The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmiz

  “What was the humming noise?”

  “That’s the Route. Vatch punched it straight into the ship so it could drop the Leewit in with us.”

  He grunted. “How did Toll do, uh, whatever she did?”

  Goth said no one had realized a giant-vatch was hanging around Karres-now until it scooped up the Leewit. With all the klatha forces boiling on and about the planet at the moment, the area was swarming with lesser vatches, attracted to the commotion; among them the giant remained unnoticed. But when the Leewit disappeared, Toll spotted it and instantly went after it. She’d got a hook into the vatch and a line on her daughter and was rapidly overhauling the vatch when it managed to jerk free.

  “I see,” nodded the captain. Another time might be better to inquire what esoteric processes were involved in getting a hook into a giant-vatch and a line through time on one’s daughter.

  “Toll didn’t have enough hold on the Leewit then to do much good right away,” Goth continued. “There was just time for the touch-talk before she got sucked back to Karres-now.”

  “I suppose touch-talk’s a kind of thought-swapping?”

  “Sort of, but—”

  The small blanket-wrapped form between them uttered a yowl that put the captain’s hair on end. The next moment he was jerked forward almost on his face as the Leewit doubled up sharply, and he nearly lost his grip on her ankles. Then he found himself on his side on the floor, hanging on to something which twisted, wrenched, kicked, and rotated with incredible rapidity and vigor. The vocal din bursting from the blankets was no less incredible. Goth, lying across the Leewit with her arms locked around her, was being dragged about on the deck.

  Then the bundle suddenly went limp. There was still a good deal of noise coming from it; but those were the Leewit’s normal shrieks of wrath, much muffled now.

  “Woo-ooof!” gasped Goth, relaxing her hold somewhat. “Rough one! She’s all right now, though — you can let go—”

  “Hope she hasn’t hurt herself!” The captain was a little out of breath, too, more with surprise and apprehension than because of the effort he’d put out.

  Goth grinned. “Take more than that bit of bouncing around to hurt her, Captain!” She gave the blankets a big-sisterly hug, put her mouth down close to them, yelled “Quit your screeching — it’s me! I’m letting you out—”

  The captain found Vezzarn and Hulik in the passenger lounge, spoke soothingly if vaguely of new developments which might get them all out of trouble shortly, and returned to the control section hoping he’d left the two with the impression that the Leewit’s mode of arrival and the subsequent uproar were events normal enough in his area of experience and nothing for them to worry about. They’d agreed very readily to remain in the lounge area for the time being.

  Goth and the Leewit were swapping recent experiences at a rapid-fire rate when he came back into the room. They still sat on the floor, surrounded by scattered blankets. “They got a klatha pool there now like you never saw before!” the Leewit was exclaiming. “They—” She caught sight of the captain and abruptly checked herself.

  “Don’t have to watch it with him any more!” Goth assured her. “Captain knows all about that stuff now.”

  “Huh!” When they’d loosened the blankets and the Leewit came eeling out, red faced and scowling, and discovered the captain there, her immediate inclination apparently had been to blame him for her experience, though she hadn’t been aware of Toll’s touch-talk conversation with Goth, in which Toll simply had used her as a handy medium — switching her on for the purpose about like switching on a ship intercom, the captain had gathered. The Leewit, in fact, remembered nothing clearly since the moment she’d relled a giant-vatch and simultaneously felt the vast entity sweeping her away from Karres. She recalled, shudderingly, that she’d been over the Egger Route. She knew it had been a horrifying trip. But she could only guess uneasily now at what had made it so horrifying. That blurring of details was a frequent experience of those who came over the Route and one of its most disturbing features. Since it was the captain who’d directed the vatch’s attention to Karres in the first place, the Leewit wasn’t so far off, of course, in feeling he was responsible for her kidnapping. However, nobody mentioned that to her.

  The look she gave him as he squatted down on his heels beside the sisters might have been short of full approval, but she remarked only, “Learned mighty quick if you know all about it!”

  “Not all about it, midget,” the captain said soothingly. “But it looks like I’ve started to learn. One thing I can’t figure at the moment is that vatch.”

  “What about the vatch?” asked Goth.

  “Well, I had the impression that after it dropped the Leewit here, it took off at top speed — as if it were scared Toll might catch up with it.”

  The Leewit gave him a surprised stare.

  “It was scared Toll would catch up with it!” she said.

  “But it’s a giant-vatch!” said the captain.

  The Leewit appeared puzzled. Goth rubbed the tip of her nose and remarked, “Captain, if I were a giant-vatch and Toll got mad at me, I’d be going somewhere fast, too!”

  “Sure would!” the Leewit agreed. “No telling what’d happen! She’d short out its innards, likely!”

  “Pull it inside out by chunks!” added Goth.

  “Oh?” said the captain, startled. “I didn’t realize that, uh, sort of thing could be done.”

  “Well, not by many,” Goth acknowledged. “Toll sure can do it!”

  “Got a fast way with vatches when her temper’s up!” the Leewit nodded.

  “Hmm,” said the captain. He reflected. “Then maybe we’re rid of the thing, eh?”

  Goth looked doubtful. “Wouldn’t say that, Captain. They’re mighty stubborn. Likely it’ll come sneaking back pretty soon to see if Toll’s still around. Could be too nervous about it to do much for a while though.”

  She regarded the Leewit’s snarled blond mop critically. “Let’s go get your hair combed out,” she said. “You’re kind of a mess!”

  They went into Goth’s cabin. The captain wandered back towards the screens, settled into the control chair, rubbed his jaw, relled experimentally. Nothing in range — but they probably hadn’t lost the vatch yet. He’d been wondering about the urgent haste with which it had seemed to pass here when pursued by only one angry witch mother. Klatha hooks… shorting out vatch innards… He shook his head. Well, Toll was a redoubtable sorceress even among her peers, from all he’d heard.

  Klatha hooks -

  The captain knuckled his jaw some more. No way of knowing when the Egger Route would come droning awesomely up again, this time bringing a troop of witches to transport the Manaret synergizer, the Venture and themselves to the embattled Karres of more than three hundred thousand years in the future. It might be minutes, hours, or days, apparently. There was no way of knowing either when the vatch would start to get over being nervous and discover there was no hot-tempered witch mother around at present -

  The captain grunted, shifted attention mentally down to the Venture’s engine room, to the thrust generators. Almost immediately an awareness came of the tiny, swirling speck of blackness there which couldn’t be seen with physical eyes… the minute scrap of vatch stuff that carried enough energy in itself to hold the ship’s drives paralyzed.

  What immaterial manner of thing, he thought, would be a klatha hook shaped to snag that immaterial fragment of vatch?

  Brief wash of heat… The speck jumped, stood still again, its insides whirling agitatedly. The captain pulled in some fashion, felt something tighten between them like the finest of threads, grow taut.

  So that was a klatha hook!… He let out his breath, drew on the hook, brought the speck in steadily with it until it was swirling above the control desk a few feet away from him.

  Stay there, he thought, and released the hook. The speck stayed where it was. As close to it as this, he could rell its vatch essence, though faintly. He
flicked another klatha snag to it, drew it closer, released it again…

  Hooks, it seemed, he could do. He might also find he was able to short out the speck’s innards if he made the attempt. But there was no immediate point in that. The speck was a tool with powers and limitations, a working device, a miniature vatch machine. He’d already discovered some of the ways such a machine could be made to operate. What else could it do that might be useful to know… perhaps might become very necessary to know about?

  The captain stared at the speck in scowling concentration, half aware Goth and the Leewit had left the cabin. He could hear them talking in the outer control section, voices lowered and intent… Turn it inside out, in chunks? That might wreck it as a device. But since it was non-material vatch stuff, it might not.

  There was a pipe in one of the drawers in his cabin, an old favorite of more leisurely days, though he hadn’t smoked it much since the beginning of the Chaladoor trip. He brought an image of it now before his mind, pictured it lying on the control desk before him, turned his attention back to the vatch speck.

  Just enough of you to do the job!… Get it!

  Out of the speck, with the thought, popped a lesser speck, so tiny it could produce no impression at all except an awareness that it was there. It hung beside the other for an instant, then was gone, and was back. The pipe lay on the desk.

  So they could be taken apart in chunks and the chunks still put to work! Now -

  “…not sure!” The Leewit’s young voice trilled suddenly through his abstraction. “Yes, I do, just barely… Stinkin’ thing!”

  The captain glanced around hastily at the open door. Were they relling the vatch speck in here? It would do no harm, of course, if Goth knew about his new line of experimentation. But the Leewit -

  Then he stiffened. Together! he thought at the two specks. The lesser one flicked back inside the other. Back down where you — but the reassembled vatch speck was swirling again above the thrust generators in the engine room before the thought was completed. He drew his attention quickly away from it.

  “Captain?” Goth called from the outer room.

  “Yes — I’m getting it, Goth!” His voice hadn’t been too steady.

  The giant-vatch was barely in range, the relling sensation so distantly faint it had been overlapped by the one produced by the vatch-speck immediately before him. The entity had returned, might be prowling around cautiously as Goth had expected, to avoid another encounter with Toll and with klatha hooks of an order to match its own hugeness. But he had been careless — it wouldn’t do at all to have the vatch surprise him while he was tinkering with the devices it had stationed here.

  It drew closer gradually. The witch sisters remained silent. So did the captain. He began to get impressions of vatch-muttering, indistinct and intermittent. It did seem to be trying to size up the situation here now, might grow bolder as it became convinced it had lost its pursuer -

  Why had it brought the Leewit through time to the Venture? She was a capable witch-moppet when it came to producing whistles that shattered shatterable objects to instant dust. From what Goth had said, she also had blasts in her armory with an effect approximating a knock-out punch delivered by a mighty fist. Neither, however, seemed very useful in getting the Manaret synergizer back to Manaret, past Moander, the Nuris, and the dense tangles of energy barriers that guarded the Worm World.

  The Leewit’s other main talent then was a linguistic one, as the witches understood linguistics — a built-in klatha ability to comprehend any spoken language she heard and translate and use it without effort or thought. And Moander, the monster-god of the Worm World legends, who was really a great robot, reputedly “spoke in a thousand tongues.” Nobody seemed to know just what that meant; but conceivably the vatch knew. So conceivably the Leewit’s linguistic talent was the vatch’s reason for deciding to fit her into its plans to overthrow Moander through the captain.

  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—”