by Andre Norton
He raised his weapon again to closely examine the butt of it. Simsa was able to see a thin bright red line there, as a hidden line of fire might show.
“I have half a charge still.” He might have been speaking aloud to himself, for he had not looked toward her at all or made any comment on what she had said. His free hand broke out of the loose hold she had kept on him and went to a row of tubes set endwise along his belt. “Two others—that is it.”
For the first time, he at last regarded her.
“If we reach there”—he gestured to the distant hump of stone—“what then?”
What then indeed? She had purposely tried not to think beyond reaching the rocks. Back across the river—finding the tunnel—the valley? But the dwellers therein had already attacked Thorn once—would they raise a single, jointed, hook-haired leg to aid him? This might be only a perilous interlude between two deaths. Since the Elder One had helped to raise the storm that had brought down the flitter, the valley people might be a little more merciful to Simsa. However, could she count on that? You could not guess the many turnings of the path in any alien mind. By her act in saving Thorn—momentarily—she could well have condemned herself in their understanding.
Yet she had nothing else to offer but the ruined block tower—beyond the faintness of the hope that, if they could hold off the crawlers for a space, the valley people might just be moved to take a hand.
All this had passed swiftly through her mind, so she could not be sure that her words of answer did not follow directly on his question.
“I do not know—for the future”—she gave him the stark truth—“but it was once a place of protection, and I feel that these crawlers cannot venture too far from their holes.” She said nothing of the valley dwellers.
She saw that he was continuing to watch her from under scowling brows.
“Was it of your raising?” he asked grimly.
Simsa did not understand. “What of what?” Had he acutely and correctly connected the storm that had downed the flitter with her fellow dweller in this body? She pressed the rod against herself and withdrew one step and then another, her attention divided between his scowling face and the weapon in his hand.
“Yes!” His scowl smoothed away, but now there was a sharp purpose in his face as his weapon swung around and up to cover her. “It was you!”
She retreated no farther. Confrontations back in the Burrows had taught her something of such a game, though this was no time for the playing of games when the yellow ovoids on the plain and their kin in the stream closed in.
“I do not know of what you accuse me.” Which indeed was no lie. She only guessed at his thoughts, would not attempt to use the skill of the Elder One to truly read them. “But if you wish to front me with blade and skill”—she fell back easily into the speech and custom of the Burrows—“it would be better to wait—we have a common enemy now.”
Zass’s screech nearly drowned out the last word of the girl’s speech. The zorsal dove at a yellow tip flapping along the edge of the rock where they stood and tore at it viciously with both tooth and talon, sending out a spurt of black-green fluid which nearly touched Thorn. Startled, he swung swiftly to face the zorsal’s opponent and aimed a beam of fire down into the owner of that questing tentacle.
Though that finger of light was far less in its brilliance and sweep than the power he had summoned earlier, Simsa once again heard the dying shriek in her mind. Zass was voicing cries of triumph, planing out from their stand toward the interior and the rock tower as if she, also, urged on them that way.
The nearest of the fissures had already proved a doorway for one of the monsters. Although it swelled into greater bulk upon coming into the air, even as they all were doing, it was not developing such a size as either Simsa or Thorn. Having apparently made up his mind, without any further argument, to their journey across the plain, the spaceman once more took careful aim at that crawler. With a sharp burst of energy, he turned it into a stinking mess of well-charred fibers.
Simsa leapt lightly to the rock level where the creature had died, keeping well away from the mass. Its thick, sour odor seemed to cling to the air and pass from that to her skin and hair so that she gagged until she was able to control herself.
Thorn had not kept up with her, and Simsa did not need Zass’s warning croak to look back. The spaceman stumbled a little, one hand to his bandaged head, yet aimed his light weapon once again and took out, or at least badly wounded, another creature sliding from its fissure to cross her path. There was a humming, unlike Zass’s shrieks of defiance or the sizzle-purr of the off-world weapon in use. For a breath or two of time, Simsa thought the sound was coming out of the air, some form of communication between blob and blob to rally the sand creepers emerging ahead of them into an array they could not hope to blast their way through.
Thorn’s weapon failed. He stood, swaying a little, as he dug another cylinder from his belt loop and, shaking one such from the butt of the hand piece, forced the other in with a sharp smack. Not from him or Zass came that sound—rather it pulsated in the air weirdly as something within her stirred and answered to it.
Simsa waited for Thorn to catch up. As he raised the weapon again for another shot to aim at a well-grown sand-thing, she caught at his wrist a second time. That murmur of sound was akin to the power raising of the Elder One and the yellow valley dweller.
Zass stopped in midshriek, rose higher into the air, circling about the two on the ground, the path of her circle growing farther away with every revolution the zorsal made. But it was the monsters that now surprised the girl—that and what she held in her own hand.
From the horn tips came a soft diffusion of light as unlike the killer beams from Thorn’s weapon as morning mist is unlike lightning. It curled out about the two of them, enveloping them even as the wreckage in the river had been earlier hidden from Simsa’s eyes. She almost expected to be caught up, taken helplessly into the air. But that whirlwind magic had been partly of the valley inhabitants—this was wholly her own.
The Elder One again—still that iron will did not move to take her over as it had so many times before. Perhaps this was only protective, preserving her from harm because of her usefulness in some future ploy. At any rate, she and Thorn must take advantage of it.
She crowded close to the spaceman, aware of their closeness of body that she had resented before.
“Together,” she breathed, “it will hold us together—free from them—your weapon—” There was a glistening line of blue encircling the weapon’s handgrip and even as she spoke he uttered a cry of pain.
“Sheathe it!” she ordered. “It is not akin to what would serve us here.”
Though he had never completely lost his look of aloofness, he did slip the weapon back into the loops on his belt while the haze thickened about them. Now their clear vision reached little more than an arm’s length ahead of them. Simsa thought of the fissures and wondered if their present blindness might bring them to worse than an encounter with one of the monsters. But her wonder was fleeting as she heard Zass’s call from overhead. They had played this game before on night foraging when the zorsal’s eyes could outsee her own. She need only to listen and Zass would guide their route for them.
At another ranging cry from Zass, without asking or seeking at all, Simsa hooked her fingers in Thorn’s belt and gave him a strong jerk south and forward. It would appear that he understood, for he made no resistance to her urging, though he kept his hand ready near the butt of his weapon.
They stumbled on, for Thorn’s weaving progress became more and more unsteady. Yet, when Simsa wished to lend him her strength, he muttered and thrust her away, though she did not loose her hold on his belt. There was a stain on his head bandage. When she could catch words he said over and over in a low, monotonous stream, she could understand none of them. This was not the trade-lingo of Kuxortal or the sparseness of space speech. She thought it might be his native tongue and wondered fleetingly ho
w far he had come from the world of his birth.
Once she must have misheard Zass’s warning cry, for they nearly blundered straight into a mass of waving yellow tentacles before Simsa could brace both feet against the stone to drag Thorn back.
Then the haze descended once more about them like a wall and they pushed on. That curtained journey across the rock floor of this world seemed endless. Twice they stopped to rest as Zass came flitting down through the cloaking mist to perch on Simsa’s shoulder and thrust her long muzzle in a moist caress against the girl’s cheek.
On the second such halt, the girl offered her water bottle to Thorn. Although his belt had a number of pockets of small tools thrust in loops, there was no sign of any liquid carrier. Perhaps all such supplies had been in the flitter and had sunk with its dead passenger into the sand. He took several lusty swallows. Simsa had her hand raised half in protest, ready to wrestle their store away from him. But she was sure that he was only dimly conscious now, and she must keep him going on his own, for she could not handle the weight of a flaccid body should he fall. To stay here waiting for their strange cover to be penetrated by any seeking blobs was the depth of folly. Let him have the drink if it gave him the energy to keep onward.
Doggedly she kept her mind from any future—let them just reach the outpost of the valley. Then she could decide on the next leg of their trek.
It was getting darker and, twice, Thorn stumbled so badly that he fell to his knees. Luckily, some instinct within him kept him struggling onward, though the girl was sure he was no longer aware of her at all. Then, when it seemed that the darker haze, which was the night here, and the mist about them were so mingled together as to give them real darkness, Simsa saw a black blot of rock loom out of the curtain ahead. She loosed her hold on Thorn, but she could still hear the click of his metal-soled space boots on the stone behind her as she lurched forward to fall against the sentinel rock, her breath coming in ragged sobs.
This beacon she knew, mainly because in setting forth from the ruin she had marked its fanciful resemblance to a head, the head of some grotesque creature of the never-seen, such as had been carven on the walls of that long-forgotten city on Kuxortal where the Elder One had waited so long for escape. Simsa gripped the stone with one hand. Her other fingers were so locked about the rod that they seemed numb, grown together with the force with which she held on to that weapon.
Zass’s squalling cry split the gloom of this double mist as the zorsal winged down to sit on the rock. Simsa leaned against it, spent by all her efforts. The clang-clang of the footplates did not fail. Thorn came to her and oddly enough much of his wavering unsteadiness was gone. His head was a little forward, as if he fought for clarity of sight, and for the first time in what must have been half the night he spoke to her:
“Simsa?”
“Yes, it is I.”
He kept on until brought up against the same rock that supported her. Now he put out a hand to touch her arm a fraction above the wrist that was cramped against the rod.
“We—we thought you—probably dead . . .” he said slowly. “There is no shelter—and your Life Boat was deserted, the direction call half-failed. Why?”
“Why?” She rounded on him. Within her flared all the frustrations and trials that had beset her since she had made her blind landing here, bringing an anger from which she drew strength. It had always been so—that anger could burn away fear, or help her forget it a little.
“Why?” She echoed his question hoarsely. “Ask that of your friends, off-worlder. Ask it of Lieutenant Lingor, of Medic Greeta—no, she is dead. If she was a great good friend of yours . . .” That thought pricked at her. What if all of his pushing her toward those off-worlders, his stories of the Histro-Tecks—those long-lived Zacathans who would treat her as a living treasure—had been false? What if such thoughts as she had picked up from Lingor, the medic, also had dwelt in Thorn’s mind—that she, Simsa, was no person but a thing, as much without life or intelligence as one of the small metal images that could be dug up in the Burrows, and sold to upper town dealers for the price of a drink or a couple of stupefying smorg leaves. What had been her price to Greeta, to Lingor—above all, to Thorn?
As she pushed away from her rock support to face him now, the anger in her indeed giving her strength, she was all Simsa of the Burrows. The Elder One slept or was gone. Fair enough, this was her quarrel—wholly hers!
“I do not understand.” There was weariness in his voice as well as in his bloodstained face. There was also stubborn determination, such as she had seen during their journeying upon her own world when he had refused to surrender his will in spite of all the obstacles that had ringed them in.
“Play not the unmind with me,” she spat. “No, I have not striven to read your thoughts,” she informed him as a shade of distaste seemed to come into his eyes. “Why should you think that? Were you not at ease knowing well your job was done when you betrayed me to those friends of yours! Lingor—he thought to make some plan to use what I might summon as power to make himself master among his own kind—No!” She gestured quickly as she saw his swollen lips open and was sure he was to dispute her words. “You need not tell me that this was not so, for that I did read in his mind. He was so sure of me. And she—that dead one—Greeta, who was supposed to be a healer, not a destroyer, what did she want of me? This”—she slapped her hand across her breasts—“my body! That she might cut and trace and learn how one who was supposed to have died perhaps a million cycles of Kuxortal ages ago could walk the earth! That, too, I read past any denial. Only, I do bear her with me ever indeed—this Elder One—and by fortune her fair self, I did not ask for that burden. She summoned me, as well you know, and I could not stand before her.
“In that hour when she came into me, I felt—perhaps just what she wished me to feel to keep me to her task—that I was whole, that a part of me long severed had come back. But she is very strong and I think that she could make anyone believe as she wished. When I am threatened, she awakes and sometimes it is she and sometimes it is I, Simsa that always was, who stands to arms and awaits battle.
“She led me to read minds and then I could plan. Do you think I survived my years in the Burrows without knowing when to fight and when to run? Run it had to be from that Lingor—and your Greeta. Once that starship planeted again they could have taken me. I know so little in this life of your ways, star rover. I would have been as an unarmored as a lizard is to Zass—sweet and short picking. Perhaps together, those two even thought to crack my bones and get all the meat! No, the spaceport was their Burrows, they would know every turn and twist therein. Thus, I made sure that they would not take me there.”
“This is a dead world,” he said slowly. There was not so much disbelief in him now, she thought, but of that she could not be sure.
“You are saying that this is a place of no refuge,” she caught him up. But, of course, he did not know of the valley. Perhaps it was best. No, she could do nothing about that; the valley belonged to the green folk and she would take no intruder into it.
“A place of no refuge,” she repeated, hoping that he had not caught the pause created by that thought. “But it is one I chose—one where I and any off-worlder hunting me can be equal from the start. I knew that the signal of the Life Boat might summon a ship. So Lingor turned back, did he?”
“You do not understand.” He placed his weapon on top of the tall rock by which they stood. “They could not have done as you thought. There was—”
“As they thought,” she retorted. “You delivered me up. They had me on their ship well between worlds. Yes, they were very sure of me—you were all very sure of me. Let me say this, off-worlder, it will be better to die of hunger and thirst or by blundering into the reach of one of the sand-things here than to be prisoner of those you chose to give me to!”
“I did not choose anything!” From the sharp note in his voice she found she had indeed pricked him then. “I am a member of the Rangers attached
to the Hist-Search under the orders of Hist-Techneer Zanantan. You could have stayed on Kuxortal. I asked you to come with me to meet those who have spent long lifetimes unriddling the secrets left behind—perhaps by such as your Elder One. It was for your own safety that you were given a single cabin, guarded—”
“Against your own officer, against such as Greeta?” she interrupted. “Do not speak such foolishness. The cabin—yes, it was safe enough! There were hidden places through which I could be watched, every movement of mine noted. But the Elder One could meet them trick for trick there!” She laughed.
“Not so!” His hand formed a fist which he slammed into the rock, not seeming to notice the pain that gesture must have caused him. “You would be an honored guest. As for leaving Kuxortal, how long would you have lasted had any one of the lordlings of the upper town known the power you could wield? Speak of having your secrets out of you—they are experts at such games and far rougher than any off-worlder can guess.”
“So!” She cut him short. “The Elder One could have handled anyone coming with steel and fire. But suppose your officer, your Greeta, came to let into my ‘safe place’ some air to breathe which would have tied me into sleep. That was but one of the things they considered. Though they were not working together. No, off-worlder, I would rather take my chances on this rock than with them. The ploys of the lords I know—the crafts and slyness of your people are something else again!”
He shrugged and slipped down, his back against the rock, his hands dangling between his knees, nor had he again taken up his weapon. It was Simsa who gathered it up and tossed it to thud on the rock before him.
“We are but at the gateway of a place we may be able to defend. And the fog which protects is going.” The cooling of the rod within her hand was a warning, and the drifting of the curtain was indeed showing thin.
He did not answer her, only pulled himself up once again, holding on to the rock. It seemed to Simsa that there was now a grayish shade to his face as though the color of the rock had somehow oozed into him even during the moments that he had been resting.
