Inside I felt the pain of seeing her so broken. The Kaththea of the past might have suffered deeply, but she would have fought to the end, asking aid only as might one shield mate from another.
“Kaththea—” I tried to put my paw on her again, but she backed farther and farther from me, her eyes wild, her hands warding me off. “Kaththea, think!” Could I reach her anymore? Though I was loath to give that which abode here any deeper rooting in me, yet that I must do, or perhaps lose her utterly.
I held the sword by the blade so that the hilt was between us. Then I said a word. Fire shimmered once more, to burn me, but still I held fast to that column of golden flame.
“Kaththea, are you one who harbors evil within you? Those of the Wise Ones often examine their spirits, look well upon their motives, know the pitfalls and traps which await all those who put out their hands to the powers. Long you dwelt with them, and your unwillingness to join with them came from no evil, but because you had stronger ties elsewhere. Since you left Estcarp and came into Escore, what ill have you done by design—or thought on doing?”
Was she even listening to me? she held her hands before her face, but did not try to touch it, as if she feared that the flesh there would not be human.
“You are not evil, Kaththea; that I will not believe! If you are not, then how can it be that you see your inner self? This is only an illusion; we are among those to whom illusion is a common tool. You are only monster on this plane, as I am monster.”
“But Dinzil—” she thought.
“To Dinzil this is his place; he has made himself one with it. He has said so, just as he also told me that when you were one with it, not part monster, then you would be locked to him and his cause. Is that what you wish, Kaththea?”
She was shivering, great shudders shaking her squat, unlovely body. More and more her face faded and I saw the eyepits, the ovoid head of the weeper.
“I am monster—lost in a monster—”
“You dwell within a covering forced upon you in this place. For many powers fair is foul, as well as foul is fair.”
I thought she was listening now. She asked slowly: “What do you want of me? Why do you come to pull at me with memories?”
“Come with me!”
“Where?”
Where, indeed? I might recross that plain, pass through the remains of the gem barrier, back beyond the weeper’s place. But then where? Could I find an exit, leading from the Tower, anchored in Escore? I was not sure, and she knew my uncertainty and fastened upon it.
“Come with you, say you! When I ask where, you have no answer for me. What would you have us do, wander in this place, brother? It holds dangers the like of which you cannot imagine. Do not doubt Dinzil will come hunting.”
“Where is he now?”
“Where is he now?” she mimicked me shrilly. “Do you fear that he will come into the here and now to face you?” Then suddenly her eyes changed and the old current flowed between us.
“Kemoc?”
“Yes?”
“Kemoc, what has happened to us, to me?” She spoke simply as might a child bewildered by all she now saw and felt.
“We are in a place which is not ours, Kaththea, and it seeks to mold us into its own forms and ways. There is a way back—do you know it?”
Her blob head on which the traces of her normal face had almost disappeared, turned slowly as if she now gazed about her with new eyes, to which this was much of a puzzle.
“I came here—”
“How?” I believed I dared not press here too hard, yet if she did know of Dinzil’s door between the worlds, and it was not the same one through which I had entered, there was a chance for our escape.
“I think—” That hand which was still human raised uncertainly toward her head. Clumsily she turned to face the tapestry covered wall. “This way—”
She shuffled, her hands out before her. Then she picked up one edge of the tapestry, pulled it out. There, set in the wall, glowing an angry purple-red, was a symbol. I did not know it but its far-off descendant I had once seen, and I knew it for a symbol of such a power as I would not dare to summon.
I felt my sister’s thoughts writhe to shape a word, before I could protest. The symbol in the stone coiled as if a loathsome reptile had been loosed. Round and round it ran, and I would not look upon it, for there was a sickness in me that Kaththea knew that word. Then the stone vanished and only those glowing lines ran, and ran, spilling down into a pool of sullen, molten color on the floor, and that began to trickle away.
I stumbled forward, pulling at Kaththea to save her from the touch of that pool. Ahead was nothingness as there had been in that other tower through which I had plunged into this place.
“The door is open,” Kaththea’s thought was once more chill and assured. “For the sake of what lay between us in the past, take your freedom and go, Kemoc!”
The arm which still bore Orsya’s bespelled scarf was about her shoulders before she could dodge me. With the sword in my other hand I plunged on, using the weight of my body to bear her with me. I think she was too surprised to resist. It might not be Dinzil’s door, but in that moment I saw it as the only hope for both of us.
Falling—falling—I had kept no grasp on Kaththea after we went over the drop. That she had come with me was the thought I carried along into nothingness.
Once more I awoke to pain and a dulling of mind. But in awhile I noted that no color flashes leapt here, rather there was dimness and chill walls about me. I thought that Dinzil, by some trick, had me again in prison. The sword—where was the sword?
I raised my head where I lay prone on hard stone and looked about. Then I saw a glimmer beyond my paw—Paw? So I was not free from that other place. A vast misery of disappointment fell on me as a crushing weight.
But—my head strained higher—the paw was at the end of an arm, a human arm! On that the faint tracing of a scar I knew well; I could remember the fight in which I took it.
Now I levered myself up to look down at the rest of my body. It was no longer that of a toadman; remnants of human clothing covered me from the waist down. But the paws—I hardly dared to touch my face with those misshapen things, as if some of their foulness might rub off. But I must know if I still wore a toad head on my shoulders.
Beyond me, in the gloom of that place, something else moved. On my hands and knees, dragging the sword with me, I went to see what.
A human body wearing the riding dress of the Valley people, a woman’s body. At the end of her slender arms were red paws even more formless than mine. Above her shoulders was an ovoid, hairless featureless, save for two eye-pits. At my coming the head swung and those pits looked at me as if organs of sight hid somewhere in their depths.
“Kaththea!” I stretched forth my paws to her, but she once more avoided me. Only raised her own paws to set beside mine, as if to emphasize their monster form. Then she cowered away and brought up her arms to hide her head.
What moved me then I do not know, but I plucked at the scarf about my arm, no longer a band of light, but once more silken fabric. I now held it out to Kaththea.
The pit eyes peered at it over the top of one of her shielding arms. Then her paw came forth and snatched it from me, winding it around and around her head, leaving but a small slit open for sight.
Meanwhile I looked around. We were either back in the Tower rooted in Escore, or its double. We sat on the floor near the staircase as steep as a ladder. The doorways through which one could pass into those other worlds were closed, but the sooner we were away the better. I turned to my sister.