The Witches of Karres Read online

  As the captain was about to reply, he became aware of a sound. It seemed very far off and was a kind of droning, heavy sound, a steady humming, with bursts of other noises mixed in, which could barely be made out in the humming, but which made him think at once of the vatch. This commotion, whatever it was, was moving towards him with incredible speed. A glance at the faces of Hulik and Vezzarn, who sat at the table across from him, told the captain it was not the sort of sound physical ears could pick up; their expressions didn't change.

  He did not have time to look around at Goth, who'd left the table for a moment, and was somewhere in the room behind him. As distant as it seemed when he first caught it, the droning swelled enormously in an instant approaching the Venture's control compartment in such a dead straight line that the captain felt himself duck involuntarily, as if to dodge something which couldn't possibly be dodged. The accompanying racket, increasing equally in volume, certainly was the vatch's bellowing wind-voice but with an odd quality the captain had never heard before. The notion flashed through his mind that the vatch sounded like a nearly spent runner, advancing in great leaps to keep ahead of some dire menace pressing close on his heels, while he gasped out his astonishment at being so pursued.

  Then the droning reached the control compartment—and stopped, was wiped out, as it reached it. An icy pitch-blackness swept through the room and was gone. For a moment the captain had relled vatch overwhelmingly. But that was gone, too. Then he realized he could still hear the monster's agitated voice, now receding into distance as swiftly as it had approached. In an instant it faded completely away.

  As it faded, Goth said, "Captain!" from across the room behind him, and Hulik made a small, brief, squealing noise. Twisting about, half out of his chair, the captain froze again, staring at the Leewit.

  Toll's youngest daughter was on the floor in the center of the room, turning over and coming up on hands and knees. She stayed that way, blond hair tangled wildly, gray eyes glaring like those of a small, fierce animal, as her head turned quickly, first towards the captain, then towards Goth, hurrying towards her.

  "Touch-talk! Quick!" the Leewit's high child-voice said sharply, and Goth dropped to her knees next to her. The captain heard the scrape of chairs, quick footsteps, glanced back and saw Vezzarn and Hulik hastily leaving the compartment section, returned his attention to the witch sisters. Goth had pulled the Leewit around and was holding her against herself, right palm laid along the side of the Leewit's head, her other hand pressing the Leewit's palm against her own temple. They stayed that way for perhaps a minute. Then the Leewit's small shape seemed to sag. Goth let her down to the floor, drew a long breath, stood up.

  "Where did . . . is she going to be all right?" the captain inquired hoarsely.

  "Huh? Sure! That was Toll," Goth told him, blinking absently at the Leewit.

  "Toll?"

  "Holding on and talking through the Leewit." Goth tapped the side of her head. "Touch-talk! Told me a lot before she had to go back to Karres-now . . . ." She glanced about, went to the stack of folded blankets used by Hulik and Vezzarn during the night, hauled them out of the corner and started pulling them apart. "Better help me get the Leewit wrapped in five, six of these before she comes to, Captain!"

  Joining her, the captain glanced at the Leewit. She was lying on one side now, eyes closed, knees drawn up. "Why wrap her in blankets?" he asked.

  "Spread them out like so. . . . Vatch took her over the Egger Route. She'll throw three fits when she first wakes up—most everyone does! Route's pretty awful! Won't last long, but she'll be hard to hang on to if we don't have her wrapped."

  They laid the Leewit on the blankets, began rolling her up tightly in them. "Cover her head good!" Goth cautioned.

  "She won't be able to breathe—"

  "She isn't breathing now," Goth told him, with appalling unconcern. "Go ahead—that's the way to do it!"

  By the time they were done, the bundled-up non-breathing Leewit looked unnervingly like a small mummy laid away for a thousand-year rest. They knelt on the floor at either end of her, Goth holding her shoulders, the captain gripping her wrapped ankles. "Can cut loose any time now!" Goth said, satisfied.

  "While we're waiting," said the captain, "what happened?"

  Goth shook her head. "First off, what's going to happen. The Leewit mustn't hear that because she can't block a vatch. They're coming for us. Don't know when they'll make it, but they'll be here."

  "Who's coming?"

  "Toll and the others. Whoever they can spare. Can't spare too many though, because they're already fighting the Worm Worlders. They're at the Tark Nembi place—the Dead Suns Cluster, where I thought it might be—trying to work through to Manaret. Right now Karres is stuck in a force-web tangle, with so many Nuri globes around you can't look into space from there—"

  It sounded like an alarming situation, but Goth said the witches had their new weapons going and figured they could make it. They'd had a plan to use the Manaret synergizer, which would have made their undertaking much less difficult; but time was running out, and they'd given up waiting for Olimy to arrive with the device or report his whereabouts. They had to assume he'd been trapped and was lost. But now that they knew what had happened, they were throwing everyone available on the problem of tracing out the Egger Route section the vatch had broken into the distant past. Toll still had a line on the Leewit, though a tenuous one, so they'd know exactly to what point to go. When they arrived, they'd reverse and take the Venture with everyone and everything on it back to Karres-now.

  "They can move the whole ship over the Route?"

  "Sure. Don't worry about that! You could move a sun over the Route except it'd nova before it got anywhere. If they get to us quick enough, that'll be it."

  "The vatch . . . ."

  "Looks to me," Goth said, "like the vatch got the idea backwards. You said get the synergizer to the other Karres, to the witches that can use it. So instead it brought a Karres witch back to the synergizer."

  "The Leewit?" said the captain, astonished.

  "Can't figure that either yet!" Goth admitted. "Well, it's a vatch—"

  "What was the humming noise?"

  "That's the Route. Vatch punched it straight into the ship so it could drop the Leewit in with us."

  He grunted. "How did Toll do, uh, whatever she did?"

  Goth said no one had realized a giant-vatch was hanging around Karres-now until it scooped up the Leewit. With all the klatha forces boiling on and about the planet at the moment, the area was swarming with lesser vatches, attracted to the commotion; among them the giant remained unnoticed. But when the Leewit disappeared, Toll spotted it and instantly went after it. She'd got a hook into the vatch and a line on her daughter and was rapidly overhauling the vatch when it managed to jerk free.

  "I see," nodded the captain. Another time might be better to inquire what esoteric processes were involved in getting a hook into a giant-vatch and a line through time on one's daughter.

  "Toll didn't have enough hold on the Leewit then to do much good right away," Goth continued. "There was just time for the touch-talk before she got sucked back to Karres-now."

  "I suppose touch-talk's a kind of thought-swapping?"

  "Sort of, but—"

  The small blanket-wrapped form between them uttered a yowl that put the captain's hair on end. The next moment he was jerked forward almost on his face as the Leewit doubled up sharply, and he nearly lost his grip on her ankles. Then he found himself on his side on the floor, hanging on to something which twisted, wrenched, kicked, and rotated with incredible rapidity and vigor. The vocal din bursting from the blankets was no less incredible. Goth, lying across the Leewit with her arms locked around her, was being dragged about on the deck.

  Then the bundle suddenly went limp. There was still a good deal of noise coming from it; but those were the Leewit's normal shrieks of wrath, much muffled now.

  "Woo-ooof!" gasped Goth, relaxing her hold somewhat. "Ro
ugh one! She's all right now, though—you can let go—"

  "Hope she hasn't hurt herself!" The captain was a little out of breath, too, more with surprise and apprehension than because of the effort he'd put out.

  Goth grinned. "Take more than that bit of bouncing around to hurt her, Captain!" She gave the blankets a big-sisterly hug, put her mouth down close to them, yelled "Quit your screeching—it's me! I'm letting you out—"

  The captain found Vezzarn and Hulik in the passenger lounge, spoke soothingly if vaguely of new developments which might get them all out of trouble shortly, and returned to the control section hoping he'd left the two with the impression that the Leewit's mode of arrival and the subsequent uproar were events normal enough in his area of experience and nothing for them to worry about. They'd agreed very readily to remain in the lounge area for the time being.

  Goth and the Leewit were swapping recent experiences at a rapid-fire rate when he came back into the room. They still sat on the floor, surrounded by scattered blankets. "They got a klatha pool there now like you never saw before!" the Leewit was exclaiming. "They—" She caught sight of the captain and abruptly checked herself.

  "Don't have to watch it with him any more!" Goth assured her. "Captain knows all about that stuff now."

  "Huh!" When they'd loosened the blankets and the Leewit came eeling out, red faced and scowling, and discovered the captain there, her immediate inclination apparently had been to blame him for her experience, though she hadn't been aware of Toll's touch-talk conversation with Goth, in which Toll simply had used her as a handy medium—switching her on for the purpose about like switching on a ship intercom, the captain had gathered. The Leewit, in fact, remembered nothing clearly since the moment she'd relled a giant-vatch and simultaneously felt the vast entity sweeping her away from Karres. She recalled, shudderingly, that she'd been over the Egger Route. She knew it had been a horrifying trip. But she could only guess uneasily now at what had made it so horrifying. That blurring of details was a frequent experience of those who came over the Route and one of its most disturbing features. Since it was the captain who'd directed the vatch's attention to Karres in the first place, the Leewit wasn't so far off, of course, in feeling he was responsible for her kidnapping. However, nobody mentioned that to her.

  The look she gave him as he squatted down on his heels beside the sisters might have been short of full approval, but she remarked only, "Learned mighty quick if you know all about it!"

  "Not all about it, midget," the captain said soothingly. "But it looks like I've started to learn. One thing I can't figure at the moment is that vatch."

  "What about the vatch?" asked Goth.

  "Well, I had the impression that after it dropped the Leewit here, it took off at top speed—as if it were scared Toll might catch up with it."

  The Leewit gave him a surprised stare.

  "It was scared Toll would catch up with it!" she said.

  "But it's a giant-vatch!" said the captain.

  The Leewit appeared puzzled. Goth rubbed the tip of her nose and remarked, "Captain, if I were a giant-vatch and Toll got mad at me, I'd be going somewhere fast, too!"

  "Sure would!" the Leewit agreed. "No telling what'd happen! She'd short out its innards, likely!"

  "Pull it inside out by chunks!" added Goth.

  "Oh?" said the captain, startled. "I didn't realize that, uh, sort of thing could be done."

  "Well, not by many," Goth acknowledged. "Toll sure can do it!"

  "Got a fast way with vatches when her temper's up!" the Leewit nodded.

  "Hmm," said the captain. He reflected. "Then maybe we're rid of the thing, eh?"

  Goth looked doubtful. "Wouldn't say that, Captain. They're mighty stubborn. Likely it'll come sneaking back pretty soon to see if Toll's still around. Could be too nervous about it to do much for a while though."

  She regarded the Leewit's snarled blond mop critically. "Let's go get your hair combed out," she said. "You're kind of a mess!"

  They went into Goth's cabin. The captain wandered back towards the screens, settled into the control chair, rubbed his jaw, relled experimentally. Nothing in range—but they probably hadn't lost the vatch yet. He'd been wondering about the urgent haste with which it had seemed to pass here when pursued by only one angry witch mother. Klatha hooks . . . shorting out vatch innards. . . . He shook his head. Well, Toll was a redoubtable sorceress even among her peers, from all he'd heard.

  Klatha hooks—

  The captain knuckled his jaw some more. No way of knowing when the Egger Route would come droning awesomely up again, this time bringing a troop of witches to transport the Manaret synergizer, the Venture and themselves to the embattled Karres of more than three hundred thousand years in the future. It might be minutes, hours, or days, apparently. There was no way of knowing either when the vatch would start to get over being nervous and discover there was no hot-tempered witch mother around at present—

  The captain grunted, shifted attention mentally down to the Venture's engine room, to the thrust generators. Almost immediately an awareness came of the tiny, swirling speck of blackness there which couldn't be seen with physical eyes . . . the minute scrap of vatch stuff that carried enough energy in itself to hold the ship's drives paralyzed.

  What immaterial manner of thing, he thought, would be a klatha hook shaped to snag that immaterial fragment of vatch?

  Brief wash of heat. . . . The speck jumped, stood still again, its insides whirling agitatedly. The captain pulled in some fashion, felt something tighten between them like the finest of threads, grow taut.

  So that was a klatha hook! . . . He let out his breath, drew on the hook, brought the speck in steadily with it until it was swirling above the control desk a few feet away from him.

  Stay there, he thought, and released the hook. The speck stayed where it was. As close to it as this, he could rell its vatch essence, though faintly. He flicked another klatha snag to it, drew it closer, released it again . . . .

  Hooks, it seemed, he could do. He might also find he was able to short out the speck's innards if he made the attempt. But there was no immediate point in that. The speck was a tool with powers and limitations, a working device, a miniature vatch machine. He'd already discovered some of the ways such a machine could be made to operate. What else could it do that might be useful to know . . . perhaps might become very necessary to know about?

  The captain stared at the speck in scowling concentration, half aware Goth and the Leewit had left the cabin. He could hear them talking in the outer control section, voices lowered and intent. . . . Turn it inside out, in chunks? That might wreck it as a device. But since it was non-material vatch stuff, it might not.

  There was a pipe in one of the drawers in his cabin, an old favorite of more leisurely days, though he hadn't smoked it much since the beginning of the Chaladoor trip. He brought an image of it now before his mind, pictured it lying on the control desk before him, turned his attention back to the vatch speck.

  Just enough of you to do the job! . . . Get it!

  Out of the speck, with the thought, popped a lesser speck, so tiny it could produce no impression at all except an awareness that it was there. It hung beside the other for an instant, then was gone, and was back. The pipe lay on the desk.

  So they could be taken apart in chunks and the chunks still put to work! Now—

  " . . . not sure!" The Leewit's young voice trilled suddenly through his abstraction. "Yes, I do, just barely. . . . Stinkin' thing!"

  The captain glanced around hastily at the open door. Were they relling the vatch speck in here? It would do no harm, of course, if Goth knew about his new line of experimentation. But the Leewit—

  Then he stiffened. Together! he thought at the two specks. The lesser one flicked back inside the other. Back down where you—but the reassembled vatch speck was swirling again above the thrust generators in the engine room before the thought was completed. He drew his attention quickly away from it.


  "Captain?" Goth called from the outer room.

  "Yes—I'm getting it, Goth!" His voice hadn't been too steady.

  The giant-vatch was barely in range, the relling sensation so distantly faint it had been overlapped by the one produced by the vatch-speck immediately before him. The entity had returned, might be prowling around cautiously as Goth had expected, to avoid another encounter with Toll and with klatha hooks of an order to match its own hugeness. But he had been careless—it wouldn't do at all to have the vatch surprise him while he was tinkering with the devices it had stationed here.

  It drew closer gradually. The witch sisters remained silent. So did the captain. He began to get impressions of vatch-muttering, indistinct and intermittent. It did seem to be trying to size up the situation here now, might grow bolder as it became convinced it had lost its pursuer—

  Why had it brought the Leewit through time to the Venture? She was a capable witch-moppet when it came to producing whistles that shattered shatterable objects to instant dust. From what Goth had said, she also had blasts in her armory with an effect approximating a knock-out punch delivered by a mighty fist. Neither, however, seemed very useful in getting the Manaret synergizer back to Manaret, past Moander, the Nuris, and the dense tangles of energy barriers that guarded the Worm World.

  The Leewit's other main talent then was a linguistic one, as the witches understood linguistics—a built-in klatha ability to comprehend any spoken language she heard and translate and use it without effort or thought. And Moander, the monster-god of the Worm World legends, who was really a great robot, reputedly "spoke in a thousand tongues." Nobody seemed to know just what that meant; but conceivably the vatch knew. So conceivably the Leewit's linguistic talent was the vatch's reason for deciding to fit her into its plans to overthrow Moander through the captain.