The Gate of the Cat

13

There was no mail-protected fighting man across the mist-hung stream—though that other went clad in gray instead of in black as a Sarn Rider. There were rents in that long robe and hair hung in a tangle across the pacer’s shoulders. Though she had lost the iron-bound neatness and sobriety of her garments there was no trouble in recognizing—Wittle!

The witch came to a stop as Kelsie approached the riverlet and now she stood with both hands cupping her own jewel with such intensity as to leave her knuckles hard knobs in her pallid skin.

“So it is you—” there was no trace of welcome in her voice and there was certainly no expression of it on her angular features.

“How did you come here?” Kelsie returned. Was Wittle able to use her jewel—if so how did she end in this noisome place of the Dark Force.

“There was a trail—it proved false.” The witch replied shortly. “And how came you?”

“We were taken, outside.” She believed that the door in the monster’s belly had led her here. “Does your jewel aid you now?”

There was a flush up Wittle’s spare cheeks which was not a reflection from the blood-red stream. For a space of two breaths Kelsie thought she was not going to answer. Then she said:

“Its power is greatly diminished but it is not dead. And what of the one you so falsely wear, outworlder?”

“It is still alive.” Kelsie was sure of that spark of warmth which had arisen after she had left the cavern of the basin. “I cannot call it though.”

“Well you cannot!” snapped Wittle. “Would you have these creatures of the Dark realize what they have taken? Come hither and join me, perhaps the gems, stone to stone, will give us true sight in spite of what lies around.”

Kelsie had no intention of wading that steaming stream. She turned and walked along it to see if it narrowed enough tor her to essay a leap to the other side. Within short space of time it did—though the rank growth on the other bank suggested no fair landing. But what Wittle had half promised was worth the try.

She drew back again and then approached the stream at a run vaulting over it and landing in the mass of fungous material which burst and broke under her weight, smearing her with a stench borne by viscid splotches. She kept herself from trying to brush the stuff from her for fear of some poison—for she could not believe that such a loathsome medley of stinking smears would not also prove poisonous. Wittle awaited her but bore back a step or two as the fetid smells grew worse at every move Kelsie made.

She pointed to a bare space where she had paced. There was a patch of loose gravel there and Kelsie gingerly scooped up some of that to brush the worst of the stuff from her body.

“The jewel!” Wittle did not leave her much time to try to cleanse herself. She advanced, her own stone lying across both of her palms, and Kelsie obediently did the same with the gem on her own neck chain. They touched and immediately there was a small flare and thereafter a core of light in each of them.

“So—they can be fed!” Wittle was exultant. “Let us see.”

She settled down on the bare gravel, still careful that her torn robe did not touch Kelsie’s beslobbered garments. With one hand still on her stone she laid it down and motioned for Kelsie to do likewise. The girl hesitated.

“And if we awake the Dark?” Kelsie asked. “You, yourself, have said that this could be so—

“You would wait here for them to come? What profit for us in that? Already they know that they have a Witch of Estcarp.” She drew herself up proudly. “They will expect no more than that I try my strength against theirs. That it be doubled now—well, that may be enough to penetrate some of their barriers.”

Slowly Kelsie placed her own jewel beside that other one, taking care to have it touch Wittle’s. The result was like a small fire, for the heart flame in each shot upward for an eye dazzling space and then died down into a steady double glow.

“The way out—” Wittle leaned forward her tongue caressing her lower lips as if she had just drunk deeply of some restoring drink.

But Kelsie was as quick with her own demand. “Yonan!”

The witch snarled and put out her hand as if to snatch away her jewel, but she did not quite break the connection between them.

“The way out!” She put her face forward, so close to Kelsie’s that a small fleck of spittle hit the girl’s cheek. “The man is useless—we must be on our way.”

“Yonan,” Kelsie repeated with stubborn determination. If she had to choose between traveling companions she already was certain which one she would take.

It would appear that Wittle did not feel strongly enough to gainsay her now for as Kelsie centered her gaze on the two glowing stones and built up in her mind her picture of Yonan as she had last seen him, the witch did not protest again. Though if she added her own focusing power to that search Kelsie had no way of telling.

There was a curdling of the light about the two stones. In that they themselves disappeared but there came a surface flat and shining like a mirror and on that formed a shadow which grew into a distinct picture. There was thick darkness there but a small gleam of light showed a hand gripping a sword hilt. Between fingers that light found its way and Kelsie knew or guessed that Yonan’s scrap of the Quan iron was still alive. Black shadow moved against shadow and she believed, though the sighting was so bad, that the Valley warrior was moving through the same lightless kind of passage which she had dared upon her awakening here.

She leaned across and fairly hissed at the witch:

“Call! With me call if you ever wish my aid again!”

“Yonan!” she shaped the word in her own mind and suddenly felt an inflow of aid. She had managed to enlist Wittle after all. “Yonan!”

She saw that dark shadow halt and the fingers slip from the hilt to the blade beneath. The Quan took on a deeper gleam and the shadow which surely was Yonan swung to the right. Kelsie reached for the arm of the witch and felt her finger bite deeply into the other’s spare flesh.

“Call!”

“Yonan,” at each repetition of that name, aided by, she was sure, the picture she continued to hold in her mind, that shadow moved now more swiftly as if on the track of something which brushed the risks of chance from its passage.

There was light in the dark, dim and hard to see—the girl thought of the glimmer of the fungi along the walls. She saw the man with the sword. They had left him his mail along with his weapon. Perhaps it was the latter their captors had feared, not for its point (though she knew he had made good play with that) but for the talisman bound into its hilt. Just as they had not taken her jewel.

“Yonan!”

There came a faint answer. “I come!”

“Fool!” If Wittle had aided in that first call she was no longer doing so now. “What need have we for him? these,” she touched her own jewel lightly, “are enough to win us out.”

“I call one who is one of us—” Kelsie began, her temper rising in that inner heat which might lead to such recklessness as that which had brought her into this perilous land in the beginning. “He—”

“Is a man!” The witch interrupted her. “What power has he beside the power of fighting arm? We need no weapon—”

“Except these,” Kelsie reminded her, pointing to the two stones between them.

Wittle grimaced. “The power is overlaid by this about us. We shall have to use it to the best of our ability to call. Were you one of the sisters—” her voice died away but there was still in her eyes the animosity which Kelsie had always seen there.

“I am not!” Kelsie was quick to deny. She did not know why the jewel had come alive in her hands but she refused to believe that some part of her was akin to this thin, bitter woman.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Wittle pursed her lips as if she doubted the need for Kelsie’s question. Then she answered:

“This is a place of the Sam Riders. Of them we know but little—”

“And none of it good,” Kelsie finished when she hesitated. “Who are they, then?”

“They serve some great Dark One. Who they are and why they serve…” she shrugged. “Both Light and Dark draw together strange partners. In Estcarp we would know. Here,” she made a small gesture with the hand which hovered over the jewel, “I cannot say. Those in the Valley hold by only one of the true adepts. There may be more of those left. Not all were eaten up by their enemies or withdrew into other worlds.” For the first time she seemed to be under the urge to talk. Kelsie was very content to let her. The more she could learn the better, even though much of what Wittle said could be guesses only.

“These adepts—” she encouraged.

“They are the ones who would rule all. Some withdrew and were neither of the Light nor the Dark but followed paths of their own. Others struggled for power and there were wars, ah, such wars! Even the earth was wrung by the strengths they called upon. For the tissue of life itself can be changed if the will is great enough.”

Kelsie thought of the stories she had heard in the Valley. “Did not those sisters of yours reach such powers? Did they not move mountains with their words of command, so that the enemy could not come upon them?”

“And so they died,” replied the witch somberly. “For the power we called upon then burnt out many of the sisterhood. Thus—it is thus we must find that which will recharge our jewels to a greater holding than they have ever known.”

“And this greater power, do you think that you will find it here?”

“It was pulling us—for like is pulled to like, and with the stones charged with the same energy we shall be led to the source of it. No, fool, it does not lie hereabout or none of this,” again she made that small one-handed gesture, “would exist. Here,” she reached behind her and pulled forward a travel-stained pack, much like the one Kelsie had lost in the burrow of the Thas. “Eat and drink—”

As if those two words had been a signal both her dry throat and her empty stomach made themselves known. The girl pulled out a metal flask and allowed herself a few sips of insipid and musty tasting water. This was followed by crumbs of a half-eaten round of journey bread. But the stench of the rank growth about her took much of her need for food. That smell rendered nauseating all she ate or drank.

Wittle leaned forward once again and was peering intently into the halo of dim light which circled about the two stones, springing from their point of touch. She began to intone in a voice hardly above a whisper, using her forefinger to sign in the air. Though there was no blue-lined answer to her now.

Kelsie crowded forward to see any picture which the stones might produce. But what she did perceive was instead lines of what might have been an unknown script. And she worried about the summoning of such in the very heart of one of the enemy strongholds.

Wittle was still repeating queer singsong uttered words in a murmur when Kelsie turned her head sharply and strove to look over her shoulder. The sense of being watched had come suddenly but it was so strong she was not surprised to see a figure dimmed by the fog of the red stream coming forward.

She had her knife and it was ready in her hand. At her hissed warning Wittle did not even look up or break her concentration upon the stones. But a moment later Kelsie was on her feet, moving through the haze, jerking from the ground the gem as she went to call to that shadow figure.

“Yonan! Here!”

Her call was near drowned out by a screech from Wittle as the stone against stone formation was broken. The witch sprang at Kelsie, clawing for the chain swinging from her hand. So that the girl had to turn and beat off her attack and did not see Yonan make the same spring which had brought her earlier to this sliver of ground free from the noisome vegetation.

“The stone—give it to me!” Wittle cried. “Almost I learned—stupid wench. Almost I had touched upon what rules here!”

“But glad that you did not!” It was Yonan who answered that. There was a smear of dried blood, bits of it flaking off as he spoke, down the side of his face. He had one arm across his chest, the hand thrust into his sword belt and there were pain lines about his mouth. But he was gripping his sword by the blade close to the hilt and the Quan iron was fully revealed.

“This is Nexus—” he added as he came closer.

To Kelsie the word meant nothing and she thought that Wittle was similarly ignorant until suddenly a shadow crossed the witch’s sharp features.

“That is legend—” she said in that same sour voice she had always used when she spoke to Yonan.

“Much in Escore is legend come to truth,” he said. “How did you get here—did you not see the Fooger Beast—?”

“I slept for I was wearied; I awakened here,” the witch returned. “The Fooger—!” It was as if she had bitten on something harsh and stinging.

“The Fooger. We are within it, Witch. And I do not think that any power of yours is going to get us out.”

She pointed to the gem still swinging from Kelsie’s hand. “There are two of these and,” she gestured at his sword, “and what you carry.”

“These against that which shaped the Fooger—” His lips quirked at the edges into something which was certainly not a smile but suggested derision.

“Small stones to bring down the enemy full armed and with weapons which we may not have known before. How come you here, Lady?” He swung so sharply to Kelsie that she stammered over the first word of her answer. But she told as swiftly as she could of her journey down the dark passages and her final emergence guided by the witch to this place.

His frown grew. “Thus I was brought also—by your calling on me. Have you thought that perhaps that which holds us wanted us together so that it might wait and see what we should do then, what power we can summon to break us out?”

Kelsie accepted the logical reasoning of that but Wittle shook her head vigorously. “Such as you envision, warrior, would not wish even the smallest of Light weapons to be used within its hold. Balanced always is the power and if that balance shifts but a trifle, the merest finger’s breadth or less, then all within its range are affected. Why do you think they left us these?” she waved her jewel in Yonan’s face. Because they cannot handle what might be provoked into life should they meddle with them. Yes, it is true that they may have brought us together for some purpose of their own but also it may be as a test—to see if we dare to stand up to their might.”

“You speak of 'they,'” Yonan said. “Who are these then? Sam Riders and Thas? Their like we know. But the Fooger—”

“Is perhaps lying dead!” snapped Wittle. “What is death but a gate and we of the mysteries know many gates. Was not the adept Hilarion summoned back through the one he himself had opened when the Tregarth traitoress went a-meddling? So I speak of 'they’ and you would know who and what they may be? Think upon your darkest nightmare and then count that light against what comes from the Dark, warrior.”

“If they would test us, why bring us together?” he said musingly as if he asked that question of himself and not of Wittle. But Kelsie thought she could answer that.

She had settled down again on the sweep of clean gravel and was slipping the jewel from one hand to another.

“They would see what we can do when we try to defend ourselves—the three of us together—

Wittle favored her with a grimace. “Have I not already said it? And have we not already given them a showing of banner in that we HAVE come together?”

Yonan stood looking about the cavern. It was perhaps larger than the one which held the basin of fire, but the most of it was choked by the growth. And the constant stench of that made Kelsie nauseous so that she was like to lose the small mouthfuls she had taken. It was Yonan who moved first. Without a word to Wittle he used the Point of his ensorceled weapon and drew about the three of them a five-pointed star, digging deep in the sand and gravel to keep the line intact. Wittle watched him and for the first time Kelsie saw a shade of astonishment on the witch’s face.

“What would you do?” she demanded. He neither answered nor looked to her but out of his belt pouch he took a mass wrapped in a withered leaf. Kelsie caught the unforgettable aroma of illbane. At each point of the star he laced outward and, spearing a bit of the crushed herb on his sword point, he planted it in the ground.

“Fool!” Wittle came to life and moved as if to erase the marking nearest her. He swung around and in a quick movement slashed downward before her the sword as if so locking her in.

“They will come,” she screeched at him, both her hands cupping her jewel. “To set up a place of power within their own holding—you are a madman.”

“I am one,” he returned, “who wants to see his opponent. Fighting blind here will avail us nothing. Do you,” now he spoke directly to Kelsie, “take your jewel and,” he turned a fraction toward Wittle, “you know the signs—use them and let her follow. We are now locked within this hold, better that we learn what will come of us—

For a long moment Kelsie thought Wittle would refuse. Then stiffly as if each gesture she made was forced out of her, she knelt and reached out one long stick-thin arm so that she might use the point of her jewel to draw in the Clipping ground a line here, a circle there—and more intricate symbol somewhere else. When she had done in the first of the points Yonan gestured to Kelsie so that the girl squatted on her heels and tried to copy the signs—though she doubted much her ability to match them, so loose was the soil. Around the inner part of the star the two of them crept, Kelsie duplicating as best she could all that Wittle did.

She had more than half expected that the witch would utterly defy Yonan’s orders, yet she tamely obeyed him. Perhaps within her she thought that what they did might establish—for a space—an island of safety.

Only it was not meant to work that way. For when she had done and arose, Kelsie behind her, she favored Yonan with a display of yellowish teeth which surely was no smile.

“SO—the bait awaits, warrior. What do you expect to bring into being by defying the balance here?”

“What you wish to see as well as I,” he replied. “I do not fight blind when there is a chance of seeing openly.”

“You shall see,” she cackled. “Oh, yes, you shall see!”

Kelsie swung about where she stood and began carefully to examine the vegetation on each side, turning slowly. So grotesque was that growth and in such tangle anything might be creeping upon them now unseen until it reached the very edge of the open space. That they were now bait she firmly believed.

But as the minutes passed, her heart beat slowly. She could see nothing moving and the growth remained the same. Nor did anything come out of the river. Wittle spoke first.

“They know how helpless we are,” she said grimly, “why trouble themselves with us?”

“Balance,” Yonan said firmly. “Balance. In the heart of their own holding there is this.” With his sword he pointed to the star about them. It seemed to Kelsie that she could smell the fragrant freshness of the illbane combating the stench of the growth.

A tendril of haze snaked out from that murk which clothed the stream. It was almost like the weighted line Yonan had used to bring down the birds in his hunting, but this was aimed at them. It curled like the lash of a whip through the air. But when it reached the star it snapped back.

Wittle again made that harsh sound which was her laughter. “Do you think that is all they have to send against us?” she demanded.

Yonan did not answer. He had stooped and picked up one of the small stones which studded the sand at his feet. Now he blew upon it and then spat, rubbing the moisture into it with his thumb. Having done so he rubbed the stone three times against the Quad iron of his sword hilt and called upon a name Kelsie had heard him summon before.

“Ninutra!”

Out toward the questing tongue of haze he hurled the stone. It passed through that arm of mist and that lifted for a moment so that Kelsie saw the stone fall into the red river. The liquid there roiled, churned, droplets arose to sprinkle the vegetation which straightway fell into a black liquid rot. And the mist snapped back toward its source.

“Child’s play!” Wittle said. “And who is Ninutra? Some Old One long since gone?”

“If she has gone,” he replied, “then she has left certain strengths behind her. I serve a Lady who is her chosen voice in the here and now. And—”

“Look!” Kelsie interrupted him.

From out of the river where the stone had fallen there arose something which chilled and sickened her. Perhaps once it had had life—it must have had—but this was the worst of death’s decay incarnate. Half-skeleton, half-boiled and seared flesh, it was tossed ashore as if the river itself had so sent one of its slaves to dispute with them. Was it a man—or had it been a man? Kelsie wanted to close her eyes, to refuse to look upon it but she could not.

Slowly, clumsily it got to its feet and for the first time turned the blob of its head in their direction. Kelsie cried out. Those swollen, bloated features were ones she knew—Yonan’s!

She heard him whisper from beside her. “Urik—NO!” While Wittle seized upon her jewel and cried out “Make-ease!”

The half-eaten away features of the thing writhed and changed—now the girl saw Dahaun wasted and blasted, and alter her Simon Tregarth. While from her companions, she heard other names given to that nightmare.

It tottered on legs which were bare bone, heading for the star. Kelsie gripped the jewel and in her mind refused any belief—this could not be true. It was not true! Even as the thing became Yonan once more she cried out:

“No—it is not true!”

Yonan—that was no longer Yonan, nor Dahaun, nor the eldest of the Tregarths. It was her own blasted face which crowned the shambling figure.