Andre Norton - The Gate of the Cat

“A keep… I think…” he was plainly uncertain. “But a very old and long since deserted one. There are such to be found, though usually we avoid them. But with that,” he nodded at the star in which she still stood, “I do not think that this is any trap of the Dark. Look to your jewel—does it blaze in warning?” He held onto his perilous perch with one hand and with the other sought the hilt of his sword. There was a warmth in her stone but no fire and she reported as much.

He nodded. “The power is very old here—near exhausted and—” His head swung suddenly around and she could see his body tense.

“What is it?” She had moved now to the wall directly below his perch.

He made a silencing gesture with his hand. It was plain to Kelsie that he was listening, listening and staring beyond to seek the source of whatever it was he heard.

Now she concentrated on hearing, too. There was a distant bark—but it did not have the fierce threat of a hound’s cry. Then, from the air, sounded a trilling which was far from the hoarse cries of the dark flying things which companied those of the Dark.

From Yonan’s own lips came a whistle, close in pattern to the trill. Kelsie saw the flash of rainbow wings, the light body those carried. There hung in the air before her companion one of the Qamen, the small humanoid body supported by the fast flutter of the wings. She had seen them often in the Valley and knew what was told of them, that they were capricious and short of memory—they might carry messages but could easily be turned from their task by something else new which caught their attention.

Now it landed near to Yonan, its wings only half folded, as if it would make off in an instant, peevish at being controlled even by so little as answering his signal. He whistled again, his face set in a mask of impatience.

Kelsie was as aware of the hostility of the flyer as much as if it had cried aloud denial of having to have anything to do with the two. There was a coaxing note in Yonan’s whistle and then he spoke rapidly in a series of singsong words she could not recognize.

The flamen shook its head violently, gave an upward bound which carried it out into the air and almost instantly beyond Kelsie’s range of sight. Yonan whistled twice more but it did not return.

“Not of the Valley,” there was a disappointed note in his voice. “It is one of the unsworn. Which means—” He fell silent.

“Which means what?” she demanded, when he did not continue.

“That we have come far eastward—perhaps well beyond all the trails known to the Valley people.”

“Can you still see your mountain?”

He shifted carefully about and searched the air so far above her. “That may be it. But… there are leagues now between—” He was facing at an angle to the room below.

She waited for that touch of buried compulsion which always in her answered any thought of returning to what safety this land could offer. Yes, it still rode with her even now. Without thinking she, too, turned to face in near the opposite direction from Yonan’s stance. Whatever drew her lay still ahead in the unknown.

However, when she spoke it was of more immediately practical things.

“We need food and water—” Both hunger and thirst were making themselves known now.

“Come up!” He lowered himself to his belly and reached down his hands. She gave a jump and felt fingers catch one of her wrists while her other hand missed and scrabbled at the stone until he managed to seize it also. He was stronger than he looked, this warrior of the Valley, for somehow, with very little assistance from her, he brought Kelsie up beside him on the crumbling top of the wall.

What stretched for a distance before her and on every side were more walls marking rooms, or passageways, long unroofed. In addition the pile stood on a mound or small hill, and stretching out from that was a patchwork of fields each also partitioned by broken walls. There was an opening not far to their left which suggested a road had led here and that that maze of rock had been the entrance to this place. But nowhere was there any hint of water.

“That way—” Yonan pointed north and rose to his feet cautiously. His motion, as wary as it was, started a slip of loose stone down into the room of the star.

“There are no doors.” Kelsie had noted that almost at once. These walls sealed in each room one from the other, and their only path to freedom appeared to be by the tops of those shaky divisions.

“That is the truth. Therefore we must take these upper ways and with full care. Follow me, and, if you can, place your feet where mine have been.”

The sun was up and beginning to warm the rocks about them before they reached that point which once might have been a gate. Not only was Kelsie hungry and thirsty but she was also trembling from the tension of that journey. Twice they had had to make detours which had lost them much time because the wall tops were too unsteady to allow them footage.

Though she looked with hope into each room they passed she saw no way of going except by this dangerous path they had chosen. There were no doorways, no trace of any floor side opening from one space into the next. This amazed her.

“They might have had other means of entrance,” Yonan commented when she spoke of this. “If they were winged for example.”

“Flamen!” she burst out in denial. She could not think of the small airborne creatures as the architects of such massive walls.

“There may be—or were once—other flyers beside the flamen,” he told her soberly. “It is well known that the adepts played with the very forces of life itself, creating new creatures for their own use or amusement. Such are the Krogan, the water people, and even the Thas. There were few of true blood left when the rest of the Old Ones thought to flee such unnatural dealings and went into Estcarp, laying upon themselves forgetfulness of their land lest they be tempted to so misuse the power again. But whoever set these stones together are now long gone. Ah, take this wall, and then that, and we shall be at outer bailey at last.”

Perforce she followed him, though the footing was never safe and she tottered on the edge of slipping twice before they reached the point he indicated and could look down at the earth below.

Yonan selected a portion of the wall path which appeared to show the least of time’s erosion and lay flat on it. Then he ordered Kelsie:

“Give me your hands and swing over. You will drop but I think that the space is not so much we cannot make it. We have no other choice.”

There was a drop certainly and she hit ground, to roll over the edge of another small fall, coming to stop painfully against one of those broken field walls. There was a whir in her face which made her start and cry out as two birds took off out of a clump of grass before her, not ascending very high into the air but covering a goodly space before they alit and disappeared again into the tall cover of the field.

When Yonan joined her he was fumbling with his sword belt and produced a length of what looked like tough cord, a small weight fastened to either end.

“Circle,” his command was delivered in a voice hardly above a whisper, and he motioned with his hand toward where the birds had taken again to cover. “Come at them from the south if you can, but get them up.”

She obeyed in spite of her bruises, trying to walk as noiselessly as she could through the vegetation which was waist-high grass, giving support here and there to a loaded seed head as if it were some form of wild sown grain.

There was another whir and eruption of feathered bodies. Something whirled through the air and one of the birds fell, entangled foot to wing by Yonan’s weighted cord. A moment later he passed her in a leap, knife in hand, and used that expertly to put an end to the wildly struggling bird.