The Gate of the Cat

12

There was a dark hole where the curve of its pendulous belly touched the ground. So regularly shaped it was that it could be a door—A door into what? Kelsie dared a quick glance up into the eye pits. But there was no hellish fire burning there, they were only dark caverns.

A harsh noise brought a small cry from her. Surely the thing before her was not alive, had not delivered such a hail. No, that had come from the winged things circling about its head. They were brilliantly scarlet even in this early eventide except for their bills and their feet—which were the black of the orifice opening at the end of the skull road.

They were stringing out, away from that perfect circle they had made about the head of the squatting thing, coming toward them. Yonan gave a cry in turn, one which perhaps was meant to hearten himself as well as any who heard. He hurled about his head the weighted cord he had used for hunting. But it was nothing for the pot that he would bring down now. The cord flew out, so quickly she hardly saw it go and wrapped itself about the long neck of one of the flyers, bearing the thing to the ground where it flopped and fought.

Yonan was ready for it with sword and a single sweep of blade whipped off the darting head. But he had to whirl then to beat off another flyer which swooped, dagger bill ready.

to attack. Then that one, too, was left to flop on the ground headless but somehow still living.

Kelsie shouted and tossed up the jewel as a third sped clown the sky aiming straight for her. She had little hope of heating it off—the thing was fully half her size, its wing spread was beyond her reckoning.

The jewel flickered with life and the bird sheered off. Kelsie’s eyes following its flight fearfully saw something else. From the broad nose which covered near a third of the face of the demonic monster there puffed two small clouds of reddish smoke, thin and without any flame to feed them but they spread forward in the air, not diffusing as she thought that they would, rather to form a distinct cloud or blot. It was already under the film of twilight but that smoke—or breath—was still distinguishable.

The birds had attacked Yonan again, seeming to look upon him as the enemy they could bring down the easiest. He called to Kelsie, panting a little as he countered with sword against bill to keep his feet and break the attack.

“Do not let them circle! Break up that—!”

She swung the jewel, with no hope of contacting any of the flyers but noting that they fled the sparks which flew in the air from her only weapon. Then she was back to back with Yonan.

“Back to the woods?” she got out that question.

“Not with night coming,” he told her. And she could understand the wisdom of that. They might escape the birds when they gained the shadows of the trees but they also would be girt about by a place of the Dark. At least in the open they could see their attackers.

Three of the birds had fallen to Yonan’s sword but still the others attempted to build up a circle in the air above the two of them. And it was Yonan’s constant thrusts which kept them from forming it completely.

Why they just did not fly higher and out of his reach Kelsie could not understand. But whatever plan governed them meant that they must travel close to the ground and fairly close to the two they would take.

She drew a deep breath and coughed, her throat rasped, her eyes burning. That breath from the monster was settling on them. She swung the chain of the jewel vigorously. That might keep off the birds but it had no effect upon the puff of crimson air. She coughed again, near strangled by the breath which she had been forced to inhale. There was a wretched burning, in her nose, her throat. Her eyes were beginning to water so she could hardly see. But still she strove to keep her feet and ward off this new peril—only it did not answer the jewel. Had she come to depend too much on that because so far it had not failed her? To everything there was a limit and here they two might have reached that.

For Yonan was also coughing hard. He stepped back and his shoulders were now against Kelsie’s so she could feel the racking shudders which shook him. The birds cried out again even as they had done at their first coming—harsh squawks but ones which held a measure of triumph in them.

She felt Yonan slump and turned just in time to swing the jewel out to stop a vicious bill which was aimed for him as he crumpled to the ground. There was blood on that part of his face she could see below his helm and the helm itself had been knocked askew. The bird which had launched a fight attack on him was on the ground, its long legs holding well above it but its head drawn back for a finishing stab at the feebly moving man who was trying to regain his feet.

“No—circle—” he gasped.

But it was too late. Kelsie was coughing with such pain and depth that she felt her very lungs would be brought up by her choking. She could only hunch over Yonan holding above the two of them the Witch Jewel. And that one of the fearsome flock who had been about to impale her companion drew back and sidestepped from the run which would have carried it to that action.

Moisture from her tortured nose dripped down on Yonan and she saw it form beads of blood on his mail. Her throat was rasped so raw that nothing mattered now save that she could find some refuge from this poisoned cloud.

Through her tearing eyes she could see an open space where the dancing red motes of the cloud made up the haze about them. On her knees, the gem in one hand, her other laced in Yonan’s belt she strove to reach that promise of freedom.

She did not understand that she was being herded, not then. But she had a full moment of truth before the end came. The cloud lifted—she saw before her the black gap of an opening and only there was the promise of breath which had become a matter of life itself. One last effort—One effort and a momentary awakening to the danger—She had reached the ominous door in the monster’s great belly and it was toward that she had crawled, dragging Yonan with her.

Kelsie strove to turn and the red haze settled. Coughing and tasting her own blood she fell forward into complete darkness in which she was lost.

Darkness again met her when she roused. For a moment she could not remember—and then the terror which had woven around her when she realized where they had been herded struck full force. She was not in that place of darkness where she had once been tossed, afraid and alone. No, she was truly awake and in a place of dark which was of this world. Her hands questing out on either side of her bruised and aching body were exploring over stone, rough and damp. Her fingers flinched away from a patch of slime.

She swallowed and her throat was sore burned by that last blast of the ruddy smoke. But this dark was so intense she was cold with another fear—that she was blind. She raised a hand feebly, for all her strength seemed drained and gone, rubbed across her closed eyes, opening them once more when she had done—upon thick dark.

Thick—for it seemed to have a quality of its own—smothering, holding her. Somehow she braced her hands on the floor and levered herself partway up, now depending upon her ears. There were no sounds—was hearing smothered and gone like her sight?

“Yonan!” There came no answer to her shout. Where-over she was trapped, she was alone.

Now she felt for that which had lain on her breast—upon which she had come to depend. Her fingers closed upon a cold stone; it could be any pebble she might have taken up. The life and warmth she had sensed in it from the very first were gone. It was dead—

Dead? Perhaps this was death and she had come from life into an eternal dark.

It was only when that last fear began to crowd all control from her mind that Kelsie first became aware of something which was not sound but rather a vibration, growing ever stronger and sinking into her own body. It followed a regular series of beats yet there was no extra rhythm in it as had been in the bowl drums of the Thas. This was more like the measured thud of a heart—a heart so powerful that it could echo outside the body which held it.

The black gate in the belly of the monster—had she entered a thing with a life of its own? Her thoughts squirmed away from that—even in this country of strangeness and hallucinations such a thing could not be true.

She sat fully up in the dark and with her hands explored her whole body. The last remnants of the illbane wrappings were gone from her feet, but at her belt, snug in its own sheath was the long-bladed knife which was a part of all the clothing of a Valley dweller. She edged that out of its covering now, afraid of dropping it in this thick dark and losing her only weapon since it seemed that the power of the stone had deserted her.

Kelsie did not try to stand up. Keeping the knife ready she used her hand as a sweep before her. Always at the back of her mind was the fear that she was in truth blind and that her movements might well be under observation by those who had arranged her capture. Yet she could not remain huddled where she was awaiting some unknown attack.

There was the faint grating sound as her knife swept across the stone and that broke somehow the pattern of the beating which seemed to grow stronger the more she moved. Suddenly her hand stubbed against an obstruction of some sort and she quickly felt a barrier of stone as high as she could reach and as far as her arms on either side could stretch.

Now she did pull herself to her feet, running fingers along that wall as she arose. Where the floor had been cold, slime-dotted and forbidding, this wall differed in that there was a warmth to the stone the higher she reached—and it extended tar above her head even when she stood on tiptoe.

The vibration which had reached her through the floor was more apparent here and she thought that somehow her own heart responded in beat to match that rhythm.

Now she began to move cautiously to her right. Feeling outward with the toe of one boot before she took any step with her weight upon it, running her fingers as a guide along the wall. The steady inpush of the dark around her made her doubly unsure of herself and she tested again and again her blind impression of what lay around her.

Then her hand slipped from the stone into open space—a door? She turned slowly with as much caution as she could summon. The flooring seemed secure enough. With knife she probed to her right and both heard and felt the touch of the blade to another obstruction. So—a door. Yet there was still no light to give her any help and she would have to travel anyway ahead with the same caution she had used before. Perhaps it would be better to explore the rest of the room before she attempted to use this other opening which might lead only to worse entrapment.

She sidled past that open space and once more encountered a wall under her touch. Now she began to count and was still counting when she discovered a sharp corner and changed her way to skirt a new wall. Three paces farther on was another opening and from that came a puff of air. Not the clean, lung cleansing breeze one could find in the outer world—this was moist and carried in it the stench of decay. Clearly NOT a way to follow.

Kelsie soon established that she had awakened in a room which had openings in three of its four walls, the third one much like the first one she had discovered. And it was between those two which she must choose now.

She returned to the first and ventured into something which her sense of touch said was a passage. Though she shrank from using her hands, as those patches of slime which she had found on the floor were here more numerous and often joined with one another when her fingers swept over them. She tried hard in her mind to build up a picture of where she was but without sight her imagination was limited and she was forced to understand that there was nothing she could do save that which she was doing, blindly venture into the dark tangle of this way.

As in that air which had puffed from the second passage she could smell corruption and once her fingers penetrated, before she could jerk them back, a mass of something clinging to the wall which squirted liquid, to burn her flesh as she hurriedly wiped her hand down her breeches, the evil smell so being carried with her.

The vibration was growing stronger and—she blinked, and blinked again. No she could not be mistaken, somewhere very far ahead there must be a source of light for the darkness was now not so complete. She hurried her pace and gave a small sigh of relief as that grayness overcame the blindness of the complete dark. Now she could see the walls and need not fear a second contact with the patches of dull black stuff which seemed to grow there as moss had done on the statue in the wood.

Yonan! At the far back of her mind all along there had rested the picture of the Valley warrior as she had seen him last, choking and sick from the fog. At least her explorations in the cell in which she had awakened had shown that he had not shared it. Where was he?

The gray light was tinged now with a faintly reddish gleam and she feared another encounter with that smoke which had undone them both, yet she could not yet turn away from light and seek the full dark again. The red became brighter. Her hands looked almost as if their blood within her veins had been drawn to the surface. It was warmer, much warmer also. And while the stench had grown worse there was no hint as yet of the choking gas if that was what the monster had exhaled.

Ten strides farther on and she came to another opening. Dropping to her knees she looked out into space where the red light glowed. She crept out on what proved to be a balcony or upper walk around a deep chamber, most of which lay beneath her, and there she froze, belly pressed to the stone, striving to see without being seen. For she was not alone.

There were at least a half dozen of them, she could not be sure because they came and went and only three remained steadily at their post which was on a similar balcony to the one she occupied but on the opposite wall of this deep opening.

Below was what amazed her the most. For there were humanlike figures there but here was also a vast tub or basin us big as a good-sized pool. It was filled not quite to the brim with a mass of what looked like thick red slime and it bubbled continuously as if aboil on some gigantic stove. As each of the bubbles on the surface broke they released a reddish mist which floated like a cloud, thinning to a kind of dribbling moisture which poured down again into the basined stuff.

Those who watched and came and went—Kelsie drew a deep breath and strove to make herself still smaller and less visible. That black-clad rider who had urged on the hound outside the stones—here was his like over and over again. The Sarn—! Feared as they were, not even the records of the Valley had had much to say about them or their deeds—save that they were wholly given to darkness and despair. They wore thigh-length cloaks over tight black covering which appeared modeled to their bodies, these cloaks having hoods as tight fitting with only apertures for eye holes. Their gloved hands moved in stiff jerky gestures as if it were by this method they conversed.

Kelsie’s hand reached for the Witch Jewel. However, even as it had been on her first waking here, so was the gem cold and dead. The power she had come to lean upon had deserted her.

Twice one of the masked Sarn Riders had glanced upward to where she crouched. So she flattened herself yet more but was not yet willing to withdraw from the chamber into the maze of dark passage behind her. There was a stirring below and she saw four other of the Riders come out of an opening to the side driving before them some captives. She had never seen the Thas in good light but there was no mistaking these creatures being hauled along by a rope knotted from one neck noose to the next, being pulled out into the dull red light of the ledge above that basin. They cowered and had to be dragged along. She was sure that over the ever hissing of the bursting bubbles she could hear thin, mewling, terror cries.

But the Thas were of the Dark—why had the Sarn taken prisoners from those on their own side? Or could it be that those of evil did not hang together by any desire save when such cooperation was demanded of them.

What she witnessed now shook her badly. Loosed from the first noose in that line the shaggy form of a Thas was thrust forward by the butt of a long pole held by two Riders. He—it—tottered for a frenzied second or two on the very edge of the ledge and then fell. This time it was easy to hear a grating scream as the creature was gone into the bowl of flame. The others in that line of sacrifice were tearing at the ropes about their own throats, pulling back on the ends the Sam Riders held so firmly. As for their unfortunate fellow, he was swallowed up in the liquid fire and did not come to the surface once more.

Kelsie swallowed and swallowed again, again the raw sickness rising in her throat. If these Sarn Riders used one of their allies so—what death would they wish upon an enemy? She began to edge back inch by inch on the walkway which held her—though she had no wish to be hunted through the dark. There was another opening besides the one she had come through at the other end of the balcony and, after a moment of doubt and realization that to return to the cell where they had left her would avail her nothing, she chose to creep in that direction, keeping an eye on the Riders in the hopes of learning whether or not they watched her. However, they seemed completely intent on driving their captives to their doom one by one.

The girl gained that second doorway and crawled within it, finding that after a short distance it turned sharply to the right, seeming to run parallel to the chamber of the basin. Now it was dark. When she got well beyond the portal she got to her feet, for there were patches of growth along the walls which gave off a dull yellowish gleam, when her eyes Adjusted to the dark. There were no side openings in those walls, and shortly she came to a flight of stairs leading down. Once more she hesitated and felt for the jewel. But it remained obstinately dead. She would have to rely on her own choices and powers. Where was Yonan? Kelsie was sickened by the thought that perhaps he had already been led to the basin and that fiery thing which dwelt within it. Now that she was away from that actual chamber she was again aware of the steady beating vibration.

However, it was to go down or return and she knew that she had nothing to hope for in that direction. So she took the stairs step by step one hand feeling for any hold on the wall, tor the patches of the yellow growth had in places swallowed a goodly portion of a step.

Kelsie counted again, trying to remember the position of the basin and guess whether this was carrying her below that or not. She had reached twenty when into her mind came that which for a moment wiped the memory of the Riders’ hall from her.

“To the right—always the right—” She caught as a jog in the steps made her stumble and held on with both hands tearful for an instant at losing her step and plunging forward down this endless stair.

Yonan? Could that guiding have come from him? Somehow she could not tell. It was as if the mind voice which had sent it was hidden behind some distorting noise. Bait for a trap? She could not help but think of that. Yet if it were real and some other captive sought aid could she ignore it? There was always hope that the other would know more of this pile than she. and if she turned away she could be defeating the very purpose which had set her roving through the dark.

“Right—!”

The word faded and was gone. Kelsie took one step and the next with slow care, for here the yellow growth crossed the steps proving to be a jelly which gave forth a puff of foul decay. Then she had reached the level of another passage and sure enough it divided before her, right and left.

For the first time since she had awakened here she felt a faint warmth in the jewel and snatched it out. There was, in the very heart of it, a spark of light, far too small to aid her. But the very fact that it was able to project so much now heartened her. She turned right, one hand cupped tightly about the stone, following the direction given by that now silent voice. She made one attempt to use her own questing thought and then stopped that within almost the same instant. Among the terrors of this place there could also exist some method of picking up any mental communication and she did not have the use of the jewel strong enough to build up her call.

Again the way split and once more she tried the right-hand path. The eerie glow of the slime growths was augmented by a light from ahead—not the fearsome red of the basin chamber but more as if the flames of the leprous growths about her were increased a hundredfold. She was faced suddenly with a hole in the wall, but one which she must fall to her hands and knees to pass. Shrinking, sick from the odors which arose from the weird chamber before her instead of a passage.

There were growths here, also fungi perhaps, which had reached the height of small trees. Between them were smaller lumps of plants or mushroomlike things of different colors, as if in their misshapen bodies they aped flowers of the upper, clean world.

There was water also—or a liquid of some sort—which formed a small rivulet winding its way across the huge chamber. Its swollen looking waters were red and a haze arose above its length.

Through that she saw movement. Someone or something paced back and forth within the edge of the mist which spread out for a short space on either side of the stream.

Yonan! She dared not call his name, perhaps even think it. But she strode forward, trying to avoid contact with the smaller growth each of which when crushed added to the general foulness of the place.