03. Gods at the Well of Souls (6 page)

How long this had gone on, he could not know, but slowly, ever so slowly, he  began to come out of the stupor. Rational thought returned with the same  slowness, in fits and starts. He was unable to distinguish what was real from  what was dream, but eventually he came to understand that for some reason that  drug no longer affected him, that its power was fading with increasing  quickness. 

There was some sense of denial about that fact. He didn't want to come out of  it, didn't want to think and perhaps face the pain and monotony of this life,  but his own inner strength denied him the oblivion he needed. 

What did it matter that he was no longer addicted except to add to the torture?  If they found out, they might not trust him anymore, and that would mean his  finish. 

But that, too, was an odd thought. Wouldn't death be preferable to a life of  this! 

The answer, though, was no. 

That left escape, even though he was a four-footed freak far from any home or  help, forever cut off from rational communication with the outside world. Even  if that weird new translator didn't encode everything in and out, it would  probably be useless. His mouth felt funny; it wasn't malleable as it always had  been. Even the limited communication he'd had with the handlers who had special  translators to make themselves understood was now one-way. The only sound he  seemed capable of anymore was from very deep inside and sounded more like a bray  and meant nothing. His handlers, usually none too bright underlings, had found  that amusing. 

Still, it had been a shock to find out that indeed he had changed so radically  and that after all this time of staring down at the ground, his neck was somehow  now long enough and flexible enough to allow him to look straight ahead. In  fact, it became increasingly flexible as time wore on. 

They had fused his hands to form hoofs and, after castration, had filled him  with female hormones that had produced grotesque travesties of Erdomese breasts.  Yet now the breasts seemed to have shrunk away while the legs and hooves seemed  to have solidified and changed. Through the fragmented and confused mental haze  he was in, he realized at some point that he was very, very different from what  Campos had intended or how he'd started out under the hands of those maniacal  butchers. 

His vision was weak, distorted, and without color, but it had tremendous  contrast abilities. It was hard to imagine that there were this many scales of  gray. Vision was short-range but sharp straight on, but there was little if any  peripheral vision to speak of. To see something to the side, he had to move his  head rather than his eyes. It took some getting used to once he started to try  to use his vision again for more than spotting things to step over. Anything  outside a two- to seven-meter range was a gray blur. This was true day or night,  although night was more comfortable. Bright light, even reflected, blinded him  for a minute or more after he turned to avoid it. Hearing and smell were much  more trustworthy than sight. 

I've become some kind of a horse, he realized after a while. Not any horse he  knew, but close enough. The forelegs were true forelegs, the front hooves true  hooves, and the joints angled like a horse's joints. Everything was  proportional, comfortable, balanced. His nose and mouth had elongated and  combined into an equine head, and somehow he'd grown a long bushy tail. His ears  felt funny, too, but he couldn't tell why. The one thing he still had as before  was the horn. 

A unicorn, he thought at last, the old vision coming from deep in the past. But  a unicorn with no interest in virgins; most definitely a gelding. How did it happen, and how long had it taken? No way to know, but it was likely  that those butcher bastards had access to technology far in advance of mere  mutilation, perhaps some kind of rapid genetic manipulation. 

Still, how rapid was "rapid"? Not only were the days under the drug's influence  a blur, but even when his mind had returned, his sense of time had not. When he  was hungry, which seemed to be most of the time, he ate large quantities of  grass and bushes and whatever else looked green and tempting. He wondered how  much he weighed. He didn't seem all that much bigger, certainly not true horse  size. Probably the size of a Shetland pony, but perfectly proportioned. The thought of the virgins made him aware of just what had been removed. He  remembered Alowi fondly but could not even recall what kind of sexual attraction  she'd had. It was more than the loss of ability or desire; he seemed to have  totally lost even the memories of the feelings that sexuality had brought, human  or Erdomese, male or female. 

He knew the lack of it should have bothered him, but it didn't; instead, it only  bothered him that there was now a hole somewhere inside him where something once  valued and prized had been, something now utterly excised. It was in many ways  the same as the loss of any sense of time and, oddly, no more disturbing or  important to him. 

There was a certain satisfaction in that. To deny him sexuality had been the  heart of Campos's revenge. That he neither missed it nor gave it any more  thought after this was another slap in the bastard's face. 

He had become a unique animal but a consistent one. It was stupid and  meaningless to dwell on anything he lacked, particularly something that was now  no more than a set of definitions for how a species reproduced itself. If he  could get a better handle on what it had once meant or felt like, perhaps he  would think it a tragedy, but for now it seemed somehow-liberating. When one was  without sex, one had no stereotyping, no fears or expectations based on a factor  that did not apply to one, and when one was one of a kind, as lonely as that  might become, there were neither expectations nor fears from peers. It was gone,  every last bit of it, and being gone, it took with it all sense of deprivation  or loss. It was irrelevant. "Relevant" was learning everything there was to  learn about what he now was and how he interacted with everything else. The scent he followed, whose slightest trace he could pick out of hundreds of  others, he soon realized was the scent of his own excrement. It interested  rather than revolted him to discover that he had virtually no bladder or bowel  control. It came out when it was ready and had to, but only when he was in  motion, never when he was still or asleep. Once discovered, that fact, too, was  simply discarded and not thought of again because it didn't matter. That was how  he was, period. 

Each trip through the dim forests of Liliblod found him growing more and more  comfortable with this new form and thinking about things that were important  rather than dwelling on his twin pasts, both of which seemed to have decreasing  relevance or even interest to him. Instead, he concentrated on developing his  superior sense of hearing, which could pick out the song of a distant bird or a  chorus of sonorous insects with ease, and in determining and cataloging what  each sound meant. Similarly, classifying every scent, every odor, analyzing not  only the ground and trees but the very breezes, provided vital information once  he'd matched scent to source. Since there was a mind behind that classification  system and nothing else to do but walk, smell and sound proved to be more  precise than sight had ever been. 

He knew he'd have to become an expert at this, since the same line of thought  told him that he would have no choice but to escape as soon as he felt it was  safe to do so. Not that he had any illusions about the rest of his life even if  he did get away. He would neither understand nor be understood by anyone else,  he had no hands or tentacles with which to write, and he didn't know how to read  any native languages. He'd be an animal, period, able to perhaps study and  explore for the sake of knowledge but not to interact. It wasn't what he would  really want, but it was absolutely preferable to staying where he was. Death was  better than that and more moral, but somehow he didn't want to die. Not now. Not  yet. 

The fact remained, though, that he was carrying a drug that allowed evil people  to poison other people, to steal their very minds and souls, and he simply could  not continue to be a part of that. He felt bad about what he'd already carried  for them, but to continue to serve them once he felt confident enough to get  away was unthinkable. And, too, his careful studies of Liliblod had revealed  something of the nature and nastiness of its inhabitants, and he knew that when  someone got a whim or when he was older or perhaps got sick or hurt, those who  now worked him would not hesitate to feed him to those damned tree-dwelling  monstrosities. 

He'd seen them clearly only once, although he knew their sounds and scents and  knew that they were always there, high up above, a thought that also made escape  seem attractive. Accompanied by one of his handlers, he had carried in a huge  load of what smelled like monstrous chocolate bars. Part of the payoff, he  understood, for the creatures keeping the back trails used by the couriers open  to the drug runners and no one else. And down they'd come, from the very tops of  the trees, where their vast ropelike webs created almost a roof over the hex.  Huge spiderlike creatures the size of a ten-year-old child, with eight hairy  legs that ended in small but malleable pincers and bright, shiny brown bodies  topped by demonic heads with gaping mouths and hateful, bright red eyes. He and  the handler left as quickly as possible, since chocolate had been known to send  the Liliblodians into a frenzy of uncontrollable and often violent behavior. All  female, the handler had told him. The tiny, mindless, wormlike males crawled  literally into the wombs and were sealed inside, their outer skins dissolved by  special juices releasing the sperm, and the remainder provided the food for the  brood until they were ready to be hatched. 

It was not a nice thought that so many of them, perhaps tens of thousands, were  clustered up there and could drop down at any moment if the bargain suddenly  seemed not to their liking. That was why they used "mules" like Lori for most of  the work. 

No, there would have to be an escape, and if this trail went only from Agon to  Clopta, then his escape would have to happen at one of the ends of the route. He  was pretty sure that there was no real escape in Liliblod. 

He wished he knew what had become of the others. Although he felt no physical  attraction, poor Alowi, or Julian, was still as close a friend as he had here,  and without him she was in a real mess. She would never go home, but she might  well kill herself, and that was the most worrisome thing of all. The Dillians  were probably well out of it- he'd never really understood why they were in it  in the first place, except that they'd once been human and were at least still a  bit human, as were the others. Still, they had potential lives back in their  home hex and no stake in this affair. And then there was Mavra Chang. If they  had done this to him, what had they done to her? Or was that a long-term  concern? Didn't Mavra claim that she could not be killed, that anything injured  or lost would regrow, that no damage was permanent to her? Sooner or later, no  matter what monster they'd made of her, they'd have to take her to that Well,  whatever it was. They'd have to risk it, whoever "they" might be, because the  other fellow might get there ahead of her if they didn't. Then she would be in  real trouble, but then, whoever had Chang and hadn't at least made the attempt  would probably be in worse shape. 

Well, there was little chance he'd ever find out how any of them had made out.  It was enough to try to figure out how and where to escape. 

Agon would be better geographically; it hadn't seemed overly developed for a  high-technology hex, and there was a lot of rough country in the north, and it  was connected, if he remembered correctly, to other hexes for vast distances.  The trouble was, he wasn't ever technically in Agon; the cleverly concealed  entrance to the headquarters was in Liliblod even though the whole underground  complex was under Agon's soil. It wouldn't be much of a run to bypass it, but  there were so many guards and so much in the way of defenses that it was a sure  route to capture and disaster. 

That left Clopta, which seemed almost paved over from the moment one reached the  border, as overdeveloped as Agon seemed just right. But the warehouse there  where the trail ended was well within the border and was in the middle of what  appeared to be an industrial district. Most of the time a handler was right  there, waiting, but every once in a while they missed him, and he would have to  make his way several blocks along dark back alleys between warehouses and  factories to the rendezvous. If they did it again, he would go. He felt as ready  as he would ever be, and the alternatives seemed increasingly bleak. They  wouldn't expect it; they thought he still needed that drug. 

He was always surprised when he reached the border, even though he could smell a  bit of Clopta as he grew near. With no time sense and no more drug craving, he  never seemed to know how long he'd been on the trail or just how far along it he  might be. It was daylight by the time he reached it this time, and that meant he  would have to stop and wait. There were clear instructions that under no  circumstances was he to enter Clopta in daylight or while there was any traffic  in the immediate area. 

The hex boundary remained the most dramatic feature of the Well World, even now.  It appeared to his altered eyes as a thin but infinite piece of semitransparent  gauze at which the endless Liliblodian forest stopped with amazing suddenness,  replaced by a brightly lit but sterile-looking mass of metallic buildings. It  was hard to look at them too long; sunlight would catch some window or piece of  polished metal, and he would be suddenly blinded. Muffled sounds of much  activity came through the barrier: sounds of machinery operating, men yelling,  vehicles going this way and that, huge doors sliding open or closed-all the  sounds of a manufacturing district, although what they made there he did not  know.