Gunit Sangh was shaken, obviously, and a number of different ideas came rapidly through his mind at one and the same time. It was Brazil, but it was now dead, and Brazil couldn’t die so it couldn’t have been Brazil but if it wasn’t, then who was Brazil…?
He looked again at the Equatorial Barrier. Just two of the flying horses like the Agitar flew. What…? And why two?
It struck him almost like a physical blow. Mavra Chang’s catatonia, Brazil’s comatose body, all the powers and magicians’ tricks they had pulled.
And then Gunit Sangh laughed, laughed so loud it echoed up and down the canyon. Finally, he looked at the two flying horses and said, “Well, well. The real Nathan Brazil, I presume. And who’s this with you? Not a genuine flying horse, I wouldn’t think. No, could it be that I’ve also found the mysteriously missing Mavra Chang? Ah! A start of recognition! Yes, yes, indeed it is.” And he laughed again. “I’ve won!” he cried. “All the way to the wire and I’ve won!”
Behind the two of them a light clicked on.
Sangh saw it and roared with sudden rage. He moved on them, and, almost reflexively, they edged back into the Equatorial Barrier; edged into it and passed through it, inside the Well of Souls before they even realized what happened.
“Not yet!” screamed Gunit Sangh. “Oh, no! Not yet!” and he started for the still-lighted barrier.
Suddenly there was the sound of hoofprints, like a horse charging up the canyon towards the Barrier. Sangh, started, stopped momentarily and turned his massive head to see what it was. He froze.
Glowing slightly like some ghostly, supernatural thing, a Dillian was bearing down on him, a Dillian holding a large, ornate sword in his right hand.
Sangh lashed out with his deadly forelegs but the sword penetrated, slicing through the giant Dahbi like a knife through butter. Sangh screamed in pain and fell, where it started to change, grow more opaque, as it sought its only natural avenue of escape.
The huge centaur laughed horribly, waved its sword, and instead of the weapon there was now a bucket in his hand, a bucket that sloshed with liquid. Sangh’s head went up and he screamed, “No!” and then the contents were poured onto the Dahbi, half-sinking in the rock. Where the water struck, the form solidified once more into the brilliant off-white, and the Dahbi leader gave a choking gasp and fell victim to a vicious kick from the forelegs of the centaur that literally severed the Dahbi’s body in two at the point where it was half in the rock, half out. It quivered a moment, then went still.
Without a pause, the centaur laughed in triumph and threw the bucket against the far wall, where it hit with a clanging sound, then dropped to the floor of the Avenue. With that, the apparition whirled and galloped back off down the chasm, back into the darkness, and was quickly gone.
Inside the Equatorial Barrier, Mavra stared back at the scene she had just witnessed.
“Speak now, if you wish,” came Brazil’s voice behind her, definitely his yet somehow oddly changed and magnified. “I can hear your directed thoughts.”
“That—that was Asam!” she breathed. “But he’s dead! He was killed in the battle… They said…” She turned to face Brazil and stopped, gazing in horrid fascination. Brazil was no longer there.
In his place was a great, pulpy mass two and a half meters tall, looking like nothing so much as a great human heart palpitating with almost hypnotic regularity, a combination of blotched pink-and-purple tissue, with countless veins and arteries visible throughout its barren skin both reddish and blue in color. At the irregular top was a ring of cilia, colored an off-white, waving about—thousands of them, like tiny snakes, each about fifty centimeters long. From the midsection of the pulpy, undulating mass came six evenly spaced tentacles, each broad and powerful-looking, covered with thousands of tiny suckers. The tentacles were a sickly blue, the suckers a grainy yellow in color. An ichor seemed to ooze from pores in the central mass, thick and foul-smelling, which did not drip but, rather, formed an irregular filmy coating over the whole body with the excess reabsorbed by the skin.
“No, it wasn’t Asam,” Nathan Brazil told her, his voice seeming to emanate from somewhere inside that terrible shape. “It was simply justice. The Borgo Pass has held, and that freed an old friend of ours to look in on us from time to time.”
She was unable to take her eyes off the terrible thing that now stood with her, but she was able to control her revulsion by strong self-will.
“It was Gypsy,” she realized.
“But he looked like Asam to Gunit Sangh,” Brazil noted with satisfaction. “It was the way he should have died.”
“And a good thing, too,” she noted. “He almost had us, here, right at the end.”
“No he didn’t,” Brazil told her. “He’d lost as it was. He just didn’t notice it. Hard as it is to believe, Mavra, it still isn’t time for the Barrier to open up as yet. There was a—malfunction, let’s call it. A convenient malfunction, when I was trapped by a deadly enemy. The Well takes care of its own, Mavra, always. Even when you don’t want it to. And once inside here, I am invulnerable.”
She looked up at him and he could feel her disgust at the shape and form, her revulsion at the horrible smell, like rotting carrion. “That’s what the Markovi-ans were like?” she managed. “The fabled gods, the Utopian masters of creation? Oh, my God!”
He chuckled. “You’ve seen enough alien forms on this world and in the universe to know that mankind is neither unique nor particularly the model for creation. The Markovians evolved naturally, under a set of conditions far different than man’s, far different than most of the races’ of our universe. What is horrible to you was very practical to them. By their standards I’m tall, dark, and handsome.”
“It would be easier if you didn’t stink so much,” she told him.
“What can I do?” he replied in a mock hurt tone. “Well, let’s get this show on the road. If you got the guts, you’ll come to think of this smell as exotic perfume.”
“I doubt that,” she muttered, but when he started off, using the tentacles as legs, she followed, marveling at the ease and surity of his movements in that form.
“Although the Markovians may look strange, even repulsive, they were our kin in more ways than spiritually,” Brazil noted as they went along. “This form breathes an atmosphere compatible with what you’re used to. The balance is a little off, but not so much as you’d expect. And the cellular structure, the whole organism, is carbon-based and works pretty much like the other carbon-based organisms we know so well. It eats, sleeps, even goes to the bathroom just like all the common folk, although sleeping’s not mandatory at this stage. They outgrew it and acquired the ability for a selective shut down, which did the same thing. At least, they were biologically enough like us to be consistent with what we know of lifeforms everywhere. They don’t break any laws.”
He stepped onto a walkway on the other side of a meter-tall barrier. When he was certain she followed, he struck the side of the barrier with a tentacle and the walkway started to move. As they were carried along, the light behind them went out and the light in their area and immediately ahead switched on.
“This is the walkway to the Well Access Gate,” he told her. “In the early days a shift would come on and off at each Avenue every day. The workers and technicians would come in as we are now and go down to their assigned places. Near the end, when only the project coordinators were left, they limited access to midnight at each Avenue and then only for a short time, mostly to allow the border hexes to get on with their own growth and development. The entrances were later keyed only to the project coordinators, themselves gone native, so that nobody could run back in with second thoughts. The last time I was here I rekeyed them to respond only to me, since it was theoretically possible for somebody to solve the puzzle of the locks.”