Shadow of the Well of Souls

Dlubine

Ever since Gus had slid into the water, he’d had no contact with anyone for several days. He had looked on some of the islands for Brazil and Terry but hadn’t found any sign of them and wondered if, in fact, those were the same islands they’d wrecked on or if he’d been carried along farther in the chain before managing to make shore.

At any rate, he’d been unable to find the one with the lava coming down the side in that pattern, and that suggested that he was in the wrong place or at the very best on the wrong side.

It didn’t take him long to discover as well that the islands bore no sign of anything a Dahir could eat. Some of the insects were large enough, but they not only didn’t smell right, they smelled very much all wrong, and since being out on his own in this world he’d learned to trust his nose beyond all else. In any event, someone of his size couldn’t expect to sustain himself on those things for very long.

That meant getting off, and the nearest mainland was at least fifty, maybe a hundred kilometers away—there was no way of telling for sure, but even if he set off in the right direction, he’d be dead of exhaustion long before he arrived. He was already all in.

He was not, however, the only one who’d lost Brazil and Terry, as he discovered the second day on the island while weighing what few options he had. He heard it first, then saw it—a patrol boat, a big steamer with metal plates on its hull not unlike the one back at the island harbor. Maybe—no, probably—the one that had caught and sunk them!

He was angry at them, but clearly they hadn’t found anybody, either, or they wouldn’t be poking around like that. In any event, with this black volcanic sand not taking much in the way of footprints or other signs, they had the same sort of problem he did and had to send a few of the crew over in small rowboats to look around and check for any signs of anything.

It was a pretty clear way out. If they continued searching and found them, he’d be there to help them out. If they failed, at least they’d head for some place to resupply, and that was the kind of place that might well have decent Dahir eating and he could figure out what to do next.

Besides, the idea of sitting right on the deck of a police launch and having nobody notice him was irresistible.

He worked his way up the island just beyond the beach, then out across some fresh lava rock that extended right down almost to the water, and slid in, swimming to the launch before the men were back. He waited there until the shore party did return so that they’d discount any extra weight or water when he came aboard on the same side.

They went from island to island, beach to beach, looking for any signs of wreckage or of anyone coming ashore, but found nothing. One time they did in fact come right around to a daylight version of what Gus thought he’d seen at night, only there wasn’t any lava visible. It was only when he realized that the stuff was in fact coming down and dumping into the ocean and that this was what was causing the massive steam eruption over to one side that he understood his mistake. The lava hadn’t been out in the open but had formed lava tubes, the rock hitting the air getting solid and forming a kind of roof for the rest. At night it looked like red-hot streams of the stuff, but by day it was a lot less obvious.

And that presented a real problem. If they had gotten on the beach and were on that island, what help would he be? No food, and instead of two of them being stuck, all three of them would be stuck. If it was the same as the island he’d been on, and he had no reason to think it wasn’t, they could eat some of the fruit even if he could not, and there’d been water on the other island, which was much smaller, so there was likely to be water here. The way he’d seen Terry’s powers in action, too, he knew they could hold out there a damned long time.

He would do more good to try to find the location somewhere and then come back for them when he could. It wasn’t what his heart told him to do, but him dead and them alive and stranded didn’t equal all three alive in any reasonable book. He just wished he’d realized his mistake on the volcano, when there had been time to get ashore, look by himself, and still catch the boat.

That night, after the last methodical search, near dusk, the launch gave up and headed out toward open sea. Gus just relaxed and snoozed on the bow and hoped that they were headed some place useful.

Within a few hours they were approaching land, and from the darkness Gus saw that wherever it was was definitely more civilized than he’d like. It looked like the coastline of Oregon or northern California, densely populated and brightly and artificially lit.

After they had slipped into an official naval dock facility and tied up, he waited until all but the watch and maintenance personnel were off and then just walked ashore.

Beyond the buildings, piers, and guards, though, was a kind of lunatic’s seaside resort, at least to his mind. All the houses, hell, all the buildings, big and small, seemed like they’d been poured by a five-year-old out of some play-dough set. They looked, well, kind of weird, not at all symmetrical or standard but solid, colorful, and well built out of some synthetic material.

And by bright streetlights he found himself in what he thought of as the Land of the Ninja Turtles.

Well, not exactly, but they did sort of remind him of the cartoon characters. No shells, though, and no Ninja gear. And some of them had beards, of all things, and some of them wore what looked like Scotch plaid kilts, but most of them wore ugly, serviceable form-fitting plastic-type clothing.

There were big bipedal turtles and little ones and in-between ones, and except for the occasional oddball in kilts or other nonstandard clothing and the few with little goatees, they all looked just exactly alike to him.

Well, they seemed warm-blooded by their actions, in spite of looking like reptiles, and that made them somewhat akin to him, however different they really were. Maybe, just maybe, what they ate he could eat.

For a while he feared they were all herbivores, but then he discovered the refrigerated warehouses and lots and lots of meat. It was all dead, of course, and some of it might take a while to thaw out, although he wondered how long it would take anything to thaw in the waters just beyond the breakwater in superhot Dlubine. Rather than be piggy, he picked a half dozen smaller cuts, a mere six or seven pounds of meat of some kind, went down to the shore just beyond the town and waded, then floated out until he was in the warmest water he’d ever known.

The answer was about an hour a pound.

It didn’t taste the same, not without the warm blood and all the nice mushy insides and skin and all, but it wasn’t the time to be a gourmet or look gift horses in the mouth. He’d eaten a lot worse on this trip, and natural taste and instinct didn’t fill an empty gullet. All in all, it was a quite satisfactory beach picnic, even if the company didn’t show up.

The next day he tried to find out a little information about where the hell he was and what he might be able to do next.

This, it appeared, was a seaside resort in Agon, so even if the other two had failed to make the northern continent, he had, and he was the only one who didn’t give a damn if he ever saw the place or not.

He knew he didn’t like the place. It wasn’t the locals, or the climate, or even the food so much as it was the fact that it was a high-tech hex. He’d had to bypass several security systems the previous night, and even so, he knew they knew somebody had broken in. In fact, a whole damned busload of uniformed turtle cops had shown up by dawn and were busily going over the place. He decided that they must have found something, because one of the cops lit out for the naval station on a crazy kind of vehicle that seemed to float just off the ground on nothing in particular but had handlebars and a hand accelerator and a hand brake kind of like a motorbike’s. He decided to follow, mostly to see if there was any suspicion of a Dahir being involved.

The little fellow on the flying surfboard beat him there by a bit, of course, but he was there with several navy types of various races spouting off a storm. Gus moved closer to overhear.

“…definitely no race on our local registry. It has to be something from one of your crews! You had a patrol come in just last night!”

One of the crew, who looked like a five-foot-tall version of Rocky the Flying Squirrel sans goggles to Gus, who was, after all, a television person, responded, “Now, calm down. What did you say was stolen again?”

“Zlabruk!Eight prime filets! Highest quality, too!”

“I assure you we feed our men well,” responded another, who looked like a giant frog in full uniform. “And they earn more than enough to not go off after a very hot and difficult mission, break into a place, and steal a bunch of—steaks.”

“Zlabruk!That’s imported, you know! Expensive!”

“Well, I don’t think—” began the squirrel, then stopped and thought a moment. “Steaks… Who in the world would break in and steal slabs of meat? I wonder… Wait here a moment. I want you to speak to someone else.”

The giant walking squirrel vanished into a nearby building and was gone for two or three minutes while the others fiddled around and the Agonite cop kept muttering about imported filets. Finally the big gray lump of fur emerged, but he was not alone. Following him was a much more amorphous creature, a creature Gus had seen before, and when it spoke through an orifice it formed within itself, it was unmistakably the same one as well.

“I am Colonel Lunderman,” said the Leeming. “Now, what’s this about someone coming in and stealing a bunch of steaks?”

Gus wasn’t at all sure whether to be relieved or fearful at the colonel’s appearance on this side of the ocean. As much as he needed an ally, he felt he could trust this character about as far as he could throw him.

Just great!he thought to himself. So now what the hell do I do?