Quest for the Well of Souls

Oyakot, Nearing the Pugeesh Border

The Oyakot continued the relatively swift and comfortable passage the group had thus far experienced. The creatures resembled olive-green canvas bags with small, sharp spikes all over. They had hundreds of tiny legs beneath and a central network of long tentacles atop. The location of their eyes, ears, nose, or mouth was not apparent, and the mountainous landscape with its strong cold winds didn’t seem to faze them.

But they had roads, and vehicles that traveled swiftly along single lines of light. The hex was crisscrossed with a tremendous transportation network, and the journey took them over massive bridges and through tunnels many kilometers long. Speed was constant and control automated; drivers only monitored progress and took over in an emergency.

The Oyakot were also talkative; a friendly, practical people, they had made the most of a harsh land. That oxygen was a solid to the Oyakot didn’t dim the mental kinship the travelers felt for these clever, industrious people.

Wooley was worried, though. Word had come through the dispatching network that Trelig and his party were also well into Oyakot, and only a few hours behind them. Too, her party was already approaching Pugeesh, and information was still sparse.

“Can’t tell much on them,” their Oyakot driver admitted. “Much too hot over there. Sure death just to cross the line. Ugly-lookin’ place, though, all boilin’ and hissin’. I’m told they don’t have anybody at Zone, neither—so your guess is as good as anybody’s. There—you can see it ahead. Gives me the creeps just to look at it.”

It was a jungle, that was for sure. A solid wall of purple plants rose before them, and tremendous vapor veils drifted here and there, between the leaves of thick growths.

As they unloaded, Wooley warned them, “The Sea of Borgun is just to the north of Pugeesh, and it’s primarily liquid chlorine, so that will give you an idea of the place. The Oyakot think of it as hot, but it’s still extremely cold to any of us.”

Mavra Chang and Joshi surveyed the scene uneasily. “No sign of roads, either,” she pointed out. “How are we going to get through that crap?”

“There’s flat land slightly to the north,” the Yaxa replied, looking at a topographic map. We can get around the mountains that way. As to crossing the jungle, well, we might have to cut a pathway.”

Ben Yulin was uneasy. “Suppose the plants are the Pugeesh?” he said worriedly. “We start chopping through them and zap! And we’ve got a long way to go to fight our way through.”

“I am fairly certain that they are not plants,” the Torshind put in. “Exactly what they are I do not know—but we’ll find out. In the meantime, we have the means to be pretty effective through there.” The tendrils of the crystal creature it inhabited fumbled in the heavy packs on Joshi’s back, finally coming up with several odd-shaped metallic parts. Assembled, these made a rifle with a long stock and a huge low-slung cylinder.

Mavra looked at the curious weapon with wonder. “What’s it shoot?”

“Napalm,” the Torshind replied.

To Mavra and Joshi, they rigged long flats that balanced on a single broad, spiked roller. On these the supplies could be carried. The travois were perhaps two meters wide, but balanced properly, they worked very well.

Mavra in particular resented the hookup, especially the halter bit, but the others were sharp with her. “It’s why you’re along at all,” Yulin snapped irritably. “If you don’t pull your weight, you’re no good to us.”

She finally relented, although she was always conscious of the contraption. A beast she might be, but a beast of burden was almost too much.

There were wide spaces once they reached the plain, and the going was relatively easy for a while. The ground was hard and covered with long razor-sharp purple stalks that reacted much like grass when walked on and offered no resistance to the rollers.

Maintaining the proper heading was often difficult, and Wooley frequently had to consult a compass when they had to detour from a straight-line route. The needle always pointed to the Equator, which was sufficient.

As to what kind of being the Pugeesh were, there wasn’t a clue. No visible trails, no evidence of moving things. This made them nervous; they would have preferred vicious predators to something they could neither see nor identify until, perhaps, it was too late.

They had traveled a good distance by sundown, and they had to stop and rest. Yulin and Wooley agreed that the inhabitants had to be nocturnal, which meant posting a guard at all times. It was decided to stand in twos: Wooley and Mavra the first shift, Yulin and Joshi the second, with the Torshind—who did not need sleep but could selectively turn off parts of its brain for rest—as a backup.

Wooley and Mavra switched their suit radios to a different frequency—the Yaxa had to do it for the handless horse—so as not to disturb the others.

For a while there was silence between them, and of course little noise penetrated the suits, either. Finally Wooley said, “Sure is still around here.”

Mavra nodded. “It’s completely dark now. You can see some stars up there—and nothing down here but the plants. Of course, I don’t have much vision now, but I haven’t seen anything. You?”

“Nothing,” the Yaxa admitted. “Perhaps we’ll get lucky and it’ll stay this way. There seems to be nothing at all alive here except the plants. The only things moving are those wisps of gas—I think they’re chlorine from their color, but I can’t be sure,”

Mavra strained and did manage to make out cloudy patches here and there. “You don’t suppose…?”

“The clouds? I’ve been thinking the same thing. They don’t seem to drift in any particular direction, as with a wind. But they’re just wispy puffs. Even if they are the Pugeesh, they can’t harm us much. Even the worst of these suits could take a bath in pure sulfuric acid without harm.”

Mavra considered it. “But napalm wouldn’t be very effective against them, would it?”

There wasn’t much to say.

“You’re an Entry, aren’t you?” Mavra asked the Yaxa. “I can tell by some of your expressions.”

The Yaxa nodded slowly. “Oh, yes. Not from any place you’ve ever heard of, though. I’ve been a little of everything—farmer, politician, cop. Finally I just got old, and rejuves take something out of you mentally each time, so we—I—decided the hell with it, I’d done all I could, more than most people ever do. I went out with that frame of mind, and wound up getting suckered by a Markovian gate. They’re triggered by that, you know—a desire to end it all, despondency, all the things the Markovians would feel when they used it to come here. But it’s been a good life since, too. I don’t regret much of my past or present. You?”

Mavra was surprised at the Yaxa’s candor; some genuine emotion came through, at least in intent, despite the ice-cold monotone. It was because she was an Entry, Mavra decided.

The once human horse chuckled dryly. “Me? Nothing much to tell that you wouldn’t already know. As for regret—I don’t know, really. Some individual things I would like to do differently. Stop my husband from that meet where they killed him. Not touch that damned stone in Olborn that changed me into a half-donkey. Maybe not have been so damned complacent these last years. I still don’t understand why I stayed in Glathriel and accepted it so calmly.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you had little choice in that,” the Yaxa told her. “Every six months the Ambreza gave you a physical. One of the devices they used for checking you was also a hypno gadget. Bit by bit they carefully changed your attitudes—slowly this time, so you’d never even be conscious of it.”

Anger grew within her. “So that’s it,” she said in a tone devoid of emotion. “That explains a lot.”

“But in a crisis the old you returned in full,” Wooley pointed out. “They didn’t dare hypno too strongly or too deeply, or you’d have been no use to them later. And that brings up your stake in all this. Only that computer up there can restore you to humanity, you know—or the Well itself, which might make you something other than what you want to be. I guarantee that if you somehow escaped they’d find a way to keep you from the Well just so your knowledge wouldn’t fall into others’ hands. They’d do a full brain scan, maybe using a Yugash to keep you from Well processing. You’d be a dumb horse.”

Mavra considered that. She wasn’t sure it was possible to return to the South without Well processing, but a lot more impossible things had happened. “I’m not sure I care,” she said softly.

Wooley was startled. “Huh? How’s that?”

“I keep going over and over my life,” Mavra responded, “and I keep wondering what I’m trying to get back to. Sometimes I feel like the Markovians—money, some power that money brings, skill, my own ship, although it’s probably been sold for salvage by now. But for what? Somewhere along the line I missed something, and I don’t know what it is.”

They were silent for a while, each locked in her own thoughts.

Mavra felt a little groggy, drained. At first she thought it fatigue, but the condition persisted, a numbness increasing like a lead weight on her brain. She shook her head to clear it, but the movement didn’t help. She felt herself drifting off.

She was a little girl, running across green fields toward a large farmhouse. An elderly man and woman stood on the porch, looking kindly and smiling as she ran to them.

“Gramma! Grampa!” she squealed in delight. Her grandfather picked her up and hugged and kissed her, laughing. Her grandmother was still a remarkably good-looking woman, and she seemed to have an infectious spark of life inside her. She tenderly brushed back the little girl’s long hair and kissed her.

And they sat on the porch and played and talked, and Grampa told tall tales of a magical world where everybody was a different kind of creature and you could have wondrous adventures. He was a marvelous storyteller, and she was enthralled. But though only four or five, she sensed that something was wrong, something was different about this visit.

It wasn’t anything they said or did, it was something else, something in the grim way they talked to her parents and older brothers and sisters, some seriousness they tried valiantly to hide from her but could not.

And she’d cried and wailed when they left; for some reason she was certain that they were leaving for good this time, that they would never come back.

And they didn’t. There was furious activity in the house, people coming and going, all kinds of serious people who spoke in whispers and pretended nothing was wrong whenever she approached.

She started playing games to eavesdrop on them. Once she hid behind a couch while her mother was arguing with two big men.

“No! We won’t desert this farm and this world!” her mother yelled angrily. “We’ll fight! We’ll fight as long as there is breath in us!”

“As you wish, Vahura,” one of the big men replied, “but you may regret it when it’s too late. That bastard Courile is in charge now, you know. He’ll seal this world off in a minute when he’s ready. Think of the children!”

Her mother sighed. “Yes, you’re right about that, I suppose. I’ll try and make some arrangement.”

“Time’s short,” the other man warned. “Already it might be too late.”

And it had been too late. Some of the political opponents had been allowed out, but not her parents, for they were the leaders of the opposition to the party takeover. Not them. Their children would be the example of the new conformist society, and they would be forced to watch. An example to the nation, to the world.

And, one night shortly after, the funny man had come. A small, skinny man who sneaked in a back window, her window. She’d started to scream, but he was such a funny little man and he had such a nice smile. He hdd a finger to his lips and winked at her, and went out her door.

Soon there was muffled conversation, and then her father came back with the funny little man.

“Mavra, you have to go with our friend here, now,” he whispered to her. She was confused, hesitant, but there was something in the little man that made her trust and like him, and Daddy had said it was okay.

And the little man smiled at her, then turned to her much taller father, smile gone. “You were fools to stay,” he whispered. “The Com is absolute once it wins.”

Her father swallowed hard and seemed to be fighting back tears. “You will take good care of her, won’t you?”

The smile was back. “I’m no father figure, but when she needs me, I’ll be there,” he assured the other.

They sneaked out the back, running from bush to bush, a game she was too sleepy to follow.

“Awake! To arms! Here they come!” A loud electric shout shot through her. Only vaguely did she identify it as the voice of the Torshind.

Woozily she managed to look up. Ben Yulin moved swiftly, grabbing the napalm rifle from Wooley’s stunned grasp, turning, and firing.

A tremendously bright, pencil-thin line of flame shot outward, striking some objects nearby. There was a flash. Suddenly it seemed as if the very atmosphere were on fire, burning white-hot, burning and illuminating the Pugeesh, great huge spindly creatures standing on ten incredibly thin legs, with monstrous claws front and rear and large eyestalks that shone like rubies in the center of their round tiny bodies.

The napalm was effective. It struck the leading trio of attackers and clung like glue. There was no sound, but the two forward legs melted like molten plastic and the claws deformed. They retreated hastily, dripping fire.

“To your left!” Joshi shouted. “Something like a cannon!”

Yulin saw it by the flickering light and adjusted a dial on the rifle. The Torshind meanwhile had assembled a second weapon from the pack and shot a random half-moon of burning gelatin behind them, lighting up the surroundings.

Yulin fired again, this time in broad intermittent bursts, at a huge device that did indeed look like a cannon. When it went up, the whole area seemed to be melting.

“My God! They’re all over the place!” Yulin screamed. “Get me a new cylinder!”

There was a report of some kind from the right, and a large stone landed near them with a crash and rolled, almost getting the Torshind on the bounce.

Wooley seemed to snap out of whatever trance she was in and grabbed a napalm cylinder, tossing it to Yulin.

Mavra looked around at the eerie scene, trying to see what she could with her poor vision. Napalm at least was the right weapon here; it seemed to set fire to anything it touched. Whenever it landed the stuff melted, burned, and bubbled—and it spread.

The Torshind covered the rear while Yulin zeroed in on a large and complex cannon device that shot huge rocks. He was good with the rifle; the third blob struck, disabling the machine before the Pugeesh manning it could fire again.

And suddenly they were gone. Moving so fast the eye had trouble following, they just faded back into the brush, leaving only the burning remains of eight of their number and the bubbling wreckage of two cannons.

The minotaur was furious and turned on Wooley. “Some guard! They damn near had us!” he snarled.

The Yaxa was slightly bewildered. “I—I don’t know what happened,” she stammered, the cool self-confident tone of the Yaxa breaking for the first time. “I just seemed to sink into dreaming without even realizing it. I just don’t understand it—I never dream, normally.”

“Me, too,” Mavra put in, furious not only at her own lapse but also because in a battle such as this she had been totally helpless. “It just sank on me like a heavy, irresistible weight.”

The Torshind considered this. “I think perhaps there is no blame here. It is entirely possible that the Pugeesh caused those effects to take us off guard. I have heard of such things being done elsewhere.”

“Oh, damn!” Mavra swore. “Not another magic hex!”

“Call it what you will,” the Torshind replied, “I think we’d better be doubly on guard from now on. How many more cylinders do we have of this stuff? I don’t think anything but chemical fire is going to stop them. They appear to be silicon-based.”

Yulin, scared and still grumbling, looked into the ammo pouch. “Nine. That’s not so good. I don’t think we can fight more than two more battles like this.”

The Yugash silently agreed. “Let’s try diplomacy, then. What have we to lose? Reach over and switch my radio to external amplification, will you?”

Yulin was still too upset, and it was Wooley who made the adjustment.

The Torshind walked to the side of the camp. “Pugeesh!” it called, its voice booming now out into the night. “Pugeesh! We should talk! We are weary travelers, nothing more. We do not threaten you or what is yours. We need only to cross your land to reach the other side! No one else need die, on either side! We ask your permission to continue!”

They waited. There was no reply, but there were no further attacks, either. They settled back for an uneasy balance of the night as the fires slowly burned themselves out and black smoke rose into the night sky.

About forty kilometers back, the other group was fighting a similar battle with different weapons.

Trelig and Burodir were crouched behind rocks, shooting tracers at the attackers. They had some effect, but not much; although the Pugeesh were enormous, there was really very little to them. A wall of flame was much more effective than the odds of projectile hitting a vital spot.

The Dillians, acutely aware of how large a target they were, found concussion hand grenades much more effective. The shrapnel from the grenades found their marks in a wide spread.

One of the spindly creatures charged and a great claw reached out for Renard. The Agitar’s suit was from an Entry of his race; it was designed at several contact points to allow the electrical discharge of which all Agitar males were capable. The claw grabbed him, and he reached up and fed the charge into it.

There was a hiss and a crackle, and the Pugeesh curled up into an impossibly small burning ball. This made the other Pugeesh pause, and they drew back cautiously.

The grip hadn’t torn the suit, but it had been painful nonetheless. Renard hoped his shoulder was just bruised, not broken.

“Well, they’re not eager to die, anyway,” Trelig shouted optimistically.

The Ghiskind considered that. “Perhaps that works for us. Make sure this ptir doesn’t wander away,” it said, then abandoned the body, its red-cloaked visage floating into the darkness after the still-present but hesitant Pugeesh.

The creatures watched the Yugash’s approach and hurled some rocks at it, which passed harmlessly through. One took a sharp spear and lunged at the Yugash, also to no effect.

The specter reached the spear-thrower’s body and merged into it. The Pugeesh turned, convulsed, then charged into its fellows in the darkness.

Terrified, they uttered high-pitched screams.

The occupation was short-lived, however; too scared to do anything, the poor Pugeesh who’d been possessed simply dropped dead.

The Ghiskind emerged, satisfied with it demonstration, and headed for another. They pulled back in terror.

Frustrated that it couldn’t talk to them at this point, the Yugash turned and glided back, then returned into the ptir.

“I have just given those savages a demonstration of my powers,” it told them. “Perhaps now I can talk to them.”

The ptir scuttled toward them, and this time they were not hostile toward it. Their red faceted eyes had followed the fearsome ghost back to the camp and watched as it merged with the crystal being. They knew what approached them.

The Ghiskind stopped when it was convinced it had an audience, and turned its radio to external broadcast.

“Pugeesh! Hear me! We will cross your land. We will not harm or otherwise touch you or yours unless you attack us again. If you do, I promise you that not only you but your children will suffer for generations. Neither mind nor body of us shall you touch, and we will do the same. Is that agreed?”

There was no reaction for some time, then the sound of murmuring and mumbling. The Yugash received no formal reply, but soon heard the sound of many creatures moving off. Inspection revealed just one or two remaining, apparently observers.

In a way, they’d agreed.

Fairly confident now, the Yugash rejoined the others. “I don’t think they’ll bother us again. If they do, we’ll have to come up with a really big power demo.”

“Maybe they were luckier with the Yaxa group farther on,” Trelig said hopefully.

Vistaru, totally helpless in the battle because she was too small to man a weapon and her suit prevented flying or use of her stinger, sighed. “Poor Mavral” was all she could manage.

None of them slept the rest of the night, and they packed up and continued their journey at dawn’s first light. None of the strange creatures had molested them further in mind or body, and they hoped it would stay that way.

A couple of hours later they came upon the camp of the Yaxa party, saw the charred remains of the battle, and Vistaru noted with relief the lack of non-Pugeesh bodies about.

“Too bad,” Antor Trelig said sadly. “Looks like they’re still in front of us.”