The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmiz

  “Dear me!” Hulik giggled. “We really have them upset now.” She reached for the rope in the captain’s hand. “Lift the little witch up and I’ll get her fastened. It doesn’t matter though. We won’t make it back to the ship.”

  But they did make it back to the ship. Afterwards, the captain couldn’t remember too much of the hike down along the slope. He remembered that it had seemed endless, that his legs had turned into wobbly rubber from time to time, while Goth’s small body seemed leaden on his back. The do Eldel walked and clambered beside or behind him. Now and then she laughed. For a while she’d hummed a strange, wild little tune that made him think of distant drum-dances. Later she was silent. Perhaps he’d told her to shut up. He couldn’t remember that.

  He remembered fear. Not of things following on the ground or of some flying monster that might come swooping down again. As far as he could tell, they had lost their escort; the gorges, ravines, the thicket-studded slopes, seemed almost swept clean of life. Nothing stirred or called. It was as if instead of drawing attention now, they were being carefully avoided.

  The fear had no real form. There were oppressive feelings of hugeness and menace gathering gradually about. There was an occasional suspicion that the red sky had darkened for moments as if shadows too big to be made out as shadows had just passed through it. The staccato thunder, which had no lightning to explain it, reverberated now and then above the mountains; but that disturbance never came nearly as close again as it had done at the cliff. When they reached the edge of the ravine where, on the way up, they’d stopped to listen to something like a series of deep, giant bells, far off in the valley, he thought he heard a dim echoing of the same sound again. No matter, he told himself — the Venture still lay undisturbed below and ahead of them in the valley, not many more minutes away…

  “They’re waiting for us at the ship,” Hulik said from behind him. She laughed.

  He didn’t reply. The do Eldel had been a good companion when it came to facing the Agandar and his killing machine. But this creepy shadow world simply had become too much for her.

  Then, on the final stretch down, Hulik faltered at last, started weaving and stumbling. The captain helped her twice to her feet, then clamped an arm around her and plodded on. He began to do some stumbling himself, got the notion that the ground was shifting, lifting and settling underfoot, like the swell of an uneasy sea. When he looked up once more to see how much farther it was, he came to a sudden stop. The bow of the Venture loomed above them; the ramp was a dozen steps away. He glanced at the dark open lock above it, steered Hulik to the foot of the ramp, shook her shoulder.

  “We’re there!” he said loudly as she raised her head and gave him a dazed look. “Back at the ship! Up you go — up the ramp! Wake up!”

  “They’re here, too,” Hulik giggled. “Can’t you feel it?” But she did start up the ramp, the captain following close behind in case she fell again.

  He felt something, at that. A cold electric tingling seemed to trickle all through his body, as if he’d stepped into the path of a current of energy. And looking up past the ship’s bow he’d seen something he was certain hadn’t been in view only minutes before — a great dark cloud mass boiling up over the cliffs on the far side of the valley.

  So a storm was coming, he told himself.

  He hustled Hulik through the lock, slammed it shut behind them before he switched on the control section lights, pulled out a knife on his way over to the couch and cut the ropes which held Goth fastened to him. He slid her down on the couch. When he looked back for Hulik, she had crumpled to the floor in the center of the control room.

  The captain let her lie, pulled the package of wrapped gadgetry from his pocket and dumped it on the control desk. He began moving hurriedly about. Getting the Venture readied for action again seemed to take a long time, but it might have taken three minutes in fact. The electric tingling was becoming uncomfortably pronounced when he finally settled himself in the control chair. He fed the underdrives a warm-up jolt, held one hand on the thrust regulator as he checked the gun turrets, finally switched on the viewscreens.

  A black cloud wall was rising above the cliffs on either side, and the screens showed it also surging up from distant upper stretches of the valley… and from the plain beyond the valley mouth behind the ship. A turbulent, awesomely towering bank of darkness encircling this area — yes, past high time to be away from here! The captain started to shove the thrust regulator forwards, then checked the motion with a grunt of astonishment.

  The starboard screen showed a tiny man-shape running towards the ship, arms pumping. The captain stepped up the screen magnification. Vezzarn -

  * * *

  He swore savagely, flicked over the desk’s forward lock controls, heard the lock open — then a new rumbling roar from the world outside the lock. Vezzarn, at least, hadn’t much more than two hundred yards to cover, and was sprinting hard. His head came up for an instant — he’d seen the sudden blaze of light from the lock.

  The captain waited, mangling his lip with his teeth. Each second, the surrounding giant cloud banks were changing appearance, lifting higher… and now they seemed also to slant inwards like dark waves cresting — about to come thundering down from every direction to engulf the ship! Vezzarn passed beyond the screen’s inner range. More seconds went by. The roaring racket beyond the lock grew louder. Those monster clouds were leaning in towards the Venture! Then a clatter of boots on the ramp. The captain glanced back as Vezzarn flung himself headlong through the lock, rolled over, gasping, on the floor. The thrust regulator went flat to the desk in that instant.

  They leaped five hundred feet from the ground while the lock was clicking shut. The Venture’s nose lifted high as they cleared the cliffs and the atmosphere drive hurled her upwards. Three quarters of the sky above seemed a churning blackness now. The ship turned towards the center of the remaining open patch. At the earliest possible moment the captain cut in the main drive -

  The roiling elemental furies dwindled to utter insignificance beneath them as they hurtled off the world of red twilight like a wrong-way meteor, blazing from stem to stem. Space quenched the flames seconds later. The bloated giant sun and its satellite appeared in the rear screens. Cooling, the Venture thundered on.

  “Whooo-oof!” breathed the captain, slumping back in the chair. He closed his eyes then, but opened them again at once…

  It was something like smelling a grumble, or hearing dark green, or catching a glimpse of a musky scent. As Goth had suggested, it was not to be described in any terms that made sense. But it was quite unmistakable. He knew exactly what he was doing — he was relling a vatch.

  The vatch. Big Wind Voice. Old Windy -

  CONGRATULATIONS! cried the vatch. THE TEST IS OVER. AGAIN YOU SURPRISE AND DELIGHT ME, SMALL PERSON! NOW THE GLORY OF A GREATER DREAM GAME IS TRULY EARNED. LET US SPEAK AT ONCE TO ANOTHER OF ITS PLAYERS…

  With that, the control room blurred and was gone. He, too, the captain decided a stunned moment later, had blurred and was gone, at least in most respects. Beneath him still hung a kind of pale, shifting luminance which might bear some resemblance to his familiar body in its outlines. He seemed to be moving swiftly with it through a sea of insubstantial grayness…

  A greater dream game! What was that vatch monster getting him into — and what would happen to Goth and the Venture? He couldn’t -

  PATIENCE, SMALL PERSON! PATIENCE! Old Windy boomed good-humoredly from the grayness. THE GAME IS ONE IN WHICH YOU HAVE AN INTEREST. YOUR PHANTOM COMPANIONS WILL BE SAFE UNTIL YOU RETURN.

  The last, at least, was somewhat reassuring… A game in which he had an interest?

  WORM WORLD! bellowed the vatch-voice delightedly, rolling and tumbling and swooping about him. WORM WORLD… WORM WORLD… WORM WORLD -

  Chapter TEN

  He did have, the captain acknowledged cautiously, a very strong interest in the Worm World. Where was it?

  For a moment he received the
impression of a puzzled lack of comprehension in the vatch. WHERE IS IT? the great voice rumbled then, surprised. IT IS WHERE IT IS, SMALL PERSON!

  So the captain realized that instruments like stellar maps meant nothing to this klatha entity, that it had in fact no real understanding of location as the human mind understood it. But it didn’t need such understanding. The universe of humanity seemed a product of vatch dream-imagination to the vatch. It roamed about here as freely as a man might roam among creations of his imagination. If it wanted to be somewhere, it simply was there.

  With the exception of the Worm World. The Worm World, the vatch explained, was an enigma. A tantalizing enigma. Having picked up reports of Manaret and its terrors here and there in its prowling, it had decided to take a look at it.

  It discovered it was unable to approach Manaret. Something barred it — something blocked it. Its essence was held at a distance by the Worm World. That shouldn’t have been possible, but it was so.

  It made the Worm World a challenge. The vatch investigated further, began to fit together a picture of what was known about Manaret. There was the dire monster Moander which ruled it and commanded the worm globes that terrorized human worlds wherever they went. The vatch learned that Manaret was in fact a ship — a tremendous ship designed along planetary dimensions. Confined within a section of the ship was a race of proud and powerful beings, who had built it and originally had been its masters, but who were now the prisoners of Moander. These were known as the Lyrd-Hyrier to humans who had gained contact with them in seeking the means to resist Moander and his Nuris. If there was anything the Lyrd-Hyrier could do to overthrow Moander and regain possession of Manaret, they would do it. And that would end at the same time the oppressive and constantly growing threat Moander presented to humanity.

  The vatch was intrigued by the situation and had watched the captain become involved in the game against the Worm World. It thought now he could be developed into the player who would bring about Moander’s downfall.

  What could he do, the captain asked.

  Information was needed first, the vatch-voice told him. The means to act against the monster might be at hand, if they understood how to use it. And information could be obtained best from those who had most to tell about Moander — the Lyrd Hyrier confined in Manaret. The vatch could not reach them, and nothing material could be sent through the barriers maintained by Moander. But in his present form the captain lacked all material substance and could be projected directly into the one section of Manaret still held and defended by the Lyrd-Hyrier. There, by following the vatch’s instructions, he would learn what he needed to know…

  * * *

  There were advantages to being a ghost — a temporary ghost, the captain hoped.

  Fire from concealed energy guns had blazed through and about him the instant he arrived in the private chamber of the Lord Cheel, Prince of the Lyrd-Hyrier, the Great People, in a central section of Manaret. The guns hadn’t caused the captain any discomfort. When, at some unseen signal, the firing ended, he was still there insubstantial but intact. The hostile reception was no surprise. Knowing nothing of vatch powers, the Lyrd-Hyrier would regard any intrusion here as being an attempted attack by Moander.

  So the captain was thinking expressions of polite greeting and friendly purpose at the Lord Cheel as he drifted down closer towards him. This was in line with the vatch’s instructions.

  There was no immediate response to his greetings from Cheel, who was sitting up in a nest of rich robes on a wide couch near the center of the chamber, watching the approach of the wraith which had invaded his privacy, and apparently disturbed his slumber, with large, unblinking golden-green eyes. The vatch had told the captain that the Lyrd-Hyrier lord had a mind of great power, and that if he formulated his thoughts carefully and clearly, Cheel would understand them and think back at him. The captain began to wonder how well the plan was going to work. What the robes allowed to be seen of Cheel’s person might have been sections of a purple-scaled reptile cast into very tall, attenuated human form. The neck was snaky. But the large round head at the end of it did suggest that it bulged with capable brains; and Cheel’s whole attitude, at a moment which must have been rather startling to him, was that of a bold, arrogant, and resourceful being.

  About a third of the way down to the couch — the chamber had the dimensions of a spaceship hangar and the jeweled magnificence of a royal audience room — the captain encountered a highly charged force field. He realized what it was: any material object or inimical energy encountering that barrier should have been spattered against the walls. But the only feeling he had was one of moving, for a moment, through something rather sticky and resistive. Then he was past the force field. Cheel gave up on defensive measures. His long purple arm moved under the robes; and his thoughts now touched the captain’s mind.

  “The inner barriers are turned off,” they said. “It appears you are not Moander’s tool. Are you then one of the friendly witch people?”

  The captain formulated the thought that he was an associate of the witch people and Moander’s foe as they were, that he might be in a position to give assistance against the machine, and that he was in need of information to show him what he could do. Cheel seemed to understand all this well enough. “Ask your questions!” he responded. “Without aid, our situation here will soon be hopeless—”

  The exchange continued with only occasional difficulties. Manaret, at the time it appeared in the home-universe of humanity, had been under the control of a director machine called a synergizer, an all-important instrument unit which actuated and coordinated the many independent power systems required to maintain and drive the ship. The same near-disaster which hurled Manaret and the Lyrd-Hyrier out of their dimensional pattern of existence into this one also had temporarily incapacitated the synergizer. Moander, an emergency director of comparatively limited function, had become active in the synergizer’s stead, as it was designed to do. Manaret was an experiment, a new type of Lyrd-Hyrier warship. There had been no previous opportunity to test out Moander under actual emergency conditions.

  Now it appeared there had been mistakes made in planning it. Alerted to substitute for the synergizer only until that unit resumed functioning, the emergency director had taken action to perpetuate the emergency which left it in charge. The synergizer was very nearly indestructible. But Moander had placed it in a torpedolike vehicle and set the vehicle on a course which should plunge it into a great star near the point where the giant ship had emerged here. Free of its more powerful rival, Moander could not be controlled by any method available to the Lyrd-Hyrier.

  “We know the synergizer was not destroyed at that time,” Cheel’s thoughts told the captain. “Apparently the vehicle was deflected from its course towards the star, presumably by the synergizer’s own action. But it has not returned and we have never found out where it went. Recently, there was a report—”

  The thought halted. The captain was producing a mental image of Olimy’s mysterious crystalloid…

  “That is it!” Cheel’s recognition of the object came almost as a shriek. “Where have you seen it?”

  His excitement jumbled communication briefly; then he steadied. The Lyrd Hyrier had received reports through a spy system they’d been able to maintain in various sections of Manaret that Moander’s Nuris had picked up the long-lost trail of the synergizer. Only hours old was the information that a witch ship transporting the instrument had eluded an attempt to force it and its cargo into a sun, and had disappeared.

  The captain acknowledged the ship was his own. Temporarily the synergizer was safe.

  The alien golden-green eyes were smoky with agitation. A view of a great dim hall, walls tapestried with massed instrument banks, appeared in the captain’s mind. “The central instrument room — it is under our control still. Once there, in its own place, the synergizer is all-powerful! Away from it, it can do little…” The picture flicked out. Cheel’s thoughts hurried on. A long
time ago they had picked up fragmentary messages directed at Manaret by others of their kind from the dimensions of reality out of which they had been thrown. A vast machinery had been constructed there which would pluck the giant ship back from wherever it had gone the instant it was restored to operational condition under the synergizer’s direction. All problems would be solved in that moment!

  But there was no method known to the Lyrd-Hyrier, Cheel admitted, of bringing a material object through Moander’s outer defenses of Manaret. The synergizer was many things more than it appeared to be, but it was in part material. And Manaret’s defenses were being strengthened constantly. “The Nuris again are weaving new patterns of energy among the dead suns which surround us here on all sides…” Of late, Moander evidently had found means of disrupting mental exchanges between the Lyrd-Hyrier and some telepathic witches of Karres. They had recently become unable to establish contact with Karres.

  It seemed a large “But…” “Any chance your friends eventually might send something like a relief ship here which could handle Moander?” the captain inquired.

  “Impossible!” View of madly spinning blurs of energies, knotting and exploding… “There is no dimensional interface between us — there is a twisting plunge through chaos! We were there; we were here. In a million lifetimes that precise moment of whirling shift could not be deliberately duplicated. They cannot come here! They must draw the ship back there… and they can do that only when its total pattern of forces is intact and matches the pattern they have powered to attract it.”

  Which required the synergizer…