Chalker, Jack L. - Well of Souls 02 (45 page)

It had been a marriage of convenience, of course. All Makiem marriages were marriages of convenience in a race that had no sex except one week a year, underwater, when they had nothing but. The convenience of the scoundrels that ran Makiem, the inconvenience of himself, naturally. She was the good minister's daughter, and, if anything, she was slicker and nastier than her father.

What a team we'd make, he sighed once again, if only we could be on the same side!

"You needn't pretend, my dear. You know everything and I know it, so what's the difference? You can't go this time."

"I go where you go," she responded. "It is law and custom. And you cannot stop me!"

He chuckled. "But it's cold up there, baby! What good would you be as a sleeping beauty?"

She reached over, opened a wicker basket, and removed something. It was a slightly different design, but unmistakably a spacesuit.

He gaped. "How long have you had that thing?" he asked.

"Since Makiem," she replied smugly.

Camp 43, Gedemondas

The trails weren't bad. Gedemondans, it was known, were large creatures, and limited but steady use by the horselike Dillians had made them even more comfortable, on the whole around two meters wide.

It was a strange party that set off from the chilly shack into the snow cover: Tael, the Dillian guide, was in the lead, then the two Lata, occasionally walking but more often riding on Tael's back, then Renard leading the winged pegasus, Doma, with the strange figure of Mavra Chang tied between wings and neck. The air was becoming cold; there was little conversation between them, nor was much possible without yelling, for blowing wind howled through the rocky clefts as if it, too, were a strange and living creature of this strangest of worlds.

It was only on the occasional breaks, done mostly for Renard's benefit, that they could say anything. The plain was far behind; the twists and turns that the switchbacked trail forced upon them had all but the confident Tael totally lost, and the bright snow reflecting the glare of the sun, even when cut with sun goggles, made distance impossible to judge. They were tiny figures moving in a sea of white.

The trail itself seemed often lost in the snow, yet Tael went on as if it were a paved and marked highway, never hesitating in the slightest— and the footing was always there.

After they had been climbing for what seemed like a full day, they rounded one more mountain curve and, suddenly, the plain was spread out below them once more.

"Wait!" Mavra called to them. "Look! They've arrived!"

They stopped, and saw immediately what she meant. Tiny puffs of orange seemed everywhere in the air, and large numbers of creatures could be seen erecting tents and digging into the rock that was the start of the mountains. The cabin was invisible, but they all knew that, if it was there at all, it was being converted into a fort.

"Look at them!" Tael breathed. This was her first taste of armies and war. "There must be thousands of them!"

"The Yaxa," Vistaru said flatly. "They will be coming up only a day or so behind us. This is not good."

Tael laughed confidently. "Let them try and find the trail!" she boasted. "Without a guide they haven't a prayer!"

Mavra turned and looked out at the sky. There were thin, wispy clouds and an occasional big, fat cumulus puff, but it was basically crystal clear.

"They'll follow our own tracks," she told them. "There's no snow, nothing to cover them. They might mistake them for animal tracks, or Dillians alone, but where a four-footed animal or Dillian can go, so can they."

The centaur frowned. A good snow guide, Mavra thought, but naïve as hell. Dillia must be a very peaceful place.

"We could lay a false trail," Tael suggested. "Run tracks off a cliff. It's not that hard. The powder here could be brushed for a few hundred meters."

Mavra considered it. "All right, do it," she told them. "But it won't do much. Slow them up, get a couple, that's all. Better than nothing, though."

They rigged the deception fairly simply. The Dillian girl picked a point, walked out to where there seemed to be continuous snow, then stopped. Renard removed his small snowshoes and followed gingerly behind in her tracks, then guided her feet as she backed up into her old tracks.

Mavra surveyed the results. "A little too deep," she said critically. "An experienced tracker would catch on, but I think it'll work. Does that snow fall off there and I just can't see it, or what?"

Tael laughed. "This is the edge of what we call Makorn Glacier. A river of slowly moving ice with a snow-cover on top. There is a crevasse there at least three hundred meters down and a good ten meters wide. I could almost feel the edge of it."

The small Lata then went back after they went around another bend with Tael's fur hat and used it to fill in the tracks. Not an expert job, but they weren't trying to fool experts.

They went on, into the hex and up at the same time. More frequent rest periods were called for. The air was becoming thin.

During one of these stops, Mavra said, "Still no sign of the Gedemondans. Hell, if they're big bastards there must be awfully few of them to be this invisible."

Tael shrugged. "Who knows how many there are? Sometimes there seem to be a hundred sneaking around the mountain tops; sometimes you will go completely through the hex without seeing one. That is not the trouble here, though."

"Huh?" they all said at once.

She nodded. "We're being watched. I can feel it. I'm not sure where they are, but there is certainly more than one. I could barely hear some intermittent deep breathing."

They looked around, suddenly nervous. No one could see anything.

"Where?" Renard pressed.

Tael shook her head. "I don't know. Mountain sounds are deceptive. Close, though. They have networks of trails they, ah, discourage us from using."

"They'd have to," Mavra said dryly. She strained but could hear nothing but the howling wind.

She was freezing to death, too, despite being covered by an amazingly resourceful patchwork set of clothes. Her face and particularly her ears were killing her; still, it was no worse on her than on the others, and they didn't complain.

"Let's keep going," Hosuru said after a moment's listening. "If they're shadowing us, they'll either make a move or they won't. Just keep listening and looking."

"Don't strain too hard," Tael warned. "If they don't want to be seen, they won't be. All bright white like the snow, they could be ten meters away and out in the open and you'd never know it."

They pressed on.

They reached Camp 43 before sundown, but Tael insisted that this would be their stop for the night. "We couldn't possibly make the next camp before nightfall, and you don't want to be out here after dark."

"I hope those Yaxa or whatever feel the same way," Renard worried.

"I hope they don't," Mavra responded. "That'll kill a lot more of them a lot quicker. Vistaru? Hosuru? You're nocturnals. You want to try this trail in the dark?"

Vistaru laughed. "Not in the dark, not in the daylight, not anytime without a guide who knows what she's doing!" she responded.

The crude shelter was built for two Dillians; the stalls were fine for Tael and Doma, and the others just sort of scrunched in as best they could. With the supplies, it was hard to close the door, and the old iron fireplace was so close to them they had to choose freezing or burning. But, it would do.

It had been a trying day; they were all dead tired, half-snowblind, and ready for a rest. There seemed little point in setting a guard; if the Gedemondans wanted to do them in, they could do it any time. If they wanted contact, well and good. And if the Yaxa coalition party somehow managed to close in on them, they had little means to fight it anyway. As the fire burnt down, they slept.

* * *

There was a wrongness somewhere. It disturbed her in her sleep, and her mind fought for it, tried to seize on it, and it seemed somehow elusive yet present and growing more and more ominous.

Mavra Chang awoke, lying motionless. She looked quickly around. They were all there; not only Tael and Renard, but even Doma snored.

She tried to figure out why she was suddenly wide awake. There was some sense of alarm, something that had her suddenly as clear-headed as ever when danger threatened. She reached for the source with her mind and eyes. It was chilly now, yes; it must be well into the night. But that wasn't it.

Doma suddenly awoke and shook her great head. She snorted nervously. Mavra lifted her head a little, sure now that she wasn't going crazy. The pegasus sensed it, too.

There it was. A noise. Scrunch-scrunch; scrunch-scrunch, over and over, a little louder each time.

Someone— or something— was walking rather calmly and steadily up the trail, something confident even in the night and snow.

Scrunch-scrunch, the snow was falling under its feet. It seemed to be big.

And now the noise stopped. Whatever it was was right outside the door, she knew. She started to call out, to warn the others, but somehow she couldn't seem to make a move, only stare at that closed door. Even Doma seemed suddenly calm, but expectant. She was reminded of the Olbornian priest's power over her, but this wasn't like that. It was— something else. Something strange, completely new.

The door opened, surprisingly silently considering its rusting hinges and bad fit. A blast of chilly air hit her, and she felt the others stir uncomfortably.

A huge white furry shape was there. It was tall— tall enough that it had to bend a little to stick its head just inside the door. A face looked in at her, and smiled slightly. It raised a huge hairy white paw and put a huge, clawed index finger to its mouth.

Gedemondas— a Back Trail

Antor Trelig cursed for the thousandth time. One mishap after another on this damned journey, he thought sourly. Avalanches in front of them, the trail undercut— almost as if someone was trying to stop them or slow them down, although no one had been sighted of any kind.

The trail was a lot more obvious on the map than it was in reality; it wasn't well maintained, some of the shelters were in disrepair and obviously had been so for years, and the trail often vanished without visible landmarks, causing the Agitar to have to probe gingerly ahead with their tasts. Their party of fourteen— twelve Agitar, he, and his not-so-loyal wife, Burodir— was now nine, still including Burodir, unfortunately.

But the landmarks were reasonably clear; the terrain was not bad, most of the climbing having been at the beginning, and as many times as the trail had vanished it had also been crystal clear, as if tramped down by the soles of many feet.

This had worried him at first, until he was reminded by the Agitar that this was, after all, somebody's hex, and somebody had to live in it.

In a way, that thought was the most disturbing. They had neither seen nor heard a native in all this time, in all this way. It made no sense at all that there shouldn't be some creatures somewhere along the way, except the occasional panic-inducing arctic hare, or whatever it was, and a few small weasellike creatures.

And yet— somehow, they'd made it. Somehow they'd kept to this trail. Somehow they were going all the way. He was, anyway. What the others did was up to them.

He studied the maps and aerial photos from the Cebu scouts. He knew pretty much where he was, although without the prescouting he would have been lost and dead now, he had to admit. The inner ring of mountains, slightly taller than the outer but hidden before now, was clearly ahead. And, just on the other side of that big, glacier-carved peak over there, and over a bit, was a U-shaped valley with a very important large object lying askew on a ledge.

They would not make it today, that was for sure. But sometime tomorrow afternoon, certainly, if nothing else happened.

Along the Intermountain Trail

"Ifrit! My field glasses!" Ben Yulin commanded. The cow reached into the pack of her cowife and quickly extracted them.

"Here, Master," she said eagerly, handing them to him. He took them without a word and put them to his eyes.

They were not merely binoculars; they had additional special lenses that helped his nearsightedness. With the already ground prescription snow goggles, they brought anything within their range into sharp, clear focus.

"Trouble?" growled a low voice next to him.

He looked away and over at the thing. It looked like a walking hairy bush, about as tall as he, with no apparent eyes, ears, or other organs. In actuality, it was not a single creature, but a colony of thirty-six Lamotien, adapted to the cold weather and the snow.

"That shack up there," he pointed suspiciously ahead. "Doesn't look right, somehow. I don't want any more tricks like that fake trail. We lost two good cows there." Neither his, he failed to add.

"We lost thirty brothers, don't forget!" snapped the Lamotien. "We agree it looks strange. What should be done about it?"

Yulin thought a minute, trying to find a good solution without risking his noble neck or his possessions. "Why don't a couple of you go on up? Turn white or something and take a look around."