The Warding of Witch World

34 West Coast Voyage, North

The Wave Cleaver had altered course soon after they had picked up the drifting boat. As yet there had been no signs of any floating bergs, but Captain Stymir was willing to take the longer route, that he might not encounter whatever had brought the Flying Crossbeak and its crew to their end.

Dargh was well marked on the map used by any ship bearing north, but it lay closer east than west. Their new course would add extra days of sailing onto their voyage, as on the west there were treacherous shoals and reefs among which few ever wished to hunt a path.

Undia had recovered by the second day after the ordeal she had partly shared with Audha and insisted on returning to her post at the prow—though for the first day Joul remained at hand.

Audha still remained in deep slumber in Undia’s bunk. Frost and Inquit took turns visiting her, though Kankil was always cuddled close to her unmoving body. Trusla felt she had little to offer now, but concern pulled her in the same direction several times each day.

She sensed that the Sulcars of the crew were tense and apprehensive. Axes and swords had been loosened of the oiled covering which kept them from rust at sea. And it seemed that all day long the screech of metal against an edging whetstone could be heard. They kept a lookout on the midmast, though those had to be changed hourly because of the nip of the wind.

From time to time Undia raised the horn which hung at her belt and blew patterns of notes which set the crew to various tasks, most of which Trusla could only guess at. Simond had been summoned twice by the captain and she guessed that his own knowledge of possible attacks from the Dark were examined. After all, though his service had been only on land, for the past months he had been heading one of Koris’s Estcarp search parties and twice they made finds which had sent a witch riding in a hurry to lay some trouble to rest.

On the fourth day they sighted the first warning of the rough way ahead. Sometime in the past an unknown who had feared the traps the sea laid had erected, on a wave-washed cone of rough rock sometimes completely hidden by the water, a cairn which appeared to be fused together. At least the wrath of the sea about it had not beaten it away.

At the tip of that rugged pile was set a round of metal. And the sea had not had its way with that, either, for it was not dimmed. Undia swung up a rod with a similar disk at its end. There was flash from the cairn-set plate.

“Hothrot’s light.” The tall Hansa came up beside Trusla as he spoke. “ ‘Tis said that he gave one of his own eyes to win that beacon for us all. It is true that some Power holds it steady.”

The ship veered again slightly. Undia leaned forward in her seat, her attention fast-fixed on the waves into which their prow plowed. Another blast from her horn caused a flurry of activity.

Now Trusla could see the dark rise of the western coast. Unknown land. That which was known of Arvon, where the four Mantle overlords held reign, was to the south. She had seen some furs on the wharf market tables—some of a dull gray—which most of the buyers had avoided and she had overheard named stinkwolf. Indeed they had smelled strong, and Trusla had heard from one complaining customer that they came from some beast unknown in the east and a peril to be avoided in the west.

For the rest of the day and through the dusk, which came very late in these northern reaches at this time of year, the Wave Cleaver followed the pattern set by Undia’s horn.

At last the captain himself ordered her from her perch and Joul took her place so that she could eat and drink. However, she refused to go to her cabin but lay on a wad of sail and blanket they spread for her.

Trusla made a final trip to see Audha before she herself sought sleep. Frost sat cross-legged on the deck planking, her body swinging to the motion of the boat. Her head had fallen forward on her breast and she plainly dozed.

Inquit slid open the door behind Trusla and edged in. Their vigil was beginning to affect both women. By the limited light of the lantern swinging from its hook above, they looked gaunt and strained.

Just as Inquit closed the door, Audha moved. She had lain every time Trusla had seen her in that same stiff, unnatural position as when they had arranged her so on the bunk. But now her head turned from side to side and she sighed and then gave a small cough and her blue eyes opened.

She stared at Trusla in bewilderment and then turned her head weakly to survey what she could of the cabin.

Kankil raised her soft head from the girl’s shoulder and patted her cheek gently. Both Frost and Inquit half pushed Trusla aside to go to their charge.

“What watch?” Her voice was thin. “My watch—I must keep my watch.” She sat up suddenly and collapsed as quickly. “My head spins… but the watch.”

“The watch is kept, little one.” Frost’s voice held its most gentle note. “You are safe—this is the Wave Cleaver.”

Audha’s eyes seemed to open farther. She raised a hand and pushed aside Kankil as if she desired no comfort, no tending.

“Then—then I dreamed true.” Her face twisted as if some pain wrenched at her lean middle. “We—we were taken—but how—how did I come here, Lady?” She reached up now and grasped the sleeve of Frost’s robe, nearly jerking the witch down upon her with a sudden show of strength. “The captain—tell the captain—the Dargh—

“We are well away from that plague spot,” Inquit said, drawing Audha’s attention to her.

“You—you are Latt.” The girl spoke as one now dazed. “And you…” She looked to Frost, and then shrank down into the bunk, loosing her hold on the other quickly. “You are a witch—out of Estcarp. Witchery—it was dire witchery as caught us. What do you weave now?”

She was shaking, and, without thinking, Trusla pushed past Frost, though her smaller form could not hide the taller witch. As Kankil had done, she patted the other gently.

“We seek woven witchery to break its web, wavereader. It was the Power of these”—she indicated Inquit and Frost—“who, with the aid of our own wavereader, found you.”

The girl bit her lip. “It must be by some favor of Power I live. Rogar—Lothar—Tortain?”

Trusla shook her head. “They walk the Road of Heroes’ Grace. But you remain.”

Now the girl clutched Trusla’s hand, holding it tightly. “Perhaps I lived to warn. There is that which moves. Something drove the bergs so that our ship was herded like one of the wasan to the fall slaughtering. Dargh…” She shuddered, and Trusla settled herself precariously on the side of the bunk and somehow brought Audha up into her own arms.

“All is well,” she crooned, as she would have to one of the little ones in the children’s room in the great house where she had been born. “We are far from Dargh. Our captain has chosen a western way.”

The girl in her hold stiffened. “That is the way of peril also—though only by rocks and the whims of the sea and not the beastliness of maneaters. To voyage so is a great danger, though it has been done.”

“As we shall do again. Captain Stymir has made other northern voyages. Many of the perils are already known to him.” But she saw the shadow of uneasiness still on Audha’s face.

Inquit had moved up beside Trusla. “We are of the north, though we do not take to the sea except for the hunt. Yes, there grows danger, but it is that which we are sworn to seek and face—Power to Power. Now you must eat and grow strong and perhaps in a few days you can aid Undia with the watching, for she has no ’prentice on this voyage.”

The feeling of calmness and good sense which Inquit projected now was such that Trusla could also feel. After a last lingering look at Audha, Frost slipped out of the cabin and the other two proceeded to tend their charge. At length she slept again and this time it seemed that she rested naturally.

However, there was a meeting in the great cabin at dusk. The Wave Cleaver had again altered course several degrees east, since the strain of trying to read the wave run in this dull northern light was too much for either Undia or Joul, though both stayed stubbornly at the bow post.

Captain Stymir had out his map and was regarding it closely.

“We are beginning to sight ice—not real bergs but still visible. And the western reefs devour ships as a hungry man clears his dinner plate. From what can be guessed, the Flying Crossbeak was taking the way of most caution—eastward—before swinging toward the western shore. A peninsula that is well armored with reefs and tricky currents. Yet we must round it to reach End of the World.” He looked to Frost.

“Lady, you have your own way of foreseeing, is that not true?”

“No one can truly foresee, Captain,” she replied. “For life is made up of choices. We can sometimes tell what lies ahead for this choice or that. I do have the Power”—and her hand instinctively cupped her jewel—“to know whether any menace of the Dark lurks ahead—but that range is limited.”

“You have tried it.” He made that more statement than question.

“I have. There is a shadowing in the north. Also a blot of evil which I believe to be this Dargh. The Dark draws energy from pain, fear, violent death. See for yourself.” She slipped off the chain and now her jewel dangled over the map. It began to swing and yet somehow they were sure that she did not urge it so. Then it settled in the air as if an invisible pocket held it, aslant on the chain and to the east on the map.

“Is this your Dargh?” she asked.

“It is Dargh right enough, but certainly not mine, nor that of any true man. Those who den there have no right to the name of humankind.”

The color of the jewel was changing now. There was a dull red glow—it might be an ember scraped from some hearth, so dark a red that it was nearly black. Simond’s sword hand curled, to grip a weapon he did not draw. He had seen such a message given once before, when he had ridden the outer reaches of Estcarp seeking any entrance for the Dark. Then the witch in their company had been close enough to be sisterhood to alert them and draw Power. And a thing which might have once been a circle of slimed green rock had died in flame focused through her jewel—erased before it could once more be used.

“Can it be destroyed? I saw what happened in the Glade of Bone Trees,” he blurted out.

“Only a great summoning can cleanse such a Dargh,” the witch replied. “You witnessed the erasure of something very old—that which set it was long gone. This lives and gathers. But it is only a servant, or so it would seem.”

The captain made a dry sound which was far from a laugh, if that was what he had intended.

“You give us faint encouragement, Lady Frost.”

“If what we are now seeking is indeed the gate through which your people came, Captain, why did they chance such a journey into the unknown? The Sulcars are spoken of as lovers of trade and gain and they have served not only themselves but also our world well by those very matters. But above all else, as a goad, there hangs fear.

“The best recorded entrance of a whole people uncovered so far at Lormt is that of the Dalefolk. Their wisefolk deliberately opened that door to escape some disaster so great that, lest some longing for a part of the past would move them to eventual return, they closed and sealed it behind them with the strongest Powers they could against any reopening. The Kioga—they fled a war and found a land they could make their own. And those others who through the years have come singly—such as Simon Tregarth—have been hunted by their kind and took a final chance for escape.

“Your legend of a northern gate through which you passed on ships—tell me, Captain, you have known it from childhood. Is it not deliberately obtuse? If those who come thus into our seas fled, then what did they flee? The wild Power loosed when the Mage-stone went from us was enough to arouse many sleeping things—and it has. The shadows that have driven the Latts from their home ranges with evil and deadly dreams—this affair of the Flying Cross-beak—does that not suggest that perhaps some lock your people put upon a gate is weakening, that something beyond is drawing to it, or perhaps experimenting with that of the Dark it can summon and control?”

Stymir had shifted a little in his chair. “And if we follow the hints of legend to this gate, Lady, and it opens—how do we battle?”

“They search now at Lormt, as you know, for the ultimate sealing of all gates. Hilarion remains and he is an adept such as could gather power into his hands and hurl it like lightning. Even we of the jewel”—she held hers close again—“who have been favored above most by the talent, cannot command such forces as an adept summons. But if his Powers, plus all we can feed him—and there are many talents, each with their own strength and virtue—fails, then there will be a sequel battle such as this world has not often seen.

“I cannot chart a sea path for you, Captain. That is the talent which is of your blood. What I can do is foretell any blight of the Dark which lies across our path. And at this time I see nothing which threatens save the weapons of nature herself.”

The captain reached within a coffer on the table which served him as a desk. He brought out a plaque of what looked to Simond like clear ice, yet in the warmth of the cabin it showed no signs of melting.

“Three years ago”—Stymir seemed reluctant to say anything, turning to plaque about in his callused hands—“I made the voyage to End of the World. It is never one popular with my people, but if a man succeeds, the return is great. Not only are there precious furs such as can be found in no other land, but when the ice streams run from beneath the glaciers still farther north, men seeking in their gravel beds find gold nuggets, as well as gems, held prisoner by the ice for seasons and released only by the chance of a melt.

“This is such a thing.” He laid the plaque on the table. “It is something not even our Storm Talkers can understand. Though it seems ice, it is not, nor is it glass, which would not have existed for a fraction of an hour candle in such a rough cradle. But from the north it came, and now… look into it, Lady, and tell us what can be seen.”

Simond had already noted a dark spot in the middle of the plaque, though all the rest of it was crystal clear. It appeared to him that as the witch leaned closer to view the find, that spot not only grew darker but larger. Also suddenly small sparks of light glittered at one end, coming alive as might stars in the southern nights.

“It is…” She had held her jewel pointed toward it and there was a flicker from those star points. “It is a ship—ice-trapped, yet not destroyed. And those stars…”

“If they are stars,” said the Captain, “then they are ones we do not know, we who use such light as part of our guiding. Nor is the ship like the one on which we now travel.”

Frost had taken a step away and now those others there drew closer to study the find in turn. Among them Odanki was the first to speak. As a rule he was silent in most company; Simond thought that he deliberately listened to gain knowledge of these strangers around him, jealously in turn guarding his own inner self as best he could.

“That is the Foot of Arska.” He did not quite touch finger to the plaque, but he indicated plainly the stars. “Not always is it so—for Arska walks the skies of the world and sometimes His tracks are different—but there is a long time between such differences. ”

“Yet you call the constellation by name, and we who travel the northern waters do not see them so.” The captain was frowning.

“To Arska there is no time as we know it,” the young Latt hunter responded calmly. “We, too, have our guide maps, and they are of the sky. Twice has Arska’s trail changed since our Rememberers kept records.”

Simond caught his breath. He had listened and read enough of the records at Lormt to know that mankind’s time was swallowed up when the stars appeared to move and that seasons beyond counting lay between such shiftings. How long must these Latt records run? It would seem that his unspoken question was already one to be voiced from Frost herself.

“Your shaman, hunter, has told us that you have no tradition of any gate—any offworld beginnings.”

He smiled with a flash of white teeth clear against his dark skin. “That is certainly the truth. Do you have a gate memory, Powerful One?”

She was frowning a little. “No,” she returned. “Nor do any of the true Old Race. It is our belief that we have been here always—and that there were no gates until the adepts created them as doors for learning or amusement.”

“So…” he faced her straightly. “Perhaps we are ‘Old Ones’ also, but of a different breed. Our Rememberers tell of the coming of these shipmen, and also of a war to the southward, when a people who were one with animals they called hounds strove to drive us north and out of the land which was once ours.”

Alizon, thought Simond. But by all they had learned from Kasarian in Lormt, it had been a good thousand years or more since the hounds had entered this world. So if the Latts had ever had such a gate, it lay so far back in time that it was truly lost.

“We were never a people great in numbers,” Odanki was continuing, “but we found a place we could make our own and Arska signed His judgment of us then in the skies. So”—he came back to the matter immediately at hand—“there are Arska prints and they shine upon a ship which you say, Captain, is not one of your kind.”

Simond could catch only a shortened sidewise view of that shadow at the heart of the plaque. Even he who was no seaman could make an outline of another type of vessel. This one had no masts; instead, in the center section of its deck, there was an erection like a tower standing to a goodly height.

Captain Stymir’s eyes had been fastened intently upon it as if the thing had more meaning than any of the questions and answers about him. Simond saw the captain’s features stiffen, his thin-lipped mouth straighten into a line. Did he indeed begin to recognize it?

“It is a thing of evil,” he said. “It…” He reached for the plaque as if he would dash it to the decking, destroy it utterly.

Simond swung out his hand to intercept the other’s. “It is a key.” He did not know why those words had come to him, but he knew they must be said.

“You are right, southerner.” Surprising them all, Odanki spoke again. “This was found, you tell us, Captain, in one of the summer glacier streams. Thus it is out of the upper ice—from the great halls we have seen from afar. It is a track such as a hunter will follow to find his prey.”

Captain Stymir looked up at the young Latt. “Your track,” he said almost jeeringly, “has lain long. The quarry must have far since vanished.”

“Not so.” Odanki seemed unshaken by the captain’s tone. “The ice holds what it takes far past generations of any kinline. Last warm season Savfak took a hunting party northeast. There are sometimes the great horned ones to be found there—thin though the forage is. Into that land the moving ice has flung a wide arm. It was a warmer season than any but the oldest could remember and the weather was good.

“Savfak found trail and we took it. It was lost at last at the foot of the ice wall. But in that wall…” he paused, “by the honor of the past kin I swear that we saw what was encased there—such a beast as never any hunter had faced before. Three men standing on each other’s shoulders could perhaps have reached its back, and its mouth was open, showing such fangs as were out of natural growth.

“It was of the ice and we left it to that hold. But things can be indeed kept very’ long in such storage. Who knows, Captain, how long the ice held this picture thing of yours?”

“Your legend speaks of a gate through which your ships came,” Frost said. “We know that this quest of ours is overseen and appointed by Powers we do not question. Perhaps you do have now a guide of sorts. In End of the World can you not seek out the one who traded this to you and discover all he knows?”

“That much can be done. But—look—it fades!” said the captain. The flicks of stars were gone, and the ship was again a black blot growing ever less.

Frost had once more put on her jewel. “Power summons Power,” she commented. “When it is needed, we can raise it again.”

“Things washed from the ice barriers—great beasts caught within.” Trusla marveled at Simond’s report of the meeting in the captain’s cabin. “Could such beasts come alive again?” she wondered.

“This land,” Simond returned with a grin, “has seen even stranger things in its time. Lady Frost has gone to report to Es and to gather any news which may have been passed from Lormt.”

Trusla knew the deep trances which were part of any such communication. It might be some time before the witch would rejoin them to share what she had learned. The sun was warm here. She had been able to discard her cloak. She knew that this strange country did have its summer, though it was very short. But it was long enough to start runnels of water in streams from under the tall glacier walls.

People would have spread out from End of the World preparing for the threat of next season’s cold. She had listened to the talk of the seamen enough to know of the fishing which went on long into the night dusk, the cargoes brought back to be spread on racks and dried.

Then there were the herds of horses—somehow Trusla found it difficult to think of horses not much larger than wolfhounds—shaggy, except where the marks of packs had worn away some of the strands of hair. These were no Torgians, not even equal to the mountain ponies—certainly very far removed from the proud Keplians she had seen in Es, who considered themselves the equal if not superior to her own species.

There would be pack trains of these miniature beasts gone out of the trading post—each with some prospector or hunter. At the same time there might be another ship in harbor, since this was the open season…

Another ship! She thought of Audha. The Sulcar girl seemed to be nearly recovered. At least she no longer was plagued by the nightmares which Frost and Inquit apparently had driven out of her memory.

In fact she seemed uneasy in her idleness and had offered her services to relieve Undia, though the latter appeared not to wish that.

A small brown furred figure bounded across the deck now, uttering a small squeaky cry Trusla now recognized as her own name as Kankil believed it to be. She held out her arms and the little one threw herself in a tight hug. Kankil was firmly bonded with Inquit, but somehow with all that had been going on, Trusla had never been able to satisfy her curiosity concerning the shaman’s companion. Were those of Kankil’s kind common among the Latts? Where did they come from otherwise? Certainly they were far from being pet animals. Holding this loving warmth close to her, she wished—when all this trail was safely over—she might find a Kankil also to companion her.

Inquit had followed her small companion and now sat down cross-legged on the deck beside Trusla. She no longer wore her feather cloak and the lacings of her white fur tunic were undone so that the sun reached the thin skin undergarments she wore and part of her own skin.

She sniffed deeply and then nodded. “Not far now, Trusla. The land breezes already seek us. See…” She pointed to a dark line across the sea, which they were veering east again to avoid. “That is the snout of the traders’ land. It shall not be long before we come to anchorage there.”