Andre Norton - Warlock of the Witch World

But come it did—first as dim questions, then as fragmentary answers.

There came a time when I stopped crawling, looking with my watering eyes at what had become my body. I was not—a man!

Green-gray, warty hide with straggling patches of hair-fine tendrils of flesh growing out of it. My hands were paws, webbed, thickened; my feet like them. I tried to straighten my back, found that my head was set forward between high, hunched shoulders. But around my right arm was wound a strip of green flame—flame? Slowly I raised one of those misshapen paws and touched it. It had no substance, being a mist, into which my paw sank.

But that movement, the sight of the band, awoke in me a greater stirring of memory. Scarf—But there had been something else—a sword! The word slipping into my sluggish mind acted as a key to turn a lock, open a coffer from which flooded full memory.

The sword! I looked about me frantically; I dared not lose the sword!

There was no sword. But on the ground before me, that stony surface splotched with searing color, was a shaft of golden light. As did the green mist about my arm, it too soothed my irritated eyes. I reached for it. Again my paw sank into light and fear struck at me. I could no longer hold it!

But I must! I opened and closed that paw as best I could. It swept back and forth through the shaft of light, grasping nothing. I pounded my paws on the rocky floor in fear and rage. Pain came from that. A thick, greenish fluid oozed from the bruises. I folded them against the distorted barrel which was now my chest and rocked back and forth, moaning with a mouth I could guess was of no human shape.

How had that shaft come here? I had been crawling when my wits began to return to me. I had not carried the sword, yet there it lay. Therefore it had somehow come with me, though I had not borne it.

I rubbed the back of the warty paw across my face to clear away the sticky tears, shrinking from that touch of unwholesome flesh against flesh. There was one way to learn how that shaft had come with me, and that was to travel on and see what happened. But not crawling—no! This hideous form which I looked upon was not my own, though I seemed now to inhabit it. But I was a man, and as a man I would now go to meet the unknown on my feet—so much had resolution returned to me.

But to get onto those paw feet and then balance erect was a labor which seemed almost beyond my determination to accomplish. My hunched back pushed my torso so far forward that I was top-heavy. I could not screw up my head to see more than a few steps ahead. I tried to learn more of this body. The hunched back, the thick shoulders tapered to abnormally slender loins and legs. Cautiously I raised a paw to touch my face, almost afraid of what that examination would tell me. My mouth appeared to be a wide gash with little lip, in it teeth which were sharply pointed fangs.

My nose had ceased to exist; in its place was a single gash which served as a nostril. There was no hair on my head, but a ragged growth of flesh stretched from ear to ear in a quivering band. The ears were very large, though lobeless. In truth, I was such a monster as to send any but the stoutest of heart screaming from a first meeting.

Flinging out my arms to balance the top-heavy weight of flesh and bone, I took one unsteady step and then another, as one who walks a narrow and perilous bridge above a gulf. The shaft of light moved, always the same distance ahead of my tottering advance.

Heartened by that, for I thought that the sword, even in this strange new form, was the best talisman I could have, I practiced walking. I discovered that a slow shuffle would carry me along.

Along—where?

I had come into this hellish place seeking Kaththea. Kaththea! Glancing down at the loathsome body I now had, I recoiled from the thought that if it had fared so with me, then it must also have been with my sister. Where was this place? Surely far outside the boundaries laid upon any normal world known to human kind.

If the Dark Tower guarded a gate, and it would appear that was so, I did not believe that Dinzil had meant for Kaththea never to return. Loskeetha had said Dinzil looked upon Kaththea as a means of gaining mastery over new forces. He would not willingly lose such a key.

If he had not taken steps from which there was no retreat.

I paused, strained to lift my monster head the higher in order to see what might lie ahead. There was no horizon in this place, nothing but the eternal explosions of color and the hard ground over which I moved so slowly.

The colors . . . perhaps I was growing more accustomed to them. My eyes did not water so much, neither was the pain so sharp when I looked about me. I began to count and found they followed a pattern. The pattern they followed was the old one: three, seven, nine. Not only could I count that between bursts, but certain colors showed in flashes of the same grouping. Thus what abode here was in tune to a power.

But I must have a guide.

“Kaththea!”

Just as once I had seen certain words take shape and fly visibly before me, so now in this place I saw my sister’s name do likewise. Brightly green as the scarf which was now a ring of light, it took wing, speeding to the right of my path.

I shuffled to follow it. Then it was hidden in a burst of purple fire, a fountain of angry crimson.

“Kaththea!”

Another bird-thought skimming ahead. Under my feet the gold of the sword moved with me. I put my hand-paw once more to the band of the scarf.

“Kaththea!”

Bird-thoughts flying, if they only would continue to lead me! Yet she did not answer, and I could only trust that what I followed was the truth and not bait for a trap.

I saw nothing but the springing flashes, the ground under my feet, until, when a spout of dark blue shot high, I sighted a massive bulk a little to the left of the path the winged thoughts set me.

It was a sullen crimson in color, its hue not affected by the constant play of contrasting shades. I thought it first a rocky outcrop, and then some very rudely wrought and ancient statue.

It crouched upon wide haunches, its hands upon the ground on either side just beyond the upjutting of its knees, its head turned a little to watch in the direction my thoughts flew. It was obscenely female, huge pendulous breasts flowing over its knees. But the face was unfinished—there was no mouth, no nose, only pits for eyes. From those pits flowed steadily two streams of darker red, like unto blood, which dripped and stained the rest of its body. In size it was twice, three times, that of the body I now wore. From it spread such a dampening of the spirit that I nearly wilted under that blow, which was not to the body, but the soul.

Whatever it might once have been, it was now a prisoner, and the agony of its spirit was a shadow over the land on which it crouched. I shuddered away from it, yet did I turn twice to look back. Monstrous though it was, it stirred my pity.

The last time I turned, I forced up one of my paws. I tried to mouth aloud what I would say. But human words could not be shaped by the guise I wore. So I thought, the very old words which we had used many times along the border, to wish to rest those who had been shield mates and sword brothers in our company. For I knew no other comfort for the suffering spirit.

“Earth take that which is of earth. Water, accept that of water, and that which is now freed, let it be free, to follow the High Path—Sytry willing—”

Those last two words, they were not of my belief. But I had only a moment to think that. For once more I saw thoughts speed through the air, not green this time, but golden, the golden of the sword. The flew to that crouching red thing which wept blood. Then they were gone as if they had entered it, some in the featureless head, some in the body.