Revenge of the Catspaw

by Helena Puumala

  They had reached the lounge outside the client rooms when the the trouble started. Suddenly large, skinny cats were pouncing into the middle of the lounge from all directions! They zeroed in on the Elites, ignoring the pilots. They moved so quickly, and in such an organized, and united manner that the men's weapons were useless, taken out of play before they could be aimed!

  For an awful moment the first pilot stared at blood spurting from Mogron's nape where one of the beasts had sunk its teeth. Then he became aware that he had dropped his laser pistol, and that his fellow pilot was shaking him.

  “Let's get the hell out of here!” the second pilot yelled at him, and he found his feet.

  They ran until they were back outside, banging on the door of the Security Shack. The two men inside turned off the screen showing the lounge where the mayhem was going on, looking shaken, even while one of them opened the door to the pilots.

  “The cats seem to hit on the Elites only,” Jem, the Law-Enforcer said. “They seem to have a real hate on for them.”

  “It's as if they hate them as much as most of the people I know do,” added the House Security man. “Is hate catchy? Can animals get it?”

  “Don't have a clue about that,” muttered the first pilot, stepping back outside. “But I need a beer, and there's plenty in the flyer I was piloting. Come on, all of you.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I guess I've learned enough about transporting, that this time I failed to kick myself out of body, and into some other reality,” Sarah said to no-one in particular as she crawled up from the carpet of the Fleet ship's recreation room.

  The floor was covered with bodies. The jaunt through—what? space?—had apparently unbalanced every one of the travellers, though people instinctively had given one another room, and a casual inspection detected no mangled physical forms.

  Sarah revelled for a short moment in the exuberance of having successfully completed the transport. She looked around for the Guru Johannes to thank him for his, and his compatriots' aid. He was climbing up off the floor, next to her, as it happened, a big grin on his face.

  They had no chance to speak before the door to the recreation area opened, and several uniformed Armed Forces Officers entered, staring at its contents.

  “Oh, Captain Jeffries,” she called, for that was who was at the forefront of the group. “Were you forewarned of our arrival?”

  The Captain did not answer. He stared at her.

  “And who may you be, young woman?” he finally asked.

  It was Sarah's turn to stare.

  Then she heard laughter, Lindy's laughter, and the Guru's laughter, and that of Cameron. All three of them had their eyes on Sarah.

  “Sarah, you need to look into a mirror!” Lindy cried. “You're back to looking like the tiny, talented Kordean Witch! Sunny has disappeared!”

  “What?”

  Sarah looked around the room, and her eyes found a large mirror on one wall, a decoration, perhaps. She darted over to it, over and around bodies, some still lying down, others in every stage of getting up on to their feet.

  Lindy was right. She was back to being Sarah Mackenzie, pale-skinned, and sharp-featured! All that was left of the body-sculpted Sunny was the bleached hair, and even there the black roots were obvious!

  “I have no idea how that happened!” she called to Lindy from beside the mirror.

  Lindy was still laughing, and Cameron, beside her, was grinning. The Guru had turned to converse with the Captain.

  “We'll have to warn the body-sculptor, Dorian,” Lindy responded, “that his artistry may not survive travel via Witch transport! At least, not when you're the Witch doing the transporting!”

  Sarah's eyes were flitting around the room. A nodule of fear had lodged itself into her chest.

  “Where's Coryn?” she asked. “Why am I not seeing him?”

  She could have felt for him while clutching her amarto, but suddenly was afraid to do so.

  Cameron was picking his way towards her, his face serious.

  “I'll take you to him, Sis,” he said when he got near.

  He grabbed a tight hold on her arm. His eyes did not meet hers straight on; instead he began to steer her towards the middle of the room where she could catch glimpses of a blanket-wrapped bundle lying still on the floor, in contrast with the moving, unitard-clad forms of the numerous young men.

  “How bad...?” She could not finish the question.

  “You'll see in a minute.”

  Lindy came to join them, and positioned herself on Sarah's other side. The three of them made their way over to where the blanketed body lay completely still. A dark-haired woman sat beside it, her hands on a tote bag half-filled with Sarah knew not what.

  “Ariane.” Lindy's introduction of the woman to Sarah was brief. “She was the so-called Keeper at the Pleasure House.”

  “She was always kind to us,” piped up a dark-skinned, curly-haired young man, from nearby.

  “I did what little I could to try to help him, using what I found in Evella's bag,” Ariane said, indicating the still body. “He needs much more attention.”

  “Kordean healing magic,” Cam added, finally turning to directly face his sister.

  Sarah sank to her knees beside the body, her fear heavy in her heart. She uncovered the face which had been covered with a corner of the soft blanket in which he had been wrapped. The sound that the sight drew out of her throat was a whimper.

  The face was barely recognizable, it was so badly bruised.

  “Is the rest of him as bad?” she heard herself ask, in a voice barely recognizable.

  “Worse,” Ariane replied, and Lindy and Cam echoed agreement.

  Cam and Lindy had been the ones to have fetched him from Evil Evella's clutches, Sarah remembered. She—or Sunny—had been told to stay away, and not to even think about him!

  This was why.

  The breath Sarah drew in was a sob. She buried her face into her hands, trying to control the emotional storm within her.

  “Sarah,” said Cam sharply. “Pull yourself together, and get out your Stone. He needs you to heal him.”

  She looked up at Cam, then, and refused to wail, even though that was what she wanted to do.

  “Cam, I can't,” she tried to explain, through tears. Or maybe she did wail. “I finally got to the lessons on healing at Ferhil Stones, Cam, and I flunked out! I have no talent for healing! I can do some superficial stuff, but nothing like what's needed here!”

  Oh how admitting that hurt!

  “Marlyss and the Healing Instructor, Witch Tanya, said that it was okay, every Witch has her Achilles heel, something that she's just sub-par at! Nobody can be good at everything, they said!

  “But Coryn, my beloved Coryn, needs healing, and I haven't got it to give!”

  Tears ran down her cheeks! The triumph of having transported several dozen people across an immense expanse of space lay in ashes around her! She was useless in this emergency!

  “We'll get the ship's medic here, right away,” said Captain Jeffries.

  Sarah was not quite sure when he and Guru Johannes had arrived to stand beside Lindy and Cameron. The Captain was shaking his head as he looked at Coryn's face.

  “What the hell did the poor sod ram into?” he asked.

  “Evil Evella Copoz,” replied Cam. “Now the late Evil Evella Copoz.”

  “Sarah,” said the Guru. “While we wait for the medic, why don't you do like Cam suggested, and pull out your amarto? I and my compatriots will add our energies to yours; perhaps we can augment your abilities somewhat. Some healing is better than none, my girl. Enough has to be done, at least, to ensure that he can stay conscious through the coming omega-jumps. Otherwise....”

  “The Greencat can help with that, if she will. Apparently she did so for me enroute to Kordea from the Planet of the Amartos.

  “It's not the power that I lack, Guru Johannes,” Sarah added sadly. “It's the healing talent. I'm a klutz when it comes to
dealing with the energies involved in healing. Even if I had the strength of all those amartos that I used in the transport, it wouldn't help; in fact, I'd probably do more harm than good.”

  “We'll get him to Kordea as soon as possible where expert healers can work on him,” replied the Guru. “In the meantime, work with us. There are over a dozen of us, and my guess is that you can do more than you realize with your strength, especially if you allow us to lead you.”

  “It's worth a try, Sarah,” Cam encouraged her.

  “Couldn't you play to your strength and transport him to Kordea?” Lindy asked. “Didn't you do something like that once before?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “I wouldn't dare,” she said. “Not in his state of health. It's possible that transporting him here may have worsened his injuries. But there was no choice about that transport.”

  “No, no choice whatsoever,” Lindy agreed immediately. She had squatted down beside the kneeling Sarah and added earnestly: “Please listen to the Guru, and do what you and his people can. As you know, it was Cam and I who pulled Coryn out of Evella's room. We know how bad a state he is in, and the way I see it, any help is better than none.”

  “The only person who expects you to do the impossible is you, yourself, Sarah,” Cam said with a faint smile. “That hasn't changed in a dozen-plus years.”

  Sarah took her Stone into her hands, drew a deep breath, and looked into its depths to fully connect with it. She knew that she would need all of her concentration to direct her meagre healing talent.

  “Can someone uncover him, please?”

  Ariane, Lindy, and one of the recovered ex-slaves did her bidding, trying to be as gentle as was possible. Sarah steeled herself for what she might see and sense; Coryn's breathing was laborious and shallow. He seemed to be barely aware of his surroundings.

  She heard gasps from the witnesses, as the patient's body was revealed.

  “What? Was that woman you named—Evil Evella—a sexual predator?” Captain Jeffries blurted.

  “The worst kind.”

  It was Ariane who had spoken, her voice shaking.

  “Young, enslaved men died in her hands. Others killed themselves to get away from her. One threw himself to the feral cats, to be torn apart, rather than let her finish him off. I could do nothing because she was an Elite, and her husband and the other Elite men condoned her behaviour. They did insist for a long time that she not do too much damage to this one—they had a use for him, but I don't know what it was. But they must have decided that they didn't need him any more, since last night the restraints on her behaviour were off.”

  “They thought that they had Sarah in their sights, ready to be plucked, like a ripe fruit,” commented Shellion, who had joined the group around Coryn's form. “Didn't need the bait, anymore. Well, they were wrong.”

  “They thought that they had the catspaw, the one which they truly wanted,” Cam interjected. “But the catspaw turned on them. Justice was served, harsh justice, but fair.”

  Shellion nodded, and drew a ragged breath. His expression was stony; the Team members had seen the look before, if not often.

  “To think,” he added harshly, “that those perverts are supposed to be my people!”

  “And mine,” said Ariane.

  **

  Sarah surfaced from her trance about an hour later, exhausted. It was odd how much more exhausting it was to do something that one had little talent for, as compared to those things that came easily. Moreover, the results of her healing struggles were not even close to the quality of her transportation efforts!

  She and the Guru's people had concentrated on what they had considered the most essential repairs. They had worked on his mouth, throat, and neck; she had shuddered to think what equipment Evil Evella had been using. They had then done as much as they could to bring his nether parts into at least rudimentarily useful shape. The crazy woman had paid a lot of attention to them for obvious reasons. They had finished by knitting together broken bones on the hands and feet; Sarah could not help but wonder why Evella had bothered to break bones; what had that to do with anyone's sex drive, no matter how twisted? Perhaps the broken bones had been a side effect of something more sinister?

  Much was left undone. Neither she nor her helpers had had enough energy left to deal with the lash wounds which still covered the body. As for the raw sores of the psyche, none of them had the expertise to dare to even touch them.

  “I can do no more, even with all the help I've been given,” she groaned, as she loosed her Stone to lie on her chest.

  “What you've done is a lot more than Terran medicine could have accomplished,” said a professional-looking woman in a lab coat who was kneeling beside her, scrutinizing her work. “We can use ointment on the skin lesions.”

  She smiled at Sarah.

  “I'm Dr. Jenni Liu,” she introduced herself, “and I prescribe you a good meal, and rest, young woman. You're exhausted.”

  The area of the floor where they were had emptied itself of bodies. The Guru was still sitting beside Sarah, and his compatriots were rousing themselves from cross-legged positions, a little ways away.

  “My people are better with telepathy than with matter-transforming aspects of ESP,” the Guru said with a sigh. “With only so few of us, we weren't as much help to you, Sarah, as we wanted to be. To be really effective, we usually bring together the minds of thousands of people—for some things, all the adults of the planet.”

  Then he smiled.

  “But I'm good with telepathy, and I will get hold of Marlyss at the earliest. She'll welcome us to Kordea with the best healing there is to be had on planet.”

  “Your Team mates—that's what they termed themselves—were busy persuading Captain Jeffries to take this ship directly to Kordea,” Dr. Liu said. “The blond woman, Lindy Cass, especially, is a very persuasive person. The Captain was demurring, since the Kordeans have been very unwelcoming to large military vessels, in the past. In fact, he was saying that they are forbidden to land in Trahea Port, and apparently the scuttlebutt is that the Witch Women who run the planet are perfectly capable of enforcing that stricture.”

  “They are,” the Guru agreed. “However, I think that they'll make an exception in this case. Coryn is very popular on Kordea, including among the Witches. In fact, Witch Marlyss, the Eldest of the Sacred Circle of the Twelve, the largest of the Seven Circles, is as fond of him as if he was her own son.”

  “True,” said Sarah, with a slight grin, more forthcoming than she would have been had she been less tired. “He wormed his way into her good graces as soon as he took on the job of the Kordean-Confederation Liaison Officer. Meanwhile Marlyss and I, though she was one of my most important teachers, bristled at each other every moment that we had to spend together.

  “But Dr. Liu, can I get that meal you prescribed me, please? And if at all possible, I'd like to sleep next to my ailing husband—I mean to hover over him like a mother hen until we get to Kordea.”

  “Two very good ideas, Sarah,” the Doctor said. “I don't quite see why you consider yourself a poor healer. Your husband will be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and, very likely, his wife's presence will be better medicine than any potion that I could offer.”

  **

  “Sarah.”

  It pained her to hear how slurred his speech sounded. She had failed to do an adequate job on his throat.

  “I'm here,” she said. “Right next to you. I asked to be allowed in your Infirmary room, and they pushed me a cot beside yours.”

  She felt him grope for her hand, and, as gently as she could so as to not cause him further pain, she took hold of his fingers.

  “Thanks for being here,” he whispered. “Although I'm not much good to you now, and I don't know when I will be, again.”

  “That's hardly surprising.” She tried for a light tone. “I'm not about to make any demands on you.”

  “It's not fair to you,” he added. “To
be tied irrevocably to a husk of a man. If I had known what was coming, I never would have agreed to the terms of this marriage.”

  “Don't fret over it, dear heart. Things will work out. Just because I'm rotten at healing doesn't mean that there isn't healing to be had.”

  She realized that the croak that came from his throat was supposed to be a laugh.

  “You did manage to make it possible for me to go to the bathroom without painfully eliminating my guts at the same time. Evil Evella would not have thanked you.”

  “Evil Evella, I understand, is beyond thanking anyone for anything.

  “I didn't see it, or her,” she added. “Lindy, and Cam, and the Guru Johannes insisted that I stay out of that room. I wasn't even allowed to think about it—or you, while we were there.”

  “Smart of them,” he replied.

  His voice was fading, and she told him to save it, and go back to sleep

  She lay there, beside him, gently holding on to his fingers, as his breathing evened out, proving that at least his lungs had survived the ordeal intact.

  For the first time in their relationship she felt like she was the strong one in charge; he was the one depending on her. It was an odd feeling. Although she had well understood, all along, that in some ways she was more than his equal, the simple fact that he was seven years older than she was, had always made her feel like a child, while he was the adult. She recalled how amazed, and thrilled she had been to find out that he had fallen in love with her, little Sarah Mackenzie who wasn't even pretty. She had needed recurrent reassurances of his affection, and he had given them, without reservation.

  Now she had the chance to return the favour, and she would—oh yes she would!

  “There's no way I'd leave you, my dearest,” she whispered to his sleeping form, “even if I could.”

  **

  Sarah's resolution was sorely tried that very shipboard night.

  That was when Coryn, free of Evil Evella's pharmaceuticals had the first nightmare. Sarah awoke to Coryn's hoarse screams and thrashing, and, foolishly, reached a hand to calm him. He, at first, recoiled from her touch, then, suddenly, grabbed hold of her, pinned her down on the cot. She felt his hands encircle her neck, and gasped as she realized that he was not fully awake. He was trying to throttle her in his sleep!