by Andre Norton
“You should be free now, both of you,” Tarlach observed, “yet you are still in this world, visible to us.”
“We would not be able to talk with you properly if you could not see us, so the Amber Lady let us have that gift. She can do a great many things, you know.”
“Gunnora?” Una whispered. “You have seen her?”
“Yes, and she is truly wonderful!” The girl smiled at the memory of that meeting. “She held us close and gave us such welcome that we felt we were already home, though I knew we had a long, long way to travel before we reached that.”
The softness left her, replaced by purpose. “She knew what you did for Adeela, Mountain Hawk, how you were kind despite your fear, how you saw she was innocent despite the awful harm she caused, how you were gentle with her instead of hating, even though you knew she might make you die very horribly. The Lady said there was no fitting reward for that, but a dreadful danger was coming to this whole world, and she might at least bring you warning of it. I … I said that since you had helped my sister, I wanted to do it, and she agreed.
“Gunnora told it all to me very carefully. I did not quite understand everything, but she said that did not matter as long as I told it to you correctly.”
“Go ahead, Kathreen. Just take your time and do not be frightened of us.”
“Many gates open into this world. In fact, the ancestors of all of us humans originally came here through one. Well, we are good for this place and for each other, more or less, but some gates lead to places where the people are very bad.”
“The Dark!” Brennan hissed.
“No, just bad people in this case, or bad for everyone else except themselves. These ones are all warriors, the men are, and they work for a lord—they call him a Sultan—that they think is a kind of human form of their god. They do not believe any other people have worth or rights, and they conquered their whole world.
“That happened a long while ago in their time, more than four hundred years ago, and they believed all the other poor people, whom they used for slaves, had no fight left in them. They were wrong, though, and the people met and worked and trained together. They were able to keep it all secret since no one was afraid enough to watch them, although they were always careful, of course.
“When they were ready, everyone attacked at once, all over the whole world. The Sultanites were taken completely by surprise, and many of their armies were wiped out and the rest had to run, taking all their people who had moved into the conquered places with them.
“Now they are all back in their original country and are fighting to hold that. They are brave and very skillful, and there are a lot of them, and they have only one short border to defend. The whole rest of their holding faces on the ocean, and their enemies as yet have no ships or the skills to manage them. Still, they know they cannot win. Their land is very dry and does not grow a lot of crops, not enough to feed them all. It is flat, too, so it would be hard to defend once their enemies got inside.”
“Their position is a bad one right enough, and amply earned by the sound of it, but how does their plight concern us?” Tarlach asked.
“Long ago, there used to be men there who could call on a kind of Power. The Sultan at the time was afraid of them and killed most of them and their families, but some of the more powerful ones had been able to make gates of a sort and escape into various realms. They were not proper gates and could be used only twice, once from each end, and then with great difficulty, but I suppose that was for the best. Their enemies had no way of following them once they were gone.
“Two, two brothers, were killed before they could leave, and all this while, their passages have remained unused.”
“They lead into our world?”
“Yes. They wanted to live together.—No one there can make gates any more, but a scholar learned about these and discovered how to work them only a year ago. They would have been tried eventually anyway, but now everything is so desperate that spies were sent through one of them. They traveled around here, by boat mostly since their gate opened from and into the ocean, and looked about when they could land without being noticed, which was always at night, then they went home again. That was the hardest part, but they proved it was safe, and they reported that the country nearby was suitable for them. That meant they thought they could conquer it quickly.”
“Through their remaining gate,” the Falconer leader said. “What are their plans?”
“They are going to send a big fleet with all the soldiers they do not need right away. When they have enough land safe enough to try it, they will summon the rest of their people, letting their enemies have their old world.”
“Where in Estcarp will they put to shore?”
“Not Estcarp. High Hallack. They have chosen Seakeepdale's harbor, Mountain Hawk. It is nearest to where they will come through, and they think there are so few people there that they can kill them all and settle in before anyone even knows they have come.”
“Seakeep!” Brennan exclaimed.
“It is not unreasonable,” his commander told him. “The harbor is small, but it is good, and it is the only one along that stretch of coast. Those farther south, if they were explored at all, are busy, and most have large companies of blank shields wintering in and around them.—I am right, Kathreen, in assuming they are looking more for an easy landing than a fight at this stage?”
“Yes. They have only about three months to reopen the gate, and they will need nearly four weeks of that, with no disturbance at all, to do it. They have to be on solid, very high land, too, otherwise they could not bring up sufficient Power to hold it open long enough to be able to get all their people and animals and goods through.—I do not really understand how it works. …”
“Nor do we,” Ouen reassured her. “It is not necessary that we do, is it, Captain?”
“No. What is important is that these Sultanites must be kept from reaching any of Seakeep's mountains.—They are armed with normal weapons?” The Kolder had possessed strange and terrible arms and had supplied some of them to Alizon. It could well prove the same here.
She nodded vigorously. “Lady Gunnora said that especially. They use swords, spears, the usual things. No sorcery.”
“How many soldiers are aboard that fleet, Kathreen? The Amber Lady must have told you that, too.”
“She did,” the child replied promptly. “Sixty thousand.”
It was just a big number to her, more or less meaningless, but those listening to her sat back, stunned. Many of the peoples, entire races, occupying the lands they knew were not so numerous and had not been even before war had been loosed to ravage them.
“Whatever their strength, they will have to be stopped,” Tarlach stated flatly. “If once that host wins past Seakeep into the lands beyond, it will take many years and the loss of almost countless lives to drive them forth again, if they can be ejected at all, which I doubt, not after they have brought their people through to support them.”
“We are hardly unaware of that,” Brennan snapped. “We lack the power to alter reality, not the desire to do so.”
“Perhaps,” the Captain told him.
Both his voice and his expression had become thoughtful. He rose to his feet abruptly and started pacing rapidly, a trait his comrades recognized from of old when some matter of serious import was before him.
All watched him for several minutes, none speaking or moving lest they disrupt his train of thought.
At last, he stopped and faced his companions once more. “Victory is impossible as matters now stand, but we should be able to hold these invaders back for a time, for a long time if fortune grants us a sufficient number of days in which to prepare for their coming. Kathreen, can you tell us when that will be?”
“The Amber Lady said in about two weeks, Mountain Hawk.”
The Falconer turned on his heel, away from them. His shoulders fell. They were finished, then, before they had begun. They could not reach High Hallack in
less than two months even if they found a ship waiting to carry them when they reached the coast.
Una of Seakeep watched him a moment. She could read the defeat on him and shared it, but then fire flashed in her eyes, and her head snapped toward the child. “Gates have brought us to this pass, and a gate can save us out of it! Kathreen, return now to Gunnora and carry this message to her, that her warning is worthless, no, a work of cruelty only, unless she also provides us with the means of acting upon it. Let her open a gate to Seakeepdale for us now, to the round tower, so that we can lay whatever plans we may and implement them with no further waste of time.”
Tarlach whirled around. “Be sure to add my name to that request and also ask that a second gate be opened if possible leading to Linna.”
He smiled at the Holdruler's frown. “Do not scowl, Lady. If you are willing to risk angering the Great Ones in our cause, do not imagine I am so small as to hold back. Falconers will perish as well as Dalesfolk if these Sultanites sweep High Hallack.”
His eyes fixed on the ghost child. “Go with our thanks, Kathreen, and may you and Adeela journey well to a good ending.”
Adeela regretfully left Bravery and came to her sister in response to her call. She raised a small hand in farewell to Tarlach. There was no other motion on the part of either child, but in the following instant, both were gone, vanished from sight and from the realm of living men.
12
No one moved within the hall as seconds crawled by as slowly as if they were hours.
Nothing happened, and it seemed that nothing would happen, but then the air in the room's center shimmered and what appeared to be a long tunnel walled with back-lighted clouds stood open before them.
The Captain waited another moment before finally releasing his breath. Only one gate, but he had not really expected the other. The Amber Lady had done so much. The rest lay with human hands and human-wielded swords.
“Go quickly,” he said softly to his comrades. “Bring our horses and gear. We shall have time for that, I think, but the Lady Una and the Lieutenant shall remain here with me in case it does begin to close. We, at least, must go through it.” Fortunately, the hall was on the first level and the corridor and doors were wide enough to permit passage for the animals, as was the gate itself.
Pyra quietly took her place beside the three.
He shook his head. “Stay here. We go to fight and probably to die, not to build a new life as I had hoped.”
“All the more reason to have another healer in your company. Lady Una will be of little service in that capacity, I think, since she will probably claim her place beside you, as is a Holdruler's duty. As for the rest,” she shrugged, “what must be endured shall be.”
She saw the way his head raised and smiled in amusement. “I have heard you use that phrase, Mountain Hawk, but it is uttered in the villages as well and in the same context. We are of one race, after all.”
“And of one stubbornness,” he muttered, but he made no further attempt to dissuade her.
Their comrades were not long in returning, but once all was ready, they stood frozen, looking into the mist-shrouded passage, none wanting to be the first to enter it.
There had been no taint of the Dark on the two children—the falcons would have detected that—and it was patent that Kathreen had believed fully every word she had spoken, obviously half by rote, but what if it had not been Gunnora who had schooled her? Could a spirit be so duped?
What if that powerful being were not of the Light at all and this gate led to some inescapable prison or Shadow-ruled demon's hall? It, too, was free of open corruption and was fair enough to look upon, but the senses were not always to be trusted where illusion might too easily be at work. This was witchery of the highest order. …
Bravery stretched and walked to the passage, her tail held high. She meowed once, impatiently, and leaped inside, vanishing as she did so. Sunbeam gave a single sharp cry and plunged in after her.
Una's shoulders squared. She grasped Eagle's reins more firmly. “The rest of you can come with us or go by sea, but I follow my cat and falcon.”
The Captain pushed ahead of her. If they were to meet disaster, it was his to shield her, if only for a brief moment… .
He was caught up in a breathless rushing motion that left him completely disoriented. He could not have told in what direction he moved or if he still stood upright at all.
Something, someone, was beside him. A hand pressed against his. He could feel the scars circling it, and his fingers closed around it, comforting but also taking comfort as they whirled together through the seemingly endless mist.
The eldritch motion stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The Falconer stumbled and swayed, then found his balance.
He looked about him and discovered that he and Una were standing in Seakeep's one inhabited valley, at the foot of the road leading up to the round tower that had been their goal.
He quickly released the Daleswoman's hand and hastened to assist and steady their companions and mounts, who were coming through behind them.
He did so with raised head and eyes flaming with pride and something more. That these men would have followed him straight against any military foe, he had known, but in traveling that strange tunnel, they had chosen to put themselves into contact with much that they most greatly feared—powerful sorcery, sorcery of a strength similar to that which had once enslaved and very nearly broken all their kind. Never had he honored them more in his heart than he did in this moment and never had he been more deeply aware of either their devotion to their duty or their love for him.
He shivered, then, deep within his own heart. His orders, the war to which he would commit them, would soon send all too many of them to their deaths.
He had no time to brood upon that. Their arrival was nothing if not dramatic, and both horsemen and warriors running on foot were already racing toward them, having delayed this long only to confirm the identity of the newcomers.
The first to reach them drew rein beside him.
“Captain, what …”
“Explanations must wait. Summon both Rorick and Rufon to the tower if they are not already within. We have a council before us. A council of war.”
Soon the three Falconer leaders and both Una herself and Rufon, her liege man and long-time aide, were assembled in the rather small chamber where the Holdrulers of Seakeep had ever met with their advisors when matters of grave import lay before them.
Tarlach recounted all that had transpired at Lormt, concluding in great detail with the spirit child's warning.
When he had finished speaking, he spread his hands, “I could have wished for more specific military information, but we must be grateful for even this much and act as best we can upon it.”
“Act!” Rorick exploded. “Did the trip through that gate rive you from your senses? No army could reach us in two weeks, even if one were already mustered and waiting for our call.”
“We must use what we have on hand to hold them off.”
“Five hundred of us, six hundred if you count Seakeep's garrison, most of whom are women, trained, yes, but whose only battle experience has been in chastening a few bandits?”
“They have had some pretty intensive Falconer schooling in these last months,” Una reminded him. That had been part of their treaty, a minor part, but Tarlach had insisted upon its beginning at once as a gesture of good faith.
“Lady, they might be Falconers with no better effect! There are sixty thousand warriors coming against us! With those odds, they need not even be passable fighters to sweep us all away and not even notice that we had ever been here.”
“Maybe.” Rufon had battled Alizon's Hounds beside the Lord Harvard. He knew fighting men and those who led them, and now his attention was fixed on the Captain. “You do see some hope for us, then, Mountain Hawk?” he asked, picking up the name as instinctively as those others who had heard it.
He nodded. “This valley is narrow in every part
and shrinks still further just above the final fields skirting the place where land and beach meet. If we can throw up a wall there, no more than the number mounting it would be able to come against us at any one time, and we could hold a full third of our force in reserve to act as reinforcements for particularly hard-pressed sections and replacements for our inevitable casualties. In the meantime, some help will be reaching us from Seakeep's neighbors.”
“Not much, I fear,” Una interjected. “I know these Holdlords around me. They are good men, brave men, but the fever left them with little more in the way of able-bodied troops than it did me, and some they needs must keep with them, however fully they believe our declaration that High Hallack's stand has to be made here, that individual Dales will be quickly swallowed up if the invaders get past us, even as was the case with Alizon. They cannot send us what they do not possess. Do not forget, none of them trained their women as we did.
“Ravenfield is the only one with a sizable male population, and Ogin made sure there was no fight in any of them. We can expect nothing of people so cowed. They would flee at the first sign of a determined foe, giving us more trouble than help.”
“The lords around will be more generous with supplies?”
“Yes. That help will not be denied.”
“That should be sufficient. It is not in any Dale that I am thinking of placing our hope.”
Seakeep's Lady frowned. “In whom, then?”
“Falconers. Remember the Warlord's summons? His ships should be making Linna about the time our courier arrives there, and most of us serving in High Hallack should already have assembled in obedience to his summons. Even with all the columns united, we would not equal a third of the invaders’ strength, but given a strong defensive position here and the losses any attacker must sustain in assailing the like, we would have good hope for victory, and even as we fought, the Dales would be mustering to take over for us should we fail.”
“Will your people respond?” the Holdlady asked him. “They have not come to Linna to fight, nor could even the greatest of the Dales hope to pay so many—”
