So intent was I upon following it that it was not until later I realized I had said no farewell to Orsya, nor was I even sure I could find again that reef-ridge in the stream where I had left her. But I knew without being told that if I allowed other thoughts to distract me from the remembered image of Kaththea I would lose this guide.
I climbed the bank, giving my green ribbon full attention. Above the cut of the stream the mist thinned. For a space there was good and wholesome foliage about me, as there had been all along the waterway. But that began to grow sparser. Then came herbage of another kind which had the noxious look of evil growth. I had taken time by the stream to reinforce my boots with strips cut from my jerkin, and now my upper body was bare to the chill which lingered over the land.
On wriggled the scarf and I followed. The ground rose steadily, but as yet the slope was not difficult to breast. I kept the sword in my hand, looking now and then to it for the glowing of the danger runes.
Orsya had masked us in illusion. That would not hold for me alone. But as yet the land seemed deserted; that in itself struck me as strange and sinister, as if I walked now into a trap, my way made easy until the lock of the cage clicked behind me.
Up and up, and colder the air I shivered in. Kaththea . . . I sought Kaththea. She was to me as a missing arm, a part lopped off to leave me crippled.
Then the sword blazed scarlet. Someone came running lightly through the last tatters of the mist. She whom I sought! But the sword was red—
“Brother!” Her hands reached for mine.
There had been another Kaththea who was illusion, who had almost tricked me once, in the garden of the Secret Place.
Or was this such a future as Loskeetha had seen. If I turned steel against this smiling girl, would my sister’s blood flow over it?
Trust to the sword, Orsya had said. Fair is foul . . . if it says so.
“Kemoc!” Hands out . . . then that green ribbon flowed across the rock. She gave a croaking cry which could never rightfully burst from any human throat, as if that silken thing was a poisonous reptile. And I struck.
Blood fountained up to bathe the blade, showered in crimson drops over my hand. Where those drops touched my skin, fire ate. What lay writhing on the ground was a thing out of deep nightmare. It died still trying to reach me with great grasping claws.
Did he who ruled the Dark Tower know that I came? Or was the form this guard had used to mask its evil lifted just now from my mind? For the Kaththea who had run to meet me was the youthful Kaththea I thought on. I thrust the sword into the sand, whipping it back and forth to cleanse it of the smoking blood. The drops I smeared from my hand left blisters rising on the skin. Then I hurried to catch up with the green ribbon which had not paused.
It dropped over a bank into a road, rutted by use, and that not too long ago. To my unease the ribbon wriggled now in one of those ruts. But there was naught I could do, save follow, even though such a path must lead me directly to whatever guards Dinzil would have placed here.
Towering rocks walled in this way and, as it had been in the road away from Loskeetha, it seemed that things slid to peer, leer, threaten under the surface of the stone, to be sighted from the corners of one’s eyes, to vanish when one looked directly.
I heard weeping as a low wail such as the wind might make, but it grew louder as I went. From the top of a rise I looked down into a cup, from which the road went up again on the far side. In that hollow was a woman of the Green People, her clothing rent from her, her bruised body lashed across a rock so that her spine was arched at a painful angle. She wailed and then babbled as might one who had passed too far the threshold of pain and terror.
The sword flamed—
Too good a touchstone was that for Dinzil’s traps, or those I had met so far. It would be easy to pass this counterfeit of his devising, yet to leave a live enemy at my back—that was folly. So persuasive was the illusion that I had to force my hand to the use of the warning sword.
The woman vanished as blood ran. There was a man in her place, choking in death. Man? He had a human body, and human features, but what I saw in the hate-filled eyes he turned upon me, what he screamed as he died—those were not of mankind.
A dead monster, a dead seeming-man. Did Dinzil know when they died? Did I so alert him against my coming?
I pulled up to the top of the rise beyond the cup and saw it.
This was the Dark Tower of Loskeetha’s pictures. I hesitated; two visions she had shown me. In one I would meet with some bewilderment before I reached the Tower and, during that, cut down Kaththea. Therefore, beware; watch for any troubling. . . .
The green ribbon flowed on to where that black finger pointed as if in defiance to the sky.
It was in truth, a dark tower. The stone of its walls was black; it had about it that suggestion of terrible age which was in Es City, in some of the places where the Wise Women carried out their sorceries. As if not only the years men knew had passed over it, but another withering and aging which was not of our reckoning.
There were no breaks in its surface, no sign of door or window. It stood on a mound covered with a thick growth of short grass, a gray grass. The road I followed ran only to the foot of that mound. There had been traffic on that road, yet those who used it might well have leaped forth from the ground at that spot; there were no signs they had ever passed over the grass.
I went forward slowly, alert always to any hint that Loskeetha’s prophecy was about to be fulfilled. When I reached the mound I breathed easier. Two of her pictures had I now defeated, that of the Valley, and the fight before the Tower.
The scarf had paused before the mound side. One end of it arose to wave in the air, back and forth, as if it would climb that rise but dared not rest upon the grass. I saw that the runes were red when I pointed the sword at that slope.
I touched the scarf with the sword and was amazed as straightway the silk wreathed itself about the length of golden metal, writhed up over it to my arm, and there wrapped itself around and around flesh and muscle. There was a warmth to it which spread over my shoulder into the rest of my body.
But I was no nearer my goal, the interior of the Tower. Now I put the thought of Kaththea to the back of my mind while I considered the problem immediately before me. There was a spell here to which I had no key.
Or did I? There was one mentioned in old legends, but it was danger above danger to use it in such a place. For, while it opened the doors of the Shadow, or was said to do so, it also threw away some of the defenses of him who used it, rendering him easy prey.
How much can one trust legends? Since we had come into the fields of Escore, we had come to believe that there was more truth than fantasy in the tales of Estcarp. I could take this road, knowing I had thrown away some shields, and prove whether or not this particular story was also true.
To linger here, hoping for blind chance to perhaps throw me a favor, was folly. I had no other key, so let me turn this one.
I set off to walk around that mound and Tower widdershins, against the light of the sun, open-eyed into the ways of those who served the Shadow. If I did it with my teeth set, my hand locked upon sword hilt, that was only return for the danger I was sure I faced.
Three, seven, nine, those are the numbers which have power in them. One of those three I was sure I must use now. Three times I walked that ringing, from the road’s end to the road’s end. Nothing happened.