Ghost of the Well of Souls

Next!”

And with that she was through. Still, the speech was a little scary; she carefully folded the paper with its attachment, put it in her travel case and sealed it tightly. The last thing she wanted was to be arrested in a place like this.

She looked for the steamer company office, but instead saw a Pyron standing not too far away, looking at her with those serpent’s eyes.

They were such a strange and eerie race to look at. She thought of them as serpents who crawled on their bellies, but she saw that they did have legs, partially cloaked by the enormous hoods. Still, they looked like giant snakes rearing up and poised to strike, and she wasn’t at all comfortable with their appearance, even though this one was radiating no threat at all. She was going to have to get used to looking only inside these different creatures. Cuddly little bears with the souls of mass murderers; fanged, giant serpentlike creatures who were, if not saints, at least ordinary people: she wondered how those who couldn’t look beneath managed to cope.

The Pyron stepped forward, still moving as if slithering on its belly, even though it wasn’t proportionately long enough to do that. “You are Jaysu? I am First Consul Auglack of Pyron. You received my message?”

“Yes, yes, sir, I did,” she managed. “It was quite a surprise. In fact, it was a surprise to be here at all.”

“Well, someone should have warned you. They do this all the time, in fact, when they don’t have a cargo in mid-ocean. This is, quite frankly, a very pleasant city overall for a ship’s crew to stay over in when they spend all that time at sea, and they look forward to putting in for minor repairs most times. The company doesn’t mind unless it has business on the wider route. We weren’t positive from the manifest that they were doing it this time, but we were ready if and when they did. Will you come with me, please?”

“Yes, sir. Certainly. But you must bear with me. My race is not built for long walks on this hard ground.”

The consul chuckled. “Hard gr— Oh, you mean the floor! Yes, I can see where your feet aren’t well-suited for that. Well, we will walk as little as we must, I promise. First things first. How do I address you?”

“Sir? I do not understand.”

“You are a cleric of some kind, I know. Clerics tend to have titles beyond Citizen or Madam, just as politicians do. They call me Excellency in my official capacity, otherwise I am just ‘sir’ or ‘mister.’ I know religious leaders who are addressed as Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Reverend, Doctor, Holiness, Most High, and about a dozen other titles. How should you be addressed?”

“We do not go in much for that sort of thing,” she told him. “Jaysu is fine. My title is important when I am introducing myself or acting in a religious capacity, but it is just a title, just as yours is, First Consul, if I hear right.”

“Very well, then. It is simply important in my post that no one be insulted by those around me failing to use a title of respect. If Jaysu is what you like, then that is what we will use. How was the voyage?”

“Not very good, overall. Boring for much of it, then frightening in stormy seas. And, of course, that doesn’t even include the attempt to kill me this morning.”

The consul stopped. “I beg your pardon?”

“A Kehudan, Algensor, tried to shoot me.”

“Indeed? And it missed?”

“No, she did not miss. When it came time, she simply could not do it.”

The consul let it go at that, not realizing how literal his guest might be.

“This was the only attempt on you? I mean, not that we expected even that, but there were no others aboard who appeared to have less than noble intentions toward you?”

“There was this one creature, a giant, hairy green spiderlike thing, that I knew from the start was not my friend, yet at no time did he act against me or even pump me for information. He had two hideous little winged henchmen, but they were kept back, or so I had the impression, by their master. Both of them flew off to this city last night.”

“Indeed? That is most interesting. Normally anything that crossed into Alkazar, airborne or otherwise, would have been vaporized without question if detected. Either they landed on a boat just short of the border or they were expected. Most interesting. Oh, we received your photographs, by the way. Most useful. I’m sure your spider and little flying things are there, as is the Kehudan. The spider’s the one to watch. He’s been at the scene of other things such as this, and is absolutely in the service of Chalidang. We’ve been unable to get anything on his background, which is quite unusual and suggests that he might well be an import from outside the Well World whom, for whatever reasons, his new people are keeping well-hidden.”

“Well, he called himself Wally,’ if that is any clue. He said I could not pronounce his real one.”

“Probably true. You probably couldn’t pronounce mine, nor I yours, either, but that hasn’t stopped us. Ah, here we are.”

“Here” turned out to be a moving sidewalk just outside the shipping terminal. It appeared that the whole city was covered with these, moving along at a steady but not very fast clip. They were clearly designed as mass transportation; there were some hovering, flying vehicles, all looking very sinister, darting about overhead and going between the buildings and such, but ground transport was via these moving belts.

“I want to point out something to you, although you’ll not be here long enough to really appreciate how paranoid you can get in this town,” the consul said as he stepped on. After a moment’s hesitation, she did likewise, and gripped the small handrail.

The city might have seemed majestic, even beautiful to some, but to her it felt unnatural, wrong, claustrophobic. She didn’t like it one bit. It wasn’t right to cram so many people into such a small space. It was filled with a thick atmosphere of the most awful odors, and a cacophony of sounds that made her head hurt.

“See those small posts every fifty meters or so alongside the walkways?” the Pyron asked.

She looked and nodded. There was so much filling every view that she’d barely noticed them.

“Well, on each are tiny little high-resolution cameras showing what’s going on in all directions. At all times when you are anywhere in this city, and maybe in this whole godforsaken country, you are being watched. Inside every building, every corridor inside the buildings, same thing.”

“Goodness! Why? And by who?”

“Alkazarian Security Police and their watch computers, which are programmed to alert them to anything suspicious. By their standards that means two people whispering who can’t be picked up by their hidden sound monitors. We found them embedded in our offices and in our diplomatic quarters, which is highly improper and illegal, of course, but they deny it and it’s their city. It’s our belief that there isn’t a single place you can go, or anything you can say or do here, that isn’t monitored. Of course, we have our own ways of blocking the ones inside our diplomatic areas, but otherwise even going to the toilet, pardon, is a public act to them.”

“How can anyone live like that?” she asked him.

“Because they have no choice. The foreigners here, like us, and many of those you see all over here, are here because it’s their job and it’s money. The pay is exceptional here because of the stress, but you can tune it out, take it for granted after a while, kind of build your own safeguards and go about your business. The services of a great city are here as well. Entertainment zones, any kind of goods or services one might desire, even if illicit, plus many of the comforts of home, major shopping with no tariffs, all that. And all completely safe. There are no murders here, no theft to speak of, not even much littering. Not when they’re watching. In an odd way, it makes my job easier as well. If one of my people vanishes, I know immediately that the Alkazarian government has him or her because they are the only ones who could.”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to be here under these conditions!”

“Well, they are a bit more tolerant of us foreigners,” the consul told her. “They can’t have the absolutely free hand they have with their own people, poor devils, because they know that if they got too nasty or intrusive, we’d simply all pack up and leave. It’s a wonderful natural harbor at a convenient spot, but it’s not the only one, and it’s not a place that is essential, only convenient. There is a difference. And if we pack up and leave, well, they are a high technology hex, it is true, but they are resource poor. Without the import of raw materials and the export of sophisticated manufactured goods at cheap prices, it would quickly become a very bleak place indeed. Ah, we switch here to the diagonal belt on the right side. Not much farther.”

Once he’d pointed out the cameras, she couldn’t get them out of her mind. What kind of people would create such a system, and what sort of people would willingly live under it? A very frightened and insecure system, surely. A meter tall and only of average strength… She wondered if perhaps they were petrified of the outside