07. Ghost of the Well of Souls (38 page)

"Sorry, my guests, but I fear I will be slightly deaf for a while. I hope not forever, but even if so, it would be worth it. Victory is worth any price."

"It looks like the price was real high, particularly among the Sanafeans," Ming noted.

"Yes, they put up a much tougher fight than we hoped. Fortunately, we had contingency plans for such eventualities, and this is the result."

"It doesn't seem to me that you won anything, General," Ming replied. "I mean, the object wasn't to kill, it was to get that whatever it was you wanted to get, or did I misunderstand you?"

"No, you're quite right. They are bringing it to us now. There were a half-dozen or so survivors, and they gave me their word and went to get it. That is what we are waiting for."

"You really think they're gonna come back and bring you this trophy?"

"I do. The price is that I do not blow up the rest of their reefs. You see,
they
can't survive without their reefs. The reefs not only are at the heart of their food chain, it's where they bear and nurture their young. 1 daresay we probably killed quite a number of the clan's children today, before they could ever taste the freedom of the open sea."

"Some deal! And as soon as we're gone, the other clans'll come in and wipe out the rest of them and take over here anyway."

"Not my problem. Ah! I see that this affair is close to a conclusion . . ."

Coming from a valley between two blasted reefs was a small contingent of Sanafeans. Most were adults, but there was a difference you couldn't quite pin down in some of the larger ones in the rear.

The wives and mothers, I bet,
Ming guessed, shaking her head.

In the front of the group, and bearing in his hand an odd-shaped piece of, well, something, was a young male, perhaps too young to have yet been a warrior in the big contests like this one.

The young creature stopped just short of the Chalidang line, and General Mochida, sensing the hesitancy, descended to the young one's level.

"I am Colonel General Mochida. You have brought what we came for?"

The young male quivered, as if summoning up courage, but he replied, in a shaky yet clear voice, "I am Kirith, High Lord of the Paugoth. In the name of all our sacred gods, take this cursed thing and depart our lands."

Ari and Ming both had a sudden sense that there was more meaning to this sad scene than merely surrender with honor. It was unlikely that the old lord had been the father of someone this young; he was too big and too old for that.

Most likely Mochida's bombs had killed his grandfather and his father, and possibly his older siblings as well. A second look at the remains of the carnage below showed harpoons with expanding heads in almost every intact body.

The Chalidangers who'd recovered first had descended and finished off those of the enemy still living.

Mochida extended one of his two extra long tentacles and took the object, then immediately moved up and away.

He moved toward the large ship, tapped on the side in what seemed to be a code, and a panel slid back noisily to reveal a water-filled central compartment aboard the vessel.

"Put the medical people and the wounded inside the ship," he instructed. "We'll sail into Kalinda and get the benefits of modern medicine, at least. The rest of you form up and prepare to follow the ship."

"You're going into Kalinda
now
?" Ari asked incredulously. "There's no way you're fit or in any numbers to resist internment!"

"I have no intention of being interned," the General responded. "We are going to go in unarmed and request the right to fair return under the Neutrality Treaties. We will be escorted directly to the capital and we will then be unceremoniously thrown out through the Zone Gate. There are only . . . oh, I'd say 115 or so of us. I should think that word of this should make your people more relaxed about us. We have what we were after. I hope to receive word from Quislon that we have another shortly. If so, that will leave only one piece of the Straight Gate left to acquire. If not, we'll have another bloodbath at some point before it is all gone. Our air-breathing agent has proven extremely capable."

"Yeah? And what good is even
that
if you can't get the last piece?" Ari asked him. "And, if I remember, that's the one nobody could find."

"Oh, I am pretty certain where it is," the General responded. "And I think you might be as surprised as everyone else when you find out. And you
will.
I would love to take you to Chalidang to meet Their Majesties. I'm certain that they would be thrilled to have you for dinner. But now you're my native guide. What happens from this point is going to depend on who is or is not waiting for me when I reach Zone. And you,
both
of you, shall accompany me. I and my men will soon be strangers in a very strange land. We appreciate our native guide."

One of these days, somebody is going to kill that asshole squid,
Ari commented.
He reminds me of my uncle Jules.

Don't they all,
Ming sighed.

An Imtre who had splashed down into the water approached the General.

"Yes?"

"Sir, beg to report that General Kusdik and Minister Krare are both dead. Assassinated."

"What! But Kusdik was aboard this very ship! And Krare was supposedly waiting at the Kalindan border!"

"They were, sir, but—well, something got them. Just like they got the others."

A nervous chill radiated from the General in spite of his triumph. All the deaths he'd seen, all the deaths he'd just caused, and these two were the ones that affected him.

"Kincaid?"

"Yes, sir. At least we assume so in the case of the minister. On the ship, well, er, he left a note."

"He did
what
?"

"Y-Yes, sir. It said that we were all to tell the Empress that she would be the last, and that there were only two to go. And he—he added something. Something for you."

"For
me
?
But I'm not from his damned universe! What concern of his am
I
?"

"He said, well, he—"

"Come on! Out with it!"

"He said that you should be told that he didn't like genocide no matter who did it. That he was very busy now but that he expected he would get around to you sooner or later."

"Figures. Has my great staff and would-be replacements figured out yet what the devil Kincaid
is
that he could get this close to us? And I mean, the minister would have been in a water-breathing atmosphere, like here, not air like the others. How can he do that?"

"I don't have word on it, sir, but I'll have them send queries as soon as we're in high-tech. If they know anything now, they'll tell us and I'll tell you."

"Very well. Go! Let's get moving here!"

"Problems, General?" Ming asked, not sounding worried about his health and welfare.

"You know Kincaid. Or knew him anyway. Tell me what you know."

"Not much, really. Just the usual. Josich was Emperor, and he went to war very much like you do and at one point suffered losses severe enough to set back his plans for months. In fact, it turned out to be such a loss of momentum that it cost him the war. He took it out on the planet that had fought so hard and stalled him for so long, and he blew the entire planet up, along with over four billion sentient creatures. Just like you did this afternoon, only on an imaginably larger scale. Kincaid's whole family was on that world, but he wasn't at the time. He's been out to get Josich and every single high-level individual regardless of rank or position or power ever since, fanatically so, to the exclusion of all else. He won't even be deterred by hostages. He's a machine, General, as well as a madman, and if he says he's going to get you, he'll get you. He followed Josich and the remnants of the Hadun court here, and from the sound of it, he's gotten far more than the one in Zone that we knew about."

"Yes, that's true. Of the more than twenty people who came in with the Empress, we're down to just two, including Her Majesty. It will make for an interesting situation if our agent is present in Zone when I come through holding another piece of this jigsaw puzzle. I am convinced that so long as Josich remains in Chalidang and in the palace there, she can not be gotten, even if someone were invisible. The controls and security are just too perfect. But if she comes out, well, then it is a different story. So far nobody has been able to protect anyone outside of that level of security. And Josich will have to come out if we have the Quislon piece."

"Have to?"

"Yes. Again, you will see, when it is time."

"If I were you, I wouldn't be counting too much on him stopping with your Empress," Ari noted. "He's added you to his list now."

"And that should worry you," the General responded ominously.

"Oh?"

"You see, I have given orders to every single one of my people. If I should die, for any reason, they are to kill you immediately."

Quislon

JAYSU WAS FREE TO  FLY AT DAWN, BUT IT DID NOT EXCITE HER AS much as it should have. The landscape she'd awakened to was among the most barren she'd ever seen, and she wondered how she would even get food and drink for the long journey ahead.

To the north there was a mountainous landscape with noticeable green all about and even a waterfall in view, but it was distorted by the gauzelike effect of the hex barrier. She could see the Customs station and the triple fencing that went as far as the eye could see, and she knew that she didn't dare go back that way. Even if she could have flown over before, she surely would face a trap now.

That left Quislon, the object of her long journey but also a place definitely not made for Amborans. She wondered, in fact, how the two Pyrons were going to make it, considering how barren it seemed.

She launched herself into the air, suddenly conscious of where she'd lost some feathers and had perhaps gotten a scrape coming through that fencing, but finding, too, that it was an endurable nuisance and not a debilitating injury.

Before her was a cold, hard desert, with hard-packed rock and ancient windblown canyons and tablelands. It was clear that nothing had ever lived in this region, and she couldn't imagine how such a place could support a large population of anything, not unless they got moisture from somewhere belowground and ate rocks.

She climbed, hoping to spot some hidden pool, some oasis, some sign of green, but there was nothing at all. Here and there were curious clusters of what at first seemed to be natural shapes, but after realizing how organized and perfectly shaped they were, she realized they were pyramid-shaped buildings. Still, there was nothing to indicate fires coming from any of them, nor could she see any sign of creatures moving about, nor even roads that would connect the structures and other clusters. She flew directly over one and got the oddest series of empathic impressions. It wasn't that there was nothing recognizable there, but there was so much it overwhelmed her senses. About the only use she could get for this was the limits of the habitation, which stretched solidly through all the structures and some distance beyond. She realized that they were underground, and the structures were not houses or buildings, but some kind of entranceways to different parts of the world below.

Now, at least, she understood why even the most evil saw their only chance at grabbing this sacred object to be the one time it was brought out for ceremonies.

She hadn't seen the two Pyrons, either, and suspected they were keeping out of sight somewhere, possibly resting. They were more comfortable in the dark.

For a while she followed the curious tracks, and eventually caught up with Wally's group, which included a dozen or so of those horrid Jerminins. They seemed to be taking turns hauling huge cubes on giant sleds, illustrating their strength, but what was in those cubes was a mystery.

She thought she spotted Wally, flattened down and probably asleep on one of the sleds just in back of a cube. The little winged monkeylike creatures were there, too, each one sitting atop a cube, and she decided that she'd rather not have a confrontation with them if she could help it. Best they not know that she'd made it this far, let alone all three of them.

She was curious that they were not heading due south, but southeast. It didn't make sense if they were going to try a snatch at the ceremonies at Quislon Center, but she couldn't waste time shadowing them. She'd been told to get to Quislon Center as quickly as possible, and that had to be her duty.

She would have to undergo some fasting, but if she could find some water, somewhere, anywhere in this barren place, she could make it in just a couple of days.

It turned out to be easier than she thought.

Thirsty, heading south, she passed over a particularly elaborate complex and decided that, if she was here to speak to the locals, she should try and make contact. Everyone had warned her that they were very ugly, but she was beginning to see that looks had little to do with good and evil, the spiritual and the profane.

She circled and landed in front of the largest pyramid structure near twilight, figuring that if the natives were nocturnal or diurnal, it would be a good time to make contact. She could feel beneath her the sense of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of creatures moving about, all with complex and overwhelming empathic waves, but far too dense for her to pick out any and make any sense of it. Their lives, almost entirely underground, must extend to great but deep complexes. Since this was a nontech hex, she wondered if they might be blind.

"Hello!" she called out. "I am Jaysu, priestess and servant of the Grand Falcon of Ambora. I am on my way by invitation to witness your great forthcoming religious affirmation, but I fear that I am unable to forage or find food and water. Does anyone guard these buildings? Can anyone hear my call for assistance?"

There was an odd reaction. The area directly beneath her and extending to the big structure simply stopped, as if a stampede of wild animals had somehow been frozen in its tracks. She sensed that she'd been heard, and that somehow this had been instantly communicated to a large mass of others. It was fascinating. While the rest of the complex went on, this area suddenly seemed to lock on as if the individuals within were now one organism. A door in the pyramid that she hadn't realized was there opened, and a grotesque face with big round eyes and insectlike fangs peered out and looked at her.