03. Gods at the Well of Souls Read Online Free Page A

west from the Ocean of Shadows and across the entire Overdark. Deals could be  made in Zone in the traditional way, but without somebody on site, there was no  way to guarantee quality, compare prices and deals, and put everything together.  Dillians had never been the sort to relish staying long periods of time in  remote and alien lands, and so they'd pretty much had to accept the traditional  "take it or leave it" deals from their nearer neighbors. Merely the threat of  competition could only help, and here were two who wanted to remain, at least  for a significant period of time. 
     
    Dillia itself was something of a hotbed of semitech innovation, conservation  plans and concepts, and agricultural management, particularly forestry, and had  much to trade in areas most nations largely ignored. In exchange, it needed  steam vessels, particularly for internal lakes and rivers, and other heavy  industrial items either impossible or impractical to make at home. Dillians also  had a taste for things that could not be grown locally, including many tropical  and subtropical products, coffee, tea, cocoa, and tobacco. The Dillian  government was more than happy to set Tony and Anne Marie up as a trade office  and see what they could do. 
     
    Neither of them was under any illusions that this was a permanent job or that  the opportunity wasn't created because, for reasons of its own, the Zone Council  saw some value in keeping them in the region at that time, but as it served  everyone's purposes, there were no objections. 
     
    Alowi was not so fortunate. She was nothing to Dillia, of course, and even less  to Erdom, who clearly was disinterested even in whether or not one more female  came back at all. Nor did the council as a whole see any use for her. So she  became basically the Dillians' housekeeper, keeping their new home clean,  cooking the meals, and doing other chores, all of which was made much easier by  being in a high-tech hex where things not only worked smoothly, they seemed in  some ways futuristic compared to Earth. 
     
    Because she had no translator, Alowi spent the time studying and learning  Agonese, a language that sounded bizarre but that, she soon discovered, followed  a pattern not too different from some Earth tongues. It was soon clear that  Julian Beard was not dead inside her brain but merely dormant; it was in fact  Beard's knowledge of Japanese that gave her the clue to understanding Agonese.  Not that they resembled each other in obvious ways, but the structure wasn't all  that different. 
     
    The trade mission had some initial frustration but then some startling  successes. Tony was adept at business, and Anne Marie seemed able to spot a con  or a sucker deal almost instantly and knew just when to give in on a  negotiation. The initial commissions weren't huge, but they no longer had to  worry about going broke. 
     
    They used some of the first money to buy Alowi a translator. She made no  objections this time, spending much of her time doing a great deal of studying,  using the Agonese computer libraries. Their written language was actually pretty  basic; for a high-tech society, it appeared that they were surprisingly  illiterate and used voice and picture technology for all their information  sources. Her greatest frustration lay in her inability to really use her hands;  the oversized split hooves proved unable to push even a few small buttons on a  console, but she managed by gripping a wooden stick and using that instead. There was an ancient language of commerce on the Well World that had evolved to  cover just about every conceivable situation. It was a written language  only-translators filled the gap for spoken tongues-and it had arisen from a  pictorgraphic alphabet so ancient, nobody now knew its origins. It was extremely  complex-it had to be to cover so many tiny worldlets and so many varying  races-but it was used on virtually all