Andre Norton - Web of the Witch World

“Where?” He made the one word into a demand and saw her gaze about with dawning comprehension. “She might be within arm’s distance or well away, but where?” He hammered home the hopelessness of their unthinking pursuit. This warren of ruins was made for endless hide and seek.

Jaelithe raised her hands and cupped them over her eyes, standing very still while her breathing quieted. Simon did not quite know what she would do, but in confidence he waited. She pivoted, part way around, and then dropped her hands to point.

“Thus!”

“How do—?”

“How do I know? By what is not there—Kolder barrier—and she wears the Kolder talisman.”

A thin clue—there could be other Kolder traces in this land. But it was the only one they had. Simon nodded and accepted her guidance. It was a crooked path Jaelithe set them, and it bored on into the mass of ruins away from the cleft. Simon marked a back trail as they went, blazing growths, or scratching stones. But the time this chase was taking he regretted.

They came out on a large paved space, ringed by buildings in a better state of repair than those nearer the cut. There was a different look to these structures—not quite the sealed appearance of the Kolder holds, yet with some of their stark rigidity of design. Grace and beauty in the sense his world knew them, Jaelithe’s people held, were totally foreign to the minds which had conceived and built these. And any one of them might provide Aldis with numerous hiding places.

“Where?” Simon asked.

Jaelithe put her hand on the top of a low wall which ran about that open space. Her breath came fast and the dark finger marks of fatigue under her eyes were plain.

They had drunk their fill of rain water in the storm, but there had been no food for a long time. Simon doubted if they could hold this pace much longer. And now Jaelithe shook her head slowly.

“I do . . . not . . . know. It has gone from me—” Her hurried breaths were close to sobs. Simon caught her, drew her against him, and she came willingly as if very grateful for his strength, his touch which held comfort.

“Listen,” he spoke softly, “do you think you could sing her out, as you did in those in ambush?”

“We must. We must!” Her voice was a husky whisper with an element of hysteria in it.

“And we can! Remember once—back in Kars when there was need of shape-changing and you said that you would call upon me for that which you needed to make the ceremony a swift one? Now it will be the same: call upon me for what you need.”

She turned in his arms, though she did not step away from him, only faced outward. And her fingers grasped his in a grip which tightened with her need for the effort. Once more she began to sing that song of invocation which started as a hum and rose higher. And Simon felt, as he had on that day in Kars, that flowing from him, down his arms, through his hands, into her, draining him so he used iron will to stand unmoving.

All this world became one with that sing-song, so that he did not see the drab stones about him, nor the patches of encroaching vegetation—only a kind of silvery sheen which was within him and without him at once and the same time. But there was no time either; only this—this—this—

Then that chant which beat in his veins died, and he saw again this deserted city. There was movement, something in the shadows. Coming into the open, crawling . . . Aldis crawling. She did not try to get to her feet, instead she collapsed and lay still. Jaelithe released her hold on Simon.

“She is dead—“

Simon hurried to turn over the limp body. Blood, his hands were wet with it, yet there was more flowing, so much more. Her wan face was untouched but below, the wound flowed blood.

And torn flesh was one with torn robe where she had worn the Kolder talisman. Jaelithe cried out. But Simon caught at one of the bruised hands which was a fist tightened in death to still protect. He worked the rigid fingers until he released what they had gripped to the end of reason and life. Whatever had striven to tear from Aldis the Kolder device had not succeeded in winning its desire. She had lost her life in that battle, but not what she had fought to retain. He held the talisman.

“Come.” Simon stood up, his eyes searching the windows, the doors, for any sign of the one or ones Aldis had met here.

Jaelithe stooped and pulled a fold of the torn robe across the body, veiling the ravaged face and the wound on the breast. Then she made a sign in the air above its quietness.

They worked their way back to the cut at the best pace they could muster. Simon watched the back trail, unable to believe that they would not be stalked by whatever had killed Aldis. Had the possession of the Kolder talisman brought on that assault? He believed that it had, and that it might draw the same fate after them. The possessed dead lay in the broken road. There was no sign that anyone had passed this way since they had left hours earlier. Only the shadows were longer, the signs of approaching night clear.

They climbed down into the cut and stood on the cracked surface of the road where the wrecked crawler slewed to close it off. There were the pillars marking the gate, the dusk making the green somber streaks.

Simon raised his hand, the palm cupping the Kolder talisman, and Jaelithe set her hands on his shoulders, keeping such contact with them as they approached the gate.

Would the talisman take them past? They had been three together when they had made the other crossing. And the skeleton army had needed the Kolder to see them through. Simon walked on.

He did not know what to expect, but he was not surprised when the object in his hand grew cold and colder—this was akin to the Kolder barrier against mind reaching. But Aldis had not been Kolder by blood and it worked for her.

Another step and they were both between those wall strips. Once more the shaking, wrenching sense of being whirled into a nothingness which was highly inimical to their kind—then through it. Simon staggered forward. He was on his hands and knees on rock still warm from the sun of a baking day, Jaelithe beside him.

Sunset was not complete enough to hide what lay before them. There had been a battle here. And it had not all been the way of the otherworld force as it had on the other side of the gate. The rock was not only heated by sun, great ribbons of black scorch lay back and forth across the whole plain of the gate and there were things lying there . . .

Simon wavered to his feet, stooped to bring Jaelithe up in turn. Nothing before them moved, this had been left to the dead. What he was going to do now might be the wrong thing, but it was the only blow he could see to strike for the freedom of this world against the Kolder and what the Kolder had drawn upon this world.

He raised the alien rifle and fired whatever energy it controlled at the base of the nearer of the gate columns. For a moment in the half light he thought that either the charge was exhausted or that it had no effect upon the structure. Then came a shimmering, licking up from his point of target, running along all that side, coming to the bar at the top, across it, down the opposite pillar. Shimmering became sparkling motes drifting apart.

Simon cried out and dropped the weapon. His hand—his hand!

The Kolder talisman which had still been in his grasp when he fired that shot or ray fell from him, leaving his flesh blackened and burning! It rolled out midpoint between the gate posts shimmering into nothing—to explode in a flash of green fire. But the gate was also gone and they looked upon barren space.

Together they staggered on to where the Kolder camp had been, where there was still a huddle of machines and about them things neither wished to see clearer; they were thankful the light was half cut away by the shadow of the mesa. Simon lurched to the ground by one of the crawlers, his hand pressed against him, much as Aldis had always pressed the talisman to her. He was only aware of the pain, pain mixed with a rising weakness so that he could not think clearly, pain beyond enduring save for the space of a breath, and another, and another—