Twilight at the Well of Souls

“They wish to proceed away from Dahbi?” A slight nod. “They do, Your Holiness. They are quickly learning their new bodies and adjusting with astonishing rapidity to new forms and abilities.”

“It is to be expected,” Gunit Sangh noted. “Whoever planned this operation knew the Well World before they ever got here. They have been thoroughly briefed. They knew they were going to become different forms with different abilities and were told to explore their new forms and adjust quickly. They are not here as ignorant children to live a new life; they are here as preprepared soldiers. You see what I mean, my brothers. We could lose this thing.”

They seemed to shimmer a bit at this idea. It was disturbing to them, as it was to Gunit Sangh. “You have them under restraint?”

Zilchet sounded slightly miffed at the question. “Of course, Your Holiness. Any who appear are brought as quickly as possible to a central receiving facility, where they are carefully interrogated and then restrained, awaiting Your Holiness’s decision.”

“My decision is to let them go,” the leader told them.

This astonished them, and there was much agitated rippling of their ghostly white forms.

“Tell me, are they of the same race? The same world?”

Zilchet had barely recovered from his shock. “Yes, Your Holiness. The same. Remarkable uniformity, in fact, if I do say so myself.”

“Do they appear to know each other personally— as from before?”

“No, it is not evident. At least I have seen no indication of such. Not that it might not happen, but if you are talking about a population of a billion or more, as we surmise, it would be pure chance.”

Gunit Sangh seemed pleased at this. “And is your understanding complete enough to allow, say, three hundred Entries to go where they will—and four hundred Entries to arrive there? In close company all the while?”

“Four—” Zilchet seemed confused, slightly hesitant. Then, all at once, he got the idea. “Oh, I see.” He considered it. “Superficially, at any rate. I would prefer not to have them travel as a group. A chance encounter, yes, but not moment-to-moment. No. There are too many tiny details. You could slip so very easily and never know. But we could send three hundred, then another hundred a day or so behind them, following. Conditioning so many would be out of the question, too, but we could condition a few, say six or seven real Entries. They would lead the group and would see nothing awry in our own party. That we could easily manage, and it should work.”

“Then we do it that way,” the leader ordered. “We need some of our own people on their side. We won’t be the only ones, either, of course. The biggest weakness his side has is that it can’t possibly know the true nature of everyone in its armies, nor their loyalties. They must know this. But most will be there as spies, nothing more. Ours will have a different task.”

“And what is this?” Zilchet was so involved he forgot he wasn’t supposed to prompt the leader.

Gunit Sangh gave him an icy stare as a reminder, but otherwise let it go. This was far too important to execute the wretch now. But he would remember the lapse…

“Of all the different Entries, only a few are not of this soldier type. These are his commanders, of course. A number of them. Information from the central command Ortega is establishing tells me, though, that at least one of these has more than utilitarian meaning to Brazil. This is the woman Mavra Chang, now a Dillian. He regards her as something of a sibling with that curious bond lesser races have for such. I want our people there to behave just like good soldiers, to fight in Brazil’s forces, take orders, do all that they would be expected to do. But if it looks as if Brazil will attain his goal, if it looks like his side will win, I have a special task for them.”

“Holiness?”

“No one can control Brazil directly once he is inside to the Well. But if we hold this Mavra Chang, secretly, outside the Well, while I or one of us enters with him, that is just as good.”

“But what if, once inside, he merely wills himself to find her and free her?” Zilchet asked dubiously.

“I seriously doubt whether any mind, even a Markovian, could pick out an individual on the Well World without knowing her location, captors, or status. I think Brazil could easily create a race, but not change a mind unless he knew all the particulars. At any rate, the odds favor our taking this action. We really have nothing to lose.”

Zilchet was still worried, and his rippling showed it. Gunit Sangh glared at him. “Well? What is it?”

“I was just wondering how many other races have exactly the same idea,” the other responded.

“Probably several,” the leader admitted. “She will be a major target, have no doubt—and, because of that, most assuredly well protected. We must see that we are the ones who get her—if the military action fails, of course. If not, it is an academic exercise. But we will not fail. Our ancestors have shown us the true course, and they will not let us fail.”

They bowed again in prayer, and, although they wouldn’t have realized it, they sounded more than a little like religious fanatics themselves.

Gedemondas

It quickly grew not only cold but steep as well; the blue-white mountains that made such a beautiful and romantic scene from Dillia were, very quickly, a different and alien land. Only a few kilometers in, the trees diminished to practically nothing and the forest gave way to barren tundra, covered only with hardy grass, moss, and lichen. Even this didn’t last long; within another three or four kilometers the land, going ever upward, became flecked with wet, dirty snow; waterfalls, mostly small, were wherever there was any sort of rocky outcrop or drop, and rivulets were everywhere. Roughly two degrees-centigrade was being lost for each five hundred meters upward they went—and the trails were always up.

Mavra began to appreciate the centaur’s body more as they went on. It certainly had more strength for such climbing and trail work, and it could carry an extremely heavy load of supplies, if properly balanced, on the equine midsection. She wore a loose-fitting jacket first, but as they went on, she switched to a heavier, minklike fur jacket, fur stocking cap and heavy, leathery gloves that were fur-lined. While the equine part of the Dillian was well insulated by thin but dense hair and layers of fat that trapped the cold and kept in the heat, the more human parts were only slightly tougher than her former skin and needed a great deal of protection.

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.”