Well of Souls

by Ilsa J. Bick

  His heart filled with grief. They’d lost so much. Until the last two rancorous years, when the marriage was dissolving, her mind had always been open. At the height of their love, Kaldarren felt as if they shared the same mind, the same feel….

  Suddenly, a bolt of searing pain ripped through his brain. Kaldarren couldn’t help it; he screamed. His vision dimmed, and his knees buckled. He felt the sharp bite of rock as he sagged to the ground, hands clutched at either side of his helmet. The pain came again: sharp, knifing his brain as if someone had taken an axe and driven it through his mind, cleaving it in two.

  Stop. Moaning, Kaldarren tried to put up a shield, keep the intruder-thought at bay. He had to get it to stop, stop! Who could be doing this, who had this much power…?

  Then, through a haze of agony, Kaldarren saw an image: a shape. Indistinct, shadowy. Not humanoid. A dragon. No, not a dragon—Kaldarren tried clamping down on the pain shivering through his mind, along his limbs—not a dragon, a woman with a dragon’s…no, a serpent’s body, and wings, and eyes, those eyes….

  Dad! Dad, help! Help us!

  “Jase,” Kaldarren hissed, his mind spiraling toward blackness. “Jase!”

  “What is it?” asked Jase. He passed his tricorder over the wall before them. The wall wasn’t rock; he stared at his tricorder’s readings then passed the device over the wall once more for good measure.

  “It’s metal,” said Pahl, confirming Jase’s readings. He, too, had a tricorder. “A bunch of metal. Titanium and some other stuff, I don’t know what, I haven’t gotten that far yet in school.”

  “Metal?” Jase echoed. “In a rock tunnel? And what about this?” He shoved his tricorder before his friend’s faceplate. “A magnetic lock?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  Disgusted, Jase shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Looking around, he searched for a place to sit and found none. He settled for squatting, cross-legged, on the rock floor. He was tired and hungry, and now they’d run into a metal wall sealed with a magnetic lock, of all things. They’d been walking for hours, and he was sweating, not from exertion this time but anxiety.

  His eyes roamed the tunnel shaft behind. He picked out the faintly phosphorescent glow of flare markers, winding round like a string of fireflies, that they’d left wedged in rock clefts along the way just in case their tricorders quit. Other than their flare markers, the tunnel was pitch black. A kilometer back they’d left a pack of supplies: spare air, more flare markers. Plus they carried tiny packs of spare air on their backs, for emergencies. He hoped he wouldn’t need to use his.

  Discouraged, Jase swung his head back toward the metal panel. The panel made no sense. A magnetic lock, one that was still active, on a dead planet made even less. Unless it had been left over from the time when there were people here. If true, where was the power coming from? There had to be a power source somewhere, one to power the lock and to generate the field they’d found at the tunnel mouth. But their tricorders had registered nothing, given not the slightest hint as to where this power source must be. Had to be. The only answer was that the source was shielded, or that they just didn’t know what or how to look. They were just kids, after all, and neither of them were exactly in love with science.

  He ought to tell Pahl to forget this whole adventure and go back. Jase was in over his head, and he knew it. Yet he felt a strange compulsion to keep going. Even as he fought the urge to go deeper and deeper, as if an invisible tether were reeling him in, Jase felt his apprehension grow. Small comfort he’d been right about the general design of the tunnel, its similarity to tombs he’d seen in Egypt. The tunnel was carved out of the mountain rock and was tall enough for a man to pass through without stooping. Unlike tombs on Earth, however, these had no drawings on the walls, nor were the walls plastered. Instead of running straight down—under the dead lake, if their tricorders were accurate—the tunnel twisted and turned and doubled back several times in underground switchbacks, almost like a maze. Maybe now, with the metal door and the magnetic lock, this was probably just an old mine shift, and not a tomb at all. How dumb. Jase was disgusted. They’d been like little kids, thinking they were going on some great adventure when, instead, this was a mystery better left for adults who knew what they were doing, not a couple of kids armed only with dinky tricorders—not even really fancy ones—air, and flashlights.

  Jase pushed against his thighs and clambered to his feet. His calves cramped, protested the unaccustomed exercise. “We should go back, tell my dad, and let him decide what to do.”

  But Pahl was shaking his head. “I think I can get us through this. There’s a magnetic field here all right, just like at the entrance. But the field has a periodicity, like a pulsar.”

  “So?”

  “So,” said Pahl, fiddling with his tricorder, “that far in school I did get. Maybe if I match the ambient resonance frequency of the magnetic field but reverse it, I can open this.”

  “And then what? How do we know you can get us back out? We don’t even know what’s on the other side. Could just be another tunnel that’ll go on for kilometers.”

  “Or it might not,” said Pahl, turning his head until his ice-blue eyes and pale brown face stared down at Jase. “You and I both know there’s something here, something that wants to be found. Why else put up a wall? Why lock other people out?”

  He knew Pahl was right. The setup was too elaborate: the magnetic distortion field topside, the panel and its lock. “The lock could be to keep whatever it is inside.”

  “Maybe,” said Pahl, turning aside and staring at the readings on his tricorder.

  Jase watched in silence as Pahl’s tricorder searched for a match, found it, and then began to emit a reverse polarity pulse. The tricorder pulsed red…red…red…green.

  “Jase,” Pahl began.

  The metal panel slid to one side. There was no sound, though Jase imagined that there must be the whine of some mechanism scrolling the panel to one side. But Jase heard Pahl gasp and, instinctively, both boys took a step back. On cue, they glanced at one another and exhaled a peal of embarrassed laughter.

  Jase shone his torch into the blackness. Almost immediately, he felt a twist of disappointment. The panel opened into a tiny, arched room that reminded Jase of the well chamber he’d been expecting. Only the walls curved and there was no shaft to catch water. The floor was smooth and level with that of the tunnel in which they stood. Opposite the panel was another door.

  “Same metal,” said Pahl, consulting his tricorder. “But there’s no magnetic field.”

  “So it’s not locked.” Jase chewed on his lower lip. “An invitation? Like it wants us to come on in.”

  Pahl nodded. “There are old-fashioned laser sensors. Here and here,” he gestured with his tricorder to either side of the chamber. “All along the walls. Can’t see the beams, though.”

  “Are they weapons?”

  “No, the beams aren’t strong enough to burn anything. I think they’re meant to trigger some sort of mechanism.”

  “Wait.” Jase bent, scooped up a small quantity of fine-grained dirt from the tunnel floor, and tossed the dirt into the chamber. The dirt was so fine that it formed a swirling cloud, like curls of smoke. Then, so ephemeral they were like the threads of a spider’s web, a network of thin, pulsing red lines appeared, crisscrossing the chamber.

  “Sensors, all right. Displacement detectors, I’ll bet.” Jase looked over at Pahl. “And you want to go in there.”

  Pahl nodded. “Don’t you? Can’t you feel it?”

  “No,” Jase lied.

  “Well, I do. It’s almost like a voice, only not words so much. Just a feeling. It’s not going to hurt us.”

  “Then what? What is it? And why is it talking to us? Why not my dad?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe your dad isn’t the right person.”

  Jase took a step back. “I don’t understand that, and I think that until you understand something…until somebody
tells us it’s okay, we ought to go back.”

  “Well, I’m not,” said Pahl calmly. He snapped his tricorder shut and slung the carrying strap over his shoulder. “I’m going on, Jase. This is where I’m meant to be. You can go back. You know the way. Go get your dad, if that’s what you want. But I’m going.”

  For a brief moment, Jase was tempted to do just that: to leave. The way he felt, staring at Pahl and then into the chamber, was just what he’d experienced aboard Chen-Mai’s ship. There was a terrible darkness in Pahl, a void scoured out of Pahl’s soul by grief and loss. This void was bottomless; Pahl’s need knew no end. Once before, the Naxeran had reached out without knowing what he was doing and grabbed hold of Jase, trying to pull him down into this black whirlpool, and Jase was afraid this would happen again. Only this time, Jase was being asked to walk, willingly, into the abyss.

  Yet Jase knew this was something he had to do. Something was beyond that door, calling him, tugging at his mind. It had brought him this far. Maybe it would be satisfied with Pahl. Probably would. But then Jase would have abandoned his friend.

  Jase shouldered his tricorder. “Let’s go.”

  Together they crossed the threshold and stepped into the chamber.

  Chapter 30

  At first, nothing happened. Then Jase heard what he thought was a faint but audible click. Impossible. He frowned. They were in vacuum. Probably all he’d heard was the pop of static that sometimes played as background on an open comm channel. Then he became aware of something else: a rushing noise, like water.

  He turned to Pahl. “Do you hear that?”

  “Yes.” Pahl gave a slow, puzzled nod. “But how…?”

  Groaning, the panel before them slid right: metal scraping rock.

  Sound. Jase let out his breath in a surprised exhalation. There were sounds, and if there were sounds…Quickly, he whipped his tricorder around, activated it. “Pahl, it’s air. There’s air! And it’s getting warmer,” Jase watched as the ambient air temperature rose: now zero degrees, ten degrees. “It’s an airlock and…Pahl, do you see that?”

  Pahl’s tricorder burbled. “Yes. I read a power source, about three kilometers ahead, almost straight down. Looks nuclear. Probably a generator of some kind, only down deep where it’s been shielded.”

  “Or maybe our tripping the airlock turned it on. Except,” Jase aimed his flashlight, its beam stabbing the darkness, into the tunnel, “there’s nothing. Just more tunnel.”

  He was disappointed because he’d expected something spectacular: a room heaped with piles of gold or jewels. Something. Why else an airlock? A metal door? The sensors, and shielding? Then he noticed something. Fanning his light over the tunnel walls, he caught a glimpse of color. Squinted. “I think there’s something here. Written on the walls. Paintings, maybe.” He consulted his tricorder again. “I’m reading more tunnels, but they don’t branch off here. There’s…” He did a double take of his readings, and his disappointment evaporated. “This is really strange. There’s another larger tunnel about a kilometer to the west, and then more…wow, at least ten more tunnels branching off that. But, dead ahead, there are rooms.”

  “How many?”

  “Four.” Eyes bright with excitement, Jase looked over at his friend. “You know what? I think this is a tomb. I think the tunnel we found was some sort of secret entrance, that the bigger tunnel I’m reading to the west is the main entrance that was probably sealed off.”

  “But why?”

  “Grave robbers, maybe. They did that in Egypt. Sealed up the main tunnel after they moved the sarcophagus down and then left a different way, so no one would know how to get in. I’ll bet that if we walked down that main tunnel, there’d be the stuff you’d find in Earth tombs: booby-traps, pits, stuff like that. But I’ll bet that when we step out of here, that panel’s going to slide shut, just like any airlock.”

  “And evacuate the air inside to equalize the pressure.” Pahl’s pale blue eyes looked almost silver in the glow of their flashlights.

  “Yeah.” Jase aimed a significant look at his friend. “Probably we can get back out. At least, there’s air: oxygen, nitrogen. A little helium.”

  “Like someone’s expecting us.”

  “Yeah.” Jase hesitated, then reached up with both hands and thumbed the seals on his helmet. There was a hiss as the seals released. Cautiously, Jase lifted the helmet a few centimeters and sniffed. Instantly, he recoiled. “Ugh. Smells old, kind of stale. Thick. Like,” he made a face then turned and spat, “tastes like something…”

  He stopped as he recognized the stench of death. And what else was he expecting? It’s a tomb, you jerk. Jase worked out another mouthful of foul-tasting spit. Of course, there’s something dead.

  “Come on,” Jase said, clipping his helmet to his waist. He hoped he would get used to the smell. Otherwise, he would be forced to put his helmet back on; the smell of decay was that strong.

  As Jase predicted, the panel slid shut behind them when they stepped away. Through the metal, they heard the swoosh and hiss of air being evacuated.

  As they walked through the tunnel, Jase swung his light over the paintings on the wall. They were done over what looked like plaster, almost exactly the way he remembered tomb paintings from the Valley of the Kings, but the plaster here was very different: textured so that the images were arranged within outlines that were diamonds and trapezoids. Many of the patterns overlapped and intersected along diagonals, like—Jase groped for a comparison—like glass that had been shattered into a spider’s web of individual panels but not fallen out its frame. The paintings were probably of gods, Jase thought, or demons. He recognized one animal: a plump, ashen-white bull with long, pointed horns. He couldn’t quite place it; the name was on the tip of his tongue, and he knew he’d seen the painting before, someplace with his dad, some collection. He just couldn’t remember where.

  There was one recurrent image: a great woman-snake, or maybe it was a dragon, Jase couldn’t tell. The thing had green scales, curved talons, and batlike wings; her eyes were set within ridges of scales and the same rhomboid-and diamond-shaped scales ran down the sides of her neck. Her neck wasn’t exactly straight either; it flared, so her shoulders and neck inscribed an arc, not an angle. In some of the paintings, the woman-snake hovered over figures that were clearly worshippers; Jase spotted humanoid figures carrying baskets of offerings—jewels, coins, food—and other figures that played upon piped instruments or harps. But in other paintings, the woman-snake formed the background for a figure that Jase thought must be the king: a jeweled diadem nestled on his forehead.

  Playing his light over the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, Jase saw irregular, glittery white streaks of calcite, the end result of water having seeped through the rock over time. Probably from that big, dead lake. And he noticed something else. At first, it seemed a trick of the way the light from his torch spilled along the walls. But, no—he blinked—the tunnel was getting brighter.

  He tapped Pahl on the arm. “Do you…?”

  Pahl nodded and stared at his tricorder. “There’s light. Just ahead.”

  The tunnel dipped left then right, took a last turn, and there was an arc of light straight ahead: the end of the tunnel. They hesitated an instant just beneath an arch, and then they crossed the threshold into a room.

  In the room was a man with golden skin. Staring at them.

  Jase flinched back with a cry. His heart thumped against his ribs, and his legs went watery with fear, and then he made himself look again. Almost at once, he wanted to kick himself for being so stupid. No, jerk. It’s not a man. It’s a statue. Jeez.

  The statue was gold, its features inlaid with colored stones: rubies for the lips, coal-black obsidian eyes outlined in some dark blue gem, black crystals for nostrils. A green faceted stone (an emerald?) centered on the forehead: the king’s diadem. The statue stood before a stone altar that was a triangle three meters high; each side was flanked by a flight of three stone steps. Chiseled carvi
ngs of chimeras roiled along the altar’s three stone faces.

  Everything in threes. Jase took a few steps toward the statue, and then turned to inspect the rest of the chamber. Jase saw that the tunnel they’d traveled came in from the side of the chamber, at a diagonal. The room was a rhomboid and studded at equal intervals with three curving stone pillars that arced from floor to ceiling. In each of the chamber’s four walls were three arched niches spaced at equal intervals, and within each were gold statues of women with peculiar diamond-shaped scales that ridged their eyes and long hair that spilled over their shoulders and breasts.

  “An altar,” said Jase. He knelt on a step and his gloved fingers played over white smooth humps of material clinging to the rock. “Melted wax, like from candles. They probably did something religious here, prayers or something, before they left.”

  “This way,” said Pahl, indicating a small passageway to the right of one statue. “There’s another room, much bigger.”

  Once in the room, which was lit with a dim glow that seemed to have no source, they stood for several seconds, mouths open. Just staring.

  “Oh,” said Jase, releasing his breath in an astonished gasp. His gaze traveled along the vaulted ceiling. The ceiling was painted a rich, dark blue and studded with glittering yellow stars. Like the sky at night, and there are two bigger than the rest, probably those binary stars. He saw at once that the paintings on the walls of the elliptical room—a dizzying array of red, blacks, and greens—were divided into three registers, with figures contained within intersecting rhomboids and trapezoids. Probably telling a story. Yet the story didn’t unfold in a straight line; the mural swirled along the walls. Jase spotted serpents, jagged bolts crashing through skies studded with blazing stars, the arcs of arrows curving in the air. The paintings felt organic and alive but suspended in time, in that instant between life and death every child knows but does not remember: the moment before he draws its first breath. Instinctively, Jase understood that the mural told a story of the hours of a single night. The story seemed to end with an image of huge golden disc at the far side of the room.