Andre Norton - The Gate of the Cat

There was a curdling of the light about the two stones. In that they themselves disappeared but there came a surface flat and shining like a mirror and on that formed a shadow which grew into a distinct picture. There was thick darkness there but a small gleam of light showed a hand gripping a sword hilt. Between fingers that light found its way and Kelsie knew or guessed that Yonan’s scrap of the Quan iron was still alive. Black shadow moved against shadow and she believed, though the sighting was so bad, that the Valley warrior was moving through the same lightless kind of passage which she had dared upon her awakening here.

She leaned across and fairly hissed at the witch:

“Call! With me call if you ever wish my aid again!”

“Yonan!” she shaped the word in her own mind and suddenly felt an inflow of aid. She had managed to enlist Wittle after all. “Yonan!”

She saw that dark shadow halt and the fingers slip from the hilt to the blade beneath. The Quan took on a deeper gleam and the shadow which surely was Yonan swung to the right. Kelsie reached for the arm of the witch and felt her finger bite deeply into the other’s spare flesh.

“Call!”

“Yonan,” at each repetition of that name, aided by, she was sure, the picture she continued to hold in her mind, that shadow moved now more swiftly as if on the track of something which brushed the risks of chance from its passage.

There was light in the dark, dim and hard to see—the girl thought of the glimmer of the fungi along the walls. She saw the man with the sword. They had left him his mail along with his weapon. Perhaps it was the latter their captors had feared, not for its point (though she knew he had made good play with that) but for the talisman bound into its hilt. Just as they had not taken her jewel.

“Yonan!”

There came a faint answer. “I come!”

“Fool!” If Wittle had aided in that first call she was no longer doing so now. “What need have we for him? these,” she touched her own jewel lightly, “are enough to win us out.”

“I call one who is one of us—” Kelsie began, her temper rising in that inner heat which might lead to such recklessness as that which had brought her into this perilous land in the beginning. “He—”

“Is a man!” The witch interrupted her. “What power has he beside the power of fighting arm? We need no weapon—”

“Except these,” Kelsie reminded her, pointing to the two stones between them.

Wittle grimaced. “The power is overlaid by this about us. We shall have to use it to the best of our ability to call. Were you one of the sisters—” her voice died away but there was still in her eyes the animosity which Kelsie had always seen there.

“I am not!” Kelsie was quick to deny. She did not know why the jewel had come alive in her hands but she refused to believe that some part of her was akin to this thin, bitter woman.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Wittle pursed her lips as if she doubted the need for Kelsie’s question. Then she answered:

“This is a place of the Sam Riders. Of them we know but little—”

“And none of it good,” Kelsie finished when she hesitated. “Who are they, then?”

“They serve some great Dark One. Who they are and why they serve…” she shrugged. “Both Light and Dark draw together strange partners. In Estcarp we would know. Here,” she made a small gesture with the hand which hovered over the jewel, “I cannot say. Those in the Valley hold by only one of the true adepts. There may be more of those left. Not all were eaten up by their enemies or withdrew into other worlds.” For the first time she seemed to be under the urge to talk. Kelsie was very content to let her. The more she could learn the better, even though much of what Wittle said could be guesses only.

“These adepts—” she encouraged.

“They are the ones who would rule all. Some withdrew and were neither of the Light nor the Dark but followed paths of their own. Others struggled for power and there were wars, ah, such wars! Even the earth was wrung by the strengths they called upon. For the tissue of life itself can be changed if the will is great enough.”

Kelsie thought of the stories she had heard in the Valley. “Did not those sisters of yours reach such powers? Did they not move mountains with their words of command, so that the enemy could not come upon them?”

“And so they died,” replied the witch somberly. “For the power we called upon then burnt out many of the sisterhood. Thus—it is thus we must find that which will recharge our jewels to a greater holding than they have ever known.”

“And this greater power, do you think that you will find it here?”

“It was pulling us—for like is pulled to like, and with the stones charged with the same energy we shall be led to the source of it. No, fool, it does not lie hereabout or none of this,” again she made that small one-handed gesture, “would exist. Here,” she reached behind her and pulled forward a travel-stained pack, much like the one Kelsie had lost in the burrow of the Thas. “Eat and drink—”

As if those two words had been a signal both her dry throat and her empty stomach made themselves known. The girl pulled out a metal flask and allowed herself a few sips of insipid and musty tasting water. This was followed by crumbs of a half-eaten round of journey bread. But the stench of the rank growth about her took much of her need for food. That smell rendered nauseating all she ate or drank.

Wittle leaned forward once again and was peering intently into the halo of dim light which circled about the two stones, springing from their point of touch. She began to intone in a voice hardly above a whisper, using her forefinger to sign in the air. Though there was no blue-lined answer to her now.

Kelsie crowded forward to see any picture which the stones might produce. But what she did perceive was instead lines of what might have been an unknown script. And she worried about the summoning of such in the very heart of one of the enemy strongholds.

Wittle was still repeating queer singsong uttered words in a murmur when Kelsie turned her head sharply and strove to look over her shoulder. The sense of being watched had come suddenly but it was so strong she was not surprised to see a figure dimmed by the fog of the red stream coming forward.

She had her knife and it was ready in her hand. At her hissed warning Wittle did not even look up or break her concentration upon the stones. But a moment later Kelsie was on her feet, moving through the haze, jerking from the ground the gem as she went to call to that shadow figure.

“Yonan! Here!”

Her call was near drowned out by a screech from Wittle as the stone against stone formation was broken. The witch sprang at Kelsie, clawing for the chain swinging from her hand. So that the girl had to turn and beat off her attack and did not see Yonan make the same spring which had brought her earlier to this sliver of ground free from the noisome vegetation.

“The stone—give it to me!” Wittle cried. “Almost I learned—stupid wench. Almost I had touched upon what rules here!”

“But glad that you did not!” It was Yonan who answered that. There was a smear of dried blood, bits of it flaking off as he spoke, down the side of his face. He had one arm across his chest, the hand thrust into his sword belt and there were pain lines about his mouth. But he was gripping his sword by the blade close to the hilt and the Quan iron was fully revealed.

“This is Nexus—” he added as he came closer.

To Kelsie the word meant nothing and she thought that Wittle was similarly ignorant until suddenly a shadow crossed the witch’s sharp features.

“That is legend—” she said in that same sour voice she had always used when she spoke to Yonan.