Midnight at the Well of Souls

to change those equations. Not just our lives but our very existence is at stake.”

She looked at him for a long time, then turned idly, staring into the forest, lost in her thoughts.

Suddenly she said, “Look, Nathan! The flying lights are out! And I can hear something!”

He turned and looked into the forest. They were insects of some kind, he thought, glowing as they flitted through the forest. The light, he saw, was constant—the blinking that had been apparent from shore was an illusion, caused by their passage behind the dense foliage. The darkness was too complete for his deer vision to get any detail, but the floating, gliding lights were clear. There was something very familiar about them, he thought. I’ve never been here, yet I’ve seen this before.

“Listen!” Wuju whispered. “Hear it?”

Brazil’s fine-trained ears had already picked it up even over the crashing of the waves.

It was music, haunting, strange, even eerie music, music that seemed to penetrate their very bodies.

“It’s so strange,” Wuju said softly. “So beautiful.”

The Faerie! he thought suddenly. Of course there’d be Faerie! He cursed himself for not thinking of it before. This close to the equator there was bound to be magic, he realized. Some of those authoritarian sons of bitches had snuck onto Old Earth and it had been hell getting rid of them. He looked anxiously at Wuju. She had a dreamy look on her face, and her upper torso was swaying in time to the music.

“Wuju!” he said sharply. “Come on! Snap out of it!”

She pushed him away and started forward, toward the woods. He rushed up and tried to block her way, but she wouldn’t be deterred. He opened his mouth and tried to grab her arm, but it wouldn’t hold.

“Wuju!” he called after her. “Don’t go in! Don’t desert us!”

Suddenly a dark shape swooped down from the sky at him. He ducked by lowering his forelegs and started running. It swooped again, and he cursed the poor vision that kept him from taking full advantage of his reflexes.

He heard maniacal laughter above him, and the mad thing swooped again, brushing him this time.

They’re forcing me into the forest! he realized. Every time he moved in any direction but in the creature’s, laughing and gibbering, it would swoop in and block his way.

“Cousin Bat! Don’t do it! It’s Nathan Brazil!” he called to the dark shape, knowing the effort was futile, that the bat was under a Faerie spell.

Brazil was in the woods now, where Bat couldn’t follow by flying. He saw the creature standing there, outlined in the starlight glare on the ocean, looking up and down the beach.

He looked around, and barely made out a large form heading away about eight meters farther in.

It’s useless, he realized. The music’s got her and Bat’s got me.

I’ve faced them down before, he thought, and won. Maybe again, because they don’t know that. No choice here, though. If I don’t follow they’ll send some other creatures after me.

He could barely see despite the light from the flitting bugs that grew thicker and thicker as he entered the forest, but he smelled Wuju’s scent and followed it.

After what must have been twenty minutes, he emerged into a clearing in the woods.

A toadstool ring, he thought grimly.

Under a particularly huge tree was a wide ring composed of huge brown toadstools. The music came from here, made by the thousands of insects that swarmed in the center of the ring. Wuju was in the ring, too, almost covered by the creatures, so thick now that they lit up the place like a lamp. She was dancing and swaying to the eerie music of their wings, as were a number of other creatures, of varying shapes and sizes.

The music grew in intensity and volume as more and more of the creatures of light came to the ring. Sitting in the hollow of the great tree, still and observing, was a glowing insect much, much larger than the others— perhaps close to a meter. It had the oval shape of a beetle, and a light, ribbed underside that was highly flexible. Two long, jointed hind legs were held in front of it in a bent but relaxed position, and two forelegs, longer and with sharp-toothed ridges, that seemed to be leading the insect orchestra, waving in perfect time. It sat like this, underside exposed, leaning against the tree, a face on a telescoping neck down on the chest, watching things. The face was strange, not insect-like at all, nor was the position of the sitter nor the fact that it had only four limbs. It appeared to have a tiny, scruffy moustache, topped by a perfectly round and black nose, and two almost human eyes that reflected the glare of the proceedings with an evil and ancient leer.

There was a sudden darkness above, and Cousin Bat landed in the middle of the circle, bowed to the large onlooker, and joined the dance. The strange eyes of the lead bug darted around the circle, then over to Brazil, whose form was just barely visible still hidden by the forest.

* * *

Suddenly the leader’s forelegs went into a V shape, and the music stopped, everyone staying perfectly still; even the bugs seemed frozen in midflight.

The lead bug, who Brazil knew was the Swarm Queen, spoke to Cousin Bat, and Brazil found it interesting that the translator carried it as the voice of an incredibly tiny and ancient old woman.

So are the legends of witches born, he thought sardonically.

“You have brought only two! I charged you to bring all three!” the Swarm Queen accused Bat.

Bat bowed, his voice flat and mechanical. “The other is a plant, Highness. It is rooted for the night, asleep beyond any recall except the morning sun.”

“That is unacceptable,” the Swarm Queen snapped. “We have dealt with this problem before. Wait!” She turned to Brazil, and he felt the piercing eyes fall on him.

“Deer! Come into the circle!” the Swarm Queen ordered, and Brazil felt himself moving slowly, haltingly, toward the circle despite no order on his part. He felt the energy grow to almost overpowering proportions as he crossed the toadstool ring.

“The ring binds you all! Bound be ye till my return, or till morning, till midnight at the Well of Souls,” she intoned, then flipped over on her stomach, supported by all four legs. The back had long, integral wings and seemed to glow with the same stuff as her underside, although Brazil knew that was mostly reflection.

“You will show me,” she said to the bat, and Bat immediately took off, the Swarm Queen following with a tinkling sound that was like a single note in the eerie Faerie symphony.

Brazil tried to recross the circle of toadstoals, found he couldn’t. He idly kicked at one, but it proved to be more rock than toadstool, and his hoof met with a clacking sound but nothing else.

He looked at the inhabitants of the circle. All, like Wuju, were frozen, like statues, although he could see that they were breathing. There was a monotonous, yet pleasant, hum from the Faerie, marking place.

Many of the other creatures were vaguely humanoid; all were small, a few monkey-like, but all were distorted, hellish versions of their former selves.

Brazil remembered the encounters on Old Earth. Since the Faerie created their own press to suit themselves, they had a pretty good reputation in folklore and superstition. He had never discovered how they had managed to get in. Oh, some representatives of many other races had—some as volunteers to teach the people, some because their home worlds had closed before they personally had reached maturity and Old Earth had the room and a compatible biosphere.

He wondered idly if those primitive peasants who told such wonderful stories of the Faerie would still like them if they knew that these folk doubled as the basis for witches and many evil spirits. Once created by some Markovian mind, they could not be wiped out; they had to run their course and survive or fail as the rules said.

They had done too well. They worked their magic and dominated their own hex, using the collective mental powers of the swarm directed and guided by the Swarm Queen who was mother to them all, and tried to spread out. They managed to interfere in thirteen other Southern hexes where the mathematics did not forbid their enormous powers, before the Markovians finally moved to limit them to their own hex.

Here they were in their own element, and supreme. How many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of swarms existed in this hex? Brazil wondered. I beat them outside of their own element once, but can I do it here?

About an hour passed, with Brazil, the only moving thing in the ring, getting more and more nervous; yet he held onto a streak of optimism deep inside. If they couldn’t succeed with Vardia before daybreak, these nocturnal