Jack Chalker: Echoes of the Well of Souls

Julian sighed. “Well, now I am Lori-Julian, or Madam Lori. Husband’s name goes first here, but even if you take a dozen more wives I’ll still be the only Madam Lori.”

“I know,” Lori replied, stretching out on the pillows and sighing. “Sorry, I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“You are lucky. I got none at all. I never thought I would ever get married again. And I surely never thought I would be somebody’s wife .”

Lori frowned and looked up at her. “You were married?”

“A disaster. I will tell you about it if you want. We were divorced years ago, and after she remarried, I never saw or heard from her again. You were never married?”

“No. I lived with a string of men off and on, the last one for five years. We had just broken up for good when I got the offer to cover the meteor strike.” He smiled sadly. “Want to know the ultimate irony? I forced the issue. I was closing in on forty, and my biological clock was in screaming mode. The idea of children frightened him to death for some reason. I pressed, he left. Just moved out without a word.” The smile turned to a nasty grin. “How I’d like to see him now! ”

Julian chuckled. “Yes, it might be fun to see Holly now, too. I’ve got twice her cleavage in both ways. Useful, too. They actually are ‘jugs,’ you might say, holding water until near the time of birth, when Mother Nature throws a switch inside. You think you have problems. Erdomese gestation is almost a year long, and the little buggers have hooves.” She lay down beside him. “We can get some rest now and do what we must later,” she suggested, “but can you at least satisfy one bit of curiosity I’ve had since I woke up here?”

“Huh? What?”

“Will you take that thing off? I’ve got to know if it really is that big or if those things are falsies.”

Lori shifted around, removed the codpiece, and put it to one side, then rolled back. He’d never seen anybody’s eyes get that big.

“Oh, my! Ohmy, oh my…”

It proved a lot easier, and a lot better, than either of them had thought it would be.

The land changed considerably as they neared the coast, becoming harder and more like the deserts of the American southwest or the steppes of Kazakhstan than like the Saharalike interior. Water here could be found coming from fissures in the rocks or occasionally in streams around which sprang dramatic vegetation. Because of this, they would often run into wandering herds of amat, twon, or zalj, the Erdom equivalent of the bison, the cow, and the antelope, respectively, and, here and there, signs of mahdag, the elephantine and vicious yaklike creatures of the steppes. Overhead, the fierce pterodactyllike maguid would swoop down in aerial packs; while preferring carrion, maguid were perfectly willing to do their own killing if they were really hungry.

Posiphar had exchanged the sand skis for wooden wheels, and it occasionally took all of them to get it up some of the grades and all of them to keep it from going down some grades ahead of them. Mostly, the daughters pulled it, the others walking beside.

“This place could be beautiful if you knew the rules and what was dangerous and what was not,” Julian noted. “Unfortunately, I do not know those rules, and it seems pretty scary to me.”

“I’ve seen little here that scares me,” Lori assured her. “Nothing I couldn’t take with a spear or arrow, anyway. Mahdag is a different story, but I don’t want to try one of those.”

“There be them who hunt them,” Posiphar remarked. “And them who be offerings of mahdag to the maguid who have tried to hunt them, too. Luckily, they be few and far between, and the ground be shaken long afore they come.”

“Have you ever seen one?” Lori asked him.

“Yes, several times in this district, always from a distance and going the correct way, which is not the same way the mahdag be going. The cursed beasts be a head or more taller than even y’self and weigh a couple of tons or more.”

Lori shook his head in wonder. “What do they eat ? It would seem that it would take a lot to satisfy just one of them.”

“Oh, there be a lot more vegetation around on some of these plateaus and mesas than ye’d think,” the old trader told him. “I be not sure anyone has ever had the opportunity to study livin’ ones and survive, but I be certain that they be vegetarians and kill entirely for pleasure.”

The church taught that the mahdag had once been people, evil ones beyond redemption, doomed to wander in the wastes until the end of the world.

The trip had been an uneventful one as usual, and Lori and Julian had pretty well stuck to the bargain. She was even mixing the herbs herself according to the instructions passed on to them. They also practiced some social rules that Lori at least had never even noticed before, although he’d been around Posiphar’s wives and daughters since arriving in Erdom. He should have noticed, though, and he felt bad about his lapse, since most were really designed to keep women in their “place.”

For instance, a wife or daughter could address a husband or father easily, and also any other woman, but conversing directly with any other man, unless specifically invited to do so by husband or father, was forbidden. Since Julian considered Posiphar’s family a set of ignorant little airheads, she talked mostly to Lori, but never interrupting a conversation Lori was having with Posiphar. This grated a bit on Julian’s nerves, but she held it in and practiced it anyway. She was well aware that she was still on some kind of probation and that it all could be yanked away, and that was her biggest terror.

Still, when they got to the start of the last mesa, they found themselves in an actual forest, which seemed strange and alien to them after so long in the desert, and when they emerged from it at the other end, the whole of the Sultanate of Aqomb was spread out below them in the late afternoon light, and even Julian had to gasp.

The town itself sat on a broad coastal plain, its towers and spirals and vast honeycomb of streets looking like something out of the Arabian Nights. The green of trees and grass, in parks within the city walls as well as outside and up the coast as far as the eye could see, made it seem literally a different world. But what was even more startling was the view beyond, not only just to the east of the city but also to the south of it, and it wasn’t the vast expanse of the West Arm of the Sea of Turigen, either, although that seemed amazing enough. It was the shimmering curtain that seemed to follow the coast all the way through which most of the water was glimpsed, a curtain that seemed to rise up to heaven itself.

“That’s right,” Posiphar cackled, “Ye never seen a hex boundary afore. That there be the border with Hadron. All the nations be bordered like that, all over the world. It can be kinda odd sometimes, not like now. I hear tell of some where it be havin’ ice fallin’ from the skies and as cold as the lower hells on one side, and on the other side it be sunny and warm as the Hjolai at midday.”

“And that to the right—it looks like the same sort of thing, only solid. You sure can’t see through it.”

The wall there did indeed look thick and translucent; it reflected the sun to some extent but was a mottled gray-black going from behind to ahead of them as far as could be seen.

“That be the Zone Boundary,” Posiphar told him. “Inside there is where ye came in, somewheres. Damn thing’s so huge, you can put dozens of nations in it at least. Even where they be havin’ great weapons, they can’t blast through it, chip it, even scratch it. The only way in or out of it is by the Great Zone Gate, which be hidden by that tall building down there built up against the wall. I hear tell it be a mighty strange thing. Ye walk through any of them, and it’s like a tunnel and there you are in the Zone. But no matter if ye walk in your own, or someplace far away, even on the other side of the world, when ye leave the Zone, ye walk out right there. If ye travel as I know ye intends, remember that. Any gate will take you to Zone, and any gate out of Zone will take ye right there. Be a whale of a shortcut home.”