who’s she?”

  Halak put a hand on Batra’s shoulder before she could answer. “She’s a friend, Arava. She’s from my ship.”

  “Can she be trusted?”

  “This does seem to be the topic of the day,” Batra broke in. She shook off Halak’s hand. “Since I’m here and I’m with Samir, the question’s moot.”

  “I trust her,” Halak said. “That should be enough for you, Arava.”

  He was keenly aware of how vulnerable they were, out in the open like this. “I think we should continue this inside somewhere, don’t you?”

  The Bolian spoke for the first time, his voice surprisingly high for such a large man. “He’s right.”

  “Okay,” said Arava. She jerked her head to the right. “Over there.”

  She started for a nearby warehouse, a blocky structure with no windows that squatted at the near side of a pier lined with identical warehouses. Following after, Halak darted looks up and down the street. The street seemed empty. He wondered, briefly, how Arava had known exactly where to intercept them, and then it occurred to him that Qadir’s men must have monitored their progress as soon as he and Batra had turned onto Tajora. Dalal was right; he was getting soft. Likely they’d been followed before, perhaps as they’d left Dalal’s apartment.

  And the men who attacked them? Strictly speaking, he’d told the truth. He hadn’t recognized them, and hadn’t a clue who they worked for. Qadir, or the Orion Syndicate? Maybe if he had a few moments alone with Arava, he’d ask her what she knew, or had heard.

  God, Ani. He owed her more than his life. Yes, there were family matters to consider: his loyalty to Dalal, for one. As for Baatin…Halak’s heart twisted with pain. He’d bear the guilt for Baatin for the rest of his life, and he wanted to make things right by Arava, but not if it meant endangering Batra more than he already had.

  Arava keyed a combination on a magnetic lock, verified her identity via retinal scan, and ushered them inside a small side door set well away from the street. She had the Bolian—who she called Matsaro—stand guard outside then led the way into the building.

  “Lights,” said Arava. “Half.”

  Instantly, the interior of the warehouse was suffused with a dusky yellow light. The space was twice the size of a standard cargo bay and three times as high. The warehouse was packed with crates and containers stacked flo
or to ceiling in long precise rows running from the entrance to a larger set of doors at the very end. Halak browsed the containers for markings, or an indication of destination or origin, and found none. Understandable: Making things appear and disappear was Qadir’s stock and trade. He was sure some of the crates were legitimate, but most probably weren’t.

  “Well,” said Arava, shrugging out of her cloak and tossing it onto a nearby barrel. Her face was a smooth oval, and her hair—a golden, honey blonde—spilled about her shoulders. “The prodigal son returns. Your timing stinks. What, did you think Qadir would just forget?”

  Halak heard Batra’s sudden intake of breath. “Actually, I didn’t pick the time,” said Halak, choosing not to address what Qadir might, or might not forget. “Dalal contacted me. Said I had to talk some sense into you.”

  “Sense.” Arava gave that nonlaugh again. She hugged her arms to her chest, as if she were cold. With her blonde hair and large, brown-black eyes, she looked very small to Halak, almost like a child. But there was a hard edge to her now, a cynicism and bitterness he didn’t remember. The Arava he’d left behind had been a young, fresh-faced woman. He saw now the changes that time—and tragedy—had inscribed on her features. A tracery of tiny lines fanned from the corners of her eyes and her face was white and pinched, with a furrow chiseled into either side of her nose, as if she never really found anything to smile about.

  “Dalal doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” said Arava, crossly. “She’s meddling in things that aren’t her concern.”