The stairs were behind me at last, and I stood on the top of the cliff wall of the Valley. Cut into the surface of the stone was a path. As the steps had narrowed little by little, this followed the opposite pattern: beginning no wider than that exit, spreading out, wedge-shaped, beyond to a place where stood a forest of pillars.
Night had come while I climbed and, though I wanted to go on, the weariness was now so heavy upon me I could pull myself no farther than to where I could rest my length in a slot of the road, wrapped in my cloak. So I slept, with no drowsy fall into slumber, but a swift extinction of consciousness. Had I wished, I could not have fought that sleep.
I awoke as swiftly, sat up stiffly, to flex my arms and legs. Dawn light struck here. I ate sparingly from the food Dahaun had packed for me, drank a mouthful of water from my bottle. I must guard well those supplies, she had warned me. For, in troubled lands where the Shadow reached, a man might be brought under evil influences should he eat of what he found growing ripe and ready to his plucking.
Once more I walked that wedge road. The pillars did not appear to be set in any order, nor did they carry any marks of tooling. They might rather have been the boles of petrified trees from which crowns and branches had long since been chipped away. So strong did this feeling of being in a stone forest grow, that I kept glancing from side to side to see if those missing branches might still lie on the surface between the boles. But the rock was bare. As the wind arose and blew among those standing stones, I could plainly hear the sound present in a grove when a stout breeze sets leaves to rustling. I shut my eyes once and knew that I stood in a grove; yet when I opened them to look, I only gazed upon stone.
The rustling of the unseen wood grew louder, though the push of air against me was no more. There began a wailing, a keening, which were the cries of all the bereft of the world wailing their dead. That, too, died away, and then there was sound—words I thought—in no tongue known to me or any man of my kind. It did not answer, as had that Other I had provoked in the lowlands. No, these sounds were uttered in a space which might touch upon that in which I moved, but was not mine.
The very feeling of that awesome otherness was such that I did fall, or rather was crushed, to my knees, unable to even think of where that might be—or what lips uttered those words.
There followed silence as sharp as if a door had been shut, no wind, no wailing, only silence. I got to my feet and began to run on. So I came into an open space where the road ended, and I stood staring about me.
Stone and rock . . . Across that rock a splash of color. I went to that. It lay in a loose coil as if dropped only a moment earlier. I picked up a scarf, loose, silken, its fine threads catching on my scarred fingers’ rough skin. It was green-blue, such a scarf as the women of the Valley wore about their shoulders in the evening. Kaththea had worn a like one when she had laughed with Dinzil at the feasting.
“Kaththea!” I felt it was wrong to raise my voice in that place, but I dared the mind call, as I stood running the soft length back and forth in my hands. “Kaththea! Where are you?”
Silence . . . that dead and awesome silence which had fallen in this place since the closing of the door. To my mind not the faintest answer, though I went seeking.
I coiled the scarf into a small handful and stowed it inside my jerkin to lie against my breast. It had been Kaththea’s I was sure. Thus, perhaps, I could use it for a linkage, since a possession can be a draw point.
But where had she gone from here? Not back into the Valley . . . and the road to this haunted place ended here. If she had gone on, it was among those stone trees and there I would follow.
The road had been a sure guide, but once I left it behind and threaded a way among the standing stones, I found I had entered a maze. There was no point ahead I could fix upon as a goal, and, as I twisted and turned, I found myself heading back into the open space where I had found the scarf. On the second such return, I sat down.
That there was a spell set here I no longer doubted. It was meant to confuse mind and eye. To counter it, I closed my eyes upon those bewildering ranks of trees and concentrated on the days I had spent in Lormt. It had been so accepted that no male could use witch power that no guardianship had been put on the records. It was true that most were written in such allegorical style, with so many obscure references to matters unknown, that those not carefully schooled in witch training could make little or nothing of them. At the time I had been searching there, my one desire was to find a refuge for us, and so I had paid little attention to other secrets.
But some of what I had pushed aside along the way lingered in mind. I had the words which had brought the answer; those I had no intention of trying again. Now I must bring to my need other knowledge.
There was a chance. I forced a picture from memory.
A page of parchment covered with crabbed, archaic writing. Of the handful of words I had been able to read, perhaps a few would serve. How much power did I have in me? Was I one who had inherited the ability of my father to overstep the boundaries of my sex and be more gifted than other males of the Old Race?
I brought out that scarf I had carried. Now I began to knead and roll it between my fingers, twisting it slowly and with care into a cord. So soft was the material it was like a ribbon. Then I knotted the two ends and laid it down before me, so that what I had was a circle, very vivid against the stone.
Fixing my full attention on it as it lay there, I brought my will into use. I had no training in such matters. All I possessed was a memory of some lines on parchment, a driving need for success, and a will which might or might not be equal to the demand I made upon it.
Kaththea . . . in my mind I built the picture of Kaththea, perhaps not just as she was in life, but as she was to me. I concentrated upon that picture for a long time, trying to see her standing within that green circle. Then—now would come the test of what I knew, or what I might be.
I moved my hands slowly and I said aloud three words.
Hardly daring to breathe I watched and waited. The blue-green circlet trembled . . . one side across. Now it was a hoop balanced on its edge. It began to roll slowly, away from the open, out among the topless, branchless stone trees. I followed it, holding to the hope that I had now a guide.
* * *
* * *
VII
BACK AND FORTH the hoop wove a path through the stone wood, and many times was I sure it turned upon itself to lead me in circles. Yet it was my only hope for passing through this ensorceled place. Sometimes I faced the now beaming sun, and then I would remember the old warnings: when a man’s shadow lay behind him, so that he could not set eye upon it—that was the time when evil might creep upon him unawares. But, although this place was alien to me, I did not think of it as evil, rather as a barrier, set up to warn off or mislead those who had no kinship with it. We came at last to the other side of that pillared land and the hoop rolled into the open. It wobbled from side to side as if the energy which sustained it was failing. Yet still it rolled, and the path it followed was straight ahead; now there was no chiseled road, only rough rock worked by time and storms.
To the very end of this plateau the loop brought me before it collapsed, no longer anything but a silken cord. If what powers I had sought to fasten upon it had worked, then Kaththea had come this way. But why? And—how?