Looking around and seeing no one obvious, he climbed down onto the trim little craft, and the girl followed, eyes darting around, ears alert for any signs of danger.
There were no tides to speak of on the Well World, but there were many currents, and ports in general were designed to take advantage of them. The diagonal bloat slips were the first step; each was basically a small canallike lock which filled when the ship was docked and raised it a few meters above the surrounding sea. If he triggered the lock mechanism, it would open, and, casting off at the precise moment, the ship would float out into the harbor on the outflowing water. Then he could turn, raise a single sail by that winch over there, and make his way out and into Pulcinell. The wind wasn’t entirely favorable in the storm, and it would mean moving quickly, but he thought it was possible.
Not for the first time did he wish he could at least tell the girl how to do something. It would be very useful if she could take the wheel, trigger the sail winch, or even push the damned lock button. He sighed. Well, he was on his own, and that was that. He checked the mechanical winch on the small sail he would need, figured out the safety and the release, and decided it would work. Then he walked over to the outside wheel aft of the mast and removed the blocks and wheel lock, testing it to ensure that it was free.
Gesturing for her to stay aboard, he then climbed back on the dock, found a small metal pole with a rectangular box on it, opened it at the hinge, and found two large buttons there, one depressed. He pushed the other one, cursed as it rang a very loud bell that seemed to echo over the entire harbor area, then ran back and jumped onto the deck from the pier, slipping and falling in the snow as he did so. The lock was opening pretty fast—a lot faster than he’d figured—and he let go of the bowline and rushed back, let go of the stern line, and almost slipped again as the small sailing vessel lurched free and then began to move with more speed than he wanted backward into the channel. He climbed up and grabbed the wheel, feeling out of breath, then worried that the damned lock wouldn’t be completely out of the way by the time he passed the wall. It almost wasn’t; he felt a bump, and the ship lurched and groaned, but it continued out into the channel.
There were several yells, curses, and threats from behind him as the bell and the launch had made it clear to some of those still aboard other boats that this one was leaving in the storm and probably not with its owners, but he didn’t care. He spun the wheel for all it was worth, turning the little craft so its bow faced the inner marker buoys, then locked it with the latch and ran forward to trigger the sail. He barely noticed that the girl was watching him, fascinated, and it was probably a good thing. He would have been furious had he seen her just sitting there on a hatch cover when he was so frantic.
The winch jammed when he pushed the release; he cursed, then started hitting it and banging on it for all it was worth. The damned thing was frozen! He looked up and saw that the ship was turning slightly on its own and was beginning to drift sideways out of the docking area and back toward the other boats, many of which now had very nasty-looking creatures on them just waiting for him to drift near.
The girl sensed the danger and saw what he was trying to do. She got up, came over to him, and put her hand on the stuck lever. There was a sudden electrical crackle, and steam actually rose from the winch mechanism. The lever moved back, releasing the sail.
He was far too busy and too worried even now to consider what he’d seen. Two ropes came down from either side of the sail, and they had to be grabbed and tied to the pulley mechanism on either side of the boat. He grabbed one and tied it off as she watched, then the girl went over and caught the other and handed it to him when he reached her. It was a big help; he wouldn’t have expected most people to know how to tie into the remote mechanism.
By this point they had drifted very close to the pier. At least a half dozen angry shapes were atop the various lock gates just waiting for him, and he wasn’t at all sure he could get out of there in time to keep from bumping into one of the gates and giving whatever was there an open invitation to board.
He ran forward again, expertly engaging the intricate system of levers, pulleys, and gears that allowed a single pilot to handle the steering and sail adjustments, and brought the craft under some control. Momentum, however, wasn’t that great, and he felt a mild bump as the ship’s side struck the closest lock door. Something screamed and cursed at him, and a large black shape jumped aboard and fell to the deck.
By this time he had things under control and was working the ship back out into the docking area and toward the inner markers. That, however, had allowed the unwanted newcomer to regain its footing, and it now stood there, almost in front of and just below him, glowering menacingly.
It was two meters tall and covered in thick black fur, and its huge eyes glowed yellow; when it opened its mouth, it showed more teeth than a shark, all very large and very pointy. Although something of a shapeless mass with no clear waist, it had huge, thick, fur-covered arms ending in clawed hands. On its feet was the only clothing it apparently wore or needed—an outlandish pair of what could only be galoshes, size twenty, extra wide. It did, however, have one other thing that was even more intimidating. In its right hand it held what looked very much like some kind of humongous pistol.
“Turn this ship around!” it thundered menacingly. “This is a Chandur ship, and you’re no Chandur, thief!”
“And neither are you!” he shouted back, thinking fast and still steering for the markers. “I know very well whose ship this is! I was hired to repossess it for failing to make payments for much of this past season!”
“Repo—! That’s worse than a damned thief!” the creature roared. “I ate the last repo agent who tried it on my ship! We watermen stick together!” It looked around and saw that they were still headed out. “I said turn this boat around! Now!”
“If you ate the last repo agent, then I’ve nothing to lose, do I?” he responded, trying to sound as cool as possible. “If I’m going to die, I guess I might as well take you with me. That barge over there looks solid enough to crack us up and put us under.”
The creature raised the pistol. “Get away from that wheel or I’ll blast you where you stand! Move away, I say! Down here! I’ll take her in! Don’t think I won’t shoot, either. It’ll blow your wheel, but I can use the other one in the wheel shack amidships!”
Nathan Brazil sighed and stepped back from the wheel and over to the right as directed. Well, I almost got away with it, he thought glumly.
Suddenly a dark shape moved from the center deck behind the creature forward to where it could sense something moving. It whirled and immediately faced the girl.
It towered over her, and the mouth opened, revealing the very nasty teeth, but she did not seem intimidated. Instead, she looked up at the thing and right into its huge oval eyes.
“You! You get over with your friend—” it began in the same deep, threatening tone it had used on him, but suddenly it stopped. The big eyes seemed to squint, and the huge mouth took on a look of undeniable surprise and confusion. “You—you get—I—uh . . .” it tried, then stopped, seemingly frozen to the spot, unable to move.
Brazil didn’t wait to find out what was going on. With the gun no longer aimed at him, he went back to the wheel and began adjusting the course. Still, one eye was on where they were heading and the other was on the drama unfolding just below.
Slowly, jerkily, as if fighting something that was making the creature move against its will as if it were some sort of giant marionette, the right arm was coming up to the face, the gun still firmly in its hand, and when it was at mouth level, the wrist trembled and began to turn the barrel inward, toward that mouth.
“No!” Brazil yelled at her, trying to project as much emotion as he could that she should not go through with what she was obviously doing. What he particularly didn’t like was what he was getting back from her.
Nothing.
A cold, empty nothing, devoid of pity, hesitation, question.
Devoid of humanity.
She felt his revulsion, though, and hesitated, as if waiting for instructions.
They weren’t very far from the barges. The water was icy cold, but with that kind of insulation the creature shouldn’t have any trouble making it to them before he froze to death. Frantic to try to communicate with her and upset by this terrible, almost machinelike coldness he felt inside her, he tried mental pictures of the thing jumping overboard and said aloud, “Splash! Swish!”
For a moment nothing happened, then she seemed to get the idea. The big creature turned, walked stiffly to the side of the boat, bent over the rail, then dropped into the water, still holding the gun.
He spun the wheel back toward the center channel and then shouted, “Let go of it! Let. Go. Of. It!”
She again seemed to get the message, and from perhaps ten meters behind he heard the creature break to the surface and roar with fury. When the curses and threats came, Brazil relaxed. The big thing would be okay.
The girl seemed to be back to normal now. The feelings he got were the basic ones, of satisfaction at dealing with a threat, of a job properly done. That deep, abiding coldness he’d felt was now once again hidden, but he would not forget it.
That would-be hero was too much like himself, a fellow sailor doing what honor required him to do. He would kill such a man in a fair fight if he had the chance and no other choice, but always out of necessity, never coldly and never without profound regret.
She either didn’t understand that or had discounted it. It was almost as if she’d observed the situation, done a cold, mathematical calculation, and taken the easiest route. No regrets, no second thoughts, no recrimination, nothing. The fact that she had a kind of mental power that could do this at all was scary enough, but to do it so damned coldly was . . . scary.
He had never been this frightened of something. Not in a very, very long time. If she could do that to the sailor, then she could do that to him and might well do so. He tried very hard to suppress the fear, but it was there, niggling, and that was the worst of it; he knew she could feel it inside him as surely as if it were inside her. The only thing that gave him some comfort was that she had acted only for his protection, and she had listened to him when he had insisted that the sailor should live.
The truth was, he could sense in her no danger to himself, but that wasn’t what scared him so much.
What if they can all do this? What kind of game is the population of Glathriel playing, and with how much of this world?
He was out into the full channel now and approaching the hex barrier, and he turned to a more practical concern. At least the weather had prevented the other sailors from pursuing them; now he had to prove he was enough of a sailor to get through it himself. The snowstorm wasn’t a big deal, but the dark, swirling clouds in Pulcinell right ahead didn’t promise anything better.
He passed through the barrier, feeling the very slight tingle that was all anybody felt when going through one of the energy walls, and he was suddenly in tropical heat and a roaring wind. For several minutes he was again frantically working for control of the boat in ankle-deep snow on the deck while sweating from the heavy clothing he wore.
He estimated the winds at gale force, no worse, but it meant trimming sail to the minimum, heading upwind, and battling the sea with a wheel that had a mind of its own. He only hoped that the girl didn’t suffer from seasickness; this was going to be one rough time.
No rest for the weary, he thought glumly, but if he could hold out, it would be very much to his advantage. He didn’t care how far he went or if he went very far at all; if the storm grew no worse and if he maintained his current heading, it would put a lot of water between him and any pursuers. He fully expected to use this wind once it slackened off enough to trust.
For now, though, it was a matter of keeping the damned boat afloat. He watched wave after wave crash into the bow and engulf it and then felt that bizarre sensation only those who had sailed into a large storm knew, that of the deck shifting suddenly both horizontally and vertically at once as the bow came up and broke free to await another wave.
There was a lashing post, and he considered tying himself to the wheel station, but he’d sailed worse-handling craft than this in even rougher weather over thousands of years and countless endless seas. Once he got his sea legs and the rhythm of the ship, he would feel fairly comfortable with it. Still, it would be nice to sit down, strapped to a fixed chair rather than having to stand through the storm for who knew how long. Still, he dared to lock the wheel long enough to slip off the heavy coat he was wearing and noted for the first time that he’d lost his hat somewhere along the way.
Finding himself pretty well soaked anyway, he slipped off his shirt and was just deciding if he could go any farther when the small boat gave a sudden, violent lurch to one side, throwing him to the deck.
“What the—?” he asked himself, getting up and looking around. It was still pretty rough, but it wasn’t that rough. Must have hit a reef or something, he decided, shaking his head and turning back to the wheel.
He suddenly froze, a cold chill going through him to the bone even though it was as hot as ever. He looked around for the girl but found her sitting just behind the mainmast, cross-legged, looking forward at the huge swells exactly as she’d been when he’d locked the wheel. And, yet, and yet . . .
Wet and crumpled, his hat now sat atop the topmost spoke of the ship’s wheel.
Itus
“I UNDERSTAND THAT WE HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON,” ONE of the twin centauresses said to Julian in heavily accented English as they entered the hotel room.
“Yes?” was all Julian could manage, still startled both by the unexpectedly diminutive appearance of Mavra Chang and by the startling if imposing twins who seemed to have stepped out of Fantasia.
“You were a human male, were you not? And so was I. Not so Anne Marie, who was my wife.”
“I’m afraid Tony is having a very difficult time with this,” Anne Marie put in, her voice absolutely identical to the other’s but with a definitely softer and gentler, almost “sweet” tone, while Tony seemed much firmer, almost aristocratic. There were clearly two different personalities inside those mirror-image heads, not to mention the fact that Anne Marie’s accent was very British.
“I will survive the shock,” Tony commented, as if reassuring herself as well as Anne Marie. Tony was in fact looking at the very feminine, pastel-colored, and four-breasted Julian and already seeing how much worse things might have been.
Mavra walked over to Lori and stood looking at him. While she had always projected the feeling of someone much larger, in fact she now barely came up to the middle of his chest, heeled boots and all. She gave a low whistle.
“Man! The Well outdid itself on this batch! The two guys become girls, one of the girls becomes a guy, and the other girl becomes the exact identical twin of her husband. Boy! Talk about screwing around with people’s psyches!”
Lori was as stunned by the twin centauresses as Julian had been. “I thought you said two entries to the same species was just about unheard of,” he said to Mavra. He left unsaid that he was startled to be “hearing” the centauresses in Erdomese in spite of the fact that since Julian could understand them, they were most likely speaking English. Was that, he worried, a price of the translator? That it translated even languages one knew! He wondered for a moment why he hadn’t noticed this with Julian, then realized that they had uncharacteristically spoken only Erdomese to one another since his return the previous afternoon.
Mavra nodded at Lori’s comment about same-species conversions being uncommon. “They are. Sex changes—no, they happen all the time. The reason generally is to maintain the balance in the hex, since you can’t add territory. Dillians—that’s what this pair is—tend to mate only a couple of times a year and have long gestation periods. I know the race well myself. The result is that they often have periods when there are fewer births than normal, so they’re a natural to add to during one of those times, and newcomers are almost always females there because with that long gestation, they’re not necessarily going to increase the population before the Well can balance things out. It would also be most common to be female if you got put in Erdom, as Julian was, since they have a lot more females than males. Lori, I think you were the exception for reasons we discussed. On the other hand, if you had come through first, you’d undoubtedly have been female, and Julian wouldn’t even have wound up Erdomese. Hard to say. For my selfish purposes, anyway, I’m glad it worked out the way it did. Happy to have you both aboard.”
The twins, as it were, were stunning creatures on both the “human” and nonhuman halves. Both stood about 215 centimeters tall, with thick, billowing strawberry blond hair that cascaded from their heads and went down the back like a mane, out of which stuck two very equine ears that seemed to be able to pivot independently of one another, and big green eyes set in an exotically beautiful face that contained elements of classical European but had other influences from many races. The complexion was a golden brown, although it was difficult to determine if it was tanned or naturally that way. The breasts were rather large and seemed designed more to hang down when the torso leaned forward, suggesting that centaur young nursed standing on all fours; otherwise, the figure was close to perfect, going down to a very small waist at the point where the hu-manoid torso merged into the equine half just about where a horse’s neck would begin, so that the entire humanoid torso seemed to be slightly forward of the main body.
The lower half was not quite horse, either, but rather an equine extension of the torso, clearly having a single, supple backbone that ran from the humanoid shoulders all the way to the tail. The pony like body tapered in just forward of the rear thighs and was covered with short golden hair, ending in a large, bushy tail of the same strawberry blond as the hair on their heads. They were for all that almost su-pematurally supple; the backbone had to be able to flex effortlessly in almost any direction. They could bend the humanlike torso down so that they were able to actually touch the ground without bending at the knees, turning it almost backward, while swiveling the rear hips around to reach their own tails. It was in form a masterpiece of beauty and functional design.
They were the sexiest-looking creatures Julian had ever seen or imagined, all the more so because, while bipedal, she shared some of the equine look herself. She found herself thinking, Now, that’s the way it should be done!
Lori had much the same reaction and was somewhat amazed and embarrassed to discover that he was becoming turned on just looking at them. He decided he’d better sit down.
The room, which had seemed large, was pretty cramped with the two centaurs inside, but they made do as best they could. “We ordered some coffees and teas,” Julian told them. “It was all we could think of since we did not know the nature or needs of your companions.”
“Tea is fine with me,” Mavra told her. “Tony, being a native Brazilian, will probably complain about the coffee, but he won’t drink much else. Anne Marie, being British, is self-explanatory.”
“I feel like I should help you, dear,” Anne Marie said apologetically, “but I’m afraid I haven’t gotten used to all this excess baggage on my rear end in rooms like this yet. Both of us have already made some frightful messes knocking over things.”
“No, no. You are our guests,” Julian told her, and went into the corridor to the bath and prepared the drinks, then brought them back out. The sight of the two centauresses standing there holding cups and saucers was almost funny.
Anne Marie looked at Julian as if studying a sculpture. “You know, I always fantasized about becoming what I am now, but I do believe that had I known of or imagined your form, I should have preferred it. You are so pretty and combine much of the best of both human and animal form.”
“I think you got the best of it,” Julian told her. “The status of females in Erdomese society is that of objects. It would be unthinkable for one or two females to travel alone even there, let alone to other lands.”
“Oh, yes, I’m afraid Mavra has told us about that. What a shame for you, poor dear! At least you are fortunate to be married to someone from your own culture. I will say that Dillian society is quite comfortable and relaxed. Oh, the men like to show off their strength and do a lot of man things like drinking heavily and boasting and competing in all sorts of games and silly contests, but women are equal on the councils and in education. The people are all quite civil, so there’s not the fear and pressure there is back home. I can—and did—walk the trails alone at night with no more worry than that of tripping over a log. There’s quite a lot of stock taken in family. Not much privacy, but you can’t have everything, after all. It’s quite pleasant, really. More than I hoped for and much less than I feared.”
Julian looked over at Tony, who seemed in general a bit less happy about the situation, but she decided it was a matter for later, more discreet discussion.
“I’ll get right to the point,” Mavra told them, her sharp, penetrating voice more than compensating for her tiny size. “We’ve got passage on a cross-country train this afternoon that will take us directly to the Ogadon border. Ogadon’s a water hex, so that means taking another ship.” She unfurled a map on the cushions, and they all looked at it.
“There are some places here I’d rather not revisit if I can avoid it,” she continued. “Makiem is definitely one of them; dealing with an absolute monarchy of giant toads with little love for their own kind, let alone others, is not something I want to do. Parmiter is a whole nation of professional thieves and scoundrels, I’m told. I have a fondness for Awbri, but it’s not much for trade and few ships stop there, and since they’re fliers, there are no roads or even trails to speak of. Agon is the most likely jumping-off spot and about as far as I think I can afford. Trouble is, once we’re ashore, we’re in totally foreign territory for me. I’m much more familiar with the regions north and particularly east of here.”
“Then why not go north through that one, there?” Lori asked her, pointing to Wygon and wishing she could read the scratches that served for writing on Mavra’s map. “Or even hop a ship east? There are lots of those.”