Twilight at the Well of Souls wos-5

by Jack L. Chalker

  Now Gunit Sangh unfolded himself. He was an impressive, vicious-looking creature, with three pairs of sticky tentacles and a face that said here was a thing that ate only living flesh. The tentacles showed sharp reflective shields of cartilage that obviously could cut like knives. The whole creature, close to three meters long, was in its own way as much a killing machine as the Hakazit—and unlike the Hakazit it looked very much in practice, not bluffing at all.

  “I can do nothing if the host country forbids it,” Sangh spat. “But your untried army will have to face mine yet, off-worlder. You mark my words. I am the enemy you will have to face one day soon.”

  “Any time,” Marquoz responded as casually as he could manage. “And, in case you think I’m a pushover, well, Colonel Asam sends his regards.”

  “Asam!” the Dahbi hissed. “Eating the two of you will be the most supreme pleasure of my very long life!” And, with that, to the amazement of both sides, Gunit Sangh seemed to change his color to a more milky white, becoming slightly glowing, less substantial. He folded himself back into his ghostly shape and, without another word, sank into the ground itself as if it were water.

  Marquoz felt well satisfied even though the troops would be upset at still no battle. He had faced down the Ambreza and removed another potentially nasty threat, neutralized that big multiracial force, and snubbed the enemy commander all at one time. He was particularly happy to have met Colonel Asam by chance in Zone; otherwise, he would never have known about that story…

  He turned, nodded to a subordinate, and green flares were lit and shot into the air. The army started to move. He and his aides stood there and let it march past, looking damned menacing and impressive. The Ambreza and allied forms got out of the way fast; most, he guessed, were heading to nearby communications tents to radio the news.

  One of his Hakazit aides inched over to him as they tramped by, masking most other sounds.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Those bombs—superbombs or whatever. Was that for real?”

  He drew himself up to full attention. “General, I would no more bluff than I would tell a lie,” he huffed, and that closed the matter.

  And, of course, it took some time before the aide realized that he had not had an answer at all.

  The passage across Ambreza had been swift and easy. Roads were cleared for them; vehicles, in fact, were provided. They avoided the major cities—no use in giving any provocations, he decided—and the Ambreza and allied forces they met along the way mostly stared, gawked, and even snapped pictures occasionally. The cold, crisp weather had the Hakazit breathing steam, and that leant an even more sinister touch to everything. Marquoz liked it. It was good theater.

  It was easy to see where Ambreza ended and Glathriel began. It was winter in Ambreza, and the trees were barren and the soil frosted. But there, shimmering slightly, was a lush, green world ahead of them. It was like walking through some sort of invisible curtain from late fall into deepest summer. Glathriel was a tropical hex, and, as they saw, it was one that didn’t stop just because an army was passing through.

  They were all around, these creatures that looked so much like the dominant race of the Com from which he had come. And why not? These were the prototypes, smaller than the average Com human, but that might have been climate or diet or a combination of things, and darker, too, but very much “human” all the same. Most were naked or wore only clouts or loincloths—that, and collars.

  Here were the great plantations from which Ambreza tobacco came, and tropical fruits as well, men, women, children, all ages out in those fields working, working, working, all worked by these human slaves supervised by Ambreza overlords. Occasionally they would stop and gawk at the hordes passing along the road, but not for very long and certainly not without cowering in abject fear and terror.

  Over a thousand years, Marquoz guessed, they’d had the aggressiveness bred out of them and the traits needed to do this sort of job emphasized.

  There was a commotion ahead, and Marquoz rushed to find the reason for it. To his surprise, he found three very young human women there, seemingly begging or pleading and looking nervously around. They were naked, wore brass collars, and seemed no different from the rest—except they had the nerve to approach the column where nobody could understand them or would even deign to notice them.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he thundered.

  The women reacted as if they’d suddenly gone mad. “You can hear us!” they cried. “You can understand us! Thank God!”

  They nodded. He turned to the leaders of the column. “I want the word passed down the line. Any Glathrielites who approach us are to be taken under our protection and kept awaiting my inspection. Clear?”

  Word was passed. Shouldn’t overlook any bets or reject any soldiers, no matter how small or flimsy-looking, he decided. Besides, one of ’em might be Gypsy—er, Nathan Brazil. Wouldn’t do to leave him behind after going to all this trouble to pick him up, he thought sardonically.

  At the night’s camp he had them brought to him. They had picked up a few more—perhaps twenty in all—along the way, two males and the rest females. They had come through, of course, as had everybody else, and had awakened in Ambreza. The Well didn’t recognize hex-swapping, so Ambreza Entries were deposited in old Ambreza, or Glathriel, while the reverse was true for humans. It made them stand out, of course, and they had been quickly picked up and carted off to Glathriel, where they had been assigned to the fields and had the collars welded on. None could believe the horrible system, and less comprehensible still was the absolute submission of the natives.

  His orders had been to reach the northwestern facet of Glathriel and proceed along it to the coast, then turn north into Ginzin and head north until he linked up with Mavra’s army moving due west. His communications were good; Jorgasnovarians, who were huge, ugly, flat creatures with gaping mouths and somehow flew like birds, often raced hundreds of kilometers to an accessible Zone Gate for news, then returned. He knew of the battle in Olborn, and the progress beyond it, almost within hours of their happening—and they now were hearing from him.

  Ginzin rose before them along the Sea of Turagin now, and still no Brazil. The nasty, hot, volcanic land was inhospitable to most of their kind, but here, right where the land met the sea, it was passable.

  He began to wonder if something had slipped.

  The going was slow up the coast, and they had particular troubles with their heavy equipment, which helped take his mind off the anxiety some of the time. Still, he had expected Brazil by now—or, rather, a Brazil look-alike he knew well but which would be Brazil as far as everyone else knew. Where was he?

  Finally, on the last evening in Ginzin, they camped as best they could, all strung out up and down the beach, and watched the sun slowly set. He sat there, idly watching the play of sunlight on the rolling waves, although the sun was setting behind him and would be gone before it truly set, when he thought he saw something out there. He stared into the gathering gloom, trying to make it out. A ship—there was a ship out there! Waynir was high-tech, and he could see the billowing smoke from belching stacks as the great craft steamed onward to the northwest. It seemed oddly near to shore, though, taking something of a risk; there were reefs and shoals hidden in the shallows here, a product of lava flows from Ginzin reaching the sea and then being covered with coral and other sea creatures. He reached for his field glasses, gogglelike affairs specially built for his strange eyes. They were effective.

  He watched as long as the light permitted him, watched as the mystery ship, without cutting steam, lowered a small boat, which headed in toward the beach.

  Suspicious of the whole thing, Marquoz notified the guard to put everyone on alert. Here, in a non-tech hex, backs to the sea on one side and the volcanic cliffs on the other, would be the perfect place to attack.

  They watched and waited warily as the small boat approached. Finally, it came in and two dark figures jumped
out and pulled it up on what passed for a beach. The only other member of the boat party waited, then got up and jumped down into the shallow water. He shook hands with the other two—who looked, Marquoz saw, like Type 41 humans—and then as the other two pushed off and jumped in, the passenger made his way up to the waiting force, which visibly relaxed now.

  He heard the humans in his own party gasp as they recognized the figure, and for the first time he felt a bit better about this whole thing. He walked down to meet the figure.

  “Welcome to the war, ah, Brazil,” he called out.

  The figure stopped, staring for a moment at the huge, looming creature only half-visible in the darkness, its red eyes blazing. “That you, Marquoz?” he called.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” he replied. “Come ahead. We were beginning to give up on you.”

  All fires had been extinguished on the sound of the alert, but now they were being restoked. He stepped up to the nearest one, shivered slightly in the slight chill, and nodded in satisfaction.

  He was dressed in a pea-green tunic and trousers and wore sandals. His hair was extremely long, down past his shoulders, and he looked slightly weather-beaten and somewhat older than Marquoz remembered—but, then, he’d been here awhile.

  Marquoz guessed that the real Brazil probably looked exactly like this one, even to the clothing.

  “Any problems?” Brazil asked casually.

  “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Marquoz told him. “You wouldn’t like Glathriel. It’s pretty unpleasant. Plantation slavery. But, still, we got through without a shot fired, much to the disappointment of some of the boys. I’ll give you a rundown later.”

  Brazil nodded. “Well, we’ll have a fight now. If I were the opposition, I’d try and get a force in between ours and Mavra’s before we can link up. Might be hairy if we can’t make time.”

  Marquoz stared at him suspiciously. For a moment he found himself wondering, wondering if this was, indeed, Gypsy. The mannerisms, the tone and accent, they were all consistent with Brazil. Could it be…?

  And then Brazil reached into his tunic and pulled out a cigarette, reached down for an ember and lit it.

  Marquoz felt better.

  Brazil made a face as he inhaled. “Local stuff,” he muttered grumpily. “Almost all cigar and pipe tobacco. Not really good for cigarettes.”

  “We all have to make sacrifices in war,” Marquoz responded with mock sympathy.

  At that moment the humans in the party could not be restrained and started running for the small figure by the fire. He looked up at the commotion, his face a mixture of shock and revulsion.

  They prostrated themselves before him and cried out, “Nathan Brazil! Master! We are your servants! Speak and we shall obey!”

  He looked at them, a whole range of conflicting emotions passing across his face. Finally he went up to the leading humans.

  “Look up at me,” he said softly, and they did.

  He studied their young faces and forms thoughtfully. Finally he said, almost to himself, “Maybe this god business has some advantages after all…” He looked over at Marquoz. “How many?” he asked.

  “Eighteen female, two male,” the Hakazit responded.

  Brazil nodded. “Maybe this trip won’t be such a holy terror after all,” he murmured. “Eighteen…”

  Gypsy, Marquoz thought, was showing through a bit.

  Zone

  “Brazil’s been seen.”

  The report startled Serge Ortega. Somehow he hadn’t quite expected it to be this easy.

  “Where?” he asked sharply.

  “With the Southern force. Apparently he’s been on a ship on the Sea of Turagin all this time. Rowed ashore and joined them just south of the Ginzin border.”

  Ortega frowned suspiciously. “Are you sure it’s him? These are tricky bastards we’re dealing with, and he’s the trickiest.”

  “It’s him,” the messenger assured him. “Some of our people with the force have seen and talked to him and the Entries in the group are acting like God Himself just paid them a call.”

  The Ulik nodded absently and switched off. Brazil. Visible, easily located, ripe for the plucking, with over three-thousand kilometers left to go to the nearest Avenue. It smelled wrong, somehow. It was too obvious, too blatant, too much a dumb mistake in an operation that had been, so far, beautifully planned and executed. It was as if, with everything going his way, Brazil had suddenly popped up and shouted, “Here I am! Come and get me!”

  And he was vulnerable. Except for death, he wasn’t immune to anything that could happen to anyone else. He suffered pain and torment, and he was wide open to everything from hypno devices to magic.

  He punched in a communications code. “Central Command,” answered a translator-pitched voice.

  “This is Ortega. Now that the information about Brazil has come in, what does Commander Sangh intend?”

  The communications officer hesitated. “Sir, I don’t think we can give that out right now. Not even to you, sir.”

  He growled. “I’m coming down there. Something’s very wrong here, and I want to make sure there are no slip-ups.” He switched off angrily and slithered from behind his great U-shaped desk and out the door.

  It was still bad in the corridors; there seemed no end to the Entries, and he knew he couldn’t protect them much longer. If Brazil were captured, or even if they thought they had him, a lot of restraints would suddenly ease around the world.

  Central Command was located in the Czillian Embassy, simply because Czill had the best, most sophisticated computers and records and it provided easy access. The machines in the embassy were compatible with the ones in Czill, and information could quickly be traded back and forth by simply having the Czillians take the computer storage modules between home and embassy.

  It was crowded, though, with many races, all with forces in the critical area. For one of Ortega’s bulk, he had to watch it or get injured by accident by some spiked or poisonous or other lethal creature just trying to keep out of the way.

  He spotted Sadir Bakh, the Dahbi second-in-command who was Gunit Sangh’s alter ego in Zone. Ortega didn’t like the Dahbi much, although with his racial command policies he was dealing here with only half a dozen. Had Brazil gone the other way, Sangh wouldn’t have been the commander, but Dahbi would have been in the path of march.

  “Bakh! What’s the commander going to do about all this? Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  The folded Dahbi turned, looking more like a ghost than ever, and sighed. “His Holiness flew to Cebu with the Cebu commander as soon as the Ambreza situation was resolved,” he said coolly. “He is there now. We have a mixed force of about twenty thousand ready to go in the area, and another force of almost twelve thousand is currently being ferried across Laibir from Conforte to Suffok, which should be sufficient to cut off that route and the Ellerbanta-Verion Avenue. The enemy is currently split into three parts, the Awbrian part consisting of about six thousand natives and roughly two thousand others. Parmiter is remaining officially neutral, but we believe a large part of it has been bought off by the enemy and will supply the technological weaponry the Awbrian force needs.”

  “Why doesn’t he bomb the damned factories from Cebu?” Ortega growled.

  “As the Ambassador must know, Parmiter is officially on our side. Do we turn probable collaboration into active opposition on a suspicion that some Parmiters—they are a rather anarchistic group, you might recall—are doing us harm?”

  Ortega nodded glumly. Damn it, the cards were always stacked on the wrong side.

  “You’re forcing them toward the Yaxa-Harbigor Avenue, then,” he noted, looking at the situation map.

  “All ours, all armed, all ready and well equipped. It is our feeling that they will go north along the Sea of Storms to avoid as much as possible the high-tech hexes. Once they are north of Boidol, there will be a solid wall of us while they will be in hostile hexes with their backs to the sea at all points. That will effec
tively isolate the southern and eastern forces from those in Awbri, who will have to break through heavily defended border positions over a long distance to link up. By that time our own forces will be able to move from the Ellerbanta-Verion area to engage them, and that will be that.”

  He studied it, then decided it was a good, reasonable, rational plan based on current information—and one that seemed absolutely foolproof. That worried him. The other side read maps and had a fair amount of intelligence itself and would know exactly this. The more he looked at it, the more he thought that he was missing something, he wasn’t sure what. Something wrong. A joker.

  He turned to the intelligence chief sitting in front of a computer console. “You have anything out of the ordinary away from the battle lines?” he asked uneasily. “Any reports of any odd occurrences or movements?”

  “Nothing much,” the chief told him. “We traced that ship Brazil used on Turagin. He owned it—at least, it was bought with a hell of a lot of money, about nine times the going price. Bought at least two weeks before he got here and outfitted with a nice crew of multiracial freebooters and cutthroats.”

  Ortega considered that, too. “Where the hell are they getting the money for all this?” he wondered aloud, and not for the first time. There was no common currency on the Well World—many hexes didn’t use any—and much of it was in large-scale barter-type trade.

  The intelligence chief shrugged. “Gold, diamonds, you name it—they got it. Even a bunch of trade goods, food, manufactured items. We can’t trace it, frankly, but I’ll tell you this. Whatever they need they ask for, and whatever price is demanded they pay.”

  “I’d like a general intelligence summary for the past two weeks,” he told the intelligence officer. “Somewhere here, I don’t know where, there’s a joker. Somewhere somebody’s laughing at me, and I don’t like it.”