“This gate—their gate—you think it lies there?” Jaelithe asked.
“Only a guess, but I believe it a good one. They are either reaching through that again, or preparing to. For some reason they must have contact with their home world.”
“And that is where we may also find most of their fighters.” One of the Sulcarmen observed.
“It is that—or the fortress. And frankly I would rather be in the open than in that Kolder shell again.”
The Sulcarman grunted what might be an assent to that. “Open—that is best. Ynglin, this will be a night to notch on the sword hilt before it is done.”
“The sword of Sigrod has already been well notched,” his fellow replied. “Lord, do we also take this woman with us?”
“Yes!” Jaelithe answered first. “She is needful to us, how I cannot yet see—but yet she will be needful.”
Simon was willing to trust to Jaelithe’s instinct in this. Aldis had not even gasped when the heat ray skimmed so close to their hiding place. Whether the Kolder agent was in a state of shock, or whether she was familiar with her masters’ weapons and merely waited for nemesis to catch up with the fugitives, Simon could not tell. But he felt uneasy over the talisman she carried and what that might do to entangle them again.
“We should take her Kolder symbol—” He spoke that last thought aloud.
But again Jaelithe countered with: “No—in some way that is a key and it may open doors for us. I do not think it will work so, save when Aldis uses it. But no thing of power is to be lightly discarded. And I shall know if she tries to use it, that I shall surely know!” The confidence in her words was complete, though Simon still had shadowy reservations.
Again linked together they began a slow journey, since none of them denied the wisdom of seeking the bottom of each cut or canyon which led in the general direction of the ulterior. In the dark Simon was the guide, testing and feeling for each step at times. And their progress was painfully slow.
At intervals they rested and all of them nursed bruises, scrapes, a cut or two, from falls and slips among the rocks. The dawn showed them as grimed and dirty scarecrows. But with the early light also came sound . . . Flattened on a rock slope they could watch, over the spine of a ridge, a crawling vehicle, its arcs of light cutting ahead to dazzle the fugitives’ eyes. Simon sighed with relief. His worst fear had been that they were lost in this wilderness of rock. Now he believed they must be close to what they sought.
This crawler was returning to the keep, empty of supplies. Supplies. Simon swallowed. Food, water—both in this barren country would be found only in Kolder hands. Already the need of water pressed him; it probably was as hard for the others. Five of them and a prisoner—and there the might of the Kolder. Perhaps it would have been simpler to invade the keep.
“Simpler—” Jaelithe’s answer was almost a part of his own flow of thought. For seconds Simon did not realize that it was not. “Perhaps simpler, but not the right answer.”
He glanced at her where she lay, her mail-clad shoulder nearly rubbing against his. With her helm on her head and the loose scarf of metal links depending from it wound about chin and throat, half her face was veiled. But her eyes met his squarely.
“Reading of thoughts?” Again she answered an unvoiced question. “Not quite that, I think, rather that a similar path is followed by us both. You are aware, too, that this is necessary for our venture. And the answer is not safety—not for us—but something far different.”
“The gate!”
“The gate,” she affirmed. “You believe that these Kolder must have something from there to aid in what they would do in our world. That I believe also, therefore they must not succeed.”
“Which depends upon the nature of their gate.”
The one which had brought Simon into this world had been a very simple affair—a rough stone between pillars of the same crudely hewn substance. A man sat himself there so—hands at his sides fitting into depressions such as also cupped his buttocks. He then waited for dawn and the gate was open. The guardian of that way had told Simon legends in the hours he had passed of a long night waiting for the dawn. The tales told that this was a stone of great story: the Siege Perilous of Arthur’s use, an enchanted stone which somehow read a man’s soul and then opened to him the world in which he best fitted.
But whatever gate had let the Kolders through to defile this world had not been that kind. And what five of them could do to close it, Simon had not the least idea. Only Jaelithe was also right—this was the thing which must be done.
They skulked along the heights as the light grew stronger, able to follow the marks of the caterpillar trucks below. One of the marines climbed the mesa wall to scout beyond. The others took turns in sleeping in a hidden crevice. Only Aldis sat, staring before her, her hands, though bound at the wrists, resting tight against the Kolder talisman on her breast, as if such touch brought her strength.
She had been a rarely beautiful woman, but now she aged before their eyes, her flesh thinning until the bones were stark in jaw and cheek, her eyes sunken in ridged sockets. Her tangled golden hair was as incongruous as a girl’s wig on an old woman. Since they had begun the march her sight had never focused on any of them; she might have been one of the possessed. Yet Simon thought it was not the quenching of life which made her so, but rather a withdrawal to some hiding place deep within her, from which spirit and life would waken when the need came.
And so, for all her present passivity, she was to be watched—if not feared. Loyse was the watcher and Simon thought she took more than a little pleasure in the knowledge that their roles were now reversed, that it was she who controlled, Aldis who obeyed.
Simon lay with his eyes closed, but he could not sleep. The energy he had expended in the Kolder keep and after, instead of tiring him, seemed to set ferment to working. He had the sensation of one faced with a problem, clues close to hand, and the driving need to solve it. More used to weapons he could hold, touch, this new ability to work mentally kept his mind restless, awoke uneasiness in him. He opened his eyes to find Jaelithe watching him across the narrow cleft in which they sheltered. She smiled.
And for the first time he wondered a little at the form of their meeting. That barrier he had thought so thick, growing thicker, had vanished utterly. Had it ever been there at all? Yes—but now it seemed as if it had existed for two other people, not for them.
She did not touch him by hand, or mind, but suddenly there was a flow of warmth and feeling about him, in him, which he had never experienced before, though he thought he had known the ultimate in union. And under that caressing warmth he at last relaxed, the pitch of awareness no less, but not so taut and binding.
Was this what Jaelithe had known as a witch, what she had missed and then thought she had found again? Simon understood perfectly how great that loss must have seemed.
Scrape of boot on rock—Simon was on his feet, looking to the end of the crevice. Sigrod swung down. He pulled off his tight-fitting, crestless helm, wiped his arm across his sweating face. His cheeks were flushed.
“They are there right enough, a whole camp of them—mostly possessed. They have a thing set up.” He was frowning a little as if trying to find the words in his seaman’s vocabulary to best describe what he had seen. Then he used his fingers to support description. “There are pillars set so . . .” Forefinger pointed vertically. “And a crosspiece—so.” A horizontal line. “It is all made of metal, I think—green in color.”