The Witches of Karres

away, subsided again.

“Dear me!” Hulik giggled. “We really have them upset now.” She reached for the rope in the captain’s hand. “Lift the little witch up and I’ll get her fastened. It doesn’t matter though. We won’t make it back to the ship.”

But they did make it back to the ship. Afterwards, the captain couldn’t remember too much of the hike down along the slope. He remembered that it had seemed endless, that his legs had turned into wobbly rubber from time to time, while Goth’s small body seemed leaden on his back. The do Eldel walked and clambered beside or behind him. Now and then she laughed. For a while she’d hummed a strange, wild little tune that made him think of distant drum-dances. Later she was silent. Perhaps he’d told her to shut up. He couldn’t remember that.

He remembered fear. Not of things following on the ground or of some flying monster that might come swooping down again. As far as he could tell, they had lost their escort; the gorges, ravines, the thicket-studded slopes, seemed almost swept clean of life. Nothing stirred or called. It was as if instead of drawing attention now, they were being carefully avoided.

The fear had no real form. There were oppressive feelings of hugeness and menace gathering gradually about. There was an occasional suspicion that the red sky had darkened for moments as if shadows too big to be made out as shadows had just passed through it. The staccato thunder, which had no lightning to explain it, reverberated now and then above the mountains; but that disturbance never came nearly as close again as it had done at the cliff. When they reached the edge of the ravine where, on the way up, they’d stopped to listen to something like a series of deep, giant bells, far off in the valley, he thought he heard a dim echoing of the same sound again. No matter, he told himself — the Venture still lay undisturbed below and ahead of them in the valley, not many more minutes away…

“They’re waiting for us at the ship,” Hulik said from behind him. She laughed.

He didn’t reply. The do Eldel had been a good companion when it came to facing the Agandar and his killing machine. But this creepy shadow world simply had become too much for her.

Then, on the final stretch down, Hulik faltered at last, started weaving and stumbling. The captain helped her twice to her feet, then clamped an arm around her and plodded on. He began to do some stumbling himself, got the notion that the ground was shifting, lifting and settling underfoot, like the swell of an uneasy sea. When he looked up once more to see how much farther it was, he came to a sudden stop. The bow of the Venture loomed above them; the ramp was a dozen steps away. He glanced at the dark open lock above it, steered Hulik to the foot of the ramp, shook her shoulder.

“We’re there!” he said loudly as she raised her head and gave him a dazed look. “Back at the ship! Up you go — up the ramp! Wake up!”

“They’re here, too,” Hulik giggled. “Can’t you feel it?” But she did start up the ramp, the captain following close behind in case she fell again.

He felt something, at that. A cold electric tingling seemed to trickle all through his body, as if he’d stepped into the path of a current of energy. And looking up past the ship’s bow he’d seen something he was certain hadn’t been in view only minutes before — a great dark cloud mass boiling up over the cliffs on the far side of the valley.

So a storm was coming, he told himself.

He hustled Hulik through the lock, slammed it shut behind them before he switched on the control section lights, pulled out a knife on his way over to the couch and cut the ropes which held Goth fastened to him. He slid her down on the couch. When he looked back for Hulik, she had crumpled to the floor in the center of the control room.

The captain let her lie, pulled the package of wrapped gadgetry from his pocket and dumped it on the control desk. He began moving hurriedly about. Getting the Venture readied for action again seemed to take a long time, but it might have taken three minutes in fact. The electric tingling was becoming uncomfortably pronounced when he finally settled himself in the control chair. He fed the underdrives a warm-up jolt, held one hand on the thrust regulator as he checked the gun turrets, finally switched on the viewscreens.

A black cloud wall was rising above the cliffs on either side, and the screens showed it also surging up from distant upper stretches of the valley… and from the plain beyond the valley mouth behind the ship. A turbulent, awesomely towering bank of darkness encircling this area — yes, past high time to be away from here! The captain started to shove the thrust regulator forwards, then checked the motion with a grunt of astonishment.

The starboard screen showed a tiny man-shape running towards the ship, arms pumping. The captain stepped up the screen magnification. Vezzarn -

* * *

He swore savagely, flicked over the desk’s forward lock controls, heard the lock open — then a new rumbling roar from the world outside the lock. Vezzarn, at least, hadn’t much more than two hundred yards to cover, and was sprinting hard. His head came up for an instant — he’d seen the sudden blaze of light from the lock.

The captain waited, mangling his lip with his teeth. Each second, the surrounding giant cloud banks were changing appearance, lifting higher… and now they seemed also to slant inwards like dark waves cresting — about to come thundering down from every direction to engulf the ship! Vezzarn passed beyond the screen’s inner range. More seconds went by. The roaring racket beyond the lock grew louder. Those monster clouds were leaning in towards the Venture! Then a clatter of boots on the ramp. The captain glanced back as Vezzarn flung himself headlong through the lock, rolled over, gasping, on the floor. The thrust regulator went flat to the desk in that instant.

They leaped five hundred feet from the ground while the lock was clicking shut. The Venture’s nose lifted high as they cleared the cliffs and the atmosphere drive hurled her upwards. Three quarters of the sky above seemed a churning blackness now. The ship turned towards the center of the remaining open patch. At the earliest possible moment the captain cut in the main drive -

The roiling elemental furies dwindled to utter insignificance beneath them as they hurtled off the world of red twilight like a wrong-way meteor, blazing from stem to stem. Space quenched the flames seconds later. The bloated giant sun and its satellite appeared in the rear screens. Cooling, the Venture thundered on.

“Whooo-oof!” breathed the captain, slumping back in the chair. He closed his eyes then, but opened them again at once…

It was something like smelling a grumble, or hearing dark green, or catching a glimpse of a musky scent. As Goth had suggested, it was not to be described in any terms that made sense. But it was quite unmistakable. He knew exactly what he was doing — he was relling a vatch.

The vatch. Big Wind Voice. Old Windy -

CONGRATULATIONS! cried the vatch. THE TEST IS OVER. AGAIN YOU SURPRISE AND DELIGHT ME, SMALL PERSON! NOW THE GLORY OF A GREATER DREAM GAME IS TRULY EARNED. LET US SPEAK AT ONCE TO ANOTHER OF ITS PLAYERS…

With that, the control room blurred and was gone. He, too, the captain decided a stunned moment later, had blurred and was gone, at least in most respects. Beneath him still hung a kind of pale, shifting luminance which might bear some resemblance to his familiar body in its outlines. He seemed to be moving swiftly with it through a sea of insubstantial grayness…

A greater dream game! What was that vatch monster getting him into — and what would happen to Goth and the Venture? He couldn’t -

PATIENCE, SMALL PERSON! PATIENCE! Old Windy boomed good-humoredly from the grayness. THE GAME IS ONE IN WHICH YOU HAVE AN INTEREST. YOUR PHANTOM COMPANIONS WILL BE SAFE UNTIL YOU RETURN.

The last, at least, was somewhat reassuring… A game in which he had an interest?

WORM WORLD! bellowed the vatch-voice delightedly, rolling and tumbling and swooping about him. WORM WORLD… WORM WORLD… WORM WORLD -