The Sorceress of Karres (33 page)

After a few yards in the shopping thoroughfare, Goth couldn't take it anymore and led them into an emporium selling saddles for wisents. There, she changed them from no-shape into the appearance of local wisent herders. The disappointed shopkeeper watched them all troop out and continue to walk towards the
Venture.
Goth looked forward to the sanctuary of her hull.

The open airlock and ramp were barely fifty yards ahead when the dart hit Pausert. His first and instinctive reaction, as the peculiar numbness spread through his limbs and made him fall like a puppet whose strings have suddenly been severed, was to englobe Goth and then the Leewit in a protective cocoon. He was dimly aware of a fight and being manhandled. Wanting to resist but being slack-muscled and helpless. And then . . . oblivion.

Goth saw Captain Pausert stagger and felt the familiar surge of klatha energy as she stepped towards him to help . . . and found herself in the egglike shield-cocoon of impenetrable klatha energy. The side effect of this was to have her fall like a skittle. So had Pausert—but without any transparent cocoon of force to keep him from the ground. She saw that the Leewit, too, had tumbled—also in a klatha-shield-cocoon. But her little sister was plainly not conscious, because she lay still, her eyes rolled back.

Running towards them from where they had obviously been hiding were a substantial number of men whose city pallor and clothing identified them as Marshi's men. As they arrived, Ta'zara exploded up from next to the Leewit. The first man found himself airborne, flung back into his companions. Goth began her own fight back too. Hampered yet protected inside the shield cocoon, she could still 'port objects. And sow chaos. The air itself seemed to become as thick as soup, almost impossible to see through. Objects came pelting down on the attackers as fast as she could 'port them. Ta'zara, merely one spiral-tattooed man, became four and then sixteen.

That might even have stopped them if they'd been a force of men and not just part of the mother-plant. As it was, it merely slowed them down.

Still, that was enough to call the Pampez citizenry into the act, and there were even more of them than Marshi had been able to deploy. The herders had to deal with wisent buyers. That certainly didn't mean that they liked them. Men in city-people clothes attacking people dressed like fellow herders? They had no doubt whose side they were on.

The ground shook with a close proximity launch. The
Venture
climbed skyward, and Goth realized, as the dust and smoke cleared and left them lying in the field of combat, that Marshi had gotten all she cared about. The box. The thing she called the Illtraming map. And she had something Goth cared much more about, too.

They'd taken Captain Pausert. And here Goth was, trapped in the cocoon shield Pausert had created to protect her, with no way out. Only the captain could extricate them.

The Leewit was either dead or unconscious. Ta'zara was wounded but alive and trying to stand. Goth swore furiously, angry, frustrated, desperate tears pricking at her eyelids. Had they killed the captain?

Then the hard-headed Goth, a far more dangerous person than the half-panicked Goth, reasserted herself. They'd hardly bother to take his body. She remembered now that several of the miscreants had even tried to pick her up.

Pushing his way through the fast-forming crowd of wisent-herders came Himbo Petey. He had the right tool for pushing. He was still riding a fanderbag. And up beside him was none other than Olimy. They were clearing people out of the way, and a few moments later Himbo was attending to Ta'zara.

Olimy was signing to her. "Are you all right?" at a guess. And then a floater from the lattice ship arrived, and, with difficulty, they loaded her and Leewit onto it and took them back to the big synthasilk and beam structure, to Himbo's office. Here Goth 'ported a piece of paper and pen in to herself, and then back to the Karres witch.

Marshi has taken the captain and the llltraming box-map.

How do we get you out of there?
wrote Olimy.

The captain has to do it
, wrote Goth.
Subradio. Tell Sedmons and Karres what happened.

Olimy nodded. Venture
will be hunted
, he wrote.

That was a start. But Goth wanted to hunt it herself. And when she caught up with Marshi, she was going to deliver a generous dose of weedkiller.

Can you tell me how the Leewit is?
she wrote.

We can see no injuries. She's breathing. There is what appears to be a tranq dart in there with her. We assume she, and Pausert, were shot with those.

Goth could almost not breathe with relief. She felt quite faint.

We have a surgeon with Ta'zara
, Olimy added.

Goth forced herself to be calm and to think. What was Olimy doing here? Either he'd been with the circus—he knew what had been going on with the vatchlets, or had been sent to watch it, when she handed information on to him. Let it be a lesson to her, she thought savagely. If they'd sneaked in disguised or even in some other ship, and then slipped into the circus, they'd not have been tracked . . . 

And then it occurred to her. Marshi's operatives had been here
before
they got here. Either waiting or already searching. The information must have come from that long-eared, treacherous Mebeckey. She'd probably mentioned the circus—and it would only take the resources of a big criminal outfit a short time to track down
Petey, Byrum and Keep
as the circus that had been on Nikkeldepain when Marshi had been captured.

She needed to get out of this cocoon! It had kept her from getting hurt or captured, she appreciated. But right now she was anything but grateful to the captain for it.

Neither, when they trundled her in on a barrel, awake but definitely confused and angry, was the Leewit.

Actually, by the looks of it, when the Leewit was this angry and plainly trying out her whistles, maybe the best place for her to be was inside one of the captain's cocoon-shields.

* * *

The Leewit, once she had got over her initial fright and confusion, and the subsequent rage, which had made her head hurt something fierce with her own whistling, was very relieved to get a piece of paper and pencil 'ported in to her.

Let me out!
she demanded.

Can't
, wrote Goth.
They got the captain
.

The Leewit, who privately considered her older sister to be tougher than hull-metal, was surprised to see that there was a small tear in the corner of her eye.

She went quite cold with shock. Not . . . dead? Not the captain dead?

She was relieved to see, through blurry eyes, that Goth had written:
Chump. Not dead
.

Trust Goth to have guessed. Sisters did have some upsides. Now to get out of here.

What a strange thing.
It was a little vatch. Even smaller than Little-bit, just a vortex of dark energy.
Some dream things are so odd.
It didn't appear to be examining her at all.
Why are you wrapped in vatch-egg-stuff?

"To keep me safe. But I need to get out now," the Leewit informed it.

But you are long hatched. Why are you in it anyway?

Being patient and able to reason with a vatch was not something the Leewit was given to. But she had some experience with Little-bit.

"To show you what fun you can have letting me out," said the Leewit airily. "Of course, if you were really strong and clever, you could open both this one and that one. But you can't. I know I've stopped you."

Easy. You big dream things think that would stop me? I'm not a new hatchling.

As she fell a few hand spans to the floor, the Leewit reflected that being powerful didn't always make you particularly clever, and that maybe this was just as well.

Goth too was free, rubbing the bit she'd landed on and frowning faintly—a sign of intense concentration in the second of Toll and Threbus's daughters. "Clever Leewit," she said. "Now for the million mael question. Is Little-bit still around the
Venture
and can we talk her into doing stuff for us?"

* * *

He was entirely unsure where or even what he was. He stood up. Something told him this place was familiar. But that memory was buried. All that was important was to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to create more seedlings. There were other hazy memories of doing something else. Of someone important called Goth. But what was someone? There was only one. The mother-plant. He was part of the mother-plant. It would grow in him and grow in him. Eventually he would be full of the mother-plant and he would burst into a pool of motile fragments.

The idea did not worry the part of the mother-plant that had once been Captain Pausert of Nikkeldepain. He only knew that much because the mother-plant was trying to access the memories of that person that used to be. It had not known what it was to be part of the mother-plant. It had not known purpose: to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to create more seedlings.

The memories the mother-plant could access were cloudy, incomplete and disturbing. The mother-plant saw and recognized the Illtraming spacecraft. It had known for some time about the existence of the witches of Karres. But now it saw them for what they were: something that knew of the mother-plant's existence, and had somehow killed a haploid without killing the host, just as the Illtraming had deserted the purpose. Karres would try to stop the mother-plant from covering all, harvesting, bringing back to the mother-plant, and above all: stop the creation of more seedlings.

It had powers that the mother-plant feared. Powers the Illtraming had abused too, in those vile perversions of mother-plant seedships. Ships that went too fast and could not be destroyed. Ships that had forced the mother-plant to turn its last weapon onto them, a weapon that cracked the fabric of space-time itself. The mother-plant had not wished to do that. But the Illtraming would not return to the purpose: to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to create more seedlings.

Other life must exist to serve that purpose, not for any other reasons. To do so was evil. The mother-plant rooted among the motile Pausert's memories. It was difficult to access any motile from this strange species properly. This one was more difficult than most. Parts of it were blocked. Parts the mother-plant needed for this "klatha."

But at long last the mother-plant had the Illtraming device. The prime female motile was nearly full now. This had arrived just in time. The device was typical of the Illtraming motiles. They had been cunning little artificers who liked making new and clever things. Even as part of the mother-plant, that aspect of their nature had been useful and not suppressed. Like their love of decoration and patterning objects. The mother-plant knew the decoration was purposeless, did not serve to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to create more seedlings, but it had found that preventing that wasteful aspect had also smothered the creativity of useful things for the plant.

It had taken the mother-plant some days to get the new motiles to trigger the device that the Illtraming had created. Clever little motiles—to store and move the complex electronic heart to the navigation system that they had once used to guide the mother-plant seedships thus! It wasn't what the humans understood as "a map," of course. Such a thing worked poorly in the three-dimensionality of space. It was instead a vast database of stellar information. Now the mother-plant could finally see just where the Illtraming homeworld lay. Fortunately, through the archaeological looting she had obtained a powering system that could activate it. There would still be some work necessary before it could cross-reference this onto the human maps. But the mother-plant had vast resources among the new hosts. The mother-plant did not care how it spent them. But it needed its old host. And it needed it soon. The mother-plant seedlings must come to be.

Some of the motiles were allowed a fairly large degree of self-determination. Some even thought on their own, and were just absolutely dependent on the mother-plant via the hormonal feeds to their pleasure centers. This Pausert-part of the plant could be allowed no such freedom, the mother-plant knew. The Pausert-part had told her that it too would be like the Illtraming.

Still, it had brought her much valuable information. The spore planted in it had not been wasted, although there were few spores left now. The motile, it seemed, was valued as an individual—a concept the mother-plant did not fully understand—by the klatha-wielding Karres.

The mother-plant had not wasted a spore on the other captive that the Pausert part knew as "Vezzarn." It wasn't worth keeping. Too old and of too low an order in the human hierarchy. Anyway, it must have escaped. It was no longer on the ship.

The Leewit shrugged. "Maybe. Little-bit is going through a stage right now where she seems to prefer watching. Like interaction is hard work and it's a bit boring. The problem is that she goes anywhere and we don't. I have no idea how to make contact when she doesn't want to. The captain can call them. I can't."

"We need to get after the captain. After our ship."

"Yeah, but how?" asked the Leewit.

"Olimy," said Goth. "I need your ship." It was not a tone that brooked argument.

The Karres agent shook his head, nonetheless. "It's a one man scout, Goth. Besides the fact that you'd kill yourself with overuse of the Sheewash drive, just where are you going to go to?"

That was such impeccable logic that Goth could do no more than glare at him angrily.

"They've got several hours' head start, Goth. The ship could be anywhere," he said.

"Yes. Being right does not make things better for you, Olimy," said Goth darkly. "I'll still need a ship. Unless . . . I'll take the Egger Route!"

Olimy shook his head. "At the risk of being right again, assuming that Captain Pausert is still on the
Venture,
you will arrive in the post-Egger state and at best be captured and more likely be killed."