Twilight at the Well of Souls

“And Dahbi?” she asked, interested.

“A race of bastards,” he told her. “All of ’em. Scum of the earth. There’s some like that on this world, though thankfully not very many. Theocracy based on ancestor worship. Very brutal, very repressive. Ritual cannibals, for example—the standard method of execution. They get eaten in a religious service by the congregation—alive, that is. They think that, that way, they’re eatin’ the soul and so the fellow won’t be around as an ancestral spirit. Kinda like big grasshoppers, I guess that’d be closest—albino grasshoppers, all white. But they ain’t like you and me and most of the races you meet. Somethin’ crazy in their make-up—they go right through walls.” She stared at him. “You’re kidding!”

“Nope. Not a door in the whole damned hex. They just kinda ooze through the cracks, you might say, and walk down the walls on the other side.

“Well, anyway, a religion’s not a religion if it’s that strict that long. Hexes ain’t that big—sooner or later, particularly if you trade, your people start seein’ that other folks don’t have to be as miserable as you and they start givin’ the folks ideas. They’re nontech, so for the comforts of manufactured goods they got to trade. Mostly minerals. When you can go through rock, it kinda makes you a natural miner. They even hire out work teams, through the religion, o’course, to mine other places, explore for wells, that kinda thing. Now, what can that cult offer ’em? Promise ’em a better afterlife? Good for a while, but when the folks around you are livin’ better than your religion’s afterlife, well, you start to wonder. A lot of Dahbi started to wonder, and you can’t kill the whole population. The leaders are smart—nasty, but smart. For their own survival, they decided to produce—and that meant opening up adjoinin’ hexes, like Morguhn, to Dahbi settlement, domination, and control.”

“But I thought that was impossible,” she responded. “I mean, walking through walls or not, you really can’t expect a nontech hex to defeat a high-tech or even a semi- in a war.”

“True enough,” Asam agreed. “And the Dahbi knew it, though they’re great close-up fighters. Got slashin’ blades on their long legs and nasty chewing pincers. No, what their leader, an ultimate son of a bitch if there ever was one named Gunit Sangh, came up with was a deal with a high-tech Northern hex that didn’t even understand what the hell things were like in lands like ours. They synthesized a bug, a bacterium, whatever, that laid the Morghunites flat. It was just the start, understand. Eventually the Dahbi planned to rush in with some kind o’ miracle cure mixed with religious mumbo-jumbo and ‘save’ the remaining part of the Morgnunne population. By then, o’course, the Dahbi would’ve been in there in force and runnin’ things.”

“And you stopped this?”

He nodded proudly. “Well, sorta. See, nobody knew the Dahbi were behind it. Diseases break out all the time in one hex or another, and the damned creatures had acted up to this pretty much like any concerned neighbor—friendly, helpful, you know. And since no bugs from one hex can affect another race, well, there was no danger to them. The Morghunite ambassador, who was down with it himself and close to death, appealed to the Zone council for help, and got Cziil, a high-tech hex that has walkin’ plants and does mostly research—like a big university, sorta—interested. They isolated the bugger, and once they had, and established it was artificial, they worked out a counter. Trouble was, there was no Morghunite able to even get to the Zone Gate and able to pick it up, so a couple of neighboring hexes volunteered to handle the job. Things happened, the shipments never arrived. It was clear that somebody was stoppin’ ’em.”

“And how did you enter into it?” she asked, getting more involved in this Well World intrigue.

“I was in Dhutu, not far from there, and Ortega got in touch with me, explained the problem. The Dhutu ain’t very mobile—they kinda crawl slow, take all day to cross the room, but they’re tremendously strong. No trouble gettin’ the serums in, but then I rounded up a crew and we started off for a four-thousand-kilometer trip to Morguhn. It was a hairy trip, I’ll tell you.”

Of the dozen in his party, only four had survived the trip. Dahbi had hired mercenaries to waylay them and when his party fought them off, had come themselves, oozing out of the ground or rock when you decided to take a rest, quietly slitting throats and fading back into the solid rock once more.

“Then how did you finally beat them off?” she pressed.

He laughed. “Accident, really. One came up out of a rock face when I wasn’t lookin’ and almost had me ’fore I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I was away from my weapons, the only thing I had in my hand was a big bucket of water from a stream I was bringin’ back for rubdown purposes. Well, I whirled around and flung the bucket at the bastard, missed him, hit the rock above his head, and the water sloshed out and some of it hit the Dahbi. It was weird, you know? It was like he suddenly became solid flesh, like us, where the water hit him. With no warnin’. The part that got wet seemed to go real smooth, then dropped to the ground. He screamed holy terror and what was left of him went back into the rock.”

“But—water?” she responded with disbelief. “I mean, they must have a lot of water in their own hex, and certainly in the mines.”

He shrugged. “I dunno. I think maybe they can be solid, like you or me, or somethin’ else, like when they ooze through rocks. Maybe they rearrange their— what’dya callit, molecular structure, I guess. They can be one or the other, but not both. When they’re solid, their reaction to water’s just like ours—and I know they drink.” He grinned. “They even bleed—yellow, but they bleed. When they go into that other state, the water that’s in ’em—in their cells—changes to that new form, too. But when it does, a heavy concentration of liquid makes whatever it hits turn back solid and they come apart. I guess it has to be a real splash, too, since even rocks got water. Well, after that, we just took buckets with us and got a bunch of ’em. Got to Morghun, and what could the Dahbi say? Publicly, they thanked us for doin’ a wonderful job savin’ their dear friends. Privately, them and we knew who it was started it. So did everybody else—but you couldn’t prove nothin’. They covered their tracks too well. They lost, let it lie. But old Gunit Sangh, he put a curse on me and I got back home fast. Haven’t gone near there much since, I admit. Not as long as Sangh’s still alive.”

“You think he still hates you, after all this time?” she asked him.

“Oh, yes. Now more than ever. Blood feud. His boys have tried me lots o’ times in the past twenty years. Lots o’ times. He’s given up recently, I think, but that don’t mean he’s forgot. If he got the chance, he’d slit my throat and eat me. And if I got the chance, I’d damned sure carve him up in little pieces. I doubt if either of us will ever get the chance, though. Who knows?”

The wind was kicking up; clouds had come in, partly obscuring the sun, and the temperature had quickly dropped several degrees. They were into the lower snowfields now, where the temperature was at freezing or slightly below, and with the wind, the effect was far below.

“There’s a shelter not far up the trail,” he told them all. “If there’s no other party already there, we’ll stay the night there. It’s gettin’ pretty late and the wind’s rising something fierce.”

Throughout the major trails of Gedemondas Dillians had built an entire network of these shelters for their hunting parties. If the local inhabitants objected, they hadn’t made it known nor molested them.

The cabin, a huge log affair with chimney on the back, looked peaceful enough. Inside, if previous users hadn’t depleted the supplies, would be bales of grain, cooking pots and utensils, and even a few cords of wood, stocked regularly by Dillian service patrols.

“No smoke,” Asam noted. “Looks like we’re in luck.” Still, he frowned, and when she started to go forward he stopped her. She glanced around and saw that the others in the party had spread out on the flat-sculpted, snow-covered outcrop and were slowly reach-big for their bows.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered, more puzzled than nervous.

He gestured with his head. “Over there. About three or four meters beyond the cabin, right at the edge.”

She stared in the indicated direction. Something dark there, she thought. No, not dark— It was hard to see in the cloudy, late-afternoon light, particularly through snow goggles she’d donned almost immediately upon their reaching the snow area, for her blue eyes provided little natural protection against snow blindness.

Cautiously, she lifted up the goggles to get a better look. Red—crimson, a red strain in the snow, very near—no, actually at the edge. And the marks of something having been dragged.

“It could be an accident,” she said softly. “Or the remains of some hunter’s kill.”

“It could,” he agreed, but now his bow was cocked. “Can you handle a weapon? I forgot to ask.”

“About the only thing I might be decent with would be a sword,” she sighed, a little disconsolate at the idea.

“Why not?” he shrugged, and reached back into his pack. He pulled out a scabbard—not a puny, plain sort of