It quickly grew not only cold but steep as well; the blue-white mountains that made such a beautiful and romantic scene from Dillia were, very quickly, a different and alien land. Only a few kilometers in, the trees diminished to practically nothing and the forest gave way to barren tundra, covered only with hardy grass, moss, and lichen. Even this didn't last long; within another three or four kilometers the land, going ever upward, became flecked with wet, dirty snow; waterfalls, mostly small, were wherever there was any sort of rocky outcrop or drop, and rivulets were everywhere. Roughly two degrees-centigrade was being lost for each five hundred meters upward they went—and the trails were always up.
Mavra began to appreciate the centaur's body more as they went on. It certainly had more strength for such climbing and trail work, and it could carry an extremely heavy load of supplies, if properly balanced, on the equine midsection. She wore a loose-fitting jacket first, but as they went on, she switched to a heavier, minklike fur jacket, fur stocking cap and heavy, leathery gloves that were fur-lined. While the equine part of the Dillian was well insulated by thin but dense hair and layers of fat that trapped the cold and kept in the heat, the more human parts were only slightly tougher than her former skin and needed a great deal of protection.
Colonel Asam, unlike her, was a deep brown that tended to hold the sun more, and he continued to dress loose and comfortable, seemingly oblivious to the cold. Even when the going became heavy and she found her massive lungs pounding, he kept up an almost constant dialogue, telling of many of his adventures and the people and lands he'd seen. She let him talk, partly because he seemed to enjoy it—though his associates looked fairly bored, having probably heard all this before—and also because he was a fascinating man. Occasionally he would ask her to compare notes on something, or tell some similar episode in her own past, and it was some time before she realized that, very subtly, he was trying to get a lot more information on her. For whom, she wondered? Himself? Some employer? Asam was very much as she had been, as her husband had been so long ago: an adventurer, a freebooter whose word was good but who would be loyal to any commission be undertook. She decided it was best if he did most of the talking.
"That business about the plague," she prompted him. "What was that about?"
He smiled, appreciating a fresh audience. "Well, lass, that was twenty year or more ago, I guess. There was these two hexes, Morguhn and Dahbi, next to each other, and Morghun was a rich agricultural land that raised all sorts of livestock and fruits and vegetables—tons of it—and exported it for stuff they needed, mostly manufactured goods. They're a semitech, like Dillia, and that gave 'em the power they needed for irrigation and all that other stuff. Their food and skins, over the years, bein' so superior to most else in those parts, Morghun become a kind o' big market everybody went to. Hell, most of the other hexes didn't even bother much with agriculture and such any more—didn't have to. The high-techs in particular, now, they go in for all that fancy stuff. Most of 'em, no matter what the culture, can't see a piece of good pasture without dreamin' of pavin' it over for something. So they made the fine special alloys for the Morghun machines and lots of other stuff the best machines could do best—synthetic fertilizers, prefab farm buildings, like that. Not to mention good holidays for the farmers when they wanted. It all worked out."
"And Dahbi?" she asked, interested.
"A race of bastards," he told her. "All of 'em. Scum of the earth. There's some like that on this world, though thankfully not very many. Theocracy based on ancestor worship. Very brutal, very repressive. Ritual cannibals, for example—the standard method of execution. They get eaten in a religious service by the congregation—alive, that is. They think that, that way, they're eatin' the soul and so the fellow won't be around as an ancestral spirit. Kinda like big grasshoppers, I guess that'd be closest—albino grasshoppers, all white. But they ain't like you and me and most of the races you meet. Somethin' crazy in their make-up—they go right through walls."
She stared at him. "You're kidding!"
"Nope. Not a door in the whole damned hex. They just kinda ooze through the cracks, you might say, and walk down the walls on the other side.
"Well, anyway, a religion's not a religion if it's that strict that long. Hexes ain't that big—sooner or later, particularly if you trade, your people start seein' that other folks don't have to be as miserable as you and they start givin' the folks ideas. They're nontech, so for the comforts of manufactured goods they got to trade. Mostly minerals. When you can go through rock, it kinds makes you a natural miner. They even hire out work teams, through the religion, o' course, to mine other places, explore for wells, that kinda thing. Now, what can that cult offer 'em? Promise 'em a better afterlife? Good for a while, but when the folks around you are livin' better than your religion's afterlife, well, you start to wonder. A lot of Dahbi started to wonder, and you can't kill the whole population. The leaders are smart—nasty, but smart. For their own survival, they decided to produce—and that meant opening up adjoinin' hexes, like Morguhn, to Dahbi settlement, domination, and control."
"But I thought that was impossible," she responded. "I mean, walking through walls or not, you really can't expect a nontech hex to defeat a high-tech or even a semi- in a war."
"True enough," Asam agreed. "And the Dahbi knew it, though they're great close-up fighters. Got slashin' blades' on their long legs and nasty chewing pincers. No, what their leader, an ultimate son of a bitch if there ever was one named Gunit Sangh, came up with was a deal with a high-tech Northern hex that didn't even understand what the hell things were like in lands like ours. They synthesized a bug, a bacterium, whatever, that laid the Morghunites flat. It was just the start, understand. Eventually the Dahbi planned to rush in with some kind o' miracle cure mixed with religious mumbo-jumbo and 'save' the remaining part of the Morghunite population. By then, o' course, the Dahbi would've been in there in force and runnin' things."
"And you stopped this?"
He nodded proudly. "Well, sorta. See, nobody knew the Dahbi were behind it. Diseases break out all the time in one hex or another, and the damned creatures had acted up to this pretty much like any concerned neighbor—friendly, helpful, you know. And since no bugs from one hex can affect another race, well, there was no danger to them. The Morghunite ambassador, who was down with it himself and close to death, appealed to the Zone council for help, and got Czill, a high-tech hex that has walkin' plants and does mostly research—like a big university, sorta—interested. They isolated the bugger, and once they had, and established it was artificial, they worked out a counter. Trouble was, there was no Morghunite able to even get to the Zone Gate and able to pick it up, so a couple of neighboring hexes volunteered to handle the job. Things happened, the shipments never arrived. It was clear that somebody was stoppin' 'em."
"And how did you enter into it?" she asked, getting more involved in this Well World intrigue.
"I was in Dhutu, not far from there, and Ortega got in touch with me, explained the problem. The Dhutu ain't very mobile—they kinda crawl slow, take all day to cross the room, but they're tremendously strong. No trouble gettin' the serums in, but then I rounded up a crew and we started off for a four-thousand-kilometer trip to Morghun. It was a hairy trip, I'll tell you."
Of the dozen in his party, only four had survived the trip. Dahbi had hired mercenaries to waylay them and when his party fought them off, had come themselves, oozing out of the ground or rock when you decided to take a rest, quietly slitting throats and fading back into the solid rock once more.
"Then how did you finally beat them off?" she pressed.
He laughed. "Accident, really. One came up out of a rock face when I wasn't lookin' and almost had me 'fore I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I was away from my weapons, the only thing I had in my hand was a big bucket of water from a stream I was bringin' back for rubdown purposes. Well, I whirled around and flung the bucket at the bastard, missed him, hit the rock above his head, and the water sloshed out and some of it hit the Dahbi. It was weird, you know? It was like he suddenly became solid flesh, like us, where the water hit him. With no warnin'. The part that got wet seemed to go real smooth, then dropped to the ground. He screamed holy terror and what was left of him went back into the rock."
"But—water?" she responded with disbelief. "I mean, they must have a lot of water in their own hex, and certainly in the mines."
He shrugged. "I dunno. I think maybe they can be solid, like you or me, or somethin' else, like when they ooze through rocks. Maybe they rearrange their—what'dya callit, molecular structure, I guess. They can be one or the other, but not both. When they're solid, their reaction to water's just like ours—and I know they drink." He grinned. "They even bleed—yellow, but they bleed. When they go into that other state, the water that's in 'em—in their cells—changes to that new form, too. But when it does, a heavy concentration of liquid makes whatever it hits turn back solid and they come apart. I guess it has to be a real splash, too, since even rocks got water. Well, after that, we just took buckets with us and got a bunch of 'em. Got to Morghun, and what could the Dahbi say? Publicly, they thanked us for doin' a wonderful job savin' their dear friends. Privately, them and we knew who it was started it. So did everybody else—but you couldn't prove nothin'. They covered their tracks too well. They lost, let it lie. But old Gunit Sangh, he put a curse on me and I got back home fast. Haven't gone near there much since, I admit. Not as long as Sangh's still alive."
"You think he still hates you, after all this time?" she asked him.
"Oh, yes. Now more than ever. Blood feud. His boys have tried me lots o' times in the past twenty years. Lots o' times. He's given up recently, I think, but that don't mean he's forgot. If he got the chance, he'd slit my throat and eat me. And if I got the chance, I'd damned sure carve him up in little pieces. I doubt if either of us will ever get the chance, though. Who knows?"
The wind was kicking up; clouds had come in, partly obscuring the sun, and the temperature had quickly dropped several degrees. They were into the lower snowfields now, where the temperature was at freezing or slightly below, and with the wind, the effect was far below.
"There's a shelter not far up the trail," he told them all. "If there's no other party already there, we'll stay the night there. It's gettin' pretty late and the wind's rising something fierce."
Throughout the major trails of Gedemondas Dillians had built an entire network of these shelters for their hunting parties. If the local inhabitants objected, they hadn't made it known nor molested them.
The cabin, a huge log affair with chimney on the back, looked peaceful enough. Inside, if previous users hadn't depleted the supplies, would be bales of grain, cooking pots and utensils, and even a few cords of wood, stocked regularly by Dillian service patrols.
"No smoke," Asam noted. "Looks like we're in luck." Still, he frowned, and when she started to go forward he stopped her. She glanced around and saw that the others in the party had spread out on the flat-sculpted, snow-covered outcrop and were slowly reaching for their bows.
"What's the matter?" she whispered, more puzzled than nervous.
He gestured with his head. "Over there. About three or four meters beyond the cabin, right at the edge."
She stared in the indicated direction. Something dark there, she thought. No, not dark—It was hard to see in the cloudy, late-afternoon light, particularly through snow goggles she'd donned almost immediately upon their reaching the snow area, for her blue eyes provided little natural protection against snow blindness.
Cautiously, she lifted up the goggles to get a better look. Red—crimson, a red strain in the snow, very near—no, actually at the edge. And the marks of something having been dragged.
"It could be an accident," she said softly. "Or the remains of some hunter's kill."
"It could," he agreed, but now his bow was cocked. "Can you handle a weapon? I forgot to ask."
"About the only thing I might be decent with would be a sword," she sighed, a little disconsolate at the idea.
"Why not?" he shrugged, and reached back into his pack. He pulled out a scabbard—not a puny, plain sort of thing but a monstrous scabbard covered with strange, ornate designs. It was clearly a broadsword of some kind, the hilt solid, firm, and yet also ornately sculpted with the shapes of creatures she couldn't guess the true form of. He handed it to her. "Everything comes in handy sooner or later," was his only explanation.
She strapped it around her waist, the place where the humanoid part of her met the equine, and pulled out the blade. It had good balance and feel to it and seemed so perfect she found she could cut a swath with one hand. But for serious business, like skullcracking, two hands would be best.
"Colonel?" Jodl, one of the aides, whispered. Asam nodded, and the other centaur crept slowly forward, crossbow at the ready, eyes on the cabin door itself.
All had shed their packs; in a fight, baggage would unbalance them. The advance man was light and cautious, but made no attempt at concealment. He was, after all, over two and a half meters tall and more than three long and weighed in around seven hundred kilograms, hardly the sort of being who could make a surreptitious entry.
"Who do you think it is?" she whispered to Asam. "One of your old enemies?"
He shrugged, never taking his eyes off the door. A second man started out, keeping distance and interval. They were going to approach the cabin from all sides and make sure that only one would be attacked first—if attacker there were. "Could be anybody," he told her softly. "Hired assassins, freebooters, criminals, Dillian or foreign. Hard to say."
It startled her slightly to consider Dillians as criminals or killers. They were a rough but likable and levelheaded lot. But there must be some bad ones, she realized. There always are.
They were fanned out now on all sides of the cabin, keeping at least ten meters from the cabin door. They didn't worry too much about any other place of attack; the rocky ledge gave them a measure of protection from above, the far trail was fairly clear to the eye, and the cabin sat on the edge of a sheer cliff. Thinking of the Dahbi, she considered their disregard of the cliff area a mistake. If this world had creatures that could pop up through solid rock, they had dozens that could cling to the sides of sheer cliffs or, perhaps camouflage themselves into near invisibility. Some of the latter had once almost done her in in the distant past in far-off Glathriel.
The point man had reached the area in question on the far side of the cabin. She stayed in back of the men's semicircle, feeling helpless and a little irritated that she was not up to this kind of thing. And, for all her own great mass, she was still smaller, yet no more maneuverable, than the males.
Still, she held the rear guard, sword at the ready, and pulled her goggles back down. Her eyes were already beginning to hurt slightly.
"Colonel!" the point man called, his voice echoing slightly off the walls near and far. "Party of three. Hunters. Our people. Pretty messed up. They cut 'em up and then tossed 'em over the cliff. They're forty, fifty meters down when the slope smooths out." He didn't attempt to whisper the word. If the killers were still around, they most certainly knew just where they were by now.
Asam considered, then turned back to Mavra. "Could it have been Gedemondans who did this?"
She shook her head violently. "Not a chance. If they want you dead, they just point a finger and you curl up and die."
"Didn't think so," the Colonel muttered, and turned back to the cabin. "All right, boys, let's go visitin'."
They converged, very slowly and carefully, on the cabin until the closest was only a few meters from the front door. It was Mavra who saw that, for the first time, they were twenty or thirty meters out in the open from the rock shelf above. Something was up there, a shadow, a discontinuity . . .
"Asam!" she screamed. "Above and behind you!"
At that moment the attackers leaped off their high perches and fell toward them. There were more than a dozen of them, some armed with pikes, some with crossbows, others with swords.
They were bats—no, apes, of some kind, with bat's wings—or— Whatever they were, they were small, agile, they could fly, had blazing eyes and sharp teeth, and wore some kind of dull coppery uniform.
But they were not flying down; rather, they made a controlled plunge, like skydivers, but with some maneuverability, and they were uttering singularly alien screeches that sounded like high-pitched bagpipes trying to yodel.
Two with crossbows loosed their bolts while still falling, but they missed their target and plowed into the snow; Jodl and one other who were at an angle to the fall whirled and raised their crossbows. From a firm standing position, they didn't miss. The force of the Dillian bolts was so strong that the two struck almost seemed suddenly to fly backward, then hit the wall and start forward again, limp.
By the time this happened, though, the others were upon them, two leaping directly on Asam. They were small but extremely powerful; one fell right for his head and torso, the other for his hindquarters. The Colonel reared and twisted, flinging the one off his behind, then, dropping his own bow, he grabbed the other creature by its wicked, extended claws and heaved him against the rock wall with tremendous force.
Before Mavra knew what was happening, one was coming right at her. She waited, then thrust herself outward, both hands on the sword hilt.
The thing impaled itself on the sword and spurted thick red blood, but it was not dead; somehow, awful hate in its distorted, terribly ugly face, its right arm raised the sharp spear in its hand while its body weight on the broadsword forced Mavra down with it to the ground. She had only a split-second to decide what to do. Falling, off-balance, there was only one thing she could do: she accelerated the fall and rolled; the spear came at her, tearing through her thick fur coat, and she felt a stabbing pain in her left side.
Too mad to pay any attention to it, she got up with as much speed as possible and saw that the thing, still impaled on the sword, twitched and gibbered. A wave of utter fury swept over her and she reared up on her hind legs and came down, forelegs with their heavy steel shoes crashing into the thing again and again and again.
Meanwhile, the rest of the creatures were down and slashing now. They were effective; two of the centaurs were down, bolts or spears in them, but Asam still stood, a bloody but superficial wound on his equine body's left side. Rearing, turning, charging, all the time yelling at the top of his lungs, he charged the things again and again. One of the creatures managed a roll and tried to take off into the air, throwing a spear at the raging Colonel. It struck, but all he did was flinch, cry out, more in fury than in pain. He reached around, pulled the spear out of his side, and threw it at the now airborne attacker. The spear struck the thing, and it paused for a moment, then fell like a rock over the side of the cliff.
Mavra whirled, oblivious to the pain, and charged into the midst of the fight. Suddenly leathery wings seemed to strike her in the face, then there was a massive shock, so hard it felt as if her brain were reverberating inside her skull, and then there was darkness. She never even felt herself fall.
She felt as if she were drowning in a sea of thick liquid, unable to get her bearings, unable to see anything but the swirling wet mass that was all around her. She tried to struggle against it, tried to fight its overwhelming, engulfing motion, but it was impossible. There was pain, dull throbs and sharp stabbing sensations about which she could do nothing, and it was alternatingly suffocatingly hot then icy cold. She thrashed out at the swirling, liquid mass, tried to beat it off.
There seemed to be others in the mass as well; strange shapes and faces that would occasionally focus and then fly away. Some were horrible, gargoylelike creatures that swooped in and out but out of her reach, jabbering and mocking her; others were more familiar, yet no less threatening: giant, catlike creatures with glowing eyes; tiny, mulelike beasts whose eyes showed agony; phantom minotaurs, great scorpions, phantoms out of her past.
In the midst of all this activity, there stalked a small, frail-looking figure, his back to her, oblivious to all the horrors. She reached out for him, tried to call to him, but the liquid that she seemed suspended in prevented that, though he seemed oblivious to it.
Finally she managed some sort of scream, a scream of terrified helplessness. He must hear! He must! He must! She concentrated all she could muster on the walking figure.
He stopped, seemed to hear, and slowly turned. It was the face of Nathan Brazil she saw, and he stared back, looking more bored than sympathetic.
"Brazil! You-must-help-me!" she gasped, reaching out a hand to his.
He smiled, took out a coin and flipped it to her. "Glad to be of service," he responded lightly. "Any old time. Got to go now. I'm God, you know. Too many things to do. . . ."
He turned from her and walked into the mists, not heeding her anguished cries, then faded into the swirling, milky whirlpool and was lost from view.
She was alone, alone again with the liquid and the horrors that floated by her, mocking her, striking out at her.
Alone.
"Help me!" she screamed at nobody in particular. "Will no one help me now?"
Figures appeared, kind-looking human figures. A handsome, middle-aged man and a stunningly beautiful woman. They stretched out their arms to her, beckoned her to come to them, to run to their protection. She started for them, but suddenly a great dark shadow came out of the whirlpool and intervened between the pair and her. A great, angelic shape in white robes, it smiled at her even as it put out its own outstretched arms.
She hesitated, then started to approach, but the kindly figure began to undergo a terrible metamorphosis, changing from its human perfection into some sort of hideous, ugly frog-creature that gibbered and drooled and turned from her to devour her parents far in the distance, laughing as it did so.
She felt herself falling, down, down, into some sort of pit still awash in that liquid that now had the foulness of decaying garbage.
She struggled even more against the noxious odor, reached out for something to grab onto, but no one was there, no one at all. She was sinking, sinking further into the filth and slime, and the terrible creatures still floated around laughing, mocking, joking, and jabbing.
A tough-looking pasty-yellow face with hair nearly white appeared at the edge, smiled at her, and offered a hand. But the hand decayed as Mavra touched it, became a skeletal thing. The infection finally consuming the old woman, and when that happened she felt herself sinking even more into the bottom layers of slime. She felt more and more alone, more and more like she was going to remain forever in this bottomless pit of torment and corruption.
Now another face appeared, a kind face, a face that was representative of all the races of Old Earth, a handsome face that said it wanted to help. He reached out his own hand and took hold of her, pulling her up, up from the muck and the mire, and for a moment she thought she was free. She could see air ahead, and stars, millions of twinkling, blinking lights spread everywhere before her.
There was a sound, a loud explosion somewhere near her, and as she looked again in horror, her savior's face seemed to be coming apart, exploding grotesquely, and the grip slipped.
"Gimball!" she screamed. "No! No! My husband . . ."
But he was gone, and she was alone again, sinking again in the filth, never free of the swirling liquid, and it seemed to her as if the gibbering creatures were enjoying it all the more now.
Black shapes moved in, bound her, sliced her up into pieces of herself, made her a deformed, helpless monster. Still she struggled against them, fought the dark forces pushing her deeper and deeper in the muck. Another, misshapen, mutilated like herself, approached as the creatures swirling around started to close in on her, to choke her off. A gargoyle raised a spear and thrust it at her, hate inits eyes, but the other moved quickly, took the spear, and vanished, too, into the corruption.
A purplish light broke through the muck, and she heard Obie's voice, calling to her, and she reached the light. "I'm your magic genie," he told her. "Where in the universe do you want to go?"
"Everywhere!" she cried, and, in fast, flashing scenes she did. Yet, there was something wrong, very wrong. Every place they went had more of the foul corruption she thought she had escaped. Every place had more and more, all stinking, rotting, garbage.
The purple glow faded, and standing there, once more, was Nathan Brazil. He shrugged and gave her a crooked smile. "Well, what did you expect?" he asked her. "After all, I created the damn place in my own image."
And there was just the swirling, engulfing liquid and the stench and corruption, the chills and burning sensations, the pain, and nothing else. Nothing. Nothing.
Alone. She was alone. Alone forever in the muck . . . She hated that muck, she hated that stench, and, most of all, she hated a universe teeming with life in which she could be so utterly, so completely alone. If this was the way the universe was, it was better destroyed, she thought fiercely. Clear the muck, throw out the garbage, clean and cleanse, cleanse . . . But so empty now, so alone, so very alone . . .
Yet somehow she was not alone, not now, not at this point. She had the impression of someone hugging her, transferring warmth and caring to her, someone whispering gently to her, telling her it was all right, that someone else was there. She anxiously fought to open her eyes, to see who or what it might be, and finally managed, but the world wouldn't focus. A figure, just a figure, no more, no less. A figure, bending down, concerned, worried. A weathered, tough, handsome face whose eyes showed some ancient wisdom and gentleness he might try to hide but could not.
Suddenly she felt terribly tired, terribly worn, and she sunk back, not into the coma, not into the muck, but into a deep, dreamless sleep.
She awoke, blearily looked around, and tried to move. She was in some kind of harness and couldn't quite get free.
There was a crackling fire in the fireplace. Two of the party were in sleeping stalls like herself, suspended by elaborate but obviously jury-rigged harnesses made of belts, straps, strips of fur, anything available.
Two other centaurs moved around, one stoking the fire and checking a pot of what was probably melted snow, the other standing at a small table and looking over some papers. Neither looked in the best of health themselves; the one at the fire, a mass of professional looking bandages and deep scars, was favoring his right foreleg; the other, at the table, was Colonel Asam, whose humanoid torso was covered with puffy bruises. He, too, had a number of slick surgical bandages on various parts of his body.
"Asam?" she called out, sounding weak even to herself. "Asam, what happened?"
Both men turned, and the Colonel approached her quickly, a smile on his face. One of his eyes was swollen almost shut and his face was so bruised and puffy it shocked her, but he smiled, reached down to a pouch, and took out a cigar. "Well, well! Welcome back to the land o' the almost-living," he cracked.
She smiled. "What—who were those things?"
"Tilki. Pretty far from home, too. Bloody bastards. If this hadn't been a nontech hex, they'd have had us sure. Them high-tech bastards usually are pretty lousy with close-up weapons."
"Bandits?" she guessed.
He shook his head. "No. They had uniforms. Army. A neat little ambush team."
"They were . . . assassins, then?" she asked cautiously, still thinking of Asam's tale of a blood feud.
"Assassins, yes," he agreed, "but not for me. We got 'em all—I think, anyway. Unless they had some they held back who took off when we got the upper hand. Doubt it, though. One or two more would've finished us."
"Not for you? But—"
"I've got a translator, remember," he told her. "I understood their jabberin'. No question in my mind it was you they was after. Heard your name a coupl've times. They mighta gotten you, too, if there'd been fewer of us, or if they hadn't been screwed up by the earlier group of hunters. They picked their spot well—this would be the logical first night's camp, and, flying, they could reach it without havin' to go over the tall peaks. Trouble was, when they got here they found the hunters already there. They knew you wasn't with 'em. I don't think they had too clear an idea of your looks, but the other were all men and they knew you was a woman. Only a guess, you understand—no witnesses left. I'd say they probably drew out the hunters, who had no reason to fear and would be just damned curious at meetin' Tilki up here, of all places. My guess the bastards took 'em so quick they never even knew what hit 'em."
She considered this. "You said they were Army. Why me?"
He grinned. "You told me a lot about what was goin' on right now. I'd say the Zone Council's decided on war, sifted through their records to find who the key ringleaders on the other side would be, and are out to wipe out Brazil's generals before they start. They might also be nervous about Gedemondas. Unknown quantity, you know. If you can't get to 'em, they're outta the fight."
She nodded and looked around. "The others . . . ?"
His expression became grim. "We're it. The survivors. Malk and Zorn, there, they're gonna need better medical care than we can give 'em. In a way we were lucky they hit us here, instead of just inside Dillia—infection's much less of a problem. We're battling only the bugs we brought with us."
"How are you ever going to get them to a hospital?" she wondered, feeling sorry for them.
"A group of hunters came through yesterday. They'll carry the news to Uplake and get help. I think they can stand it here another day or two until help arrives. We're not really into the bad country yet, so they ought to be able to get 'em down without much trouble."
"I see. Well, I— Did you say a group of hunters came through yesterday?"
He smiled and nodded. "You been out three days. We thought we were gonna lose you. Most of your wounds aren't really bad, nothin' serious. It was the concussion that almost did you in. Bastard came in and hit you with a sapper."
"A . . . a what?"
"Sapper. Stiff skin laced around lead shot. Damn thing can crack your skull. Don't think it did, though—but you got a hell of a bump. Sent you into shock."
"Why . . . why am I trussed up like this?"
"We'll get you unhooked if you feel up to it." He reached over and started undoing some of the knots. "Like some of the large animals of the world that are our distant cousins, we breathe back of our under-bellies. If you're down on your side for more than a couple hours, your own weight will press down on the lungs and suffocate you. We had to get you up and keep you up—not easy, I'll tell you. The two of us ain't in the best shape, either, but we're a lot better off."
"I . . . I saw you take a spear . . ." she began.
He chuckled. "Oh, it takes a lot more'n that to get me. Didn't hit anything vital and only hurts when I laugh. We're just lucky they moved so fast from their home hex they didn't have a chance to really look things up properly. All their tips were poisoned with what I guess they consider a horrible deadly toxin. Tannic acid. Maybe the next time we meet those bastards we ought to dump a pot o' tea on each of 'em!"
She laughed, and when she did she felt all the wounds and bruises and sores she had accumulated. There were a lot of them, and over a large area, but she had had as bad or worse before and it hadn't bothered her for long. Uncomfortable, yes, but little else.
Freed from the harness, she stood alone and tried walking out of the stall. Immediately she felt dizzy and wobbly, and had to hold on. "Guess I'm still a little weak," she muttered to herself.
"Take it easy," he cautioned. "That's a nasty crack on the head. Ease into normal activity."
She tried it again, more cautiously, and found that as long as she was holding onto something it was all right. He went up to her and let her lean on him, and together they made it out into the main room.
"Feel like you could eat something?" he asked her. "You really should."
She looked over at the bales of strawlike material at the far side of the cabin. She didn't really feel like eating, but decided he knew best.
The stuff tasted awful, but she found herself unable to stop once she started. Asam chuckled and told her to go ahead. "You don't realize just how much food we Dillians need a day. Eatin' regular like we do, that is. When you take it in at one gulp after a few days off, it can seem pretty piggy."
Piggy wasn't the word for it, she decided when she was finished. She went through most of a bale, a little at a time, and each bale weighed close to twenty kilos.
Later she did feel better, and managed to find a small mirror. She had double black eyes and felt like she had bitten the inside of her mouth half through, but otherwise the damage didn't appear all that bad. The wounds on her equine back and side were painful and there was some internal bruising, but there didn't seem to be serious damage and she felt she could live with them.
Asam, too, was as tough as his reputation. After seeing him in action, she decided she wouldn't doubt any of his stories and legends again, and she said as much.
He grinned. "You did pretty fair yourself, you know. I don't know too many folks, man or woman, could hold their own like that." He looked at her and the grin faded, but only a bit. "You know, you asked me once whose side I was on. Alter this, you don't have to ask any more. You understand? And not just me. Those fools did half the work for you. They slaughtered innocent Dillians in cold blood, Dillians with no politics, no positions, just good, ordinary people. I know my people, Mavra. They'll want to get even." He paused and smiled broadly once again. "And as for me, I've gotten to know you and see you in a number of different situations. I'd be proud to serve with you, any time."
She smiled, took his hand, and squeezed it. She felt like hugging the old adventurer, but they were both too bruised for that. Still, she thought back to that dream, that bastard child of her innermost mind that had been raised by the sapper. She wished she was as certain of her side and her cause as he now seemed to be.
"So what do we do now?" he asked her. "I wouldn't stay here much longer, if you feel like moving. There's always the chance that they had somebody as observer, or maybe agents in Dillia will carry the news. Either way, they hit us again here as soon as they can mount another force. I've been uncomfortable with the idea for the past couple of days. How do you feel?"
"Lousy," she replied glumly. "Still, what are the options?" She looked at the cabin, which had become such a hospital ward.
"We can wait for the rescue party. They should be here in the next few hours if luck holds. Remember, they had nobody to send without leavin' Uplake without its one good healer. Probably a good, strong team came in on today's boat or on a special and they're on their way even now. They'd need supporting equipment, anyway, which would slow them down."
Going back. She wanted to go back, back to the peaceful village with its ale and companionship and gentle waterfalls.
"If anybody wants to make a try at us, that'll be the time to do it," she pointed out. "And any observer will have a pretty good description of me now."
"The only alternative is for us to press on," he pointed out. "And neither of us is strong enough to carry a full load or force-march. In a few days, yes, but not now. You're still pretty rocky, and the trail gets pretty hairy from here on."
She went over to the table Asam had been standing at when she had come out of it. Spread out was a chart of Gedemondas, a topographic map with trails, shelters, and cabins marked. It was easy to find where they were now, the first cabin above the snow line. She studied the map, and he came over and looked over her shoulder.
"What're you lookin' for?" he asked.
"A collapsed volcano," she replied. "A huge crater of some kind, high up, surrounded by high mountains."
"Most of Gedemondas is volcanic," he noted. "Active, too, a lot of 'em. Not very dangerous, for the most part—you could outrun a lava flow if you had to. Some of the big ones puff a lot, though."
She nodded. "The Gedemondans live in volcanic chambers and use interconnecting lava tubes to get around beneath the surface. The network is fantastic and complex. They also use the volcanic steam for heat and primitive power—even though this is a nontech hex, they have natural, rather than machine-generated, steam combustion. It's comfortably warm in there, too."
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Steam power? And what do they use it for?"
"I have no idea," she told him honestly. "We heard what could have been the turning of gears and levers for some great machine, and we got the idea that there were lots of things going on there we never knew about, but we saw only what they showed us—and I was in a worse position than most to be observant. I think all the entrances are farther in, though, in the high country."
"On some of the old and little-used trails, maybe?"
She shook her head negatively. "Uh uh. It doesn't matter where—might as well be comfortable. We just need to be higher . . ." Her voice trailed off as she continued to look at the map, settling on an odd set of concentric rings, like tree rings, and an open area in the middle. "In that direction," she told him, pointing to it. "I know they have openings into that crater from their main complex."
He looked at the spot. "Or did have, centuries ago," he half-muttered, worriedly.
"We go there. Easy stages. You game?"
He grinned. "You know I am. But, like it or not, I think we ought to leave tomorrow morning, not right now. We need the extra rest and healing"—she knew he referred to her—"and we ought to make sure these folks get back—at least wait for the rescue party."
She didn't really want to, but her head was throbbing and she felt very weak and tired. "All right, Asam. In the morning."
Although the trail was firm and well-marked, it was not easy going for either of them. The wind cut into them, and even the reduced packs seemed to shift onto every cut and bruise. Asam, as befitted his character in more ways than one, grimaced occasionally but never complained, nor did she. Still, dark thoughts pervaded their climb, mostly her own self-doubts about what she was doing. Was she, in fact, on the right side? Not that she should be on the Well's side, but why should she be on any side?
She knew the answer to that, of course. Brazil had refused to fix the Well unless she was there, unless she specifically ordered it. She wondered who would give the order if she were killed in this crazy battle of wits. Maybe nobody. Maybe he would just go into the Well, put himself back in the regular universe in whatever place he liked, and sit back and wait for eventual destruction. The responsibility was hers, not his. He had as much as said so.
Well, she hadn't asked for that responsibility, she told herself, and didn't want it. It wasn't fair. Nothing in her whole damned life had ever been fair, but at least she had been the mistress of it. Now they had even taken that away from her.
There were doubts, too, about her part in it all. She was to establish herself in her hex and wait for instructions. That had been all they had told her—that and the fact that the Entries would eventually rally around her, form up into a multiracial fighting force, one of several that would, on signal, converge on a single spot and combine into a mighty army, perhaps the greatest the Well World had ever seen: an army fed and supplied by other hexes as it marched, by other Entries and diplomatic friends who would, it was presumed, be there always with whatever was needed. It sounded pretty damned chancy.
And yet, if Asam were right, Dillia would follow her. Right now they would follow—not all, of course, but enough for a substantial force. That was all she had been asked to do. Why was she in Gedemondas? A hunch? Or was it, she wondered, her subconscious self's desire to throw enough of a joker into the deck that she could, as usual, be more in command?
Another night, another cabin. They felt better, slept better, as the journey wore on, and out of the comradeship of the first day's battle had grown a true affinity.
That, too, worried her. He was Asam, a great man and good friend, it was true. But he was Asam, a Dillian centaur born on the Well World who, because of that, would never leave it. She was Dillian only superficially; inside she was still the same Mavra Chang, still the same woman of a very different race and, beyond that, a very different time and culture. At the end of this was the unknown and unknowable. Perhaps Brazil knew, but where was he?
And so she rejected Asam's affection, kindly but firmly. She saw that it hurt him and because of that it hurt her, too. But anything else just wasn't fair, not to him, not to her.
On the fourth day out, they were close to exhaustion. The going had been very rough on the icy slopes where melt never happened, and the peaks had few and difficult passes. Neither of them, she knew, could take much more of this. They got into the cabin, a much smaller affair than the usual since this was a relay point to other valleys and not a base camp. As dark closed in, they settled down with a good fire going, and both were so damned tired they hardly said a word to each other. A stillness fell with the night, a stillness so absolute it seemed unnatural, unbroken even by word. There was nothing but the crackling fire and their own slow breathing as they slipped into sleep.
She dozed fitfully, for she was so tired she was having trouble sleeping, and so the crunching sound, as if some heavy, large animal were trudging through the snow, only half-registered on her. Was it truly something, or was it dream? Or was it, perhaps, an echo of her hopes? She didn't know, and felt too far gone to give it much thought.
The door opened, creakily, noisily, but neither of them stirred. In Gedemondas, you stirred if they wanted you to stir.
The Gedemondan stood upright, like a human or ape, but at almost three meters it almost touched the ceiling. Its face was doglike, with a long, thin snout and a black button nose, but its eyes were very much like a human's or Dillian's eyes, large and a misty, pale blue. It was covered in snow-white, almost brilliant-white fur, fairly woolly, like a sheep's, and two earflaps dangled down on either side of its head.
The Gedemondan gave the sleepers little attention at first, going over to the packs and looking casually through them. It came upon Asam's cigars, pulled one out, and looked it over carefully, as if trying to figure out what it was. It ran a thin, pink tongue over the wrapper, cocked its head as if in contemplation, then shrugged slightly and stuck the cigar in an invisible marsupiallike pouch just above its crotch.
Finally it seemed satisfied, then noticed the map of Gedemondas. It unrolled the map and looked at it for a few moments, and from deep inside it came an odd sort of rapid clicking sound that might have been chuckling. Using its odd, flexible three-finger-and-thumb hands, it rolled the chart back up and replaced it. At rest, the hands formed an almost rounded pad that hardly looked like hands at all.
It turned now and went to the rear, where the stalls were, and looked briefly at Asam, slumbering peacefully. Then it moved to the next, where Mavra slept deeply, now, as if drugged.
The two pads went first to her head, where they seemed to stroke it. A hand uncoiled and gently moved the long blond hair so that the ugly-looking bump on her head was clear and exposed. Hoping it would drain and subside on its own, Dillian Healers hadn't bandaged it.
The hand formed again into a pad, and from the odd-looking hairy pinkish palm came a sticky-looking secretion. The Gedemondan, holding back the hair with its other hand, applied the pad with the secretion like a compress on the swelling.
Now, for the first time, it seemed to realize the bruises were bruises and the bandages covered other wounds. Carefully it removed the bandages and looked at the wounds. It had some difficulty getting to her hindquarters, and at one point actually pulled her gently out of the stall, but neither she nor Asam awakened.
A second Gedemondan entered now and looked at the two sleepers, then nodded to the first who was with Mavra. It seemed to sense immediately that the two were injured and went to work on Asam, whose injuries, deeper and nastier than he had led Mavra or the others to believe, were consequently much more painful.
In the course of their mysterious treatment, the second Gedemondan made a slight grumbling sound and pointed to Asam's throat. The first nodded, then gestured back at Mavra and shook his own head negatively. The meaning was clear. Asam had a translator; they could talk to him, but not to Mavra, and not to these two. It was clearly Mavra they wished to speak with.
They had a problem, they understood. They needed a language specialist, and there was not one here. They needed to take these two elsewhere, but wondered how far they could be moved. But they were in a public cabin on a public trail in hunting season. Neither wanted to wait it out here, risking discovery.
Both mulled it over. The debate had been entirely silent, not even telepathic. They had simply known the words that needed to be said, the facts that needed pointing out, and with an occasional gesture an entire conversation had been boiled down to almost nothing at all.
One made a decision and went over to Asam, still asleep, and started making noises at him, noises like the yipping of some small dog. Still held by whatever power these two used and therefore still hypnotically asleep, Asam spoke.
"Mavra Chang, hear us."
"I hear you," she replied as if drugged, eyes still closed, breathing evenly, and as she said it Asam repeated it.
The Gedemondan nodded to itself, seeming satisfied. The other understood intuitively its feelings: it wasn't perfect, but you made do with what you had at the time.
"The Well is damaged," the Gedemondan said through Asam. "We know it. We felt it as it happened. It is a machine, but it isalso in many ways like a living organism. It is in agony. We gave you medical help, and this was easy to do. The Well, too, needs this help, but it cannot help itself. This, too, we understand. We will help you to do this, for our own vision is cloudy, our own minds affected, for we are attuned to the Well." It paused. "Speak to us now."
"Brazil seeks to fix the Well," she told them. "The nations combine to stop him. There will be war. Any and all help is desperately needed."
"We understand the plan," the Gedemondan told her. "We have had our share of Entries, too, but, unlike most other hexes, the Entries are of little help to you. They are us physically, certainly, but our powers are through training, study, intensive concentration from even before birth, even selective breeding for certain things. These are not things one can learn overnight, only over a lifetime. Speak now."
"Your powers are needed by us, though," she told them. "Desperately needed."
"We understand. Now you must understand that we are only messengers here. We learned of your presence only when we sensed the violence of the attack upon you. The two of us were closest to you and we hurried as best we could. But we are not the ones you need, nor the ones to decide. We may only take the data from you and pass it back to wiser heads. Speak now."
"Then we must go with you to where those who can help are," she told them.
"It is not possible," the Gedemondan told her. "There is not enough time. A meeting is being called. It is necessary for you to attend. Speak now."
"I know of no such meeting," she responded. "Who has called it, and for what purpose?"
"Your own people have called it, to plan greater strategy. It is to be in the place called Zone, in the place reserved for us for which we have no need. Speak now."
"The Gedemondan Embassy?" she murmured, managing some surprise even in her state of light hypnosis. "Then I must get to a Zone Gate."
"Your Zone Gate is far from here," the Gedemondan told her. "You must go to it as quickly as possible. After the meeting we might be ready to contact you again. Speak now."
"Your own Zone Gate would be closer," she pointed out. "We should be taken there."
The creature stared at her a moment, seemingly thunderstruck. It was obvious that this had never occurred to the great white thing; their Zone Gate had never been used in recent memory and so was irrelevant to them.
"You could use our Gate?" it asked.
Even through the thin fog they had placed upon her, Mavra sensed the creature's amazement and felt some satisfaction. Deep down, even if buried in her subconscious and not readily available, would be the new knowledge that Gedemondans were neither all-knowing nor all-powerful.
The first Gedemondan stalked over to Asam's pack and withdrew the map once again, unrolled it, and looked at it carefully, then nodded to his companion. She was right. Their Gate was much closer, particularly through the tunnels of Gedemondas only the natives knew.
The decision was made then and there. The two were put under much more deeply and called out. They were helped into their heavy cold-weather clothing, but the packs were ignored. Then, slowly, deliberately, the two Gedemondans walked out the door and the two spellbound aliens followed meekly.
Hours had passed as they went deeper into Gedemondas. Then a rocky wall had parted, and they had entered the warm interior tunnels of the strange, unknown hex, and now they walked in its mazes, hour after hour, without pause or complaint. The two were more securely bound than if they'd been tied with ropes and had guns to their heads. They knew absolutely nothing of the journey, of the passing through many busy arteries and through centers of Gedemondan activity. More than once their keepers changed, but they continued onward.
Finally, they reached an old dust-ladened hallway that clearly hadn't been entered in a very long time. Just off a main tunnel, it didn't go far before widening into a smooth chamber. The evidence was such that the single Gedemondan and the two centaurs were the first in known history to be there. At the far end of the chamber was a hexagonal shape of deepest, impenetrable black. It seemed unnatural there, out of phase somehow with the reality of the rock walls and floor.
Mavra Chang awoke, and, seeing the Gedemondan ahead of her and the looming dark shape in back of them, she smiled. She had no memory of how they had gotten there, nor of any of the previous conversation, but she knew she had gotten through. More interestingly, the hurt was gone. She felt clear-headed and without any pain for the first time since the battle, although she also felt ravenously hungry. She glanced over at Asam and realized immediately that he was in some sort of artificial sleep.
"My apologies for not being able to provide food," the Gedemondan said in a clear, pleasant voice. "I'm afraid all this was put together at the last minute, so to speak."
She realized with a start that he was not wearing a translator and was somehow synthesizing a normal tone in a throat that couldn't possibly handle those sounds or shape the words. She wondered how he did it. More interesting yet, he was not speaking Dillian but rather the far more sophisticated and complex language of the Com.
"Yes, it's Com speech," he admitted, seeming to read her mind. "We are getting a pretty large number of Entries from there right now for reasons we both understand, and a number of us have taken up studying the speech. I hope it's all right."
"Yes, perfect," she replied, noting that she was speaking Dillian. She tried to concentrate on her old tongue.
"Don't bother," the Gedemondan told her. "It's too much of a strain. You talk Dillian, I'll talk Com, and if there are any concepts your old language can handle better, I'll understand." He looked around. "Sorry for the housekeeping, too, but we don't use this very much. I suppose we will have to clean it out, though. Your Entries are no good to us, but they and some volunteers from our side will be necessary if we are to reintroduce our species into the universe." He paused and looked almost wistful. "We aren't there now, you know. We died out on the last try."
She nodded. "That's one reason I thought of you."
"We're well aware of what you thought. Perhaps better than you. And, yes, we'll help, certainly. We would have in any case, even if you had not come—but that unwarranted attack within our borders, that is intolerable. It will not happen again."
She looked at Asam, noting his bandages were off but there was little sign of old injury. Even his face had regained much of its original look and color. Her hand instinctively went to the back of her head, where she could feel a slight tenderness, nothing else.
"Thank you for whatever medical help you gave," she said sincerely, then glanced over at Asam. "You know, he has dreamed his whole life of just meeting and talking with you. It's a shame you can't bring yourself to wake him up, at least for a moment."
The Gedemondan shrugged. "Against the rules, really. Wiping a mind is a lot harder than this, and is for the same purpose. The fact is, you'll have to get to Zone as quickly as possible anyway—your people are meeting shortly, using our own empty embassy there. We haven't completed our analysis of your information and ours to decide what ways we can help as yet. You understand that, while we have great powers, we are actually pretty vulnerable, nocturnal, and hardly inconspicuous. Those things have to be weighed. In these mountains we're invulnerable, but out there, in the rest of the world, we're not nearly as effective. I seriously doubt if any Gedemondan could wage the type of fight you think of. We'll decide and be in touch shortly, wherever you are. The only thing I can promise is that we will do what we can to aid you."
"That's all I wanted," she replied earnestly. "And I thank you for it."
The Gedemondan just stood there a moment, looking at her with a puzzled expression and slightly cocked head. "You are troubled. You are in pain," he said, concerned.
She shook her head slowly. "No. I feel fine. Nervous about the future, yes, but nothing more than that."
The Gedemondan gestured at the still-sleeping Asam. "He is in love with you, you know that."
She sighed. "I suspected as much."
"And yet you reject him. Why?"
She was puzzled, too. But she didn't like the Gedemondan's sudden change in direction toward the more personal. It was none of this creature's business.
"You feel an equal attraction to him," the Gedemondan said flatly. "I can sense this."
"It's . . . it's a little complicated to go into now," she responded, trying to get him away from the topic.
"You are wrong," the creature told her. "You think of him as you would an alien creature, but he is not. He is of your own kind."
"He is a Dillian," she noted, growing more irritated.
"You are a Dillian, too," the Gedemondan responded. "No matter what you once might have been, you are a Dillian now. If you die on this world, you die a Dillian. If you live on this world, you live as a Dillian. You can not alter that. Even if you were to undergo the Well of Souls in the recreation, you would still be what you are now. You are this, now and forever." He reached out the padlike hands, took her head in them, and held it, gently, for a moment.
"Ah," he said. "Apprehension. Insecurity. Again you are wrong. If you should die tomorrow, there is still today. If you or he should die at any time, that would not negate the time you spend together. You still mourn your husband's death, he a thousand years dead. Why?"
She felt held, compelled to look at the Gedemondan's eyes, compelled to answer.
"I loved him very much."
He nodded. "And did you love him because he died?"
"Of course not!" She wished all this was over.
"You see. You mourned him because of the good life you had together. It is only life that has meaning, not death, O foolish child. Here, I will render what aid I can."
There was a sudden cloud over her mind. She felt something, some energy, something alien, yet warm, kind, not at all threatening there. It was no hypnosis or mind control, merely some sort of reinforcement of what the Gedemondan was saying.
The huge white creature went over to a wall near the gate itself and rubbed off a lot of dust, so much that his arm started turning gray. To her surprise, it was a polished surface, glasslike yet seemingly natural.
"It is solid obsidian," he told her. "Smoothed and finely polished in the earliest days of this hex. There, now, look into it and tell me what you see."
Curious, and slightly amused by what seemed like dime-store psychiatry, she walked to it and looked. She saw herself, perfectly reflected in the mirrorlike surface.
"I am suppressing certain neural circuits in your brain," he told her. "Nothing to do with thought or judgment, but sedating, shall we say, those extraneous matters that always color our thinking. It's a simple thing, but useful. I doubt if we here could get along without the ability to do it to ourselves when need be. We can teach it to you easily, as it is simply conscious control of something the mind does anyway, but with less success in many cases."
There were no more nightmares, no more lurking monsters in the shadows of her mind. For some reason she felt freer, clearer-headed than she could ever remember before. It seemed odd that suppressing something in the mind could make it crisper, somehow cleaner.
She looked again at her reflection and thought, almost curiously, That's me. Face, breast, long, flowing blond hair, down to the golden-haired equine body that seemed perfectly shaped, perfectly suited to the rest, matched, a part of the whole. She had always, somehow, thought of centaurs, Rhone or Dillian, as simply humans with a horse stuck on the back. Now she saw that wasn't true at all; she was a distinct, logical creature now, one which, in many ways, was far superior to the form in which she had been born. And, she realized, the Gedemondan had been right. The person she remembered wasn't really her, not any more. It had never really been her. Its physical shape and form, so deliberately assembled so long ago, had been no more authentic than this form she now wore.
And what was form, anyway? Just something that made things harder or easier, depending on how you looked. Inside, where it counted, behind the eyes of those she had felt strongly about, that was truth. All her life, she realized, still looking at the sleek form reflected in the obsidian, she'd been living for the future or mourning the past. Seven years, seven short years so long ago were the only bright, shining jewel. Not because of her accomplishments—she had had them aplenty, and she was proud of them—but because of living, real joy of living.
She turned to the Gedemondan. "Yes, I would like to learn that someday. I think you have a lot to teach the rest of us. Maybe that would be your perfect role."
He nodded. "It will be considered."
She paused a moment more. "I think we're ready to go now," she told him at last. She went up to him and hugged him, and if he could have smiled, he certainly would have. Finally she said, "Your people seem so much wiser, so much more advanced than any I have known. I wish more could learn what you know."
The Gedemondan shrugged. "Perhaps. But, remember, Gedemondans and Dillians both went out into the universe at the same time. Your race survived, grew, built, and expanded. Ours died out."
He gestured at Asam, who walked to and through the blackness of the Zone Gate. She turned and followed him.
The Gedemondan stood there a moment, then walked over and studied his own figure in the clear obsidian. It was a perfect surface and an exact reflection, and it worried him a great deal that there seemed to be an indefinable flaw in it.