The Witches of Karres (35 page)

There was no way of trying to calculate the nature of those schemes or of the Leewit's role in them more specifically. The manner in which the vatch played its games seemed to be to manipulate its players into a critical situation which they could solve with a winning move if they used their resources and made no serious mistakes ... and weren't too unlucky. But it gave them no clues to what must be done. If they failed, they were lost, and the vatch picked up other players. And since it was a capricious creature, one couldn't be sure it wouldn't on occasion deliberately manoeuvre players into a situation which couldn't possibly be solved, enjoying the drama of their desperate efforts to escape a foreseeable doom.

The captain realized suddenly that he wasn't relling the vatch any more, then that the control room was spinning slowly about him, turning misty and grey. He made an attempt to climb out of the chair and shout a warning to Goth; but by then the chair and the control room were no longer there and he was swirling away, faster and faster, turning and rolling helplessly through endless greyness, while rollicking vatch laughter seemed to echo distantly about him.

That faded, too, and for a while there was nothing…

"Try to listen carefully!" the closer and somewhat larger of the two creatures was telling him. There was sharp urgency in its tone. "We've dropped through a time warp together, so you're feeling confused and you've forgotten everything! But I'll tell you who you are and who we are, then you'll remember it all again.

The captain blinked down at it. He did feel a trifle confused at the moment. But that was simply because just now, with no warning at all, he'd suddenly found himself standing with these two unfamiliar-looking creatures inside something like a globular hollow in thick, shifting fog. His footing felt solid enough, but he saw nothing that looked solid below him. In the distance, off in the fog, there seemed to be considerable noisy shouting going on here and there, though he couldn't make out any words.

But he didn't feel so confused that he couldn't remember who he was, or that just a few moments ago, some vatch trick again had plucked him from the control room of the Venture, standing on a rainy, rocky slope of the Karres of over three hundred thousand years in the past.

Further, since the creature had addressed him in what was undisguisedly Goth's voice, he could conclude without difficulty that it was, in fact, Goth who had pulled a shape-change on herself. It didn't look at all like her; but then it wouldn't. And, by deduction, while the smaller, chunky, doglike creature standing silently on four legs just beyond her looked even less like the Leewit, it very probably was the Leewit.

However, Goth evidently had warned him he'd better act bewildered, and she must have a reason for it.

"Umm ... yes!" the captain mumbled, lifting one hand and pressing his palm to his forehead. "I do feet rather ... who ... what ... where am I? Who... " He'd noticed something dark wagging below his chin as he was speaking, and the arm he lifted seemed clothed in a rich-textured light blue sleeve he'd never seen before, with a pattern of small precious stones worked into it. When he glanced down along his nose at the dark thing, he glimpsed part of a gleaming black beard. So he, too, had been shape-changed!

"You," the Goth-creature was saying hurriedly, "are Captain Mung of the Capital Guard of the Emperor Koloth the Great. My name's Hantis. I'm a Nartheby Sprite and you've known me a long time. That"--it indicated the other creature--"is a grikdog. It's called Pul. It--"

"Grik-dogs," interrupted the grik-dog grumpily in the Leewit's voice, "can talk as good as anybody! Ought to tell him that so--"

"Yes," Goth-Hantis cut in. "They can speak, of course--shut up, Pul! So you'd bought it for the Empress at the Emperor's orders and we are taking it back to the capital when all this suddenly happened…"

He'd been staring at her while she spoke. Goth might have gone on practicing her shape-changing on the quiet because this was a perfect, first-class job! Even from a distance of less than three feet, he couldn't detect the slightest indication that the Nartheby Sprite wasn't the real thing. He remembered vaguely that galactic legend mentioned such creatures. It looked like a small, very slender, brown-skinned woman, no bigger than Goth, dressed skimpily in scattered patches of some green material. The cheekbones were set higher and the chin was more pointed than a human woman's would have been; with the exception of the mouth, the rest of the face and head did not look human at all. The slender ridge of the nose was barely indicated on the skin but ended in a delicate tip and small, flaring nostrils. The eyes had grass-green pupils which showed more white around them than human ones would; they seemed alert, wise eyes. The brows were broad tufts of soft red fur. A round, tousled mane of the same type of fur framed the face, and through it protruded pointed, mobile, foxy ears. The grik-dog might be no less an achievement. The image was that of a solidly built, pale-yellow animal which would have been about the Leewit's weight, with a large round head and a dark, pushed-in, truculent, slightly toothy face. The grey eyes could almost have been those of the Leewit; and they stared up at the captain with much of the coldly calculating expression which was the Leewit's when things began to look a little tight.

"What, uh, did happen, Hantis?" the captain asked. "I seem almost to remember that I ... but--"

The Sprite image shrugged.

"We're not really sure, Captain Mung. One moment we were on your ship, the next we were in this place! It's the place of a great being called Moander. We haven't seen him but he's talked to us. He's upset because nothing was supposed to be able to get in here and now we've come in, through time! It must have been a warp. But Moander won't believe yet it was an accident."

"He'd better believe it!" snorted the captain haughtily, playing his part. "When Koloth the Great learns how his couriers have been welcomed here--"

"Moander says, sir," Goth-Hantis interrupted, "that in his time the Emperor Koloth the Great has been dead more than three hundred years! Moander thinks we're perhaps spies of his enemies. He's setting this place up now so nobody else can get in the same way. Then we'll go to his laboratory so he can talk to us. He--"

"GRAZEEM!" a great voice shouted deafeningly in the fog above them. "Grazeem! Grazeem! Grazeem… " The word seemed to echo away into the distance. Then there was more shouting all around them by the same mighty voice.

"What's the yelling about?" the captain asked in what he felt would be Captain Mung's impatient manner.

"Moander talking to the other machines," said the grik-dog. "Got a different language for each of them, don't know why. It's just a big, dumb machine, like they said."

"Pul, you--"

" 'S'all right, Goth," the grik-dog told the Sprite. " 'Grazeem' means 'all units.' Moander's talking to all of them now. Machine that was listening to us won't till Moander stops again. You got something to say, better say it!"

"Guess she's right, Captain!" Goth-Hantis said hurriedly. "Vatch got us into Moander's place on the Worm World, our time. Haven't relled it, so it's not here. Got any ideas?"

"Not yet. You?"

"Uh-uh. Just been here a few minutes."

"The vatch figures there's something we can do if we're smart enough to spot it," the captain said. "Keep your minds ticking! If somebody sees something and we can't talk, say, uh--"

"Starkle?" suggested the grik-dog.

"Eh? All right, starkle. That will mean 'attention!' or 'notice that!' or 'get ready!' or 'be careful!' and…

"Starkle!" said the grik-dog. "All-units talk's stopping!"

The captain couldn't tell much difference in the giant shouting, but again they probably could trust the Leewit in that. Whatever machine had been listening to them had begun to listen again. Goth-Hantis was glancing about, the image's big, pointed, furry ears twitching realistically.

"Looks like we've started to move," she announced. "Probably going to Moander's laboratory, like he said…"

The fog substance enveloping the spherical hollow which contained them, and which must be the interior of a globular force field, was streaming past with increasing swiftness. There was no sensation of motion, but the appearance of it was that the globe was rushing on an upward slant through the gigantic structure on the surface of Manaret, Moander's massive stronghold, which the captain had glimpsed in a screen view during his talk with Cheel the Lyrd-Hyrier. The fog darkened and lightened successively about them, giving the impression that they were being passed without pause through one section of the interior after another. Sounds came now and then, presumably those of working machine units, and mingling with them, now distant, now from somewhere nearby, the shouted commands of Moander resounded and dropped away behind them.

Then, suddenly, there was utter silence ... the vast, empty, icy kind of silence an audio pickup brings in from space. There were blurs of shifting colour in the fog substance ahead and on all sides; and the fog no longer was rushing past but clinging densely about the globe, barely stirring. Evidently they had hurtled out of the stronghold and were in space above Manaret, and if Moander chose to deactivate the field about them now, the captain thought, neither the vatch's planning nor any witch tricks his companions knew could keep their lives from being torn from them by the unpleasantly abrupt violence of the void.

It seemed a wrong moment to move or speak, and Goth and the Leewit appeared to feel that, too. They stood still together, waiting in the cold, dark stillness of space while time went by, a minute, or perhaps two or three minutes. The vague colours in the fog which clung about the force field shifted and changed slowly. What the meaning of that was the captain couldn't imagine. There was nothing to tell them here whether the globe was still in motion or not.

But then a blackness spread out swiftly ahead and the globe clearly was moving towards it. The blackness engulfed them and they remained surrounded by it for what might have been a minute again, certainly no longer, before the globe slid out into light. After a moment then, the captain discovered that the fog was thinning quickly about them. He began to make out objects through it and saw that the force field had stopped moving.

They were within a structure, perhaps a large ship, which must be stationed in space above the surface of Manaret. The force globe was completely transparent, and as the last wisps of fog stuff steamed away, they saw it had stopped near the center of a long, high room. The only way the captain could tell they were still enclosed by it was that they were not standing on the flooring of the room but perhaps half an inch above it, on the solid transparency of a force field.

Almost as he realized this, the field went out of existence. There was the small jolt of dropping to the floor. Then he was in the room, with the images of a Nartheby Sprite and a grik-dog standing beside him.

The room, which was a very large one, had occupants. From their appearance and immobility, these might have been metal statues, many of them modeled after various living beings, but the captain's immediate feeling was that they were something other than statues. The largest sat on a thronelike arrangement filling the end of the room towards which he, Goth, and the Leewit faced. It could have been an obese old idol, such as primitive humanity might have worshipped; the broad, cruel face was molded in the pattern of human features, with pale blank disks for eyes which seemed to stare down at the three visitors, It was huge, towering almost to the room's ceiling, which must have been at least seventy feet overhead. Except for the eye-disks, the shape seemed constructed of the same metal as the throne on which it sat, rough-surfaced metal of a dark bronze hue which gave the impression of great age and perhaps was intended to do so.

A round black table, raised six feet from the floor, stood much closer to the center of the room; in fact, not more than twenty feet from the captain. On it another bronze shape sat cross-legged. This one was small, barely half the size of a man. It was crudely finished, looked something like an eyeless monkey. In its raised right hand it held a bundle of tubes' which might have been intended to represent a musical instrument, like a set of pipes. The blind head was turned towards this device.

The remaining figures, some thirty or forty of them and no two alike, stood or squatted in two rows along the wall on either side of the captain and the witch sisters, spaced a few feet apart. Most of these were of more than human size; almost all were black, often with the exception of the eyes. Several, including a menacing, stern-faced warrior holding a gun, seemed modeled after humanity; and across from the warrior stood a black-scaled image which might have been that of Cheel, the Lyrd-Hyrier lord of Manaret. None of the others were recognizable as beings of which the captain had heard. The majority were shapes of nightmares to human eyes.

This was Moander's laboratory? Except for its disquieting assembly of figures, the great room seemed to hold nothing. The captain glanced up towards the ceiling. Much of that was a window, or a screen which served as a window. Through it one looked into space. And space was alive with the colours they had seen vaguely through the fog enclosing the force globe. Here they blazed brilliantly and savagely, and he could guess at once what they were; reflections of the great network of energy barriers Moander and his Nuris had constructed about the Worm World between the dead suns of the Tark Nembi Cluster. As he gazed, something edged into view at one side of the screen, blotting out the fiery spectacle. It was the metallic surface of Manaret. The structure of which this room was a part appeared to be rotating, turning the viewscreen now towards space, now to the Worm World far below it.