Midnight at the Well of Souls

THE BEACH AT IVROM—MORNING

“Looks peaceful enough,” Vardia commented as they unloaded the raft onto the beach. “Very pleasant, really.”

“Reminds me of the Dillian valley area, upvalley in particular,” Wuju added, as they strapped the bulky saddlebags around her.

“Something in here doesn’t like people, though,” Brazil reminded them. “This hex has no embassy at Zone, and expeditions into it have always vanished, as Bat did last night. We have only this one facet of the hex to travel, but that’s still over one hundred kilometers, so I think we’ll stick to the beach as long as possible.”

“What about Bat, then?” Wuju asked in a concerned voice. “We can’t just abandon him, after all he’s done for us.”

“I don’t like doing so any more than you do, Wuju,” Brazil replied seriously, “but this is a big hex. He can fly at a good speed over obstacles, and by now he could be just about anywhere. We might as well be looking for a particular blade of grass. As much as I’d like to help him, I just can’t take the risk that whatever’s here will get one or all of us.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Wuju said adamantly, but there was no assailing his logic on any grounds except emotion. “We survived the Murnies,” she reminded him. “How much worse can it be here?”

“Much,” he replied gravely. “I survived Murithel by luck, as did you—and we knew who the enemy was and the problems. This is even more chancy, because we don’t know what’s here. We’ve got to leave Bat to the Fates. It’s Bat or all of us.” And that settled that.

With Bat gone, Brazil regretted more and more his lack of arms or other appendages that could hold and use things. Although this was a nontechnological hex, several good and somewhat nasty items would be usable, and these were given to Wuju and Vardia. The centaur was given two automatic, gunpowder-powered projectile pistols, worn strapped to gunbelts worn in an X—and carrying extra ammunition clips—across her chest. Vardia had two pistols of a different kind. They squirted gas kept under pressure in attached plastic bottles. When the trigger was pulled hard, a flint would ignite the gas, which could be liberated at a controlled rate. The flamethrower was good for about ten meters, and needn’t be very directional to be effective. Wuju, of course, had never fired a pistol and had no luck with the little practice gotten in in the ocean. But these were still effective short-range weapons, psychologically if nothing else, and they made a lot of noise going off.

“We stick to the beach,” Brazil reminded them. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to get the whole way without going into the forest.”

As satisfied as they could be, they thanked the Umiau who had pulled them this far, and the mermaids left.

Brazil said “Let’s go,” in a voice more filled with tension than excitement.

The sand and huge quantities of driftwood slowed their progress, and they found on several occasions that they had to walk into the shallows to get around some points, but the journey went well.

They made good time. By sundown, Brazil estimated that they had traveled more than halfway. Since his vision was extremely poor after nightfall, and Vardia was better off rooting, they stopped for what they all hoped would be their only night in the mysterious hex.

The sandy soil was not particularly good for the Czillian, but she managed to find a hard, steady place near the beginning of the woods and was set for the night. He and Wuju relaxed nearby as the surf crashed on hidden rocks just beyond the shoreline, then gently ran up with a sizzling sound onto the beach.

Something was bothering Wuju and she brought it up. “Nathan,” she said, “if this is a nontechnological hex like Murithel, how come your voice works? It’s still basically a radio.”

The idea had never occurred to Brazil and he thought about it. “I can’t say,” he replied carefully, “but on all the maps and the like this is nontech, and the general logic of the hex layout dictates the same thing. It can’t work, though, unless it’s a byproduct of the translator. They work everywhere.”

“The translator!” she said sharply. “Feels like a lump in the back of my throat. Where do they come from, Nathan?”

“From the North,” he told her. “From a totally crystalline hex that grows them as we grow flowers. It’s slow work, and they don’t let many of them go.”

“But how does it work?” she persisted. “It’s not a machine.”

“No, not a machine in the sense we think of machines,” he replied. “I don’t think anyone knows how it works. It was, if I remember right, created in the same way as most great inventions—sheer accident. The best guess is that its vibrations cause some kind of link with the Markovian brain of the planet.”

She shivered a little, and Brazil rubbed close to her, thinking the dropping temperature was the cause. “Want a coat?” he asked.

She shook her head negatively. “No, I was thinking of the brain. It makes me nervous—all that power, the power to create and maintain all those rules for all those hexes, work the translators, even change people into other things. I don’t think I like the idea at all. Think of a race that could build such a thing! It scares me.”

Brazil rubbed her humanoid back with his head, slowly. “Don’t worry about such things,” he said softly. “That race is long gone.”

She was not distracted. “I wonder,” she said in a distant tone. “What if they were still around, still fooling around. That would mean we were all toys, playthings—all of us. With the power and knowledge to create all this, they would be so far above us that we wouldn’t even know.” She shook him off and turned to face him. “Nathan, what if we were just playthings for them?”

He stared hard into her eyes. “We’re not,” he responded softly. “The Markovians are gone—long dead and gone. Their ghosts are brains like the one that runs this planet—just gigantic computers, programmed and automatically self-maintained. The rest of their ghosts are the people, Wuju. Haven’t you understood that from what you’ve learned by this trip?”

“I don’t understand,” she said blankly. “What do you mean the people are the Markovian ghosts?”

“ ‘Until midnight at the Well of Souls,’ ” he recited. “It’s the one phrase common to all fifteen hundred and sixty hexes. Think of it! Lots of us are related, of course, and many people here are variations of animals in other hexes. I figured out the solution to that part of the puzzle when I came out of the Gate the same as I went in—and found myself in a hex of what we always thought of as ‘human.’ Next door were one-and-a-half-meter-tall beavers—intelligent, civilized, highly intellectual, but they were basically the same as the little animal beavers of Dillia. Most of the wildlife we’ve seen in the hexes that come close to the type of worlds our old race could settle are related to the ones we had back there. There’s a relationship for all of them.

“These hexes represent home worlds, Wuju,” he said seriously. “Here is where the Markovians built the test places. Here is where their technicians set up biospheres to prove the mathematics for the worlds they would create. Here’s where our own galaxy, at least, perhaps all of them, was engineered ecologically.”

She shivered again. “You mean that all these people were created to see if the systems worked? Like an art class for gods? And if it was good enough, the Markovians created a planet somewhere that would be all like this?”

“Partly right,” he replied. “But the creatures weren’t created out of the energy of the universe like the physical stuff. If so, they’d be the gods you said. But that’s not why the world was built. They were a tired race,” he continued. “What do you do after you can do it all, know it all, control it all? For a while you delight in being a race of gods—but, eventually, you tire of it. Boredom sets in, and you must be stagnant when you have no place else to go, nothing else to discover, to reach.” He paused, as the breaking waves seemed to punctuate his story, then continued in the same dreamy tone.

“So their artisans were assigned to create the hexes of the Well World. The ones that proved out were accepted, and the full home world was then made and properly placed mathematically in the universe. That’s the reason for so much overlap—some artisans were more gifted than others, and they stole and modified each other’s ideas. When they proved out, the Markovians came to the Well through the gates, not forced but voluntarily, and they passed through the mechanism for assignment. They built up the hexes, struggled, and did what none else could do as Markovians—they died in the struggle.”

“Then they settled the home worlds?” she gasped. “They gave up being gods to suffer pain and to struggle and die?”

“No,” he replied. “They settled on the Well World. When a project was filled, it was broken down and a new one started. What we have here today is only the youngest worlds, the youngest races, the last. The Markovians all struggled here, and died here. Not only all matter, but time itself, is a mathematical construct they had learned and overcome. After many generations, the hexes became self-sufficient communities if they worked. The Markovians, changed, bore children that bred true. It was these descendants, the Markovian seed, who went to the Well through the local gates to what we now call Zone, that huge Well we entered by. On the sixth day of the sixth month of each six years they went, and the Well took them, in a single sweep like a clock around the Well, one sweep in the middle of the night. It took them, classified them, and transported them to the home world of their races.”

“But surely,” she objected, “the worlds had their own creatures. There is evolution—”

“They didn’t go physically,” he told her evenly. “Only their substance, what the Murnies called their ‘essence,’ went. At the proper time they entered the vessels which had evolved to the point of the Well. That’s why the translator calls it the Well of Souls, Wuju.”

“Then we are the Markovian children,” she breathed. “They were the seeds of our race.”

“That’s it,” he acknowledged. “They did it as a project, an experiment. They did it not to kill their race, but to save it and to save themselves. There’s a legend that Old Earth was created in seven days. It’s entirely possible—the Markovians controlled time as they controlled all things, and while they had to develop the worlds mathematically, to form them and create them according to natural law, they could do millions of years work rather quickly, to slide in their project people at the exact moment when the dominant life form or life forms—would logically develop.”

“And these people here—are they all Entries and the descendants of Entries?” she asked.

“There weren’t supposed to be any,” he told her. “Entries, that is. But the Markovians inhabited their own old universe, you know. Their old planets were still around. Some of the brains survived—a good number if we blundered into even one of them in our little bit of space. They were quasi-organic, built to be integral with the planet they served, and they proved almost impossible to turn off. The last Markovian couldn’t shut his down and still get through, so they were left open, to be closed when time did to the old worlds what it does to all things left unmaintained.”

“Then there are millions of those gates still open,” she speculated. “People could fall in all the time.”

“No,” he replied. “The gates only open when someone wants them to be open. It doesn’t have to be a mystical key—although the boy Varnett, back on Dalgonia, caused it to open by locking into his mind the mathematical relationships he observed. It doesn’t happen randomly, though. Varnett was the exception. The key is mathematical, but anyone near one doesn’t have to know the key to operate the Gate.”

“What’s the key, then?” she asked, puzzled.

“Spacers—thousands of them have been through the Well, not just from our sector but from all over. I’ve met a number. It’s a lonely, antisocial job, Wuju, and because of the Fitzgerald Contraction and rejuve, it is a long one. All those people who came here through gates got signals on the emergency band that lured them to the gates. Whether they admit it or not, they all had one thing in common.”

“What was that?” she asked, fascinated.

“They all wanted to or had decided to die,” he replied evenly, no trace of emotion in his voice. “Or, they’d rather die than live on. They were looking for fantasy worlds to cure their problems.

“Just like the Markovians.”

She was silent for a while. Suddenly she asked, “How do you know all this, Nathan? The people here don’t, those children of the Markovians who didn’t leave.”

“You got that, did you?” he responded admiringly. “Yes, when the last were changed, they sealed the Well. Those who didn’t want to go, lost their nerve, or were happy here—they stayed, with only a memory, perhaps even regret once it was done, for they kept the phrase ‘until midnight at the Well of Souls’ alive as the symbol of forever. How do I know all this? I’m brilliant, that’s why. And so is Skander—that’s why we’re going where we have to go.”

She accepted his explanation, not noticing the evasion. “But if everything is sealed, why bother?” she asked. “Skander can’t do any harm, can he?”

“Deep beneath our feet is a great machine,” he told her seriously. “The Markovian brain is so powerful that it created and maintained the home worlds as it maintains this one; the brain keeps the equations that sustain all unnaturally created matter, that can undo the fabric of time, space, and matter as it created them. Skander wants to change those equations. Not just our lives but our very existence is at stake.”

She looked at him for a long time, then turned idly, staring into the forest, lost in her thoughts.

Suddenly she said, “Look, Nathan! The flying lights are out! And I can hear something!”

He turned and looked into the forest. They were insects of some kind, he thought, glowing as they flitted through the forest. The light, he saw, was constant—the blinking that had been apparent from shore was an illusion, caused by their passage behind the dense foliage. The darkness was too complete for his deer vision to get any detail, but the floating, gliding lights were clear. There was something very familiar about them, he thought. I’ve never been here, yet I’ve seen this before.

“Listen!” Wuju whispered. “Hear it?”

Brazil’s fine-trained ears had already picked it up even over the crashing of the waves.

It was music, haunting, strange, even eerie music, music that seemed to penetrate their very bodies.

“It’s so strange,” Wuju said softly. “So beautiful.”

The Faerie! he thought suddenly. Of course there’d be Faerie! He cursed himself for not thinking of it before. This close to the equator there was bound to be magic, he realized. Some of those authoritarian sons of bitches had snuck onto Old Earth and it had been hell getting rid of them. He looked anxiously at Wuju. She had a dreamy look on her face, and her upper torso was swaying in time to the music.

“Wuju!” he said sharply. “Come on! Snap out of it!”

She pushed him away and started forward, toward the woods. He rushed up and tried to block her way, but she wouldn’t be deterred. He opened his mouth and tried to grab her arm, but it wouldn’t hold.

“Wuju!” he called after her. “Don’t go in! Don’t desert us!”

Suddenly a dark shape swooped down from the sky at him. He ducked by lowering his forelegs and started running. It swooped again, and he cursed the poor vision that kept him from taking full advantage of his reflexes.

He heard maniacal laughter above him, and the mad thing swooped again, brushing him this time.

They’re forcing me into the forest! he realized. Every time he moved in any direction but in the creature’s, laughing and gibbering, it would swoop in and block his way.

“Cousin Bat! Don’t do it! It’s Nathan Brazil!” he called to the dark shape, knowing the effort was futile, that the bat was under a Faerie spell.

Brazil was in the woods now, where Bat couldn’t follow by flying. He saw the creature standing there, outlined in the starlight glare on the ocean, looking up and down the beach.

He looked around, and barely made out a large form heading away about eight meters farther in.

It’s useless, he realized. The music’s got her and Bat’s got me.

I’ve faced them down before, he thought, and won. Maybe again, because they don’t know that. No choice here, though. If I don’t follow they’ll send some other creatures after me.

He could barely see despite the light from the flitting bugs that grew thicker and thicker as he entered the forest, but he smelled Wuju’s scent and followed it.

After what must have been twenty minutes, he emerged into a clearing in the woods.

A toadstool ring, he thought grimly.

Under a particularly huge tree was a wide ring composed of huge brown toadstools. The music came from here, made by the thousands of insects that swarmed in the center of the ring. Wuju was in the ring, too, almost covered by the creatures, so thick now that they lit up the place like a lamp. She was dancing and swaying to the eerie music of their wings, as were a number of other creatures, of varying shapes and sizes.

The music grew in intensity and volume as more and more of the creatures of light came to the ring. Sitting in the hollow of the great tree, still and observing, was a glowing insect much, much larger than the others—perhaps close to a meter. It had the oval shape of a beetle, and a light, ribbed underside that was highly flexible. Two long, jointed hind legs were held in front of it in a bent but relaxed position, and two forelegs, longer and with sharp-toothed ridges, that seemed to be leading the insect orchestra, waving in perfect time. It sat like this, underside exposed, leaning against the tree, a face on a telescoping neck down on the chest, watching things. The face was strange, not insect-like at all, nor was the position of the sitter nor the fact that it had only four limbs. It appeared to have a tiny, scruffy moustache, topped by a perfectly round and black nose, and two almost human eyes that reflected the glare of the proceedings with an evil and ancient leer.

There was a sudden darkness above, and Cousin Bat landed in the middle of the circle, bowed to the large onlooker, and joined the dance. The strange eyes of the lead bug darted around the circle, then over to Brazil, whose form was just barely visible still hidden by the forest.

Suddenly the leader’s forelegs went into a V shape, and the music stopped, everyone staying perfectly still; even the bugs seemed frozen in midflight.

The lead bug, who Brazil knew was the Swarm Queen, spoke to Cousin Bat, and Brazil found it interesting that the translator carried it as the voice of an incredibly tiny and ancient old woman.

So are the legends of witches born, he thought sardonically.

“You have brought only two! I charged you to bring all three!” the Swarm Queen accused Bat.

Bat bowed, his voice flat and mechanical. “The other is a plant, Highness. It is rooted for the night, asleep beyond any recall except the morning sun.”

“That is unacceptable,” the Swarm Queen snapped. “We have dealt with this problem before. Wait!” She turned to Brazil, and he felt the piercing eyes fall on him.

“Deer! Come into the circle!” the Swarm Queen ordered, and Brazil felt himself moving slowly, haltingly, toward the circle despite no order on his part. He felt the energy grow to almost overpowering proportions as he crossed the toadstool ring.

“The ring binds you all! Bound be ye till my return, or till morning, till midnight at the Well of Souls,” she intoned, then flipped over on her stomach, supported by all four legs. The back had long, integral wings and seemed to glow with the same stuff as her underside, although Brazil knew that was mostly reflection.

“You will show me,” she said to the bat, and Bat immediately took off, the Swarm Queen following with a tinkling sound that was like a single note in the eerie Faerie symphony.

Brazil tried to recross the circle of toadstoals, found he couldn’t. He idly kicked at one, but it proved to be more rock than toadstool, and his hoof met with a clacking sound but nothing else.

He looked at the inhabitants of the circle. All, like Wuju, were frozen, like statues, although he could see that they were breathing. There was a monotonous, yet pleasant, hum from the Faerie, marking place.

Many of the other creatures were vaguely humanoid; all were small, a few monkey-like, but all were distorted, hellish versions of their former selves.

Brazil remembered the encounters on Old Earth. Since the Faerie created their own press to suit themselves, they had a pretty good reputation in folklore and superstition. He had never discovered how they had managed to get in. Oh, some representatives of many other races had—some as volunteers to teach the people, some because their home worlds had closed before they personally had reached maturity and Old Earth had the room and a compatible biosphere.

He wondered idly if those primitive peasants who told such wonderful stories of the Faerie would still like them if they knew that these folk doubled as the basis for witches and many evil spirits. Once created by some Markovian mind, they could not be wiped out; they had to run their course and survive or fail as the rules said.

They had done too well. They worked their magic and dominated their own hex, using the collective mental powers of the swarm directed and guided by the Swarm Queen who was mother to them all, and tried to spread out. They managed to interfere in thirteen other Southern hexes where the mathematics did not forbid their enormous powers, before the Markovians finally moved to limit them to their own hex.

Here they were in their own element, and supreme. How many thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of swarms existed in this hex? Brazil wondered. I beat them outside of their own element once, but can I do it here?

About an hour passed, with Brazil, the only moving thing in the ring, getting more and more nervous; yet he held onto a streak of optimism deep inside. If they couldn’t succeed with Vardia before daybreak, these nocturnal creatures would go back to their tree burrows, Swarm Queen included. How long to dawn? he wondered.

A sudden thought came to him, and he started carefully to draw a pentagram around the circle. He tried to be casual, so it didn’t look as if he were doing much of anything; but his hoof managed to make the mark in the grassy meadow. This was a long shot, he knew, but it might stall the Swarm Queen until morning.

He was about halfway around when brush crackled and he saw Vardia walk onto the knoll and into the circle, the Swarm Queen resting on her sun leaf. There was a shadow above, and Bat landed back in the circle. As soon as Vardia was across the toadstool ring, the Swarm Queen flew back over to her seat under the tree and resumed that casual and unnatural sitting position.

Too late, he thought, and stopped the pentagram. I’ll have to accept the spell and break it.

The Swarm Queen looked thoughtful for a few minutes. Then, quickly, she looked at the circle. “Be free within the circle,” she said almost casually in that tiny, old-woman’s voice.

Bat staggered a few seconds, then caught himself and looked around, surprised. He saw the others and looked amazed.

“Brazil! Vardia! Wuju! How’d you get here?” he asked in a puzzled tone.

Wuju looked around strangely at the assemblage. She saw Brazil and went over to him. “Nathan!” she said fearfully. “What’s happening?”

Vardia looked around and barely whispered, “What a strange dream.”

Bat whirled, spied the Swarm Queen, and started to walk toward her. He got to the circle, and suddenly couldn’t make his feet move. He flapped his wings for a takeoff, but didn’t go off the ground.

“What the hell is this?” Bat asked strangely. “Last I remember I was flying near the shoreline when I heard this strange music—and now I wake up here!”

“These creatures seem to—” Wuju began, but the Swarm Queen suddenly snapped, “Stand mute!” and the Dillian’s voice died in midsentence.

The Swarm Queen glanced up at the barely visible sky.

“There’s a storm coming,” she said more to herself than to anyone. “It will not be over until after dawn. Therefore, the simplest thing should be the best.” She looked up at the buzzing swarm, then flipped over and walked into the circle. Brazil could feel the power building up. The Swarm Queen flipped again lightly, and sat on the side of a toadstool, inside the ring, forelegs behind her to steady her.

“What shall we do with the interlopers?” she asked the swarm.

“Make them fit,” came a collective answer from the swarm.

“Make them fit,” the Swarm Queen echoed. “And how can we make them fit when we have so little time?”

“Transform them, transform them,” suggested the swarm.

The Swarm Queen’s gaze fell on Wuju, who almost withered at the look and clung to Brazil.

“You wish him?” the Swarm Queen asked acidly. “You shall have him!” Her eyes burned like coal, and the humming of the swarm intensified to an almost unbearable intensity.

Where Wuju had been, there was suddenly a doe, slighter smaller and sleeker than Brazil’s stag. The doe looked around at the lights, confused, and then leaned down and munched a little grass, oblivious to the proceedings.

The Swarm Queen turned to Vardia. “Plant, you want so much to act the animal, so shall you be!”

The buzzing increased again, and where Vardia had stood was another doe, identical to the one that had been Wuju.

“It’s easier to use something local, that you know,” the Swarm Queen remarked to no one in particular. “I have to hurry.” She turned her gaze on Cousin Bat.

“You like them, be like them!” she ordered, and Bat, too, turned into a doe identical in every way to the other two.

Now she turned to Brazil. “Stags should not think,” she said. “It is unnatural. Here is your harem, stag. Dominate them, rule them, but as what you are, not what you pretend to be!”

The swarm increased again, and Brazil’s mind went blank, dull, unthinking.

“And finally,” pronounced the Swarm Queen, “so that so complex a spell, done so hurriedly, does not break, I bequeath to the four the fear and terror of all but their own kind, and of all things which disturb the beasts. They are free of the circle.”

Brazil suddenly bolted into the dark, the other three following quickly behind.

There was the rumble of thunder, the flash of lightning.

“The circle is broken,” intoned the Swarm Queen.

“We go to shelter,” responded the swarm as it dispersed. The other creatures came alive, some gibbering insanely, others howling, as the lightning and thunder increased.

The Swarm Queen flipped and walked quickly over to her tree and into the base.

“Sloppy job,” she muttered to herself. “I hate to rush.”

The rain started to fall.

Even though it was a sloppy spell, it took Brazil almost a full day and night to break it. The flaw was a simple one: at no time during the encounter had the Swarm Queen heard him talk, and it just hadn’t occurred to her that he could. The input-output device on the translator continued to operate, although it did little good for the rest of the night in the storm and throughout the next day, when the nocturnal Faerie were asleep.

When the creatures emerged at nightfall, though, they talked. The conversations were myriad, complex, and involved actions and concepts alien to his experience, but they did form words and sentences which the transceiver mounted in his antlers delivered to his brain. These words, although mostly nonsense, gave a continual input that banged at his mind, stimulated it, gave it something to grab onto. Slowly self-awareness returned, concepts formed, forced their way through the spell’s barrier.

That spark inside of him that had always ensured his preservation would not let him lapse or quit. Concepts battered at his brain, forcing word pictures in his mind, building constructs which burst into his consciousness.

It was like a war against an invisible barrier, something inside him attacking, always beating at the blocks that had been placed.

Suddenly, he was through. Memories crowded back, and with them came reason. He felt exhausted—he was totally worn out from the struggle, yet he knew that precious time had been wasted, and more roadblocks raised.

He looked around in the dark. It was very hard to see anything except the flitting shapes of the Faerie, but he knew that he must be deep inside the hex. He looked around. Asleep nearby were the three transformed members of the expedition, absolutely identical even to scent. The Swarm Queen had been in a hurry and had used but a single model.

Realizing there was little that could be done until shortly before dawn, lest he give himself away to some curious Faerie by acting undeer-like, he relaxed and waited for the sky to lighten.

With daylight came safety, and the freedom to move. He spent over an hour trying to make some kind of contact with the three does, but their stares were blank, their actions totally natural. The spell could not be broken from without as far as they were concerned.

For a while he considered abandoning them; they would follow him to the border, of course, but would be unable to cross it. The stakes certainly warranted it; logic dictated it.

But he knew he couldn’t do it. Not without a good try.

He started off, wishing he could trace the wild, crazy route they had used to get where they were. He decided that the best thing to do would be to head due east; no matter what, that would bring him to the ocean sooner or later, and from there he could get his bearings.

He moved with the swiftness that only a deer could have in the forest, and the three followed him loyally, almost slavishly. Part of the spell, he guessed. The Swarm Queen had bound Wuju to him, and then duplicated her transformation precisely on the other two, which simplified things a great deal.

He made the ocean before nightfall, but had no way of telling if he were north or south of the Faerie colony he sought. He decided that he had accomplished enough for one day, and that the next day would tell the story.

He awoke later than intended, the sunlight already glaring down on the ocean, causing diamond-like facets to cover the surface.

Which way? he wondered. Am I north or south of our last position?

He finally decided to go north; at worst, this would take him to the Ghlmon border and where he had to go. If he didn’t run into the place he was looking for, he would have to abandon them for a while and return later to straighten the matter out. About an hour up the beach he came upon the packs, still sitting in the sand where they had camped the first night. They were wet and sand-blown, but still intact.

As the does romped in the surf or sniffed at the strange-smelling things in the sand, he worked feverishly, cursing his lack of hands. It took ten minutes to open a pack, and several more to work one of the flame guns that Vardia had carried out of the pack. The next task was somehow to pick it up.

He finally managed a grip of sorts with his mouth. It was awkward, and he dropped it many times as he went back into the forest, but each time he patiently turned it just right and handled it again.

It seemed like hours getting the flame pistol through that forest, but at last he came upon the clearing of ominously familiar character: the toadstool ring and the great tree. It was too well etched in his memory to be simply a similar place of some other swarm, and his deer’s nose confirmed the proper scents.

Carefully he searched for a large, uneven rock, and with great difficulty rolled it to within a meter of the hollow area that was the Swarm Queen’s throne, at the base of the big tree. He managed to prop the flame gun sideways against the rock, so that it was mostly upright and pointed at the hollow.

Satisfied, he went and got sticks from the forest and built a crude pentagram around the pistol and rock. Next he positioned himself so his forelegs were on either side of the pistol, the left one serving as a backstop for the grip area which also contained the gas, the right one just to the right of the trigger.

He nodded to himself in satisfaction, and briefly checked the sun and the location of his three does, all of whom were idly grazing nearby. About two hours to sundown, he thought. Just about right.

He brought his right foreleg to bear on the trigger. The pistol jiggled but remained in the right general direction. There was a hiss of escaping gas, but no flame. He released it, realizing that the flint igniter mechanism would require a hard and quick jerk on the trigger.

He knew that, if he did that, he might lose control of the gun, even have it suddenly jump up and burn him. He sighed and made up his mind. Tensely, he planted his left foreleg against the gun butt and his right just touching the large, unguarded trigger made for Czillian tentacles.

Suddenly, in one sudden motion, he pulled against the trigger hard with his right leg. It jumped a little, but stayed firm.

And remained unignited.

Steeling himself, he tried again. Once more it failed to ignite, because he had flinched and not pushed the trigger straight back. He wondered idly if he could succeed, given his physical limitations. If not, he would just have to abandon his companions.

He tried one more time, using extra force. The pistol ignited, but the thing almost jerked out of his precarious hold. Carefully, without releasing the trigger, he gingerly managed to point the thing back in the general direction of the tree. Just to the left of the tree the area was smoldering, some of it still afire.

Now the jet of flame focused on the tree hollow, and he could see the bark smolder and catch, the fire almost enveloping the tree like something liquid and living. Smoke billowed up, the scent disturbing to his nostrils. Birds screeched, and forest animals ran for cover in panic.

Suddenly he heard what he had been waiting for: a tiny, weak voice coughing.

The Swarm Queen had more than one exit available, and she crawled dizzily out of the top of the tree trunk, near the point where the four main branches went off. She was blind, sick, and groping feebly, starting to make her way up the side of one of the branches.

“Swarm Queen!” he called, not letting up on the flame. “Shall I burn you or will you meet my conditions under pain of reversal?”

“Who are you that dares do this to me?” she managed, coughing and groaning in fear and misery as she maintained her dignity.

“He who was wronged by you, and he who drove your ancestors off distant planets!” he replied boldly, but idly and somewhat fearfully wondering how much more of a charge the pistol had. “Do you yield under pain of reversal?”

The large bug hadn’t made it up the branch, almost overcome by the smoke and feeling the flames. Brazil was suddenly afraid she would fall into the fire before she yielded.

“I—I yield!” she called. “Turn off your cursed fire!”

“Say the whole thing!” he demanded.

“I yield under pain of reversal, dammitall!” she screamed nervously.

At that moment the charge ran out of the gun and it sputtered and died. Brazil let go, and looked at it strangely. A few seconds longer, he thought, and I’d have lost.

“Get me down before I burn!” screamed the Swarm Queen, who was still very much in danger. The flames continued to smolder in the tree and around the trunk, although without the added fire they were slowly turning to glowing red against the charred and blackened side.

“Jump straight ahead and fly to the ground,” he told her. “You know the distance.”

She could have done so before, of course, but the heat and fire always induced panic in these creatures.

She landed shakily and sat, trembling, for several minutes. Finally she regained her composure and peered up at him with those old and evil semihuman eyes, squinting. She was not totally blind in the light, but her vision was quite poor.

“You’re the deer!” she gasped in amazement. “How did you break the spell? How do you talk at all?”

“Your spells cannot hold me for long,” he told her. “That which inhabits this simple vessel is your superior. But it does bind my companions, and it is for their sake that I charge you.”

“You have three charges only!” she spat, looking at the still smoking, blackened tree. “Consider them carefully, lest I kill you for what you have done to my home and my honor!”

“Honor be damned,” Brazil replied disgustedly. “If you had any, there would have been no need to invoke a reversal. Remember that well. Should you default on the charges, it is I who will be Swarm Queen and you who will be a deer!”

“State the charges, alien,” she responded in a bitter tone. “They will be honored.”

Brazil thought carefully.

“One,” he said. “My three companions and I shall cross the border into Ghlmon, traversing the distance from here to there without spell or any form of interference that would cause danger or delay.”

The Swarm Queen’s eyebrows rose, and she said, “Done.”

“Two: the spells shall be removed from my three companions, and they shall regain all mental faculties, all memory, and shall be restored to their original forms.”

“Done,” the Swarm Queen agreed. “And the third?”

“You shall cast a spell to be effective when we cross the Ghlmon border that will erase all memories, effects, and signs of us four having been here, including those from your own mind.”

“A pleasure,” she said. “So shall it be when darkness falls.”

“Until midnight at the Well of Souls,” he responded.

And she was stuck. Should any of the conditions cease to function or be unfulfilled, the original spell would bounce back at her.

Nightfall came in about two hours. There were still some wisps of smoke from the tree, but little else to show the struggle. When the swarm emerged from its thousands of holes in the surrounding trees, it found the queen disturbed, but they sensed that a battle had been fought and that she had lost. Since their power could only be focused through her, they had to go along.

The three does had scattered during the fire, but all had timidly returned by dusk and were herded into the toadstool circle without much difficulty.

The Swarm Queen’s eyes burned with hatred, but she followed orders. As the swarm gathered in the circle and hummed its strange music, she pronounced the first charge, for their safe conduct, then turned to the second.

“The three within the circle shall be restored in mind and body to their original selves!” she pronounced, and as she said it, it was so.

Brazil gasped, cursing himself for a fool in remembering the literalness of charges.

In the circle stood Vardia, not as a Czillian, but as she had looked those first days on his ship—human, about twelve years old, thirty or so kilos, with shaven head.

Next to her, looking even more confused, was not the Dillian Wuju but Wu Julee, obviously a healthy and unaddicted one, but about forty-five kilos, long black hair, and decent-sized but saggy breasts.

And there was a stranger there. He was a boy, about Vardia’s apparent physical age, with short hair and prepubescent genitals, about 150 centimeters tall, muscled, and fairly well proportioned.

“Well, Master Varnett,” Brazil said, bemused. “Out of the woodwork early, I guess.”