Read 03. Quest for the Well of Souls for Free Online

produced.
    The doctor, if that was what she was, looked uncertain. "You're sure this won't put you under, too?" she asked, worried. "And a total takeover—it's reversible?"
    The Yaxa-Yugash nodded. "Totally. The creature will simply not be able to recall more than dimly the possession. Come! It is becoming more difficult!"
    The syringe was inserted through a joint, and in a few minutes the jerking ceased. The Yaxa was in a deep hypnotic sleep. Suddenly it became animated. It rose on all eight tentacles confidently, flexing its wings and tentacles. It donned a Yaxa pressure suit.
    "That is much better," said the Torshind. "I am in complete control now. I would have to spend several days in a body as complex as this to learn it all, but I think I can manage. Shall we go?"
    They left, the whole party, and walked to the nearest Zone Gate. Everyone, including the Torshind, was tense.
    The ambassador and the project leader entered the Zone Gate first, then the Yaxa-Yugash, followed by the rest.
    In his office far down the corridor, Serge Ortega cursed. His monitors had told him everything except whether the experiment had worked. Was the Torshind now in Yaxa or in Yugash?
    Only the Yaxa knew, but Ortega would fix that.
     

Glathriel
    The Gedemondan, almost three meters high, of white fur, with padlike legs and a dog's snout, chuckles.   
    "But the true test of awesome power is the ability not to use it." He looks toward her and points a clawed, furry finger. 
    "No matter what, Mavra Chang, you remember that!" he warns sharply.   
    She feels puzzled. "You think I'm to have great power?" she asks skeptically and a little derisively, reflecting the way she feels about such mysticism.   
    "First you must descend into Hell," the Gedemondan warns her. "Then, only when hope is gone, will you be lifted up and placed at the pinnacle of attainable power, but whether or not you will be wise enough to know what to do with it or what not to do with it is closed to us."   
    Vistaru, the Lata pixie challenges it. "How do you know all this?" she asks.   
    The Gedemondan chuckles. "We read probabilities. You see, we see—perceive is a better word—the math of the Well of Souls. We feel the energy flow, the ties and bands, in each and every particle of matter and energy. All reality is mathematics, all existence—past, present, and future—is equations." 
    "Then you can foretell what's to happen," Renard the Agitar satyr points out. "If you see the math you can solve the equation." 
    The Gedemondan sighs. "What is the square root of minus two?" it asks smugly.   
    Mavra Chang awoke, the words of the snow-giant echoing as always in her ears. She'd dreamed that dream a thousand times since the actual event. How long ago? Twenty-two years, the Ambreza doctor had said.
    She had been twenty-seven then; she was approaching fifty now. All those years, she thought, lying here on her cushions. A lifetime.
    She stretched, and thought about it for a bit. About herself, how she had changed so much in the years.
    She no longer thought about the time she'd been human. She knew they'd hypno-burned that impression into her twenty-two years before, but it had worn off, in time, with the dreams and the thoughts.
    And, for a while, it had mattered. She remembered the Gedemondans, even if they'd made sure nobody else did—their power and wisdom, the way one of them had simply pointed a finger at the engine pods and they had toppled and exploded.
    She remembered being captured by the Olbornians—great bipedal cats in ancient livery—and taken to their temple, where they had touched her extremities to that curious stone. But she couldn't remember what life was like before that.
    Oh, she remembered her past, but somewhere, years before, something had snapped inside her. She remembered that part of her life only in a lopsided, distorted way: everyone she remembered looked like her—the beggars, the whores, the pilots, her husband. Mentally, she saw