Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Can’t say for sure,” the Dahir responded. “I guess I’m pretty well insulated, since I haven’t really felt uncomfortable in any extreme weather. Oh, I knew it was cold back in Hakazit, but it felt like I was wearin’ a full set of winter clothes, if you know what I mean. Dahir’s kinda high up, sort of a rain forest swamp like you find in northwest Washington, where it rains half the time and can get kinda chilly but not freezin’. I hope I don’t need no clothes for any of this! I mean, jeez! Where would I get somethin’ to fit me?”

  “Well, we’ll soon know. Here we go.”

  Pulcinell had been warm and comfortable for Brazil, with both water and air temperatures somewhere in the high twenties Celsius, very much like Rio had been in its spring. He felt the tingle as they passed through the barrier and was suddenly aware that the problem in Dlubine would not be freezing.

  It was hot. It was a steambath of major proportions, and the sun was almost on the horizon! It had to be close to forty degrees Celsius. Even Gus wasn’t unaffected.

  “Wow! Feels like somebody just threw a hot blanket over me!”

  “Me, too,” Brazil responded. “This one’s a hotbox, that’s for sure. With heat like this near dusk, I’m not sure what midday might bring and I don’t like to think about it. No wonder they had major storm warnings on the chart all over this hex! With this kind of heat and humidity you can get a hurricane between dusk and midnight! Evaporation here has got to be nuts!”

  “Yeah, and when it’s clear, it’ll be Sunstroke City, definitely for you, maybe for me. I dunno. Maybe we oughta figure on riggin’ up some kind of roof or sunshade or somethin’ for tomorrow, though.”

  Brazil nodded. “At least it’s calm right now, and we’re in very deep water here with no shoals or reefs. I can pretty well lock the wheel down and the both of us can look for something to use. Otherwise we’ll have to just drift through the day or find some shallows and anchor. Might not be a bad idea to do that, anyway. I can use some decent rest, and I get the bad feeling that there isn’t a night in this land that isn’t filled with thunder and lightning.”

  Gus looked out at the darkening horizon. “I’m not too thrilled to look forward to that experience, considerin’ the storm we started with, but I’m just as worried at what I see out there.” A tiny finger gestured to the northeast, and Brazil’s gaze followed it.

  “Well,” the captain said with a sigh, “we couldn’t exactly expect to travel even an ocean without company.” He fumbled and came up with the binoculars from his pack and examined the horizon more closely. “Looks like all commercial traffic, anyway, just from the look of the sails. All heading pretty much the same way, too.”

  He made an estimate of the common heading of the three sets of sails still far off on the northeastern horizon and looked at the charts. “There,” he said finally, pointing to a dot on the map with his finger. “Five will get you ten that they’re all making for that island.” He looked up at the sail. “Not much of a wind, but they should make it in, oh, two hours, I’d say. Maybe less if the wind picks up like I expect once things start to cool—and I say that in a relative sense. They cut it close, but they should be in the harbor there before any big blow comes up.”

  “What about us?” Gus asked him. “Shouldn’t we put in someplace, too?”

  “Well, the island, which is called Mahguul on the chart, is the only thing within our reach, too. Pretty small—only a few kilometers across by the look of it here, but with some elevation. I’d rather not risk getting bottled up in there if the word’s out on us. It would only take somebody from Mowry to come over and post the gory details. A consortium could post a decent reward, but if they just posted that we’d stolen a fellow sailor’s ship, it wouldn’t take much of a reward.” He thought for a moment. “Still, I don’t want to battle storms all night even if I’m gonna fry tomorrow. I’m gonna head for it even in the dark. If we can just find some shelter off it, we might be able to get what we need.”

  “Sounds about as dangerous as takin’ on the storms,” Gus noted worriedly. “Still, you know the business.”

  “Yeah.” Ihope.

  The night brought a stunning surprise. The ocean was alive with light; greens and blues and reds and yellows and all sorts of in-between shades were all over the place, forming patterns just beneath the surface and giving the whole sea an almost fairy-tale glow.

  “Damn! Will you look at that!” Gus exclaimed at the unending parade of lights. “What do you suppose causes it? Could it be the lights of the people who live under the water here?”

  “Unlikely,” Brazil responded, fascinated himself by the beauty of it. “If it was coming from intelligent creatures, we’d see more movement in the patterns, and this is a semitech hex, so there wouldn’t be any real power source. The water here is fairly deep, too, so it’s not something pasted on or painted on bottom structures. That range of colors means they’re not too deep. My guess would be some kind of marine life that forms large colonies that float or swim a few meters below the surface, but around here you can never take anything at face value.”

  “Terry seems to like it. It’s the first really human reaction I’ve seen her have.”

  “She’s probably analyzing its atomic structure or something equally absurd,” Brazil responded grumpily. “Where is she, anyway? I can’t see much in the dark, even with the glow lighting things up.”

  “Right there by the side rail, on the left. Easy to spot her with this light show. You’ve got to be able to see her. Nobody who can grow a new eyeball can have vision that bad.”

  “No, I—Oh, wait a minute! Hold on! Damn it! Son of a bitch!”

  “What?”

  “She’s solved your damned trick! Now I can’t see either of you!”

  “You’re kiddin’! ’Course, how would I be able to tell? So I can see her and she can see me, but you can’t see neither of us unless we’re talkin’ to you or in your face! Ain’t that a kick in the head!”

  “Yeah, for me,” Brazil sighed. “And I’m the one that could use it best right about now! More than either of you, since I’m the target.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t do much about that, but at least you don’t exactly fit the wanted poster no more. I mean, they’re bound to have the both of you on it, right? They won’t expect you alone, particularly when she was clearly aboard when you stole this skiff.”

  “Yeah, but that won’t mean much. She’s just an identifier, like me having a beard or black hair. You can lose people all sorts of ways, but my description’s pretty well fixed. Still, I wish I could really get through to her, make her understand what we need and persuade her to go get it. You can carry more, but she can climb and get in and out of a lot of places that you can’t.”

  “Tried just about every which way, huh?”

  “Just about. The only thing I didn’t try, and I’m not sure it would do anything or not, was to try and connect on her level, body to body, mind to mind.”

  “Jeez! You can do that?”

  “Of course not. But I have a suspicion that she could, if the will to do it was within me and if I could put myself into a trancelike state where I would not resist.”

  “I don’t think I could do that.”

  “Yeah, well, I had some practice with such things while I was in the Orient. In a way, the state she’s in and the power she has are very reminiscent of the goals of various schools of Eastern mysticism. Thing is, what I’ve seen ordinary Earth humans do with their minds once they were in a mental state totally removed from the material world awed and scared even me. I think, maybe, deep down it’s everybody’s inheritance from the folks who built all this. The potential is there, anyway, to some degree.”

  “Well, why didn’t you try that, then?”

  He gave a wry smile. “For the same reason I stopped short in the lamasery. Because I’m not so sure if I entered that mental realm that I could get back any more than she can. What if whatever force that has this metaphysical, mental, symbiotic relations
hip with her were to get that same degree of control inside me? With that kind of power and lack of dependence on most things physical, I could make it to the Well easily. The question is, what sort of mind would I be bringing into it? Could I shake it off when I had to, or would I be bringing a force I don’t understand into direct contact and connection with the Well and all its powers?”

  “You think this thing is evil, then?”

  “Not in the absolute sense, no. It would be evil to some, good to others, I think. But it, itself, is, I think, beyond that sort of definition in the same way that the Markovians, the founding race, were beyond it. I don’t know, Gus, but I would have to be in a very desperate situation before I could open myself up to that kind of threat.”

  “I think I might take the chance at some point if I thought I might be able to become one of them good guys myself. I could stand a billion years before gettin’ bored.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if I would want that or not. God knows I’ve thought about it enough. And it might not be the kind of godhood anybody would want, anyway.” He chuckled. “Besides, I’ve spent half an eternity as a crook, con man, scoundrel, rogue, and pirate. To be able to do anything you wanted or have anything you wanted by wishing for it would take all the fun out of life. And you’ve got to ask yourself, What would the Glathrielians want to do? And what would a race of mystics that has sworn off all material desires want, anyway?”

  “Urn, yeah. I see your point.”

  They were silent for a while as the wind picked up and they began making some speed again. Off to the west the sky began a dramatic display of lightning, but it was still far enough away that they couldn’t hear the thunder.

  “Gus?”

  “Yeah, Cap? I’m still here, watchin’ the fireworks.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s not heading toward us. I’ve been looking at the lights, though, and I think maybe I was wrong. I think those are some kind of intelligent lighting system. The patterns… Well, don’t they remind you of something? A bit more color, but don’t they kind of look like what a great city might look like when you’re passing over it two kilometers high in an aircraft?”

  “Yeah! Now that you say it, I do see that. I’ll be damned! I thought there was somethin’ familiar about ’em. But I thought you said this was deep water.”

  “It is. The first impression, I think, is an optical illusion based partly on the knowledge that this is a semitech hex and they can’t have an elaborate electrical grid, even water-insulated somehow.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It’s the fact that they live so very deep that gives us this overall impression and view. They do have some kind of light source, probably organic, arising from chemical means. They’ve lit their city, their civilization, their little world with it. And to them, we’re doing exactly what the vista suggests—we’re ‘flying,’ as it were, on the very top of their atmosphere, looking down. Now that, to me, is impressive.”

  “Yeah.” Gus breathed deeply and continued to look at the vast rippling field of lights. He wondered what the people were like down there and whether this was a city asleep or a city alive at night, bustling with traffic and commerce and all the things a great city might offer.

  There was lightning all around after a while, and some distant claps of thunder could be heard rolling hollowly over the waves. Slowly, too, the vast undersea city, if that indeed was what it was, began to trail off, the lights becoming fewer, and great dark patches began appearing. Still, a few lines of light continued on almost beneath their ship, as if they were lonely highways stretching out from the metropolis to others far distant.

  Suddenly Gus realized that this was exactly what they were or at least what Brazil thought they were, and in fact their ship was following the broadest twin line of lights just as an airline pilot might follow a great road.

  “It’s going where we’re going,” Brazil assured him. “It’s too bad it’s so damned hot here that we get all these night storms. Otherwise this would be a dream stretch of ocean to navigate by eye alone. All you’d need would be a general destination or maybe a road map.”

  The captain had finally shed the last of his persona] dignity in reaction to the steam bath heat. His clothes were designed for a cold climate, and Dlubine was anything but that. He was a little, bony sort of guy, Gus noted, although quite hairy, and it was easy to see why he’d be a hit with the women even though the rest of him was small.

  Brazil himself would have preferred at least a pair of briefs, even though he was the only Earth-human male in a vast stretch of the world and the only Earth-human female around had seen him like this many times and indeed seemed to prefer him this way. It was just part of his nature. He had not, however, ever found any nonhuman on the Well World who could get the crotch right.

  Yet, it felt better, even if he was still sweating like a pig.

  “Lights ahead. On—maybe above-—the surface,” Gus warned suddenly.

  Brazil nodded. “I see them. That looks to be a lighthouse to the left, and the lanterns just right of dead ahead—see? Two on the right side, one on the left—they’re channel markers. Being northbound, I’ve got to lay just inside the double lights to remain both in the channel and in the lane.”

  “Must be coming in to that island, then. Can’t see nothin’, though.”

  “You can interpolate it, Gus. Look at the underground highway. The main drag continues right along the markers, but another goes off in a Y to the left, toward the light. I’ll probably swing wide before it gets there, though, since the lighthouse is almost certainly marking reefs or shoals.”

  “You gonna take a chance on the harbor?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to follow the markers around to it, that’s for sure, and we’ll take a look at it. If it’s wide and deep enough, we might just slip in, do what we have to do, and slip out before morning. If it’s small, active, and threatening, I might just do a go-round and see if we can find some kind of temporary anchorage well away from it. I’m going to get in, since the only thing I would like less than climbing over volcanic rocks in pitch darkness is climbing over them when they’re hot enough to fry eggs.”

  The mountain itself, the top of which was the island, could not be seen in the darkness, only inferred, but the channel markers above and the glowing road below made it a simple matter to avoid any nastiness and move slowly around the mass toward the harbor area. Brazil couldn’t help thinking, but didn’t say, that it would also be simple defense by the Dlubinians to shift that road, extinguish a marker lantern or two, and pile everybody up nicely on the rocks he could hear the water slapping against all around the boat.

  Damn it, though, he wished he had a cigar to calm his nerves.

  “There it is!” Gus shouted. “Pretty damned small-looking, if you ask me.”

  “Well, the locals don’t breathe air, so they’ve got little use for the place except as a trading center, and anybody hired to run the place would prefer it nice and compact and manageable, I’d think,” the captain replied. “It’s probably run by some international outfit. There’s bound to be several offering services like this. Hard to say who or what might be running it, let alone what’s in there.”

  “I make seven… no, eight ships, all pretty much like ours,” Gus noted. “And one medium-sized thing with a smokestack parked off by itself over there.”

  Brazil nodded. “That’s the one to worry about. Those are the cops, Gus. I’m giving the entrance a pass.”

  “Cops? Here? Whose?’

  “Just like the trading companies and maintenance companies. All the hexes that have some concern with the sea or coastal security get together and maintain a multinational force run by a professional, multiracial naval authority. They didn’t have anything like that the last time I was here, but I got an earful about them back in Hakazit. They’ve got a mean reputation. Discipline’s about as ugly as a navy gets, but each crew gets a percentage of any seized contraband or reward mo
ney. You can get rich at it if you’re good, and since it’s an all-or-nothing share for the whole crew, if you’re not good, you’re history, anyway. We can’t totally avoid them, but I’d just as soon not tangle with them or answer any nasty questions. You can challenge them if they’re wrong, but we’re a long way from a Zone court here—not that I would particularly want to see what a Zone court was, either, right about now.”

  Gus nodded, watching as they passed the harbor entrance and continued on past the island. “I see. But you said they only had volunteers from coastal hexes and those doing trade with the water hexes.”

  “So I was told.”

  “Then there ain’t likely to be no Dahirs among ’em, and in this hex there’s also not likely to be any automatic surveillance cameras or electric eyes, right?”

  “I see what you mean. No, I’d expect you’d be invisible to them, since they wouldn’t have much call to counter crooked Dahirs around here. Don’t take them or the locals for stupid or ignorant types, though. You can trip a wire or any one of a thousand other traps that don’t require any high-tech stuff and be just as caught. I’m also not so sure you’re going to do any better over this terrain in the dark than I would.”

  “I wasn’t thinkin’ of that. I was thinkin’ it wouldn’t be much of a problem to swim this distance. Even if you anchor on the other side of the island, it’s only gonna be a mile or so back, right? I figure I could manage a fair-sized sack and a keg or two for that distance, and I know what you two can eat and drink, havin’ had some experience along them lines myself. As for findin’ my way, hell, even I can follow these lights.”

  “You sure you’re up to this?” Brazil pressed. “I have to tell you I’d rather not go in there at all if I don’t have to, but it could be tricky.”

  “Jeez! This is a piece of cake! I mean, I got along in Hakazit for weeks, and they got all that electronic shit. Of course, I’m pretty fair with that kind of stuff myself, but I never saw cameras like they had or as tiny as they used, and I still never got tripped up. Man, I remember one time we was in the Congo when this riot broke out and turned into a kinda little revolution. They were shootin’ anything that moved and had all the exits blocked. Me and Terry, we—”