Andre Norton - The Gate of the Cat

“Where do you go?” she lengthened her stride to match step with Yonan. He answered her as curtly:

“It is more like where you go, Lady.”

Her hand loosed on the jewel and it was warm. She pulled free its chain and allowed it to swing pendulum-wise from her middle finger. There was a scrap of memory, gone so fleetingly that she could not pin it down. So she had stood once before—no, not she—but that other.

Through no urging of her own the jewel began to swing—not in a circle as it had before, but rather back and forth, pointing outward and then to her. And the way it took was east. As firm footed as if she had been given an order she could not gainsay, Kelsie turned in that direction and began to walk, knowing indeed that bound as she was, there was only the gem in real control of their path.

There were bright banners of dawn in the sky as they walked along what might have once been a road between the ancient fields. Berries clustered on thorny branches which hung over tumbling walls and she did as Yonan, swept up what she could garner, stuffing them into her mouth. They were tart and sweet at the same time and she found them refreshing, but too few to give her a feeling of having truly breakfasted.

The forgotten road transversed the open until they came again to where stands of wood broke up the fields and grew closer and closer together until they faced another wood. A small animal with a dusky red coat broke for cover, was gone before Yonan could free with throwing cord, if he wished to hunt. And there were birds—not in flight but sitting on branches to watch them pass, twittering and calling, to be answered by others ahead as if their coming was being heralded to some feathered overlord whose domain this was.

They still had a way which had narrowed to hardly more than a footpath being overhung with brush and giving rooting to stubborn grass. Once Yonan flung out a hand to ward her from touching against a bush with singular ragged looking leaves and flowers of a dull green color which gave forth a thick and cloying scent.

“Farkill,” he explained. “The odor is a sleep maker, to touch it raises ulcers on the skin, ones which even illbane finds hard to heal. And there,” he pointed to a grim gray skeleton of a tree which set a little away from their path, “is also danger. Quick!” His arm fell about her shoulders so suddenly and heavily that she was swept from her feet as she heard a whishing in the air.

“Creep—on your belly,” her companion ordered. “Do you want such as that in you?” he indicated a gray shaft which stuck, still quivering, in a bush at what might have been at the level of her shoulders had she still been on her feet.

It was in the shape of a thorn but as long as Kelsie’s forearm and she gathered that it could have impaled her had it struck. In some manner it had been so shot by the dead-looking tree.

Creep indeed they did and she wrinkled her nose at the sour smell of the muck of long dead leaves which floored their path. Twice more they passed arrow trees until at last they came into the open once again, a glade such as the one in which Yonan had used his sword key. When they were in the midst of that he allowed them to stop and they ate the meat and drank from the gourds, but sparingly for they had not seen any source of water that day.

Kelsie was growing sleepy and longed to simply stretch out on the ground here and sleep away her weariness. Only Yonan made no sign of remaining where they were and her pride and stubborn desire to match him would not let her suggest a longer resting time.

Though she consulted the jewel now and then and was assured that they were following wherever that would lead them, she wanted more and more to drop it to this ground, let it be hidden by the tall grass, and return—Where?

In the day here Ben Blair seemed very far away in her mind, her whole life up to her coming through what Simon Tregarth had called a gate was more of a dream than her nightmare just past. She began to consider Yonan. He certainly was under no compulsion to travel so. Yet it was his knowledge which had saved them over and over again. He was not of the Valley by birth. That she knew. And he was even unlike most of the human kind who had gathered there. His hair was lighter and the eyes in his weather-browned face a startling blue. Who was Yonan? For the first time her mind wandered more from their present plight to ask a question. Dahaun apparently held him in repute having sent him after them for a guardian—or a guide. She had seen one of the other Tregarths—Kyllan—but there was nothing which appeared to make Yonan one of their out-breed stock. He usually companied with the huge axe weaponed warrior Urik. And there was that strange exchange which she had heard to suggest that he believed in reincarnation and had once been Tolar who had played some desperate game in this same land centuries ago.

“How far into this land have you been?” she suddenly asked.

He had paused to adjust the cord of his improvised shoulder bag and he did not look up as he answered:

“This land is new to me. Nor is it marked on any of the charts in the Valley.”

“Yet you come with me—”

“I go with you,” he returned, “since that is the duty laid upon me. When the witches out of Estcarp made contact with the Valley they bargained for guides. Nor did they understand that the influence of the Light flickers in many places and that there are powers upon powers which they have never heard of even within the records of Lormt.”

Lormt! The place out of her half dream. Now she wanted straight answers. “What is Lormt?”

“A place in which ancient knowledge is stored. It was when Kemoc Tregarth went to Lormt that he learned of Escore—or at least that there was a country here to the east which had been forbidden to the Old Race who fled the adepts’ war.”

Now he arose and stood looking down at her. “What says your jewel? Which way?”

From her he had glanced at the wood about them. She had no desire to enter that darksome place of peril again but neither was there any sense in their remaining here in the open. So she dangled the gem hurriedly. It pointed again—more directly to the north Kelsie thought, though she was no forester or land dweller to guess aright at that signal.

The reed and illbane covering of their boots had shredded under travel and broken away so only bits of these remained. Also there were none of the herbs here and they could not renew that defense. Once more they entered the wood on the other side of the glade. There were no longer any faint traces of a trail and she noted that Yonan’s pace had slowed. Now again he halted entirely, his head up as he sniffed the breeze, even as some animal advancing cautiously into unknown territory might test for some faint presence which was perilous to his kind.

There were still the arrow trees and the farkill so their advance was not straight because of these but took on a zigzag pattern. It was on one of their crawls to escape the arrow thorns that Kelsie set hand on what she thought was a round stone. Only to have it turn under her weight and grin evilly up at her—a skull! And, though there were differences in the wide ridges of bone above the eyes and the broadness of the whole, it approached that of a human. She uttered a little cry of disgust which brought Yonan’s head around. But she had already noted two more of the grayish knobs a little before them and more—It was a pavement of skulls they had chanced upon!

Yonan shook his head when she asked what manner of creature had died here—here—and here—and there ahead—to form such a hideous track. But he kept to it even though she near refused to follow him. Then they came to the first of the monoliths.

The same grayish gleam of skull, of arrow tree, it stood out here in a half envelope of brush like a crooked giant finger pointing skyward—if there was indeed still an open sky above the ceiling of tangled tree branches.