Three Against the Witch World

II

IT WAS THUS that our mother rode out of our lives on a hot midsummer morning when the dust rose in yellow puffs under the hooves of the mounts and the sky was cloudless. We watched her go from the walk on the tower. Twice she looked back and up, and the last time she raised her hand in a warrior’s salute—to which Kemoc and I made fitting return in formal fashion, the brilliant sun mirroring on the blades of our drawn swords. But Kaththea, between us, shivered as if chill fingers of an out-season wind touched her. And Kemoc’s left hand sought hers, to cover it where fingers gripped the parapet.

“I saw him,” she said, “when she drew upon us in the search—I saw him—all alone—there were rocks, tall rocks and curling water—” This time her shudder shook her whole thin frame.

“Where?” Kemoc demanded.

Our sister shook her head. “I cannot tell, but it was far—and more than distance of land and sea lies between.”

“Not enough to keep her from the searching,” I said as I sheathed my sword. There was a sense of loss in me, but who can measure the loss of what one has never had? My mother and father dwelt inwardly together in a world they had made their own, unlike most other husbands and wives I had noted. To them that world was complete and all others were interlopers. There was no Power, good or evil, which could hold the Lady Jaelithe from her present quest as long as breath was in her. And had we offered aid in her search, she would have put us aside.

“We are together.” Kemoc had picked my thought out of my skull, as was common with us.

“For how long?” Again Kaththea shivered and we turned quickly to her, my hand again to weapon hilt, Kemoc’s on her shoulder.

“You mean?” he asked, but I thought that I had the answer.

“Seeresses ride with warriors. You need not remain here when Otkell allows us to join the Borderers!”

“Seeresses!” she repeated with emphasis. Kemoc’s hold on her grew tighter, and then I, too, understood.

“The Witches will not take you for training! Our parents forbade it.”

“Our parents are no longer here to speak!” Kemoc flung at me.

Then fear claimed us. For the training of a Witch was not like a warrior’s daily use of sword, dart gun, or axe. She went away from all those of her blood, to a distant place of mysteries, there to abide for years. When she returned she no longer recognized kin of blood, only kinship with those of her calling. If they took Kaththea from us to become one of their gray-robed ranks she might be lost forever. And what Kemoc had said was very true—with Simon and the Lady Jaelithe gone, who remained who could put a strong barrier between our sister and the desires of the Council?

Thus from that hour our life lay under a shadow. And the fear strengthened the bond between us into a tight ring. We knew each other’s feelings, though I had less skill than Kemoc and Kaththea. But days passed, and life continued as it always had. Since no fear remains sharp unless it is fed by new alarms, we relaxed.

We did not know then that our mother had wrought for us as best she could before she departed from Estcarp. For she went to Koris and had him swear on the Axe of Volt—that supernatural weapon only he could wield and which had come to him directly from the dead hand of one who might be less than a god but who had certainly been more than human—swear that he would protect us from the wiles of the Council. Thus he took oath and we lived at Etsford as always.

Years passed and now the raids from Karsten grew more continuous. Pagar returned to his old policy of wearing us down. He met a flat defeat in the spring of the year we counted seventeen winters behind us, the larger force he had sent going to their deaths in a pass. And in that battle Kemoc and I had a part, being numbered among the scouts who combed the ridges to harry fugitives. We found war to be a dark and ugly business, but our breed continued to survive so, and when one has no choice one turns to the sword.

It was mid-afternoon as we cantered along a trail when the summons came. Kaththea might have stood before me, crying out in terror. For though my eyes did not see her, yet her voice rang not only in my ears, but through my body. And I heard Kemoc shout, then his mount jostled mine as I also used spurs.

Our commander was Dermont, an exile from Karsten who had joined the Borderers when my father first organized that force. He reined around to front us. There was no expression on his dark face, but so efficiently did he block passage that even our determination was stayed.

“What do you?” he asked.

“We ride,” I answered, and I knew that I would cut down even him, should he hold that barrier of man and horse against us. “It is a sending—our sister is in danger!”

His gaze searched my eyes, and he read the truth in what I said. Then he reined to the left, opening the way to us.

“Ride!” It was both permission and an order.

How much did he know of what chanced? If he was aware, he did not agree with it. And perchance he was willing to let us make our try, for, young as we were, we had not been the least of those who had followed him uncomplaining through hard days and weary nights.

Ride we did, twice swapping mounts in camps where we left the impression we rode on orders. Gallop, walk, gallop, doze in the saddle in turns during the walking. A haze of time passed—too much time. Then Etsford was a shadow in a wide expanse of fields where grain had been lately harvested. What we had feared most was not to be seen—there was no sign of raiders. Fire and sword had not bitten here. Yet we had no lightening of our burden.

Dimly, through the ringing in my ears, I heard the horn alert of the tower watchman as we spurred down the road, urging our weary mounts to a last burst of speed. We were white with dust but the House badge on the breasts of our surcoats could be read, and we had passed the spell barrier with no hurt, so they would know we were friends.

My horse stumbled as we came into the court and I struggled to free my stiff feet from the stirrups and dismount before he went to his knees. Kemoc was a little before me, already staggering on his two feet to the door of the Hall.

She was standing there, her two hands bracing her strong body so that she met us on her feet by one last effort of will. Not Kaththea, but Anghart. And at the look in her eyes Kemoc wavered to a halt, so that I charged into him, and we held to one another. My brother spoke first:

“She is gone—they have taken her!”

Anghart nodded—very slowly, as if the motion of her head was almost too hard an effort. Her long braids fell forward, their brown now heavily streaked with white. And her face!—she was an old woman, and a broken one, from whom all will to live had been torn. For torn it had been. This was a stroke of the Power; in that instant we both recognized it. Anghart had stood between her nursling and the will of a Witch, pitting her unaided human strength and energy against a force greater than any material weapon.

“She—is—gone—” Her words were without inflection, gray ghosts of speech from the mouth of death. “They have set a wall about her. To ride after—is—death.”

We did not want to believe, but belief was forced upon us. The Witches had taken our sister and shut her off from us by a force which would kill spirit and body together, should we follow. Our deaths could avail Kaththea nothing. Kemoc clutched at my arm until his nails bit into my skin. I wanted to beat back at him, smash flesh and bone—tear—rend—Perhaps the physical weakness left from our long ride was our salvation at that moment. For when Kemoc flung his arm across his face with a terrible cry and collapsed against me, his weight bore us both to the ground.

Anghart died within the hour. I think that she had held on to life with her two hands because she waited for us. But before her spirit went forth, she spoke to us again, and, the first shock being past, those words had meaning and a certain small comfort to us.

“You are warriors.” Her eyes went from Kemoc to me and then back to my brother’s white and misery-ravaged face. “Those Wise Ones think of warriors only as force of action. They disdain them at heart. Now they will expect a storming of their gates for our dear one. But—give them outward acceptance now and they will, in time, believe in it.”

“And in the meantime,” Kemoc said bitterly, “they will work upon her, fashioning from Kaththea one of their nameless Women of Power!”

Anghart frowned. “Do you hold your sister so low, then? She is no small maid to be molded easily into their pattern. I think that these Witches shall find her far more than they expect, perhaps to their undoing. But this is not the hour—when they are expecting trouble—to give it to them.”

There is this about warrior training: it gives one a measure of control. And since we had always looked to Anghart for wisdom from our childhood, we accepted what she told us now. But, though we accepted, we neither forgot nor forgave. In those hours we cut the remaining bonds which tied us in personal allegiance to the Council.

If at that moment it seemed lesser, there was more ill news. Koris of Gorm, he who had been all these years to most of Estcarp an indestructible buttress and support, lay in the south sorely wounded. To him had gone the Lady Loyse, thus opening the door for Kaththea’s taking. So all the safe supports which had based our small world were at once swept away.

“What do we now?” Kemoc asked of me in the night hours when we had taken Anghart to her last bed of all, and then sat together in a shadow-cornered room, eating of food which had no taste.

“We go back—”

“To the troop? To defend those who have done this thing?”

“Something of that, but more of this, in the eyes of all we are green youths. As Anghart said, they will expect us to engage in some rash action and that they will be prepared to counter. But—”

His eyes were now agleam. “Do not say of yourself again, brother, that you do not think deeply. You are right, very right! We are but children in their eyes, and good children accept the dictates of their elders. So we play that role. Also—” He hesitated and then continued, “There is this—we can learn more of this trade they have bred us to—this use of arms against a pressing enemy—and in addition seek learning in other directions—”

“If you mean the Power, we are men, and they hold it is for the use of women only.”

“True enough. But there is more than one kind of Power. Did our father not have his own version of it? The Witches could not deny that, though they would have liked to. All knowledge is not bound up in their own tight little package. Have you not heard of Lormt?”

At first the name meant nothing to me. And then I recalled a half-heard conversation between Dermont and one of the men who had been with him since he had fled Karsten. Lormt—a repository of records, ancient chronicles.

“But what have we to learn from the records of old families?”

Kemoc smiled. “There may be other material there of service to us. Kyllan,” he spoke sharply, as one giving an order, “think of the east!”

I blinked. His command was foolish. East—what was east?—why should I think of the east?

East—east—I hunched my shoulders, alerted by an odd tingle along the nerves. East—There was the north where lay Alizon ready to spring at our throats, and south where Karsten now worried our flanks, and west where lay the ocean roamed by Sulcar ships, with any number of islands and unknown lands beyond the horizon’s rim, such as the land where Simon and Jaelithe had found the true Kolder nest. But to the east there was only a blank—nothing at all—

“And tell me the why of that!” Kemoc demanded. “This land has an eastern border too, but have you ever heard any speech of it? Think, now—what lies to the east?”

I closed my eyes to picture a map of Estcarp as I had seen it many times in use in the field. Mountains—?

“Mountains?” I repeated hesitantly.

“And beyond those?”

“Only mountains, on every map nothing else!” I was certain now.

“Why?”

Why? He was very right. He had maps showing far north, far south, beyond our boundaries, in every detail. We had ocean charts drawn by the Sulcar. We had nothing—nothing at all for the east. And that very absence of fact was noteworthy.

“They cannot even think of the east,” Kemoc continued.

“What!”

“It is very true. Question anyone, over a map, of the east. They cannot discuss it.”

“Will not, maybe, but—”

“No.” Kemoc was definite. “Cannot. They are mind-blocked against the east. I am ready to swear to that.”

“Then—but why?”

“That we must learn. Do you not see, Kyllan, we cannot stay in Estcarp—not if we free Kaththea. The Witches will never allow her out of their hold willingly. And where could we go? Alizon or Karsten would welcome us—as prisoners. The House of Tregarth is too well known. And the Sulcarmen would not aid us when the Witches were our enemies. But suppose we vanish into a country or place they refuse to admit has existence—”

“Yes!”

But it was so perfect an answer that I mistrusted it. Behind the smiling face of fortune often hides the cracked countenance of ill luck.

“If there is a block in their minds, there is a reason for it, a very good one.”

“Which I do not deny. It is up to us to discover what it is, and why, and if it can be turned to our purpose.”

“But if them, why not us—?” I began, and then answered my question with another: “Because of our half-blood?”

“I think so. Let us go to Lormt and perhaps we’ll have more than one explanation.”

I got to my feet. Suddenly the need to do something, for positive action, was plain to me. “And how do we manage that? Do you suppose that the Council will allow us to roam about Estcarp under the circumstances? I thought you had agreed that we should be obedient, return to the company, act as if we acknowledged defeat.”

Kemoc sighed. “Do you not find it hard to be young, brother?” he asked. “Of course we shall be watched. We do not know how much they suspect that we are bound to Kaththea in thought contact. Surely our bolting here at her message will tell them something of that. I—I have not reached her since.” He did not look to me to see if I could give a different report. It had never been put into words with us but we all knew that between Kemoc and Kaththea the communication ties were far more secure; it was as if the time gap between our births had set me a little apart from the other two.

“Kemoc—the tower room! Where our mother—” Remembrance of that time when I had been a part of a questing was not good, but I would will myself into that joyfully if it would avail us now. Only he was already shaking his head.

“Our mother was an adept, with years of use of the full Power behind her. We have not the skill, the knowledge, the strength for that road, not now. But what we have we shall build upon. As for Lormt—well, I believe that willing can also open gates. Perhaps not yet—but there will be a road to Lormt for us.”

Was it a flash of foreknowledge which made me correct him?

“For you. Lormt is yours, I am sure, Kemoc.”

We did not tarry at Etsford; there was nothing any longer to hold us. Otkell had commanded the small force to escort the Lady Loyse to South Keep. And not one among the handful of retainers left there had the authority or reason to stay us when we announced our return to our company. But as we rode the next day we were at work inwardly—striving to communicate, to speak by thought, with a determination we had never really given to such exercises before. Without guidance or training we struggled to strengthen what talent we had.

And during the months which followed we kept at that task which was hidden from our camp fellows. But hide it we were sure we must. No effort on our part ever awoke a response from Kaththea, though we were informed that she had entered the completely cloistered dwelling of the novices of the Power.

Some side issues of our talent did manifest themselves. Kemoc discovered that his will, applied to learning, could implant much in his memory from a single listening, or sighting, and that he might pick out of other minds such information. The questioning of prisoners was increasingly left to him. Dermont may have guessed the reason for Kemoc’s success in that direction, but he did not comment upon it.

While I had no such contribution to make to our mountain missions, I was aware, slowly, of another reach of whatever lay within me that was an inheritance from my parents. And this took the form of kinship with animals. Horses I knew probably as no other warrior of the forces. The wild things of the wilderness I could draw to me or send on their way merely by concentrating upon them. The mastery of horses I put to good use, but the other was not a matter of much moment.

As to Kemoc’s desire to get to Lormt, there seemed to be no way to achieve that. The scrimmages along the border grew in intensity and we were absorbed into the guerrilla tactics. As the outlook for Estcarp grew darker we were all aware that it was only a matter of time before we would be fugitives in an overrun land. Koris did not recover swiftly from his wounding, and when he did, he was a maimed man, unable to again raise Volt’s Axe. We heard the story of how he made a mysterious trip into the sea cliffs of the south and returned thereafter without his super weapon.

From that moment his luck was left behind also, and his men suffered one defeat upon the heels of another.

For months Pagar played with us, as if he did not want to quite deliver the finishing blow, but amused himself in this feinting. There was talk of Sulcar ships departing with some of the Old Race aboard. Yet I am sure that what really delayed the final push of our enemies was their age-old fear of the Power and what might chance should the Witches loose on them all that might be so aimed. For no one, even among us, knew exactly what the Power might do if a whole nation of Witches willed it into action. It might burn out Estcarp, but it could also take with it the rest of our world.

It was at the beginning of the second year after Kaththea was taken that the road to Lormt opened for Kemoc, but not in a fashion we would have wished. He was trapped in an ambush and his right hand and arm so mangled that it would be long before he could freely use them, if ever he did again. As we sat together before they took him away for treatment we had our last words together:

“Healing is fast, if willed. And add your will to mine, Brother,” he told me briskly, though his eyes were pain shadowed. “I shall heal as swiftly as I can, and then—”

He need put no more into words.

“Time may turn against us,” I warned him. “Karsten can press home at any time. Do we have even hours left?”

“I will not think of that. What I do, you shall know! I cannot believe that this chance shall be denied us!”

I was not alone as I had feared I might be when Kemoc was borne off slung in a horse litter. We had wrought well, for he was in my mind, even as I was in his. And the distance between us only thinned that bond a little, making us expend more effort. I knew when he went to Lormt. Then he warned me that we must cut contact, unless the need was great, for at Lormt he found or detected influences which tasted of the Power and these he thought perhaps a danger.

Then—for months—silence.

Still I rode with the Borderers, and now, young as I was, I headed my own small command. Uniting us was a comradeship forged of danger, and I had my friends. But still I always knew that that other bond was the stronger, and, should either Kaththea or Kemoc summon, I would be ahorse and gone, uncaring. Fearing just that, I began to train my own replacement and did not allow myself to become too involved in any matter beyond my regular duties. I fought, skulked, waited . . . and it seemed that the waiting was sometimes longer than my endurance.