“We’ve stirred up something, I think,” the Master Healer said from his perch in Torrones arms. Then he scrunched up his face. “Or else, the presence of the off-worlders being kept prisoner down here stirred it even before we came.”
“Things are not good,” said Jorun, sounding concerned. “It can’t be healthy to be locked up in here, within such a heavy, negative aura; that would be hard on anyone, never mind those who have been held as slaves. We’ll have to get them out of here as soon as we can.”
“Well, let’s get to it,” Kati said, accepting Jael’s hand to help her up.
The Granda was already at work, repairing whatever damage the slam had done to her nervous system; he was telling her that it was not actually much, well within his abilities to heal.
“Well,” Vorlund said, surveying the rest of the group from his higher than normal eye-level. “It feels and looks to me like Kati succeeded in her primary aim, if not in contacting the spiritual essence of this world. This little incident seems to have shocked us back into our normal states of mind.”
“Which is a good thing,” said Maric. “We’re almost at the locked rooms where the enslaved are stashed.”
They resumed their journey.
After only another couple of turns they came to a long, straight stretch of corridor with doors on both sides of it, the first ones open wide to reveal empty rooms. Then the ones to their left began to be closed, Mikal tried them one by one as he passed them; they were all locked. He counted them: eleven closed doors. If there were approximately twenty people in each room, and judging from the size of the empty ones, he figured that the number was such that the rooms could easily accommodate it, along with whatever was needed to keep the occupants alive for a time, there would be about two hundred and twenty enslaved people in all, for them to release.
“There seem to be no guards around,” Vonn said, having trailed Mikal during his sortie.
“No-one knows about this place,” Jael reiterated, having stayed close to the two—and Kati—during the examination. “Besides us few kids, that is.”
“If there are guards they would be up above, beyond whatever door was used to bring these people down,” said Kelt Carmaks. “And they would be there to keep the curious away.”
“Which door would that be?” Vonn asked. “Where?”
“I can show you,” Jael said, surprising Kati, who expected the teen to show animosity toward the Warrior who had man-handled her.
“Rakil, if you will go with them,” Mikal said to his cousin who immediately joined the Torrones and Jael.
“Maric, which was the door through which you talked with Ingrid?” Kati asked, anxious about the girl who had been a friend while they had both been on the slave ship.
Meanwhile Mikal had directed Lank and Morr to pull out their sonic cutters and to begin with the first of the locked doors. Kati and Maric left them to go down the corridor to where Maric rapped a door with his knuckle.
“This is it,” he said. “They all look the same but I counted the closed doors when I was with Jael. The one where we received an answer was the fifth one we knocked on. This is it, since the number of locked doors hasn’t changed; I assured myself of that when I walked the passage with Mikal. So, unless someone has been down here moving people around, and I don’t see why they’d bother to do that, your friend is behind this door. Do you want me to try to call to her through the door?”
Kati shook her head.
“It’s probably better if you get Mikal to send Lank here with his cutter, while Morr deals with the other doors. I’m going to try to see if I can’t enter that room non-physically, just to prepare us for what might be waiting for us there. And, could you ask Master Healer Vorlund if he’d join me?”
Maric left to do her bidding, and Kati sat down on the floor, cross-legged, to try to leave her body again. After the last failure she felt somewhat apprehensive—that was partly the reason why she had requested the presence of the Master Healer who had been released by his minder to walk on his own two feet again.
She drew in a few deep breaths of the slightly musty underground air. Then, with The Monk’s help she left her body again, vaguely aware as she did so that the first of the locks had succumbed to the ministrations of a cutter, and Mikal was opening a door which now had a hole where the lock had been. Curious though she was about what he would find there, she turned her attention determinedly away, noting, with some alarm, that the murk that had filled the psychic atmosphere earlier seemed to have returned. But she had no time for it; she needed to find Ingrid and the Grenie girls and see how they were doing.
Her mental essence slid through the metal of the door without a problem. The room she entered had life sparks in it, more of them than she had expected. Why had the Oligarchs and their workers crowded the enslaved when there was no need for that—there was plenty of empty space in the cellars? But that was not relevant now; she had to reach Ingrid—she ought to be able to recognize her from their time on Gorsh’s slave ship. They had been friends there; Kati thought of the bright and beautiful blonde teenager who, together with Roxanna, had helped her when she had first come out from under the mind-tangler. The image seemed to direct her to one of the life-sparks, but she nearly burst into tears on discovering how far from the remembered lively girl this one was.
This was a spark concentrating on hanging on to physical life, and to feeding the even weaker sparks surrounding her, from psychic resources already drained. Ingrid’s thoughts had narrowed down to the need of the moment, to stay alive and to keep her companions alive. Nothing, and no-one else existed for her, only the determination to hang on for as long as possible, to sell her life as dearly as she could.
“How can I help her?” Kati asked The Monk, feeling desperate herself. “She doesn’t need true healing; she needs an infusion of energy. Can I give that to her?”
“You can only try,” The Monk replied. “Try doing what you did to Kaya at the Base. She doesn’t have Kaya’s abilities, but she’s probably too weak at the moment to resist your intrusion. And she ought to recognize you.”
It was as good advice as any, and Kati took it. With the granda steadying her, she approached Ingrid’s life-spark, and entered her mental being, encountering almost no resistance. Under normal conditions, a personality who had only latent psychic talents would have fought such an intrusion vigorously, and kept her barriered away. But Ingrid was dangerously weak. Possibly, her relationship with the Grenies had weakened her normal barriers, too; in any case Kati easily broached her psyche. With The Monk’s help she began to spin her own energy into a thread of light which she then fed into Ingrid’s spark, pleased to see a slight brightening—which Ingrid, immediately, transferred into the weaker sparks surrounding her. There were four of them so what Kati was feeding did not seem to amount to much, but, she reminded herself, it was something, and it might just be enough to make a difference.
She kept it up, ignoring the deepening of the murkiness of the psychic atmosphere around her. After a while she felt the presence of another energy thread being spun next to hers, this one a stronger one than hers, but familiar in its essence. The Master Healer had arrived to assist her! Gratefully she accepted his aid, and had the pleasure of seeing all the five sparks brighten further, and she knew that the physical forms of the five, curled up as the Grenie quatrad was against Ingrid’s body, were stirring slightly.
And then something went terribly wrong.
The murk in the psychic atmosphere abruptly grew into a stench, a stinking, fetid miasma, which intercepted the energy that Kati and the Master Healer were feeding into Ingrid and the Grenie quatrad! Kati could feel a weight pressing down on her, the Granda, and the Master Healer, even as she lost the connection to the five who needed her!
“What?” she gasped, whether physically, or only mentally, she did not know; she was too busy fighting the smell of rot all around her.
But she knew. They were being assaulted by the coalesced forces of
all the horrors that had been perpetrated in the Prison Complex cellars over the long centuries! Somehow all the unacknowledged crimes committed by the Vultairian Authorities in these spaces had become personified over time, even as the Spirits of the Land had! Only the Cellar Spirit was not a life-giving force, but born out of hate, pain and terror; it was an ugly psychic construct, lacking good will! Up until now it had been satisfied to lurk within the stone and the soil of the cellars, but, somehow, Kati’s and Vorlund’s strong combined talents had woken it up to action! And now it was sucking them dry, and the Grenies and Ingrid as well! And possibly everyone else who was in the cellars, whether an ex-slave or one of the liberators!
Lank was cutting the lock off the door beside which Kati and the Master Healer sat, cross-legged, entranced when the horrid smell of rot suddenly filled the passageway.
“What?” he gasped, in an unconscious echo of Kati’s mental speech.
He covered his mouth and nose with a shirt tail, while continuing to operate the sonic cutter, while his stomach heaved.
People around him were choking, trying not to retch.
“What’s going on?” Mikal called.
He had begun to herd the first roomful of the released prisoners in the direction of the door Jael had shown to Vonn and Rakil
“Oh gods, what a reek!” Jael’s voice came from the stairs. “Vonn’s calling for reinforcements! Maric, help me get to more doors we can open! We need to get more air in here!”
Lank pushed the loose lock into the cellar room, and shoved the door open almost simultaneously. He happened to glance down at Kati and Vorlund, only to see them both slumped on the passage floor, in unnatural positions. He reached down to touch Kati’s shoulder; she might have well have been a rag-doll for all the resistance there was in her body.
“Kati and Vorlund need help!” Lank shouted, and Mikal was there beside him.
“Oh no!” he cried, scooping her into his arms, even as the Torrones who had been minding the Master Healer arrived to gather him up.
“She can’t be dying,” Mikal whispered, his face gone ashen. He wrapped his arms around her.
His inner energies coiled into a psychic spring poised for action.
“She can’t die!” he shouted out loud. “All ye gods and goddesses, and spirits of this world, hear me! You can’t let her die! She must live!”
Something about the urgency in his cry seemed to cut through the miasma somewhat. The cellar grew better lighted, in some fashion—although, all the noded persons were, of course, on highest sight enhancement. But suddenly Lank could see Rakil at the bottom of the stairs, and seeing the Borhquan gave him an idea.
“Rakil, get Vonn to call for the Klensers!” he shouted. “They need to know that Kati and Vorlund need the Forest’s Spirit’s help!”
Rakil nodded, and rushed back up the stairs, and Mikal turned to follow him, clutching Kati to his breast, and followed in turn by the Torrones carrying the Master Healer.
“The rest of you,” came Kelt Carmaks’ voice, sounding unusually harsh. “Let’s get these people freed and out from this stinking cellar, like right now!”
Lank realized that he had been joined by Jorun at the open door. People had begun stumbling out. It took the Tarangayan a few moments to find Ingrid and the green girls, but when he did, Jorun scooped up Ingrid, and a few of the ex-slaves in reasonably good shape picked up the girls, to take them up into open air.
Lank moved on to cut off the next lock.
*****
Kati and the Granda were fighting the Cellar Spirit. Vorlund was with them, trying to feed them energy, but all their abilities to draw forth the power of the living planet seemed to have been staunched, as if the entrances into the cellars had been stoppered somehow.
“We can’t keep this up,” The Monk muttered, next to Kati, while trying to shield her from the flow of the murk which was enveloping them and trying to erode their very psychic cores.
“I will not—be taken over by that disgusting—sad creature,” Kati subvocalized.
“Sad is more correct than disgusting,” came the Master Healer’s thought, and Kati could not help but admire him for having compassion even at a time like this.
“Sad, sad, sad,” the murk around her seemed to be repeating. “I am sad. I am hurt. I am ugly and must hide, hide, hide, forever, underground. But you will stay with me, and keep me company.”
“I don’t think so,” muttered the Granda. “We’ll die if we stay here, and I for one have no intention of dying. At the very least, I mean to make it back to my mother, the Brain Planet.”
“No!” cried the Cellar Spirit. “Everything I touch dies! I don’t want you to die! I want you to keep me company!”
“We must get all of us up into the world above ground,” said the Master Healer. “That includes the Cellar Spirit. Otherwise we’re lost. Come on, friend Spirit, can you unlock the gates?”
“I mustn’t. I’m ugly, and I’m filled with pain, and hate and anger. I have to hide down here.”
How to reason with the creature? If only Kati could have an infusion of energy! Forest Spirit energy—or, better yet, Ocean Sister’s energy! Some of that indomitable, dancing, weaving strength that had driven Kati half-nuts the first time she had dealt with the Sea Spirit!
“Yes, yes, Kati my friend, everyone wants you to live!”
She could have sworn that she could smell salt and kelp in the atmosphere around her!
“I heard your man shouting! I heard the humans known as Klensers calling for help from my sib, the Forest Spirit, for you and the Healer! I heard my sib, calling for my help, because he—she—whatever—was afraid of the very creature he had locked in these cellars! He did not want to deal with the ugliness that some of his people have created!
“But I will release you all into the world! And with the help of the three of you, and my Forest Sib, I will heal this Cellar creature, turn it into a being, if not beautiful, at least one capable of enjoying existence! And then I will take this child to visit my waters and islands! So that when he comes back to the cellars he will know how to love stone and soil, and think of them as essential to the world to which he belongs!”
*****
Kati came to, lying on the grass of the Prison Complex, with Mikal anxiously hovering next to her. The Master Healer was close by, his Torrones minder keeping an eye on him. Ingrid and the green girls were near, too; a quick check by The Monk reassured her that they were recovering. There seemed to be a lot of people milling around, mostly Torrones Warriors and Klensers. The off-worlders who had been enslaved were mostly sitting around on the grass, looking dazed, and dirty and tired.
“How long was I out?” were Kati’s first words to Mikal.
From the look on his face she guessed that those had to be the most absurd, but welcome words he had ever heard. She could tell that he was holding himself back from gathering her up, and carrying her off to the nearest private nook, by an act of will.
She shook her head, and began to struggle into a sitting position.
“About a half-an-hour,” Mikal replied, helping her to sit.
“Hard to believe that’s all. We even helped to heal that Cellar creature—a Spirit child, really—and the Ocean Sister took it with her, after giving the Forest Spirit a piece of her amorphous mind for locking it up, and not dealing with it before this.”
She grinned at him.
“I gather you let out a psychic scream loud enough to be heard around the planet when you thought I was gone for good,” she said. “The Ocean Sister said that it was one of the summons that alerted her.
“Thank ye gods,” Mikal said, sliding an arm around her. “I’m glad if my distress did some good.”
“Can we get some help from the Klensers for the folk who came up from the cellars?”
Jorun’s call had the effect of bringing to attention the Klensers milling about. Kati saw Zass get up from where he had stopped to chat with the Master Healer. The Shelonian had been help
ed into a sitting position by the faithful Torrones Warrior who now loomed above him.
“Let’s do it,” said Zass, and within moments the Klensers had organized themselves to attend to the ex-slaves.
Two middle-aged Klensers, a man and a woman, settled next to Ingrid and the green girls. The woman began to remove the dirt that had collected on the body and the clothes of one of the Grenies, drawing a gasp from Malin who was standing nearby, no doubt worrying about the fragile children from his home world.
“The man is feeding energy from the Forest Spirit into Ingrid, so she can keep on supporting the girls,” The Monk informed Kati.
Thank goodness for that. Kati was not sure that she could have been of any help to Ingrid after what she had been through.
The Klenser woman looked up at Malin and smiled; then she then turned her attention to the second Grenie girl.
“It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?” Hector’s voice was saying behind Kati. “I’m still amazed by it every time I see it, and I’ve lived with the Klenser’s talents all my life. The Klensers deal with life energy in an entirely different way from how the rest of us do; perhaps what Kati and the Master Healer can do, somewhat approximate some of the Klensers’ talents.”
When the Klenser woman had finished with the grenies, she started to work on Ingrid, and the watchers were able to see a lovely, if very pale, young woman emerge from under the dirt and despair that had accumulated on her during the stint underground, and her time in the brothel. Malin gasped again as the blond hair came clean.
“I can see why the quatrad girls glommed onto her!” he exclaimed to all who were listening. “She’s the image of the Spring Goddess! For whatever crazy reason—I certainly don’t know why but maybe some scholars on Paradiso do—the Grenies have a tradition of a fair-skinned, fair-haired deity known as the Spring Goddess! And the really strange thing is that when my people made contact with the Grenies, they recognized this Goddess, because the Great Goddess of Volkor IV is also a tall blonde!”
Kati burst into hysterical giggles on hearing this.
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted Page 81