Midnight at the Well of Souls

NEAR THE IVROM BORDER IN THE UMIAU NATION

They presented a sight unprecedented on the Well World: a broad raft of logs, pulled along by ten Umiau wearing harnesses. On the raft were a Dillian centaur, a giant stag, a two-meter-tall bat, and a Czillian, plus a well-depleted bale of hay and a box of dirt.

“Why can’t the Umiau just take us all the way up?” Vardia asked Brazil.

The stag turned his head. “I still can’t get used to the idea that you are in two places at once, so to speak,” he said through his radio speaker. The splashing and sound of the wind on the water made it hard to hear his little box if you weren’t positioned just right.

“I have a hard time thinking that the little captain I came here with is a huge deer,” she replied. “Now answer the question.”

“Too dangerous,” he told her. “We’re going as far up as possible, but you eventually start getting some nasty currents, whirlpools, and other stuff. They don’t get along too well with the inhabitants, either. The Umiau would make out, but those nasty fish with the twenty rows of teeth would chew up this raft and us before we could be properly introduced. No, we’ll take our chances with a hundred and sixty kilometers of Ivrom.”

“What is Ivrom, Nathan?” Wuju asked. She had gotten the translator, and overcome most of her reservations. He treated her gently, and said only the right things, and she had eased up. There was still that something different about him, that indefinable something they all sensed but couldn’t put their fingers on.

Wuju had talked it out with Cousin Bat. “How would you feel,” Bat had asked her, “if you’d awakened not a Dillian but a regular horse? And looked down at your own dead body? Would you still be the same?”

She had accepted that explanation, but Bat didn’t believe it himself. What had changed in Brazil was the added air of total command, of absolute confidence and certainty. And he had as much as admitted he knew the answer to the total puzzle. He could get in to the control center, control the world—or more.

Bat was more encouraged now, really. So much the better. The man with the answers had no hands, couldn’t even open a door by himself. Let him get in, Bat thought smugly. Let him show how to work things.

“Nathan!” Wuju said louder. “What is Ivrom? You haven’t told us!”

“Because I don’t know, love,” he replied casually. “Lots of forest, rolling hills, plenty of animals, most familiar. The atlas said there were horses and deer there. It’s a nontechnological hex, so it’s the sword-and-spear bit again, probably. The intelligent life form is some kind of insect, I think, but nobody’s sure. Those active volcanoes to our left—that’s Alisstl, and it’s a formidable barrier. The people there are thick-skinned reptiles who live in temperatures close to boiling and eat sulfur. Probably nice folks, but nobody drops in.”

She looked over at the range of volcanic mountains. Most were spouting steam, and one had a spectacular lava fountain along a side fissure. She shivered, although it wasn’t cold.

“This is the way to travel if you can!” Brazil said with enthusiasm, taking a deep breath of the salty air. “Fantastic! I used to sail oceans like this on big ships, back in the days of Old Earth. There was a romance to the sea, and those who sailed it. Not like the one-man space freighters with their computers and phony pictures of winking dots.”

“How soon will we land?” Wuju asked him, a bit ill at the rolling and tossing he liked so much. She was happy to see him obviously enjoying himself, talking like his old self again, but if it was at the cost of this kind of upset stomach, she would take land.

“Well, they’ve gone exceptionally fast,” he replied. “Strong devils, and amazing in their element. I’ll have to remember that strength. Wouldn’t do to underestimate our Dr. Skander.”

“Yes, but how long?” she insisted.

“Tomorrow morning,” he replied. “Then it’ll be no more than a day or so to Ghlmon—we won’t have to cross the whole hex of Ivrom, just one facet—and another day to the top of the bay in Ghlmon.”

“Do you really think we’ll meet them—the others, that is—up there?” Vardia asked. “I’m most anxious to free my other self—my sister—from those creatures.”

“We’ll meet them,” Brazil assured her, “if we beat them—and we certainly should at this rate. I know where they have to go. When they get there, we’ll be ready for them.”

“Will I be able to scout this Ivrom tonight?” Cousin Bat called out to him. “I’m sick and tired of fish.”

“I’m counting on you, Bat,” Brazil replied laughing. “Eat up and tell us what’s what.”

“No more midnight rescues from the jaws of death, though,” Bat replied in the same light vein.

“You never know, Bat,” Brazil replied more seriously. “Maybe this time I’ll rescue you.”

The Umiau had been remarkably uninformed about Ivrom, which wasn’t as strange on the face of it as it would seem. The Umiau were water creatures, and their need was for technological items they could not manufacture. An alliance with the Czillians was natural; their other neighbors they at least knew from watery experience, even if they didn’t get along too well with all of them, and Aisstl was too hot to handle. Ivrom, named from the old maps and not by the inhabitants, was peaceful forests and meadows, no major rivers, although it had hundreds of tiny creeks and streams. It was a nontechnological hex, so it wasn’t easy to get to, even harder to move around in, and probably not worth the trouble. Of course, the major problem was that no one who had ever set out for Ivrom—to study, for contact, or to go through it—had ever been seen or heard from again. For that reason the party stopped on a reef, over a submerged shoal in deep water, and anchored for the night even though there would still have been time when they arrived to have made camp on or near the beach.

It did look inviting, too. The air was sweet and fresh, about twenty degrees Celsius, surprisingly comfortable humidity for a shore area because of the inland breeze, a few light, fluffy clouds but nothing that looked threatening, and a deep blue sky.

The shoreline revealed a virgin sandy beach, flat and yellow and stretching down the coast. The breakers and some obvious storms had forced driftwood onto the shore, where it had built up near the beginning of the forest. It was a very dense forest, rather dark from the thickness of the underbrush and giant evergreens, but nothing looked suspicious or sinister. As twilight deepened, they could make out an occasional small deer and a number of other animals much like muskrats, marmots, and other woodland creatures.

It reminded Brazil of a number of really pleasant places on Old Earth before they were paved over. Even the animals and birds, now flocking to roosts in the tall trees, seemed very Earthlike—far more than even the most familiar hexes he had been through.

He wished he could recall more about the place, but he couldn’t. Nobody could keep track of everything, he thought, even though the mind behind Ivrom had obviously paid a great deal of attention to a Type 41 habitat.

Insects, his mind kept telling him. But that was the kind of fact that you heard once or twice rather than recalled from personal experience, and it registered but was not something you had paid attention to at the time. Everything has changed so much it probably wouldn’t matter anyway, he thought. Evolution and natural processes like erosion and deposition, diastrophism and the other forces operated in accordance with the logic of each hex, so things were constantly changing on the Well World as they were everywhere in the universe.

Darkness totally obscured the shoreline for all but Cousin Bat, who reported that he couldn’t see anything they hadn’t seen by day.

“Well, maybe something,” Bat corrected. “I can’t be sure at this distance, though. Looks like tiny, little, blinking lights, on and off, on and off, all over the forest—moving around, too, but slowly.”

Lightning bugs, Brazil thought. Was he the only person from their little corner of the galaxy who could remember lightning bugs?

“Well, go on in, then,” Brazil told the bat after a while, “but be careful. Looks peaceful, but the place has a really spooky reputation, and except for the fact that my mind keeps insisting that the life form there is insects, I can’t think of anything else to tell you. Just watch out for insects, no matter how small or insignificant—they might be somebody we’d rather make friends with.”

“All right,” Bat responded calmly. “Insects are a normal part of my diet, but I won’t touch them if I can help it. Just a quick survey, then I’ll be back.”

They agreed and Bat took off into the darkness.

When the sun came up the next morning, Cousin Bat still had not returned.