Exiles at the Well of Souls wos-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  Renard had a sudden thought. “Look!” he said excitedly. “It isn’t forever!”

  “The priest said it was irreversible,” Mavra responded. “He said it so joyfully I believed him.”

  “No! No!” the Agitar protested. “You haven’t been through the Well Gate yet!”

  “The priest said the stone’s power was from the Well,” she retorted.

  “That’s true,” Vistaru put in, “but so is everything else on the Well World. Why that stone is there and why it does what it does we’ll probably never know—it’s a substitute for something they would have to handle on their own planet, that’s all. Like the magic hexes here, which really mean they can tap a limited part of the Well to compensate for something in their designed homes. You still haven’t been classified and added to the Well’s input, so whatever changes the stone made won’t affect that.”

  Mavra felt renewed hope. “Not forever,” she almost breathed, and seemed to relax. Suddenly she was upset that she’d let something show through the armor, and she took a deep breath.

  “Not forever,” Renard agreed. “Look, want to head for a Zone Gate now? Not Olborn’s certainly, but we can get in somewhere, I’m sure. We can run you through like you ran me through.”

  Mavra shook her head violently. “No, no, not yet. Later, yes. As soon as possible. But the surrounding hexes are in the war. This hex is in the war. That’s for normal times. We have to get to Gedemondas.”

  “I can do that!” Vistaru protested.

  Mavra shook her head again. “No, you can’t. You won’t know what the engine module looks like, nor how it’s destroyed. Besides, I have never ever backed out on a commission yet once I’ve accepted it. They wanted me along and I said yes. After—a Zone Gate—maybe in Gedemondas, if they’ll talk to us at all, or in Dillia next door.”

  “Be reasonable, Mavra!” Renard protested. “Look at you! You can’t see three meters ahead of you. You can’t feed yourself, you’re stark naked with no protection against the elements, in the middle of territory whose natives would take you back to the stone and finish the job in an instant.” He got up, looked down on her, and gently moved the horse’s tail aside. “You’re even going to have bathroom trouble. Your vagina’s where your ass should be, and the ass is farther up. The human anatomy is designed for sitting or squatting. Those legs are not designed for your body. You can’t go on!”

  She tried to look at him squarely, failed. It hurt too much. “I’m going,” she maintained stubbornly. “With you if you’ll have me. Without you if not. If you want, you can be my guide and aide when I have to see far or eat, and clean me off when I shit. If not, I’ll go anyway, and I’ll make it. When you were sucking your thumb on sponge, and I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t let you go, and I didn’t quit. This won’t stop me, either.”

  “She’s right, you know,” Hosuru said quietly. “At least, about completing the mission first. The whole world is at stake in Gedemondas. She’s needed there. If we can get her there, it’s our duty to try.”

  “Okay,” Vistaru said dubiously, trying to see the flaw in the other Lata’s logic. “If you’re going to be stubborn, we’ll all go. But I think a day or two in that new condition may cure you of this bravado. If it does, don’t feel ashamed, weak, or a failure to ask us to get you to a Zone Gate. I wouldn’t.”

  Mavra chuckled mirthlessly. “Shame and weakness don’t scare me, but I die when I’m a failure to myself.” She shifted again. “Did anybody get my clothes? I might still manage some of them, with Renard’s soldier’s kit. And we ought to get out of here. Sooner or later somebody’s going to notice the high priest didn’t come back and raise a hue and cry. We’d best be well away.”

  Renard threw up his hands. “I have your clothes. We’ll see, later. Now, let’s move! This way!” There was resignation and a total lack of understanding in his voice.

  He wouldn’t understand, Mavra thought. None of them would.

  * * *

  Apparently the shock of the slayings was too much for the Olbornians. There was no pursuit that they ever knew about.

  Mavra found that she could trot, like the little mules. Left legs out, push, right legs out, push, and again, faster and faster. She had no feeling at all in the hoofs, which helped, but all of the exposed skin area was just like normal exposed skin area. The Lata helped, flying alongside or just in front, telling her what was ahead so she didn’t run into trees or hurt her neck, and could make some speed.

  Morning had them some distance away. Renard mounted Doma, whom he’d been leading, and they scouted the terrain. It was clear that things were not going to be as difficult as they feared from the Olbornian score.

  For the “Well’s Chosen Ones,” they were quite obviously getting the hell beat out of them. They had run afoul of a coast watch set around the Sacred Stones areas; it had been sheer bad luck to pick that spot to camp. The rest of the country was wide open, with the telltale signs of a war going badly all over: military carts drawn by teams of mules hauling supplies and large cannon and mortars south; a steady stream of aimless refugees north.

  They stuck to open country, which was mostly deserted now, everyone down south into the fight or guarding the Sacred Stones and Zone Gate. They were able to relax and straighten out their situation.

  Because of the precariousness of the camp, Doma’s packs had never been unloaded, so they still had their supplies. They ate first; to Mavra, it was a humiliating type of experience she would have to get used to. They’d started to spoon-feed her, but she’d resisted that. They opened a tin of meat which Renard warmed, then broke up some small fruit, and put it in a wooden bowl. By standing on her hind legs and kneeling on her forelegs, she could eat, like a dog or cat. It was hard; the thin legs were even thinner at the ankles, and the legs moved forward, not back, and the damned bowl kept moving, but she managed it and the food tasted good. Water she drank by two methods: lapping, like an animal, and sticking her face in the pan and drinking the top half down.

  But it worked, and that was enough for her.

  Vistaru tied her hair up between and in back of her enormous ears with an elastic band, which kept it out of her face and food. She could even see level in front of her, by standing on her forelegs while kneeling on the hind ones. That position, too, was uncomfortable, but she didn’t mind. It gave her neck some relief, and allowed her to see.

  The clothing was more of a problem, though she’d need it. It was slightly chilly in Olborn, and it would be frigid in the upper reaches of Gedemondas.

  They cut the sleeves off her shirt and managed to get it on. The pants were a bigger problem, and they didn’t quite reach all the way, but Vistaru buckled the wide belt around her bare midsection and that helped. It looked wrong and stupid, and felt wrong, too, and the pants kept slipping, but it was something and it felt better. The long coat tailored for Gedemondas would possibly do what was needed, covering that impossible tail, they hoped. Some cut-off gloves might help protect the exposed skin in Gedemondas snow. Maybe.

  Oddly, Mavra felt better now. Obstacles were to be surmounted; that was part of the joy of it all. They noticed a pickup in her spirits they couldn’t comprehend.

  Sleeping was the worst compromise; the animal’s legs were designed for sleeping standing up, but the human torso was not, and sleeping on her stomach was no longer possible. She managed lying on her side.

  In the meantime, the war was going from bad to worse for those of Olborn. Occasionally they’d meet some frightened refugees, not looking as fierce or confident as those back in the priest’s lair. Their world was coming apart, and with it their world-view and their notions of their place in it. No longer sure of anything, they were somehow sad and pathetic. People they ran into kept trying to surrender to them.

  Roving military patrols caused worse problems; most were composed of deserters with the social restraint imposed on them by their life’s conditioning and faith in their favored status with the Well all gone; they brutalized th
e refugees, they tried brutalizing the alien party, but renewed Lata venom and Renard’s highly charged personality soon dealt effectively with them.

  Mavra also found it interesting that no one gave her a second glance. To these insular people, she was just one more weird alien creature.

  But progress was slow, and they turned their attention to trying to find some way to get Mavra and Renard on Doma. The problem was the great wings, which needed to be unimpeded, and which came down most of the length of the great animal’s body.

  Finally, experimentation achieved a compromise that Doma and practicality could accept. Nonessential supplies were jettisoned, and the Lata took as much as they could in their pouches. The weight would slow them, but Doma would also be slowed and impeded. With the instruments tossed out—Renard insisted he never used them anyway—she could sit, legs astraddle, on the lower neck of the pegasus, while he sat just behind, body pressed into hers. Straps from some of the excess saddlebags would hold her, and Doma, while uncomfortable with the extra weight on her neck, managed. The only problem was that it took all three of the others and some cooperation and kneeling from Doma to get her up there in the first place.

  Finally, though, they could fly, and the distance sped by. They ducked south of the hex corner, avoiding any more priestly fanatics, and crossed barely into Palim.

  The inhabitants of the hex eyed them nervously, but did not interfere or challenge them. The Palim resembled nothing so much as giant long-haired elephants. Their form was deceptive, though; they were a high-technology people, with carefully managed groves of food trees and grain, and a criss-cross of a large electric rail system and odd, gumdrop-shaped city buildings in clusters linked by ramps. They stayed clear; the Palim seemed too unconcerned by the nearby violence. It indicated that they had elected to sit out the war, and that meant the Yaxa-Lamotien-Dasheen alliance was probably making good use of that rail system in the east.

  Even slowed, they made the border of Gedemondas in under two days. There was no doubt where they were; the great mountains of the frigid hex were visible from the flat plain, like some intrusive wall, a great distance before they reached it. With a few hours to scout around by air, they found the relatively small plains area that was in Gedemondas itself. It was the logical point for the two advancing armies to head for, and it was empty of all but some minor wildlife when they arrived.

  They were first, but by how much?

  They studied the maps. It was obvious that the Makiem would airlift over Alestol, probably to near the point where they now were. The Yaxa would move from Palim at the rail terminus, then about thirty kilometers overland to the northern edge of the plain. Renard wondered idly if there would be room for both forces.

  “There will be quite a battle,” Mavra predicted grimly. “If one gets here first the other will have to dislodge them if it can. If they get here at the same time, the clash will just be more immediate, with this a no man’s land. Either way, this nice little plain is going to be littered with the dead and dying before long.”

  “According to the hex map, here, there’s a little shelter over near that cleft in the rocks,” Vistaru noted. “That’s where we’re supposed to meet our guide, if anyone’s still there.”

  Mavra tried to look to where the Lata pointed, but her head wouldn’t come up enough. Two or three meters, that was the limit. She swore in frustration, but there was determination on her face as well.

  It was about fifteen degrees centigrade on the plain, which was comfortable, but that wouldn’t last long, either. The air cooled almost two degrees for every three hundred meters in altitude, and some of those passes were over three thousand meters high.

  They walked leisurely to the shelter, and almost missed it. It was a low cabin of old stone and wood set back against the rocks, so old and weatherbeaten that it almost looked a part of the natural formations. It looked deserted, and they approached cautiously, uncertain of what surprises might be around for them.

  Suddenly the big door, almost as high as the shack itself, creaked open, and a creature came out.

  It looked like a human woman, almost. Long hair tied back in a sort of ponytail, an attractive, oval face and long slender arms. But she had little pointed ears, and from the waist down, below her light jacket, she had the body of a white-and-black spotted horse.

  A centaur,the classicist Renard thought, no longer surprised. Meeting such a creature was no longer strange; in fact, it was almost to be expected.

  The woman smiled when she saw them, and waved. “Hello!” she called, in a pleasant soprano. “Come on up! I’d almost given you up!”

  Vistaru approached. “You are the Dillian guide?” she said, almost unbelievingly. The Dillian was no more than a girl, perhaps in her mid-teens.

  The centaur nodded. “I’m Tael. Come on in and I’ll start a small fire.”

  They entered; Tael gave the strange-looking Mavra an odd look, but said nothing. Doma waited outside, placidly munching grass.

  The place was built for Dillians, certainly—there were stall-like compartments for four of them, a lot of straw on the floor, and, up on brick blocks a small wood-burning stove and scuttle filled with chopped wood. Tael threw a couple of pieces in the stove and lit a small piece of paper with a very long safety match, throwing it into the cast-iron belly of the stove.

  Dillians never sat; their bodies couldn’t stand the weight. So everybody else sat on the straw, Mavra reclining on her side. There was plenty of room.

  After some small talk, Renard voiced what they all were thinking.

  “Ah, excuse me, Tael, but—aren’t you a little young for all this?” he tried, as diplomatically as possible.

  The woman didn’t take it badly. “Well, I admit I’m only fifteen, but I was born in the uplake mountain country of Dillia; my family has hunted and trapped on both sides of the border for a long time. I know every trail and pathway between here and Dillia, and that’s a pretty good ways.”

  “And the Gedemondas?” Mavra prompted.

  The Dillian shrugged. “They’ve never bothered me. You see them every once in a while—big white shapes against the snow. Never close—they’re always gone when you get there. You hear them, too, sometimes, growling and roaring and making all sorts of weird sounds that echo between the mountains.”

  “Is it their speech?” Vistaru asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Tael replied. “I used to, but when they asked me to do this guide job for you they fitted me with a translator, and I didn’t hear any difference. I’ve wondered sometimes whether they have any speech as we know it at all.”

  “That could be bad,” Renard put in. “How can you talk to somebody who can’t talk back?”

  She nodded. “I’m still excited about all this. We’ve tried off and on to communicate with them for the longest time; I’d like to be there when it’s done.”

  “Ifit’s done,” Hosuru added pessimistically.

  “I’m worried about the smoke from that thing,” Mavra said, cocking her head a little bit toward the stove. “Not the Gedemondas. The war parties. They have to be close by.”

  The girl looked uncomfortable. “I’ve seen them already, but they just took a close look at me and went on. A few flying horses like yours, and some really strange, beautiful things that must have had orange and brown butterflylike wings three or more meters across. None of them landed.”

  Vistaru looked concerned. “Yaxa and Agitar both. Advance scouts. We can’t stay here long.”

  “We won’t,” Tael told them. “We’ll leave at first light up the Intermountain Trail in back of the base here. With any luck we’ll make Camp 43 shortly after noon, and from there we start getting into snow country—and the air thins.”

  “How high is this camp?” Renard asked.

  “Fifteen hundred sixty-two meters,” Tael responded. “But you’re already almost four hundred meters up. You wouldn’t know it, but the plain’s a slope.”

  “We could fly up that far,” Vist
aru noted. “We’re good to about eighteen hundred meters, and I think you said, Renard, that Doma’s good to about that.”

  He nodded. “But that doesn’t help our guide, here. No wings for her.”

  Tael laughed. “That’s all right. I told you I was mountain-born. Even better if we have a head start, but beyond Camp 43, flying will be difficult. I can start up this evening, and be there to meet you in the morning. That way we move even faster.” Her face darkened, and she looked at Mavra. “But you will have to be dressed far better than that. All of you, in fact. Frostbite will be a big problem.”

  “We have some winter things,” Hosuru told her. “And I understood you were supposed to bring some stuff.”

  She nodded, went over to a stall, and hauled out some tough fabric knapsacks. They were heavy, but she managed them without strain. Maybe she couldn’t fly, but she did add the muscle power that was their most conspicuous lack.

  She sorted things out. Special form-fitting thermal wear to suit Latan contours, including transparent but tough and rigid shielding for the wings, appeared, and a heavy coat and gloves that sealed with an elastic of some kind fitted Renard. “You’ll also find these useful,” she said, tossing him some small objects which proved to be wrappings for his hooves, with a flat, spiked, disklike sole that would give him not only protection but better footing. She brought out some more clothes, also of the Latan model but larger and without the wing flaps. She looked a little puzzled. They were obviously for a biped with hands and feet.

  Hastily, Mavra explained what had happened. The girl nodded sympathetically, but was plainly concerned.

  “I don’t see how these can be cut down,” she said. “Your feet should do all right in the snow, like mine, but you should have some kind of wrapping. You haven’t got my protective skin layers and hair,” she pointed out.

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” Mavra responded. “Renard will have to lead Doma once we get up there; I’ll ride her as long as possible. That should help.”