Andre Norton - The Gate of the Cat

The thing was taller than Yonan as he stood before it, and more bulky, but, though it was greened here and there with moss, it was easy to see that it had been purposely wrought into the form of a crouching image leaning forward a little—one massive arm raised and a great clawed hand or paw about to reach for some easily captured prey.

Kelsie sucked in her breath. She had seen many outre forms of life since she had so unwillingly begun this journey, but this was wholly malignant. The shoulders were bowed until it would appear that the creature it portrayed was humped. On those shoulders with a hardly visible neck perched a huge head, the bald cranium rising to a cone point. But it was the eyes which were the worst feature of that misshapen thing. They were as deep set as if they lay in pits. Yet they were not stone—or even inset gems—

She looked into them and gasped. Just like the hound that had appeared at the gate, these holes were filled with a yellowish flame. Stone and carven the monstrous thing might be. But—the eyes were alive! Was there some presence embedded in the stone—a prisoner without hope of freedom?

Without conscious thought she raised the Witch Jewel, not watching it as she did because she was entrapped by the fire in those stone-rimmed pits.

“No!” Yonan was upon her, his hand out to beat down the jewel. “No!”

She twisted in his hold, her fear grown a hundredfold. Only he had her arm so tightly pinned to her side that she could not break free to use what she had come to consider her only weapon.

“It is a watcher, let it not watch to any purpose,” he added. Then thrust her away from him, so that meeting eye to eye with the thing was broken and she was free of what she now judged was indeed one of the more subtle dangers of this place.

Still holding onto her arm as if he feared she had not taken his warning to heart, Yonan pulled her along with him, their boots with the remnants of the illbane fastenings upon them slipping and sliding on the trail of skulls.

“It watched—was alive!”

“Not it but what watched through it,” he countered. “If you had used the jewel you might have banished that watcher but you would have raised an alarm which—

He stopped nearly in mid-word. There was another creature beside this noxious trail. It bore resemblance to the first but it was not graven stone—no, this was carved of wood. Some giant of a tree had been so used that the remnant of bark, now overgrown with leprous fungi, formed a skin, watched. There were the same pits of eyes—the same—after one fleeting glance she prevented her own sight with difficulty from meeting the eyes in the wood. They were also alive.

She pulled herself free of Yonan’s grip and sped as well as she could down the skull road to avoid another meeting with that which so spied upon them. Now, as she went, she looked quickly from side to side to make sure there were no more of the watchers looming up before them.

No air stirred here under the trees, and there was a rising odor from the muck in which the skulls had been set which was putrid and sickening. There was a warmth here, too—not that protective one she knew when the jewel came to greater life, but rather a stifling sticky heat which eroded one’s spirit as well as dragged at one’s body.

However, the road led straight and she saw the ancient remains of trees which had been cut from their roots to clear a way for it. Here and there saplings had dared to reach up again, pushing aside the skulls which lay to grin at them. But they came across no more of the statues.

Not until they pushed through a last fence of brush and came to open country. The skull road had not stopped at their emergence into the open, though the bones here appeared to be more firmly planted.

“A road of the conquered,” Yonan spoke for the first time since he had warned her in the wood. “It is very old that belief. To plant the heads of your enemies so that you tread ever upon them makes complete your victory.” But Kelsie hardly heard him, she was looking ahead at the massive—thing—which had been erected there.

If she had believed the two she had seen in the wood were great and careful pieces of work, what could she call this?

For the road of skulls ran directly to a ponderous, outstretched belly of the thing squatting there—an artifact as large or nearly so as the ruin in which they had found themselves earlier. Both the hands were outspread and planted on the ground like giant pillars and those supported the huge form which was leaning forward as if to study whatever advanced toward it.

There was a dark hole where the curve of its pendulous belly touched the ground. So regularly shaped it was that it could be a door—A door into what? Kelsie dared a quick glance up into the eye pits. But there was no hellish fire burning there, they were only dark caverns.

A harsh noise brought a small cry from her. Surely the thing before her was not alive, had not delivered such a hail. No, that had come from the winged things circling about its head. They were brilliantly scarlet even in this early eventide except for their bills and their feet—which were the black of the orifice opening at the end of the skull road.

They were stringing out, away from that perfect circle they had made about the head of the squatting thing, coming toward them. Yonan gave a cry in turn, one which perhaps was meant to hearten himself as well as any who heard. He hurled about his head the weighted cord he had used for hunting. But it was nothing for the pot that he would bring down now. The cord flew out, so quickly she hardly saw it go and wrapped itself about the long neck of one of the flyers, bearing the thing to the ground where it flopped and fought.

Yonan was ready for it with sword and a single sweep of blade whipped off the darting head. But he had to whirl then to beat off another flyer which swooped, dagger bill ready.

to attack. Then that one, too, was left to flop on the ground headless but somehow still living.

Kelsie shouted and tossed up the jewel as a third sped clown the sky aiming straight for her. She had little hope of heating it off—the thing was fully half her size, its wing spread was beyond her reckoning.

The jewel flickered with life and the bird sheered off. Kelsie’s eyes following its flight fearfully saw something else. From the broad nose which covered near a third of the face of the demonic monster there puffed two small clouds of reddish smoke, thin and without any flame to feed them but they spread forward in the air, not diffusing as she thought that they would, rather to form a distinct cloud or blot. It was already under the film of twilight but that smoke—or breath—was still distinguishable.

The birds had attacked Yonan again, seeming to look upon him as the enemy they could bring down the easiest. He called to Kelsie, panting a little as he countered with sword against bill to keep his feet and break the attack.

“Do not let them circle! Break up that—!”

She swung the jewel, with no hope of contacting any of the flyers but noting that they fled the sparks which flew in the air from her only weapon. Then she was back to back with Yonan.

“Back to the woods?” she got out that question.

“Not with night coming,” he told her. And she could understand the wisdom of that. They might escape the birds when they gained the shadows of the trees but they also would be girt about by a place of the Dark. At least in the open they could see their attackers.

Three of the birds had fallen to Yonan’s sword but still the others attempted to build up a circle in the air above the two of them. And it was Yonan’s constant thrusts which kept them from forming it completely.