Twilight at the Well of Souls

direction.

Suddenly the two circular birds shot into the air, causing the bolts to miss underneath them, and both came down on the heads of the two closest attackers, vicious clawed feet digging into the huge heads and and drawing blood and grunts of pain.

A voice came out of the trees, as the others ducked for cover, loudly yelling, “Nathan Brazil! You and your cohorts will remain where you are! You are under arrest by order of the council.”

The two Quilst in the patrol roared at this; the Punretts, if they stayed where they were, would soon kill the huge creatures.

Brazil, who had run for the cover of nearby trees with Foma, turned to her anxiously. He could see that, under the threat of the bows, the two Quilst had already surrendered and were standing meekly, arms up, while the Punretts had loosed their grip and hopped to solid ground. No use in committing suicide.

“Foma!” he hissed. “Get out of here! Tell Yua what’s happened. Tell her to draw off that damned army if she has to beat them over the head!”

She looked uncertain. “But they’ll get you.”

“No they won’t,” he assured her. “Not me. You tell her to move it. I’ll get to her as quickly as possible!”

She stared at him. “I… I don’t understand.”

“Just move out!” he commanded. She slunk off into the woods.

“Nathan Brazil! Come out or we shall shoot your friends forthwith. You cannot escape!” that voice continued. “Betared patrols have been monitoring you for hours. Come out and save lives!”

He sighed, got up, and walked out into the clearing, clearly surprising both his former ineffective bodyguards, who eyed his presence with some relief, and the Quilst still standing guard.

“Okay, okay,” he called out. “Let’s get this over with. No sense in prolonging the agony, damn it!”

From the trees swooped a great butterfly shape, orange wings barely fluttering as it landed on eight tentaclelike feet. Its black skull’s head, with two eyes like great red pads, eyed him with the quizzical curiosity of a zookeeper looking over a specimen. Somehow, in this moment, he could only think that he was the object of some sort of racial revenge on every butterfly collector that ever lived.

“I am Jammer,” said the Yaxa. “I arrest you in the name of the council. You will accompany me as my prisoner to the nearest Zone Gate. It is useless to resist.”

Its segmented body rose in front, and its two forelegs became useful as mittenlike hands. They reached back into a pack, pulling out first a small medical-type bottle and then a syringe designed for its clawlike hands. Brazil sighed. He’d hoped to keep the stall going by just accompanying them to the gate—but they were going to take no chances. This he could not allow.

Crossbows were all on him now as the Yaxa approached, needle in hand, until it stood only a meter in front of him, looking down at him.

“So you are Nathan Brazil,” it sneered.

He started to chuckle. The chuckle became a laugh, the laugh a roar, until tears almost ran down his face. Before the eyes of the startled Yaxa and Quilst the body shimmered, changed before their eyes. It became taller, different-featured; the skin tone darkened, the entire body build changed. Even the clothes were not the same.

Laughing almost maniacally, the new figure pointed to the Yaxa. “Gotcha!” he managed. And then he did the even more impossible. Gypsy vanished instantly, leaving only the echo of his laughter.

Lamotien

The blackness of the Zone Gate was disturbed as a shimmering shape took form within it and stepped out. It looked like a small white ape, barely a meter high, but it wasn’t.

It was twenty-seven Lamotiens in a small colony.

The creatures on the whole were less than twenty centimeters long, shapeless masses of goo that could control their bodies so thoroughly that they could adapt to almost any environment, grow hair to length and color in an instant, take whatever features or form were necessary. They could also combine, as this one did, into a single larger organism that operated as one, with a common mind. In this way they could duplicate almost any visible organism.

The Lamotien creature didn’t give a nod to anyone in the Zone Gate area but scampered quickly off. The Gate, which opened out of a hillside, was flanked by a large number of buildings, each of which was a part of the governmental structure of the hex. Designed for Lamotien, they looked like a haphazard arrangement of building blocks, each no more than a cubic meter, many with tiny windows through which shone the yellow glow of electric lighting.

Gunit Sangh and his headquarters company couldn’t fit in any of the buildings, so a large number of tents had been set up in the government square facing the hex. It was not primitive, however; they had electric lights, heating, all the comforts of a high-tech hex.

The simian colony scampered into Sangh’s headquarters tent, where the huge Dahbi was relaxing— meditating, he called it—hanging batlike from the ceiling support beam. The Lamotien weren’t fazed.

Looking up, the creature said, “Commander Sangh! Bad news!” It waited, as there was no reply from the white thing nor any sign of movement. “Commander! A man who looks like Nathan Brazil was apprehended by a combined patrol in Quilst not two hours ago—and it was some sort of ghost or demon creature, not Brazil at all.”

The Dahbi seemed to take no notice for a moment more, then, slowly, some movement seemed to ripple through it. Eerily, it flexed slightly and then raised its head, looking down with a horrible visage on the still comparatively tiny creature.

“What is this?” Sangh demanded to know. “What’s all this about a ghost or demon?”

“It’s true, sir!” the Lamotien responded excitedly. “It seems that, acting on the hunch of your command in Zone, a watch was put out all along the western approaches and they captured someone who looked like Brazil. In fact, the people with the creature were also convinced it was Brazil. They verified it under drug interrogation. But when the Yaxa commander of the patrol approached, it laughed terribly, the report says, then changed into someone else entirely and vanished before their eyes!”

Sangh was interested now. “Changed into someone else, you say. Not something else, such as you could do?”

The Lamotien looked confused for a moment, more at the nature of the question than anything else. Finally it said, “Well, yes, that’s what the report said. The Yaxa flew itself and two of the prisoners to the Quilst Zone Gate and got to Zone.”

“But it changed into another Glathrielian form, not any other?” Sangh persisted.

“So they said,” the little creatures replied.

“That is interesting,” the Dahbi muttered, mostly to himself. He started to move now, and the Lamotien watched, fascinated, as he appeared to glide along the support beam to the side of the tent, then down the tent side to the floor.

“Tell my staff I want a meeting in ten minutes,” he told the creature. “Right here. See that they all come.”

The little creature bowed slightly, then said, “I will be returning to Zone soon. Any message?”

Gunit Sangh thought a moment, then said, slowly, “Tell them we will attempt to deal with all eventualities, but that they should be prepared to lose.”

The Lamotien just stared for a moment. Finally it said, “Lose?”

Sangh nodded somberly. “Where there is one false Brazil there may be twenty, or two hundred,” he noted. “We will do our best, but that is all we can do. Tell them, if they have any bright ideas, now is the time to get them to me.”

The little Lamotien went out, looking very much in a state of shock.

“The main army is here, in Bache,” the field commander told him. “They appear to be massing. We feel they