The Witches of Karres

would like him to be doing around the ship the next few hours.

As the captain was about to reply, he became aware of a sound. It seemed very far off and was a kind of droning, heavy sound, a steady humming, with bursts of other noises mixed in, which could barely be made out in the humming, but which made him think at once of the vatch. This commotion, whatever it was, was moving towards him with incredible speed. A glance at the faces of Hulik and Vezzarn, who sat at the table across from him, told the captain it was not the sort of sound physical ears could pick up; their expressions didn’t change.

He did not have time to look around at Goth, who’d left the table for a moment, and was somewhere in the room behind him. As distant as it seemed when he first caught it, the droning swelled enormously in an instant approaching the Venture’s control compartment in such a dead straight line that the captain felt himself duck involuntarily, as if to dodge something which couldn’t possibly be dodged. The accompanying racket, increasing equally in volume, certainly was the vatch’s bellowing wind-voice but with an odd quality the captain had never heard before. The notion flashed through his mind that the vatch sounded like a nearly spent runner, advancing in great leaps to keep ahead of some dire menace pressing close on his heels, while he gasped out his astonishment at being so pursued.

Then the droning reached the control compartment — and stopped, was wiped out, as it reached it. An icy pitch-blackness swept through the room and was gone. For a moment the captain had relled vatch overwhelmingly. But that was gone, too. Then he realized he could still hear the monster’s agitated voice, now receding into distance as swiftly as it had approached. In an instant it faded completely away.

As it faded, Goth said, “Captain!” from across the room behind him, and Hulik made a small, brief, squealing noise. Twisting about, half out of his chair, the captain froze again, staring at the Leewit.

Toll’s youngest daughter was on the floor in the center of the room, turning over and coming up on hands and knees. She stayed that way, blond hair tangled wildly, gray eyes glaring like those of a small, fierce animal, as her head turned quickly, first towards the captain, then towards Goth, hurrying towards her.

“Touch-talk! Quick!” the Leewit’s high child-voice said sharply, and Goth dropped to her knees next to her. The captain heard the scrape of chairs, quick footsteps, glanced back and saw Vezzarn and Hulik hastily leaving the compartment section, returned his attention to the witch sisters. Goth had pulled the Leewit around and was holding her against herself, right palm laid along the side of the Leewit’s head, her other hand pressing the Leewit’s palm against her own temple. They stayed that way for perhaps a minute. Then the Leewit’s small shape seemed to sag. Goth let her down to the floor, drew a long breath, stood up.

“Where did… is she going to be all right?” the captain inquired hoarsely.

“Huh? Sure! That was Toll,” Goth told him, blinking absently at the Leewit.

“Toll?”

“Holding on and talking through the Leewit.” Goth tapped the side of her head. “Touch-talk! Told me a lot before she had to go back to Karres-now…” She glanced about, went to the stack of folded blankets used by Hulik and Vezzarn during the night, hauled them out of the comer and started pulling them apart. “Better help me get the Leewit wrapped in five, six of these before she comes to, Captain!”

Joining her, the captain glanced at the Leewit. She was lying on one side now, eyes closed, knees drawn up. “Why wrap her in blankets?” he asked.

“Spread them out like so… Vatch took her over the Egger Route. She’ll throw three fits when she first wakes up — most everyone does! Route’s pretty awful! Won’t last long, but she’ll be hard to hang on to if we don’t have her wrapped.”

They laid the Leewit on the blankets, began rolling her up tightly in them. “Cover her head good!” Goth cautioned.

“She won’t be able to breathe—”

“She isn’t breathing now,” Goth told him, with appalling unconcern. “Go ahead that’s the way to do it!”

By the time they were done, the bundled-up non-breathing Leewit looked unnervingly like a small mummy laid away for a thousand-year rest. They knelt on the floor at either end of her, Goth holding her shoulders, the captain gripping her wrapped ankles. “Can cut loose any time now!” Goth said, satisfied.

“While we’re waiting,” said the captain, “what happened?”

Goth shook her head. “First off, what’s going to happen. The Leewit mustn’t hear that because she can’t block a vatch. They’re coming for us. Don’t know when they’ll make it, but they’ll be here.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Toll and the others. Whoever they can spare. Can’t spare too many though, because they’re already fighting the Worm Worlders. They’re at the Tark Nembi place — the Dead Suns Cluster, where I thought it might be — trying to work through to Manaret. Right now Karres is stuck in a force-web tangle, with so many Nuri globes around you can’t look into space from there—”

It sounded like an alarming situation, but Goth said the witches had their new weapons going and figured they could make it. They’d had a plan to use the Manaret synergizer, which would have made their undertaking much less difficult; but time was running out, and they’d given up waiting for Olimy to arrive with the device or report his whereabouts. They had to assume he’d been trapped and was lost. But now that they knew what had happened, they were throwing everyone available on the problem of tracing out the Egger Route section the vatch had broken into the distant past. Toll still had a line on the Leewit, though a tenuous one, so they’d know exactly to what point to go. When they arrived, they’d reverse and take the Venture with everyone and everything on it back to Karres-now.

“They can move the whole ship over the Route?”

“Sure. Don’t worry about that! You could move a sun over the Route except it’d nova before it got anywhere. If they get to us quick enough, that’ll be it.”

“The vatch…”

“Looks to me,” Goth said, “like the vatch got the idea backwards. You said get the synergizer to the other Karres, to the witches that can use it. So instead it brought a Karres witch back to the synergizer.”

“The Leewit?” said the captain, astonished.

“Can’t figure that either yet!” Goth admitted. “Well, it’s a vatch—”

“What was the humming noise?”

“That’s the Route. Vatch punched it straight into the ship so it could drop the Leewit in with us.”

He grunted. “How did Toll do, uh, whatever she did?”

Goth said no one had realized a giant-vatch was hanging around Karres-now until it scooped up the Leewit. With all the klatha forces boiling on and about the planet at the moment, the area was swarming with lesser vatches, attracted to the commotion; among them the giant remained unnoticed. But when the Leewit disappeared, Toll spotted it and instantly went after it. She’d got a hook into the vatch and a line on her daughter and was rapidly overhauling the vatch when it managed to jerk free.

“I see,” nodded the captain. Another time might be better to inquire what esoteric processes were involved in getting a hook into a giant-vatch and a line through time on one’s daughter.

“Toll didn’t have enough hold on the Leewit then to do much good right away,” Goth continued. “There was just time for the touch-talk before she got sucked back to Karres-now.”

“I suppose touch-talk’s a kind of thought-swapping?”

“Sort of, but—”

The small blanket-wrapped form between them uttered a yowl that put the captain’s hair on end. The next moment he was jerked forward almost on his face as the Leewit doubled up sharply, and he nearly lost his grip on her ankles. Then he found himself on his side on the floor, hanging on to something which twisted, wrenched, kicked, and rotated with incredible rapidity and vigor. The vocal din bursting from the blankets was no less incredible. Goth, lying across the Leewit with her arms locked around her, was being dragged about on the deck.

Then the bundle suddenly went limp. There was still a good deal of noise coming from it; but those were the Leewit’s normal shrieks of wrath, much muffled now.

“Woo-ooof!” gasped Goth, relaxing her hold somewhat. “Rough one! She’s all right now, though — you can let go—”

“Hope she hasn’t hurt herself!” The captain was a little out of breath, too, more with surprise and apprehension than because of the effort he’d put out.