Shadow of the Well of Souls watw-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  The Gekir chief was off the high mount almost as the huge creature stopped near the pool and snaked its long, hairy trunk into the water. The Gekir’s motion was fluid, very feline, as if she hadn’t a bone in her body. The forward pair of big, thick, short-fingered hands were used in this instance as if they were forelegs. But once on the ground, the Gekir chief supported herself on her four rear legs and raised her short torso and long neck in something of a centauroid fashion, although even ripples of skin under the fur gave an impression not of Dillian rigidity but almost of liquidity. The hindquarters, however, were smooth, with no hint of a tail.

  The other Gekirs dismounted in similar fashion but made no effort to draw weapons or approach. Instead they simply gathered by the large animals and allowed their chief to handle the business at hand.

  Although quite low to the ground, the Gekir projected a sense of bigness and strength. Certainly the creatures were large, and their hands, with the retractable claws, looked both powerful enough and sufficiently dangerous to rip one of the big mammothlike mounts to shreds. The chief came right over to them, showing no fear at all, and first the Erdomese, then the Dillians, and finally Mavra were inspected with large catlike eyes and an enormous twitching black nose. She looked at Mavra the closest, dwarfing the small woman. Mavra was close enough to touch the protruding fangs, and the creature’s breath was intense enough almost to cause her to pass out.

  Finally the Gekir said to Mavra, “You be like a zumbaga. Where do ye say ye was from?”

  “Glathriel, Excellency. Type 41.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Might I ask what a zumbaga is?”

  “Tiny bipedal apes. Horrid little pests they be. Be a tribe of ’em here somewheres. Can’t be touched because they be royal property—protected, y’ know.”

  She nodded. “We’ve seen them and noted the resemblance. They didn’t look like they fit in here.”

  The Gekir gave a rumbling roar that the translator indicated was amusement. “They don’t! They be brought here long ago in ancient times, and the ruler of the time, whose soul should be ever cursed for it, took a likin’ to ’em and bred ’em. A royal pain in the arse, they be, but we keeps their numbers managed and limited to religious sites.”

  “I thought this might be a temple. That is why we did not enter it. We had no wish for anything but water before going to the coast.”

  “Indeed? And why be ye in Gekir at all, then, when there be all the stuff ye might like or need fifty leagues north in Bug Heaven?”

  “We had no intention of coming here. Our business is far to the north and west of this whole area, and Gekir is out of our way.” Briefly she explained how their train had gone the wrong way without really giving her suspicions as to why.

  The chief was neither stupid nor ignorant. Both Mavra and Lori couldn’t help noticing that she took the translator for granted and never once asked how it was they could be understood. “We hates all them things. They robs the soul from ye and make it impossible after a whiles t’ tell the people from their machines. But the Bug machines don’t go wrong, least not that we hear, and I can see the injury to that one’s hand, there.”

  Mavra nodded, deciding to tell what she could without violating the whole detour’s purpose. “Someone has been following us. We don’t know who or why, but they have influence and money. They tried to kill me once, but now they seem satisfied to just keep me from going anywhere. We jumped off the train when we realized we were diverted and made for Gekir through the jungle. We spent the night on the rocks out there and hoped today to reach the coast and perhaps pay our way onto a coastal vessel or fishing boat and throw our pursuers off our scent.”

  The chief nodded. “Aye, we smelled yer camp and tracked you here. Been curious to see what ye might look like. Where ye be headin’ to at the end of this business, and why?”

  Mavra felt suddenly uncomfortable. “I—I’m sorry, your Excellency, but I cannot tell you that. The knowledge is of no great use to you, but if I told you, even in strict confidence, and you were later ordered by your government to report us or tell what we said and did, it would be your duty to do so. With all due respect, I cannot in good conscience place you in that position.”

  The big cat froze for a moment and glared fixedly at her, looking for all the world like an enraged lion about to pounce on a crippled antelope. But instead she said. “That big, is it?”

  “Upon my honor it is.”

  Suddenly the chief gave an unmistakable grin, and again there was that growl of amusement. “Well, I think ye be full of shit, but I likes any little one with the gall to tell me to mind me own business and make it sound like they was doin’ me some favor! Come on! We’ll take ye all to a village on the seashore that might get ye out of me fur!”

  The rest of the Gekirs, who’d watched all this not quite sure how their chief was going to react, now showed amusement and relaxed. The ice was broken.

  Once the visitors were accepted, the Gekirs proved as pleasant and hospitable as their vague reputation to the north had them. Mavra, in fact, had a tougher time relaxing with the Dillians than she did with the Gekirs. To Tony and Anne Marie, it had been like listening to only one side of a phone call, with the Gekir growling and spitting and making, in Anne Marie’s term, ” horrid little noises.” She, for one, liked her cats to be much smaller.

  The patrol was clearly out on business unrelated to them but also unrelated to the temple and watering hole. There was a certain tit for tat, though, in that Shestah volunteered neither why they were out there or particularly why someone whose position equated to provincial governor would be with them. Even so, the old girl was quite talkative about her opinions, and she had one on almost everything.

  “It be too damned civilized,” she told Mavra. “Ain’t been a war, so much as a revolution, in so many lifetimes, the young ’uns know about it only from stories. Game’s all managed, been peace with the neighbors since forever. Only thing what saves us from slow death by boredom be the no-technology laws. Keeps families together, keeps the good values, makes ye earn yer keep. That’s why we still got huntin’ parties and all the rights and ranks. Afore ye gets rights here, ye got to come out t’ here or someplace like it, bare of all stuff, make yer own kill, and live the old style. Rest of it’s mock battles against the neighbor guv’s kids. Just last month a team of me girls got right into old Skisist’s office and poured glue on the High Seat.” Again the chuckle, but this time with pride. “Took ’em three days to unstick the old witch, and she’ll be ’arf a year growin’ back the fur it cost ’er!”

  She had a lot of stories, and it was clear that she loved telling them to someone, anyone, who hadn’t heard them so often they were known by heart. Still, it was time to move out if they were to reach the coast in any reasonable time.

  Lori looked up at the chief’s elephantine mount and then back at Mavra. “You’re really going to ride up there with her?”

  “Sure. It’d insult her if I didn’t, and she’ll get to tell me dozens more tales before we’re there. I know, I know, but it’s a small price to pay when you think of it. I’d sure rather have to listen to her than fight her.”

  Lori nodded. “Amen to that. But—maybe, if you get the chance, you can find out what’s really puzzling me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There are no males. None. They aren’t even mentioned.”

  “Yeah, I did notice that,” Mavra admitted. “They might well be unisexual. Many races are. Or maybe here the men are home doing the dishes and minding the kids.” She shrugged. “We’re going to a village, anyway. We’ll know soon enough. I just want you to make sure that Alowi and the Dillians behave themselves and aren’t scared or panicked by anything they might see. This chief’s smart and sophisticated. A full report on us will be on its way to higher-ups as soon as she gets the chance. My only hope is that whoever’s screwing us up didn’t anticipate this move and enlist the locals here just in case. If not, then that report will
be quickly headed southeast to the capital and from there to Zone. By then we should be long gone.” Ihope, she added to herself.

  Lori still didn’t like Mavra’s way of thinking. “What if she is in on it?”

  Mavra shrugged. “Then we’re really no worse off than we were, are we?”

  The top of the woolly creature was a long way up, and it took Tony’s aid from below and the chief grabbing from above to get Mavra up. Once she was there, however, it proved a very wide and relatively secure platform, and the blanket spread out and secured on top was thick enough to kept the beast’s backbone from being much of a problem, particularly in the crease between the first and second pairs of the three sets of legs.

  The Gekir chief looked down at Lori and grinned. “Ye be all better goin’ aside us ’stead of in the rear. Not unless ye want t’ be steppin’ in a huge load of the world’s greatest fertilizer!”

  It was a good point, one the essentially city-bred and civilized foursome who would walk or run along with the party would not have thought of until it became very obvious.

  “We should have one of each of us on both sides of the chief’s mount,” a still suspicious Tony suggested. “That way we’d have maximum speed and position if anything went wrong.”

  “Yes, with Chang up there and trapped between us,” Lori noted. “No, it’s all right. It’s still her show, and she is not only unconcerned, she is in her glory right about now. She’s having a lot of fun. Can’t you tell?”

  “Yes, the woman’s ego is unmatched,” Tony agreed, “but you will note that while so far we have been more trouble and expense than aid to her, she wants us along. Why do you think that is? Company? She is an easy one to talk to, but beyond the surface there is someone tough, nasty, and possibly ruthless inside there we aren’t permitted to see. If even a tenth of what she claims about herself is close to the truth, then inside her is one of the most dangerous people any of us have ever met. Did you see how confident she was in turning down that chief, for whom being refused is obviously a new experience? Could you have done it? Or me? And more important, could you have gotten away with it?”

  “Well, I—” he stammered. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way. So why do you think she’s taking us along, then?”

  “To remove obstacles for her if need be,” Tony replied. “Big obstacles she can’t talk her way or think her way out of. It might be an idea to remember that she thinks herself immortal, and, true or not, she believes it. We are here to keep her from being captured or badly injured, nothing more, but we are not immortal. She said an attempt was made on her life by two assassins before any of us were here. She never said what happened to the two assassins or who she might have been with then. We are… what is the term?”

  “I believe the word you want is ‘expendable,’ dear,” Anne Marie put in cheerfully. “What Tony is saying is to worry only about yourself and your wife in the end. That woman can take care of herself.”

  Lori looked back up at Mavra Chang thoughtfully. If that was true, and it certainly rang true, why didn’t she just hire tough natives rather than transformed Westerners? A Gekir, for example, would make a formidable bodyguard and would probably love the job just for its potential danger.

  Anne Marie read his thoughts. “She’s short of funds, dear, and we’re much cheaper.”

  Alowi was concerned about Lori running. “Are you certain that your leg is not going to go out again? That it is not too soon?”

  “The leg is fine,” he assured her. “Running on it will actually help me get back into shape. What about you? You were weak as could be this morning.”

  “I am fine now. I simply needed replenishment. I will not be a burden.”

  He hugged her. “You are never a burden to me! Don’t think that!”

  “I look up at her and I feel a wrongness. I cannot say if the wrongness is me or her, but it is one of us. She rides the monster beast as if she has ridden one her whole life, and she treats the orange and black creatures as if they are old friends, yet she is weak and tiny and could be destroyed by one strike of those hands.”

  “I know. I knew the first time I met her that she was different from anyone I ever knew, but I did not know how very different she was. Your concern is me. I will deal with Mavra Chang.”

  “My lone concern is you,” she said sincerely, leaving no doubt that Mavra Chang’s interests were of absolutely no importance to her at all.

  He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. Damn it! What had happened to the two assassins?

  The village turned out to be of considerable size, spreading out on all sides of a spectacularly beautiful bay and climbing the sides of low rolling hills to the east and south.

  The buildings were basically of stone or brick with thick thatched roofs for the individual one-story houses and red slate for the larger or taller structures. The market and business district was surprisingly well developed, with buildings up to a block square and rising up to six stories high. The port was on the northern side of the bay, set off a bit by itself, including docks, piers, and warehouses. It was about as modern-looking as a nontech civilization was capable of managing. But that wasn’t the startling part of the view eastward out toward the ocean; there was something else that commanded attention even more: a shimmering, odd effect, like a thin plastic wall, that seemed to go from north to south and intersected the two far points of land on either side of the bay.

  “A sea hex boundary!” Lori exclaimed. “Right up to the town!”

  “That be Ogadon,” one of the Gekirs called down. “Ogadon takes in part of Muca Bay. The town be Port Saar.”

  Mavra, too, hadn’t expected quite this elaborate a town or this good a port. “Ships do stop here, then!”

  The chief nodded. “Not like up north in Itus, but that be far away from here, that port. Easier for us to have this and get what services we need direct than to wait weeks to get anything from the big port down at the Point. The wormies, who don’t have much of a decent harbor down south, use it sometimes as well. That be why yer train thing be comin’ so far south. See, that point of land just outside the border at the edge of the port is really in Ogadon, so they don’t need no sail to come in, neither.”

  “No ships in now, though.”

  “Don’t look it. We’ll check the schedules when we gets down there. Don’t expect ye’ll want no big ships nohow, since they’d be goin’ on from here to the wormies most like or south. Ye might be better makin’ some deal with some smaller craft for crossin’ the Great Bay to Parmiter or Awbri.”

  She nodded, not knowing if the gesture meant much here. “Do many smaller vessels actually come in here?”

  The chief pointed. “Be a few of ’em down there now. The Ogadon, they be proper flesh eaters, so’s they don’t allow no fishin’ as such, but they grows and maybe mines some real strange things down there that some folk of some nations take a real likin’ to. Some of it’s medicinal to some races, some is used as spices by others, and some’s the kind of stuff what some folks like but other folks says is evil, if you take my meanin’. Don’t know which races like what, though.”

  Mavra knew exactly what she meant. Somewhere, deep under the seemingly placid Ogadonian surface, was an entire underwater civilization probably as well developed as this one, and what they ate was some sort of fish or marine animal that was the equivalent of the Gekir’s jackalopes or the variety of edible animals on Earth. But deep down somebody had discovered long ago that many of the sea bottom plants and growths produced substances or were themselves substances that affected other races. Southern hemisphere races, after all, had the common bonds of carbon-based life on the whole. As with other Well races, the Ogadon had turned this knowledge to profitable trade, selling the minerals that others might want or need as well as the plant material and chemicals that might be of use elsewhere. Minerals, spices, and medicines, perhaps, but among the variety in such a landscape was bound to be at least one substance that translated to a pleasure drug
to one or perhaps many races on the surface. All this would be traded for such things a semitech, undersea race might well find of use but could not make itself.

  “Does the government of Ogadon officially approve, disapprove, or ignore the stuff some call evil?” she asked carefully.

  “Oh, they got to go after it to save their legal trade,” the chief responded. “They even got agreements with some of the shippin’ hexes to allow surface policin’ of the smugglers. It be kinda hard, though, to put a real stop to it. We don’t need none of it, so we just keeps out of it all.”

  I’ll bet, Mavra thought, a sour smile on her face. This bay was tailor-made for this kind of trade. If the Gekir, and particularly the local authorities, didn’t have any use for the products, smugglers would still have a great use for this area. In fact, it explained the apparent prosperity better than anything else. This was a safe haven for such ships and one that served as a convenient place to repack illegal cargo, swap it between vessels, and transfer it ashore so that it could go by Itun train all the way to the Sea of Turigen and from there to other markets. It was a place where trade deals could be consummated with little fear of fancy eavesdropping and where strangers would always stand out.

  Such a ship would be absolutely perfect for them—with one hitch. There probably wouldn’t be much of a problem talking one of the captains into taking them aboard, but there might well be a problem in convincing captain and crew to maintain their silence and thus getting back off again.

  Isle of Mahguul, Dlubine

  Nathan Brazil awoke from the deepest sleep he could ever remember in his very long life feeling energized, exceptionally well, and alert. He sat up and opened his eyes and was instantly wide-awake, and he realized that it was daylight.

  He sat up, got immediately to his feet, and looked around until it dawned on him how totally stupid that was. “Gus?” he called, then, getting no answer, he yelled “Gus!” at the top of his lungs so that the sound went around and around the volcanic bowl the ship was anchored inside.