Wizards’ Worlds (50 page)

Fob off a demon with a handful of meal and a too-ripe melon, would they? With three
haunches of cured meat and all that other stuff on board!

Craike voiced a roar which could have done credit to the red bear, a roar which altered
into a demand for meat. The paddlers nearly lost control of their crude craft. But
one reached for a haunch and threw it blindly on the refuse-covered rock, while his
companion added a basket of small cakes into the bargain.

“Enough, little men—” Craike’s voice boomed hollowly. “You may pass free.”

They needed no urging, they did not look at those threatening towers as their paddles
bit into the water, adding impetus to the pull of the current.

Craike watched them well out of sight before he made a slow descent to the rock. The
effort he was forced to expend warned him that a second such trip might be impossible,
and he inched back to the terrace dragging both meat and cakes.

The cured haunch he worried into strips, using his pocket knife. It was tough, not
too pleasant to the taste and unsalted. But he found it more appetizing than the cakes
of baked meal. With this supply he could afford to lie up and favor his leg.

About the claw rents the flesh was red and puffed. Craike had no dressing but river
water and the leaves he had tied over the tears. Sampur was beyond his power to reach,
and to contact men traveling on the river would only bring the Black Hoods.

He lay in his grass nest and tried to sort out the events
of the past few days. This was a land in which Esper powers were allowed free range.
He had no idea of how he had come here, but it seemed to his feverish mind that he
had been granted another chance—one in which the scales of justice were more balanced
in his favor. If he could only find the girl, learn from her—

Tentatively, without real hope, he sent out a questing thought. Nothing. He moved
impatiently, wrenching his leg, so that his head swam with pain. Throat and mouth
were dry. The lap of water sounded in his ears. Water—he was thirsty again. But he
could not crawl down slope and up once more. Craike closed his eyes wearily.

C
RAIKE’S
memory of the hours which followed thereafter was dim. HAD he seen a demon in the
doorway? A slavering wolf? A red bear?

Then the girl sat there, cross-legged as he had seen her on the mesa, her cloak of
hair about her. A hand emerged from the cloak to lay wood on the fire. Illusions?

But would an illusion turn to him, put firm, cool fingers upon his wound, somehow
driving out by touch the pain and fire which burned there? Would an illusion raise
his head, cradling it against her so that the soft silk of her hair lay against his
cheek and throat, urging on him liquid out of a crude bowl? Would an illusion sing
softly to herself while she drew a fish-bone comb back and forth through her hair,
until the song and the sweep of the comb lulled him into a sleep so deep that no dream
walked there?

He awoke, clear headed. Yet that last illusion lingered. For she came from the sun-drenched
world without, a bowl of fruit in her hand. For a long moment she stood gazing at
him searchingly. But when he tried mind contact, he met that wall. Not unheeding—but
a refusal to answer.

Her hair was now braided. But about her face the lock
which the guardsman had shorn made an untidy fringe. While around her thin body was
a strip of hide, purposefully arranged to mask all femininity.

“So,” Craike spoke rustily, “you are real—”

She did not smile. “I am real. You no longer dream with fever.”

“Who are you?” He asked the first of his long-hoarded questions.

“I am Takya.” She added nothing to that.

“You are Takya, and you are a witch—”

“I am Takya, and I have the power.” It was an assertion of fact rather than agreement.

She settled in her favorite cross-legged position, selected a fruit from her bowl
and examined it with the interest of a housewife who has shopped for supplies on a
limited budget. Then she placed it in his hand before she chose another for herself.
He bit into the plumlike globe. If she would only drop her barrier, let him communicate
in the way which was fuller and deeper than speech.

“You also have the power—”

Craike decided to be no more communicative than she. He replied to that with a curt
nod.

“Yet you have not been horned—”

“Not as you have been. But in my own world, yes.”

“Your world?” Her eyes held some of the feral glow of a hunting cat’s. “What world,
and why were you horned there, man of sand and ash, power?”

Without knowing why Craike related the events of the days past. Takya listened, he
was certain, with more than ears alone. She picked up a stick from the pile of firewood
and drew patterns in the sand and ash, patterns which had something to do with her
listening.

“Your power was great enough to break a world wall.” She snapped the stick between
two fingers, threw it into the flames.

“A world wall?”

“We of the power have long known that different
worlds lie together in such a fashion.” She held up her hand with the fingers tight
lying one to another. “Sometimes there comes a moment when two touch so closely that
the power can carry one through. If at that moment there is a desperate need for escape.
But those places of meeting can not be readily found, and the moment of their touch
can lay only for an instant. Have you in your world no reports of men and women who
have vanished almost in sight of their fellows?”

Remembering old tales he nodded.

“I have seen a summoning from another world,” she continued with a shiver, running
both hands down the length of her braids as if so she evoked a shield for both mind
and body. “To summon so is a great evil, for no man can hold in check the power of
something alien. You broke the will of the Black Hoods when I was a beast running
from their hunt. When I made the serpent to warn you off, you changed it into a fox.
And when the Black Hoods would have shorn my power—” she looped the braids about her
wrists, caressing, treasuring them against her small breasts, “again you broke their
hold and set me free for a second time. But this you could not have done had you been
born into this world, for our power must follow set laws. Yours lies outside out patterns
and can cut across those laws—even as the knife cut this—” She touched the rough patch
of hair at her temple.

“Follow patterns? Then it was those patterns in stone which drew you down from the
mesa?”

“Yes. Takyi, my womb-brother, whom they slew there, was blood of my blood, bone of
my bone. When they crushed him, then they could use him to draw me, and I could not
resist. But in the slaying of his husk they freed me—to their great torment, as Tousuth
shall discover in time.”

“Tell me of this country. Who are the Black Hoods and why did they horn you? Are you
not of their breed since you have the power?”

But Takya did not answer at once in words. Nor did she, as he had hoped, lower her
mind barrier.

Her fingers now held one long hair she had pulled from her head, and this she began
to weave in and out, swiftly intricately, in a complicated series of loops and crossed
strands. After a moment Craike did not see the white fingers, nor the black hair they
passed in loops from one to another. Rather did he see the pictures she wrought in
her weaving.

A wide land, largely wilderness. The impressions he had gathered from Kaluf and the
traders crystalized into vivid life. Small holdings here and there, ruled by petty
lords, new settlements carved out by a scattered people moving up from the south in
great wheeled wains, bringing flocks and herds, their carefully treasured seed. Stopping
here and there for a season to sow and reap, until they decided upon a site for their
final rooting. Tiny city-states, protected by the Black Hoods—the Esper born who purposefully
interbred their own gifted stock, keeping their children apart.

Takya and her brother coming, as was sometimes—if rarely—true, from the common people.
Carefully watched by the Black Hoods. Then discovered to be a new mutation, condemned
as such to be used for experimentation. But for a while protected by the local lord
who wanted Takya.

But he might not take her unwilling. For the power that was hers as a virgin was wholly
rift from her should she be forced. And he had wanted that power, obedient to him,
as a check upon the monopoly of the Black Hoods. So with some patience he had set
himself to a peaceful wooing. But the Black Hoods had moved first.

Had they accomplished her taking, the end they had intended for her was not as easy
as death. And she wove a picture of it, with all its degradation and shame stark and
open, for Craike’s seeing.

“Then the Hooded ones are evil?”

“Not wholly.” She untwisted the hair and put it with care into the fire. “They do
much good, and without them people would suffer. But I, Takya, am different. And after
me, when I mate, there will be others also different. How different we are not yet
sure. The Hooded Ones want no change, by their thinking that means disaster. So they
would use me to their own purposes. Only I, Takya, shall not be so used!”

“No, you shall not.” The vehemence of his own outburst startled him. Craike wanted
nothing so much at that moment than to come to grips with the Black Hoods, who had
planned this systematic hunt.

“What will you do now?” He asked more calmly, wishing she would share her thoughts
with him.

“This is a strong place. Did you cleanse it?”

He nodded impatiently.

“So I thought. That was also a task one born to this world might not have performed.
But those who pass are not yet aware of the Cleansing. They will not trouble us, but
pay tribute.”

Craike found her complacency irritating. To lie up here and live on the offerings
of river travelers did not appeal to him.

“This stone piling is older work than Sampur and much better,” she continued. “It
must have been a fortress for some of those forgotten ones who held lands and then
vanished long before we came from the south. If it is repaired no lord of this district
would have so good a roof.”

“Two of us to rebuild it?” he laughed.

“Two of us—working thus.”

A block of stone, the size of a brick, which had fallen from the sill of one of the
needle-narrow windows, arose slowly in the air, settled into the space from which
it had tumbled. Illusion or reality? Craike got to his feet and lurched to the window.
His hand fell upon the stone which
moved easily in his grasp. He took it out, weighed it, and then gently returned it
to its place. Not illusion.

“But illusion too—if need be.” There was, for the first time, a warm note of amusement
in her tone. “Look on your tower, river lord!”

He limped to the door. Outside it was warm, sunny, but it was a site of ruins. Then
the picture changed. Brown drifts of grass vanished from the terrace, the fallen stone
was all in place. A hard-faced sentry stood wary-eyed on a repaired river arch. Another
guardsman led out ponies saddle-padded and ready, other men were about garrison tasks.

Craike grinned. The sentry on the arch lost his helm, his jerkin. He now wore the
tight tunic of the Security Police, his spear was a gas rifle. The ponies misted,
and in their place a speedster sat on the stone. He heard her laugh.

“
Your
guard,
your
traveling machine. But how grim, ugly. This is better!”

Guards, machine, all were swept away. Craike caught his breath at the sight of delicate
winged creatures dancing in the air, displaying a joy of life he had never known.
Fawns, little people of the wild, came to mingle with such shapes of beauty and desire
that at last he turned his head away.

“Illusion,” her voice was hard, mocking.

But Craike could not believe that what he had seen had been born from hardness and
mockery.

“All illusions. We shall be better now with warriors. As for plans, can you suggest
any better than to remain here and take what fortune sends—for a space?”

“Those winged dancers—where?”

“Illusions!” She returned harshly. “But such games tire one. I do not think we shall
conjure up any garrison before they are needed. Come, do not tear open those wounds
of yours anew, for healing is no illusion and drains one even more of the power.”

The clawed furrows were healing cleanly, though he would bear their scars for life.
He hobbled back to the grass bed and dropped upon it, but regretted the erasure of
the sprites she had shown him.

Once he was safely in place, Takya left with the curt explanation she had things to
do. But Craike was restless, too much so to remain long inside the tower. He waited
until she had gone and then, with the aid of his staff, climbed to the end of the
span above the river. From here the twin tower on the other bank looked the same as
the one from which he had come. Whether it was also haunted Craike did not know. But,
as he looked about, he could see the sense of Takya’s suggestion. A few illusion sentries
would discourage any ordinary intrusion.

Takya’s housekeeping had changed the rock of offerings. All the rotting debris was
gone and none of the odor of decay now offended the nostrils at a change of wind.
But at best it was a most uncertain source of supply. There could not be too many
farms upriver, nor too many travelers taking the water way.

As if to refute that, his Esper sense brought him sudden warning of strangers beyond
the upper bend. But, Craike tensed, there were no peasants bound for the market at
Sampur. Fear, pain, anger, such emotions heralded their coming. There were three,
and one was hurt. But they were not Esper, nor did they serve the Black Hoods. Though
they were, or had been, fighting men.

A brutal journey over the mountains where they had lost comrades, the finding of this
river, the theft of the dugout they now used so expertly—it was all there for him
to read. And beneath that something else, which, when he found it, gave Craike a quick
decision in their favor—a deep hatred of the Black Hoods! Outlaws, very close to despair,
keeping on a hopeless trail because it was not in them to surrender.