There were no breaks in its surface, no sign of door or window. It stood on a mound covered with a thick growth of short gra.s.s, a gray gra.s.s. The road I followed ran only to the foot of that mound. There had been traffic on that road, yet those who used it might well have leaped forth from the ground at that spot; there were no signs they had ever pa.s.sed over the gra.s.s.

I went forward slowly, alert always to any hint that Loskeetha's prophecy was about to be fulfilled. When I reached the mound I breathed easier. Two of her pictures had I now defeated, that of the Valley, and the fight before the Tower.

The scarf had paused before the mound side. One end of it arose to wave in the air, back and forth, as if it would climb that rise but dared not rest upon the gra.s.s. I saw that the runes were red when I pointed the sword at that slope.

I touched the scarf with the sword and was amazed as straightway the silk wreathed itself about the length of golden metal, writhed up over it to my arm, and there wrapped itself around and around flesh and muscle. There was a warmth to it which spread over my shoulder into the rest of my body.

But I was no nearer my goal, the interior of the Tower. Now I put the thought of Kaththea to the back of my mind while I considered the problem immediately before me. There was a spell here to which I had no key.

Or did I? There was one mentioned in old legends, but it was danger above danger to use it in such a place. For, while it opened the doors of the Shadow, or was said to do so, it also threw away some of the defenses of him who used it, rendering him easy prey.

How much can one trust legends? Since we had come into the fields of Escore, we had come to believe that there was more truth than fantasy in the tales of Estcarp. I could take this road, knowing I had thrown away some shields, and prove whether or not this particular story was also true.

To linger here, hoping for blind chance to perhaps throw me a favor, was folly. I had no other key, so let me turn this one.

I set off to walk around that mound and Tower widdershins, against the light of the sun, open-eyed into the ways of those who served the Shadow. If I did it with my teeth set, my hand locked upon sword hilt, that was only return for the danger I was sure I faced.

Three, seven, nine, those are the numbers which have power in them. One of those three I was sure I must use now. Three times I walked that ringing, from the road's end to the road's end. Nothing happened.

Four times more I made that journey. The warmth from the scarf was in me; the sword showed the only danger was on the mound.

Three and seven had not availed me; now I must try nine. When I came to the road's end for the ninth time, there was at last an answer. The gra.s.s vanished in a shifting the eye could not follow. My door was open and it led, not to the tower above, but into the mound on which that sat. An open door in which no guardian stood-who knew what waited inside?

Holding the sword before me, fully expecting to see it burst into fiery runes, I advanced step by cautious step. But the warning I thought to see did not come. Before me was a pa.s.sage with unbroken walls having a cold gray glimmer. That pa.s.sage ran on and on.

I walked, my eyes going from wall to sword, to wall again, seeking a door, a stair, some way into the Tower above. While there was none of that shifting movement under the surface here, as there had been on the rocks without, still there was an odd, distracting distortion when one looked too long at those walls, a queer sickening feeling.

How long did that pa.s.sage run? It seemed to me that I had traveled leagues and that I ached with weariness, yet dared not vary my pace nor sit to rest in such a place. At last there was an archway and through it I came into a round room which might indeed have marked the foundation of the tower. There were other doors here, set about the walls, so that if similar pa.s.sages to that I had followed ran from them, they would be spoked as a wheel. But there were no stairs, no way aloft.

I moved about that round chamber, trying each door. They had neither handles nor latches; not one gave, even when I put my shoulder to them in full strength. There was only the road I had come from.

Then I went to the middle of the room. I could retreat without accomplishing anything. So far Loskeetha's third future had not materialized. There was no sign of Kaththea, nor of any shadow form to which she could betray me.

Kaththea! I laid my left hand over the binding of the scarf about my upper arm. Into my mind I resummoned the memory of Kaththea. Under my touch the tie stirred, begin to unwind. I withdrew my fingers but continued to remember. The ribbon length crept down, wreathing about the sword to reach the pavement.

XIV.

I HAD expected my silken guide to seek out one of those barred doors. Instead it drew in tight coils to the midpoint of the chamber, almost at my feet, and one end pointed up, to the roof. I leaned back, but to my eyes there was no hint of any opening there.

Illusion? This was a place in which illusion was a weapon. What was the answer to illusion? Suddenly I thought of those sc.r.a.ps netted in Lormt. To use countermagic here was to open my defenses further, yet there was nothing else I could do. The sword was an emblem of power; how much power, I could not guess. But it would provide, or I hoped it would, the spark I needed. I closed my eyes and held the sword high, pressing its blade to my face, so that I felt the metal touch my eyelids.

I did not say those ancient words aloud in this place, rather I thought them slowly, picturing them in my mind as I had seen them on that crumpled, time worn parchment.

Three there were, and then three more. Then after them the mind picture of a certain symbol. I put down the sword and opened my eyes, to see how well I had wrought.

There was a stair before me, a ladder of stone blocks. Up it went the scarf. So . . . by this much had my learning worked; I had my door into the Dark Tower. I began to climb, watching the sword for warning of ill to come. But, as in the pa.s.sage and the room below, there was no sign of glowing runes.

Up and up went that steep stair. Though I had seen a ceiling over my head when I stood below, yet now it seemed that that was also an illusion: that there were no floors above, only this stair leading up and up.

Though I could see the stone steps immediately before me, farther ahead they were concealed by a shifting. Fearing giddiness on such a steep perch, I dared not watch them.

The scarf continued to rise confidently ahead. Around the stair there was a sense of open s.p.a.ce in which that core of stone ladder was the only secure thing. Thus I could look neither to left nor right, lest light-headedness a.s.sault me.

Under my breath I muttered some of those words of power. The sensation that I might lose my balance at every step and go spinning off one side or the other, into that nothingness, grew stronger, until it was close to torment.

But there did come at last an end to the stair. I emerged through a well opening, to stand in a circular chamber, not unlike the one in which the stair was rooted, save that it was smaller. The scarf coiled there, one end aloft like the head of a reptile, weaving back and forth.

There were doorways here, also, but these portals were open, with no locked barriers. Only, each of them opened upon nothingness! Not fog, nor mist, but upon open s.p.a.ce.

When I had glanced at them I sat down on the floor, my sword across my knees, unable to move because of the panic which comes to all of us with a dream of falling. For those doorways drew, beckoned, and I was afraid as I had never been before.

What kind of a place that was I did not know. But that it was an entrance way into areas where my kind was not meant to venture, of that I was convinced. Yet the scarf brought me here.

Kaththea! I closed my eyes, fastened my will upon a mind picture, put my desire into it. Then I opened my eyes again. The scarf-it was no longer coiled-moved toward one of those portals open upon nothingness.

I thought this was another illusion, that the scarf had at last betrayed me, and once more I applied the ritual which had freed my sight below. I raised the sword to my eyes and repeated the potent charm.

When I looked again, there was no change. The scarf was coiled before the doorway directly before me; it fluttered one end up and down as it had when it had come to the mound and dared not touch the evil gra.s.s there.

I could not get to my feet, so little did I now trust my sense of balance. I crawled on hands and knees, pushing the sword before me. Then I was behind that questing scarf facing nothingness. In that moment I almost broke, being sure that it was not in me to go through that door into whatever lay beyond.

My hand went out and fell upon the scarf and once more that wreathed about my hand and wrist, moved up my arm. In my despair I voiced a call: "Kaththea!"

As I had set my will on the scarf, so did I now bend it. I had used mind touch all my life, but this time I put into it all my energy. The effort left me weak and gasping, as if I had run clad in full mail to the top of a hill and then plunged at once into fierce swordplay.

I lay flat upon the floor of that chamber, my forehead on the blade of the sword. Perhaps it was the virtue in that which helped me now. For faint, very faint, and from far off, came an answer: "Kemoc?" No louder than a sigh. Yet it was an answer, and there could be no illusion in it.

So . . . she still lived, even though she might be pent in this place. To reach her I must-must-go through that door. In that moment I was not sure I could force myself to do so.

What had I to serve me? The scarf which Orsya had bespelled for me, the sword which had not been forged by my race, some words which might summon help, or call down doom. . . . I was a blind man, wandering unguided.

I began to crawl; it was beyond my strength to stand erect and march as a man should. As I crawled part of me, deep inside, shrieked and struggled against such folly, such willed self-destruction. For it hammered in my brain that to go into such a place without mighty protection was advancing to certain death, and not only that of the body.

Now that I was on the very threshold of that doorway, I had to shut my eyes. To look upon that nothingness churned all the thoughts in a man's brain and made him mad.

My will gave me the last thrust through-over- This was the old nightmare-falling, falling, falling . . .

Not only my thoughts were twisted-pain-such agony as a man cannot bear, I felt. Yet I did not escape into unconsciousness-I fell-and felt.

I was no man now, only a thing which cried, screamed, whimpered, suffered.

Color, burst of wild color-What was color?

Crawling . . . across a flat surface. Great sweeps of that raw, eye-hurting color bursting in explosive action from surface to over head. A dull drone of noise . . . crawl . . .

My eyes were full of tears; they were also full of fire which burnt back into my head.

MY? Who was my? What was my?

Crawl on . . . keep moving. Shut eyes against another violent blast of flaming color. Do not cease to crawl-Why?

It is hard to put into words what possessed that "my" in that time. I cannot tell how long it took for a small sense of ident.i.ty to seep back to that thing which crawled, wept, flinched from every burst of the earth-sky flames.

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 h.e.l.lish 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 ma.s.sive 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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.

There was no sound, only a wave of feeling. But I was buffeted by it to the ground as a man may be beaten down by a storm of great force, I lay under it, fighting to hold my own ident.i.ty intact. Then it was gone, and I pulled once more to my hands and knees. That what had wept was crumbling, falling apart, as unbaked clay will yield to water. Swiftly it went, until there was nothing left but a heaped pile of red dust.

Shaking, I got clumsily to my feet. Something lay there. Startled, I saw that the light which had traveled with me had taken on a more substantial form. Once again it had the outline of a sword. When I went painfully back down on one knee to grasp it, I discovered that, while I could move it a little way, I still could not pick it up.

Once more I stood as erect as I could, for the first time becoming aware of another change. There was an alteration in the feeling of this land, a kind of troubling. I began to wonder if, in my pity, I had not done something which would bring on me such notice as no traveler here would care to court.

"Kaththea!"

I sent the thought and tried to speed the pace of my shuffle, also puzzling as to why my sword had changed.

Sytry willing-The words I had used from no memory of my own. Further back, when I had fought the monster in the underground channel-what had I called on? Sytry! Was it a name or a word of power? there was a way to test that. I came to a stop, staring down at that gold shaft-blade.

In the name of Sytry! I thought. Be you again a weapon to my hand, a thing of power!

There was no buffeting wind of emotion this time. Rather a trembling which shook my body as if some invisible thing shook me to and fro. A flash of light exploded, to dance wildly along the length of the sword, making it blaze until I shut my eyes and uttered a beastly kind of mewling sound. But when I forced them open again- The sword-no light beam now-but seemingly a weapon as complete and concrete as that which I had carried out of the tomb. I was on my knees where that shaking fit had left me; for the third time I reached for the hilt. It was hard to flex my paw about it, yet I did so. From that grip a new kind of strength flowed up my arm into me.

Who was Sytry? Or what? In this place it had some governance. Would it also restore my own form so that I could go into battle, if need be, as one in his proper body?

In the Name of Sytry, I tried that thought, let me be as the man I was- I waited for that shaking, for some sign that the spell would work again. But nothing came; I did not alter. Then I got wearily to my feet. The sword was a thing of Sytry; I was not. I should not have hoped it would be so.

"Kaththea!"