by Andre Norton
There was pain, but it was nothing compared to what he had felt earlier. More and more he raked at that loosened skin, felt it rip and fall away from his body. There was under it something which moved, arose – as if for all these years he had carried some other living entity on his back.
The thin light of the globe was before him. He did not look up, only pulled and tore until that which he had carried for so long was released. It moved seemingly of its own accord. He raised his head now, could raise it higher than he ever remembered doing. Muscles he had no knowledge of moved, seemingly by instinct. That on his back was unfolding – stretching – no longer in more than a few quirks of cramped pain – reaching outward.
"Winged!" He heard Lord-One Krip's voice with a strong note of awe in it. "He is winged!"
Muscles moved again, stretching in a new way. He felt a sweep of air about his small body and he dared to reach back again with one hand. What he touched was like the softest of down laid over taut skin.
Winged? Was he? How could such a thing be? Somehow he stumbled up to his feet. That which had weighed upon him all his remembered life was gone. He cautiously thought of wings and tried to move such if it were true that he had them.
There was a wide sweep through the air behind him. A small smart of pain as if something had scraped on an edge of rock. Now he longed to see!
Before him lay the globe of light. Across it he could see the faces of those he had followed – and there was awe on both. Again he raised one hand – then the other – and explored by touch. There were extensions from his body right enough. They felt slightly damp, and he had the sensation that they must be fanned in the air to take moisture from them. How did wings feel – if they sprouted from one's own body?
Who – WHAT was he now? Oh, what was he?
He edged halfway around so that those others might see the better.
"Is it true?" he demanded, wondering rather if he were unconscious from some fall back on the trail and this was all the result of feverish imagination.
"It is true!" the Lady Maelen assured him. "Your hump held wings – they are growing larger – "
"But – I am not a bird!" There were also flying reptiles and perhaps even weirder things on the many worlds from star to star. But his was a man's body – or at least humanoid. And in all his years of listening to travelers' tales in the Limits (and very strange some of those had been) he had never heard of a winged man.
Once more he fanned those straightening wings (they must, he decided, have been closely cramped within that hump) and felt his whole body lift a little. Frightened, he clapped them together. He had no idea of flight, and he thought that that must be learned. Yet in him now moved the wish to take to the air – to spiral out into the dusk, up into the circle of the third ring which was a glory now far overhead.
Even his neck felt odd, and he had to rub at it. He was able to lift it high, to hold it straight as he never had before. No more peering out on the world from a painful angle.
Then, as if a hand had reached forth and touched him on the shoulder in warning, he remembered what they fled and where they were.
"Down" – he looked to Lord-One Krip – "we must get down."
"We are down," the other answered. "This is the bottom of the gulf. And – but come and see for yourself."
A few steps on and Farree discovered he must keep the wings furled if he would walk, and he dared not try to fly, not yet. They were once more on a road or else a smooth stretch which was flanked here and there by stones fallen from the heights around. There were in walls about them the same kind of doorways chiseled into the stuff of the cliffs on either side as he had seen in the Valley of the Thassa, though this did not widen but was a narrow way between two chiseled walls.
Their small light could show them no more than those openings were too regular to be natural and they seemed to go on and on. In the darkness ahead, where the light from the globe could not penetrate, anything might be waiting, and Farree forced his mind to turn from what now was on his shoulders to search out any hint of a living thing before them.
He picked up small anonymous stirrings that were certainly animal or bird and were too far from the general thought pattern for him to follow. But of anything stronger, more threatening, there was not a hint now. Lord-One Krip, the globe half-muffled in his hand, led again, but Lady Maelen clung to his belt rather than accept Farree's assistance and the winged man was alone. Cautiously as he went he fanned the wings slightly, not daring to trust to them but sure that they needed that stretching and drying. He had peeled the rest of the rags of the shirt from his body and used those to sop up the runnels of moisture which dripped down his shoulders across his chest, which was no longer squeezed forward but was slowly coming into line with his shoulder points.
Winged! What was he then: some species so far removed from those with whom he now traveled that they would find him utterly unnatural? He watched the two moving through the dark, outlined only by the feeble glow of the light, and wondered what would happen to him now. In some ways he longed once more for the familiar weight on his back, the old knowledge that he was handicapped by something that could be understood.
Now he needs must keep those new appendages clipped close lest they scrape against the stones between which many times they had to squeeze a narrow passage. Yet they went so slowly, perhaps because of the Lady Maelen's deep fatigue, that his awkwardness had time to disappear. With each step he took there was a new confidence rising in him.
The fact that this rift among the heights must once have had meaning grew more and more evident the farther they went. The dark openings on either side were so cleanly cut that he knew them to be of the same fashioning as those in the valley where the Thassa had their meeting place. What lay within those portals the two he followed apparently had no desire to see, for their path was ever on.
They came at last to a place where the narrow slit widened out into something which was a sky-roofed valley. Yet not one like unto that of the Thassa meeting ground, for here the desert aridity was lacking.
Above the radiance of Sotrath and the third ring was once more open, and the land before them was brightly illuminated. There was the glisten of moon rings on water, for the whole center of this basin appeared to be a lake. That body of liquid was buttressed about by a thick cloak of vegetation such as Farree had seen nowhere else on this world.
Large growths of trees which supported looping and tight vines made a wall about the lake. Farree, without ever thinking of what he did, eager only to see ahead, used his wings for the first time – fanning the air and leaving the ground.
He immediately discovered that flying was an art that must be practiced, as any other exercise. His initial soaring was too abrupt and carried him up too far, the rhythmic beat of his newborn wings was something he had not mastered, and he made leaps in the air rather than sustained flight.
Still, those leaps had been enough to show him that the lake encircled an island that was so centrally placed that it might have been the pupil in a great unblinking eye. On that island there were walls and a tower not too unlike that from which the flitter had lifted him days earlier.
His two companions made no attempt to force a path into the thickly cloaking growth but had collapsed rather than seated themselves on the last space of open ground before that dense stem and branch began. The Lady Maelen sat with her head turned up to the sky, her eyes fixed upon the glory of the third ring, her mouth a little open as if she now drank sip by sip from the brilliance. As Farree watched, perching a little above the two on a last outcropping of fallen rock, she stretched wide her arms as one waiting to embrace something or someone before her.
Lord-One Krip sat with upturned face also, but his eyes were not on the glory in the sky but on Farree, as the winged one realized. And there was wonder in his face which was slowly overcome by an expression of purpose.
"What lies beyond?" he spoke rather than thought. Perhaps he feared that thought send migh
t interrupt what the Lady Maelen was doing.
"A lake and on an isle, in a ruin, a tower." Farree answered promptly.
"Can you reach it over that?" Lord-One Krip motioned toward the thick intertwining of the growth. It was only too plain that without some form of cutting tool they could not hope to blast a path farther on.
"I can try." But still Farree was distrustful of those wings. They were too new, too far removed from all he had ever knowledge of, for him to truly believe that they could be successfully used to climb into the sky more than on the short soarings he had already attempted with more than a little bemusement and uneasiness.
Purposefully now he fanned them slowly, turned his head as far as he could to sight their sweep. They were not feathered—he had already determined that with his hands reaching behind him – rather they seemed to be covered with a skin which had a soft, velvety texture almost like close-shorn fine hair. Now he stood and dared to take a small leap into the sky using the wings to support and sustain him. He had discovered a bit of the beat which would lift him and applied that rhythm.
Up he went into the splendor of the ring-bright night. When he was sure, having rounded in a circle over the other two, he ventured out above the growth, fearing to have his wings fail and let him fall down into the matted vegetation. But awkward as he was, he was learning with every movement he tried, more and more of what it took to steady himself in the air, to do what humanoids had always wanted: reach the clouds.
Only there were no clouds here – just the darkness of that tangled wood which ringed the lake, the sparkle of the water which reflected the third ring, and the island beyond.
Out over the lake he beat his way, not trying any high soaring as yet. Then he was above the island. There was growth here, too, but not a matted wall of it such as grew on the shore. Here were tall plants scattered in clumps, heavy with flowers wide open as if the moon instead of the sun brought them their nourishment. From them came a heavy perfume so that Farree, as he flew over them, felt as though he bathed in the scent. And his mental search brought no hint of life here.
He came in, to settle on the wall which ringed the tower. Now that he was close he could see that time had not struck so heavily here as it had on that castle where the Guild had taken up their den. Rather this surface was smoother than any stone he knew of and it was near white in color, veined darkly with straggling rivers of lines and splotches. There was glitter, too, from points along those paths of darker shades, and when he touched a near one he felt a roughness as if there were some other thing, perhaps a gem, inset in the veining.
Along that wall he walked, using the wings to steady and balance himself, looking down into the interior of the place which was wide open to the glory of Sotrath. There were no other buildings within. Only that tower, and it was thickly agleam with the sparks of fire such as passed beneath his feet.
He had kicked off his boots before he had taken off, and under the long-hardened soles of his feet he felt small sparks of heat, as if every one of those small stones was a flare of a tiny fire. Having made a complete round of the outer wall, he dared to glide down to the pavement below. As he had noted from aloft, here the small bright stones were set in patterns, not following any twist of veining. And each was different. As he landed in one such design, which was a concentric series of circles, there came that which almost sent him soaring again. A flap of wings did carry him upward so that his feet no longer touched the stone, for out of somewhere – the tower, the very sky above him – there had sounded a sharp note of sound as if he had struck two knife blades together.
He waited, his head turned from side to side, watching, mind seeking. The sound echoed and died. There was no answer that he could detect. But he was suspicious of those patterns now – some kind of alarm? Or was it a greeting meant to assure some people long dead? There had been Thassa-like caves along the road to the valley, but the tower seemed unlike their form of building.
The side of the tower which faced him had the dark opening of a door, though there was no sign of any windows on any level. To enter so might mean that he was an unwary smux venturing into a trap.
Smux! He had all but forgotten Toggor during the wonder of his transformation. But the smux was still with him now, claws tightly clipping his belt. Having received no intimations of life from the tower he applied touch to Toggor to see if the smux could pick up something too subtle, too far from his own species's mental processes to record. But the result was that Toggor knew nothing.
A wing-assisted leap took Farree from the circle which had brought forth that answer to the very edge about the foot of the tower where he noted the patterns did not reach. There he settled once again. There was a faint reflection of the moon and ring light. Enough to show him that there was no door here to bar passage. But the dusk which lay within was daunting. He had been foolish not to bring with him the globe. Even if he could see only a few steps ahead, he would not shrink so from investigating it.
Smux – send Toggor in again? But the creature's night sight was little better than his own. When he hunted within the walls for prey he used scent organs. And here the constant small breezes brought the overpowering odor of the flowers to kill any such clue.
There was no use lingering here – Farree would either completely explore this structure or he would have to return with the admission that he had been routed by fear. But he did not even have the slight advantage his wings gave him in the open!
Clapping those together and furling them as far as he could, Farree took a deep breath and started into the tower. He half expected a second warning of sound, perhaps even the snap of a trap. But what he did meet was a firm barrier of – nothingness.
He could not see – he could only feel as he passed his hands up and down that barrier as stout as any double-locked door. Yet he saw through and beyond it as far as the light penetrated and there was nothing – though his hands told him there was. At last he loosed Toggor but the smux was also baffled by a barrier he could not penetrate. So – the builders here had their guards after all. Perhaps this one had been alerted by his own touching of the pattern in the pavement without.
However, as he had learned in the Guild fort, there was always the roof. Urging Toggor to fasten himself once more to his belt, Farree stepped back far enough to get wingspread and then leaped upwards, with the beat of the wings indeed carrying him to where he could grasp the parapet of the tower.
Here, too, there were patterns on the surface. Farree could see no hint among them of any trapdoor such as had been his salvation before. He did not propose to get down and go exploring, not without knowing more of what he faced. Thus he set himself to studying the patterns, setting them firmly in mind.
That done, he sought out with mind reach, and the Lady Maelen, strong and clear as she had ever been, caught his cast and answered. He told her of the courtyard below, of the invisible door bar, and now of these patterns aloft.
"Show me," came her calm answer.
Trying to picture each in turn, he began with the one immediately below his perch on the parapet. It went so and so and so. While the one beyond that was thus, and this, and that. Thus he strove to set up the clearest mental pictures he could.
He felt her growing astonishment, her excitement. "Thus and thus?" came her demand with a newly mentalized design.
Farree looked, but that design was lacking. He returned that message and could sense her disappointment.
"Then this or this?"
Part of that surely – yes! But not as entire as she pictured it for him.
"Below. Look to the court below!" came her order then. As he had crouched on the wall and surveyed the patterns from a lower point, now did he again, moving with care along the parapet so that he might view all below for her. Some were so intricate in their convolutions that it was difficult for him to sort out their beginnings and endings.
"It is a maze," she returned. "But I must see for myself. I have to see."
"I cann
ot carry you," Farree pointed out. That his strength had not been great enough to hold her from slipping on the trail was a fact. Also, he did not believe that she and Lord-One Krip could fight their way through that wood and across the water.
"You can carry that which I may use." Back came her answer in a rush. "Come for it, Farree, come for that!"
Chapter 17.
Farree winged back across the band of tangled vegetation and set foot on the ground not far from the two who waited. Lord-One Krip was busy with that bag which had been clipped to his belt through all their journeying. What he brought out now was not food as Farree had expected but rather a shining square of what seemed to be bright metal, well polished and no bigger than Farree's own hand.
He rubbed his fingers across the upper surface as if to remove some unseen covering and passed it to the Lady Maelen, who held it firmly and looked to Farree.
"Those patterns," she said, "are protective devices of a sort, yet they do not follow those which I have learned. I must see them."
Farree shifted on his perch. The more he looked at the entangled maze of dark greenery before them, the less he could conceive of cutting any path through that without any tools. Perhaps a laser might clear the way but otherwise —
"Look." She was holding up that square of metal. "Have you seen one of these before? The tourists use them for recording sights they wish to remember clearly. It works thus – or better have Krip show you, since this is not a thing of Thassa world."
He had taken the square back from her and now flipped it over to show two impressions on the back into which a man's forefingers might fit. "Let the reflection of what you would preserve so show in the mirror and then press here. Wait for the count of five and press again at this other spot and then it will clear and you can move to the next. It is simple and there is room for twenty shots before the power is exhausted and it must be recharged."