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 space in which that core of stone ladder was the only secure thing. Thus I could look neither to left nor right, lest light-headedness assault 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 space.
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 grass 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 calclass="underline"
“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 identity 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.