The Witches of Karres Read online

  It checked again. The small shape spoke rapidly again, paused.

  " . . . press on me," the idol's voice continued. "My control units need my guidance or all would lapse into confusion. The barriers must be maintained. Manaret's energies must be fed the Nuris to hold high the attack on Karres the Accursed.

  "I cannot give you much attention, witch people. You are not significant enough. Open your minds to me now and your selves will be absorbed into Moander and share Moander's glory. Refuse and you die quickly and terribly—"

  For the third time, it broke off. The monkey-shape instantly piped Moander's all units signal, "Grazeem! Grazeem! Grazeem!," at the device it held and rattled on. Holding his breath, the captain darted a sideways glance at his witches, found them staring intently at him. The Sprite nodded, very slightly. The grik-dog crouched. The captain reached for it as it sprang up at him, noticed it dissolved back into the Leewit as he caught it. He didn't notice much else because he was sprinting headlong towards the black table and the talkative monkey-shape with the Leewit by then. But there were metallic crashings to right and left, along with explosive noises . . . .

  The monkey had stopped talking before he reached the table, sat there cross legged and motionless. Its metal jaw hung down, twisted sideways; the arm which held the transmission device had come away from the rest of it and dropped to the table top. There was renewed crashing farther down the room—Goth was still at work. The captain swung the Leewit up on the table, grasped the detached metal arm and held the transmitter before her. She clamped both hands about it and sucked in her breath—

  It wasn't exactly a sound then. It was more like having an ice-cold dagger plunge slowly in through each eardrum. The pair of daggers met in the captain's brain and stayed there, trilling. The trilling grew and grew.

  Until there was a noise nearby like smashing glass. The hideous sensation in his head stopped. The Leewit, sitting on the table beside the frozen, slack-jawed monkey-shape, scowled at the shattered halves of the transmitting instrument in her hands.

  "Knew it!" she exclaimed.

  The captain glanced around dizzily as Goth came trotting up, in her own shape. The rows of figures along the wall were in considerable disarray—machines simply weren't much good after a few small but essential parts had suddenly vanished from them. The black warrior's face stared sternly from a pile of the figure's other components. The bird-insect's head dangled beak down from a limp neck section, liquid fire trickling slowly like tears along the beak and splashing off the floor. The big idol's eye disks had disappeared and smoke poured out through the holes they'd left and wreathed about the thing's head.

  The ceiling screen wasn't showing Moander's stronghold at the moment, but a section of Manaret's surface was sliding past. The structure should soon be in view. The captain looked at the Leewit. She must have held that horrid whistle of hers for a good ten seconds before the transmitting device gave up! For ten seconds, gigantically amplified, destructive non-sound had poured through every section of the stronghold below.

  And every single simple-minded machine unit down there had been tuned in and listening—

  "There it comes!" murmured Goth, pointing.

  Faces turned up, they watched the stronghold edge into sight on the screen. A stronghold no longer—jagged cracks marked its surface, and puffs of flaming substance were flying out of the cracks. Farther down, its outlines seemed shifting, flowing, disintegrating. Slowly, undramatically, as it moved through the screen, the titanic construction was crumbling down to a mountainous pile of rubble.

  The Leewit giggled. "Sure messed up his holy place!" Then her head tilted to the side; her small nostrils wrinkled fastidiously.

  "And here comes you-know-who!" she added.

  Yes, here came Big Wind-Voice, boiling up out of nothing as Manaret's barrier systems wavered. A gamboling invisible blackness . . . peals of rolling vatch laughter—

  OH, BRAVE AND CLEVER PLAYER! NOW THE MIGHTY OPPONENT LIES STRICKEN! NOW YOU AND YOUR PHANTOM FRIENDS SHALL SEE WHAT REWARD YOU HAVE EARNED!

  This time there was no blurring, no tumbling through grayness. The captain simply discovered he stood in a vast dim hall, with Goth and the Leewit standing on his right. The transition had been instantaneous. Row on row of instruments lined the walls to either side, rising from the blank black floor to a barely discernible arched ceiling. He had looked at that scene only once before and then as a picture projected briefly into his mind by Cheel, the Lyrd-Hyrier prince, but he recognized it immediately. It was the central instrument room of Manaret, the working quarters of the lost synergizer.

  And it was clear that all was not well here. The instrument room was a bedlam of mechanical discord, a mounting, jarring confusion. The controls of Manaret's operating systems had been centered by Moander in his fortress; and with the fall of that fortress the pattern was disrupted. But the Lyrd-Hyrier must have been prepared long since to handle this situation whenever it should arise—

  They relled the vatch; it was not far away. Otherwise, except for the raving instruments, the three of them seemed alone in this place for several seconds following their arrival. Then suddenly they had company.

  A globe of cold gray brilliance appeared above and to the left of them some thirty feet away. Fear poured out from it like an almost tangible force; and only by the impact of that fear was the captain able to tell that this thing of sternly blazing glory was the lumpy crystalloid mass of the Manaret synergizer, returned to its own place and transformed in it. An instant later a great viewscreen flashed into sight halfway down the hall, showing the hugely enlarged purple-scaled head of a Lyrd-Hyrier. The golden-green eyes stared at the synergizer, shifted quickly to the three human figures near it. The captain was certain it was Cheel even before the familiar thought-flow came.

  "Do not move, witch friends!" Cheel's thought told them. "This is for your protection—"

  Something settled sluggishly about them, like a heavy thickening of the air. Motion seemed impossible at once. And layer on layer of heaviness still was coming down, though the air remained transparently clear. At the edge of the captain's vision was a momentary bright flashing as the synergizer rose towards the arched ceiling of the hall. He couldn't see where it went then or what it did, but a pale glow spread through the upper sections of the hall and the chattering din of instruments gone insane changed in seconds to a pulsing deep hum of controlled power.

  Now the vatch shifted closer, turned into a looming mountainous blackness in which dark energies poured and coiled, superimposed on the hall, not blotting it out but visible in its own way along with the hall and extending up beyond it into the body of the ship-planet.

  And the vatch was shaking with giant merriment . . . .

  Chapter TWELVE

  "Witch friend," Cheel's thought told the captain, "you and your associates have served your purpose . . . and now you will never leave in life the medium which has enclosed you. The synergizer is restored to its place, and its controls reach wherever Moander's did. Our Nuris are again ours, and Manaret is again a ship—a ship of conquest. It has weapons such as your universe has never seen. Their existence was concealed from Moander, and it could not have used them if it had known of them. But the synergizer can use them, and shall!

  "Witch friend, we are not allowing Manaret to be restored to our native dimensional pattern. We are the Great People. Conquest is our destiny and we have adopted Moander's basic plan of conquest against your kind. At the moment our Nuris are hard pressed by your world of Karres and have been forced back among the cold suns. But Manaret is moving out to gather the globes about it again and destroy Karres. Then—"

  It wasn't so much a thought as the briefest impulse. A lock took shape and closed in the same beat of time, and the connection to Cheel's mind was abruptly sliced off. What Cheel still had to say could be of no importance. What he already had said was abominable, but no great surprise. There'd simply been no way to determine in advance how trustworthy the Lyr
d-Hyrier would be after they were relieved of their mutinous robot director. Since that must have been considered on Karres, too, it might be Cheel would not find Karres as easy to destroy now as he believed . . . .

  But one couldn't count on that. And in any case, something would have to be done quickly. That there was death of some kind in this paralyzing heaviness which had closed down on him and his witches, the captain didn't doubt. He didn't know what it would be, but he could sense it being prepared.

  And that made it a very bad moment. Because he was not at all sure that what could be done on a small scale, and experimentally, might also be done on an enormously larger scale under the pressures of emergency. Or that he was the one to do it. But there wasn't much choice—

  OH, I KNEW IT! I FORESAW IT! the vatch-voice was bellowing delightedly. OH, WHAT A JEWEL-LIKE MIND HAS THIS PRINCE OF THE GREAT PEOPLE! WHAT A DEVASTATING MOVE HE HAS MADE! . . . WHAT NOW, SMALL PERSON, WHAT NOW?

  Carefully, the captain shaped up a mind-image of the grid of a starmap. And perhaps—perhaps—it was a klatha sort of starmap, and that tiny dot on it was then not simply a dot but in real truth the living world of Emris, north of the Chaladoor, goal of the Venture's voyage. Now another dot on it which should be in empty space some two hours' flight from Emris—yes, there!

  Then a mental view, a memory composite, of the Venture herself, combined with one of the Venture's control cabin. That part was easy.

  And a third view of Goth and the Leewit, as they stood beside him unmoving in the death-loaded, transparent heaviness still settling silently on them all from above. . . . Easier still.

  He couldn't move his head now; but physical motion wasn't needed to look up at the shifting, unstable mountain of vatch-blackness only he saw here, the monstrous torrents of black energy rushing, turning and coiling in endlessly changing patterns. Slitted green vatch-eyes stared at him from the blackness; vatch-laughter thundered:

  YOU DID WELL, SMALL PERSON! VERY WELL! YOU'VE PLAYED YOUR PART IN THE GAME, BUT NO PLAYER LASTS FOREVER. NOW YOU'VE BEEN BEAUTIFULLY TRICKED; AND WE SHALL SEE THE END!

  What manner of klatha hooks, the captain thought carefully, were needed to nail down a giant-vatch?

  Flash of heat like the lick of a sun . . . The vatch-voice howled in shock. The blackness churned in tornado convulsions—

  Not one hook, or three or four, the captain thought. Something like fifty! Great rigid lines of force, clamped on every section of the blackness, tight and unyielding! Big Windy, for all the stupendous racket he was producing, had been nailed down.

  The captain glanced at his three prepared mind-pictures, looked into the seething vatch-blackness. As much as we need for this! Put them together!

  YAAAAH! MONSTER! MONSTER—

  A swirling thundercloud of black energy shot from the vatch's mass, hung spinning beside it an instant, was gone. Gone, too, in that instant were the two small witch figures who'd stood at the captain's right.

  And now Manaret, that great evil ship—

  We don't want it here . . . .

  Black thunderbolts pouring from the vatch-mass, crashing throughout Manaret. Horrified shrieks from the vatch. The ship-planet shuddered and shook. Then it seemed to go spinning and blurring away from the captain, sliding gradually off into something for which he would never find a suitable description—except that the brief, partial glimpse he got of it was hideously confusing. But he remembered the impression he'd received from Cheel of the whirling chaos which raged between the dimension patterns, and knew the synergizer was taking the only course left open to save Manaret from being pounded apart internally by the detached sections of vatch energy released in it. And in another instant the Worm World had plunged back into the chaos out of which it had emerged centuries before and was gone.

  As for the captain, he found himself floating again in the formless grayness which presumably was a special vatch medium, and which by now was beginning to seem almost a natural place for him to be from time to time. The vatch was there, not because it wanted to be there, but because he was still firmly tacked to it by the klatha hooks. It was a much reduced vatch. Over half its substance was gone—most of it dispersed in the process of demolishing Manaret, with which it had disappeared. The captain became aware of slitted green eyes peering at him fearfully from the diminished mass.

  DREAM MONSTER, muttered a shaky wind-voice, RELEASE ME BEFORE YOU DESTROY ME! WHAT HORROR AM I EXPERIENCING HERE? LET ME AWAKE!

  "One more job," the captain told it. "Then you can go—and you might be able to pick up a piece of what you've lost while you're doing the job."

  WHAT IS THIS JOB?

  "Return me to my ship . . . ."

  He was plopped down with a solid thump on the center of the Venture's control room floor almost before he completed the order. The walls of the room swirled giddily around him—

  "Captain!" Goth's voice was yelling from somewhere in the room. Then: "He's here!"

  There was an excited squeal from the Leewit a little farther off; a sound of hurrying footsteps. And a wind-voice wailing, DREAM MONSTER . . . YOUR PROMISE!

  Struggling up to a sitting position as the control room began to steady, the captain released the klatha hooks. He had a momentary impression of a wild, rising moan outside the ship which seemed to move off swiftly and fade in an instant into unimaginable distance.

  * * *

  As he came to his feet, helped up part way by Goth tugging with both hands at his arm, the Leewit arrived. Hulik do Eldel and Vezzarn appeared in the doorway behind her, stopped and stood staring at him. By then the walls of the room were back where they belonged. The feeling of giddiness was gone.

  "All right, folks!" the captain said quickly and heartily, to get in ahead of questions he didn't want to answer just yet. "This has been rough, but I think we can relax . . . ." The viewscreens were a dark blur, which indicated the Venture was in space as she should be, while the screens were still set for close-up planetary scanning. The ship engines were silent. "Let's find out where we are. It should be north of the Chaladoor—"

  "North of the Chaladoor—!" Vezzarn and Hulik chorused hoarsely.

  "—around two hours from Emris." The captain slid into the control chair, flicked the screen settings to normal space-view. Stars appeared near and far. He turned up the detectors, got an immediate splattering of ship blips from medium to extreme range—a civilized area! "Vezzarn, pick me up some beacons here! I want a location check fastest!"

  The spacer hurried towards the communicators, Hulik following. The captain cut in the main drive engines. They responded with a long, smooth roar and the Venture surged into flight. Before departing, the vatch appeared to have thriftily reabsorbed the speck of vatch-stuff it had left in the engine room to nullify drive energies . . . .

  "Worm World?" Goth's urgent whisper demanded. The Leewit was pressed next to her against the chair, both staring intently at him.

  "Went pffttt!" the captain muttered from the side of his mouth. "Tell you later—"

  They gasped. "You better!" hissed the Leewit, gray eyes shining with a light of full approval the captain rarely had detected in them before. "What you do? That was the scaredest vatch I ever relled!"

  "Emris beacons all around, skipper!" Vezzarn announced, voice quavvering with what might have been excitement or relief. "Have your location in a moment—"

  The captain glanced at the witches. "Got a number we can call on Emris, to get in contact?" he asked quietly.

  They nodded. "Sure do!" said Goth.

  "We should be in range. Give it a try as soon as we have our course . . . ."

  It seemed almost odd, a couple of minutes later, to be speaking to Toll by a method as unwitchy as ship-to-planet communicator contact. Hulik and Vezzarn had retired to the passenger section again when the captain told them there'd be Karres business coming up. The talk was brief. Toll had sheewashed to Emris from the Dead Suns Cluster just before their call came in, because someone she referred to as a probab
ility calculator had decided the Venture and her crew should be showing up around there by about this time. Karres was still battling Nuri globes but winning handily in that conflict; and they'd realized something had happened to Manaret, but not what.

  The captain explained as well as he could. Toll's eyes were shining much as the Leewit's as she blew him a kiss. "Now listen," she said, "all three of you. There's been more klatha simmering around the Venture lately than you'd normally find around Karres. Better let it cool off! We want to see you soonest but don't use the Drive to get here. Don't do anything but stay on course. . . . Captain, a couple of escort ships will meet you in about an hour to pilot you in. Children, we'll see you at the governor's spacefield in Green Galaine—oh, yes, and tell the captain what the arrangement is on Emris. . . . Now let's cut this line before someone taps it who shouldn't!"

  "I just thought," the captain said to Goth and the Leewit as he switched off the communicator, "we'd better go make sure Olimy's all right! Come on . . . I'd like to hear about that Emris business then."

  Olimy, unsurprisingly, was still in his stateroom, aloof and unaffected by the events which had thundered about him. On the way back they stopped to tell Hulik and Vezzarn they'd be making landfall on Emris in a couple of hours, and to find out what the experience of the two had been when they found themselves alone on the Venture. "There was this noise—" Hulik said. She and Vezzarn agreed it was an indescribable noise, though not a very loud one. "It was alarming!" said Hulik. It had come from the control section. They hadn't tried to investigate immediately, thinking it was some witch matter they shouldn't be prying into; but when the noise was followed by a complete silence from the forward part of the ship, they'd first tried to get a response from the control section by intercom, and when that failed they'd gone up front together. Except for the fact that there was no one present nothing had changed . . . the viewscreens showed the familiar rocky slope about them and the rain still pelting down steadily on the Venture. Not knowing what else to do, they'd sat down in the control section to wait . . . and they hadn't really known what they were waiting for.