They left the audience chamber by a second door and traveled through such a maze of shorter and narrower passages that, though she tried to set each turn and twist in memory, she despaired of ever finding her way through them again.
At length she was shoved through a door into a room where there were more Yurth-women. None of them raised eyes to look at her as she half fell forward, being unable to help herself as her hands had not been freed. Instead those half dozen females of her own race stared blank-eyed before them. Two, she noted with horror, Karn’s threat returning, had the big bellies of the pregnant. But they were all slack faced, as if empty of mind.
None of these wore the suits of the ship people; rather their robes could be the journey dress of the Pilgrims. But she recognized none of them as missing members of her clan. And she had no way of telling how long they might have been here.
Then the woman nearest her slowly turned her head. Her gaze fastened dully on Elossa’s face and the horror of the mindlessness it suggested made the girl hurriedly edge away as the woman arose sluggishly to her feet and advanced toward her. To be touched by this-this thing wearing the guise of Yurth brought a scream very close to her lips.
But the woman passed behind her and a moment later Elossa felt a fumbling on the cords which bound her. Those fell away. Still blank of face the woman shuffled back to the pile of unsavory, stained couch pillows where she had first crouched and subsided again in the same position. Elossa, rubbing her wrists, moved back until her shoulders touched the wall and there dropped down to sit cross-legged.
Her gaze kept returning to the woman who had freed her. To look at this fellow prisoner suggested that the stranger was no different from her companions. Still, something had led her to come to Elossa’s aid. Letting her head fall back against the support of the wall, Elossa closed her eyes.
That fretting at the edge of her mind-shield was gone. Very tentatively she released a small questing probe of her own. Nothing close to hand. If these here in this room and the other Yurth she had seen in the common dress were captured during the Pilgrimage then they had come here with powers equal to her own. Still those had seemingly been drained from them, leaving them empty and useless.
But the Raski had no such power. At least those of the outer world had not. They could be manipulated by Yurth hallucinations should just cause for such arise. What was Karn that he had been able to enslave those with gifts none of his race could claim?
“Karn is Atturn. . . .”
Only discipline of mind kept Elossa quiet Who had sent that thought?
“You-where?” she shot out.
“Here. But be warned. Karn has his ways. . . .”
“How?”
“Atturn was a god. Karn is Atturn,” came the not clear response. “He has ways of breaking minds-but not all. Some of us were warned in time. . . retreated. . . .”
Elossa opened her eyes slowly, looked to the woman who had freed her. This must be the one.
“Thank you. But what can we do?”
“I am not Danna.” The correction came quickly. “She is broken. But still she can respond-a little. We work-we who still are true Yurth-to repair. But there are so few of us. No, do not look for me-we meet as mind speaking mind-we do not know each other otherwise lest in some ill chance the truth be riven from us. That death which came to Kal-Hath-Tan had strange, evil results. You have seen the twisted creatures who obey Karn in the first valley, those who trap all that wander into the inner lands.
“They are of the blood of Kath-Hath-Tan, but the ruin of the fire which blasted forth tainted them. They bear children from time to time as monstrous as themselves. Karn was worked upon otherwise; he was already learned in a strange way in secrets known only to high priests and rulers. Of them a handful were in a secret inner place when the end came to the city. Karn became deathless, the incarnation so he believes-so his people believe-of Atturn who was never a deity of any grace or good. Karn has outlived those who survived with him, always they sought what is Yurth power-that of the mind. But they sought it their own way-in order to deaden the spirit of others. And much did they learn through the passing years.Now. . . .”
As if a door had been slammed between her and the one who spoke there came instant silence. Elossa closed her eyes but did not attempt mind-probe again. The interruption had been warning enough.
Then speeding straight to her like a spear thrown in anger came another mind-touch.
“Kin.” It was not that word which was heartening, it was the very force with which it came to her. Here was no evasion or warnings. Yet, dared she respond? The small scraps of information she had been fed suggested that Karn had resources to meet Yurth power. Perhaps he could also, in some perverted way, ape Yurth call.
“Come in.”
Fair invitation, or trap? Still she hesitated. How deep had the rot reached in the Yurth who slaved for Karn; could one of them serve him thus, too, helping to betray some newcomer to actual takeover? Elossa felt that she could not depend upon her own judgment. With Stans she had been more than half convinced that he was willing to step free of the prejudices of his people, even as she had seen in that time of revelation in the ship the narrow folly-or what seemed so-of hers also. Yet Stans had indeed brought her here to Karn. Perhaps he had known from the very moment they left Kal-Hath-Tan where they were bound and why. He might have so betrayed others making the Pilgrimage before her.
“Come in,” urged that other mind, laying open the door in a way which even Yurth seldom did and then only to those they trusted above all others. It was such an intimacy, such an invasion of the inner being that it only came at times of high peril-or honest shared emotion.
“Come in.” For the third time and now it did not ask, it demanded in some impatience, even anger.
Elossa drew upon the full sum of her energy. She might be making the worst mistake of her fife, or she might be finding a defense against the worst Karn had spoken of with his vile suggestion. She shaped a mind-probe, only hoping that she would have the power to jerk loose in time, if again she had trusted wrongly. With that probe she did as the other ordered-she went in.
18.
But she was so startled as that other touch met hers that she nearly broke contact by an instantaneous retreat, a blocking. For it was not a single mind which had demanded liaison with her. No, this was a combination of different personalities! And Elossa had never known this kind of union herself. The one acting-in-concert which her own clan had done was for building of some hallucination when extra strength was needed to hold such for a length of time. Even then, she, not having made the Pilgrimage, had never been one so called upon to lend her power to the general good.
Her momentary resistance vanished, she became a part of this union, and in her grew an exultation, a feeling of such confidence as made all her other small triumphs of the past seem as nothing at all.
“We are together!” It sounded as if those others, too, felt the same surge of near invincibility. “At last, kin, we are strong enough to move!”
“What would you do?” she asked that which she could not even yet sort into separate individual personalities.
“We act!” came the firm answer. “For long have we joined one to another, and yet another. We have hidden behind the slave covers Karn set upon us. For we needed more and more strength before we could go up against him. What he controls is alien to us; he has created such a barrier that we could not blast through. But now-now, kinswoman-with your strength added we await the final battle.
“Soon they will come for you that Karn may make you even as he thinks we are. Wait, go with them, but wait. When the moment comes-then we shall be ready!”
It was in Yurth blood to be cautious, ever wary, mistrusting of one’s self for fear the power might seduce one to a downfall. All this distrust was aroused in Elossa as she listened. Yet she was impressed by the utter confidence of the multi-voice. And there was that in its argument which seemed logical. If Yurth, taken from the Pilgrimages-and perhaps elsewhere (she had no explanation yet for those wearing the ship’s clothing)-had indeed pooled their strength, added force one to another, who knows what such an accumulation might accomplish. It would seem that this was indeed her best hope of escaping the fate she saw before her in this room of beaten women. She had a sash of speculation as to which of them were allied now in this composite voice.