Web of the Witch World - Andre Norton

This crawler was returning to the keep, empty of supplies. Supplies. Simon swallowed. Food, water—both in this barren country would be found only in Kolder hands. Already the need of water pressed him; it probably was as hard for the others. Five of them and a prisoner—and there the might of the Kolder. Perhaps it would have been simpler to invade the keep.

“Simpler—” Jaelithe’s answer was almost a part of his own flow of thought. For seconds Simon did not realize that it was not. “Perhaps simpler, but not the right answer.”

He glanced at her where she lay, her mail-clad shoulder nearly rubbing against his. With her helm on her head and the loose scarf of metal links depending from it wound about chin and throat, half her face was veiled. But her eyes met his squarely.

“Reading of thoughts?” Again she answered an unvoiced question. “Not quite that, I think, rather that a similar path is followed by us both. You are aware, too, that this is necessary for our venture. And the answer is not safety—not for us—but something far different.”

“The gate!”

“The gate,” she affirmed. “You believe that these Kolder must have something from there to aid in what they would do in our world. That I believe also, therefore they must not succeed.”

“Which depends upon the nature of their gate.”

The one which had brought Simon into this world had been a very simple affair—a rough stone between pillars of the same crudely hewn substance. A man sat himself there so—hands at his sides fitting into depressions such as also cupped his buttocks. He then waited for dawn and the gate was open. The guardian of that way had told Simon legends in the hours he had passed of a long night waiting for the dawn. The tales told that this was a stone of great story: the Siege Perilous of Arthur’s use, an enchanted stone which somehow read a man’s soul and then opened to him the world in which he best fitted.

But whatever gate had let the Kolders through to defile this world had not been that kind. And what five of them could do to close it, Simon had not the least idea. Only Jaelithe was also right—this was the thing which must be done.

They skulked along the heights as the light grew stronger, able to follow the marks of the caterpillar trucks below. One of the marines climbed the mesa wall to scout beyond. The others took turns in sleeping in a hidden crevice. Only Aldis sat, staring before her, her hands, though bound at the wrists, resting tight against the Kolder talisman on her breast, as if such touch brought her strength.

She had been a rarely beautiful woman, but now she aged before their eyes, her flesh thinning until the bones were stark in jaw and cheek, her eyes sunken in ridged sockets. Her tangled golden hair was as incongruous as a girl’s wig on an old woman. Since they had begun the march her sight had never focused on any of them; she might have been one of the possessed. Yet Simon thought it was not the quenching of life which made her so, but rather a withdrawal to some hiding place deep within her, from which spirit and life would waken when the need came.

And so, for all her present passivity, she was to be watched—if not feared. Loyse was the watcher and Simon thought she took more than a little pleasure in the knowledge that their roles were now reversed, that it was she who controlled, Aldis who obeyed.

Simon lay with his eyes closed, but he could not sleep. The energy he had expended in the Kolder keep and after, instead of tiring him, seemed to set ferment to working. He had the sensation of one faced with a problem, clues close to hand, and the driving need to solve it. More used to weapons he could hold, touch, this new ability to work mentally kept his mind restless, awoke uneasiness in him. He opened his eyes to find Jaelithe watching him across the narrow cleft in which they sheltered. She smiled.

And for the first time he wondered a little at the form of their meeting. That barrier he had thought so thick, growing thicker, had vanished utterly. Had it ever been there at all? Yes—but now it seemed as if it had existed for two other people, not for them.

She did not touch him by hand, or mind, but suddenly there was a flow of warmth and feeling about him, in him, which he had never experienced before, though he thought he had known the ultimate in union. And under that caressing warmth he at last relaxed, the pitch of awareness no less, but not so taut and binding.

Was this what Jaelithe had known as a witch, what she had missed and then thought she had found again? Simon understood perfectly how great that loss must have seemed.

Scrape of boot on rock—Simon was on his feet, looking to the end of the crevice. Sigrod swung down. He pulled off his tight-fitting, crestless helm, wiped his arm across his sweating face. His cheeks were flushed.

“They are there right enough, a whole camp of them—mostly possessed. They have a thing set up.” He was frowning a little as if trying to find the words in his seaman’s vocabulary to best describe what he had seen. Then he used his fingers to support description. “There are pillars set so . . .” Forefinger pointed vertically. “And a crosspiece—so.” A horizontal line. “It is all made of metal, I think—green in color.”

Loyse moved. She jerked aside one of those hands Aldis kept folded over her Kolder talisman, displaying a part of the alien symbol. “Like this?”

Sigrod leaned closer, eyeing the talisman carefully.

“Aye, but it is big. Four—five men can march through at once.”

“Or one of those crawling vehicles of theirs?” Simon asked.

“Aye, it will take one of those. But that is all there is to it—an archway out in bare country. Everything else well away from it.”

“As if it is to be avoided,” Jaelithe commented. “Yes, they must be dealing with strange and powerful forces here. Dangerous forces if they strive to open such a passage.”

An archway of green metal, alien technology to be unleashed through it. Simon made his decision.

“You,” he nodded to the crewmen, “will remain here with the Lady Loyse. If we do not return within a full day strike for the shore. Perhaps there you can find that which will take you to sea and so escape—”

Their protests were ready, he could read them in their eyes, but they did not attempt to deny his authority. Jaelithe smiled again, serenely. Then she stooped and touched Aldis on the shoulder.

Though she did not exert any other direction, the Kolder agent rose in turn and moved to the end of the crevice, Jaelithe behind her. Simon sketched a half salute, but his words were for Loyse.

“Your part in this is done, Lady. Go with fortune.”

She, too, was all protest which she did not utter.

Then she nodded.

“To you, also, fortune—”

They did not look back as they began that long tramp, about the base of the mesa so that they might come upon the Kolder camp from the south. The sun was already warm on the twisted rocks about them. It might make this land a furnace before they were out of it. Out of it where? In hiding near the Kolder gate—or—? Somehow Simon was now sure that the gate was not their only goal.

17 BLASTED WORLD

THE SUN was high and, as Simon had foreseen, hot, so that the weight of mail shirt on his shoulders was a burden. He had twisted his Kolder smock about his head turban-wise in place of his missing helm, but the heat beat at his brain as he looked to the Kolder gate. As with the Siege Perilous in Petronius’ garden so long ago, he could see nothing beyond it but the same desert of rock. Did this one also need a certain time of day to activate it? He judged that the gate was complete, for no one worked there. Though men lay about the camp site as if struck down in exhaustion.

“Simon!”

Jaelithe and Aldis were in the shadow of a rock pinnacle, sheltered in the only way possible from the glare of this grim waste. The Kolder agent was on her feet, looking not to her companions, but straight out through the shimmering heat waves to the gate. Her hands were again over the Kolder talisman. But her face had come alive. There was an avid eagerness in her expression, as if all she had ever wanted lay just before her for the taking. She began to walk forward at a pace which quickened as she went.

Simon would have intercepted her, but Jaelithe raised a warning hand. Aldis was out in the open now, paying no heed to the heat or the sun, her tattered robe streaming behind her as she began to run.

“Now!” Jaelithe was running in turn and Simon joined her.

They were closer to the gate than those in the camp, and for part of that distance they would be screened from sight as the Kolder party sheltered behind two of the crawler trucks and some of the piled boxes.

It was the gate which was drawing Aldis, and, though she had stumbled and drawn back during their journey about the mesa, she showed no signs of fatigue now. In fact her speed of flight was almost superhuman as she pulled ahead of both her pursuers.

There was a shout from the camp. Simon dared not turn his head for they had come upon a smoothed stretch over which Aldis sped like a winged thing. He doubted if he could match her pace, though Jaelithe was not too far behind her. The gate structure loomed taller in the heat waves.

Jaelithe put on a burst of speed which allowed her to grasp Aldis’ torn robe. The fabric ripped the more under her clutch and the other’s struggles, but she held fast, although Aldis still pulled her towards the gate. Simon pounded up, his heart beating heavily in his chest, unsteady on his feet from the effort.

Something crackled overhead. Only one of Aldis’ wild plunges took them out of the path of that. They were under fire from the camp and in the open they were easy targets. Simon could see only one possible escape. With all his strength he threw himself against both of the women as they struggled, and so rushed the three of them under the crossbar of the gate.

It was plunging from midday into night in a single instant. The sensation of venturing where his kind had no right to go lasted for seconds which were eternity. Then Simon fell into gloom with a lash of rain beating across his body. While overhead crackled such a display of lightning that he was dazzled blind when he raised his head. Jaelithe lay within the circle of his arm and she twisted about, her cheek now close to his.

Water washed about them, dashed into their faces as if they lay in the bed of a swiftly rising stream. Simon gasped and pulled himself up, dragging Jaelithe along. Then she cried out something drowned by the drumming of the storm. By a lightning flash Simon could see that other body, the water striking against it as it lay crosswise, damming the stream. He reached for Aldis. Her eyes were closed, her head rolled limply. Simon thought that he might be carrying a corpse, but he brought her up from the bed of the rapidly filling stream.

They were in a valley between high walls and the water was pouring down very fast. Objects bobbed on its surface, arguing of a flash flood. Simon struggled to the wall and eyed it for possible footholds. They were there, but to make that ascent with Aldis was a task which exhausted them both. So that once at the top of the rise he lay again with Jaelithe, his back to the rain, his head pillowed on his arm as he breathed in great sobs.