Children of the Gates

  “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 I 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 life, 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 flash of speculation as to which of them were allied now in this composite voice.

  “We must not act until Karn is about to use his own power,” the voice continued. “We do not know if he can learn in any way from his own methods what we would do. Therefore, do not use mind-touch, kinswoman, until we come to you.”

  The voice was gone. Elossa shivered at its vanishing. While it had been with her she had felt warm, at peace. Now that it had gone she could worry once more, foresee only too many ways in which failure lay. She closed her eyes again and drew upon her will, upon those techniques for conserving and strengthening inner power which she had been so carefully schooled to use.

  But she was not given long to so arm herself, for the door opened and the grate of its opening aroused her, though it was not the Yurth she expected to see, those guards who would come to make her submit to Kam’s unholy slave making. Rather it was Stans.

  He slipped inside and closed the door behind him, standing then with his shoulders against it as if he would use his body to reinforce a barrier. None of the other women looked up, their faces remained blank. But he was staring straight at her, and she saw his lips move with exaggerated shaping as if he would send her some message which he must not say aloud. She tried to read as twice he went through that, and the third time. . . .

  “Come in.”

  The same message as that other. But was he Karn’s instrument? If she obeyed the Raski’s order would it mean enslavement? This was not what the multi-mind had warned her of, but that did not mean that this was not as great a peril as what her kin had here faced and lost to.

  That a Raski should summon mind-touch was so against all the customs of his race that she could not believe in this. But for the fourth time he was shaping the words, and his expression was one of strain. He had turned his head a fraction so one ear rested against the door as if he must listen for some danger without.

  It was trust he demanded. Elossa weighed her present feeling for Raski against the facts of their journey together. They had saved each other’s lives, yes. How much did that count against his words to Karn? Her inbred caution warred with another emotion she was not prepared to understand, which she wished to press out of her mind altogether but could not.

  At last she did as he wished. She sent a mental probe. Just as she had reeled and tried to withdraw from the multi-mind’s meeting so did she know instantly that strange revulsion moved in him at her invasion. Yet as quickly he steadied himself, even as a man facing impossible odds for some point of honor which was even greater to him than life. She could read. . . .

  And. . . .

  Her strange instinct was right. What he had said to Karn—that had been a weapon of sorts, all he could seize upon at that moment. She read and learned.

  Karn the impossible, the man who in the destruction of his city ages ago had, as she had earlier been told, continued to live, because he had already been deep in strange practices of the mind, disciplines of the body learned by chance by an obscure priesthood. They had wrought such changes, not by their own inner striving, but by the use of drugs and strange practices of control which could force hallucinations until the unreal became perma
nently real.

  Fleeing the destruction of Kal-Hath-Tan a handful of priests, and Karn, had reached this other sanctuary—one they knew of old—to which even then they had retired at intervals with victims for their researching into unhealthy paths. Karn had lived—or was it a hallucination of life? At any rate here he ruled.

  The Yurth from the ship—some had been captured, brought here, subjected to Karn’s processes of domination. They too, lived. But they were indeed the hollow shells of what they had been. For they had not been subjected to that change which Yurth brought upon themselves when they assumed the burden of what they considered their irreparable sin.

  When the new generations made the Pilgrimage some had been drawn into Karn’s net by the same method he had used with Elossa—the call for help uttered in Yurth mind-touch. Thus the hidden master of the over-mountain land had built up his forces.

  He had had no failures—outwardly. So he became in his own eyes, undying, all powerful, Atturn himself—that entity which had been the core of the research. One by one the priests had died, or Karn had brought death to them. But Karn remained ever in power. Now, now he had thought to gather his forces, to extend his rulership. He had been questioning Stans—striving to learn what lay open to his taking in the plains lands to the east

  “He read your mind?” Elossa demanded. For if Stans had lain as open to Kara as he was now to her then what hope had either of them for rebellion?

  “He could not,” Stans returned. “He was angry, and—I hope—troubled. But I am not one with him in Atturn. However, the fact that we are kin may not keep him from striving to break me. He has all which worked for him long ago—the drugs—the other things. But that takes time—he had not had me long enough in his hands.”

  Elossa made her decision. “Do even as you have done—play his liege man.”

  “But he will take you soon. You will become as these.” Stans made a slight gesture to indicate the women about her, none of whom had seemed even yet to note his presence.

  She might trust him from what she had read in his open mind, but it would be better not to provide him with any other information, unless she could hint that within herself lay some defense she had not yet tried.

  “It may be that I can stand to him. If he holds in thrall all these Yurth then that must be exhausting to whatever power he summons. I am fresh come—and. . . .”

  Stans stiffened. He turned to face her fully, his hands now balled into fists.

  “They are coming!”

  “They must not find you here.” She was quick to recognize the additional peril in that. “Behind there.” She pointed to one of the low couches on which the women sat. There was a small space between it and the wall—a very poor hiding place. But if they took her quickly—and she distracted their attention—it might serve.

  He shook his head but she crossed swiftly and seized upon his sleeve.

  “If Karn’s men find you here then what good will you do either of us?” she demanded fiercely. “Hide, and later do what you can. Be Karn’s man—perhaps he will bring you to see how he can enslave me. Then we can well have a chance there to act together.”

  Stans did not look convinced, but he did push toward the divan. The unmoving women still did not lift their eyes as he flattened himself into hiding there as best he could. Elossa, chin up, summoning her best appearance of confidence, stood not too far from the door as if she had been pacing up and down as might a new taken prisoner.

  It was not the Yurth who came for her, rather two towering, shambling creatures, distorted, demonic-headed Raski, plainly of the same breed as those who had first captured them, the tainted city stock.

  They had to stoop to enter for their heavily muscled bodies were those of giants among their kind. And they slobbered from half-open mouths. Their near naked bodies gave off the stench of unwashed, even diseased flesh as they closed in upon her, each gripping an arm and dragging her toward the door. Nor did they glance around. Stans, she thought, was safe.

  Once again she passed, firmly held by her two monster guards, through a number of passages, until they came into a room near as large as the presence chamber in which Karn had first greeted them. Here his throne was to one side, less impressive. The middle of the room was occupied by a huge representation of Atturn. From the open mouth of that puffed, irregularly, trails of smoke, thin trails which did not rise to the ceiling, but rather wreathed around the mask-face as if it willed their clinging touch.

  Elossa smelled the strange odors of the place. Was the smoke one of the mind-bending drugs Stans had mentioned? If so there was no way for her to escape at least some of Karn’s infective devices.

  The master of this maze had directly before him a brazier of gleaming metal, along the edge of which played those lines of light as had been on the walls of the corridor behind the first of the Mouths. In this, also, burned something which gave off smoke, and he leaned forward, was inhaling that, like a man gulping down some life-renewing fluid, his mouth open.

  And. . . .

  His face was changing. She watched, sure that she was viewing some hallucination achieved by the methods of the Raski priests. His countenance when she had entered had not been that of Atturn. Now, under her gaze the flesh stretched, altered, he was becoming Atturn once again, claiming the outward seeming of his god.

  His eyes closed, he straightened up. The smoke from his brazier had died away. Whatever burned there might be utterly consumed. But his mouth hung open in Atturn’s malicious grin. Even the tip of his tongue protruded over his lower lip until he was the exact copy of the huge face before which her guards had stationed her.

  Now, without opening his eyes, Karn spoke—his words strange to her, rising and falling with the steady beat of an invocation. Words and rhythm were a part of building hallucination as she well knew. Her own defense against this instantly clicked into action. She refused to look—either at the man or the face before her. Her eyes closed, she held them so with all the firmness of her will. Still the desire to open them, to see the face, gripped her.

  It was moving—she knew it! The lolling tongue within the mouth was reaching out to grip her as had the mist tongue near taken Stans in the mountain corridor. No! That was not true—it was only what Karn tried to insert into her mind. Stans—she thought of the Raski—built his face up as a picture to fit over that of Atturn. Stans who had allowed her to read his thoughts in spite of all the horror his kind felt for such an act—Stans. . . .

  To her vast astonishment that face she held in her mind became alive, not just a representation she used as a part shield against Karn’s devilment. The lips moved, and in her thoughts a small and weak sound—wholly alien to Yurth touch—spoke:

  “I . . . come. . . .”

  Karn’s trickery? No, she felt that had the master of this den managed to slip past her barrier his message would have been far more compelling. But Raski did not have the talent, that was Yurth’s, and perhaps, combined with drugs and hallucinations, Karn’s. Then how had Stans reached her?

  She felt the beat of the words Karn mouthed, and now she crooked her fingers, altered the rhythm of her breathing, did all she could not to fall into the insidious trap that offered to make her own body betray her.

  There was a sudden check in the rhythm—Elossa opened her eyes. Stans was indeed there, within touching distance of Karn. The man who wore Atturn’s face had not looked at him, but the face itself changed again. From assured maliciousness it began to register growing rage. The eyes snapped open.

  Stans swayed as if those eyes were weapons, had flashed out at him some shattering force. And at the same time:

  “Now!” So loud was that voice in her brain that Elossa, in turn, wavered, took a step or two toward the face in order to catch her balance again. But she was no longer aware of her body at all—all that did matter was the huge face confronting her, still wreathed in those tenuous trails of sickly smelling smoke.

  Her will, all the talent which lay within her, joi
ned with those others at the summons. She was no longer a person, a living being; instead her body became only a holding place in which the power being fed to her grew and grew. She wanted to scream, to fight back—to force out of her this monstrous thing which was crushing her. But instead she was a part of it, she could not deny it entrance.

  It seemed that in her torment she would burst apart, that nothing formed of human flesh and blood could contain what gathered, strengthened, made ready. Without her knowing it her mouth opened in a soundless scream of torture. She could hold no longer. But it had gathered, become full grown to the greatest force it might ever obtain—and now—it struck!

  19

  It seemed to Elossa that she actually saw that spear point of pure energy speed outward from her. Did indeed that light become real to her eyes, or did she see it only by the Yurth sense?

  Straight for Karn that was hurled. His hands moved so swiftly that she hardly saw the gesture until they were in place, palm outwards, shielding from her his Atturn face. Now she swayed where she stood, for her body shook and quivered as the force of the Yurth gathered in her, solidified there, then sped out.

  There was no Karn, no Atturn there now.

  What curled in the place of the man were flames, both black and red. Outward flared those flames. The heat from them crisped her hair, was searing torment to her flesh. Flames swallowed up the spear of force, strove to destroy it utterly.

  Still she did not cook away to nothingness. But her consciousness retreated further and further. Elossa was near gone, what trembled and wavered here was only a vessel to collect and then dispense energy.