Exiles at the Well of Souls

frigid in the upper reaches of Gedemondas.

They cut the sleeves off her shirt and managed to get it on. The pants were a bigger problem, and they didn’t quite reach all the way, but Vistaru buckled the wide belt around her bare midsection and that helped. It looked wrong and stupid, and felt wrong, too, and the pants kept slipping, but it was something and it felt better. The long coat tailored for Gedemondas would possibly do what was needed, covering that impossible tail, they hoped. Some cut-off gloves might help protect the exposed skin in Gedemondas snow. Maybe.

Oddly, Mavra felt better now. Obstacles were to be surmounted; that was part of the joy of it all. They noticed a pickup in her spirits they couldn’t comprehend.

Sleeping was the worst compromise; the animal’s legs were designed for sleeping standing up, but the human torso was not, and sleeping on her stomach was no longer possible. She managed lying on her side.

In the meantime, the war was going from bad to worse for those of Olborn. Occasionally they’d meet some frightened refugees, not looking as fierce or confident as those back in the priest’s lair. Their world was coming apart, and with it their world-view and their notions of their place in it. No longer sure of anything, they were somehow sad and pathetic. People they ran into kept trying to surrender to them.

Roving military patrols caused worse problems; most were composed of deserters with the social restraint imposed on them by their life’s conditioning and faith in their favored status with the Well all gone; they brutalized the refugees, they tried brutalizing the alien party, but renewed Lata venom and Renard’s highly charged personality soon dealt effectively with them.

Mavra also found it interesting that no one gave her a second glance. To these insular people, she was just one more weird alien creature.

But progress was slow, and they turned their attention to trying to find some way to get Mavra and Renard on Doma. The problem was the great wings, which needed to be unimpeded, and which came down most of the length of the great animal’s body.

Finally, experimentation achieved a compromise that Doma and practicality could accept. Nonessential supplies were jettisoned, and the Lata took as much as they could in their pouches. The weight would slow them, but Doma would also be slowed and impeded. With the instruments tossed out—Renard insisted he never used them anyway—she could sit, legs astraddle, on the lower neck of the pegasus, while he sat just behind, body pressed into hers. Straps from some of the excess saddlebags would hold her, and Doma, while uncomfortable with the extra weight on her neck, managed. The only problem was that it took all three of the others and some cooperation and kneeling from Doma to get her up there in the first place.

Finally, though, they could fly, and the distance sped by. They ducked south of the hex corner, avoiding any more priestly fanatics, and crossed barely into Palim.

The inhabitants of the hex eyed them nervously, but did not interfere or challenge them. The Palim resembled nothing so much as giant long-haired elephants. Their form was deceptive, though; they were a high- technology people, with carefully managed groves of food trees and grain, and a criss-cross of a large electric rail system and odd, gumdrop-shaped city buildings in clusters linked by ramps. They stayed clear; the Palim seemed too unconcerned by the nearby violence. It indicated that they had elected to sit out the war, and that meant the Yaxa-Lamotien-Dasheen alliance was probably making good use of that rail system in the east.

Even slowed, they made the border of Gedemondas in under two days. There was no doubt where they were; the great mountains of the frigid hex were visible from the flat plain, like some intrusive wall, a great distance before they reached it. With a few hours to scout around by air, they found the relatively small plains area that was in Gedemondas itself. It was the logical point for the two advancing armies to head for, and it was empty of all but some minor wildlife when they arrived.

They were first, but by how much?

They studied the maps. It was obvious that the Makiem would airlift over Alestol, probably to near the point where they now were. The Yaxa would move from Palim at the rail terminus, then about thirty kilometers overland to the northern edge of the plain. Renard wondered idly if there would be room for both forces.

“There will be quite a battle,” Mavra predicted grimly. “If one gets here first the other will have to dislodge them if it can. If they get here at the same time, the clash will just be more immediate, with this a no man’s land. Either way, this nice little plain is going to be littered with the dead and dying before long.”

“According to the hex map, here, there’s a little shelter over near that cleft in the rocks,” Vistaru noted. “That’s where we’re supposed to meet our guide, if anyone’s still there.”

Mavra tried to look to where the Lata pointed, but her head wouldn’t come up enough. Two or three meters, that was the limit. She swore in frustration, but there was determination on her face as well.

It was about fifteen degrees centigrade on the plain, which was comfortable, but that wouldn’t last long, either. The air cooled almost two degrees for every three hundred meters in altitude, and some of those passes were over three thousand meters high.

They walked leisurely to the shelter, and almost missed it. It was a low cabin of old stone and wood set back against the rocks, so old and weatherbeaten that it almost looked a part of the natural formations. It looked deserted, and they approached cautiously, uncertain of what surprises might be around for them.

Suddenly the big door, almost as high as the shack itself, creaked open, and a creature came out.

It looked like a human woman, almost. Long hair tied back in a sort of ponytail, an attractive, oval face and long slender arms. But she had little pointed ears, and from the waist down, below her light jacket, she had the body of a white-and-black spotted horse.

A centaur,the classicist Renard thought, no longer surprised. Meeting such a creature was no longer strange; in fact, it was almost to be expected.

The woman smiled when she saw them, and waved. “Hello!” she called, in a pleasant soprano. “Come on up! I’d almost given you up!”

Vistaru approached. “You are the Dillian guide?” she said, almost unbelievingly. The Dillian was no more than a girl, perhaps in her mid-teens.

The centaur nodded. “I’m Tael. Come on in and I’ll start a small fire.”

They entered; Tael gave the strange-looking Mavra an odd look, but said nothing. Doma waited outside, placidly munching grass.

The place was built for Dillians, certainly—there were stall-like compartments for four of them, a lot of straw on the floor, and, up on brick blocks a small wood-burning stove and scuttle filled with chopped wood. Tael threw a couple of pieces in the stove and lit a small piece of paper with a very long safety match, throwing it into the cast-iron belly of the stove.

Dillians never sat; their bodies couldn’t stand the weight. So everybody else sat on the straw, Mavra reclining on her side. There was plenty of room.

After some small talk, Renard voiced what they all were thinking.

“Ah, excuse me, Tael, but—aren’t you a little young for all this?” he tried, as diplomatically as possible.

The woman didn’t take it badly. “Well, I admit I’m only fifteen, but I was born in the uplake mountain country of Dillia; my family has hunted and trapped on both sides of the border for a long time. I know every trail and pathway between here and Dillia, and that’s a pretty good ways.”

“And the Gedemondas?” Mavra prompted.

The Dillian shrugged. “They’ve never bothered me. You see them every once in a while—big white shapes against the snow. Never close—they’re always gone when you get there. You hear them, too, sometimes, growling and roaring and making all sorts of weird sounds that echo between the mountains.”

“Is it their speech?” Vistaru asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tael replied. “I used to, but when they asked me to do this guide job for you they fitted me with a translator, and I didn’t hear any difference. I’ve wondered sometimes whether they have any speech as we know it at all.”

“That could be bad,” Renard put in. “How can you talk to somebody who can’t talk back?”

She nodded. “I’m still excited about all this. We’ve tried off and on to communicate with them for the longest time; I’d like to be there when it’s done.”

“Ifit’s done,” Hosuru added pessimistically.

“I’m worried about the smoke from that thing,” Mavra said, cocking her head a little bit toward the stove. “Not the Gedemondas. The war parties. They have to be close by.”