Jack Chalker - Shadow of the Well of Souls

The ancient, imposing immortal of Julian’s mental image shattered in front of somebody who looked thirteen years old.

Chang’s tiny form was set off even more by the two figures behind her. Both stood almost as tall as Lori and stared at Julian through big green eyes with the longest lashes Julian had ever seen. From the waist up, where it curved inward in the expected way, they seemed quite human-looking except for the pointed equine ears that emerged from a thick gusher of strawberry blond hair. They were, in fact, stunningly beautiful young women of perhaps sixteen or so—from the waist up.

From the waist down they were most like palomino ponies.

They were female centaurs—centauresses, Julian thought, amazed.

And they were absolutely identical twins down to the smallest detail.

Mavra Chang smiled. “Hello. You must be Julian,” she said pleasantly in a deep female voice that nonetheless sounded hard-edged and tough in spite of its speaking Erdoma. “I’m Mavra Chang. And the girls-—well, you two think you have problems! Don’t worry, though. You won’t have any trouble telling this pair apart. Meet Tony and Anne Marie, the only other case of two entries to the same species. You see, before they went through, they were a married couple…”

FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS NOW NATHAN BRAZIL HAD HAD THEoddest feeling based on long experience that he was being followed. He’d learned to trust those instincts, but over the countless years he’d also become nearly infallible in eventually tripping up any shadow that might try it, particularly over an extended period of time. This time he’d failed, even though more than once he’d become certain that he’d nailed the bugger. He’d walked down to the docks, gone down a very long deserted pier to the end, then used a little secret he’d discovered for ducking down below the pier and making his way back along a safety catwalk below. He’d known that the shadow had followed him onto the pier; he also knew that he could not possibly have been seen going below the pier and coming back, even with the girl inevitably in tow, and he’d heard the creak of timbers and the sound of a few heavy footsteps above, going out toward the end of the pier, yet, when he’d emerged and staked out the pier from the only exit, nobody had come.

The girl was another thing. She was absolutely uncanny at spotting any potential threats or irritants, and they’d been together long enough that he could read her reactions when somebody was around who was taking an inordinate interest in them. Several times she’d had brief flashes of this wariness when he’d sensed the tail, yet after a moment, she would frown as if puzzled, then seemingly dismiss it. She could sense the colonel coming three blocks away, but she barely reacted, and then only for this brief check, when he felt a shadow so close that he could almost smell its bad breath.

He had tried without success to convince himself that it was nerves. Certainly he was antsy and frustrated as hell at being stuck in this desolate place for so long, and his money was virtually gone while his prospects for earning any more were negligible unless he moved quickly. In this one sense he envied the girl; she appeared to need absolutely nothing except his companionship.

Still, he knew that someone was around, lurking, always near. At this stage in his life such feelings and instincts were almost never wrong. But what could it want?

He was as certain of the shadow’s reality as he was that there was only one, and the same one, too. Like at the pier whenever he’d temporarily shaken the tail, he’d heard it, and it wasn’t a tiny creature like the pixieish Lata, who could fly and hide in any number of small places, or any of the other obvious possibilities. The thing was big, bigger than he was, and certainly heavier by far.

In his hotel, away from close prying eyes, he’d gone through his reference books on the Well World. The standardized written trading language had definitely changed a lot, but the basics were still there and there wasn’t a language with a fundamental multicultural linguistic base that he hadn’t been able to master in the amount of time he’d wasted here. Not that his reading ability was perfect, but at least he was at the point where it was mostly nouns that stymied him, and those one could look up in a dictionary.

Fifteen hundred sixty separate species of sentient beings… That was a lot, but one could eliminate a couple of hundred off the bat: those who were not mobile, unable to function in the south, or too insular to leave their hexes, etc. That still left more than half, though.

Which could it be? And why?

The books, which were of course simplified and intended for businesspeople, diplomats, even tourists, were of little help in his attempts to solve the mystery, but they did give him a different sort of shock.

How they had changed! How much almost all of them had changed. Some socially and culturally—although few as radically as the Glathrielians—and physically as well. Up until now, the only familiar species he’d encountered were the Ambreza, who, while becoming even more xenophobic as the reasons for it had faded into half-remembered legend, weren’t all that much different from what they had been the last time.

Dillians, though… He’d always loved the centaurs. The last time they’d been basically the stuff of ancient Greek legend, large and gruff and looking very much like ordinary Earth-human types welded to sturdy working-horse bodies.

If the two photos in the book could be believed, though, they looked quite a bit different now. Sleeker, smaller, almost streamlined. Of course, Dillia wasn’t about to pose anything but its best-looking for an international publication, but the changes were too radical in the male and female shown to just be a matter of centaur public relations. They just, well, no longer looked like the hybrids they’d always seemed, but perfectly and logically designed as a whole. If those two were typical, he almost felt as if he were half a Dillian rather than a Dillian being half man, half horse.

And if they’d been the only ones, he still might have passed it off as a slick photograph, but they weren’t. Quite a number of old familiar races looked at least as different. None were unrecognizable; none had undergone that radical a transformation. But the Uliks looked more streamlined, a bit less of the serpent, and the lower pair of arms seemed to be quite different, almost as if they were changing into clawlike feet. The Yaxa body had become fuller, a bit more humanoid, the head and chest enlarged as well… It went on and on. Nothing so glaring as to shout at a person, but noticeable in picture after picture.

Something was definitely going on here, something totally unexpected.

There was no shot of a Gedemondan, of course. He hadn’t expected one, and for one to have been there would have been as radical a change in their culture as had happened in Glathriel. The book indicated that one could now climb their mountains if it were just for sport or passage and that Dillians had an actual trail network through there all the way to Palim and the Sea of Storms and through Alestol to the Sea of Turigen, giving them access to much of the Well World in spite of their less than hospitable neighbors. But, the book also warned, do not expect to see a Gedemondan at any point, and those who damaged their land or strayed off the prescribed trails or took anything with them had a tendency to suffer mental torments of one sort or another or, in cases of gross transgression, to simply disappear.

Well, it was nice to know that at least the Gedemondans hadn’t changed much.