Quest for the Well of Souls - By Jack L. Chalker & James P. Baen Page 0,1

tried to raise itself a little. It looked the Tindler straight in the eyes, only a fraction of a centimeter from its round nostrils. "It looked just like me!"

And before the great shelled creature could react, the owl-monkey held a strange-looking pistol in its prehensile left foot. The furry animal pressed the trigger, and an enormous cloud of a yellowish gas gushed out. The movement was too sudden and too close; the Tindler's nostril flaps didn't close in time.

As the Tindler lost consciousness, two huge shapes detached themselves from the landscape where nothing could be seen before and moved toward them.

The last he heard was the little one yelling to somebody, "Hey! Doc! Get ready! This one's got a translator!"

Makiem

His name was Antor Trelig and he looked a lot like a giant frog. Nothing much unusual in this; in Makiem, everybody looked like a giant frog.Trelig's chest bore the tattoo of the Imperial Household. From his office in the palace he could look out across the great city of Druhon—a lively, medieval center for 250,000 Makiem—to the great lake beyond that reflected the city's gaslights and the fairyland lighting of the castle. In the lake the land-dwelling Makiem could wet down their bodies as needed, swim underwater for long periods for recreation, and there, for one glorious week a year, the otherwise nonsexual Makiem bred.

Looming like dark shadows on either side of the lake were high mountains that provided an irregular frame for the great starfield mirrored in the lake. The sky of the Well World was spectacular to an unimaginable degree; from the Southern Hemisphere it was dominated by a great globular cluster and clouds of swirling gas, punctuated by an impossibly dense starfield that reflected the Well's position near a galactic center. Trelig often reclined on his balcony seat, looking out at the vista on clear nights. There was no other sight quite like it.

He heard a noise behind him but didn't turn away from the view. Only one person could enter his office without challenge or concern.

"You've never given up, have you?" The voice just behind him was somewhat softer than his, but with a toughness that showed that his wife, Burodir, was not just another pretty face.

"You know I haven't," he almost sighed. "And I never will. I can't when—now, for instance—you can actually see the damn thing tantalizing me, almost mocking me. Challenging me." He pointed a clawed and webbed index finger out at the dark.

She sat beside him. Theirs was not a romantic union. She had been married off to him because her father was the power behind the throne and needed a watch kept on this stranger. Though rumor said the old man had choked to death on a bad mork-worm, she knew deep inside that Antor Trelig had somehow arranged his demise, and then moved into the vacated place.

She was her father's daughter, though, so revenge was out of the question. She would remain loyal and faithful to Trelig—unless and until she could increase her own powers safely by knocking him off.

He understood that. He was the same way.

She peered out into the darkness and the U-shaped starfield showing through the Mountain Gate. "Where is it?" she asked.

"Almost at the horizon," he gestured. "About the size of a twenty-nug piece. See it, all silvery in the reflection of the sun?"

Now she had it in sight—it was huge, really, but so low down and so oddly colored that it would often escape detection if one had a limited view of the horizon.

"New Pompeii," he breathed. "It was mine once—it will be mine again."

Once he'd been what he called human—resembling the folk of Glathriel far to the southeast. He'd been born unguessable billions of light-years from this spot, born to rule the Comworld of New Harmony, where everyone was hermaphroditic and all looked the same, but where party leaders like him had been larger, grander, than the rest.

He loved power; he'd been born to it and raised to wield it. Wealth and position meant nothing to him unless they served his lust for power. That was why he was content for now to be Minister of Agriculture, an anonymous lower cabinet position. Few knew him even in Makiem, except as the Entry who'd crashed there in a spaceship.

"Up there is all the power one could want," he told her, for perhaps the nine-thousandth time. She didn't mind; she was just like him. "A giant computer is the entire southern half of that little world,"