Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  Colonel Asam, unlike her, was a deep brown that tended to hold the sun more, and he continued to dress loose and comfortable, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Even when the going became heavy and she found her massive lungs pounding, he kept up an almost constant dialogue, telling of many of his adventures and the people and lands he’d seen. She let him talk, partly because he seemed to enjoy it— though his associates looked fairly bored, having probably heard all this before—and also because he was a fascinating man. Occasionally he would ask her to compare notes on something, or tell some similar episode in her own past, and it was some time before she realized that, very subtly, he was trying to get a lot more information on her. For whom, she wondered? Himself? Some employer? Asam was very much as she had been, as her husband had been so long ago: an adventurer, a freebooter whose word was good but who would be loyal to any commission he undertook. She decided it was best if he did most of the talking.

  “That business about the plague,” she prompted him. “What was that about?”

  He smiled, appreciating a fresh audience. “Well, lass, that was twenty year or more ago, I guess. There was these two hexes, Morguhn and Dahbi, next to each other, and Morguhn was a rich agricultural land that raised all sorts of livestock and fruits and vegetables—tons of it—and exported it for stuff they needed, mostly manufactured goods. They’re a semi-tech, like Dillia, and that gave ’em the power they needed for irrigation and all that other stuff. Their food and skins, over the years, bein’ so superior to most else in those parts, Morghun become a kind o’ big market everybody went to. Hell, most of the other hexes didn’t even bother much with agriculture and such any more—didn’t have to. The high-techs in particular, now, they go in for all that fancy stuff. Most of ’em, no matter what the culture, can’t see a piece of good pasture without dreamin’ of pavin’ it over for something. So they made the fine special alloys for the Morghun machines and lots of other stuff the best machines could do best—synthetic fertilizers, prefab farm buildings, like that. Not to mention good holidays for the farmers when they wanted. It all worked out.”

  “And Dahbi?” she asked, interested.

  “A race of bastards,” he told her. “All of ’em. Scum of the earth. There’s some like that on this world, though thankfully not very many. Theocracy based on ancestor worship. Very brutal, very repressive. Ritual cannibals, for example—the standard method of execution. They get eaten in a religious service by the congregation—alive, that is. They think that, that way, they’re eatin’ the soul and so the fellow won’t be around as an ancestral spirit. Kinda like big grasshoppers, I guess that’d be closest—albino grasshoppers, all white. But they ain’t like you and me and most of the races you meet. Somethin’ crazy in their make-up—they go right through walls.” She stared at him. “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. Not a door in the whole damned hex. They just kinda ooze through the cracks, you might say, and walk down the walls on the other side.

  “Well, anyway, a religion’s not a religion if it’s that strict that long. Hexes ain’t that big—sooner or later, particularly if you trade, your people start seein’ that other folks don’t have to be as miserable as you and they start givin’ the folks ideas. They’re nontech, so for the comforts of manufactured goods they got to trade. Mostly minerals. When you can go through rock, it kinda makes you a natural miner. They even hire out work teams, through the religion, o’course, to mine other places, explore for wells, that kinda thing. Now, what can that cult offer ’em? Promise ’em a better afterlife? Good for a while, but when the folks around you are livin’ better than your religion’s afterlife, well, you start to wonder. A lot of Dahbi started to wonder, and you can’t kill the whole population. The leaders are smart—nasty, but smart. For their own survival, they decided to produce—and that meant opening up adjoinin’ hexes, like Morguhn, to Dahbi settlement, domination, and control.”

  “But I thought that was impossible,” she responded. “I mean, walking through walls or not, you really can’t expect a nontech hex to defeat a high-tech or even a semi- in a war.”

  “True enough,” Asam agreed. “And the Dahbi knew it, though they’re great close-up fighters. Got slashin’ blades on their long legs and nasty chewing pincers. No, what their leader, an ultimate son of a bitch if there ever was one named Gunit Sangh, came up with was a deal with a high-tech Northern hex that didn’t even understand what the hell things were like in lands like ours. They synthesized a bug, a bacterium, whatever, that laid the Morghunites flat. It was just the start, understand. Eventually the Dahbi planned to rush in with some kind o’ miracle cure mixed with religious mumbo-jumbo and ‘save’ the remaining part of the Morgnunne population. By then, o’course, the Dahbi would’ve been in there in force and runnin’ things.”

  “And you stopped this?”

  He nodded proudly. “Well, sorta. See, nobody knew the Dahbi were behind it. Diseases break out all the time in one hex or another, and the damned creatures had acted up to this pretty much like any concerned neighbor—friendly, helpful, you know. And since no bugs from one hex can affect another race, well, there was no danger to them. The Morghunite ambassador, who was down with it himself and close to death, appealed to the Zone council for help, and got Cziil, a high-tech hex that has walkin’ plants and does mostly research—like a big university, sorta—interested. They isolated the bugger, and once they had, and established it was artificial, they worked out a counter. Trouble was, there was no Morghunite able to even get to the Zone Gate and able to pick it up, so a couple of neighboring hexes volunteered to handle the job. Things happened, the shipments never arrived. It was clear that somebody was stoppin’ ’em.”

  “And how did you enter into it?” she asked, getting more involved in this Well World intrigue.

  “I was in Dhutu, not far from there, and Ortega got in touch with me, explained the problem. The Dhutu ain’t very mobile—they kinda crawl slow, take all day to cross the room, but they’re tremendously strong. No trouble gettin’ the serums in, but then I rounded up a crew and we started off for a four-thousand-kilometer trip to Morguhn. It was a hairy trip, I’ll tell you.”

  Of the dozen in his party, only four had survived the trip. Dahbi had hired mercenaries to waylay them and when his party fought them off, had come themselves, oozing out of the ground or rock when you decided to take a rest, quietly slitting throats and fading back into the solid rock once more.

  “Then how did you finally beat them off?” she pressed.

  He laughed. “Accident, really. One came up out of a rock face when I wasn’t lookin’ and almost had me ’fore I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I was away from my weapons, the only thing I had in my hand was a big bucket of water from a stream I was bringin’ back for rubdown purposes. Well, I whirled around and flung the bucket at the bastard, missed him, hit the rock above his head, and the water sloshed out and some of it hit the Dahbi. It was weird, you know? It was like he suddenly became solid flesh, like us, where the water hit him. With no warnin’. The part that got wet seemed to go real smooth, then dropped to the ground. He screamed holy terror and what was left of him went back into the rock.”

  “But—water?” she responded with disbelief. “I mean, they must have a lot of water in their own hex, and certainly in the mines.”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. I think maybe they can be solid, like you or me, or somethin’ else, like when they ooze through rocks. Maybe they rearrange their— what’dya callit, molecular structure, I guess. They can be one or the other, but not both. When they’re solid, their reaction to water’s just like ours—and I know they drink.” He grinned. “They even bleed—yellow, but they bleed. When they go into that other state, the water that’s in ’em—in their cells—changes to that new form, too. But when it does, a heavy concentration of liquid makes whatever it hits turn back solid and they come apart. I guess it has to be a real splash, too, since even rocks got water. Well, after that, we just took buckets with us and got a
bunch of ’em. Got to Morghun, and what could the Dahbi say? Publicly, they thanked us for doin’ a wonderful job savin’ their dear friends. Privately, them and we knew who it was started it. So did everybody else—but you couldn’t prove nothin’. They covered their tracks too well. They lost, let it lie. But old Gunit Sangh, he put a curse on me and I got back home fast. Haven’t gone near there much since, I admit. Not as long as Sangh’s still alive.”

  “You think he still hates you, after all this time?” she asked him.

  “Oh, yes. Now more than ever. Blood feud. His boys have tried me lots o’ times in the past twenty years. Lots o’ times. He’s given up recently, I think, but that don’t mean he’s forgot. If he got the chance, he’d slit my throat and eat me. And if I got the chance, I’d damned sure carve him up in little pieces. I doubt if either of us will ever get the chance, though. Who knows?”

  The wind was kicking up; clouds had come in, partly obscuring the sun, and the temperature had quickly dropped several degrees. They were into the lower snowfields now, where the temperature was at freezing or slightly below, and with the wind, the effect was far below.

  “There’s a shelter not far up the trail,” he told them all. “If there’s no other party already there, we’ll stay the night there. It’s gettin’ pretty late and the wind’s rising something fierce.”

  Throughout the major trails of Gedemondas Dillians had built an entire network of these shelters for their hunting parties. If the local inhabitants objected, they hadn’t made it known nor molested them.

  The cabin, a huge log affair with chimney on the back, looked peaceful enough. Inside, if previous users hadn’t depleted the supplies, would be bales of grain, cooking pots and utensils, and even a few cords of wood, stocked regularly by Dillian service patrols.

  “No smoke,” Asam noted. “Looks like we’re in luck.” Still, he frowned, and when she started to go forward he stopped her. She glanced around and saw that the others in the party had spread out on the flat-sculpted, snow-covered outcrop and were slowly reach-big for their bows.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered, more puzzled than nervous.

  He gestured with his head. “Over there. About three or four meters beyond the cabin, right at the edge.”

  She stared in the indicated direction. Something dark there, she thought. No, not dark— It was hard to see in the cloudy, late-afternoon light, particularly through snow goggles she’d donned almost immediately upon their reaching the snow area, for her blue eyes provided little natural protection against snow blindness.

  Cautiously, she lifted up the goggles to get a better look. Red—crimson, a red strain in the snow, very near—no, actually at the edge. And the marks of something having been dragged.

  “It could be an accident,” she said softly. “Or the remains of some hunter’s kill.”

  “It could,” he agreed, but now his bow was cocked. “Can you handle a weapon? I forgot to ask.”

  “About the only thing I might be decent with would be a sword,” she sighed, a little disconsolate at the idea.

  “Why not?” he shrugged, and reached back into his pack. He pulled out a scabbard—not a puny, plain sort of thing but a monstrous scabbard covered with strange, ornate designs. It was clearly a broadsword of some kind, the hilt solid, firm, and yet also ornately sculpted with the shapes of creatures she couldn’t guess the true form of. He handed it to her. “Everything comes in handy sooner or later,” was his only explanation.

  She strapped it around her waist, the place where the humanoid part of her met the equine, and pulled out the blade. It had good balance and feel to it and seemed so perfect she found she could cut a swath with one hand. But for serious business, like skull-cracking, two hands would be best.

  “Colonel?” Jodl, one of the aides, whispered. Asam nodded, and the other centaur crept slowly forward, crossbow at the ready, eyes on the cabin door itself.

  All had shed their packs; in a fight, baggage would unbalance them. The advance man was light and cautious, but made no attempt at concealment. He was, after all, over two and a half meters tall and more than three long and weighed in around seven hundred kilograms, hardly the sort of being who could make a surreptitious entry.

  “Who do you think it is?” she whispered to Asam. “One of your old enemies?”

  He shrugged, never taking his eyes off the door. A second man started out, keeping distance and interval. They were going to approach the cabin from all sides and make sure that only one would be attacked first —if attacker there were. “Could be anybody,” he told her softly. “Hired assassins, freebooters, criminals, Dillian or foreign. Hard to say.”

  It startled her slightly to consider Dillians as criminals or killers. They were a rough but likable and levelheaded lot. But there must be some bad ones, she realized. There always are.

  They were fanned out now on all sides of the cabin, keeping at least ten meters from the cabin door. They didn’t worry too much about any other place of attack; the rocky ledge gave them a measure of protection from above, the far trail was fairly clear to the eye, and the cabin sat on the edge of a sheer cliff. Thinking of the Dahbi, she considered their disregard of the cliff area a mistake. If this world had creatures that could pop up through solid rock, they had dozens that could cling to the sides of sheer cliffs or, perhaps camouflage themselves into near invisibility. Some of the latter had once almost done her in in the distant past in far-off Glathriel.

  The point man had reached the area in question on the far side of the cabin. She stayed in back of the men’s semicircle, feeling helpless and a little irritated that she was not up to this kind of thing. And, for all her own great mass, she was still smaller, yet no more maneuverable, than the males.

  Still, she held the rear guard, sword at the ready, and pulled her goggles back down. Her eyes were already beginning to hurt slightly.

  “Colonel!” the point man called, his voice echoing slightly off the walls near and far. “Party of three. Hunters. Our people. Pretty messed up. They cut ’em up and then tossed ’em over the cliff. They’re forty, fifty meters down when the slope smooths out.” He didn’t attempt to whisper the word. If the killers were still around, they most certainly knew just where they were by now.

  Asam considered, then turned back to Mavra. “Could it have been Gedemondans who did this?”

  She shook her head violently. “Not a chance. If they want you dead, they just point a finger and you curl up and die.”

  “Didn’t think so,” the Colonel muttered, and turned back to the cabin. “All right, boys, let’s go visitin’.”

  They converged, very slowly and carefully, on the cabin until the closest was only a few meters from the front door. It was Mavra who saw that, for the first time, they were twenty or thirty meters out in the open from the rock shelf above. Something was up there, a shadow, a discontinuity…

  “Asam!” she screamed. “Above and behind you!”

  At that moment the attackers leaped off their high perches and fell toward them. There were more than a dozen of them, some armed with pikes, some with crossbows, others with swords.

  They were bats—no, apes, of some kind, with bat’s wings—or— Whatever they were, they were small, agile, they could fly, had blazing eyes and sharp teeth, and wore some kind of dull coppery uniform.

  But they were not flying down; rather, they made a controlled plunge, like skydivers, but with some maneuverability, and they were uttering singularly alien screeches that sounded like high-pitched bagpipes trying to yodel.

  Two with crossbows loosed their bolts while still falling, but they missed their target and plowed into the snow; Jodl and one other who were at an angle to the fall whirled and raised their crossbows. From a firm standing position, they didn’t miss. The force of the Dillian bolts was so strong that the two struck almost seemed suddenly to fly backward, then hit the wall and start forward again, limp.

  By the time this happened, though, the others were upon them
, two leaping directly on Asam. They were small but extremely powerful; one fell right for his head and torso, the other for his hindquarters. The Colonel reared and twisted, flinging the one off his behind, then, dropping his own bow, he grabbed the other creature by its wicked, extended claws and heaved him against the rock wall with tremendous force.

  Before Mavra knew what was happening, one was coming right at her. She waited, then thrust herself outward, both hands on the sword hilt.

  The thing impaled itself on the sword and spurted thick red blood, but it was not dead; somehow, awful hate in its distorted, terribly ugly face, its right arm raised the sharp spear in its hand while its body weight on the broadsword forced Mavra down with it to the ground. She had only a split-second to decide what to do. Falling, off-balance, there was only one thing she could do: she accelerated the fall and rolled; the spear came at her, tearing through her thick fur coat, and she felt a stabbing pain in her left side.

  Too mad to pay any attention to it, she got up with as much speed as possible and saw that the thing, still impaled on the sword, twitched and gibbered. A wave of utter fury swept over her and she reared up on her hind legs and came down, forelegs with their heavy steel shoes crashing into the thing again and again and again.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the creatures were down and slashing now. They were effective; two of the centaurs were down, bolts or spears in them, but Asam still stood, a bloody but superficial wound on his equine body’s left side. Rearing, turning, charging, all the time yelling at the top of his lungs, he charged the things again and again. One of the creatures managed a roll and tried to take off into the air, throwing a spear at the raging Colonel. It struck, but all he did was flinch, cry out, more in fury than in pain. He reached around, pulled the spear out of his side, and threw it at the now airborne attacker. The spear struck the thing, and it paused for a moment, then fell like a rock over the side of the cliff.