The one I followed had reached the final inner door, that of the library. And there it or she lingered so long that I wondered if that was the goal. Then, as if reassured that she was not being watched, the figure came out into the bright moonlight.
Bartare! Somehow I was not in the least surprised. She no longer wore her nightrobe, but had on her favorite green dress, though her hair swung tree as I had seen it last. She was carrying something in both hands as if, though the object seemed small and light, it was so precious that she must take good care of it. Holding it out, a little away from her body, she stood intently studying the pattern of the pavement.
Then, as if she had made some important choice, she set that which she carried on one of the crystal pieces, taking some care in that placing, as if she must be very sure of what she did.
Having so centered it to her liking, she withdrew a little, and her small hands moved in a series of gestures that wove for me a disturbing pattern. They must have a meaning, but to me the feeling was that of searching for some important word eluding the conscious mind.
I heard a murmur of sound, too far away, too low-pitched for me to distinguish any words, yet speech it was. And so speaking, perhaps to what she had put in place, perhaps only to the empty air, Bartare began a dance that led her feet from one crystal block to another, while she took great care not to tread on anything else.
Since the pattern was wide and those blocks well scattered, her round brought her slowly to where I stood in the shadow of the door of her father’s study. Now I could distinguish separate word sounds, still without meaning. It was plain she chanted, the words strung together in a cadence of a ritual salutation or invocation.
Invocation! I fastened upon that. It could explain much, and while danger lay there for any imaginative child, yet it was normal enough. I could have quoted hundreds of cases where the young, especially girls entering into adolescence, had created for themselves imagined forces and played with the belief in powers unknown to others. If Bartare was esper without realizing the fact, this might well be the fashion in which her slowly expanding power would lead her.
She halted her dance not too far away and turned to face the thing set up in the full moonlight. Once more she gestured, as if she were grasping and pulling to her some emanation. Having so gathered the invisible, she rolled it between her palms as one takes wet clay and balls it to make a sphere. Then she threw what she did not really hold, aiming it at the door of her mother’s bedroom.
Again she drew from the object, rolled and threw. This time that toss of nothing was for Oomark’s doorway. When she began for the third time to collect invisibility, I had no doubt that it was meant for the room I did not occupy, and so it was.
After she made that last throw, she visibly relaxed. I read into her stance a feeling of security such as had been mine when I closed the courtyard entrance, as if she had now bolted some doors leaving her free to do as she would.
She went back to the object, still careful to step only on the crystal blocks, picked it up, and hugged it tightly to her. Then, still treading on crystal only, she went to the outer gate of the courtyard.
However much she believed in what she had done, she had not triumphed over the robo protector. The crackles of a force shield flashed warning before her, and the alert of an audible warning brought a small answering cry from her. She stopped, her right arm raised as if again hurling something at that which barred her leaving, but this time with no results. The shield held, the alarm purred, and I judged it time to show myself.
“Bartare!” I stepped out of the shadow.
She whirled, sliding her feet from the crystal block on which she had stood. Her eyes glistened as might those of a cornered and startled animal, just as her Ups drew back against her teeth, showing small white tips bared to bite. She might have been expecting some physical attack.
Her move brought her away from the warning zone of the gate protection. Both the alert and the force field stopped. She did not move toward me, but waited for me to join her. Her arms tightened about what she held, as if that, above all, must be protected. And I saw it was the doll-image she had dressed in green.
“Bartare – ” I was rather at a loss for words. And I was sure she would answer no questions I might ask now. Perhaps I would be on better terms with her, more able to win her confidence, if I did not push the matter. That this was a secret thing of her own, I did not doubt. “Bartare – it is time for sleeping – ”
That sounded feeble as no one knew better than myself.
“Then sleep!” she returned. “They do-” That slight nod indicated the rooms of her mother and Oomark. “Why do you not?” It seemed to me that the fact I stood there was disconcerting for her, marked a failure.
“I don’t know. Perhaps because this is my first night on a strange world. Who can say that one does not change a little when stepping on alien soil?” I spoke to her as I would to Lazk Volk.
“All worlds are strange – if you look.”
I guessed that she was referring obliquely to what had occurred here, so I nodded.
“That is true, for no one can look through another’s eyes and see exactly as she sees. What I call a flower – such as this” – and I reached down to touch a cup-shaped bloom in a nearby bed – “you may also call a flower and yet not see it as I do – ” I halted, for the blossom I had touched was going through a frightening transformation.
It had been pale ivory. Now from the point where my ringers had so lightly touched it, a dark, unwholesome stain spread. The flower was withering, decaying, dead and dying, as if my touch polluted and killed.
Bartare laughed.
“I see a dead flower. What do you see, Kilda? Is it the same? Do you see death coming from your fingers?”
This might be hallucination, but how it had been produced I could not tell. It was certainly unnerving. My hold on logic was the hope that it might indeed be so fragile a bloom that any touch would harm it. There were sensitive plants, though I had never seen one so much so as this.
“Do you see death often, Kilda? As in mirrors?” She came closer to me, her glistening eyes on mine, trying to see into me, see the fear that had filled me when I had looked into the mirror. At that moment I could believe – I was sure that Bartare not only knew what had happened, but also why and how. And I could not hold back questions.
“Why, Bartare-and how?”
Again she laughed, shrilly, a little cruelly, as sometimes a child may when she is single-hearted and set on gaining her own desires.
“Why? Because you look, Kilda, and you listen, and you want to know too much. Do you want to look in other mirrors, Kilda, and see always what you would not like to? There are other things that can happen – worse than just a reflection.”
Deliberately she turned a little from me to gaze out over the moonlit court. Then she spoke once more, but it was not to me. She addressed those words to the empty air.
“You see?” she demanded. “Kilda is no more than any of the others. There is no need to think twice of her.”
She waited as if for an answer. Then she retreated a step or two, and the look of triumph vanished from her face. My own imagination supplied a rebuke that I could not hear but which had Chastened the girl’s self-esteem. If that was what had happened, she might be ready to vent her disappointment and anger on me, the more so because I was a witness.
But her discomfiture was that of a child. She lost the Strange, disturbing maturity that had masked her. Instead, her features screwed up into a familiar pattern of frustrated – anger as she shrilled at me, “I hate you! Spy on me again, and I’ll make you sorry! I will! I will! You’ll see!”
She turned and ran, paying no attention now to the blocks over which she fled, intent only upon reaching the door of her room. And an instant later that clicked firmly shut behind her.