Jack Chalker - Exiles at the Well of Souls

“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 naive 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.

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.