The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmiz

  Hulik acknowledged she did. The captain returned his attention to the Venture and the world she was approaching. Vezzarn hadn’t let out any immediate howls at the analyzers, so at least they weren’t dropping into the pit of cold poison the surface might have been from its appearance. The lifeboat blister was in the storage compartment; so was the ship’s single work spacesuit. Not a chance to get to either of those… The planetary atmosphere below appeared almost cloudless. Red half-light, black shadows along the ranges, lengthening as the meridian moved away behind them…

  How far could he trust the vatch? Not at all, he thought. He should act as if he’d heard none of that spooky background commentary. But the vatch, capricious, unpredictable, immensely powerful — not sane by this universe’s standards — would remain a potential factor here. Which might aid or destroy them.

  Let nothing surprise you, he warned himself. The immediate range of choice was very narrow. If the compartment walls didn’t hold, they had to leave the ship. If the walls held, they’d remain here, at emergency readiness, until Goth awoke. But the Agandar’s frustrated fury would matter no more than his monster then — unless Yango’s attention turned on the strongbox in the vault. No telling what might happen… but that was borrowing trouble! Another factor, in any case, was that while Goth remained unconscious, Yango would want her to stay alive. All the pirate’s hopes were based on that now. It should limit his actions to some extent…

  “Skipper?” Vezzarn muttered, hunched over the analyzers.

  “Yes?”

  Vezzarn looked up, chewing his lip. “Looks like we could live down there a while,” he announced grudgingly. “But these things don’t tell you everything—”

  “No.” The Venture wasn’t equipped with an exploration ship’s minutely detailing analysis instruments. Nevertheless, there’d been a sudden note of hope in Vezzarn’s voice. “You’re sure you’re coming along if we have to get out?” the captain asked.

  The spacer gave him a wry, half-ashamed grin. “You can count on me, sir! Panicked a moment, I guess.”

  The captain slid open a desk drawer. “Here’s your gun then,” he said. “Yours, too, Miss do Eldel. Yango collected them and I took them back from him.”

  They almost pounced on the weapons. Hulik broke her gun open, gave a sharp exclamation of dismay.

  “Zero charge! That devil cleaned them out!”

  The captain was taking a box from the drawer. “So he did,” he said. “But he didn’t find my spare pellets. Standard Empire military charge — hope you can use them!”

  They could, and promptly replenished their guns. The captain looked at the console chronometer. Just over nine minutes since he’d broken intercom contact with Yango. The lack of any indication of what the pirate was doing hadn’t helped anybody’s nerves here; but at least he hadn’t got out of the storage compartment yet. The captain set Vezzarn to detaching and gathering up various articles — keys and firing switches to the nova gun turrets, the main control release to the lifeboat blister, the keys to the main and orbital drives…

  There were mountains just below now, and the shallow bowls of plains. The dull red furnace glare of the giant sun bathed the world in tinted twilight. The Venture continued to spiral down towards a maze of narrow valleys and gorges winding back into the mountains…

  They flinched together as the intercom hurled the sounds of a hard metallic crashing into the control room. It was repeated a few seconds later.

  “Compartment D!” whispered Hulik, nodding at the intercom panel. “They’re through the first wall—”

  A dim, heavy snarling came from the intercom, then a blurred impression of Yango’s voice. Both faded again.

  “Shut them off,” the captain said quietly. “We’re through listening.” Eleven and a half minutes… and it might have been a minute or so before Yango set the Assassin to work on the wall.

  Hulik switched off the intercom system, said, a little breathlessly, “If Yango, realizes we’ve landed…”

  “I’m going to try to keep him from realizing it,” the captain told her. The ship was racing down smoothly towards the mouth of a steep-walled valley he’d selected as the most promising landing point barely a minute before.

  “But if he does,” Hulik said, “and orders the robot to beam a hole directly through the side of the ship — how long would it be before they could get outside that way?”

  Vezzarn interjected, without looking up from his work, “About an hour. Don’t worry about that, Miss do Eldel! He won’t try the cargo lock or blister either. He knows ships and knows they’re as tough as the rest of it and can’t be opened except from the desk. He’ll keep coming to the control room — and he’ll be here fast enough!”

  “We’ve got up to thirty minutes,” the captain said. “And we can be out in three if we don’t waste time! You’re finished, Vezzarn?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wrap it up — don’t bother to be neat! Any kind of package I can shove into my pocket—”

  The red sun vanished abruptly as the Venture settled into the valley. On their right was a great sloping cliff-face, ragged with crumbling rock, following the turn of the valley into the mountains. The captain brought the ship down on her underdrives, landed without a jar on a reasonably level piece of ground, as near the cliffs as he’d been able to get. Beside him, Hulik gave a small gasp as the control section lock opened with two hard metallic clicks.

  “Out as fast as you can get out!” The captain stood up, twisted the last set of drive keys from their sockets, dropped them into his jacket pocket, jammed the package Vezzarn was holding out to him in on top of them, zipped the pocket shut, and started over to the couch to pick up Goth. “Move!”

  Faces looked rather pale all around, including, he suspected, his own. But everybody was moving…

  Chapter NINE

  The captain used the ground-level mechanism to close the lock behind them, sealed the mechanism, and added the key to the seal to the assortment of minor gadgetry in his jacket pocket. Then, while Hulik stood looking about the valley, her gun in her hand, he got Goth up on his back and Vezzarn deftly roped her into position there, legs fastened about the captain’s waist, arms around his neck. It wasn’t too awkward an arrangement and, in any case, the best arrangement they could make. Goth wasn’t limp, seemed at moments more than half awake; there were numerous drowsy grumblings, and before Vezzarn had finished she was definitely hanging on of her own.

  “Been thinking, skipper,” Vezzarn said quietly, fingers flying, testing slack, tightening knots. “He ought to be able to spot us in the screens—”

  “Uh-huh. Off and on. But I doubt he’ll waste time with that.”

  “Eh? Yes, a killer robot’d be a good tracking machine, wouldn’t it?” Vezzarn said glumly. “You want to pull Yango away from the ship, then angle back to it?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Desperate business!” muttered Vezzarn. “But I guess it’s a desperate spot. And he wants Dani — never’d have figured her for one of the Wisdoms!… There! Finished, sir! She’ll be all right now—”

  As he stepped back, Hulik said in a low, startled voice, “Captain!” They turned towards her quickly and edgily. She was staring up the valley between the crowding mountain slopes.

  “I thought I saw something move,” she said. “I’m not sure…”

  “Animal?” asked Vezzarn.

  “No… Bigger. Farther away… A shadow. A puff of dust. If there were a wind—” She shook her head.

  The air was still. No large shadows moved anywhere they looked. This land was less barren than it had appeared from even a few miles up. The dry, sandy soil was cluttered with rock debris; and from among the rocks sprouted growth — spiky, thorny, feathery stuff, clustering into thickets here and there, never rising to more than fifteen or twenty feet. “Let’s go!” said the captain. “There probably are animals around. We’ll keep our eyes open—”

  As they headed towards the ra
gged cliffs to the right of the ship, the valley’s animal life promptly began to give indications of its presence. What type of life it might be wasn’t easy to determine. Small things skittered out of their path with shadowy quickness. Then, from a thicket they were passing, there burst a sound like the hissing of ten thousand serpents, so immediately menacing that they spun together to face it, guns leveled. The hissing didn’t abate but drew back through the thicket, away from them, and on to the left. The uncanny thing was that though their ears told them the sound was receding across open ground, towards the center of the valley, they could not see a trace of the creature producing it.

  They hurried on, rather shaken by the encounter. Though it might have been, the captain thought, nothing more ominous than the equivalent of a great swarm of harmless insects. A minute or two later Hulik said sharply, “Something’s watching us!”

  They could see only the eyes. Two brightly luminous yellow eyes peering across the top of a boulder at them. The boulder wasn’t too large; the creature hidden back of it couldn’t be more than about half human size. It made a high giggling noise behind them after they were past. Other sets of the same sort of eyes began peering at them from around or above other boulders. They seemed to be moving through quite a community of these creatures. But they did nothing but stare at the intruders as they went by, then giggle thinly among themselves.

  The ground grew steeper rapidly. Goth’s weight wasn’t significant; the captain had carried knapsacks a good deal heavier in mountaineering sport and during his period of military training. His lungs began to labor a little; then he had his second wind and knew he was good for a long haul at this clip before he’d begin to tire. Vezzarn and Hulik were keeping up with no apparent effort. Hulik, for all her slender elegance, moved with an easy sureness which indicated she was remarkably quick and strong, and Vezzarn scrambled along with them like an agile, tough little monkey.

  The ground leveled out. They waded through low tangled growth which caught at their ankles, abruptly found a steep ravine before them, running parallel to the cliffs. Beyond it was a higher rocky rise.

  “Have to find a place to cross!” panted the captain.

  Vezzarn looked back at the long shadow-shape of the Venture in the valley below and behind them. “If we climb down there, sir,” he argued, “we can’t see them when they come out! We won’t have any warning.”

  “They won’t be out for a while,” Hulik told him. “We’ve been walking only ten minutes so far.”

  They turned left along the edge of the ravine. Perhaps half a mile ahead was a great rent in the side of the mountain, glowing with the dim light of the red sun. Cross a few more such rises, the captain thought, then turn right to a point from where they could still see Yango, when he came tracking them with the robot. As soon as their pursuers had followed the trail down into this maze of ravines, they’d have their long headstart back to the ship…

  They came to a place where they could get down into the ravine, hanging on to hard, springy ropes of a thick vine-like growth for support. They scrambled along its floor for a couple of hundred yards before they reached a point where the walls were less steep and they could climb out on the other side. Level ground again, overlooking the valley; they began glancing back frequently at the dim outline of the ship. Something followed them for a stretch, uttering short, deep hoots, but kept out of sight among the rocks. Then another ravine cutting across their path. As they paused at its edge, glancing up and down for a point of descent, Vezzarn exclaimed suddenly, “He’s opened the lock!”

  They looked back. A small sharp circle of light had appeared near the Venture’s bow. They hurried on. The light glowed steadily in the hazy dimness of the valley for about two minutes. Then it vanished. “Could he have found a way to seal the lock against us?” Hulik’s tone was frightened.

  “No. Not from outside,” the captain said. “I have the only key that will do that. I think he’s cut off the light in the control section before leaving — doesn’t want to attract too much attention to the ship…”

  Hulik was staring down at the Venture. “I think I see something there!”

  The others saw it, too, then. A small, pale green spark on the ground this side of the ship. It appeared to be moving along the route they had taken.

  “That could be that robot!” Vezzarn said, awe in his voice.

  It might have been. Or some searchlight Yango was carrying. But there wasn’t much doubt now that they were being tracked.

  As they turned away, Hulik exclaimed, “What was that?”

  They listened. It had been a sound, a distant heavy sound such as might have been uttered, miles up the valley, by some great, deep-voiced bell or gong. It seemed a very strange thing to hear in a place like this. It died slowly. Then, after moments, from a point still farther off in the mountains, came a faint echo of the same sound. And once more, still more remote, barely audible.

  * * *

  They were down in the next ravine minutes later, and had worked almost up to the point where spilling dim sunlight flushed a wide cleft in the mountain’s flank before they again reached a level from where they could look into the valley. Nothing showed in the sections they could see; and they began doubling back in the shadow of the cliffs to reach a point to the right of their line of approach. Lungs and legs were tiring now, but they moved hurriedly because it seemed possible Yango and his killing machine already had entered the area of broken sloping ground between them and the valley and were coming along their trail through one of the lower ravines.

  And then, lifting over a rocky ridge much closer than the ones they’d been watching for it, was a pale green shimmer of light and the spider robot came striding into view. The captain saw it first, stopped the others with a low, sharp word. They stood frozen, staring at it. It was a considerable distance below them but in all not more than three hundred yards away.

  It had come to a halt now, too, half turned in their direction; and for a moment they couldn’t know whether it had discovered them or not. The green light came from the sides of the heavy segmented body, so that it stood in its own glow. Yango became visible behind it suddenly, came up close to its side. The robot crouched, remained in that position a few seconds, then swung about and went striding along the ridge, the great jointed legs carrying it quickly, smoothly, and with an air of almost dainty lightness in spite of its heavy build. Just before it vanished beyond an outcropping of rock, they could see the man was riding it.

  It explained how the pair had followed their trail so swiftly. But now -

  “Skipper,” Vezzarn’s voice said hoarsely from fifteen feet away, “don’t move, sir! I’m pointing my gun at you, and if you move, I’ll fire. You stand still, too, for a moment, Miss do Eldel. I’m doing this for both of us but don’t interfere.

  “Skipper, I don’t want to do this. But the Agandar is after you and the little Wisdom. He doesn’t care about Miss do Eldel or myself… Miss do Eldel, I’m throwing you my knife. Cut the ropes from Dani and put her down. Then tie the skipper’s hands behind him. Skipper, if you make a wrong move or don’t let her tie your hands, I’ll blast you on the spot. I swear it!”

  “What good will that do?” Hulik’s voice asked tightly from behind the captain.

  “You saw them!” There was a brief clatter on the rocky ground to the right as Vezzarn’s knife landed there. “You saw how fast it is. The thing’s tracking us so it’s moving off again. But it will reach this spot in maybe five, six minutes. And the Agandar will see the skipper and Dani lying here. We’ll be gone and he won’t bother with us. Why should he? All he’ll want is to get away with the two of them again—”

  The captain spun suddenly, crouching down and jerking the gun from his pocket. He didn’t really expect to gain anything from it except to hear the snarl of Vezzarn’s blaster — and perhaps that of Hulik’s. Instead there came a great strange cry from the air above them, and a whipping swirl of wind. They saw a descending shadow, an odd round ho
rned head on a long neck reaching out behind Vezzarn. The three guns went off together, and the flying creature veered up and away in a sweep that carried it almost beyond sight in an instant. Its wild voice drifted back briefly as it sped on into the hazy upper reaches of the valley — and Vezzarn, turning quickly again, saw two guns pointed at him, let out a strangled squawk, bounded sideways and scrambled and slid away down the rocky slope. He ducked out of view behind a thicket. In a moment, they heard his retreat continue rapidly, farther on from there.

  “Well,” Hulik said, lowering her gun, “Old Horny really broke up the mutiny! What do we do now? Do you have any ideas — except to run on until the Spider comes walking up behind us?” She nodded down the slope. “Unless, of course, Vezzarn’s done us a favor and it turns off after him here. Happy thought!”

  The captain shook his head. “It won’t,” he said, rather breathlessly. “Yango talks to it. He’ll know the trail has split and can work out who went where…” Goth was squirming around uncomfortably on his back; he got her adjusted a little until she clung firmly to him again, with a grip as instinctive as a sleeping young monkey’s. If Yango had heard the commotion and turned his Sheem Assassin up towards it, they might have less than five minutes before the robot overtook them. But no one had screamed, and blasters weren’t audible at any great distance. It should have sounded like simply another manifestation of local life — one to be avoided rather than investigated.

  In which case Vezzarn, in his terror, had overrated the Spider’s pace. It should be close to fifteen minutes, rather than five or six, before it approached again, striding with mechanical smoothness along their trail. Even so, it was reducing the distance between them much too quickly to make it possible to get back to the Venture before it caught up.