The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmitz

  There was no way of trying to calculate the nature of those schemes or of the Leewit's role in them more specifically. The manner in which the vatch played its games seemed to be to manipulate its players into a critical situation which they could solve with a winning move if they used their resources and made no serious mistakes . . . and weren't too unlucky. But it gave them no clues to what must be done. If they failed, they were lost, and the vatch picked up other players. And since it was a capricious creature, one couldn't be sure it wouldn't on occasion deliberately maneuver players into a situation which couldn't possibly be solved, enjoying the drama of their desperate efforts to escape a foreseeable doom.

  The captain realized suddenly that he wasn't relling the vatch any more—then that the control room was spinning slowly about him, turning misty and gray. He made an attempt to climb out of the chair and shout a warning to Goth; but by then the chair and the control room were no longer there and he was swirling away, faster and faster, turning and rolling helplessly through endless grayness, while rollicking vatch laughter seemed to echo distantly about him.

  That faded, too, and for a while there was nothing—

  * * *

  "Try to listen carefully!" the closer and somewhat larger of the two creatures was telling him. There was sharp urgency in its tone. "We've dropped through a time warp together, so you're feeling confused and you've forgotten everything! But I'll tell you who you are and who we are—then you'll remember it all again."

  The captain blinked down at it. He did feel a trifle confused at the moment. But that was simply because just now, with no warning at all, he'd suddenly found himself standing with these two unfamiliar-looking creatures inside something like a globular hollow in thick, shifting fog. His footing felt solid enough, but he saw nothing that looked solid below him. In the distance, off in the fog, there seemed to be considerable noisy shouting going on here and there, though he couldn't make out any words.

  But he didn't feel so confused that he couldn't remember who he was—or that, just a few moments ago, some vatch trick again had plucked him from the control room of the Venture, standing on a rainy, rocky slope of the Karres of over three hundred thousand years in the past.

  Further, since the creature had addressed him in what was undisguisedly Goth's voice, he could conclude without difficulty that it was, in fact, Goth who had pulled a shape-change on herself. It didn't look at all like her; but then it wouldn't. And, by deduction, while the smaller, chunky, dog-like creature standing silently on four legs just beyond her looked even less like the Leewit, it very probably was the Leewit.

  However, Goth evidently had warned him he'd better act bewildered, and she must have a reason for it.

  "Umm. . . . yes!" the captain mumbled, lifting one hand and pressing his palm to his forehead. "I do feel rather . . . who . . . what . . . where am I? Who . . . ." He'd noticed something dark wagging below his chin as he was speaking, and the arm he lifted seemed clothed in a rich-textured light blue sleeve he'd never seen before, with a pattern of small precious stones worked into it. When he glanced down along his nose at the dark thing, he glimpsed part of a gleaming black beard. So he, too, had been shape-changed!

  "You," the Goth-creature was saying hurriedly, "are Captain Mung of the Capital Guard of the Emperor Koloth the Great. My name's Hantis. I'm a Nartheby Sprite and you've known me a long time. That"—it indicated the other creature—"is a grik-dog. It's called Pul. It—"

  "Grik-dogs," interrupted the grik-dog grumpily in the Leewit's voice, "can talk as good as anybody! Ought to tell him that so—"

  "Yes," Goth-Hantis cut in. "They can speak, of course—shut up, Pul. So you'd bought it for the Empress at the Emperor's orders and we are taking it back to the capital when all this suddenly happened . . . ."

  He'd been staring at her while she spoke. Goth might have gone on practicing her shape-changing on the quiet because this was a perfect, first-class job! Even from a distance of less than three feet, he couldn't detect the slightest indication that the Nartheby Sprite wasn't the real thing. He remembered vaguely that galactic legend mentioned such creatures. It looked like a small, very slender, brown-skinned woman, no bigger than Goth, dressed skimpily in scattered patches of some green material. The cheekbones were set higher and the chin was more pointed than a human woman's would have been; with the exception of the mouth, the rest of the face and head did not look human at all. The slender ridge of the nose was barely indicated on the skin but ended in a delicate tip and small, flaring nostrils. The eyes had grass green pupils which showed more white around them than human ones would; they seemed alert, wise eyes. The brows were broad tufts of soft red fur. A round, tousled mane of the same type of fur framed the face, and through it protruded pointed, mobile foxy ears. The grik-dog might be no less an achievement. The image was that of a solidly built, pale-yellow animal which would have been about the Leewit's weight, with a large round head and a dark, pushed-in, truculent, slightly toothy face. The gray eyes could almost have been those of the Leewit; and they stared up at the captain with much of the coldly calculating expression which was the Leewit's when things began to look a little tight.

  "What, uh, did happen, Hantis?" the captain asked. "I seem almost to remember that I . . . but—"

  The Sprite image shrugged.

  "We're not really sure, Captain Mung. One moment we were on your ship, the next we were in this place! It's the place of a great being called Moander. We haven't seen him but he's talked to us. He's upset because nothing was supposed to be able to get in here—and now we've come in, through time! It must have been a warp. But Moander won't believe yet it was an accident."

  "He'd better believe it!" snorted the captain haughtily, playing his part. "When Koloth the Great learns how his couriers have been welcomed here—"

  "Moander says, sir," Goth-Hantis interrupted, "that in his time the Emperor Koloth the Great has been dead more'n three hundred years! Moander thinks we're perhaps spies of his enemies. He's setting this place up now so nobody else can get in the same way. Then we'll go to his laboratory so he can talk to us. He—"

  "GRAZEEM!" a great voice shouted deafeningly in the fog above them. "Grazeem! Grazeem! . . . Grazeem . . ." The word seemed to echo away into the distance. Then there was more shouting all around them by the same mighty voice.

  "What's the yelling about?" the captain asked in what he felt would be Captain Mung's impatient manner.

  "Moander talking to the other machines," said the grik-dog. "Got a different language for each of them—don't know why. It's just a big, dumb machine, like they said."

  "Pul, you—"

  "S'all right, Goth," the grik-dog told the Sprite. " 'Grazeem' means 'all units.' Moander's talking to all of them now. Machine that was listening to us won't till Moander stops again. You got something to say, better say it!"

  "Guess she's right, Captain!" Goth-Hantis said hurriedly. "Vatch got us into Moander's place on the Worm World, our time. Haven't relled it, so it's not here. Got any ideas?"

  "Not yet. You?"

  "Uh-uh. Just been here a few minutes."

  "The vatch figures there's something we can do if we're smart enough to spot it," the captain said. "Keep your minds ticking! If somebody sees something and we can't talk, say, uh—"

  "Starkle?" suggested the grik-dog.

  "Eh? All right, starkle. That will mean 'attention!' or 'notice that!' or 'get ready!' or 'be careful!' and . . ."

  "Starkle!" said the grik-dog. "All-units talk's stopping!"

  The captain couldn't tell much difference in the giant shouting, but again they probably could trust the Leewit in that. Whatever machine had been listening to them had begun to listen again. Goth-Hantis was glancing about, the image's big, pointed, furry ears twitching realistically.

  "Looks like we've started to move," she announced. "Probably going to Moander's laboratory, like he said . . . ."

  The fog substance enveloping the spherical hollow which contained them
—and which must be the interior of a globular force field—was streaming past with increasing swiftness. There was no sensation of motion, but the appearance of it was that the globe was rushing on an upward slant through the gigantic structure on the surface of Manaret, Moander's massive stronghold, which the captain had glimpsed in a screen view during his talk with Cheel the Lyrd-Hyrier. The fog darkened and lightened successively about them, giving the impression that they were being passed without pause through one section of the interior after another. Sounds came now and then, presumably those of working machine units; and mingling with them, now distant, now from somewhere nearby, the shouted commands of Moander resounded and dropped away behind them.

  Then, suddenly, there was utter silence . . . the vast, empty, icy kind of silence an audio pickup brings in from space. There were blurs of shifting color in the fog substance ahead and on all sides; and the fog no longer was rushing past but clinging densely about the globe, barely stirring. Evidently they had hurtled out of the stronghold and were in space above Manaret—and if Moander chose to deactivate the field about them now, the captain thought, neither the vatch's planning nor any witch tricks his companions knew could keep their lives from being torn from them by the unpleasantly abrupt violence of the void.

  It seemed a wrong moment to move or speak, and Goth and the Leewit appeared to feel that, too. They stood still together, waiting in the cold, dark stillness of space while time went by—a minute, or perhaps two or three minutes. The vague colors in the fog which clung about the force field shifted and changed slowly. What the meaning of that was the captain couldn't imagine. There was nothing to tell them here whether the globe was still in motion or not.

  But then a blackness spread out swiftly ahead and the globe clearly was moving towards it. The blackness engulfed them and they remained surrounded by it for what might have been a minute again, certainly no longer, before the globe slid out into light. After a moment then, the captain discovered that the fog was thinning quickly about them. He began to make out objects through it and saw that the force field had stopped moving.

  They were within a structure, perhaps a large ship, which must be stationed in space above the surface of Manaret. The force globe was completely transparent, and as the last wisps of fog stuff steamed away, they saw it had stopped near the center of a long, high room. The only way the captain could tell they were still enclosed by it was that they were not standing on the flooring of the room but perhaps half an inch above it, on the solid transparency of a force field.

  Almost as he realized this, the field went out of existence. There was the small jolt of dropping to the floor. Then he was in the room, with the images of a Nartheby Sprite and a grik-dog standing beside him.

  The room, which was a very large one, had occupants. From their appearance and immobility, these might have been metal statues, many of them modeled after various living beings; but the captain's immediate feeling was that they were something other than statues. The largest sat on a throne-like arrangement filling the end of the room towards which he, Goth, and the Leewit faced. It could have been an obese old idol, such as primitive humanity might have worshipped; the broad, cruel face was molded in the pattern of human features, with pale blank disks for eyes which seemed to stare down at the three visitors. It was huge, towering almost to the room's ceiling, which must have been at least seventy feet overhead. Except for the eye-disks, the shape seemed constructed of the same metal as the throne on which it sat—rough-surfaced metal of a dark-bronze hue which gave the impression of great age and perhaps was intended to do so.

  A round black table, raised six feet from the floor, stood much closer to the center of the room; in fact, not more than twenty feet from the captain. On it another bronze shape sat cross-legged. This one was small, barely half the size of a man. It was crudely finished, looked something like an eyeless monkey. In its raised right hand it held a bundle of tubes, which might have been intended to represent a musical instrument, like a set of pipes. The blind head was turned towards this device.

  The remaining figures, some thirty or forty of them and no two alike, stood or squatted in two rows along the wall on either side of the captain and the witch sisters, spaced a few feet apart. Most of these were of more than human size; almost all were black, often with the exception of the eyes. Several, including a menacing, stern-faced warrior holding a gun, seemed modeled after humanity; and across from the warrior stood a black-scaled image which might have been that of Cheel, the Lyrd-Hyrier lord of Manaret. None of the others were recognizable as beings of which the captain had heard. The majority were shapes of nightmare to human eyes.

  This was Moander's laboratory? Except for its disquieting assembly of figures, the great room seemed to hold nothing. The captain glanced up towards the ceiling. Much of that was a window, or a screen which served as a window. Through it one looked into space. And space was alive with the colors they had seen vaguely through the fog enclosing the force globe. Here they blazed brilliantly and savagely, and he could guess at once what they were—reflections of the great network of energy barriers Moander and his Nuris had constructed about the Worm World between the dead suns of the Tark Nembi Cluster. As he gazed, something edged into view at one side of the screen, blotting out the fiery spectacle. It was the metallic surface of Manaret. The structure of which this room was a part appeared to be rotating, turning the viewscreen now towards space, now to the Worm World far below it.

  The witch children stood quietly beside him in their concealing shapes, glancing about with wary caution. Then came a softly hissed whisper:

  "Starkle!"

  The head of the great black warrior figure against the right wall turned slowly until the sullen face seemed to stare at them. The arm holding the gun lifted, swung the weapon around, and pointed it in their direction. Then the figure was still again—but there was no question that the weapon was a real weapon, the warrior a piece of destructive machinery perhaps as dangerous as the Sheem Robot. Nor was it alone in covering them. Across from it, beside the black Lyrd Hyrier image, a figure which seemed part beaked and long-necked bird, part many-legged insect, had moved at the same time, drawing back its head and turning the spear-tip of the beak towards them—a second weapon swiveled into position to bear on Moander's uninvited visitors.

  "Starkle!" muttered the grik-dog. "Double starkle!"

  The Leewit didn't mean the warrior and the bird-thing with that because the grik dog was staring straight ahead at the bronze monkey-figure which sat cross legged on the black table. At first the captain could see no change there; then he realized the monkey's mouth had begun to move and that faint sounds were coming from it . . . Double-starkle? Perhaps something familiar about those sounds . . . .

  Yes, he thought suddenly, that was Moander's voice the monkey was producing—a miniaturized version of the brazen shouting which had followed the force-globe through the stronghold, the robot issuing its multilingual commands to the submachines . . . .

  "I am Moander!" a giant voice said slowly above them.

  They looked up together. The voice had come from the direction of the head of the big idol shape. As they stared at it, the eye disks in the idol head turned red.

  "I am Moander!" stated a shape at the far end of the row along the wall on the right.

  "I am Moander!" said the shape beside it.

  "I am Moander . . . I am Moander . . . I am Moander . . . ," each of the shapes along the wall declared in turn, the phrase continuing to the end of the room, then shifting to the left wall and returning along it until it wound up with the shape which stood nearest the enthroned idol on that side. Then the monkey-shape, which had sat silent while this went on, turned its eyeless head around to the captain.

  "I am Moander and the voice of Moander!" the tiny voice told him and the witch sisters, and the blind head swung back towards the bundle of pipes the shape held in one hand.

  "Yes," said the big idol voice. "I am Moander, and each of these is
Moander. But things are not as they seem, witch people! Look up—straight up!"

  They looked. A section of Manaret's surface showed in the great screen on the ceiling again, and on it, seen at an angle from here, stood Moander's stronghold. Even at such a distance it looked huge and massively heavy, the sloping sides giving the impression that it was an outcropping of the ship-planet's hull.

  "The abode of Moander the God. A holy place," said the idol's voice. "Deep within it lies Moander. About you are Moander's thoughts, Moander's voice, the god shapes which Moander in his time will place on a thousand worlds so that a thousand mortal breeds may show respect to a shape of Moander. . . . But Moander is not here.

  "Do not move. Do not speak. Do not force me to destroy you. I know what you are. I sensed the alien klatha evil you carry when you came out of time. I sensed your appearance was not your shape. I sensed your minds blocked against me, and by that alone I would know you, witch people!

  "I listened to your story. If you were the innocent mortals you pretended to be, you would not have been taken here. You would have gone to the breeding vats in Manaret to feed my faithful Nuris, who always hunger for more mortal flesh.

  "My enemies are taken here. Many have stood where you stand before the shape of Moander. Some attempted resistance, as you are attempting it. But in the end they yielded and all was well. Their selves became part of the greatness of Moander, and what they knew I now know."

  The voice checked abruptly. The monkey-shape on the black table, which again had been sitting silently and unmoving while the idol spoke, at once resumed its tiny chatter. And now it was clear that the device in its hand was a speaker through which Moander's instructions were transmitted to the stronghold, to be amplified there into the ringing verbal commands which controlled the stronghold's machinery. The small shape went on for perhaps forty seconds, then stopped, and the voice which came from the great idol figure resumed in turn, "But I cannot spare you my full attention now. In their folly and disrespect, your witch kind is attacking Tark Nembi in force. I believe you were sent through time to distract me. I will not be distracted. My Nuris need my guidance in accomplishing the destruction of the world I have cursed. Their messages press on me."