Warlock of the Witch World (24 page)

Even if I would now lose her, I could take but one step. “As this place shows me—I am Kemoc!”

“But Dinzil said—You are not evil; you cannot be so loathsome. I know you—your thoughts, what lies within you—“

I remembered Dinzil’s spiteful suggestion that this plane turned a man inside out, showing his spirit. But that I did not accept. If he had said the same words to her, I must break that belief and speedily, lest we both be lost.

“Think for yourself. Do not take Dinzil’s thoughts for your own!”

Had I gone too far, so that, under his spell, she would turn again to believe I spoke out of jealousy?

Then I put out one of those paws which tried to be hands now and again. I saw her gaze fasten on it, her eyes widen. So much had I made her attend to me. I raised the paw, tried to touch her. She shivered away, yet I persevered and caught firm hold on her, pulling her around to stand before that mirror. Whether she could see what I did, I did not know, but I kept my other hand upon the sword and willed that she do so.

“Not so! Not so!” She jerked loose, cowered away so she did not see the mirror. “Lost—I am lost—” She turned that head, which was now a featureless lump, now her own, to look at me. “You—your meddling has done this, as Dinzil warned. I am lost!” She wrung her hands, and never in all my years had I seen my sister so distraught and broken. “Dinzil!” She looked about and with a passion of pleading in her thought-voice: “Dinzil—save me! Forgive me—save me!”

Inside I felt the pain of seeing her so broken. The Kaththea of the past might have suffered deeply, but she would have fought to the end, asking aid only as might one shield mate from another.

“Kaththea—” I tried to put my paw on her again, but she backed farther and farther from me, her eyes wild, her hands warding me off. “Kaththea, think!” Could I reach her anymore? Though I was loath to give that which abode here any deeper rooting in me, yet that I must do, or perhaps lose her utterly.

I held the sword by the blade so that the hilt was between us. Then I said a word. Fire shimmered once more, to burn me, but still I held fast to that column of golden flame.

“Kaththea, are you one who harbors evil within you? Those of the Wise Ones often examine their spirits, look well upon their motives, know the pitfalls and traps which await all those who put out their hands to the powers. Long you dwelt with them, and your unwillingness to join with them came from no evil, but because you had stronger ties elsewhere. Since you left Estcarp and came into Escore, what ill have you done by design—or thought on doing?”

Was she even listening to me? she held her hands before her face, but did not try to touch it, as if she feared that the flesh there would not be human.

“You are not evil, Kaththea; that I will not believe! If you are not, then how can it be that you see your inner self? This is only an illusion; we are among those to whom illusion is a common tool. You are only monster on this plane, as I am monster.”

“But Dinzil—” she thought.

“To Dinzil this is his place; he has made himself one with it. He has said so, just as he also told me that when you were one with it, not part monster, then you would be locked to him and his cause. Is that what you wish, Kaththea?”

She was shivering, great shudders shaking her squat, unlovely body. More and more her face faded and I saw the eyepits, the ovoid head of the weeper.

“I am monster—lost in a monster—”

“You dwell within a covering forced upon you in this place. For many powers fair is foul, as well as foul is fair.”

I thought she was listening now. She asked slowly: “What do you want of me? Why do you come to pull at me with memories?”

“Come with me!”

“Where?”

Where, indeed? I might recross that plain, pass through the remains of the gem barrier, back beyond the weeper’s place. But then where? Could I find an exit, leading from the Tower, anchored in Escore? I was not sure, and she knew my uncertainty and fastened upon it.

“Come with you, say you! When I ask where, you have no answer for me. What would you have us do, wander in this place, brother? It holds dangers the like of which you cannot imagine. Do not doubt Dinzil will come hunting.”

“Where is he now?”

“Where is he now?” she mimicked me shrilly. “Do you fear that he will come into the here and now to face you?” Then suddenly her eyes changed and the old current flowed between us.

“Kemoc?”

“Yes?”

“Kemoc, what has happened to us, to me?” She spoke simply as might a child bewildered by all she now saw and felt.

“We are in a place which is not ours, Kaththea, and it seeks to mold us into its own forms and ways. There is a way back—do you know it?”

Her blob head on which the traces of her normal face had almost disappeared, turned slowly as if she now gazed about her with new eyes, to which this was much of a puzzle.

“I came here—”

“How?” I believed I dared not press here too hard, yet if she did know of Dinzil’s door between the worlds, and it was not the same one through which I had entered, there was a chance for our escape.

“I think—” That hand which was still human raised uncertainly toward her head. Clumsily she turned to face the tapestry covered wall. “This way—”

She shuffled, her hands out before her. Then she picked up one edge of the tapestry, pulled it out. There, set in the wall, glowing an angry purple-red, was a symbol. I did not know it but its far-off descendant I had once seen, and I knew it for a symbol of such a power as I would not dare to summon.

I felt my sister’s thoughts writhe to shape a word, before I could protest. The symbol in the stone coiled as if a loathsome reptile had been loosed. Round and round it ran, and I would not look upon it, for there was a sickness in me that Kaththea knew that word. Then the stone vanished and only those glowing lines ran, and ran, spilling down into a pool of sullen, molten color on the floor, and that began to trickle away.

I stumbled forward, pulling at Kaththea to save her from the touch of that pool. Ahead was nothingness as there had been in that other tower through which I had plunged into this place.

“The door is open,” Kaththea’s thought was once more chill and assured. “For the sake of what lay between us in the past, take your freedom and go, Kemoc!”

The arm which still bore Orsya’s bespelled scarf was about her shoulders before she could dodge me. With the sword in my other hand I plunged on, using the weight of my body to bear her with me. I think she was too surprised to resist. It might not be Dinzil’s door, but in that moment I saw it as the only hope for both of us.

Falling—falling—I had kept no grasp on Kaththea after we went over the drop. That she had come with me was the thought I carried along into nothingness.

Once more I awoke to pain and a dulling of mind. But in awhile I noted that no color flashes leapt here, rather there was dimness and chill walls about me. I thought that Dinzil, by some trick, had me again in prison. The sword—where was the sword?

I raised my head where I lay prone on hard stone and looked about. Then I saw a glimmer beyond my paw—Paw? So I was not free from that other place. A vast misery of disappointment fell on me as a crushing weight.

But—my head strained higher—the paw was at the end of an arm, a human arm! On that the faint tracing of a scar I knew well; I could remember the fight in which I took it.

Now I levered myself up to look down at the rest of my body. It was no longer that of a toadman; remnants of human clothing covered me from the waist down. But the paws—I hardly dared to touch my face with those misshapen things, as if some of their foulness might rub off. But I must know if I still wore a toad head on my shoulders.

Beyond me, in the gloom of that place, something else moved. On my hands and knees, dragging the sword with me, I went to see what.

A human body wearing the riding dress of the Valley people, a woman’s body. At the end of her slender arms were red paws even more formless than mine. Above her shoulders was an ovoid, hairless featureless, save for two eye-pits. At my coming the head swung and those pits looked at me as if organs of sight hid somewhere in their depths.

“Kaththea!” I stretched forth my paws to her, but she once more avoided me. Only raised her own paws to set beside mine, as if to emphasize their monster form. Then she cowered away and brought up her arms to hide her head.

What moved me then I do not know, but I plucked at the scarf about my arm, no longer a band of light, but once more silken fabric. I now held it out to Kaththea.

The pit eyes peered at it over the top of one of her shielding arms. Then her paw came forth and snatched it from me, winding it around and around her head, leaving but a small slit open for sight.

Meanwhile I looked around. We were either back in the Tower rooted in Escore, or its double. We sat on the floor near the staircase as steep as a ladder. The doorways through which one could pass into those other worlds were closed, but the sooner we were away the better. I turned to my sister.

“Come—”

“Where?” her thought demanded. “Where can I find a place to hide what I now am?”

Fear touched me that perhaps her terror was rooted in truth, that we had brought back from the place Dinzil knew permanent disfigurement, since we had wrought there with powers of the light, but which, perhaps, had been distorted by the Shadow.

“Come—”

Somehow I got her to her feet, and we went down that breakneck stair and stood in the corridor of the mound. Once more the runes ran red on the sword, and those I watched. But still I set paw to Kaththea and drew her with me. She went silently beside me, moving as one stricken so she cared not where she went, nor to what future.

We came out into a gray day with sullen rain falling heavily. I wondered at how I was to find our way back to where I had left Orsya. But this rutted road we could follow in part.

Kaththea’s mind was closed to me, though I tried to get her interested in our escape. She walked dumbly, behind a barrier I could not pierce. I kept my eye upon the sword, though after we emerged from the mound, the runes cooled, nor did they fire again as we passed through the dell and climbed the rise on the other side.

From here I surveyed the ground, marking landmarks I had set in mind when I came this way. Surely it had been over there that I had slain that monstrous thing which was one of the guardians of the Dark Tower.

The hunger of which I had been aware in that other world was now pain and I brought out from my belt pouch the roots Orsya had supplied. I offered one to Kaththea.

“It is good—untainted—” I told her as I put another to my lips.

She struck it out of my grasp, so it rolled out of sight into a crevice between two rocks. Still her mind was closed to me. My hatred of Dinzil was such that had he stood before me I would have tried to rend him with teeth and nails, as might a woodland beast.

Kaththea began to waver back and forth, stumbling now and then, so I steadied her. Suddenly she twisted and shoved me from her, so I fell. Before I gained my feet she was staggering back toward the Tower.

I caught up with her, and, apparently, that last rebellion had drained her energy. She did not try to throw off the hold I kept on her, though I was alert to any move she made.

We went downslope and the footing was rough. But we might have walked through a deserted world. The sword runes did not light, and we saw no living thing. I thought I knew the brush ahead, though it was not mist-wreathed today. At last we came to the stream and the reef of rock where I had last seen Orsya. Somehow, I do not know why, I had expected to sight her there still, waiting, just as I had seen her last. When she was not I knew a surge of disappointment.

“Did you think you could depend upon the water wench, my foolish brother?” That hard, unknown Kaththea’s thoughts cut into my brain. “But it is as well for her.”

“What do you mean?”

Laughter now, inside my head—such laughter as I had never thought to hear except from one as far along the path elsewhere as Dinzil.

“Because, Kemoc, my dear brother, I might ask a boon of you and, I think, I could make you grant me that boon, and thereafter it would not be well with your water wench.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded again since she had left down the barrier. Only that dreadful laughter rang in my head. I guessed I had lost Kaththea for now, even though she walked unwillingly beside me.

Our road out was the stream and beyond the river. So plain was that I did not need Orsya’s guidance. Yet I still worried about her—hoping that she had prudently withdrawn to safety, and not that she had been captured by some roving danger of this land.

We came to the deserted house of the aspt and under my urging Kaththea crawled into the chamber ahead of me. She settled herself against the far wall, as far from me as was possible in such confined quarters.

“Kaththea, in the Valley they know much, more than we. They will know what to do!”

“But, Kemoc, my brother, I know what to do! I need only your water wench for the doing. If not her, there will be another. But she is an excellent choice, being what and who she is. Bring her to me, or me to her, and we shall make such magic as shall astonish you—Kemoc who thinks he knows something of mysteries and only cons tatters discarded by those far greater than he.”

I almost lost my patience. “Such as Dinzil, I suppose.”

She was silent for a long moment. Then once more that laughter rang in my mind. “Dinzil—ah, there is one who climbs clouds to tread the sky. He wants so very, very much, does Dinzil. But whether he will have even a handful from the full measure he thinks upon, that is another question, and Dinzil must come to face it. I think I hated you, Kemoc, for what you wrought when you brought me forth. But now, thinking on it the more, I see you have served me even better than I could have ordered for myself. There I was subject to Dinzil—you were so right to fear that for me. Dear brother, for your services there shall be a reward.” The head so closely shrouded in the green scarf nodded.

I was chilled within, wondering what manner of thing had come to dwell within Kaththea, and whether it could ever be expelled. I thought of those two fates Loskeetha had foreseen, though neither had come to pass. In them Kaththea was one with the enemy. Now perhaps I could accept that she would be far better dead.