05. Twilight at the Well of Souls - The Legacy of Nathan Brazil (12 page)

"What's the matter?" she whispered, more puzzled than nervous.

He  gestured  with  his  head.   "Over  there.  About three or four meters beyond the cabin, right at the edge."

She stared in the indicated direction. Something dark there, she thought. No, not dark— It was hard to see in the cloudy, late-afternoon light, particularly through snow goggles she'd donned almost immediately upon their reaching the snow area, for her blue eyes provided little natural protection against snow blindness.

Cautiously, she lifted up the goggles to get a better look. Red—crimson, a red strain in the snow, very near—no, actually at the edge. And the marks of something having been dragged.

"It could be an accident," she said softly. "Or the remains of some hunter's kill."

"It
could,
"
he agreed, but now his bow was cocked. "Can you handle a weapon? I forgot to ask."

"About the only thing I might be decent with would be a sword," she sighed, a little disconsolate at the idea.

"Why not?" he shrugged, and reached back into his pack. He pulled out a scabbard—not a puny, plain sort of thing but a monstrous scabbard covered with strange, ornate designs. It was clearly a broadsword of some kind, the hilt solid, firm, and yet also ornately sculpted with the shapes of creatures she couldn't guess the true form of. He handed it to her. "Everything comes in handy sooner or later," was his only explanation.

She strapped it around her waist, the place where the humanoid part of her met the equine, and pulled out the blade. It had good balance and feel to it and seemed so perfect she found she could cut a swath with one hand. But for serious business, like skull-cracking, two hands would be best.

"Colonel?" Jodl, one of the aides, whispered. Asam nodded, and the other centaur crept slowly forward, crossbow at the ready, eyes on the cabin door itself.

All had shed their packs; in a fight, baggage would unbalance them. The advance man was light and cautious, but made no attempt at concealment. He was, after all, over two and a half meters tall and more than three long and weighed in around seven hundred kilograms, hardly the sort of being who could make a surreptitious entry.

"Who do you think it is?" she whispered to Asam. "One of your old enemies?"

He shrugged, never taking his eyes off the door. A second man started out, keeping distance and interval. They were going to approach the cabin from all sides and make sure that only one would be attacked first —if attacker there were. "Could be anybody," he told her softly. "Hired assassins, freebooters, criminals, Dillian or foreign. Hard to say."

It startled her slightly to consider Dillians as criminals or killers. They were a rough but likable and levelheaded lot. But there must be some bad ones, she realized. There always are.

They were fanned out now on all sides of the cabin, keeping at least ten meters from the cabin door. They didn't worry too much about any other place of attack; the rocky ledge gave them a measure of protection from above, the far trail was fairly clear to the eye, and the cabin sat on the edge of a sheer cliff. Thinking of the Dahbi, she considered their disregard of the cliff area a mistake. If this world had creatures that could pop up through solid rock, they had dozens that could cling to the sides of sheer cliffs or, perhaps camouflage themselves into near invisibility. Some of the latter had once almost done her in in the distant past in far-off Glathriel.

The point man had reached the area in question on the far side of the cabin. She stayed in back of the men's semicircle, feeling helpless and a little irritated that she was not up to this kind of thing. And, for all her own great mass, she was still smaller, yet no more maneuverable, than the males.

Still, she held the rear guard, sword at the ready, and pulled her goggles back down. Her eyes were already beginning to hurt slightly.

"Colonel!" the point man called, his voice echoing slightly off the walls near and far. "Party of three. Hunters. Our people. Pretty messed up. They cut 'em up and then tossed 'em over the cliff. They're forty, fifty meters down when the slope smooths out." He didn't attempt to whisper the word. If the killers were still around, they most certainly knew just where they were by now.

Asam considered, then turned back to Mavra. "Could it have been Gedemondans who did this?"

She shook her head violently. "Not a chance. If they want you dead, they just point a finger and you curl up and die."

"Didn't think so," the Colonel muttered, and turned back to the cabin. "All right, boys, let's go visitin'."

They converged, very slowly and carefully, on the cabin until the closest was only a few meters from the front door. It was Mavra who saw that, for the first time, they were twenty or thirty meters out in the open from the rock shelf above. Something was up there, a shadow, a discontinuity . . .

"Asam!"
she screamed. "Above and behind you!"

At that moment the attackers leaped off their high perches and fell toward them. There were more than a dozen of them, some armed with pikes, some with crossbows, others with swords.

They were bats—no, apes, of some kind, with bat's wings—or— Whatever they were, they were small, agile, they could fly, had blazing eyes and sharp teeth, and wore some kind of dull coppery uniform.

But they were not flying down; rather, they made a controlled plunge, like skydivers, but with some maneuverability, and they were uttering singularly alien screeches that sounded like high-pitched bagpipes trying to yodel.

Two with crossbows loosed their bolts while still falling, but they missed their target and plowed into the snow; Jodl and one other who were at an angle to the fall whirled and raised their crossbows. From a firm standing position, they didn't miss. The force of the Dillian bolts was so strong that the two struck almost seemed suddenly to fly backward, then hit the wall and start forward again, limp.

By the time this happened, though, the others were upon them, two leaping directly on Asam. They were small but extremely powerful; one fell right for his head and torso, the other for his hindquarters. The Colonel reared and twisted, flinging the one off his behind, then, dropping his own bow, he grabbed the other creature by its wicked, extended claws and heaved him against the rock wall with tremendous force.

Before Mavra knew what was happening, one was coming right at her. She waited, then thrust herself outward, both hands on the sword hilt.

The thing impaled itself on the sword and spurted thick red blood, but it was not dead; somehow, awful hate in its distorted, terribly ugly face, its right arm raised the sharp spear in its hand while its body weight on the broadsword forced Mavra down with it to the ground. She had only a split-second to decide what to do. Falling, off-balance, there was only one thing she
could
do: she accelerated the fall and rolled; the spear came at her, tearing through her thick fur coat, and she felt a stabbing pain in her left side.

Too mad to pay any attention to it, she got up with as much speed as possible and saw that the thing, still impaled on the sword, twitched and gibbered. A wave of utter fury swept over her and she reared up on her hind legs and came down, forelegs with their heavy steel shoes crashing into the thing again and again and again.

Meanwhile, the rest of the creatures were down and slashing now. They were effective; two of the centaurs were down, bolts or spears in them, but Asam still stood, a bloody but superficial wound on his equine body's left side. Rearing, turning, charging, all the time yelling at the top of his lungs, he charged the things again and again. One of the creatures managed a roll and tried to take off into the air, throwing a spear at the raging Colonel. It struck, but all he did was flinch, cry out, more in fury than in pain. He reached around, pulled the spear out of his side, and threw it at the now airborne attacker. The spear struck the thing, and it paused for a moment, then fell like a rock over the side of the cliff.

Mavra whirled, oblivious to the pain, and charged into the midst of the fight. Suddenly leathery wings seemed to strike her in the face, then there was a massive shock, so hard it felt as if her brain were reverberating inside her skull, and then there was darkness. She never even felt herself fall.

She felt as if she were drowning in a sea of thick liquid, unable to get her bearings, unable to see anything but the swirling wet mass that was all around her. She tried to struggle against it, tried to fight its overwhelming, engulfing motion, but it was impossible. There was pain, dull throbs and sharp stabbing sensations about which she could do nothing, and it was alternatingly suffocatingly hot then icy cold. She thrashed out at the swirling, liquid mass, tried to beat it off.

There seemed to be others in the mass as well; strange shapes and faces that would occasionally focus and then fly away. Some were horrible, gargoylelike creatures that swooped in and out but out of her reach, jabbering and mocking her; others were more familiar, yet no less threatening: giant, catlike creatures with glowing eyes; tiny, mulelike beasts whose eyes showed agony; phantom minotaurs, great scorpions, phantoms out of her past.

In the midst of all this activity, there stalked a small, frail-looking figure, his back to her, oblivious to all the horrors. She reached out for him, tried to call to him, but the liquid that she seemed suspended in prevented that, though he seemed oblivious to it.

Finally she managed some sort of scream, a scream of terrified helplessness. He
must
hear! He must! He must! She concentrated all she could muster on the walking figure.

He stopped, seemed to hear, and slowly turned. It was the face of Nathan Brazil she saw, and he stared back, looking more bored than sympathetic.

"Brazil! You-must-help-me!" she gasped, reaching out a hand to his.

He smiled, took out a coin and flipped it to her. "Glad to be of service," he responded lightly. "Any old time. Got to go now. I'm God, you know. Too many things to do. . . ."

He turned from her and walked into the mists, not heeding her anguished cries, then faded into the swirling, milky whirlpool and was lost from view.

She was alone, alone again with the liquid and the horrors that floated by her, mocking her, striking out at her.

Alone.

"Help me!" she screamed at nobody in particular. "Will no one help me now?"

Figures appeared, kind-looking human figures. A handsome, middle-aged man and a stunningly beautiful woman. They stretched out their arms to her, beckoned her to come to them, to run to their protection. She started for them, but suddenly a great dark shadow came out of the whirlpool and intervened between the pair and her. A great, angelic shape in white robes, it smiled at her even as it put out its own outstretched arms.

She hesitated, then started to approach, but the kindly figure began to undergo a terrible metamorphosis, changing from its human perfection into some sort of hideous, ugly frog-creature that gibbered and drooled and turned from her to devour her parents far in the distance, laughing as it did so.

She felt herself falling, down, down, into some sort of pit still awash in that liquid that now had the foulness of decaying garbage.

She struggled even more against the noxious odor, reached out for something to grab onto, but no one was there, no one at all. She was sinking, sinking further into the filth and slime, and the terrible creatures still floated around laughing, mocking, joking, and jabbing.

A tough-looking pasty-yellow face with hair nearly white appeared at the edge, smiled at her, and offered a hand. But the hand decayed as Mavra touched it, became a skeletal thing. The infection finally consuming the old woman, and when that happened she felt herself sinking even more into the bottom layers of slime. She felt more and more alone, more and more like she was going to remain forever in this bottomless pit of torment and corruption.

Now another face appeared, a kind face, a face that was representative of all the races of Old Earth, a handsome face that said it wanted to help. He reached out his own hand and took hold of her, pulling her up, up from the muck and the mire, and for a moment she thought she was free. She could see air ahead, and stars, millions of twinkling, blinking lights spread everywhere before her.

There was a sound, a loud explosion somewhere near her, and as she looked again in horror, her savior's face seemed to be coming apart, exploding grotesquely, and the grip slipped.

"Gimball!"
she screamed. "
No!
No! My husband . . ."

But he was gone, and she was alone again, sinking again in the filth, never free of the swirling liquid, and it seemed to her as if the gibbering creatures were enjoying it all the more now.

Black shapes moved in, bound her, sliced her up into pieces of herself, made her a deformed, helpless monster. Still she struggled against them, fought the dark forces pushing her deeper and deeper in the muck. Another, misshapen, mutilated like herself, approached as the creatures swirling around started to close in on her, to choke her off. A gargoyle raised a spear and thrust it at her, hate in its eyes, but the other moved quickly, took the spear, and vanished, too, into the corruption.

A purplish light broke through the muck, and she heard Obie's voice, calling to her, and she reached the light. "I'm your magic genie," he told her. "Where in the universe do you want to go?"

"Everywhere!" she cried, and, in fast, flashing scenes she did. Yet, there was something wrong, very wrong. Every place they went had more of the foul corruption she thought she had escaped. Every place had more and more, all stinking, rotting, garbage.

The purple glow faded, and standing there, once more, was Nathan Brazil. He shrugged and gave her a crooked smile. "Well, what did you expect?" he asked her. "After all, I created the damn place in my own image."

And there was just the swirling, engulfing liquid and the stench and corruption, the chills and burning sensations, the pain, and nothing else. Nothing. Nothing.