The Gate of the Cat (Witch World: Estcarp Series) (13 page)

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 Sarn 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 fed 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, for 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 fearful 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 crashed added to the general foulness of the place.

Thirteen

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 for 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 ringers 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 Sarn 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.”