At first the evil was disembodied, a cloud without form or person. But the more it lapped around me, the more aware I became that it was in some way almost tangible.
And that I would face that —thing—and soon.
Shudders I could not control shook my body now. In spite of my furred skin I was naked to the freezing force of whatever Dark Thing had so entrapped me. There was nothing I might do, save wait helplessly for it to come—to—
Movement!
I tried to screw my head farther around, to see more plainly what I had only glimpsed from the corner of one eye. This was an effort, but I managed to achieve a twisted angle of my head that gave me a wide range of vision.
The two pillars between which I was prisoner were backed by a tumble of rocks. No—not rocks! They were, in spite of the erosion of time, too carefully shaped. There had once been a building there—the pillars mounting guard before it.
Now the ancient blocks had fallen in upon each other in a heap. No grass had rooted about them, though the cracks were filled with a bleached looking earth. In fact, there was no vegetation within a wide area about the ruin. And in the middle of the rock pile gaped a dark hole.
There was a flicker of movement again within that. At last I had traced the evil to its source. The weaver of this web rested therein, viewing me with an avid pleasure that struck at my reason. I was prey!
Out of the hole, moved by stiff jerks, came a segmented leg. Upheld at the end of that a claw stretched wide enough to perhaps tear the throat out of my pard body. And, through the leg was covered by a hard encasing substance not unlike that of an insect carapace, yet at each joint of the segments there sprouted a tuft of course gray-white hair.
The claw closed upon one of the cords of the web that was still anchored to the pillar, applied a vigorous shaking that I tried to resist. That must have informed the lurking hunter that its trap did indeed enclose some living thing.
Leg and claw instantly snapped back into the hole. But that I had won no more than a very short respite I well knew. My neck ached at the stiff position of my head. Still I must face whatever might come at me from the lair.
The hole, the longer I stared into it, was not entirely black. There were small yellow points of light, very dim —but still there. I counted eight set in two rows. Eyes! Eyes surveying me, making sure I was safely a prisoner.
Beyond, the sound of the fleeing animals had died away. It seemed to me that I hung in a moment of utter silence—waiting—Then out of the hole came once more the leg—or arm—and then a second such! Beyond those only the eyes were visible, the rest of the creature lying deeper within the den.
I thought that I had screamed. Then I knew that the furious challenge had not burst from my throat, but another's. A furred shape flowed fluidly into my very limited range of vision, leaped, not at the hole into which the arms had whipped back at the sound, but to the top of the jumble of blocks that formed my enemy's den.
A snow cat! And a larger one than I had ever seen. The creature was in a snarling rage, its yellow eyes afire, its tail whipping from side to side. The gaze of the eyes fixed upon me and now it growled.
Well did I know the reputation of the giant hill cats. They were highly protective of their hunting territories, fighting to the death often to resist any invasion of the stretches of hill and forest that they considered their own. Save during the mating season, they held no contact with their fellows, walking alone and arrogant in their jealous pride.
That a pard was invading the snow cat's territory was indeed a challenge. However, I was already helplessly the prey of the lurker in the hole, no threat to this newcomer. Why did he then wish to attack?
The cat was a male, at the height of his strength and might, I believed. Under other circumstances, I would have thought him a magnificent sight. But—perhaps death under his swift attack would be easier than that which the lurker had planned for me. Only no one welcomes death gladly.
Then—
I squalled again. Not from the pain of any wound, but from fear that struck me more severely than any rippling of claws. There was a voice in my mind!
That the Wise Ones could communicate so among their kind was well known. But they did it only when well trained and provided with certain safeguard barriers, so that such an invasion could be controlled and tempered. No ordinary human possessed such a talent, nor would welcome even the thought of it.
“Do not move!”
Did the lurker so warn me? Or the snow cat? Were the great felines thus able to communicate with their kind, unknown to men?
“Do not move.” Again that command was impressed upon my mind.
The cat! Certainly it was the cat!
He was now pressed belly flat on the stone, inching forward to another block, a little lower, that rested directly above the hole. As he extended a paw to place on it, I saw the stone move a fraction. Quickly, the snow cat drew back. He bent his head, sniffed along the inner edge of the block. Or was he examining closely the way it rested upon its fellows?
Whatever he had discovered, made him crouch down and back. I could see muscles ripple under his hide, the telltale twitch of the dark tip of his silver-white tail. He did not advance now with exploratory stealth, rather he leaped, landing full force upon the suspect block.
It gave under him, crashing down. But so quick was the cat that he was again arching his body into the air in my direction even while the block he had loosened by the weight of his body smashed to earth, sealing the hole, perhaps for good.
One of his forepaws, as he landed, had caught in the sticky cords of the web. He did not fight as I had done so disastrously. Rather he moved with infinite caution, drawing back his paw so the broken portion of web was stretched out. Then, lowering it to earth, he sawed the thread back and forth across a drift of grit that formed the soil around the ruin.
Where my most frenzied struggles had produced nothing but a tighter prison, his delicate handling of his bonds broke the cord, loosed him. I would have followed his action if I could, but I was too tightly caught.
“Be still!” He varied his command, padding back and forth just beyond the tangle of the broken web, studying me and my bonds. Then he turned, was gone like a flash of silver.
I was left to my entrapment. The snow cat had bettered my fate by so much—the hole was sealed and no claws now reached for me. The quick death that had been before me could well now become a slow one of thirst and starvation, or of horror, if scavengers chanced upon me so helpless. I had to face that prospect bleakly.
My forepaws were thickly entangled. The pain where the web strands had fallen upon my scratched back and flanks was gone, but my hindquarters were numbed. I had—
Back into view moved the snow cat. He mouthed the end of a branch splintered and gnawed as if he had freed it from the parent tree by the action of his fangs. The leaves, crushed by being dragged along the ground, gave off a strong, nose-wrinkling odor, acrid enough to make me cough and my eyes tear as the cat approached.
He laid his burden down with care that none of the mangled leaves touch his own hide. Approaching, he eyed me and the tangled cord with an absorbed examination.
“Danger—” His thought reached me strongly. “Only way—do not move!”
Once more he grasped the branch in his jaws. Making a visible effort, he swung it clear of the ground, brought it around by the strain of his neck muscles, and dropped the length so that it lay with sap-oozing leaves directly across the strands of the web, but not touching me. There followed a puff that looked like steam rising from the cord.
Where the leaves touched the remnants of the web, it withered, blackened, gave off a nasty stench. Now the withering ran out from the actual contact, along the portions in which I was enwrapped. I felt as if my bonds were being burned away. Perhaps that was what was happening, for they fell from my body in tattered, blackened strands.
That I was free, was all that mattered. I lunged away from the pillar. Only I found it hard
to move. The numbness in my hindquarters did not lessen. I staggered, would have fallen had the snow cat not moved up so that his shoulder touched mine, his strength kept me on my feet.
That he was no true cat, I had already begun to believe. Yet there was about him, as we moved slowly away from that pocket of evil, no taint such as had hung about the dweller in the ruin and its trap-web. Another Were? Dared I believe that I had found such?
As my companion shouldered and urged me back into the ground across which the wild hunt had pounded, I no longer sensed the compulsion to flee. That the lurker in the ruins had been the primary cause of that panic, driving the forest creatures, I did not believe. I was certain that what had sent such force to snap at one's heels was a harrowing hound of the Shadow.
The snow cat guided and supported me back toward the river. Slowly my hindquarters began to lose their numbness, but that was no favor from Fortune, for the wounds on my back began again to trouble me. The mounting pain of each step became a kind of red torment in my mind, and, at last, I moved in a haze of agony hardly aware of aught that lay around me.
Why I did not drop to the ground in my suffering I did not know. Save that just as I had been driven by some Shadow will earlier, so now I was kept moving by the determination of the snow cat. He did not again speak to me, mind to mind. However, there was a force radiating from him that acted as a goad of sorts.
In sight of the river he halted, his head up to sniff the air. About us were rocks and crevices. Toward one of those he nudged me. I crawled within, so spent that I thought each effort of raising a paw and putting it down once again was the last I could so endure.
There I crouched, my mouth dry, longing for the water of the stream I could hear from my hiding place, yet could not reach. The snow cat stood between me and the outer world, his stance one of he who waits. Through the ground under me I could feel, even as my pain-dulled ears could hear, the thud of trotting hooves. Men—? Hunters from the Keep?
If they saw the snow cat they would be after two trophies instead of one! He must be warned—Only I had not his trick of mind-speech, I could but utter a low growl.
“Not those you fear.” He did not turn his head to look at me, but his message was clear. “Be silent—”
I could see the rider now. There was only one within sight. He rode clad in mail, an ornate battle helm on his head. Mounted on that was what appeared to be a life-size eagle, its wings half upraised as if prepared for flight. The horse he bestrode was not akin to those of the Clan fold, but plainly of the same blood as the ones I had seen pastured by the Star Tower, the hide dappled, the legs longer than normal.
As the rider noted the snow cat, he did not reach for the sword sheathed at his hip. Rather, he raised his gauntleted hand in salute as a man gives greeting to another he knows. Then the cat moved forward, leaping to a rock that brought his fanged head near on a level with the rider's.
Mount reined in, the rider, whose face was too much in the shadow of the helm for me to see clearly, sat easily in the saddle, facing the cat. Though I heard nothing, either with my ears, or my mind, I was certain that they spoke together by some method of their own.
I could see no belt about the body of the cat. If he were of the Werekin, then he needed no such key to change shape. Was he one of the Wereriders? Their territory was supposed to lie to the southeast of the Clan lands, but that would not prevent them from traveling elsewhere.
At length, the rider once more raised his hand to salute the cat. When he moved on, he changed directions, heading back the same way from which he had come. Had he brought some message?
The cat did not watch him go, but returned swiftly to where I lay. As he neared, his mind-speech was imperative.
“We must hurry. The Shadow is on the move!”
The part-buried man in me responded to the urge. I managed to waver to my feet. But my pard body was near spent. Somehow I staggered down to the water, felt that rise about my limbs, pasting my fur tight to skin. Again, his strength alone, pushing against me, brought me through the weak current, out onto the far bank.
There I sank down, utterly exhausted, though he nosed at me, trying to get me on my legs. Once more, I could hear a thud of hooves against the ground. The cat left my side, trotting purposefully toward the edge of the forest. Was the eagle-helmed rider returning, or was this indeed a hunter approaching, and my companion, having done his best for me, was prudently withdrawing?
At that moment neither guess mattered. I was far too spent to care. Apathetically I watched, unable to raise my head any to widen my field of vision. The cat had halted by the first tree, once more waiting.
From under the shade of branch and leaves moved a rider leading another horse by the reins. I knew her—the Moon Witch; though this time her white body was clothed in breeches, boots, shirt and jerkin of green and brown intermingled so that only when she had advanced fully into the open, could I see her clearly.
The cat reared up, setting his paws against her saddle blanket on either side of her leg, the mount showing no alarm at the beast's move but standing quietly. She leaned over a little so that they stared eye to eye, then she nodded.
From the breast of her jerkin she pulled some small object, which hung there on a chain. With this in her hand, as if it might be a weapon, she came purposely toward me, the cat trailing behind.
Before she reached my side, the girl slid from her light saddle, her mount standing quietly with the reins dropping to the ground. She came to me, swinging in her hand from its chain a round globe of crystal. Within it was imprisoned a sprig of some sort of vegetation, green and glowing.
The Moon Witch swung the chain to encircle my head as I raised it at her coming. Then the ball with its sprig of green came to rest just below my throat. I—
I was a man!
My fur was gone, my skin was visible, though I had not regained my belt. I was—back!
The shock of the transition without warning was so great, my world swung dizzily to and fro. I was aware of her hands on me, that I was being lifted, carried. I was laid across a saddle and caught my breath at the pain of the jolting, which each step of the horse caused me.
Someone mounted up, raised me, though his touch on my back nearly tore a scream from my dry throat. For this was a man, not my Moon Maid who tended me, though from whence he had suddenly appeared, I had no knowledge.
I had a blurred impression of a dark head bent over me, a thin face, well browned by sun and weather, above which the hair peaked sharply. His was a secret face, one to keep thoughts and words locked well within. Like the Tower woman, one might have judged the stranger in the flowering of youth, but the eyes, yellow as any cat's, were old—weary and old.
The eyes held mine. No mind-speech came to me, only a kind of force. It drove me steadily away from consciousness into a darkness where pain was gone and time no longer mattered.
Yet I was not entirely overborne by the stranger's will. As if I sensed from a very far distance, I knew we rode on and the forest held us again. I was convinced, as well, that the stranger who held me meant me no harm, rather good. Also that I must not trouble myself with such matters now—but withdraw, to regain my strength and will. The wonder of my change held—the Moon Maid's magic had wrought this. On my breast, I felt warmth spreading from the pendant she had put on me. That talisman I must hold to so I remain a man.
Of Those in the Tower and How I Chose Danger
I lay face down, my head turned to one side so that before my bemused eyes I saw only stone blocks of a wall. Across my back rested something cooling, soothing, drawing from my wounds the pain of the fire that had lain within the ragged furrows since I had won from the web trap. I heard voices behind me, not in my mind this time.
“The moly will lose its power soon. What then, my Lord?”
It was a woman who spoke so. A challenge hung in her tone.
“We must discover who he is, from whence he comes. I do not believe from the Gray Towers. Yet what other
Werestrain walks this land? And he is not of the Shadow. If he rouses before the change, perhaps this we can learn—”
A man—he whom I remembered holding me before him as we rode from the river? But where did I lie? And who were they who had tended me? My passage from sleep to waking became complete as I felt that I must know answers to those questions.
I levered myself up a little on the bed and turned my head, to face those who stood beyond.
Yes, that was the man who had come to my rescue. The Moon Witch did not accompany him as I had hoped. Rather, there stood the woman of the herb garden who had driven me into exile. Why had she now given me both shelter and tending? I must be within the Star Tower, for I could see that the walls behind the two who were regarding me were oddly angled. The chamber must be shaped to fit into one of the points of the star.
“Who are you who have given me shelter?” I asked when neither of them spoke.
The woman came to my side. Her cool fingertips rested for a moment on my forehead. There was a faint perfume of spicy growing things coming from her hand, as if she had but lately been at labor in her garden.
“His fever is gone,” she said. Now she stripped the covering from my back, so I felt the small chill of air striking my shoulders and hips. Again, she touched here and there along what must have been the wounds the hawk had set upon me. “Healing well, the poison being stayed,” was her second verdict.
“You ask who we are.” She moved around into my full sight. “We are those who dwell apart, asking naught of any man save that we be left to follow our own ways.”
There was no welcome in her face, nor was there outright rejection either. She might be waiting for me to take some action, speak some word, on which she could base her judgment of whether I was friend or foe. Yet, for all her reserve of emotion, I knew I could never name her enemy. There was that about her which argued that she abhorred the Shadow in all its ways.