The captain pushed his palm over his forehead, wiping clammy sweat. “But what are they?” he asked. “What do they want?”
“What are they? They are the Nuris… What do they want?” Vezzarn shook his head. “Worm Weather comes! Perhaps only a lick of fire in the sky at night. Perhaps nothing else happens…” He paused. “But when they send out their thoughts, sir — then it can be bad! Then it can be very bad!”
People slept, and woke screaming. Or walked in fear of something for which they had no name. Or saw the glorious and terrible caverns of Manaret opening before them in broad daylight… Some believed they had been taken there, and somehow returned.
People did vanish when Worm Weather came. People who never were seen again. That was well established. It did not happen always, but it had happened too often…
Perhaps it wasn’t even the thoughts of the Nuris that poured into a human world at such times, but the thoughts of Moander. Moander the monster, the god, who crouched on the surface of Manaret… who spoke in a thousand voices, in a thousand tongues. Some said the Nuris themselves were no more than Moander’s thoughts drifting out and away endlessly through the universe.
It had been worse, it seemed, in the old days. There were ancient stories of worlds whose populations had been swept by storms of panic and such wildly destructive insanity that only mindless remnants were later found still huddling in the gutted cities. And worlds where hundreds of thousands of inhabitants had tracelessly disappeared overnight. But those events had been back in the period of the Great Eastern Wars when planets enough died in gigantic battlings among men. What role Manaret had played in that could no longer be said with any certainty.
“One thing is true though, sir,” Vezzarn concluded earnestly. “I’ve been telling you this because you asked, and because you should know there’s danger in it. But it’s a bad business otherwise to talk much about Worm Weather or what it means — even to think about it too long. That’s been known a long time. Where there’s loose talk about Worm Weather, there Worm Weather will go finally. It’s as if they can feel the talk and don’t like it. So nobody wants to say much about it. It’s safer to take no more interest in them than you can help. Though it’s hard to keep from thinking about the devil-things when you see the sky turning yellow above your head!
“Now I’ll wish you good-night, Dani and Captain Aron. It’s time and past for supper and a nightcap for old Vezzarn — who talks a deal more than he should, I think.”
“Didn’t know the Worm stuff had been around here,” Goth remarked thoughtfully as they turned away from the groundcab that had brought them back up to their house.
“You already knew about that, eh?” The captain nodded. “I had the impression you did. Got something to tell you — but we’d better wait till we’re private.”
“Uh-huh!”
She went up the winding stairway to the living room while the captain took the groceries they’d picked up in the port shopping area to the kitchen. When he followed her upstairs he saw an opaque cloudy shimmering just beyond the living room door, showing she’d switched on their spy-proofing gadget. The captain stepped into the shimmering and it cleared away before him. The watch-shaped device lay on the table in the center of the room, and Goth was warming her hands at the fireplace. She looked around.
“Well,” he said, “now we can talk. Did Vezzarn have his story straight?”
Goth nodded. “Pretty straight. That Worm World isn’t really a world at all, though.”
“No? What is it?”
“Ship,” Goth told him. “Sort of a spaceship. Big one! Big as Uldune or Karres… Better tell me first what you were going to.”
“Well—” The captain hesitated. “It’s that description Vezzarn gave of the Nuris…” He reported his dream, the feelings it had aroused in him, and what had been going on when he woke up. “Apparently there really was Worm Weather over Zergandol that night,” he concluded.
“Uh-huh!” Goth’s teeth briefly indented her lower lip. Her eyes remained reflectively on his face.
“But I don’t have any explanation for the dream,” the captain said. “Unless it was the kind of thing Vezzarn was talking about.”
“Wasn’t exactly a dream, captain. Nuris have a sort of klatha. You were seeing them that way. Likely, they knew it.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked, startled.
“Nuris hunt witches,” Goth explained.
“Hunt them? Why?”
She shrugged. “They’ve figured out too much about the Manaret business on Karres… Other reasons, too!”
Now he became alarmed. “But then you’re in danger while we’re on Uldune!”
“I’m not,” Goth said. “You were in danger. You’d be again if we got Worm Weather anywhere near Zergandol.”
“But…”
“You got klatha. Nuris’d figure you for a witch. We’ll fix that now!”
She moved out before him, facing him, lifted a finger, held it up in front of his eyes, a few feet away. Her face grew dead serious, intent. “Watch the way it moves!”
He followed the fingertip as it drew a fleeting, wavy line through the air. Goth’s hand stopped, closed quickly to a fist as if cutting off the line behind it. “You do it now,” she said. “In your head.”
“Draw the same kind of line, you mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
She waited while the captain went through some difficult mental maneuverings.
“Got it!” he announced at last, with satisfaction.
Goth’s finger came up again. “Now this one…”
Three further linear patterns were traced in the air for him, each quite different from the others. Practicing them mentally, the captain felt himself grow warm, perspiry, vaguely wondered why. When he was able to say he’d mastered the fourth one, Goth nodded.
“Now you do them together, Captain… one after the other, the way I showed you quick as you can!”
“Together, eh?” He loosened his collar. He wasn’t just perspiring now; he was dripping wet. A distinct feeling of internal heat building up… some witch trick she was showing him. He might have felt more skeptical about it if it weren’t for the heat. “This helps against Nuris?”
“Uh-huh. A lock.” Goth didn’t smile; she was disregarding his appearance, and her small brown face was still very intent. “Hurry up! You mustn’t forget any of it.”
He grunted, closed his eyes, concentrated.
Pattern One — easy! Pattern Two… Pattern Three -
His mind wavered an instant, groping. Internal heat suddenly surged up. Startled, he remembered:
Four!
A blurred pinwheel of blue brilliance appeared, spun momentarily inside his skull, collapsed to a diamond-bright point, was gone. As it went, there was a snapping sensation, also inside his skull — an almost audible snap. Then everything was relaxing, went quiet. The heat magically ebbed away while he drew a breath. He opened his eyes, somewhat shaken.
Goth was grinning. “Knew you could do it, Captain!”
“What did I do?” he asked.
“Built a good lock! You’ll have to practice a little still. That’ll be easy. The Nuris come around then, you switch the lock on. They won’t know you’re there!”
“Well, that’s fine!” said the captain weakly. He looked about for a cloth, mopped at his face. He’d have to change his clothes, he decided. “Where’d that heat come from?”
“Klatha heat. It’s a hot pattern, all right — that’s why it’s so good… Don’t show those moves to somebody who can’t do them right. Not unless you don’t mind about them.”