03. Quest for the Well of Souls (13 page)

The sight of the fast-approaching bow chain seemed to help. The horse put on the brakes with barely fifty centimeters to spare and managed a turn.

Taking a little time to recover his breath and his nerve, Renard looked around at the crew, who were watching him curiously. For the first time he wondered whether or not he should have asked permission or something to come aboard. Two nasty-looking Ecundans were sunning themselves atop the bridge, stalked eyes staring at him; the two Twosh eyed him with expressions more bored than hostile.

He got down and nervously approached the Twosh with the cigar. "Uh, excuse me, but is this the
Toorine Trader
?"

The Twosh took a bite of its cigar, chewed, and swallowed. "Since you took so much trouble to drop in, I'll have to say yes to that."

This reply embarrassed him a little. He wasn't sure how one greeted a little pink brown-eyed bowling pin. Shake hands? No, then what would it stand on? Oh, well . . .

"My name is Renard," he tried. "I'm from Agitar."

"That's interesting," the Twosh responded helpfully.

Renard cleared his throat and tried again. "I'm, ah, representing Ambassador Ortega of Ulik."

The Twosh surveyed him critically. "My, my! Where's your other four arms?"

He sighed. "No, I'm just working with him. I'm searching for a woman, a person named Mavra Chang, who disappeared from Glathriel."

"Does she do other tricks?" the second Twosh put in.

Renard felt frustrated, and the sniggers from the rest of the crew didn't help any.

"Look," he said earnestly, "I'm an old friend of hers. I heard she was in trouble, and I've come to help. We've traced her to this ship, and I'd appreciate some help in locating her. It's extremely important."

The Twosh with the cigar eyed him suspiciously. "Important to whom?" it asked.

"To me, mostly," the Agitar replied. "And to her."

"I'll bet," the other Twosh said under its breath. "Well, if you've traced her to this ship, she must be on it someplace, eh? You're welcome to search away, although I'm afraid that on a ship at sea the crew is a bit too busy to assist you." Its black, straight eyebrows suddenly dipped until they touched the upper part of its eyes. "But I'll tell you right now it won't do any good," it whispered. Its small head gestured to the two Ecundans perched atop the bridge housing. "They ate her, you see."

For an uncomfortable moment Renard thought the little creature was telling the truth. But he dismissed it with a queasy feeling and was certain now that she was not aboard. They were trying too hard.

"You've only made landfall once since Glathriel," he told them, "and that was in Ecundo. Did you drop her there?"

The Twosh looked shocked. "Of course not! When we disembark someone, we lower him
gently
over the side!" it huffed.

Renard threw up his hands. "How you people can be so flippant about all this is beyond me!" he fumed. "That's a dangerous hex for someone like her!"

The Ecundans on top of the bridge suddenly got up on their six legs. "Say, goat-man! Are you insulting us?" one sneered. Two stingers rose.

He felt total defeat. "I give up!" he said, disgusted.

"If you think she's in Ecundo, then you'd better go there," one Twosh suggested. "The way everybody's looking for this person or whatever it is, you will have us covered in Domien. Watch it in Ecundo, though. Those two up there were thrown out for being such
nice
guys."

"Wait a minute. The way
everybody
is looking? Have others been here?"

The answer to that question the Twosh saw no reason to disguise. "Sure. Big bastard with pretty orange wings and a little bitch about as big as your knee flew in this morning. We weren't as helpful to them as we were to you, you bein' such a
nice
guy."

He was learning to ignore the sarcasm. "A Yaxa and a Lata? Did they run into each other?" He was concerned for Vistaru, from whom there'd been no word for several days.

"Considering one was perched on top of the other, I'd say they would have a hard time running into each other," the Twosh observed.

That bothered him even more, and he took great pains to describe a Lata to them to make certain they weren't putting him on some more. A Yaxa and a pink Lata—almost certainly Vistaru—
together?
It seemed almost impossible.

"Did either one seem in command?" he asked them. "I mean, did it look like one was, say, a prisoner of the other?"

The Twosh thought about it. "Nope. I wouldn't say they were buddies—but, then again, I don't think anybody could be buddies with that orange iceberg. But they sure seemed to be working together."

That bothered him. Had the Lata, for some reason, deserted Ortega after all this time and joined their old enemies? That was unthinkable—and yet, it had been so many years. People change, he told himself. Governments change, individuals change.

It didn't sound good.

"Hey, mate!" one of the Ecundans called.

He was startled. "Huh?"

"How you gonna take off?" it asked in an amused tone.

The question brought him up short for a moment. He just hadn't thought about it. The sea was too rough, and Domaru definitely needed as long a runway to take off as he did to land—and with wings spread.

He was stuck until landfall at Domien, another day in the direction opposite to where he wanted to go.

They were all snickering now. Finally it was left to Tbisi to administer the
coup de grâce
. "Passage is twelve gold pieces a day," he said, approaching Renard.

The Agitar sighed and mentally kicked himself. "I'll get it out of Domaru's bags," he said resignedly.

"That's another thing," Tbisi added. "The horse is freight. One piece per kilo."

Wuckl

The chatter of a few birds flittered back and forth between the shady trees and sometimes, although rarely, back and forth between the hex border and the forest. There was something in the air of Ecundo the Changs didn't like and soon learned to avoid if possible.

The underbrush crackled as something inordinately large moved in this placid world of bird and leaf. Whatever it was, it was not in a hurry. It moved steadily and deliberately toward the electrified fence bordering Ecundo, a sentinel in response to a silent alarm.

The creature that reached the fence was a large biped. Its body, an almost perfect oval covered with thick, wiry black hair, was suspended on enormous birdlike feet, each with five long, clawed toes. The legs looked like long helixes, making the creature appear as if standing on springs; those thick meter-long legs could bend in any direction.

The Wuckl stopped and looked at the fence and at the two unconscious creatures with curiosity. Then it walked over to the fence and almost touched it. Its head swung this way and then that on its long, golden-ringed neck, as it studied every angle of fence wire and trapped creatures.

The Wuckl was plainly puzzled by them. From a distance they had looked like bundas, but close up they looked different from anything in its experience—bundalike, but distorted somehow.

It finally decided to leave its wonder for later. The fence was not loaded with enough charge to kill a bunda, Ecundan, Wuckl, or any other large creature likely to blunder into it. It was supposed to drive intruders away, not knock them out—but one of them had tried to crawl under the fence, got stuck, and became the focus of a series of jolts. The second had grabbed the first firmly and been subjected to the abnormal shocks too. By now, the cumulative effect had knocked them out.

Although the Wuckl wore no apparent clothes, a long, thin hand reached into the side of its body and pulled out of an invisible pocket a pair of insulated gloves. The right hand re-entered and came out with what looked like large wire cutters. Donning the gloves, it carefully cut the wire strands around the unconscious creatures so that there was clearance.

The first one was then easily dragged over to the Wuckl's side of the border. The second, however, caused more trouble, since the Wuckl didn't want to cut away the entire fence. For a while it considered leaving the other one behind. But clearly, beneath their bundalike garments, these were two of a kind and should not be separated—at least not until the mystery of their origin was solved.

Finally, by reaching over and then pulling from below, the Wuckl managed to drag the unconscious Joshi across as well. Then it removed the gloves and placed them, along with the cutters, in its invisible pockets and picked up one creature with each hand as if they were weightless. It walked back down the path with them.

Toug was a forester; injured animals were not its specialty, so it headed for the house of the gamekeeper, who had a graduate degree in Animal Skills. In the almost ten minutes it took Toug to make it to the gamekeeper's, the two beings it carried never stirred.

The gamekeeper, after some initial clicking of its beak and grouching about being disturbed at dinner, grew interested when it saw Toug's burden. Quickly, all thoughts of food gone, it bade the forester to bring the two into the surgery.

The room had an operating table more than three meters long that was almost infinitely adjustable and some vats, bins, refrigerators, and the like. Special lighting was brought into play, and while Joshi was placed carefully on the tiled floor, Mavra was placed on the table, which was then adjusted to the game-keeper's convenience. It was smaller than Toug and obviously a bit older, but otherwise looked much the same.

"Where did you find these two?" it asked the forester.

"By the fence, as you see them," Toug replied. "I received a buzz alarm at Post 43 and went down to investigate."

The gamekeeper seemed bewildered. "Were they trying to get into Ecundo, then?"

"No, Senior, they were by all appearances trying to get into Wuckl," the other responded.

The gamekeeper's long neck moved as it surveyed the unconscious body. Long thin fingers probed this way and that. Finally it said, "Return to your duties. This will take some thought."

"They are not dead, then?" Toug responded with obvious concern.

The other Wuckl wagged its head in a circular motion. "No, not dead. But their systems are far too delicate for what they have received. Go, now, while I solve this riddle."

Once Toug was gone, the examination of Mavra and Josh began in earnest. The Wuckl simply could not figure them out. As animals, they did not make sense.

The brain seemed inordinately large and complex, but there was little for it to do. With such limited limb movement and a total lack of prehensility, these creatures could not possibly be of a high order. They were clearly hoofed animals. They were shaped like bundas, but their internal construction was all wrong, and their faces faced downward. The legs, muscle tone, and the like were too obviously correct to be constructs; therefore, these must be mutants, it decided. But mutations of what?

They were strange, that was certain. The Wuckl pulled down its Well World Catalog and looked through it, but nothing matched up. There were centauroids, yes, but these were not like those. In some ways they were similar to those of Glathriel, yet far enough different that the gamekeeper rejected that possibility. The others were even more remote.

It replaced the books, satisfied that these were animals, not intelligent creatures, brain structure notwithstanding.

But what to do with them? Their nervous systems had suffered tremendously. The creatures needed help or they would surely die, and though it didn't know exactly what they were, the Wuckl had not devoted so much time to becoming a senior in Animal Skills to let animals die when it was within its power to save them.

Mavra's reproductive system brought the Wuckl up short. Someone with Skills had operated on it, crudely but effectively. These were not, then, something wild.

It thought about this, and reached the only conclusion it could think of that fit the facts. It remembered that five of its fellow students had been expelled, sent to disgrace in Manual Skills for their efforts. Though quite different in result, what he had before him reminded the Wuckl of their experiment. Taking a basic animal as a start, the five had added and subtracted with abandon, rearranging limbs, taking organs from other animal stocks. They created a pair of monstrosities.

What if recent students had done the same? And, fearing discovery, they'd taken the poor creatures and left them in Ecundo to be eaten or otherwise lost to Wuckl authority?

No Wuckl could deliberately kill, so that solution to the hypothesized dilemma never occurred to the gamekeeper.

That, of course, is what these creatures must be. Hideous creations of students. It explained a lot, but the implications were even uglier. These brains might have come from high-order creatures, implanted, perhaps, in the fetal stage, growing with the creatures for—how long?

Death might be a mercy for such as these, it thought sadly, but, then, these two would never know that they were what they were, and surely would not and should not suffer for the horrors growing from the minds of others.

It would report this butchery, though; the perpetrators would be caught, and their minds adjusted to Manual Skills. Even that was too good for them, but compassion was in all Wuckl.

But what to do with these two?

To leave them as they were was unthinkable; they were not in the Catalog, they could not assimilate into the Balanced Environment. To cast them out, as had been obviously tried, was equally unthinkable.

The only answer was to readapt them to the Catalog. The problem was that the life forms of Wuckl were, on the whole, quite different from those in other hexes, except for bird and insect life. The bunda would be the easiest, of course, but much time and effort had been expended in keeping bunda out of Wuckl; adding two more would hardly be good for the ecological balance.

It went once more to its references. In a preserve, some exceptions would be tolerated. If a form in the Catalog were chosen, it could be explained and rationalized as were the animals in any foreign-animal compound. Basically, the changes would be cosmetic, of course. An animal was a complex organism, not easily built from scratch. Some needs would have to be satisfied, however; special food would be out of the question, so some modification of the digestive system would be in order. And acclimation, of course, which would be tricky with brains so complex.