Warlock by Andre Norton

Why? That puzzled her almost more than how. She could only believe that it had been left here for her. But that meant that “they” knew she was coming, could gauge the moment of her arrival so well that the yellow stew had been hot when she first tasted it. There was no mark that any aircraft had landed.

Charis moistened her lips.

“Please—” her own voice sounded thin and reedy and, she had to admit, a little frightened as she listened to it “—please, where are you?” She raised that plea to a call. There was no answer.

“Where are you?” Again she made herself call, louder, more beseechingly.

The echoing silence made her shrink a little. It was as if she were exposed here to the view of unseen presences—a specimen of her kind under examination. And she wanted away from here—now.

Carefully she placed the now empty bowl on the rock. There were several of the fruit and two pancakes left. Charis rolled these up in the cloth. She got to her feet, and for some reason she could not quite understand, she faced seaward.

“Thank you.” Again she dared raise her voice. “Thank you.” Perhaps this had not been meant for her, but she believed that it had.

With the bundle of food in her hand, Charis went on across the plateau. At its southern tip she looked back. The shining white of the bowl was easy to see. It sat just where she had left it, exposed on the rock. Yet she had half expected to find it gone, had kept her back turned and her eyes straight ahead for that very reason.

To the south, the terrain was like a flight of steps, devised for and by giants, descending in a series of ledges. Some of these bedded growths of purple and lavender vegetation, but all of it spindly short bushes and the tough knife-bladed grass. Charis made her way carefully from one drop to the next, watching for another eruption of clakers or others signs of hostile life.

She had to favor her sore feet and that journey took a long time, though she had no way of measuring the passing of planet hours save by the sun’s movements. It was necessary that she look forward for shelter against the night. The sense of well-being which had warmed her along with the food was fading as she considered what the coming of Warlockian darkness might mean if she did not discover an adequate hiding place.

At last she determined to stay where she was on the ledge she had just reached. The stubby growth could not mask any large intruder, and she had a wide view against any sudden attack. Though how she might defend herself without weapons, Charis did not know. Carefully she unwrapped the remains of the food and put it aside on some leaves she pulled from a sprawling plant. She began to twist the alien fabric into a cord, finding that its soft length did crush well in the process, so that she ended with a rope of sorts.

With a withered branch she was able to pry a stone about as big as her fist from the earth, and she worked hurriedly to knot it into one end of her improvised rope. Against any real weapon this would be a laughable defense, but it gave her some small protection against native beasts. Charis felt safer when she had it under her hand and ready for use.

The sunlight had already faded from the lower land where she now was. With the going of that brighter light, splotches of a diffused gleam were beginning to show here and there. Bushes and shrubs glowed with phosphorescence as the twilight grew deeper, and from some of them, as the heat of the day chilled away, a fragrance was carried by a rising sea breeze.

Charis settled her back against the wall of the drop down which she had come, facing the open. Her weapon lay under her right hand, but she knew that sooner or later she would sleep, that she could not keep long at bay the fatigue which weighted not only her drooping eyelids but her whole body. And when she slept . . . Things happened while one slept on Warlock! Would she awake once more to find herself in a new and strange part of the wilderness? To be on the safe side, she put the food in its leaf-wrapping into the front of her coverall and tied the loose end of the scarf weapon about her wrist. When she went this time, she would take what small supplies she had with her.

Tired as she was, Charis tried to fight that perhaps betraying sleep. There was no use speculating about what force was in power here. To keep going she must concentrate on the mechanics of living. Something had turned the clakers and the sea beast from attack. Could she ascribe that to the will of the same presence which had left the food? If so, what was “their” game?

Study of an alien under certain conditions? Was she being used as an experimental animal? It was one answer and a logical one to what had happened to her so far. But at least “they” had kept her from real harm—her left hand folded over the lump of food inside her coverall; as yet any active move on “their” part had been to her advantage.

So sleepy . . . Why fight this leaden cloud? But—where would she wake again?

On the ledge, chilled and stiff, and in a dark which was not a true dark because of those splotches of light-diffusing plants and shrubs. Charis blinked. Had she dreamed again? If so, she could not remember doing so this time. But there was some reason why she must move here and now, get down from the ledge, then get over there.

She got up stiffly, looping the scarf about her wrist. Was it night or early morning? Time did not matter, but the urgency to move did. Down—and over there. She did not try to fight that pressure but went.

The light plants were signposts for her, and she saw that either their light or scent had attracted small flying things that flickered with sparkles of their own as they winged in and out of those patches of eerie radiance. The somberness of Warlock in the day became a weird ethereality by night.

Darkness which was true shadow beyond—that was her goal. As had happened on the beach when she had struggled to turn north to try and retrace her path to the post, so now she could not fight against the influence which aimed her at that dark blot, which exerted more and more pressure on her will, bringing with it a heightening of that sense of urgency which had been hers at her abrupt awakening.

Unwillingly she came out of the half-light of the vegetation into darkness—a cave or cleft in the rock. Drifts of leaves were under her feet, the sense of enclosing walls about her. Charis’s outflung hands brushed rock on either side. She could still see, however, above her the wink of a star in the velvet black of the night sky. This must be a passage then and not a true cave. But again why? Why?

A second light moved across the slit of sky, a light with a purpose, direction. The flying light of some aircraft? The traders searching for her? That other she had seen on the com screen? But she thought this had come from the south. A government man alerted to her message? There was no chance of being seen in the darkness and this slit. She had been moved here to hide—from danger or from aid?

And she was being held here. No effort of her struggling will could move her another step or allow her to retreat. It was like being fixed in some stiff and unyielding ground, her feet roots instead of means of locomotion. A day earlier she would have panicked, but she had changed. Now her curiosity was fully aroused and she was willing, for a space, to be governed so. She had always been curious. “Why?” had been her demanding bid for attention when she was so small she remembered having to be carried for most of the exploration journeys Ander Nordholm had made a part of her growing years. “Why were those colors here and not there?” “Why did this animal build a home underground and that one in a tree?” Why?—why?—why?

He had been very wise, her father, using always her thirst for knowledge to suggest paths which had led her to make her own discoveries, each a new triumph and wonder. In fact, he had made her world of learning too perfect and absorbing, so that she was impatient with those who did not find such seeking the main occupation of life. On Demeter she had felt trapped, her “whys” there battered against an unyielding wall of prejudice and things which were and must always be. When she had fought to awaken the desire to reach out for the new among her pupils, she had clashed with a definite will-not-to-know and fear-of-learning which had first rendered her incredulous and then hotly angry and, lastly, stubbornly intent upon battle.