07. Ghost of the Well of Souls (28 page)

That, and the fact that the general and the Chalidang ambassador in Zone both assured the natives that the entire crew would be out of there in under seven days, won grudging assent. So long as none of this commando force ate any Yabbans, it seemed as if the bastards had gotten away with it.

Ming and Ari had to wonder what Core thought of all this now that it was public.

Proof? There's your damned proof!

But how were they going to move the two hundred or so kilometers north to Sanafe without both choking on the thick living soup out there or seeming an imperious army marching through towns and villages, raising resentment?

"You already know, don't you?" the General responded to the question.

"The pneumatic railroad? But there weren't any plans to run it to Sanafe, as far as we knew, and in any event, how will you, with those large spiral shells, soft or not, fit inside the tubes?"

The General chuckled. "One of the lines does in fact go that way, and it's got an unusually large tube diameter," he told them. "You see, the Yabbans have always felt they were the stepchildren of Kalinda, dependent on your people for all those nice tech-type handouts, the materials themselves, even the building of things like the pneumatic train system. Most of them have thought of themselves as working for the Kalindans since they were born, and that's not far wrong. Kalinda has always treated most of its neighbors like ignorant colonials, markets rather than equal and sovereign races and nations. We offered them an alternative source of what they needed, as well as international funding, with no strings. They've been quite tolerant of us so long as they felt we were working only against the interests of Kalinda and not against them. It's been a fairly happy arrangement. And now we are going to reap some of the rewards of that association. We're all going to the one neighboring hex that sealed itself off rather than become a Kalindan dependency. It was a conscious decision. They essentially banded together and threw you all out.
That
is why we can't just go in there as we did here and make friends. Not yet. We'd get almost to the point where none of this would be necessary, only to discover that, well, yes it was in the end. To them, the enemy of their enemy is not necessarily their friend but maybe yet another enemy. My intelligence research believes we have the way around this roadblock. If I am right, we will attain what we want, and the damage to Sanafe and its people will be negligible. If I am wrong, well, then we'll all be dead."
Us, too,
Ari noted warily to Ming.

Alkazar

SHE WAS  BARELY  SETTLED  INTO THE  PYRON  CONSULATE  IN
Kolznar when she was awakened. It was the middle of the night, and she felt some alarm at the sight of the snakelike creature. Worse, they all looked alike to her, making it impossible for her to tell the friendly consul from the suspicious security chief. She hoped they were all on the same side, otherwise she'd never figure out who was who.

"I beg your pardon for waking you," the creature said to her, "but I am afraid you must leave now and move toward Quislon with as much speed as possible."

She yawned and tried to shake the lead from her brain. "Now? Why? I know I wasn't to stay here long, but—"

"There has been an, um, unforeseen development. I am afraid that if you remain here you will either be arrested when you leave the consulate or you will wind up imprisoned here for an indefinite future. We must move quickly! Gather up whatever is yours and come with me. I shall explain the situation on the way."

She managed, with the help of some cold water from the basin, to get her small kit strapped on and follow him, but she felt miserable, and everything looked like it was being viewed through a curtain of fog and blurry reflections.

The consul was below. She knew it was him because of his manner and his warmer-than-normal—for a Pyron, anyway— empathic signature. "What is going on?" she asked him.

"They were going through cleaning and maintenance on the ship you came in on and they discovered a body," the consul told her. "Murdered, in a most brutal and ugly fashion, and apparently after some torture."

"A body! Whose? Where?" She feared that somebody had done in the stubborn Kehudan she'd left in her cabin, for failing to complete her mission.

"An Ixthansan. One of our people. They've been shadowing the ship off and on all along. This one was supposedly bringing you information of some importance. We don't know if they got it or not, but did you?"

"I—I saw one such, a very pleasant fellow, but that was far back, not long after I boarded."

"Probably not the same one, but a cousin. It doesn't matter. You were not approached by an Ixthansan at any point after leaving Suffok?"

"No, not a word. I'd been wondering, considering the first contact, why I hadn't heard from any others."

"Apparently the second one was discovered, and since then they've been laying for them. There should have been three contacts." The translator gave the suggestion of a resigned sigh. "All right, then. We must move."

"Surely they do not think that
I
had anything to do with this! I cannot kill anyone! It is against the very oath of my office and the core of my being!"

"Well, I'm afraid that folks like the Alkazarians think that everybody else is just like them, and in this port they have jurisdiction. Fortunately, that also means they're corrupt to the core, but that can only reach so far. We need to get you completely out of the Colony District before somebody we missed comes looking, and I suspect that won't take long."

"Surely they would not hold me! I had nothing to do with this!"

"Ah, but you're the one closely connected. They have at least one witness who claims to have seen you speaking with an Ixthansan on the ship, and it's a witness that isn't part of any side in this conflict. That must have been the first one. That's enough for them. And as to not holding you, well, Ambora doesn't have much of an army or navy, and that's all they're scared of here. The justice system actually harkens back to the days of ancient belief systems, when you could be accused of trafficking with evil demons and they'd torture you. If you died, you were innocent. That's the thinking in criminal inquisitions here as well."

"But where will I go? I mean, by sea is certainly out, and it is roughly four hundred kilometers overland to Quislon, all in Alkazar. How can I avoid them?"

"Well, some bribes help," the consul admitted, "but there is also the point that somebody out of their local district jurisdiction is somebody they don't have to deal with, explain, account for, etcetera. You see what I mean? If we can get you out of this city, we'll probably not have any problems over it."

"But how?"

"Let me worry about that," said another Pyron, from the entry parlor to her right. She turned and saw what at first seemed to be another identical snake-man, but his empathic signature was very different, almost as if he were not truly kin to the others here. It was also vaguely familiar.

"I am Genghis O'Leary. We met at the Kalindan embassy in Zone," he told her.

"Of course! I was trying to figure out how I could have known you!"

"My apologies for this. I'm even more tired than you are. I've been here less than forty minutes, and I've slept even less. Still, we Pyrons are more nocturnal types and I can manage. This other gentleman is Har Shamish, Security Officer for the consulate here and quite a capable agent. He will accompany us and smooth things through to the border, as well as acting as a bodyguard of sorts until we reach Quislon. After that, you and I are on our own."

"You make it sound so threatening. Surely it's not as bad as all that!"

Shamish said, "I'm afraid, madam, that if we spend any more time here, it will be even worse. There is no way I could fight my way out of this city, and with all those cameras, we certainly can't
sneak
out. Let's go."

She thanked the consul and bid him farewell, and walked out with the two Pyrons.

The sight on the night vision cameras of the striking winged Amboran flanked by two blocky, sinister, cobralike Pyrons would have startled the most jaded watcher.

She was surprised to find that the odors in the air, the sounds of the great city, all the lights and action, seemed just as vibrant and active at night as in the daytime.

"Big cities never sleep," O'Leary noted. "They just have different routines for different times."

"I do not see as well at night as in the day, normally, but I can make do through here," she told them.

"It's the lighting. The walkway and building and commercial lighting is so concentrated that it lights up the air over us," Shamish explained. "It won't be the same once we get out of the urban area. On the other hand, if your vision is best in daylight, ours is best in darkness, and it takes very little light for us to see perfectly well. We should be a good team."

Jaysu could barely see the great mountains beyond the city, but she knew they were there by the lack of any sense of life along them save some sleeping birds. As they rode on the moving walkways, she noted that they were paralleling the rock wall rather than heading toward it, and in fact they seemed to be moving slowly back toward the sea, although well away from the harbor where the big ships came in.

"Where are we going?" she asked them.

"First we take a boat," Shamish told her. "That takes us out of Alkazar and their jurisdiction, not to mention some of their prying eyes. Once we're aboard, I'll explain the rest. You never know what's monitored here."

They eventually reached a low-lying, small boat basin. Most of the boats were fishing craft of various designs, none longer than twenty meters or so, but there were some private craft among them in a small marina. Now it was time to walk. "That's the boat there," O'Leary told her, although she could see little except bobbing shapes in the darkness. She followed closely, one of the Pyrons in front, one behind her, relieved that the Pyrons took slow, deliberate steps on their fragile looking legs, which allowed her to keep up even though her feet were killing her after so many days of hard floors, hard woods, and plastic.

As they got closer, she could make out shapes on one of the larger private boats. It was a sleek, streamlined, dark blue and gray yacht, an elaborate sailing vessel, and didn't have smokestacks at all.

"We use a different power in high-tech waters," Shamish told her. "In all other cases, we use sail, although there's a way to stoke a small boiler for emergencies if we must. Just go aboard and find a spot out of the way."

The Pyron on the boat seemed tense; she could sense them, coiled like springs, ready to strike at any enemy, but when they saw the Pyrons with her, they relaxed and got ready to cast off.

They used no sails for this, letting go fore and aft. Then, before she was even at an out-of-the-way point on the stern, there was a high-pitched whine of engines below. The running lights came on and they eased out of the slip, turned, and headed for the breakwater.

"As soon as we pass that flashing beacon there, we will be safely out of the district and, in fact, Alkazar," Shamish said, using a thin tentacle emerging from under his hood to point.

"Where are we going, then?" she asked.

"Tonight we'll head west along the coast, then go 'round the point and down just a few kilometers under sail. That'll put us in nontech territory for a short while, but it will allow us to turn in and reenter Alkazar via the Corbino River. It parallels the range—the Solarios Mountains, as they're called through there—and will get us upriver to the limits of navigation at Zadar Station, which is a good 140 kilometers up and in a tropical rainforest. Not too many Alkazarians there, which is excellent, and less snooping, although they still monitor the place with other gadgets and gizmos. We should get a local guide there who'll take us as far as the point where it will be impossible to avoid the Solarios. Then it's up and over. At each point we'll be under intense scrutiny. We will have to be on our best behavior, and also have to depend on corrupt people staying corrupt. If so, we should be to the border and you should be done with this bloody hex in just a couple of days. Now, I suggest you leave the sailing to us and try and get some sleep. We'll let you know if there's any trouble."

That was easier said than done, now that she'd been so rudely roused and marched down here, only to be told that the dangerous adventure was only beginning. Still, she found the sea motion almost welcome now, and while the accommodations below were basic and not designed for anything with wings or anyone who slept standing up, she could manage. With the familiar rolling motions of a gentle sea, but absent any of the noise and vibration she'd become accustomed to, she fell asleep without even realizing it.

She awoke quite late, or so it proved to be once she'd splashed cold water all over herself and made her way up to the deck.

She had thought that she'd slept hardly at all; she ached and creaked as if she hadn't had a good sleep in days. But when she got topside, she saw that they had not only reached the nontech hex area but had gone through it and were on a river. The sun, too, was not just up, it was almost overhead, signifying that it was close to midday.

She found O'Leary on the afterdeck, unnervingly lying, serpentlike, looking out at the shore. The great head, which was integrated into the body, turned, and those huge orange and black eyes with narrow pupils stared at her.

"Hello," she called. "Goodness! How long did I sleep?"

"Eleven hours," O'Leary answered. "You must have been as tired as I was."

"You slept almost as long?"

"No, I slept for about five, I just
need
ten or eleven. That's all right. I'm partly shut down here, and the sun helps recharge me."

"Where are we, exactly? This is quite unusual to look at."

"We're almost ninety percent there," he told her. "If they hadn't had to stop a few times for authorization checks, we'd actually be ready to disembark now. Damned officious little teddy bears!"