“It’s pretty much like Toll’s voice,” she agreed. “That was my Toll pattern.”
“Your what?”
Goth rubbed her nose tip. “Guess I can tell you,” she decided. “You won’t get it all, though. I don’t either….”
Her Toll pattern was a klatha learning device. In fact, a nonmaterial partial replica of the personality of an adult witch whose basic individuality was similar to that of the witch child given the device. In this case, Toll’s. “It’s sort of with me in there,” Goth said, tapping the side of her head. “Don’t notice it much but it’s helping. Now here, Sedmon was checking on how good I was. Don’t know why exactly. I figured I ought to get fancy to show him but wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So the Toll pattern took over. It knew what to do. See?”
“Hmm… not entirely.”
Goth pushed herself up on the edge of a gleaming blue table and looked at him, dangling her legs. “Course you don’t,” she said. She considered. “Pattern can’t do just anything. It has to be something I can almost do already so it only has to show me. Else it’d get me messed up, like I told you.”
“Meaning you’re almost able to plant a pig’s head on somebody if you feel like it?” the captain asked.
“Wasn’t a pig’s head.”
“Pretty good imitation then!”
“Bend light, bend color.” Goth shrugged. “That’s all. They’ll stay that way as long as you want. When Sunnat puts her hands up to feel, she’ll know she’s got her own head. But she’s going to look part pig for a time.”
“Can’t quite imagine you doing one of those incantations by yourself! That was impressive.”
“Incant….’ oh, that! You don’t need all that,” Goth told him. “Toll pattern did it to scare everybody. Especially Sedmon.”
“It worked, I think,” He studied her curiously. “So when will you start bending light?”
Goth’s face took on a bemused expression. There was a blur. Then a small round pig’s head squinted at him from above her jacket collar, smirking unpleasantly.
“Oink!” it said in Goth’s voice.
“Cut it out!” said the captain, startled.
The head blurred again, became Goth’s. She grinned. “Told you I just had to be shown.”
“I believe you now. How long will Sunnat be stuck with the one she’s got?”
“Didn’t you hear what the pattern told her?”
He shook his head. “I heard it, it seemed to mean something. But somehow I wasn’t really understanding a word. And I don’t think anyone else there was.”
“Sunnat understood it,” Goth said. “It was talking to her…. She’s got to quit wanting to do things like burning people and scaring people, like that fat old Bazim. The less she wants that, the less she’ll look like a pig. She works at it; she could look pretty much like she was in about a month. And….”
Goth turned her head. There’d been a knock at the door. She put her hand in her pocket, snapped off the spy-screen, slid down from the table. The captain went over to the door to let in the Daal of Uldune.
“There are matters of such grave potential significance,” the Daal said vaguely, “that it is difficult, extremely difficult, to decide to whom one may unburden oneself concerning them. I….”
His voice trailed off, not for the first time in this conversation. His gaze shifted across the shining blue table to the captain, to Goth, back to the captain. He shook his head again, bit at a knuckle with an expression of worried irritability.
The captain studied him with some puzzlement. Sedmon seemed itching to tell them something but unable to make up his mind to do it. What was the problem? He’d implied he had information of great importance to Karres. If so, they’d better get it.
The Daal glanced at Goth again, speculatively. “Perhaps Your Wisdom understands,” he murmured.
“Uh-huh,” said Goth brightly, in her little-girl voice.
He’d tell Goth if they were alone? The captain considered. There hadn’t been many “Your Wisdoms” coming his way since that business in the Little Court! Possibly Sedmon had done some private reevaluating of the events in Sunnat’s underground dungeon last night. It would take, as, in fact, it had taken, only one genuine witch on the team to account for that.
Not so good, perhaps…. He considered again.
“I really think,” he heard himself say pleasantly, “it might be best if you did unburden yourself to us, Sedmon of the Six Lives…”
The Daal’s eyes flickered.
“So!” It was a small hiss. “I suspected … but it was a difficult thing to believe, even of such as you. Well, we all have our secrets, and our reasons for them….” He stood up. “Come with me then Captain Aron and Dani! You should know better what to make of what I have here than I do.”
The captain hoped they would. He certainly did not know what to make of Sedmon the Sixth, and of the Six Lives, at the moment! But he seemed to have said the right thing at the right time, at that.
Sedmon led them swiftly, the hem of his black gown flapping about his heels, through a series of narrow passages and up stairways into another section of the House of Thunders. They met no one on the way. Three times the Daal stopped to unlock heavy doors with keys produced from a fold in the gown, locked them again behind them. He did not speak at all until they turned at last into a blind passage that showed only one door and that near the far end. There he slowed.
“Half the problem is here,” he said, addressing them equally as they came up to the door. “When you’ve seen it, I’ll tell you what else I know, which is little enough. There’ll be another thing to show you later in another place.”
He unlocked and opened the door. The room beyond was long and low, showed no furnishings. But something like a heavy, slowly rippling iron gray curtain screened the far end.
“A guard field,” said the Daal sourly. “I’ve done everything possible to keep the matter quiet. In that I think I’ve been successful. It was all I could do until I came in contact with a competent member of your people.” He gave them a sideways glance. “No doubt you have your own problems but for weeks I’ve been unable to learn where somebody who could act for Karres might be found!”
His manner had taken another turn. He was dropping all formality here, addressing them with some irritability as equals and including Goth as if she were another adult. And he was not concealing the fact that he felt he had reason for complaint, nor that he was a badly worried man. Reaching into his gown, he brought out a small device, glanced at it, pressed down with his thumb.
The guard field faded, and the far end of the room appeared beyond it. A couch stood there. On it, in an odd attitude of abruptly frozen motion, sat a man in spacer coveralls. He was strongly built, might have been ten years older than the captain. Goth’s breath made a sharp sucking sound of surprise.
“You know this fellow?” the Daal asked.
“Yes,” Goth said. “It’s Olimy!”
“He’s of Karres?”
“Yes.”
She started forward, the captain moving with her, while the Daal stayed a few feet behind. Olimy gazed into the room with unblinking black eyes. He sat at the edge of the couch, legs stretched out to the floor, arms half lifted and reaching forwards, fingers curled as if closing on something. His expression was one of alertness and intense concentration. But the expression didn’t change and Olimy didn’t move.
“He was found like this, a month and a half ago, sitting before the controls of his ship,” the- Daal said. “Perhaps you understand his condition. I don’t. He can be shifted out of the position you see him in, but when released he gradually returns to it. He can be lifted and carried about but can’t actually be touched. There’s a thin layer of force about him, unlike anything of which I’ve heard. It’s detectable only by the fact that nothing can pass through it. He appears to be alive but….”
“He disminded himself.” Goth’s face and tone were expressionless. She looked up at the captain. “We got to take him to Emris, I guess. They’ll help him there.”
“Uh-huh.” Then she didn’t know either how to contact other witches this side of the Chaladoor at present. “You mentioned his ship,” the captain said to the Daal.
“Yes. It’s three hours’ flight from here, still at the point where it was discovered. He was the only one on board. How it approached Uldune and landed without registering on detection instruments isn’t known.” Sedmon’s mouth grimaced. “ He had an object with him which I ordered left on the ship. I won’t try to describe it; you’ll see it for yourselves…. Are there any measures you wish taken regarding this man before we go?”