The others slowly raised their own and chanted, “And to you, most revered and holy leader.”
The one who was so obviously in charge now underwent a slight change. The ghostly head moved slowly back, the “eyes” moving with it, revealing a head and a face, a vicious, ugly face, with bright multifaceted eyes that seemed to generate their own light, flanked by a sharp proboscis under which extended menacing mandibles.
“You all have been briefed on the situation?” It wasn’t really a question. Anyone who hadn’t would have to execute the staff that should have kept the leader informed.
“As you are aware, then, I instructed us to vote with the majority,” the leader continued. “Our somewhat unique abilities should make us invaluable in a fight. And yet I am unhappy, for I do not like things left to the fates. Our ancestors would demand more of us.”
They didn’t comment, keeping their heads tucked in reverently. It was partly reverence, partly respect— and partly that even they, the twelve who ruled their land as an absolute theocracy, were terrified of Gunit Sangh.
Anyone in Dahbi could enter the priesthood; those with a lot of brains and guts could rise far inside the hierarchy, too. But to reach the top, the pinnacle, you had to have more. In a land ruled by ancestor worship, old age commanded the greatest respect. And in a land where only the smartest, the most ruthless, the most totally amoral could reach the top of the order, the oldest of that hierarchy was not only the leader, but also the nastiest bastard the race had yet produced.
“Hear my commands,” intoned Gunit Sangh. “First, we shall prepare a force under the overall Zone council command. We will contribute whatever is asked, in equal measure, from each prefecture. Choose your people well. I want the most expendable, to be sure, but also I want people who can take orders, who can fight—and kill.”
The twelve gave a silent nod in unison. “However, this is not sufficient,” Sangh continued. “Suppose the battle occurs far from Dahbi? This would leave us as helpless pawns, known to be fighting this Brazil creature yet unable to do anything to influence the outcome. That is intolerable. Zilchet, you have a report on the Entries in our land?”
One of the twelve stirred, and the vicious insectlike head rose. “I have, Your Holiness. We have received approximately three hundred so far. I say “approximately” only because one seems to pop up almost every hour.”
“And you have interrogated the newcomers?”
“I have, Your Holiness. Our psychologists find them a truly alien mentality—which is to be expected, of course, but not quite to this extent. They seem to have all been females of the Type 41 category—the same as Brazil. They are part of a religious cult of some kind that believes Brazil to be God—not a god but the God—and will do whatever he wills. In other words, fanatics on a holy mission.”
“They wish to proceed away from Dahbi?” A slight nod. “They do, Your Holiness. They are quickly learning their new bodies and adjusting with astonishing rapidity to new forms and abilities.”
“It is to be expected,” Gunit Sangh noted. “Whoever planned this operation knew the Well World before they ever got here. They have been thoroughly briefed. They knew they were going to become different forms with different abilities and were told to explore their new forms and adjust quickly. They are not here as ignorant children to live a new life; they are here as preprepared soldiers. You see what I mean, my brothers. We could lose this thing.”
They seemed to shimmer a bit at this idea. It was disturbing to them, as it was to Gunit Sangh. “You have them under restraint?”
Zilchet sounded slightly miffed at the question. “Of course, Your Holiness. Any who appear are brought as quickly as possible to a central receiving facility, where they are carefully interrogated and then restrained, awaiting Your Holiness’s decision.”
“My decision is to let them go,” the leader told them.
This astonished them, and there was much agitated rippling of their ghostly white forms.
“Tell me, are they of the same race? The same world?”
Zilchet had barely recovered from his shock. “Yes, Your Holiness. The same. Remarkable uniformity, in fact, if I do say so myself.”
“Do they appear to know each other personally— as from before?”
“No, it is not evident. At least I have seen no indication of such. Not that it might not happen, but if you are talking about a population of a billion or more, as we surmise, it would be pure chance.”
Gunit Sangh seemed pleased at this. “And is your understanding complete enough to allow, say, three hundred Entries to go where they will—and four hundred Entries to arrive there? In close company all the while?”
“Four—” Zilchet seemed confused, slightly hesitant. Then, all at once, he got the idea. “Oh, I see.” He considered it. “Superficially, at any rate. I would prefer not to have them travel as a group. A chance encounter, yes, but not moment-to-moment. No. There are too many tiny details. You could slip so very easily and never know. But we could send three hundred, then another hundred a day or so behind them, following. Conditioning so many would be out of the question, too, but we could condition a few, say six or seven real Entries. They would lead the group and would see nothing awry in our own party. That we could easily manage, and it should work.”
“Then we do it that way,” the leader ordered. “We need some of our own people on their side. We won’t be the only ones, either, of course. The biggest weakness his side has is that it can’t possibly know the true nature of everyone in its armies, nor their loyalties. They must know this. But most will be there as spies, nothing more. Ours will have a different task.”
“And what is this?” Zilchet was so involved he forgot he wasn’t supposed to prompt the leader.
Gunit Sangh gave him an icy stare as a reminder, but otherwise let it go. This was far too important to execute the wretch now. But he would remember the lapse. . . .
“Of all the different Entries, only a few are not of this soldier type. These are his commanders, of course. A number of them. Information from the central command Ortega is establishing tells me, though, that at least one of these has more than utilitarian meaning to Brazil. This is the woman Mavra Chang, now a Dillian. He regards her as something of a sibling with that curious bond lesser races have for such. I want our people there to behave just like good soldiers, to fight in Brazil’s forces, take orders, do all that they would be expected to do. But if it looks as if Brazil will attain his goal, if it looks like his side will win, I have a special task for them.”
“Holiness?”
“No one can control Brazil directly once he is inside to the Well. But if we hold this Mavra Chang, secretly, outside the Well, while I or one of us enters with him, that is just as good.”
“But what if, once inside, he merely wills himself to find her and free her?” Zilchet asked dubiously.
“I seriously doubt whether any mind, even a Markovian, could pick out an individual on the Well World without knowing her location, captors, or status. I think Brazil could easily create a race, but not change a mind unless he knew all the particulars. At any rate, the odds favor our taking this action. We really have nothing to lose.”
Zilchet was still worried, and his rippling showed it. Gunit Sangh glared at him. “Well? What is it?”
“I was just wondering how many other races have exactly the same idea,” the other responded.
“Probably several,” the leader admitted. “She will be a major target, have no doubt—and, because of that, most assuredly well protected. We must see that we are the ones who get her—if the military action fails, of course. If not, it is an academic exercise. But we will not fail. Our ancestors have shown us the true course, and they will not let us fail.”
They bowed again in prayer, and, although they wouldn’t have realized it, they sounded more than a little like religious fanatics themselves.
Gedemondas
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 he 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 Morguhn 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 semi-tech, 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 kinda 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 Morgnunne 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 Cziil, 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 Morguhn. 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 reach-big 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 skull-cracking, 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.