Web of the Witch World

16 GATEWAY

IT EDGED IN through the shadows, another shadow close lying on the sea, its prow pointed for the strand just below their stand. Now Simon could hear the faint hiss of water on oar—no sailing vessel, but a ship’s boat making a rash touch on enemy territory. He could make out two—three in the boat and he knew that one was Jaelithe.

Beside him Loyse started forward as if to greet the newcomers, her stride stiff, limited. She was under control. And Simon did not need to see what menace hid in the shadows.

“Sul!” He gave voice to the war cry they had heard so many times in battle and threw himself, not at the girl, but at the watching Kolder.

The alien went down with a startled cry as Simon closed. Then the attacker discovered that if the Kolder used machines and possessed, they could also fight hard to save their own skins. This was no easy knockout but a vicious struggle with a fighter who had combat knowledge of his own. The initial surprise of his spring again gave Simon a small advantage which he used to the uttermost.

How it went on the shore he did not know, all his attention on his fight to take the most dangerous opponent out of the melee. At last that body suddenly went limp under him and he waited, his hands still locked about the Kolder’s throat, for any quiver of returning energy.

“Simon!”

Through the blood which pounded against his eardrums he heard that. But he did not loosen his hold on the Kolder, only turned his head a fraction to answer.

“Here!”

She came over rocks and sand, only a dark shape to be seen. Behind her moved others. But she would not have come so unless their struggle, too, was done. Now she was beside him, her hand touching his hunched shoulder. There was no need for more between them—not now, Simon thought with a rich exultation rising within him—or ever.

“He is dead,” Jaelithe said and Simon accepted her judgment, rising from the huddled body of the Kolder officer. For a moment he caught at her upper arms, drew her to him in what was not quite an embrace, which he needed to assure himself that this was no dream but truth. And he heard her laugh, that small happy sound he had heard before upon occasion.

“I have me a warlock, a mighty warlock lord!” Her voice was a whisper which could not have carried far beyond the two of them.

“And I have me a witch, lady, with more than a little power!” Into that he put all the pride he felt.

“So having paid tribute,” now her tone was light amusement for his sharing, “we advance to realities. What do we have here, Simon? The nest of the Kolder in truth?”

“How many are with you?” Simon did not answer her question, but went to the main point.

“No army, March Warder—two Sulcarmen to row me ashore—and these I am pledged to return to their ship.”

“Two!” Simon was astonished. “But the ship’s crew—”

“No. Upon them we can not depend until the fleet comes. What is to be done here?” She asked that briskly as if indeed she had captained in a troop of his Borderers.

“Very little.” His amusement was irony. “Merely a Kolder fortress to face—and their gate—”

“Lady!” A low but imperative call from the shore.

However, before they could answer, light—an eye-dazzling beam of it, striking to the water, lashing a path along the waves from which steam arose.

“Back!” Simon kept his hold on Jaelithe, drawing her with him into rocks which rose more than their height. He pushed her to her knees with an emphatic order, “Stay!” And ran for the beach.

The boat was still drawn up on the shingle, a body lying by it. There were startled cries.

“Get under cover—back here! Loyse—?”

He heard her answer from the left. “Here, Simon—what is that?”

“Some Kolder deviltry—come!”

Somehow he blundered to her, pulled her along, heard a curse in the Sulcar tongue as other figures followed him.

When they reached the rocky space where he had left Jaelithe, Simon found they were a party of six, two Sulcarmen having dragged a silent third form with them. As one they turned to watch the stormy display on the bay. That light, whatever it might be, cut back and forth with the precision of a weapon designed to make sure nothing alive remained afloat on the surface it now lashed. Under its touch the water boiled and frothed into steaming foam.

On the strand was another fire where the skiff had caught and burned as brightly as if it had been soaked in oil. Simon heard Sulcar curses twice as hot from the man crouched on his right.

But Jaelithe was already speaking into his ear, her voice raised above the crackling of the display in the bay.

“They will come, they are coming—”

Simon caught that warning himself, a tingling in his bones. To get away from the bay was necessary. But where to head in this maze of broken rock? The farther from the Kolder keep for now the better. Simon said as much.

“Aye!” That was the Sulcarman beside him. “Which way then, lord?”

Simon stripped off the Kolder smock since he lacked a belt. “Here.” He thrust the end of that into the Sulcarman’s hold. “Take off your belt, let your mate take the end of that. Through the dark it is best we go linked. What weapons have you?”

“Dart guns, sea swords—we are marines, Lord.”

Simon stifled a sound which dared not be laughter. Side arms—against the Kolder wealth of weapons in their home arsenal! However, night and the rough ground might aid the fugitives.

They moved out, Jaelithe paired with him, Loyse with one of the Sulcar marines, and the silent Aldis with the last. They had tied her hands, but she had not spoken since they had brought her from the shore, only moving at their pushing. Simon argued against the need of taking her with them, fearing betrayal. But Jaelithe had protested, saying she might have some use.

Their pace, of a necessity, could not be fast, but they were well away from the shore and the burning boat by the time they saw lights gather there, scatter out through the rocks marking a search. Simon kept them behind what cover he could and his precautions proved just. For they were in a pocket between two knife-edged, jutting ridges when that searing light burst over their heads.

The fugitives threw themselves face down, the heat of that ray harsh on their backs, although it whipped well above them. Back and forth across the countryside it played, and they cowered in the cut they had so luckily found. Then it flared on. Simon waited. This shift might be a device to entice them into the open. He sat up to watch the sky, studied the path of the ray as reflected there. At last it vanished. Perhaps the Kolder believed them caught and cooked.

There was one direction in which the enemy would not dare to aim that weapon—towards whatever lay behind the mesa to which he had watched those caterpillar trucks crawl. To head for that would give them some insurance against being wiped out. He told them of that.

“This gate—their gate—you think it lies there?” Jaelithe asked.

“Only a guess, but I believe it a good one. They are either reaching through that again, or preparing to. For some reason they must have contact with their home world.”

“And that is where we may also find most of their fighters.” One of the Sulcarmen observed.

“It is that—or the fortress. And frankly I would rather be in the open than in that Kolder shell again.”

The Sulcarman grunted what might be an assent to that. “Open—that is best. Ynglin, this will be a night to notch on the sword hilt before it is done.”

“The sword of Sigrod has already been well notched,” his fellow replied. “Lord, do we also take this woman with us?”

“Yes!” Jaelithe answered first. “She is needful to us, how I cannot yet see—but yet she will be needful.”

Simon was willing to trust to Jaelithe’s instinct in this. Aldis had not even gasped when the heat ray skimmed so close to their hiding place. Whether the Kolder agent was in a state of shock, or whether she was familiar with her masters’ weapons and merely waited for nemesis to catch up with the fugitives, Simon could not tell. But he felt uneasy over the talisman she carried and what that might do to entangle them again.

“We should take her Kolder symbol—” He spoke that last thought aloud.

But again Jaelithe countered with: “No—in some way that is a key and it may open doors for us. I do not think it will work so, save when Aldis uses it. But no thing of power is to be lightly discarded. And I shall know if she tries to use it, that I shall surely know!” The confidence in her words was complete, though Simon still had shadowy reservations.

Again linked together they began a slow journey, since none of them denied the wisdom of seeking the bottom of each cut or canyon which led in the general direction of the ulterior. In the dark Simon was the guide, testing and feeling for each step at times. And their progress was painfully slow.

At intervals they rested and all of them nursed bruises, scrapes, a cut or two, from falls and slips among the rocks. The dawn showed them as grimed and dirty scarecrows. But with the early light also came sound . . . Flattened on a rock slope they could watch, over the spine of a ridge, a crawling vehicle, its arcs of light cutting ahead to dazzle the fugitives’ eyes. Simon sighed with relief. His worst fear had been that they were lost in this wilderness of rock. Now he believed they must be close to what they sought.

This crawler was returning to the keep, empty of supplies. Supplies. Simon swallowed. Food, water—both in this barren country would be found only in Kolder hands. Already the need of water pressed him; it probably was as hard for the others. Five of them and a prisoner—and there the might of the Kolder. Perhaps it would have been simpler to invade the keep.

“Simpler—” Jaelithe’s answer was almost a part of his own flow of thought. For seconds Simon did not realize that it was not. “Perhaps simpler, but not the right answer.”

He glanced at her where she lay, her mail-clad shoulder nearly rubbing against his. With her helm on her head and the loose scarf of metal links depending from it wound about chin and throat, half her face was veiled. But her eyes met his squarely.

“Reading of thoughts?” Again she answered an unvoiced question. “Not quite that, I think, rather that a similar path is followed by us both. You are aware, too, that this is necessary for our venture. And the answer is not safety—not for us—but something far different.”

“The gate!”

“The gate,” she affirmed. “You believe that these Kolder must have something from there to aid in what they would do in our world. That I believe also, therefore they must not succeed.”

“Which depends upon the nature of their gate.”

The one which had brought Simon into this world had been a very simple affair—a rough stone between pillars of the same crudely hewn substance. A man sat himself there so—hands at his sides fitting into depressions such as also cupped his buttocks. He then waited for dawn and the gate was open. The guardian of that way had told Simon legends in the hours he had passed of a long night waiting for the dawn. The tales told that this was a stone of great story: the Siege Perilous of Arthur’s use, an enchanted stone which somehow read a man’s soul and then opened to him the world in which he best fitted.

But whatever gate had let the Kolders through to defile this world had not been that kind. And what five of them could do to close it, Simon had not the least idea. Only Jaelithe was also right—this was the thing which must be done.

They skulked along the heights as the light grew stronger, able to follow the marks of the caterpillar trucks below. One of the marines climbed the mesa wall to scout beyond. The others took turns in sleeping in a hidden crevice. Only Aldis sat, staring before her, her hands, though bound at the wrists, resting tight against the Kolder talisman on her breast, as if such touch brought her strength.

She had been a rarely beautiful woman, but now she aged before their eyes, her flesh thinning until the bones were stark in jaw and cheek, her eyes sunken in ridged sockets. Her tangled golden hair was as incongruous as a girl’s wig on an old woman. Since they had begun the march her sight had never focused on any of them; she might have been one of the possessed. Yet Simon thought it was not the quenching of life which made her so, but rather a withdrawal to some hiding place deep within her, from which spirit and life would waken when the need came.

And so, for all her present passivity, she was to be watched—if not feared. Loyse was the watcher and Simon thought she took more than a little pleasure in the knowledge that their roles were now reversed, that it was she who controlled, Aldis who obeyed.

Simon lay with his eyes closed, but he could not sleep. The energy he had expended in the Kolder keep and after, instead of tiring him, seemed to set ferment to working. He had the sensation of one faced with a problem, clues close to hand, and the driving need to solve it. More used to weapons he could hold, touch, this new ability to work mentally kept his mind restless, awoke uneasiness in him. He opened his eyes to find Jaelithe watching him across the narrow cleft in which they sheltered. She smiled.

And for the first time he wondered a little at the form of their meeting. That barrier he had thought so thick, growing thicker, had vanished utterly. Had it ever been there at all? Yes—but now it seemed as if it had existed for two other people, not for them.

She did not touch him by hand, or mind, but suddenly there was a flow of warmth and feeling about him, in him, which he had never experienced before, though he thought he had known the ultimate in union. And under that caressing warmth he at last relaxed, the pitch of awareness no less, but not so taut and binding.

Was this what Jaelithe had known as a witch, what she had missed and then thought she had found again? Simon understood perfectly how great that loss must have seemed.

Scrape of boot on rock—Simon was on his feet, looking to the end of the crevice. Sigrod swung down. He pulled off his tight-fitting, crestless helm, wiped his arm across his sweating face. His cheeks were flushed.

“They are there right enough, a whole camp of them—mostly possessed. They have a thing set up.” He was frowning a little as if trying to find the words in his seaman’s vocabulary to best describe what he had seen. Then he used his fingers to support description. “There are pillars set so . . .” Forefinger pointed vertically. “And a crosspiece—so.” A horizontal line. “It is all made of metal, I think—green in color.”

Loyse moved. She jerked aside one of those hands Aldis kept folded over her Kolder talisman, displaying a part of the alien symbol. “Like this?”

Sigrod leaned closer, eyeing the talisman carefully.

“Aye, but it is big. Four—five men can march through at once.”

“Or one of those crawling vehicles of theirs?” Simon asked.

“Aye, it will take one of those. But that is all there is to it—an archway out in bare country. Everything else well away from it.”

“As if it is to be avoided,” Jaelithe commented. “Yes, they must be dealing with strange and powerful forces here. Dangerous forces if they strive to open such a passage.”

An archway of green metal, alien technology to be unleashed through it. Simon made his decision.

“You,” he nodded to the crewmen, “will remain here with the Lady Loyse. If we do not return within a full day strike for the shore. Perhaps there you can find that which will take you to sea and so escape—”

Their protests were ready, he could read them in their eyes, but they did not attempt to deny his authority. Jaelithe smiled again, serenely. Then she stooped and touched Aldis on the shoulder.

Though she did not exert any other direction, the Kolder agent rose in turn and moved to the end of the crevice, Jaelithe behind her. Simon sketched a half salute, but his words were for Loyse.

“Your part in this is done, Lady. Go with fortune.”

She, too, was all protest which she did not utter.

Then she nodded.

“To you, also, fortune—”

They did not look back as they began that long tramp, about the base of the mesa so that they might come upon the Kolder camp from the south. The sun was already warm on the twisted rocks about them. It might make this land a furnace before they were out of it. Out of it where? In hiding near the Kolder gate—or—? Somehow Simon was now sure that the gate was not their only goal.