Andre Norton - The Jargoon Pard

However, there was no haze. On the path before me stood three shadowy forms, as if to bid me welcome. I fought with my own body, struggled to stop well short of them. For now it was made plain to me whom I was sent to seek—

The Moon Witch!

“Kill me!” I thought again. There was no hope of self-preservation left now. Either I would die here and now, or such untold evil as I could not imagine would engulf this maid—perhaps the others, too, but certainly her.

None of the three shrank from me and the Wereman did not heed my frantic plea. I saw then they were garbed as they had been when they had backed me with their Power in Ursilla’s Tower room. They held high their symbols of Power—the branch with its single green leaf, the rod interwoven with moonflowers, the sword. The latter—its blade should be aimed at my heart, my throat.

I snarled and growled, my fury rising. Why did they not heed me? I came to bring disaster upon them, yet they made no move.

The woman first extended her wand toward me. Perhaps she could aim a force through that—destroy me—

Instead there flowed into my churning thoughts and fears a soothing, as her herbs had soothed my torn skin when I lay under her tending. The urgency Ursilla had laid upon me as a goad, was muffled, muted—

“I am a danger—” I thought. Though I was not sure on my side of any contact, I hoped that the Wereman, at least, could read that warning.

“We know—we have seen.”

His answer formed clearly in my mind. I longed to ask how, but they must have their own ways of reading spells aimed at them.

“I must take— her !

Again I gave warning. Surely they could understand by now that Ursilla’s sorcery had left me no escape. Either I took the Moon Witch back into the buried cavern, or I would die. Of the two choices, the last was the better. “Not so.” Again came the Wereman’s reply. “We have foreread through the water, through the stars, through the fire. Destiny is somehow entangled for us and you with us. We cannot right the scales until we face this sorceress of Car Do Prawn, that is the reading.

“There is ax time,” he continued. “And there is sword time. They are the times of human man. There is wind time and Star times—which are the times of the Great Lords and the Voices. And there is Weretime and spell time—these last twain call and govern us.”

I did not fully understand what he would say. But that our destiny was entwined amazed me, though I did not doubt his words. For if he were no Voice, yet that he governed Powers of his own was something I well knew. Now the woman’s voice rang through my thoughts.

“Earth and Air, Fire and Water. By the Dawn of the East, the Moon White of the South, the Twilight of the West, the Black Midnight of the North, by yew, hawthorn, rowan, by the Law of Knowledge, the Law of Names, the Law of True Falsehoods, the Law of Balance—so do we move.”

As her words sped through my mind, leaving nothing but wonder behind them, the Moon Witch advanced from the others, coming straight to me. She laid her hand upon my head as she had done the other time when she had bid me seek out the key of my enchantment. From her light touch more easement of my burden flowed.

“The moon is thin, but it lives,” she said aloud. “It waxes, and so does that which arms me. What you would have me do shall be done. And I think that your sorceress shall not find the facing of what shall come easy.”

Thus, when I turned my back upon the Star Tower, in truth I did not go alone, for the Moon Witch walked beside me. And behind came the woman, as surefooted and swift as the great snow cat that padded at her side. We crossed the river, heading back the way I had come, the same guide drawing me straight as a released arrow.

Yet the easement they had given me allowed a slower pace. We walked the night, we did not race through it. Now and again the Moon Witch’s hand would brush my head. And each time she did so her touch lightened my heart, strengthened my hopes that what I brought back to Ursilla was not what she wanted, but what she deserved.

The false light of near dawn was about us when we came into the place of tumbled mounds. But when we were nigh to the dark hole of the cavern entrance, the woman cried out.

I turned swiftly to face her. She had halted, had her hand out before her, running it up and down in the air as if she laid her palm against some surface. There was naught there that I could see, and the Moon Witch and I were several paces past that point.

The snow cat reared on his hind legs and rested his huge paws on an invisible barrier. Growling, he extended his claws, raking them as if along a vertical surface.

My hardly won hope was smothered in an instant. I needed no words to tell me that there was a force field in existence here—one that admitted me and my victim, but not the two who would lend us their support.

I tried to retreat, to take with me the Moon Maid. For I mouthed some of the disk-strung strings of her skirt to pull her. However, just as the others could not come forward, so I could not return.

The forward pull on me was so strong that I knew I could not long withstand it. I would be drawn underground, forced to bring the Moon Witch with me. Better that the Wereman had done as I had begged and slain me out of hand. Destiny entwined or not, they could not reach me now, and I could not reach them.

“Go!” The snow cat’s command startled me. I was as one caught between two imperative orders, each of which dragged at me—in opposite directions.

“Go!” The Tower woman echoed him. “This is not a spell of might, but one worn thin by years, one we can break. However, if you linger, then she who awaits you shall know and perhaps send that to make this barrier the stronger.”

I wanted to believe that it was the truth. But dared I? Only the Moon Witch’s hand on my head once more, her face turned resolutely toward the hole of utter darkness, told me that if I could not accept the complete belief in the others’ Power, she had. Fearless she appeared, only she did not realize—

Reluctantly I went forward, she matching pace with me.

“There is great dark here,” I thought. “I am led, I do not know how—”

“Then I am led also,” she returned. “For we shall be one now.”

Thus together we entered the hole, descended warily the first of the ramps. I soon could not see her, even through my heightened cat senses, but her touch never left me.

Then—a dim glow moved beside me. Something not unlike the haze that enwreathed the Star Tower. It came from the disks that made her brief kilt, from the horned moon on her breast.

“There exists a great force here,” she said then. “It awakens all that is in tune with Power.” In her other hand she swung forward her flower-studded wand. I saw that each of the flowers, widely open, produced a wan circle of light. “Even though Mother Moon reaches not into the earth, yet her Power is fed here. Long ago there must have walked some in this way who knew the moon calls and used them.”

That she was not alarmed awakened still more strongly my own fear for her. I tried to express the fear by voice, forgetting that I had only the gutturals of the cat to make myself heard. Again she must have read my thoughts.

“No, Kethan. I do not deny that this Wise Woman of yours has sorcery beyond my knowing. But also, I do not believe that she reckons that I, in turn, can summon some that may, in turn, be strange to her. I have been well taught.

“When I was still so young a child that my speech was not plain, I saw beyond the barriers of men. My mother, reading the fire and the water, knew that I had in me talent, and one that differed from her own. However, that is not a fact to be amazed at. For my mother is a Witch of the Green Way and my father once was a Wererider.” She said that as proudly as one who recited a listing of blood-kin heroes in some Keep.