Twilight at the Well of Souls

It’s the only thing we can do—and I want to do it so little it wouldn’t take very much to let me freeze and starve up here.”

“Near midday tomorrow, then,” she agreed ruefully, “when whatever sun gets down in there is available to us.”

They slept fitfully that night, not wanting to think about, let alone face, the day ahead. And when the first of them awoke and looked around, hope was dashed even further. The clouds had risen now; the whole world was a sea of swirling white in every direction.

They nibbled some snow and relaxed, unable to move until the sun or weather patterns burned some of the fog away.

“It’s like this a lot near Avenues,” Brazil told them. “You get the same reaction when two dissimilar hexes— seasonally, that is—meet at a border, and that’s a border out there, of course, a border with a thirty meter strip in between that’s subject to wind and weather patterns from both hexes.”

They were silent most of the morning, and the mists would not clear. Brazil finally motioned for the Gedemondan to come over and “plug in,” as he thought of it.

“Mavra—what have you been thinking about?” he asked gently, trying to get her mind off the situation.

She gave a wry chuckle. “Other places. Other people,” she replied. “I wonder how the battle went? I wonder who won? And whether it made a damn bit of difference? I wonder if they bit on that empty shell of a body you left them, or if they’re all lined up somewhere, fighting yet. It would be nice to know before I…”

“Die?” he completed. “Does that really scare you?”

“Yes, of course, ” she replied. “I’m not like you, Brazil. I don’t think anyone is. I’d like to see that new universe.”

He hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, that tells me something about you I was wondering about.” He didn’t elaborate, but it settled a nagging reservation he had had. He had wondered, up to this point, whether or not she might not have desired, been happy, in her Dillian existence. Of course, Asam’s treachery would have dispelled that, but only for the two of them. It wasn’t fair, though, to do to anyone what he intended for her if she could have been happy in some alternate existence.

It wasn’t fair anyway, he knew, but she wouldn’t believe that until she found it out for herself.

The Gedemondan broke the contact. “The fog is lifting,” he noted.

They looked around and saw it was true. The sun was visible now, about a quarter of the way up in the sky, and it was burning through the thin cloudiness that seemed impossible at this altitude.

“I think I see a peak over there!” Prola called excitedly. “And another, there! Yes! I think it’s clearing.”

The Gedemondan suddenly stiffened and looked around nervously. “I don’t think all is well,” he whispered. “I sense others near by. I—I allowed my own personal emotions to cloud my senses,” he explained apologetically. “Now I can read them. We are being watched!”

They tensed, and the Agitar drew his coppery swordlike tast, which could conduct thousands of volts of electricity from his body. They waited tensely to see who the hell could possibly have penetrated this fog and found them at such a height.

“Helloooo…!” boomed a voice from somewhere just to the left of them, a call that echoed back and forth between the peaks. “Hey! Nate! Where are you?” it called. “Come on—I won! I gotcha dead to rights. You can’t move. I took your challenge and I’ve won, Nate! I’ve won!”

Brazil gestured with his head to the Gedemondan, who placed a pad on his head allowing speech.

“Over here!” he called wearily. “How the hell did you ever find us?”

A huge figure glided out of the fog and approached them carefully. It carried in two of its six hands a small electronic device.

“This is a high-tech hex, Nate,” Serge Ortega told him. “Haven’t you ever heard of radar?”

Above the Borgo Pass

Ortega had a fairly large force around, and as they walked with him the size became more apparent. They were also well armed and well equipped with the best in weaponry and detection gear and obviously digging in.

“I must say that it’s damned hard to think of you as a pegasus,” the Ulik said jokingly. “And a passionate pink one at that! My, my!”

Brazil could only snort at this commentary, since the Gedemondan could only be an effective speech conduit when they were standing still. He and Mavra could only seethe and take it; all hope was now gone.

“The Borgo Pass,” Ortega told them. “It’s the narrowest point in the whole chasm, barely ten meters clearance on either side of the Avenue and with nice, natural fortifications on both sides. As you saw from the landscape above, anyone who wants to reach the equator has to come up the Avenue itself—and has to get past this spot.”

There was a lot of activity around the mostly obscured pass; they could see a portable crane lifting some gun emplacement down into the mist and cloud layer below, supervised by a number of small flying things.

“You might be interested to know how I figured out your plot,” the Ulik continued, gloating unashamedly. “To be truthful about it, I deduced it as you went along and the final pieces only fell into place a couple of days ago, but I’d already guessed the rough outline. It was clear from the start, at least after I discovered how you’d evaded our traps in Zone, that yours was a campaign of misdirection. Still, nothing could deny the fact that, sooner or later, you would have to move in force toward one or more of the Avenues, and as soon as the Hakazit moved up the Isthmus I knew from its direction and the direction of the Dillians that you had to be coming to this area. Although your double in the ship gave me some uneasy moments, I admit, I rejected water Avenues as simply too risky. That left Yaxa-Harbigor or here. Now, you had an army for each, as did the council, and a double for each, which drove us crazy. So, which Avenue?” He paused, savoring his moment of triumph. “I rejected Yaxa-Harbigor not only because the inhabitants around there are incredibly formidable anywhere and damn near absolute in their own neighborhood, but also because that would put Gunit Sangh’s army in between, by far the more formidable of the two,” he continued. “But a glance at a map showed that, if you turned westward and started the other Awbrian force northward, you’d have a massive double army coming down on a smaller and less equipped council force. Ergo, Ellerbanta, since Verion is inhospitable, nasty, alien, and probably lethal. I’m not sure those fancy charged- up glowworms can be reasoned with. Good thing they’re superstitious, though, or we couldn’t hold both sides of the pass.”

Brazil halted and gestured with his head to the Gedemondan, who understood and made the link.

“All right, Serge, but how did you get here?” he wanted to know.

Ortega chuckled. “All in good time, my boy, all in good time. So, anyway, old Gunit Sangh and his crew wouldn’t listen to a lot of what I had to say and paid for their mistakes. They got outmaneuvered time and time again. Well, once I knew where you were headed, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Your curious friend Gypsy had told me that I could leave Zone without withering into dust, and I finally had it, completely, up to here, with sitting in my private little prison while everybody else had all the fun. Oh, I could have ordered folks over here, but I simply could not deny myself the pleasure of this. You don’t know what it’s meant to me, Nate, leaving that stinking hole. Seeing stars, breathing clean air, feeling the wind and heat and cold and rain… It’s almost like being reborn. I may be the only man anywhere who can identify with you, Nate. My little prison, really, isn’t that much different than the prison you’ve been living in all those thousands of years. We were both trapped by our own devices.”

“But how did you get here?” Brazil persisted. “I mean, Ulik’s almost on the other side of the world from here, even if it is at the equator, and that bulk of yours can’t fly.”

Ortega laughed. “Oh, but it can, Nate, although it damned near killed me from being out of practice. I’ll show you one in a little while.”

“One what?” he wanted to know.

“A trublak,” the Ulik replied. “It’s a huge, pulpy worm with six pairs of huge, tough, transparent wings, about six meters long. Nasty-looking, but harmless. They are to Ulik pretty much what the horse was to our ancestors—