Ghost of the Well of Souls

Alkazar

She was barely settled into the Pyron consulate in Kolznar when she was awakened. It was the middle of the night, and she felt some alarm at the sight of the snakelike creature. Worse, they all looked alike to her, making it impossible for her to tell the friendly consul from the suspicious security chief. She hoped they were all on the same side, otherwise she’d never figure out who was who.

“I beg your pardon for waking you,” the creature said to her, “but I am afraid you must leave now and move toward Quislon with as much speed as possible.”

She yawned and tried to shake the lead from her brain. “Now? Why? I know I wasn’t to stay here long, but—”

“There has been an, um, unforeseen development. I am afraid that if you remain here you will either be arrested when you leave the consulate or you will wind up imprisoned here for an indefinite future. We must move quickly! Gather up whatever is yours and come with me. I shall explain the situation on the way.”

She managed, with the help of some cold water from the basin, to get her small kit strapped on and follow him, but she felt miserable, and everything looked like it was being viewed through a curtain of fog and blurry reflections.

The consul was below. She knew it was him because of his manner and his warmer-than-normal—for a Pyron, anyway— empathic signature. “What is going on?” she asked him.

“They were going through cleaning and maintenance on the ship you came in on and they discovered a body,” the consul told her. “Murdered, in a most brutal and ugly fashion, and apparently after some torture.”

“A body! Whose? Where?” She feared that somebody had done in the stubborn Kehudan she’d left in her cabin, for failing to complete her mission.

“An Ixthansan. One of our people. They’ve been shadowing the ship off and on all along. This one was supposedly bringing you information of some importance. We don’t know if they got it or not, but did you?”

“I—I saw one such, a very pleasant fellow, but that was far back, not long after I boarded.”

“Probably not the same one, but a cousin. It doesn’t matter. You were not approached by an Ixthansan at any point after leaving Suffok?”

“No, not a word. I’d been wondering, considering the first contact, why I hadn’t heard from any others.”

“Apparently the second one was discovered, and since then they’ve been laying for them. There should have been three contacts.” The translator gave the suggestion of a resigned sigh. “All right, then. We must move.”

“Surely they do not think that I had anything to do with this! I cannot kill anyone! It is against the very oath of my office and the core of my being!”

“Well, I’m afraid that folks like the Alkazarians think that everybody else is just like them, and in this port they have jurisdiction. Fortunately, that also means they’re corrupt to the core, but that can only reach so far. We need to get you completely out of the Colony District before somebody we missed comes looking, and I suspect that won’t take long.”

“Surely they would not hold me! I had nothing to do with this!”

“Ah, but you’re the one closely connected. They have at least one witness who claims to have seen you speaking with an Ixthansan on the ship, and it’s a witness that isn’t part of any side in this conflict. That must have been the first one. That’s enough for them. And as to not holding you, well, Ambora doesn’t have much of an army or navy, and that’s all they’re scared of here. The justice system actually harkens back to the days of ancient belief systems, when you could be accused of trafficking with evil demons and they’d torture you. If you died, you were innocent. That’s the thinking in criminal inquisitions here as well.”

“But where will I go? I mean, by sea is certainly out, and it is roughly four hundred kilometers overland to Quislon, all in Alkazar. How can I avoid them?”

“Well, some bribes help,” the consul admitted, “but there is also the point that somebody out of their local district jurisdiction is somebody they don’t have to deal with, explain, account for, etcetera. You see what I mean? If we can get you out of this city, we’ll probably not have any problems over it.”

“But how?”

“Let me worry about that,” said another Pyron, from the entry parlor to her right. She turned and saw what at first seemed to be another identical snake-man, but his empathic signature was very different, almost as if he were not truly kin to the others here. It was also vaguely familiar.

“I am Genghis O’Leary. We met at the Kalindan embassy in Zone,” he told her.

“Of course! I was trying to figure out how I could have known you!”

“My apologies for this. I’m even more tired than you are. I’ve been here less than forty minutes, and I’ve slept even less. Still, we Pyrons are more nocturnal types and I can manage. This other gentleman is Har Shamish, Security Officer for the consulate here and quite a capable agent. He will accompany us and smooth things through to the border, as well as acting as a bodyguard of sorts until we reach Quislon. After that, you and I are on our own.”

“You make it sound so threatening. Surely it’s not as bad as all that!”

Shamish said, “I’m afraid, madam, that if we spend any more time here, it will be even worse. There is no way I could fight my way out of this city, and with all those cameras, we certainly can’t sneak out. Let’s go.”

She thanked the consul and bid him farewell, and walked out with the two Pyrons.

The sight on the night vision cameras of the striking winged Amboran flanked by two blocky, sinister, cobralike Pyrons would have startled the most jaded watcher.

She was surprised to find that the odors in the air, the sounds of the great city, all the lights and action, seemed just as vibrant and active at night as in the daytime.

“Big cities never sleep,” O’Leary noted. “They just have different routines for different times.”

“I do not see as well at night as in the day, normally, but I can make do through here,” she told them.

“It’s the lighting. The walkway and building and commercial lighting is so concentrated that it lights up the air over us,” Shamish explained. “It won’t be the same once we get out of the urban area. On the other hand, if your vision is best in daylight, ours is best in darkness, and it takes very little light for us to see perfectly well. We should be a good team.”

Jaysu could barely see the great mountains beyond the city, but she knew they were there by the lack of any sense of life along them save some sleeping birds. As they rode on the moving walkways, she noted that they were paralleling the rock wall rather than heading toward it, and in fact they seemed to be moving slowly back toward the sea, although well away from the harbor where the big ships came in.

“Where are we going?” she asked them.

“First we take a boat,” Shamish told her. “That takes us out of Alkazar and their jurisdiction, not to mention some of their prying eyes. Once we’re aboard, I’ll explain the rest. You never know what’s monitored here.”

They eventually reached a low-lying, small boat basin. Most of the boats were fishing craft of various designs, none longer than twenty meters or so, but there were some private craft among them in a small marina. Now it was time to walk. “That’s the boat there,” O’Leary told her, although she could see little except bobbing shapes in the darkness. She followed closely, one of the Pyrons in front, one behind her, relieved that the Pyrons took slow, deliberate steps on their fragile looking legs, which allowed her to keep up even though her feet were killing her after so many days of hard floors, hard woods, and plastic.

As they got closer, she could make out shapes on one of the larger private boats. It was a sleek, streamlined, dark blue and gray yacht, an elaborate sailing vessel, and didn’t have smokestacks at all.

“We use a different power in high-tech waters,” Shamish told her. “In all other cases, we use sail, although there’s a way to stoke a small boiler for emergencies if we must. Just go aboard and find a spot out of the way.”

The Pyron on the boat seemed tense; she could sense them, coiled like springs, ready to strike at any enemy, but when they saw the Pyrons with her, they relaxed and got ready to cast off.

They used no sails for this, letting go fore and aft. Then, before she was even at an out-of-the-way point on the stern, there was a high-pitched whine of engines below. The running lights came on and they eased out of the slip, turned, and headed for the breakwater.

“As soon as we pass that flashing beacon there, we will be safely out of the district and, in fact, Alkazar,” Shamish said, using a thin tentacle emerging from under his hood to point.

“Where are we going, then?” she asked.

“Tonight we’ll head west along the coast, then go ’round the point and down just a few kilometers under sail. That’ll put us in nontech territory for a short while, but it will allow us to turn in and reenter Alkazar via the Corbino River. It parallels the range—the Solarios Mountains, as they’re called through there—and will get us upriver to the limits of navigation at Zadar Station, which is a good 140 kilometers up and in a tropical rainforest. Not too many Alkazarians there, which is excellent, and less snooping, although they still monitor the place with other gadgets and gizmos. We should get a local guide there who’ll take us as far as the point where it will be impossible to avoid the Solarios. Then it’s up and over. At each point we’ll be under intense scrutiny. We will have to be on our best behavior, and also have to depend on corrupt people staying corrupt. If so, we should be to the border and you should be done with this bloody hex in just a couple of days. Now, I suggest you leave the sailing to us and try and get some sleep. We’ll let you know if there’s any trouble.”

That was easier said than done, now that she’d been so rudely roused and marched down here, only to be told that the dangerous adventure was only beginning. Still, she found the sea motion almost welcome now, and while the accommodations below were basic and not designed for anything with wings or anyone who slept standing up, she could manage. With the familiar rolling motions of a gentle sea, but absent any of the noise and vibration she’d become accustomed to, she fell asleep without even realizing it.

She awoke quite late, or so it proved to be once she’d splashed cold water all over herself and made her way up to the deck.

She had thought that she’d slept hardly at all; she ached and creaked as if she hadn’t had a good sleep in days. But when she got topside, she saw that they had not only reached the nontech hex area but had gone through it and were on a river. The sun, too, was not just up, it was almost overhead, signifying that it was close to midday.

She found O’Leary on the afterdeck, unnervingly lying, serpentlike, looking out at the shore. The great head, which was integrated into the body, turned, and those huge orange and black eyes with narrow pupils stared at her.

“Hello,” she called. “Goodness! How long did I sleep?”

“Eleven hours,” O’Leary answered. “You must have been as tired as I was.”

“You slept almost as long?”

“No, I slept for about five, I just need ten or eleven. That’s all right. I’m partly shut down here, and the sun helps recharge me.”

“Where are we, exactly? This is quite unusual to look at.”

“We’re almost ninety percent there,” he told her. “If they hadn’t had to stop a few times for authorization checks, we’d actually be ready to disembark now. Damned officious little teddy bears!”

“What bears?”

“Teddy bears. That’s what they look like. Back where I came from, they used to give children toy stuffed bears that looked a lot like these critters, and they were called teddy bears for some reason. Don’t know why—they just always were. Some things are like that. Anyway, that’s the way I think of ’em. Teddy bears gone bad.”

She looked out at the riverbank. Although they’d said it was a huge river, it looked relatively narrow by Amboran standards, at least at this point. Perhaps it had been much wider downstream.

The banks on both sides were covered with jungle, and so thick that only more jungle was visible in between. The river itself was about sixty meters across at this point, substantial but not impressive. The heat and humidity, too, were very high, but not worse than much of Ambora.

“Have you been through here before?” she asked him.

“No. I’m going by briefings, maps, and whatnot. Shamish was here once before, so he tells me, but never has been inland Up the Wall, as even the locals call it.”

“The Wall?”

“The big mountains. They always strike everybody, even the natives, like some kind of massive stone wall. Don’t they seem like that to you?”

She looked off in the distance. The range was never far away anywhere in Alkazar, it seemed, and right now it seemed not much farther, jungle or not, than it had back in the city.

She sensed a tremendous life force all around them, though, and it puzzled her, since all she saw were insects, most of which seemed uninterested in them. They smelled wrong, probably.

All along one bank were thick groves of trees, not planted but still well-spaced, as if in a garden. The limbs were filled with dark shapes that looked like huge melons, but she got the impression that they were not a vegetable.

“What are those things growing from the trees?” she asked him.

His head went up and he saw what she was referring to.

“Oh, they’re not growing on the trees, they’re sound asleep,” he responded.

“They?”

“Some sort of fruit bat. Big flying mammals, nasty sharp teeth, but they sleep all day and only come out to feed at night. Don’t worry about them, though. They’re mostly nuisances, not threats, although they can get irritated and dive-bomb somebody they think is a threat. I’ve seen them or their relatives several places on this world. You don’t have bats in Ambora?”

“I do not remember any.”

“Well, these are fruit eaters. They eat a lot of fruit, true, but mostly stuff that the locals don’t like and which won’t keep to ship to anybody who might anyway. Vegetarians with an attitude. Hopefully we won’t make them mad, and this will be the only time we’ll know they’re here.”

“The more I see of the outside world, the more I am wedded to Ambora,” Jaysu said with a sigh. “It seems that everywhere else there is only strangeness with an undercurrent of ugliness.”

O’Leary gave a humorous snort. “Well, yeah, maybe, but I tend to think that other folks from other areas would find something to react the same way to in your own home. It’s simply what you’re used to and what you’re comfortable with. Me, I don’t want a life that’s cloistered, never did. My mother always had hopes I’d become a priest. Instead I became an interstellar cop. Same business—seeking out evil where it lies and exposing it—only I didn’t have the limitations of a priest in dealing with it once I found it. It just seemed more satisfying when you could shoot back.”

She didn’t see it that way. “I believe that those who serve the gods do so in their own way, it is true, but I disagree that we are in the same business. My job is saving souls. Yours, from its sound, is avenging them.”

“Well, I don’t see much wrong with that, since if they need avenging, they are past caring about your part,” O’Leary argued. “Still, I’ve always found it fascinating that most people, even those faced with the most horrible of things, don’t really believe in evil. They believe in God, and sometimes in punishment and in redemption, too, but they don’t believe in Hell. Even you. You rent space in Heaven. A cop, now, he lives in Hell, and he knows better. There is evil in the world, priestess. It’s real. There is evil, pure and absolute, and there are those who serve it. I’ve seen far more of it than of Heaven and sainthood. You are going to see some of it, I think, before this is over. I hope you’re ready for it.”

“I’ve already seen some very bad people,” she reminded him.

“No, you’ve seen evil’s shadows. You haven’t really seen it yet.” He paused. “Breakfast? We’ll be there in another hour, so it might be best to get something inside you now.”

She was startled by his casual turn of conversation. “Yes, I would like that.”

She had barely consumed some melon, cereal, and juice when there was a cry from the wheelhouse and they slowed to approach a dock on the side of the river closest to the mountain wall.

She was surprised to see not a plantation or primitive village, but a small city here, complete with powered vehicles, modern buildings, some cranes on a modern dock, and the ubiquitous black patrol boats of the Alkazarian police.

“Why do they need to be all the way up here?” she asked, wondering aloud.

“They’re everywhere here, in those boats, in cars, in helicopters,” Har Shamish replied. “These little creatures don’t even trust each other. There’s a whole department whose job it is to spy on the police. And doubtless another department that spies on that department. My advice to you is to keep as quiet as possible and answer only what they ask, if and when they ask anything. Assume that anything you say is being monitored and recorded. Fortunately, you should only have to endure this for another day and a half. They are generally efficient in day-to-day operations.”

The buildings were not as tall as the ones back in Kolznar; most were no more than four or five stories, some smaller. The city, also much smaller, was more like those on Ambora, with five to seven thousand people living and working there. But because these were Alkazarians, Jaysu and the Pyron who accompanied her had to cope with things built on a much smaller scale. Roofs, even thatched types over poles or stakes, tended to be on the order of two to two and a half meters high, which was acceptable, but the doors were often too low, forcing them all to dip or duck, and many were too narrow for someone who had such large wings, folded or not.

They had to run the usual gauntlet of black-uniformed officials, but Har Shamish took the lead and eased things through. Jaysu suspected he had passed small gems as bribes; she’d seen the small bag of the stones, but never actually saw them pass between him and any Alkazarian.

Still, the official greeting was more mock formal than real.

“Nationality?”

“Amboran.”

“Name?”

“Jaysu.”

“Family name?”

“I have no family. I am an orphan. That is my only name.”

“I see. Occupation?”

“High Priestess of the Clan of the Grand Falcon.”

That stopped him, but only for a moment, as he cleared his throat and then wrote down something on his little electronic pad.

“Purpose?”

Before she could get that one wrong or muck something up, Shamish turned and said, “Transit to Quislon, direct, no stops desired on our end,” he told them.

“You have travel documents?”

Shamish produced them for everyone from some compartment deep within the hood. The official looked them over. “You will not be staying in Zadar, then?”

“If our guide is here, then the answer is no,” Shamish assured him. “We are in something of a hurry.”

There were all sorts of stamps and little meaningless slips of paper and such, and even one that had each of their pictures on it, for all the good it would do them in trying to figure out which Pyron was which. She got the idea that these little creatures didn’t really care who they were or what they wanted to do or anything else, or even about what they themselves were doing. It was just what they did.

Finally handed a messy stapled book of paper forms, and told to never let them out of her sight and to instantly produce them on the demand of any Alkazarian, she and the others were waved through.

Waiting just on the other side of the official station was an Alkazarian wearing a hard, round hat and mud-colored clothing. He was large for an Alkazarian; not so much taller as wider, although he was by no means fat. She wondered if he actually did look distinctive or if she was starting to tell subtle differences between the Alkazarians.

“Welcome! Welcome, my friends!” he boomed, although he had the same squeaky voice the others did, and it made their natural bombastic tendencies seem comical. “I am Vorkuld, and I am to be your guide up to the Wall. May I see all your papers, please?”

Having just gone through the line and received them within sight of Vorkuld, this was one of the most ridiculous requests she could think of, but she looked into Shamish’s eyes, understood the caution she saw there, and handed everything over.

Vorkuld made a show of looking through them, but he clearly wasn’t reading anything. It wasn’t like there were many other giant snake-men or winged bird-women in the neighborhood.

She realized, then, that he wasn’t enthusiastic about it himself, but was doing it so he could be seen to be doing it. It must be awful living in a place where you had to assume that your every action or comment would be graded pass or fail, she thought, and she had that flash of the terrible hunting dream in her mind to suggest what might happen if you did fail too often.

He handed back the papers and was just going to say something when Har Shamish said to him, “And, of course, now you will show me your papers.”

The Alkazarian was startled by this, but reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a flat billfold and handed it over. It had a form inside with all sorts of official stuff on it, as well as his photo in a realistic three dimensions. Shamish seemed to study it, and then, as the little guide was getting nervous and impatient, handed it back.

Jaysu’s opinion of the security man went up several notches with this. It was nice to put them on the defensive once in a while. She would never have thought of it.

“Follow me, citizens,” the Alkazarian instructed, and they walked over to an odd-looking vehicle that seemed a cross between an army tank and a truck. It had treads on both sides like a tank, and was painted with a tan, olive, and white camouflage design, but one side was down, forming a ramp, albeit a very steep one, revealing a trucklike interior. The thing had seen a lot of action; it was dinged up badly, some of the paint knocked right off so that there were numerous rust spots, and while it had been hosed down, it smelled of muck and filth.

Vorkuld looked at them. “Well, you two gents—pardon, you are both gents, I take it?—can manage, I think, but you, my dear, don’t look suited for that sort of angle. Can you really fly with them things?”

She nodded. “Yes, I can.”

“Think you can get up enough to get into the back there? That may be the best solution.”

She could and she did, the wind from the wings almost knocking the little guide over. It felt so good, even that little tiny hop, far better than the stretching that was all she’d managed aboard ship. She began to worry that she was so out of practice she’d not be able to get off the ground, but then reminded herself that for many months she could not fly at all and it had made no difference when she’d been given back the gift.

Jaysu was surprised to find that there was not only room for them inside the truck, but also for a large amount of equipment and two other Alkazarians dressed similarly to Vorkuld. The two were smaller than the guide, and seemed to have broader hips in relation to their chests and heads. She realized, then, that she was looking at two Alkazarian females.

“I am Zema, and this is Kem,” said one of them in a voice that seemed impossibly squeaky and high-pitched. “We will be at your service and maintaining the camp tonight. If you need anything, please just order it from either of us.”

In a country where the males were only a meter high, the sight and sound of others who were not only a head shorter but proportionately smaller all around, offering to get you what you needed, was startling. It was even more startling when the two started picking up heavy-looking equipment and restacking it so they would all be more comfortable for a long ride. Unless it was some kind of compensation for being so tiny, the lesson and demonstration were clear: if these little women could lift that kind of weight easily, imagine what Vorkuld could do.

Using a motorized chain drive, Zema closed the side of the vehicle and, after it clanked into place, checked to ensure that it was secure and locked down. Vorkuld then climbed up a ladder on the side, tumbled expertly over into the bed, and, after looking around to see that all were reasonably settled and the gear secured, went forward and settled into a small semicircular compartment at the front of the vehicle. There was a shudder, a whine, and then, slowly, the thing began to move.

It had all happened so fast, from waking up to this, that Jaysu could hardly catch her breath, but she realized that much of this was Shamish’s doing. He wanted this over fast, and he wanted them out of civilization as quickly as possible, too.

The tracked vehicle didn’t go all that fast, and it was an exceptionally bumpy ride, but it was easy enough to get used to its gyrations and sounds. Jaysu did have some problems when the driver cornered; the resulting jerking around in the back meant she had to hold onto something firmly or else tumble.

They saw little of the town, keeping mostly to roads near or along the river. There was a checkpoint at the edge of the place, and, sure enough, they had to stop, present papers, do all that silly stuff again, but it was as pro forma as at the docks.

Once away from town, the foliage came right up to the truck. The road was now hard-packed dirt, but well-maintained, although barely wide enough for just them, and certainly not wide enough to allow for two-way traffic. There were turnouts cut from the jungle brush every few hundred meters to allow things to pass, but clearly, if this road had a lot of traffic on it, they all knew it would be sheer luck backing into one of those.

They did come face-to-face with oncoming traffic, twice. In both cases it was they who yielded, and without protest, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The opposition were enormous carriers, one two city blocks long and articulated in the middle for turns, carrying who knew what from the jungles to the town and probably the port, where barges would await on the commercial side.

Just what they carried remained a mystery, and one she wasn’t sure she wanted to solve. Once or twice they’d pass within sight of huge complexes deep in the jungle, but they looked less like luxurious plantations or commercial farms than like prison camps, complete with ominous towers and dull gray featureless buildings. Once, they passed a group of sad-looking Alkazarians dressed in bright red uniforms, working with machines to keep the jungle trimmed back off the road and to keep the road in good condition and hard-packed. There didn’t seem to be any guards or guns, but she got the impression that these people would not have been there if they didn’t have to be.

The two Pyrons continued to doze as they went along; there really wasn’t much else to do. She, however, was created for days, and had just completed a long and hard sleep, and all this was new to her.

Even so, she felt disappointed by the trip, at least so far. When they’d said that it would be travel through a dense jungle, she’d pictured walking down dark trails with natives chopping their way through the dense underbrush. She wasn’t sure where that idea came from, but it seemed romantic. This was just a teeth-jarring ride into a world of total green.

Har Shamish stirred and put his head close to O’Leary’s. “What were you staring at?” he asked, having noted that his companion was fixated on the two Alkazarian females.

“I was just wondering which one of them did it with him and which one of them watched,” the cop whispered back. “And, more to the point, who filled out the paperwork afterward.”

The diplomat gave a low chuckle. “I wish my own position permitted me to wonder things like that aloud.”

At nightfall they came upon a roadblock: a gated house like a toll booth that controlled access to the road. Vorkuld climbed halfway down the truck and talked to the officials within. Finally, one of the black uniforms came up and into the truck and made his way uncomfortably back to them.

“You’d think if they were this paranoid, they’d at least pave the damned road,” O’Leary grumbled.

“Oh, they don’t pave it because it’s harder to maintain paved, not because they couldn’t,” his companion replied. “Potholes, erosion—the bed’s trouble enough keeping up now.”

It was papers time again, and the same old questions, but as usual, the deputy consul managed to be first and to strike some sort of bargain with the official. Like the others, he still went through the motions, but it was clear that he was doing just that and no more.

“After you set up camp, have your guide get your validations from the Warden’s Office,” the official warned them. “Sometimes they forget. No use getting to the Wall and they won’t let you on and up, eh?”

“Thank you, sir, very much,” Shamish responded. “I shall remember you in the future as well for your efficiency and courtesy.”

Jaysu had the weird impression, because they had both raised their voices unnaturally loud, that this was a performance. Vorkuld was soon climbing back up and into the driver’s seat, and as soon as the official got down and the gate went up, he was off.

The “camp” seemed to be some kind of commercial operation, although they all had the impression that the government ran most things. There were permanent buildings, a large modern latrine that would not be suitable for any of the alien visitors, lights and such from electric generators, and some elaborate sites. Several tracked vehicles similar to theirs were parked there, and there were a number of large and elaborate tents erected. There was also a staff that seemed on constant patrol, doing everything from picking up trash to checking out the registrations of everybody they met. These Alkazarians all wore green uniforms.

The two females went into action as soon as they parked, offloading and setting up two large tents, connecting them into some sort of control boxes buried in the ground, then setting up what proved to be an ingeniously designed portable kitchen including refrigerated and frozen foods, cold drinks, and everything else they needed. It was clear from the way the two tiny women handled things that their strength was not an illusion; Jaysu tried to move the portable kitchen unit just a fraction and found that it might as well have been lead.

There was quite a difference in what they ate and what she consumed, though, and she found that she had to excuse herself and eat alone, out of sight not only of the Alkazarians, but of the two Pyron as well.

Since reaching the consulate, she’d not seen any of the Pyrons eat or drink, but she saw what they ate this night, how they did it, and it was not something she was comfortable watching. Her food and drink, however, were fine; apparently, the consulate had made contact ahead using what magic these high-tech hexes could manage, and made sure that she was well provided for.

They’d done it for themselves as well, and she’d seen the two Pyrons eat one large furry animal each. They ate them whole, and, worst of all, they ate them alive. The Alkazarians ate meat, and cooked rarely, but it was properly butchered and prepared meat, such as she’d seen others eat on the ship and at Zone. But the Pyrons—the idea of eating something alive, screaming in terror, was…

O’Leary managed to figure out the problem and sought her out after they’d finished. “Sorry. I forget myself sometimes,” he told her sincerely. “Even before I came here, I was someone who lived among different races as well as my own, and I’m just used to things being different. I should have realized.”

“No, no, it is all right,” she assured him, by which she meant it was all right because she understood that this was the way they did it, that it was normal, and that the problem wasn’t really with them but with her. But it wasn’t all right in her gut.

“Before we come across any other things that might be a problem for you, I’ll try and warn you,” he promised. “I’ve got to kick my brain back in gear and think like an alien visitor again. It was careless. At least you will only have to be near us when we eat one more time, probably at the border.”

“Huh? What?” She was wondering if it was still somehow alive, trapped, wriggling inside him, unable to get out. It was silly; she’d feel it if it were. Still, she couldn’t get that absolute terror out of her mind and soul.

“We don’t eat or drink very often, which is why we eat like we do,” he explained. “We will be able to go long and far on just this. And, I promise, you won’t have to see it again.”

“It—It wasn’t seeing it that was the problem,” she told him. “It was being almost overwhelmed by the fear exuded by its soul.”

“By its—pardon?”

“Everything has a soul. Everything alive, that is. I can see those souls, feel them. I can not shut it out. It is not my purpose to shut it out.”

He realized the situation. “You’re an empath! Well, I’ll be… Well, remind me not to lie to you, I guess. But remember our talk today about good and evil?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to shield you from too much, not now, not later on. I want you to feel that fear and see those disgusting sights. That is because we are potentially facing evil so strong that you will need to prepare for it. But I will try and warn you. You should not be unprepared. Think you can sleep?”

She sighed. “Yes, I guess so.”

“Well, perhaps you should do so. We’re going to pack up and leave not long after dawn, and we’ve got some rougher riding ahead, or so I’m told. I confess I’m kind of curious, too. We’re the only non-Alkazarians here. The way they stare at us, we may be the only ones they’ve seen for a long time. I wonder how many alien types have ever seen firsthand what’s on top of those mountains and beyond?”

“A hundred more credential checks,” she answered, trying to break the mood. There was not any way around it. He was right. She should get to sleep and try not to dream about it.

She needed to dream of Ambora, and flying above it effortlessly, darting through the clouds…

The next morning, bright and early, they were as good as their word, waking everyone at dawn and then fixing a breakfast for Jaysu and the three guides, or whatever they were. Although most bears were omnivores, even on the Well World, the Alkazarians seemed to be strictly carnivorous, although they did enjoy a lot of thick almost black ale and some sort of candied sweets. Breakfast for them was sausages of some sort and very large eggs, which they ate in a variety of ways, including raw.

Others, going in both directions and perhaps to places they didn’t know about, were there as well, but they seemed to be transporting natives wearing different colored uniforms, not paying customers. It appeared that, outside the cosmopolitan cities, everybody wore a uniform that instantly told everyone else their general occupation, and with that, their social and economic class as well. Since leaving Zadar Station, they’d seen no exceptions to this rule.

They packed up and, after the obligatory check of all papers and the quizzing of all members of the group—natives and non-natives alike—were off once more.

The jungle was so thick now that even the sun hardly got through. It was impossible to see almost anything, even the mountains they knew were in the distance.

For a brief period rains came, heavy and relentless. The two females quickly punched up an awning, and the storm hit the jungle canopy and created a lot of sound and fury, and much high-level fog and mist. The torrent, broken by the thick growth, gushed down the trunks of trees and through channels in the branches. A lot of water struck the ground, but it was localized, and for that the truck awning served quite well.

They were no longer in heavily inhabited territory, and had to yield for no traffic. In fact, after a couple of hours they had not seen another living soul, nor did Jaysu feel any sense of a population out there. There were some individuals here and there, perhaps in twos and threes, but they seemed to flee at the sound of the truck. She wondered if they were fugitives from the system, hiding out and eking out a meager subsistence living in this dense jungle rather than facing some sort of punishment, or perhaps to avoid living in that society. Unless the fugitives, or whatever they were, began attacking travelers, it wouldn’t be worth the time and money to track them down out here.

Just before midday they broke from the jungle onto a broad grassland, and were startled to see how close that mountain wall now was. It lay just ahead, stretching out as far as the eye could see on both sides, shrouded in fog and mist at the top. She had no idea how they were supposed to get up there and over it without flying.

The answer was clearer when they pulled up to a large complex set into the rock of the mountain itself. At first Jaysu thought it was a religious shrine or great temple; it had that look about it, right up to the gigantic colonnades and ornate carved figures of Alkazarians in various classic poses. There was also a busy parking lot, complete with uniformed traffic cops, and a great many of the crawlers—as the passenger trucks were called—all around, some with mud-colored uniformed crews looking fresh and waiting, others spattered with mud or reddish clay dust, looking like they’d come through rough terrain.

All roads on this side, it appeared, led here.

“Why are we here?” she asked the others. “If these people do not like others anywhere else but in towns, then why would they bring us to one of their holy places?”

For the first time Vorkuld laughed, and the two females tittered along with him. “Well, ma’am, it is a hole, all right, but it is not holy, at least not in the sense I take you mean it,” he explained. “This is the Great Western Lift. It was quite an accomplishment to build many years ago, and is also a nightmare to maintain, but it’s saved a great deal of time and effort. Before it was built, contact with the lowland coast was difficult to impossible except by airplane or glider, both of which cost a lot to run and have limited capacities. With the lifts, this one and the newer Eastern Lift in Qualt Province, we are united again. There will be, of course, more formalities, but this is our destination.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about, but the added formalities were easy to imagine.

But this turned out to be worse than the others, even the entrance ones. There seemed to be so many agencies, so many different official uniforms, so many redundant question and answer tables, that it seemed every Alkazarian was involved in bureaucracy and paper pushing. They wondered who actually did the work, or how much those who did could really accomplish in the few minutes a day they weren’t being questioned, their papers examined, and their motives impugned.

It was understandable that they be given more scrutiny than the usual worker going back and forth here, though, as the officials were fond of telling them, few foreigners were ever allowed to get this far. Even fewer were not expected to immediately return, having had a demonstration of the great ingenuity and skills of the Alkazarians.

“Don’t know what’s going on, don’t want to know,” said one of the last, a silver-and-black-uniformed officer with a nasty looking sidearm, who checked their papers at the entrance to the Great Western Lift. “Been here years without even seeing a foreigner, then two bunches of you creatures show up within hours.”

“Two bunches?” O’Leary repeated. “We are not the first aliens you have seen today?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the official muttered, trying to find an empty spot on some paper to imprint his own stamp. “Didn’t hear or see a thing.”

“Was one a giant greenish spider?” Jaysu asked him.

“Don’t answer questions, get paid to ask ’em. Don’t like spiders anyway. Okay, you’re done. All three of you proceed down the walk. Stay on the walk and proceed until stopped. If you deviate, you’ll be sorry. Turn back, you’ll be held here, and we got no supplies for aliens. And, above all, don’t ask questions.”

They decided not to press anything further, and entered the great cavern through its carved, ornate entranceway.

The cavern appeared to be an enlargement of some natural one, because it instantly became cooler and a breeze blew steadily against them as they descended. Workmen had done the walls and ceiling, though, so it appeared to be a long artificial construct with marble friezes and ceiling frescoes all along, forming a story or legend. If they were concerned with the sensibilities of the young, it didn’t show, since just within a short walk the marbles left no doubt as to how the Alkazari-ans copulated, among other things. There were also somewhat gruesome hunt carvings, and a panoply of little bear gods and demons, among them a progression from regal types to idealized Alkazarians, larger than the others, who were depicted in various extremely ornate uniforms.

The path was entirely artificial, set in a more natural bed dug into the rock. There were in fact two paths, one for going in on the left and one for exiting on the right. Both were about three meters wide and quite smooth, almost shiny, made out of some reddish substance that gave off a subtle glow so you knew exactly where it was. It was also recessed about fifteen centimeters from the more natural rock base, with regular grooves along the sides and small single rails along the top. It explained some of the crawlers and containers they’d seen just outside. Not only people, but cargo, was moved along these.

Finally they came to an elaborate security station that had but one officer, wearing the same silver and black as the one at the entrance. This station, though, was more automated. As they stepped up and passed through a portal one at a time, a three-dimensional representation of each of them appeared on a plate at a console. It then went through a series of gyrations from skeletal and nervous systems, even checking the contents of the stomach and whatever was inside any bag or article of clothing, few as those were with this trio.

Jaysu found the one of herself fascinating; she preferred not to look at the insides of either of the Pyrons.

They then had to place a hand in a recess under the officer’s watchful eye. She was surprised to feel her palm scraped, and a slight pinprick. When she withdrew the hand, it had a tiny bubble of blood at the prick, although when she sucked it, there was no apparent wound and it didn’t bleed anymore. Each of the snake-men had to surrender a tendril for the same purposes.

“You may pass. Wait in the left waiting area for the lift,” the security officer instructed them.

They went forward, and Jaysu was surprised. “No papers to check?”

“They don’t need to here,” Har Shamish told her. “They now have everything up to and including our genetic codes. From this point on I expect more of those than paper. We’re in their master computers now.”

They walked down to one of two very large doors built into the cave. Unlike the rest, the doors had only some kind of official crest on them, one she’d seen on flags and uniforms, and nothing more. There was no sign of machinery, but they could feel the whole chamber vibrating, and there was a humming noise along with the sound of rushing wind, which was hard to place.

The doors themselves were about four-by-four meters square. There was no indication as to what was behind them, although there was a pillbox enclosure to one side that seemed to have a lot of electronics in it and several operators. The pervasive cameras around the chamber told Jaysu that they wanted them to remember that they were being observed.

“Now what?” she asked the two Pyrons.

“Now we wait.” Shamish responded. “Shouldn’t be long, I don’t think. I didn’t see any big rigs out there, so they aren’t moving much cargo today.”

O’Leary used two tendrils to give a sort of shrug. In this matter, she knew as much as he did.

There was a distant added noise now, a roaring sound, and it seemed to be getting louder, until it virtually shook the whole chamber. Then there was a chunk! that shook the floor so hard it almost made them lose their footing, and then hissing, like gas venting from cylinders, although it wasn’t venting their way. They heard a hydraulic sigh, then a Klaxon alarm sounded and the great door in front of them slid to one side, into the rock.

The chamber it revealed was well-lit, and had more of the rails and grooves about its sides. It was also quite deep, going back six or more meters. They could move very large, heavy containers through it, that was clear.

The ceiling bristled with cameras, and when a loudspeaker said, “Passengers, please enter and proceed all the way to the rear of the car,” they obeyed, more curious than nervous.

At the rear, they stepped over a bar that clearly was there to keep containers from coming farther back, and then there were two sets of ladders with handrails up a couple of meters to a platform containing seats, benches, and the like. For the small Alkazarians, it was the kind of area they could move thirty or forty people.

“If you cannot sit or otherwise belt in, then go to the sides and hold tightly to the railings there,” the public address voice told them. “Once under way, you may relax pending our warning, but be prepared to grab the rails again if instructed.”

They did as they were told. Hearing warning beeps from outside, they looked, and saw several short containers being pushed into the front of the car, using the grooves on the side. Yellow-clad workers scrambled to stop them and lock them in place, and then yelled signals to one another. Finally, a half-dozen Alkazarians came back to the passenger platform and, without even looking at them, sat down and buckled themselves in to the chairs.

There was a second Klaxon sound from outside, and some kind of announcement that they could not make out, and then the door closed. When it did, a second door rolled down and closed too, locking with a series of chunks, cutting them off. Finally, there was that hydraulic sound and the sound of rushing air.

“They’re pressurizing this cabin!” O’Leary said wonderingly.

“Maybe we should enjoy it while we can,” Shamish suggested. “If we go up there, the air’s going to be mighty thin.”

There was a sudden eerie silence, and then, incredibly, they felt themselves begin to move upward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.

“It really is a lift!” O’Leary breathed. “I’ve been in ones in some mighty tall buildings before, but never one that went this far up!”

Jaysu wondered just how far up it would be. At least she was made to fly with the clouds. And in this case, what would be at the other end?