The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmiz

  “Hmm… not entirely.”

  Goth pushed herself up on the edge of a gleaming, blue table and looked at him, dangling her legs. “Course you don’t,” she said. She considered. “Pattern can’t do just anything. It has to be something I can almost do already so it only has to show me. Else it’d get me messed up, like I told you.”

  “Meaning you’re almost able to plant a pig’s head on somebody if you feel like it?” the captain asked.

  “Wasn’t a pig’s head.”

  “Pretty good imitation then!”

  “Bend light, bend color.” Goth shrugged. “That’s all. They’ll stay that way as long as you want. When Sunnat puts her hands up to feel, she’ll know she’s got her own head. But she’s going to look part pig for a time.”

  “Can’t quite imagine you doing one of those incantations by yourself! That was impressive.”

  “Incant… oh, that! You don’t need all that,” Goth told him. “Toll pattern did it to scare everybody. Especially Sedmon.”

  “It worked, I think.” He studied her curiously. “So when will you start bending light?”

  Goth’s face took on a bemused expression. There was a blur. Then a small round pig’s head squinted at him from above her jacket collar, smirking unpleasantly.

  “Oink!” it said in Goth’s voice.

  “Cut it out!” said the captain, startled.

  The head blurred again, became Goth’s. She grinned. “Told you I just had to be shown!”

  “I believe you now. How long will Sunnat be stuck with the one she’s got?”

  “Didn’t you hear what the pattern told her?”

  He shook his head. “I heard it — it seemed to mean something. But somehow I wasn’t really understanding a word. And I don’t think anyone else there was.”

  “Sunnat understood it,” Goth said. “It was talking to her… She’s got to quit wanting to do things like burning people and scaring people, like that fat old Bazim. The less she wants that, the less she’ll look like a pig. She works at it, she could look pretty much like she was in about a month. And…”

  Goth turned her head. There’d been a knock at the door. She put her hand in her pocket, snapped off the spy-screen, slid down from the table. The captain went over to the door to let in the Daal of Uldune.

  * * *

  “There are matters of such grave potential significance,” the Daal said vaguely, “that it is difficult — extremely difficult — to decide to whom one may unburden oneself concerning them. I…”

  His voice trailed off, not for the first time in this conversation. His gaze shifted across the shining blue table to the captain, to Goth — back to the captain. He shook his head again, bit at a knuckle with an expression of worried irritability.

  The captain studied him with some puzzlement. Sedmon seemed itching to tell them something but unable to make up his mind to do it. What was the problem? He’d implied he had information of great importance to Karres. If so, they’d better get it.

  The Daal glanced at Goth again, speculatively. “Perhaps Your Wisdom understands,” he murmured.

  “Uh-huh,” said Goth brightly, in her little-girl voice.

  He’d tell Goth if they were alone? The captain considered. There hadn’t been many “Your Wisdoms” coming his way since that business in the Little Court! Possibly Sedmon had done some private reevaluating of the events in Sunnat’s underground dungeon last night. It would take — as, in fact, it had taken — only one genuine witch on the team to account for that.

  Not so good, perhaps… He considered again.

  “I really think,” he heard himself say pleasantly, “it might be best if you did unburden yourself to us, Sedmon of the Six Lives.”

  The Daal’s eyes flickered.

  “So!” It was a small hiss. “I suspected… but it was a difficult thing to believe, even of such as you. Well, we all have our secrets, and our reasons for them…” He stood up. “Come with me then — Captain Aron and Dani! You should know better what to make of what I have here than I do.”

  The captain hoped they would. He certainly did not know what to make of Sedmon the Sixth, and of the Six Lives, at the moment! But he seemed to have said the right thing at the right time, at that -

  Sedmon led them swiftly, the hem of his black gown flapping about his heels, through a series of narrow passages and up stairways into another section of the House of Thunders. They met no one on the way. Three times the Daal stopped to unlock heavy doors with keys produced from a fold in the gown, locked them again behind them. He did not speak at all until they turned at last into a blind passage which showed only one door and that near the far end. There he slowed.

  “Half the problem is here,” he said, addressing them equally as they came up to the door. “When you’ve seen it, I’ll tell you what else I know — which is little enough. There’ll be another thing to show you later in another place.”

  He unlocked and opened the door. The room beyond was long and low, showed no furnishings. But something like a heavy, slowly rippling iron-gray curtain screened the far end.

  “A guard field,” said the Daal sourly. “I’ve done everything possible to keep the matter quiet. In that I think I’ve been successful. It was all I could do until I came in contact with a competent member of your people.” He gave them a sideways glance. “No doubt you have your own problems — but for weeks I’ve been unable to learn where somebody who could act for Karres might be found!”

  His manner had taken another turn. He was dropping all formality here, addressing them with some irritability as equals and including Goth as if she were another adult. And he was not concealing the fact that he felt he had reason for complaint — nor that he was a badly worried man. Reaching into his gown, he brought out a small device, glanced at it, pressed down with his thumb.

  The guard field faded, and the far end of the room appeared beyond it. A couch stood there. On it, in an odd attitude of abruptly frozen motion, sat a man in spacer coveralls. He was strongly built, might have been ten years older than the captain. Goth’s breath made a sharp sucking sound of surprise.

  “You know this fellow?” the Daal asked.

  “Yes,” Goth said. “It’s Olimy!”

  “He’s of Karres?”

  “Yes.”

  She started forward, the captain moving with her, while the Daal stayed a few feet behind. Olimy gazed into the room with unblinking black eyes. He sat at the edge of the couch, legs stretched out to the floor, arms half lifted and reaching forwards, fingers curled as if closing on something. His expression was one of alertness and intense concentration. But the expression didn’t change and Olimy didn’t move.

  “He was found like this, a month and a half ago, sitting before the controls of his ship,” the Daal said. “Perhaps you understand his condition. I don’t. He can be shifted out of the position you see him in, but when released he gradually returns to it. He can be lifted and carried about but can’t actually be touched. There’s a thin layer of force about him, unlike anything of which I’ve heard. It’s detectable only by the fact that nothing can pass through it. He appears to be alive but—”

  “He disminded himself.” Goth’s face and tone were expressionless. She looked up at the captain. “We got to take him to Emris, I guess. They’ll help him there.”

  “Uh-huh.” Then she didn’t know either how to contact other witches this side of the Chaladoor at present. “You mentioned his ship,” the captain said to the Daal.

  “Yes. It’s three hours’ flight from here, still at the point where it was discovered. He was the only one on board. How it approached Uldune and landed without registering on detection instruments isn’t known.” Sedmon’s mouth grimaced. “He had an object with him which I ordered left on the ship. I won’t try to describe it — you’ll see it for yourselves… Are there any measures you wish taken regarding this man before we go?”

  Goth shook her head. The captain said, “There’s nothing we can do for Olimy
at the moment. He might as well stay here till we can take him off your hands.”

  * * *

  Olimy’s ship had come down in a nearly uninhabited section of Uldune’s southern continent, and landed near the center of a windy plain, rock-littered and snow-streaked, encircled by misty mountains. It wasn’t visible from the air, but its position was marked by what might have been a patch of gray mist half filling a hollow in the plain — a spy-screen had been set up to enclose the ship. On higher ground a mile away lay a larger bank of mist. The Daal’s big aircar set down there first.

  At ground level, the captain, sitting in a rear section of the car with Goth, could make out the vague outlines of four tents through the side of the screen. Two platoons of fur-coated soldiers and their commander had tumbled out and lined up. One of the Daal’s men left the car, went over to the officer, and spoke briefly with him. He came back, nodded to the Daal, climbed in. The aircar lifted, turned and started towards Olimy’s ship, skimming along the sloping ground.

  There’d been no opportunity to speak privately with Goth. Perhaps she had an idea of what this affair of a Karres witch who had disminded himself was about, but her expression told nothing. Any question he asked the Daal might happen to be the wrong one, so he hadn’t asked any.

  The car settled down some fifty yards from the edge of the screening about Olimy’s ship, and was promptly enveloped itself by a spy-screen somebody cut in. Sedmon, as he’d indicated, evidently took all possible precautions to avoid drawing attention to the area. The captain and Goth put on the warm coats which had been brought along for them and climbed out with the Daal, who had wrapped a long fur robe about himself. The rest of the party remained in the car. They walked over to the screen about the ship, through it, and saw the ship sitting on the ground.

  It was a small one with excellent lines, built for speed. The Daal brought an instrument out from under his furs.

  “This is the seal to the ship’s lock,” he said. “I’ll leave it with you. The object your associate brought here with him is standing in a plastic wrapping beside the control console. When you’re finished you’ll find me waiting in the car.”

  The last was good news. If Sedmon had wanted to come into the ship with them, it might have complicated matters. The captain found the lock mechanism, unsealed it and pulled the OPEN lever. Above them, a lock opened. A narrow ladder ramp slid down.

  They paused in the lock, looking back. The Daal already had vanished beyond the screening haze about the ship. “Just to be sure,” the captain said, “better put up our own spy-screen… Got any idea what this is about?”

  Goth shook her head. “Olimy’s a hot witch. Haven’t seen him for a year — he goes around on work for Karres. Don’t know what he was doing this trip.”

  “What’s this disminding business?”

  “Keeps things from getting to you. Anything. Sort of stasis. It’s not so good though. Your mind’s way off somewhere and can’t get back. You have to be helped out. And that’s not easy!”

  Her small face was very serious.

  “Hot witch in a fast ship!” the captain reflected aloud. “And he runs into something in space that scares him so badly he disminds to get away from it! Doesn’t sound good, does it? Could he have homed the ship in on Uldune on purpose, first?”

  Goth shrugged. “Might have. I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s look around the ship a bit before we get at that object. Must be some reason the Daal didn’t feel like talking about it…”

  They saw it in its wrappings as soon as they stepped into the tiny control cabin. The large, lumpy item, which could have been a four hundred pound boulder concealed under twisted, thick, opaque space plastic, stood next to the console. They let it stand there. The captain switched on the little ship’s viewscreens, found them set for normal space conditions, turned them down until various angles of the windy Uldune plain appeared in sharp focus. The small patch of gray haze which masked the Daal’s aircar showed on their port side.

  They went through the little speedster’s other sections. All they learned for their trouble was that Olimy had kept a very neat ship.

  “Might as well look at the thing now,” said the captain. “You figure, it’s something pretty important to Karres, don’t you?”

  “Got to be,” Goth told him. “They don’t put Olimy on little jobs!”

  “I see.” Privately, the captain admitted to considerable reluctance as he poked gingerly around at the plastic. Whatever was inside seemed as hard and solid as the bulky rock he’d envisioned when he first saw the bundle. Taking hold of one strip of the space plastic at last, he pulled it back slowly. A patch of the surface of the item came to view. It looked, he thought, like dirty ice-pitted old glacier ice. He touched it with a finger. Slick and rather warm. Some kind of crystal?

  He glanced at Goth. She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t look like much of anything!” he remarked. He peeled the plastic back farther until some two feet of the thing were exposed. It could be a mass of worn crystal, lumpish and shapeless as it had appeared under its wrapping.

  Shapeless?

  Studying it, the captain began to wonder. There were a multitude of tiny ridged whorls and knobby protrusions on its surface, and the longer he gazed at them the more he felt they weren’t there by chance, but for a purpose, had been formed deliberately… that this was, in fact, some very curious sculptured pattern -

  Within the cloudy gray of the crystal was a momentary flickering light, a shivering thread of fire, which seemed somehow immensely far away. He caught it again, again had a sense of enormous distances. And now came a feeling that the surface of the crystal was changing, flowing, expanding — that he was about to drop through, to be lost forever in the dim, fire-laced hugeness that was its other side. Terror surged up; for an instant he was paralyzed. Then he felt himself moving, pulling the plastic wrappings frantically back across its surface, Goth’s hands helping him. He twisted the ends together, tightly, as they had been before.

  Terror lost its edge in the same moment. It was as if something which had attacked them from without were now simply fading away. But he still felt uncomfortable enough.

  He looked at Goth, drew in a long breath.

  “Whew!” he said, shaken. “Was that klatha stuff?”

  “Not klatha!” said Goth, face pale, eyes sharp and alert. “Don’t know what it was! Never felt anything like it.”

  She broke off.

  Inside the captain’s head there was a tiny, purposeful click. Not quite audible. As if something had locked shut.

  “Worm Worlders!” hissed Goth. They turned to the viewscreens together.

  A pale-yellow stain moved in the eastern sky above the wintry plain outside, spread as it drifted swiftly up overhead, then faded in a sudden rush to the west.

  * * *

  “If we hadn’t put it back when we did—” the captain said.

  Some minutes had passed. Worm Weather hadn’t reappeared above the plain, and now Goth reported that the klatha locks which had blocked the Nuri probes from their minds were relaxing. The yellow glow was a long distance away from them again.

  “They’d have come here, all right!” Goth had her color back. He wasn’t sure he had yet. That was a very special plastic Olimy had enclosed the lumpish crystal in! A wrapping which deflected the Worm World’s sensor devices from what it covered -

  But Manaret wanted the crystal. And Karres apparently wanted it as badly. Olimy had been carrying it in his ship, and for all his witch’s tricks, he’d been harried by the Nuris into disminding himself to escape them. Since then Worm Weather had hung about Uldune, turning up here and there, searching… suspecting the crystal had reached the planet, but unable to locate it… He said, “You’d think Sedmon would blow up half the countryside around here to get rid of that thing! It’s what keeps the Nuris near Uldune.”

  Goth shook her head. “They’d come back sometime. Sedmon knows a lot! He doesn’t have that cap of his just
because of witches. He’s scared of the Worm World. So he wants Karres to get that crystal thing.”

  “Should help against Manaret, eh?”

  “Looks like Manaret thinks so!” Goth pointed out reasonably.

  “Yes, it does…” As important as that, then! The misty screen concealing the Daal’s aircar on the plain was still there. The men inside it had seen the Worm Weather, too, had known better than to try to take off. The car would be buttoned tight now, armor plates snapped shut over the windows, doors locked, as it crouched like a frightened bird on the empty slope. But in spite of his fears, Sedmon had come here with them today because he wanted Karres to get the crystal…

  The captain said, “If we can take it as far as Emris—”

  Goth nodded. “Always somebody on Emris.”

  “They’d do the rest, eh?” He paused. “Well, no reason we can’t. If we just take care it stays wrapped up in that stuff.”

  “Maybe we can,” Goth said slowly. She didn’t sound too sure of it.

  “The Daal thinks we can make it,” the captain told her, “or he wouldn’t have showed it to us. And, as you say, he’s a pretty knowing old bird!”

  A grin flickered on her mouth. “Well, that’s something else, Captain!”

  “What is?”

  “You look a lot like Threbus.”

  “I do?”

  “Only younger,” Goth said. “And I look a lot like Toll, only younger. Sedmon knows Threbus and Toll — and we got him thinking that’s who we are. He figures we’ve done an age-shift.”

  “Age-shift?”

  “Get younger, get older,” explained Goth. “Either way. Some witches can. Threbus and Toll could, I guess.”