Hunt the Space-Witch! (30 page)

He thought of Zigmunn, like him a spacer stranded in a hostile city, and how Zigmunn must have slowly descended to whatever pit served as the entrance requirements for the Cult.

But Zigmunn had been tougher, Barsac reflected. It had taken the Luasparru eight years of life on Glaurus before he entered the Cult; Barsac had achieved the same distinction in less than eight months. Zigmunn had always been the shrewd one, though, and Barsac the stolid well-muscled one who depended on the manipulations of his blood-brother to see him through a time of trouble.

He was in trouble now. But there would be no help for him from Zigmunn, for Zigmunn had gone through the trap ahead of him and waited on Azonda now.

The seventeen were given rooms in Carnothute's palace. Cult members moved among them, speaking encouragingly to them, promising the rehabilitation the Cult held for them. Barsac barely listened. He dwelt almost entirely in an inner world where there were no betraying Sporeffiens, no lying Ystilogs, no Kassas of easy virtue, no Cult.

The night passed slowly; Barsac half-slept, half-woke, with little awareness of his surroundings. In the morning a Cultist brought him a meager breakfast, a dry bun and a sea-apple, and Barsac ate dispiritedly.

Carnothute called them all together once more to wish them well. Barsac stood, a half-corpse, among sixteen other half-corpses, and half-listened. Part of his mind wondered where the
Dywain
was, now. More than half a year had gone by since its departure from Glaurus. Captain Jaspell had been bound for the Rim.

Probably they had already touched the worlds of purple-hued Venn and golden Paaiiad, and were moving onward toward Lorrimok and the double sun Thoptor. Doubtless the vacancies in the crew had been filled by now, and the angular man named Barsac had long since faded from the minds of the men of the
Dywain
.

Sleepily he stroked the scars about his lips, and realized he would be seeing Zigmunn soon. Nearly eleven years had slipped by since his last meeting with his blood-brother, but Barsac had not expected the reunion to come about on Azonda.

Cultists shepherded them through a door and down into a liftshaft. There were several moments of free fall while they sank into the recesses of Carnothute's vaults. Five glistening little cars waited for them there, and the candidates entered, three in the first, four in the second, three in the third, four in the fourth, three in the fifth. A faceless Cultist sat behind the steering-panel of each car.

At a signal the lead car shot off down the dark tunnel ahead of them. Barsac, who rode in the second car, peered into the darkness, but saw nothing.

The trip took perhaps a five-minute span, perhaps an hour; in the darkness Barsac was unable to account for the passage of the moments. They emerged into light, eventually, and he saw he was at the spacefield outside the city of Millyaurr.

They quitted the cars and stood in an uncertain clump on the bare brown soil of the spacefield. Barsac saw the shining blue-white sweep of a giant starship's fins, and wildly thought it was the
Dywain
, till he saw the name stencilled on the vessel's landing buttresses:
Mmuvviol
. He felt no temptation to break away, run to the strange ship, inquire if there were a vacancy on board for a skilled fuelsman; he knew he belonged with the group of Cult-candidates, and made no attempt to move.

A lesser ship stood farther along the landing-strip, small and slight, with a golden-green hull that bore no name. Cultists led Barsac and the other sixteen out across the field toward the nameless ship, and Barsac saw others at the field, oilers, crewmen, passengers, draw back and stare as the procession of silver masks and shuffling zombies headed out over the field.

One by one they entered the ship. Cultists guided them to individual blast-hammocks and strapped them in; Barsac, for all his twenty years as a spaceman, made no move to draw the rig about him, but waited passively until his turn came to be strapped in.

A warning signal flashed through the ship. Barsac closed his eyes and waited. The moment came that he had thought would never come for him again: the faint anticipatory quiver as the drive compartment of a starship bursts into life, readying itself.

Lights flashed, bells rang the old standard routine for a lifting spaceship. Something deep in Barsac's numbed mind longed to respond, to perform the actions that those signals demanded, but he remembered that on this ship he was passenger and not crewman, and he relaxed.

Later came the moment of blast-off as the drive translated matter to energy and pushed Glaurus away from the ship. Barsac felt a sickening moment of no-grav; then the vessel began to spin, and weight returned.

Through a port near his face he saw the cluttered globe of Glaurus spinning slowly against a black backdrop. The ship had spaced.

Its destination was Azonda.

Chapter Six

The nameless ship hung on a tongue of fire over the dark world Azonda; then it dropped suddenly downward, and the landing buttresses sprang out at acute angles to support it.

Twenty-six spacesuit-clad figures, Barsac among them, emerged from the hatch of the ship—seventeen Cult candidates, nine watchful members. Even through the thick folds of his spacesuit, even despite the protective warmth of his suit's energons, Barsac shivered. Azonda was a dead world.

The golden sun that warmed Glaurus was only a perfunctory dab of light out here, eleven billion miles further spaceward. At this distance, the sun was hardly a sun—more like a particularly brilliant star.

Drifts of banked snow lay everywhere, glittering faintly in the eternal dusk—Azonda's atmosphere, congealed by cold. Gaunt bare cliffs glinted redly in the distance. All was silent, silent and dead. Life had never come to Azonda.

The witch—?

Barsac wondered. He moved along in single file, lifting one spacebooted foot and putting it down, lifting the other. It seemed to him a wind whistled against his body, though he knew that was impossible on airless Azonda, an illusion, a phantasm. He kept walking.

The impassive guides led them along. A well-worn path was cut in the ice, and they followed this.

They came, finally, to a sort of natural amphitheater, a half-bowl scooped out of the rock by a giant's hand. Barsac was unable to see into the amphitheater; a gray cloud hung obscuringly over it.

“We have come to the Hall of the Witch,” the leading Cultist said quietly via suit-phones. “Beyond the curtain of gray lies the place you have journeyed toward all your days of life.”

Barsac narrowed his eyes and tried with no success to see through the curtain, hoping for some glimmer of that which lay within.

“When you pass through the curtain,” came the even admonitory voice, “you will divest yourselves of your spacesuits. You will stand without clothing in the presence of the Witch.”

But that's impossible
, Barsac's space-trained mind protested instantly.
The cold, the vacuum, the pressure
—
we'd be dead in a minute
.

“No harm will come to you,” said the Cultist.

Up ahead, Barsac saw now the front men of the file disappearing into the gray curtain, vanishing first one foot, then a shoulder, then the entire body, sectioned away as if they were sliding between the molecules of a solid wall. Leadenly. Barsac moved on, waiting for his turn to come.

In time the curtain loomed inches before his nose, and without hesitation he put his right foot through and followed after. His body tingled an instant; then he had passed through and was inside, in the Hall of the Witch.

“Remove your spacesuit and inner clothing,” came the stern instruction.

I
can't!
Barsac thought. But then he looked to left and right and saw the others stripping, shedding their spacesuits and clothing like cast-off skins and evincing no ill effects. Barsac decided some manner of force-field must be in operation, a semi-permeable field that allowed humans to enter but which also maintained an atmosphere within itself. Experimentally he reached back and touched the inner skin of the curtain behind him with the tip of one finger, and got the answer: the curtain was unyielding as granite from the inside. It was penetrable only in one direction, and all within—humans and air molecules alike—were constrained to remain.

Reassured, Barsac put his hands to his spacesuit's sealing-hasps and pried them open; he felt a whisper of air rush past his throat as he removed his helmet. The suit split open like the two halves of a sea-creature's shell; he let carapace and plastron drop unheeded and peeled away the few clothes he wore beneath.

Naked now amid sixteen other naked candidates and nine Cultists clad only in their face-concealing masks, Barsac moved forward into the violet haze that blurred what lay ahead. He walked for perhaps two minutes, and then the haze cleared away.

He stood facing the Witch of Azonda.

She sat enthroned, grasped in a translucent chair trimmed with onyx and edged in chalcedony. Before her there was a sort of dais, an altar of a kind, carved of some delicate semitransparent pinkish stone. Visible beneath the outer barrier of the stone was a dark something, a mechanism perhaps; it was impossible to see it clearly.

Barsac stared at the Witch.

She was a woman who sat in naked magnificence, hands resting lightly on the knurled sides of her throne. Her skin was of a light gold color, warm-looking, her figure was lush, her breasts high, rounded. She had no face. From forehead to chin all was smooth and gently curved, polished almost, a blank planchet on which a sculptor might have carved a face had he chosen to. Yet she did not look incomplete; she seemed perfect to Barsac, a living work of art.

Around her was ranged a semi-circle of acolytes: eleven men, Barsac saw, naked all, but with faces masked. Kneeling at the outer edge of the semi-circle were eight women, masked also. From the group rose a low wordless chant, a wailing ululation that rose shiveringly through tortured chromatic intervals and down again.

The sound swelled out about him. In his mind Barsac heard a soft voice say,
Come to me, for I am the Way; come to me, for in me there is no more pain, in me there is only peace and surcease from the suffering you have known
.

Fronds of light lapped at his mind. He felt impelled forward; he seemed to glide.

An end to pain, an end to torment, an end to self
.

In me there is peace always, and companionship, and in my company will you serve cheerfully and abide for all eternity
.

In response to an unvoiced command Barsac stretched out both his hands, and felt them being taken by others; a dream-light suffused the area, and he was conscious of warmth and a kind of oozing softness.

Hands joined, the seventeen candidates advanced toward the Witch and knelt before the altar.

This was the end of the quest, Barsac thought; here was where all struggle ended, where all beingness cascaded back into the primordial womb of creation.

In my light will you be healed
—

Fingers caressed his mind, urging him to give up his oneness, to become part of the brotherhood that called itself the Cult of the Witch. He felt the bonds of tension that gripped his mind relax under the gentle ministrations. It would be so easy to slip away from himself, to allow his mind and soul to merge with the others.

He relaxed. His self ebbed away.

Look upon me
, came the command.

Barsac looked up at the faceless silent perfection of the Witch. Somehow his eyes slipped from her after a moment, and he scanned the eleven Cult acolytes ranged behind her, his eyes caught and fascinated by the brightness of the reflections from their polished masks. It was as if in each of the masks a Witch shined.

Curious, Barsac thought, with the part of his mind that still remained to him. One of those acolytes has a scarred face.

A strange pattern of incisions radiating outward from the lips. Barsac frowned. The beauty of the Witch called to him to cease all thinking and surrender himself, but he shook the temptation away impatiently, and his hand rose to feel the deep grooves that disfigured his own face.

He and that acolyte were disfigured in the same fashion, he thought.

Odd. How could that be? How—

Awareness flooded back to him. He ripped his hands free of the crooning candidates who knelt next to him and stood up, remembering now.

His shout split the sanctified silence:

“Zigmunn!
”

The light wavered. His sudden piercing bellow had broken the spell. Around him the candidates wandered in uncertain circles, torn from their trance but not masters of themselves any longer. Behind the throne, the stunned acolytes froze in astonishment, while the Witch beamed blandly down, seeming to smile facelessly, and then darkened slowly into a figure of horror.

Barsac moved forward.

“Zigmunn! You, behind the mask—I know you by the scars! I've come here to get you, bring you back. Do you know these scars, Zigmunn?”

One of the stock-still acolytes spoke: “Barsac!”

“Yes. And the Witch failed to conquer me after all!” His stubbornness burned like a flame within him now; he forced himself forward toward the ring of acolytes. “Off with that mask, Zigmunn. Come back to Glaurus with me.”

“Don't be a fool, Barsac. The Witch offers peace.”

“The Witch offers lies!”

“You can never leave her,” the Luasparru said. “Once you see her, you are part of her; the rest is superficial. Did you see her, Barsac?”

“I saw her. But I remain a free man.”

“Impossible! You see only yourself mirrored in the Witch; she exists only if the Witch-forces exist in you, in the dark cesspool at the back of your mind.”

“No,” Barsac growled.

“Yes! If you are here, if you have seen the Witch—then you are lost! Yield, Barsac! Give in. Worship her, for she is within you!”

“No!
”

He pressed relentlessly forward. A whisper passed through his mind, but he knew it was meant not for him but for the acolytes:
“Stop him.
”