Witch World ww-1

by Andre Norton

  “There is a free choice here for all who ride or sail under Estcarp’s banner. Let none gainsay that choice.”

  The Guardian nodded agreement. So the three of them went out from the tent on the sea shore: Koris, vibrant, alive, his handsome head erect on his grotesque shoulders, his nostrils swelling as if he scented more than sea salt in the air; Simon, moving more slowly, feeling a fatigue new to his overdriven body, but also buoyed by a determination to see this venture to its end; and Briant, settling his helm over his fair head, coiling the metal ring scarf about his throat, his eyes straight ahead as if he were driven, or pulled, by something far greater than his own will.

  The Captain turned to the other two as they reached the boats waiting to pull out to the ships. “You come with me on the flagship, for you, Simon, must serve as a guide, and you—” he looked to Briant and hesitated. But the youngster, with a lift of chin and stare of eye which was a challenge, met that appraisal defiantly.

  Simon sensed something crosswise between the two which was of their own concern as he waited for Koris to meet that unvoiced defiance. “You, Briant, will put yourself among my shield men and you will stay with them!”

  “And I, Briant,” the other answered with something approaching impudence, “shall stay at your back, Captain of Estcarp, when there is good cause to do so. But I fight with my own sword and wield my own shield in this or any other battle!”

  For a moment it seemed that Koris might dispute that, but they were hailed from the boats. And when they splashed through the surf to board, Simon noted that the younger man took good care to keep as far from his commander as the small craft allowed.

  The ship which was to spearhead the Estcarp attack was a fishing vessel and the Guards were jammed aboard her almost shoulder to shoulder. The other mismatched transports fell in behind her as they took to the bay waters.

  They were close enough to see the fleet rotting in Gorm harbor when the hail from the Sulcar vessels crossed the water and the trading ships with their mixed cargo of Falconers, Karsten refugees, and Sulcar survivors rounded a headland to draw in from the sea side.

  Simon had no idea of where he had crossed the barrier on his flight from Gorm, and he might be leading this massed invasion straight into disaster. They could only hope that the Game of Power had softened up the defense in their favor.

  Tregarth stood at the prow of the fishing smack, watching the harbor of the dead city, waiting for the first hint of the barrier. Or would one of those metal ships, protected past any hope of attack from Estcarp, strike at them now?

  Wind filled their sails, and, overladen as the ships were, they cut the waves, keeping station as if drilled. A hulk from the harbor, still carrying enough rags aloft to catch the wind, its anchor ropes broken, drifted across their course, a wide collar of green weed lying under the water line to slow it.

  On its deck there was no sign of life as it bore on its wallowing way. From a Sulcar ship arched a ball, rising lazily into the air, dropping down to smash upon the deck of the derelict. Out of that ragged hole in the planking came red tongues of clean flame, feasting avidly on the tinder dry fittings, so the ship, burning, drifted on to sea.

  Simon grinned at Koris, a brittle excitement eating at him. He could be sure now that they were past the first danger point.

  “We have overrun your barrier?”

  “Unless they have moved it closer to land, yes!”

  Koris rested his chin on the head of Volt’s Ax as he surveyed the dark fingers of wharves before what had once been a flourishing city. He was grinning too, as a wolf shows its fangs before the first slash of the fight.

  “It would appear that this time the Power worked,” he commented. “Now let us be about our part of the business.”

  Simon knew a twinge of caution. “Do not underestimate them. We have but passed the first of their defenses, perhaps their weakest.” His first elation was gone as quickly as it had come. There were swords, axes, dart guns about him. But in the heart of the Kolder keep was a science centuries ahead of such weapons — which might at any moment produce some nasty surprise.

  As they came farther into the harbor, faced now by the need for finding passage to the wharves in and among the vessels moldering at anchor, there continued to be no sign of any life in Sippar. Only some of the brooding and forbidding silence of the dead city fell upon the invaders, dampening their ardor, taking a slight edge off their enthusiasm and their feeling of triumph at having passed the barrier.

  Koris sensed that. Working his way back through the mass of men waiting to be landed, he found the captain of the ship and urged a quick thrust at the shore. Only to be reminded tartly that while the Captain of Estcarp’s Guard might be all powerful on land, he should leave the sea to those who knew it, and that the master of this particular ship had no intention of fouling his vessel with any of the hulks before them.

  Simon continued to eye the shoreline, studying the mouth of each empty street, glancing now and then aloft to that blind hulk which was the heart of Sippar in more ways than one. He could not have said just what he feared — a flight of planes, an army emerging from the streets to the quays. To be met by nothing at all was more disconcerting than to face the high odds of Kolder weapons carried by hordes of their slaves. This was too easy, and he could not find full faith in the Game of Power; some core of him refused to believe that because a small image had ended with a melted head, they had defeated all that lay in Gorm.

  They made the shore without incident, those of Sulcar landing farther down the coast to cut off any reinforcements which might be drawn from other points on the island. They scouted up the streets and lanes down which Simon had come days earlier, trying locked doors, investigating dark corners. But as far as they could discover nothing lived nor moved within the husk of Gorm’s capital.

  And they were well up to the center hold when the first resistance came, not from the air, nor from any invisible wave, but on foot with weapons in hand as the men of this world had fought for generations.

  Suddenly the streets were peopled with fighters who moved swiftly, but without sound, who voiced no battle cries, but came forward steadily with deadly purposes. Some wore the battle dress of Sulcarmen, some of Karsten, and Simon saw among them a few of the bird helms of Falconers.

  That silent rush was made by men who were not only expendable, but who had no thought of self-protection, just as those in the road ambush had fought. And their first fury carried them into the invasion force with the impact of a tank into a company of infantrymen. Simon went to his old game of sniping, but Koris charged with the Ax of Volt, a whirling, darting engine of death, to clear a path through the enemy lines, and another back again.

  The slaves of the Kolder were no mean opponents, but they lacked the spark of intelligence which would have brought them together to reform, to use to better advantage their numbers. They knew only that they must attack while any strength was left in them, while they still kept on their feet. And so they did, with the insane persistence of the mindless. It was sheer butchery which turned even the veteran Guardsmen sick while they strove to defend themselves and to gain ground.

  Volt’s Ax no longer shone bright, but, stained as it was, Koris tossed it in the air as a signal for the advance. His men closed ranks leaving behind them a street which was no longer empty, though it was without life.

  “That was to delay us.” Simon joined the Captain.

  “So do I think. What do we expect now? Death from the air such as they used at Sulcarkeep?” Koris looked into the sky, the roofs above them gaining his wary attention.

  It was those same roofs which suggested another plan to his companion.

  “I do not think you will be able to break into the hold at ground level,” he began and heard the soft rumble of laughter from within the Captain’s helm.

  “Not so. I know ways herein which perhaps even the Kolder have not nosed out. This was my burrow once.”

  “But I have also a plan,” Si
mon cut in. “There are ropes in plenty on the ships, and grappling hooks. Let one party take to the roofs, while you search out your burrows, and perhaps we can close jaws upon them from two sides.”

  “Fair enough!” Koris conceded. “Do you try the sky ways since you have traveled them before. Choose your men, but do not take above twenty.”

  Twice more they were attacked by those silent parties of living-dead, and each time more of their own men were left as toll when the last of the Kolder-owned were cut down. In the end the Estcarp forces parted ways. Simon and some twenty of the Guard broke in a door and climbed through the miasma of old death to a roof. Tregarth’s sense of direction had not betrayed him; the neighboring roof showed a ragged hole, the mark of his landing in the plane.

  He stood aside for the sailors who cast their grapples to the parapet of that other roof above their heads and across an expanse of street. Men tied their swords to them, made sure of the safety of their weapon belts, eyed that double line across nothingness with determination. Simon had recruited none who could not claim a good head for heights. But now when he faced the test he had more doubts than hopes.

  He made that first ascent, the tough rope scraping his palms as he climbed, putting a strain on his shoulders he believed from moment to moment he could not endure.

  The nightmare ended sometime. He uncoiled a third rope from about his waist, and tossed its weighted end back to the next man in line, taking a turn with the other end around one of the pillars supporting the hangar and helping to draw him up.

  Those planes he had disabled stood where he had left them, but open motor panels and scattered tools testified to work upon them. Why the job had not been finished was another mystery. Simon told off four men to guard the roof and the rope way, and with the rest began the invasion of the regions below.

  The same silence which had held elsewhere in the town was thick here. They passed along corridors, down stairs, by shut doors, with only the faint sound of their own quiet tread to be heard. Was the hold deserted?

  On they went into the heart of the blind, sealed building, expecting at any moment to encounter one of the bands of the possessed. The degree of light grew stronger; there was an undefinable change in the air which suggested that if these levels were deserted now it had not long been so.

  Simon’s party came to the last flight of stone steps which he remembered so well. At the bottom that stone would be coated with the gray walling of the Kolders. He leaned out over the well, listening. Far, far below there was a sound at last, as regular in its thump, thump as the beat of his own heart.

  VI

  THE CLEANSING OF GORM

  “Captain,” Tunston had moved up to join him, “what do we meet below?”

  “Your foreseeing in that is as good as mine,” Simon answered half absently, for it was in that moment that he realized he did not sense any danger to come at all, even in this strange place of death and half life. Yet there was something below, or they would not hear that.

  He led the way, his gun ready, taking those steps cautiously, but at a fast pace. There were closed doors which were locked against their efforts to open them, until they came into the chamber of the wall map.

  Here that beat arose from the floor under their feet, was drummed out by the walls, to fill their ears and their bodies with its slow rhythm.

  The lights on the map were dead. There remained no line of machines on the table, tended by gray-robed men, though metal fastenings, a trailing wire or two marked where they had rested. But at that upper table there still sat a capped figure, his eyes closed, immobile, just as Simon had seen him on his first visit to this place.

  At first Simon believed the man dead. He walked to the table watching the seated Kolder alertly. To his best knowledge this was the same man whom he had tried to visualize for the artist of Estcarp. And he was fleetingly pleased at the accuracy of his memory.

  Only — Simon halted. This man was not dead, though those eyes were closed, the body motionless. One hand lay upon the control plate set in the table top and Simon had just seen a fingertip press a button there.

  Tregarth leaped. He had an instant in which to see those eyes open, the face beneath the metal twist in anger — and perhaps fear. Then his own hands closed upon the wire which led from the cap the other wore to the board in the wall behind. He ripped, bringing loose several of those slender cables. Someone cried out a warning and he saw a barreled weapon swing into line with his body as the Kolder went into action.

  Only because that cap and its trailing veil of wire interfered with the free action of he who wore it was Simon to continue to live. He slapped out with his dart gun across the flat face with its snarling mouth which uttered no sound, its stark and hating eyes. The blow broke skin, brought blood welling from cheek and nose. Simon caught the other’s wrist, twisting it so that a thin film of vapor spurted up into the vault of the ceiling, and not into his own face.

  They crashed back into the chair from which the Kolder had risen. There was a sharp snap, fire flashed across Simon’s neck and shoulder. A scream, muted and suppressed rang in his ears. The face beneath its sweep of blood was contorted with agony, yet still the Kolder fought on with steel-muscled strength.

  Those eyes, larger, and larger, filling the hall — Simon was falling forward into those eyes. Then there were no more eyes, just a weird fog-streaked window into another place — perhaps another time. Between pillars burst a company of men, gray robed, riding in machines strange to him. They were firing behind them as they came, unmistakably some remnant of a broken force on the run and hardly pressed.

  In a narrow column they struggled on, and with them he endured desperation and such a cold fury as he had not known existed as an emotion to wrack mind and heart. The Gate — once through the Gate — then they would have the time: time to rebuild, to take, to be what they had the will and force to be. A broken empire and a ravaged world lay behind them — before them a fresh world for the taking.

  The beset fugitives were swept away. He saw only one pallid face flushed red about a wound where his first blow had landed. Clinging about them both was the smell of scorching cloth and flesh. How long had that vision of the valley lasted — it could not have been a full second! He was still fighting, exerting pressure so that he might crack the other’s wrist against the chair. Twice he struck it so, and then the fingers relaxed and the vapor gun fell out of their grip.

  For the first time since that one scream the Kolder made a sound, a broken whimpering which sickened Simon. A second fading vision of those fleeing men — a moment of passionate regret which was like a blow to the man who involuntarily shared it. They thrashed across the floor to bring the Kolder up against a spitting wire. Simon slammed the other’s metal cap hard against the floor. For the last time a fragment of recognition reached from the man to him and in that scrap of tune he knew — perhaps not what the Kolder were — but from whence they had come. Then there was nothing at all, and Simon pulled away from the flaccid body to sit up. Tunston stooped and tried to pull the cap from the head which rolled limply on the gray-robed shoulders. They were all a little daunted when it became apparent that that cap was no cap at all, but seemingly a permanent part of the body it crowned.

  Simon got to his feet. “Leave it!” he bade the Guard. “But make sure none touch those wires.”

  It was then that he was aware that that throb in wall and floor, that feeling of life was gone, leaving behind it a curious void. The Kolder of the cap might himself have been the heart, which, ceasing to beat, had killed the citadel as surely as his race had killed Sippar.

  Simon made for the alcove where the elevator had been. Had all power ceased so that there was no way to reach the lower levels? But the door of the small cell was open. He gave command here to Tunston, and taking two of the Guardsmen with him, pushed the door shut.

  Again luck appeared to be with those out of Estcarp, for the closing of the panel put into action the mechanism of the lift. Simon expe
cted to front the level of the laboratory when that door opened once again. Only, when the cage came to a stop, he faced something so far removed from his expectations that for a moment he stood staring, while both of the men with him exclaimed in surprise.

  They were on the shore of an underground harbor, strongly smelling of the sea and of something else. The lighting which had prevailed elsewhere in the pile was centered upon a runway washed by the water on both sides, pointing straight out into a bowl of gloom and dark. And on that quay were the tumbled bodies of men, men such as themselves with no gray robes among them.

  Where the living dead who had met them in the street battles had gone armed and fully clad, these were either naked or wore only the tattered rags of old garments about their bodies, as if a need for clothing had no longer concerned them for a long time.

  Some had crumpled beside small trucks on which boxes and containers were still heaped. Others lay in line as if they had been marching in ranks when struck down. Simon walked forward and stooped to peer at the nearest. It was clear that the man was truly dead, had been so for a day at least.

  Gingerly, avoiding the heaped bodies, the three from Estcarp made their way to the end of the quay, finding nowhere among the dead any armed as fighting men. And none were of Estcarp blood. If these had been the slaves of the Kolder, they were all of other races.

  “Here, Captain.” One of the Guards lagging behind Simon had halted beside a body and was looking at it in wonder. “Here is such a man as I have never seen before. Look at the color of his skin, his hair; he is not from these lands!”

  The unfortunate Kolder slave lay on his back as if in sleep. But his skin, totally exposed save for a draggle of rag about his hips, was a red-brown, and his hair was tightly curled to his scalp. It was plain that the Kolder had cast their man nets in far regions.

  Without knowing why, Simon walked clear to the end of that wharf. Either Gorm had originally been erected over a huge underground cavern, or the invaders had blasted this out to serve their own purposes, purposes Simon could only believe were connected with the ship on which he had been a prisoner. Was this the secluded dock of the Kolder fleet?