The Sorceress of Karres Read online

  The Sorceress of Karres

  Eric Flint

  Dave Freer

  The Sorceress of Karres

  Eric Flint

  Dave Freer

  Prologue

  Captain Pausert was delighted to have the familiar decks of the Venture 7333 under his feet again. The Imperial palace and the capital were all very grand and beautiful, if you liked marble and columns. Pausert preferred good, honest, unpretentious hull-metal.

  He celebrated their return to space in their own ship with one of his trademark bad take-offs. Goth shook her head. "You'll be the death of us yet, captain," she said, smiling at him and getting up with her familiar, lithe, cat-like grace. "I really need to learn some more ship handling."

  She would have to, in fact. With Hulik do Eldel having returned to Uldune with the Sedmons, they had only the old spacer Vezzarn as crew. And, of course, the Leewit. But the Leewit was still only seven years old. She was useful on comms and on the nova guns, but the mathematics of astrogation and the engineering side of the Venture were still a bit much for her.

  Goth, on the other hand, was soaking it all up like blotting paper. She might only be not quite fourteen Karres years old-the same age now, as Maleen was when he'd first encountered the witches on the Empire world of Porlumma-but she was as reliable as any crewman. On difficult or dangerous sections of their journeys he would split watches with her, rather than with old Vezzarn. She had an iron nerve and a lot of common sense. Not for the first time Captain Pausert wondered what he had done to be so lucky.

  But then luck too was a klatha thing. And he'd always been a lucky gambler. He smiled to himself. He wondered if the Leewit, cardsharp extraordinary, had actually figured out that the captain played to lose. Just enough, to keep her happy and bathing without a fight. "We'll put in some teaching time," he said. "It's so good to be back on the Venture. Just us, the old team back together again, eh!"

  "We need to use the Sheewash drive to get us back to Karres," she said. "A couple of bursts will save us months of traveling, Captain."

  "Sure. And I won't try the modification I had in mind," he said cheerfully.

  "Clumping well better not," said the Leewit, who had just walked in to the control room. "I've decided that I have to learn astrogation math," she announced. That was a reversal of her gleeful announcement of a few days earlier, when she'd told them all that she was going to be a healer and had no need of it.

  "Good," said Goth, nodding approvingly. "You never know when the captain might need you."

  They set up the focus for the klatha energies of the Sheewash drive-which amounted to nothing more than some twisted wires. The wires formed a three dimensional pattern and means of directing the vast amount of klatha force the witches channeled through their secret space-drive. The shape was important, Pausert gathered. But he wondered if it had to be wires. And what happened if you changed the pattern?

  He'd experimented with the problem, in fact-but the results of his experiments, so far, had not always been too easy to fix. So for now he'd stick to the tried and tested way. But he supposed that it was in his nature to want to push those limits. That had been why life on Nikkeldepain had been difficult for him. Nikkeldepain worked by the rules. Lots of rules. Rules to be obeyed without question. At least it had until Vala and the lattice ship got there! The show on the lattice ship had been a rare treat. And while it had nothing to do with his eventual decision to part ways with Nikkeldepain, it seemed to be a trigger to the sequence of events that had changed things.

  He tore his mind away from thinking about his youth and concentrated on the matter in hand. Soon an orange ball of furious energies danced above the truncated cone of twisted wires and the Venture 7333 raced along at a pace that the fastest naval chaser could not dream of. Pausert melded well with the two young witches, and the ship hurtled onward through space.

  Chapter 1

  Threbus looked more than a little alarmed at the sudden appearance of the slitty little silver-eyed vatches all around them. "I suppose these are the kind that can't be handled by your mother?" he asked of Goth, his middle daughter. The tone was faintly hopeful. The expression was not.

  His daughter shook her head. "I reckon not. Captain, how about you? You're a real wizard with vatches."

  Pausert considered the problem. It seemed clear enough that the little fragments of otherwhere, pieces of impossible whirling blackness called vatches, had appeared because of Pausert. Pausert was a vatch-handler, a vatch negotiator, he who had done the impossible, and made friends with the creatures who were normally puppeteers playing with humans for a sort of dreamlike amusement. It would seem that there was such a thing as too much success.

  Eventually, he shook his head. "If I tried and failed-even on one, it'd be pretty fatal. I think we're going to have to learn to co-operate with them, Threbus."

  "How?"

  "Rather like one deals with the Leewit," said Pausert.

  Threbus groaned. "One does not deal with my youngest daughter, Pausert. One merely tries to limit the damage and then distract her."

  Captain Pausert, who had had plenty of experience of the Leewit, grinned at his great-uncle. "Yes. That's it, I think."

  Threbus took a deep breath. "Pausert, you have repaid us for what we did to you."

  Because of the Karres witches, Captain Pausert had been though more near-death experiences than he cared to think about at any one sitting. He patted his great-uncle-and future father-in-law, if Goth had her way-on the shoulder. "I hope so. It was a bit rough at first. But I wouldn't have missed it for all the worlds in the Empire."

  "More to the point the Empire wouldn't have survived, without you getting through it," said Threbus.

  Pausert nodded. "I understand that now. And I wonder if the vatches are not doing the same thing for Karres."

  Threbus looked thoughtful. "You can hardly have spoken to the precog teams, Pausert. It's because of what they're seeing that we're glad you came back here so quickly. They've been giving us worrying and confused views of the future. Not all good, either. I wonder if this is another klatha talent starting to manifest in you?"

  "Nope," said Pausert. He'd been through enough of the otherworldly klatha development phases to recognize that feeling. "Just common sense. Karres has faced two terrible dangers. Been all that stood between man and Manaret, and between the Empire and the nanite plague."

  "Could be," said Goth slowly, "that Karres, just by existing, draws trouble."

  Captain Pausert felt an eerie prickle at the back of his skull. Some kind of klatha force was at work here.

  It was plain that Threbus felt it too. "We can't exactly stop existing. We've always operated, if not in secret, at least not obtrusively. We could hide back in time or something… "

  Goth shook her head, her high forehead wrinkled in concentration. "It wouldn't make any difference. Whatever causes this is like Big Windy the vatch. I reckon it's not limited to space or time as we know them. Not even this dimension. Manaret and Moander were pulled from somewhere else. Another dimension, thousands of complicated dimensions away… they thought it was by accident. But what if it wasn't?"

  "I'd say we're in trouble. Again," said Captain Pausert, shrugging. "We're getting quite good at that."

  "Clumping right," said the Leewit, arriving suddenly in their midst. "What are all these stinkin' little vatches doing here? Where is Little-bit? She's okay. I didn't invite all these other ones."

  "Perhaps she's here, somewhere. It's a bit confusing," said Pausert.

  "Well, go away, you lot," said the Leewit to the vatch-swarm. "Or I'll whistle at you. I don't know if it'll bust you up. You want to find out, huh? Anyway, Pa, I came to tell you Malee
n is here at the palace."

  Threbus brightened perceptibly. He was a fair man, Pausert knew. He never played favorites among his daughters. But he plainly had a soft spot for Maleen, his oldest child. "If they won't go away," he said, looking at the vatches, "I suppose that we could."

  The Leewit looked warily at her father. "Not the Egger route."

  ***

  There was a boom as air rushed in to fill the space. The vatches flickered and rippled around where the four Karres witches had been moments before. They'd find them again of course. They had their flavor.

  Chapter 2

  "I didn't know that it was possible to teleport that sort of mass," said Captain Pausert, impressed.

  Goth squeezed her father's hand. "Oh, yes. So long as you've got a hot witch doing it, it works pretty well."

  Threbus wiped his brow. "If the range is not particularly great, I can manage large amounts of mass. But I'm pretty well limited to a few hundred yards. A group of us can manage a few miles."

  "Still a pretty hot witch," said Goth. "I can only do a couple of pounds."

  Threbus smiled. "You've got the range on me though. And you're young yet. When I was your age I had just started to discover a few klatha powers but they were so slight that I didn't actually believe they were real."

  "That must have been just as well on Nikkeldepain," said Captain Pausert, thinking of his home planet. It was a very conservative and traditional place. Quite stuffy in a lot of ways. Karres witch tricks would not be happily received there.

  The thought made him chuckle a little. Most of the people of Nikkeldepain would be horrified by the company he was now keeping. It had not been the easiest place to grow up in, in some ways. Not if one was just a little bit out of the ordinary. Captain Pausert could see now that might easily have been the start of his own klatha manifestations. But it had given him enough trouble at school, and later in the Nikkeldepain space navy.

  That, and the infamy of his great-uncle Threbus, the very man who had just teleported them. It had been difficult growing up in the shadow of the stories about great-uncle Threbus. Harder because he'd never known quite where to stand on it all. His mother had always stood up for her strange uncle, in spite of what people said. Pausert had had a few bitter fights about it at school. He'd always held out that the stories had to be exaggerated. Now he had to wonder whether it had not been Nikkeldepain that had been the victim, not his eccentric great-uncle.

  They were joined by Maleen, who was with a young man Pausert didn't know. Pausert hadn't seen much of Maleen since the day that he had left the three witches of Karres back on their home planet after rescuing them from slavery on the Empire world of Porlumma. He'd always been a little suspicious about that. The witches were certainly capable of rescuing themselves from most situations. Maleen was a precognitive Karres witch-which gave him enough ground for extreme suspicion.

  Precog was not an exact science. But it was good enough for her to have prepared a tray of drinks for them. Tall green Lepti liquor for Captain Pausert and her father, and a pale frothy brew for her two sisters. When Pausert had last seen her, Maleen had been a pretty blonde teenage girl. It made him sharply aware of the passage of years to see that she was now definitely a young woman.

  "Captain," she said proudly, taking the young man's hand possessively, "this is Neldo. My husband."

  Pausert extended his hand. "Pleased to meet you." Well, she had said that she would be of marriageable age in two years, Karres time. Pausert was still not too sure just how long a Karres month was. But he, together with Goth and her little sister, the Leewit, had been on quite a number of adventures since then. Come to think of it, he wasn't entirely sure how many months it had all taken.

  Neldo shook his hand warmly. "I've heard a lot about you." Then he turned to his father-in-law. "Maleen has got some great news."

  "We're going to have a baby!" said Maleen excitedly.

  Threbus beamed and hugged both of them. "Would it be too much to expect for a precog to have some idea what sex it's going to be?"

  Maleen blushed. "You know we're not supposed to do that kind of thing."

  "So you got Kerris, or one of the others, to do it for you," said Goth, grinning.

  Maleen and Neldo smiled at each other. "You might be right. We might even know what we've decided to call her."

  The Leewit stood in front of them, her arms folded. "There is only one 'the Leewit.'"

  Maleen laughed. "We know that. And it still didn't put us off having children. Her name will be Vala."

  "Why?" asked Goth.

  "We don't know," answered Maleen. "It's not a name that either of us had ever heard before."

  Captain Pausert was a little taken aback by the name. It brought back a flood of memories which he had thought were gone for ever. "I knew a Vala once, back on Nikkeldepain."

  Goth looked suspiciously at him. "You said that sort of funny. Who was this Vala?"

  "Just a girl I knew when I was growing up." Pausert had a bad feeling his ears were starting to grow slightly red.

  "I bet she was your sweetheart, Captain," Maleen sniggered. "Hope she was better than that insipid girl, what was her name, Illyla."

  "She wasn't a bit like Illyla," said Captain Pausert reminiscently. "Actually, if anything she was more like Goth. Except that she had red hair and was a bit older. She got me into a fair amount of trouble, but I don't remember that I minded too much. Like the lattice ship that came to Nikkeldepain at about that time. She was one of those people that you never really forget. Oh well, it was long ago. It's a beautiful name. I'm glad you chose it."

  "Huh!" said Goth, looking at Pausert from under her dark brows. "Anyway, I've never had much time for babies, not until they grow up a bit."

  Toll came in. "And then they turn into something like the Leewit," she said, looking at her youngest daughter and smiling.

  The Leewit shrugged. "Babies are no fun anyway. I have decided that I'm going to stay with the captain for the next while. Things happen around him. And he takes pretty good care of us. Makes us wash behind our ears even."

  That last was plainly something that she felt was a little unnatural. Pausert had to smile to himself. The Leewit was a handful to deal with, but at least he felt that he was dealing with a child, even if he knew very little about how to do so. With Goth he was less certain. She was growing up. Fast.

  According to the Karres precogs this was going to be a very important year for Goth. The year had started with their departure from the Governor's palace on Green Galaine, on a life or death mission to escort the Nartheby Sprite Hantis and her Grik-dog Pul to the Imperial Palace. Of course no one had seen fit to tell him that the trip was going to be quite as risky as it had turned out to be. It had been a period during which the captain's own klatha skills had grown immeasurably. But although Goth had matured, he could honestly not say that it had been that much of an important year for her development. Except… they still had a couple of months to go. Pausert could not help but be a bit nervous as to what they might bring her.

  ***

  A little later, when Goth had gone off with her sisters, Pausert broached the subject of his next mission with Toll and Threbus. His relationship with the Witches of Karres was an interesting one. At least in theory, Captain Pausert was just an independent trader, with a fast armed merchant ship. But in practice he was part of the community of Karres. That was more about a willingness to do what was needed, than merely a reference to your citizenship or place of birth. And if Karres needed him, he was willing.

  "The Chaladoor," said Threbus, referring to a dangerous and mysterious region of space, the lair of pirates, the Megair Cannibals-and at one time of Manaret and the Nuri globes lurking within the Tark Nembi cluster of dead suns and interstellar dust and debris.

  "Oh?" said Captain Pausert warily. He'd survived one crossing of Chaladoor. Admittedly, he'd been in more danger from those inside his ship-spies and the notorious Agandar-than from forces outside it.
/>   "There is something going on in that area of space. Since Manaret was destroyed, quite a few ships have risked the crossing. And none of them have made it. The Daal of Uldune has also thought to expand his power in that direction. But he has been repulsed."

  Pausert raised his eyebrows. He knew the hexaperson that was the cloned and telepathic ruler of the one-time pirate world rather well. Sedmon the Sixth was not a trivial foe. The Empire still trod warily around him, and the forces at his command. Whatever the danger was that lurked in the Chaladoor, it was something serious. "You want me to do what, exactly?"

  "You will be a kind of bait, to be honest, Pausert," said Threbus. "All we want you to do is encounter the problem, and then run away as fast as you and the Sheewash drive can manage. The Chaladoor is a large, complex region. Karres could hunt for some years without encountering whatever the problem is. Problems tend to avoid whole worlds which are also spacecraft."

  He looked at his grand nephew with a twinkle. "And we do really mean 'run', Pausert. You've proved yourself far more than just capable with problems. And you've taken good care of my daughters in the process. But not with something that was big enough to deal with eight of the Daal's cruisers and a battle wagon. They barely had time to say they were under attack on sub-radio, before being destroyed. Whatever it is, it is no easy foe to deal with."

  Threbus cleared his throat and continued. "You have a ship which is very nearly the equal of a single cruiser anyway, as far as speed and detection equipment is concerned. We'll have it refitted with some more of the very latest equipment, at our expense. Your armaments are not quite to the same standard, but they are certainly up to holding off an enemy until you can engage the Sheewash drive. Now that you have also mastered the drive, and with Goth and the Leewit to help you in emergencies, we think you should be able to deal with running away. Leave us to the clean up!"