Ware Hawk

2

The storm’s fury lasted half a day, forcing them to brace their bodies, huddle into their cloaks, and urge their unwilling mounts onto an upward trail that became only a bare trace a half-league out of Romsgarth. From the first, the Falconer took the lead as a matter of course, moving with a self-confidence, which assured his employer that he did indeed know something about the twisted lands of the heights.

However, that faint trail did not hold him long. Within a short time of turning into it, he paused for Tirtha to draw level with him, speaking the first words to break the silence between them since they had ridden out of town.

“It is your will to go with as little notice as possible?” He had asked no questions concerning their reason for heading south, nor did she intend to supply any. However, now he appeared to guess part of her purpose.

“You know another way?”

She resented once more, with a growing spark of warmth, that he could look plainly upon her and she could not view him unmasked.

“It will not be easy, but I do not think anyone moving along the path I know will be overlooked. There was a hosting hereabouts two months ago. The Marshal’s men swept out a nest of raiders and their lookouts.”

“Well enough.” Tirtha had no mind to ask him how he had become familiar with a raider path. Falconers did not turn outlaw—or so she had always heard. Also, she had her own way of recognizing danger. The Old Race—yes, a measure of their heritage still held, even for such draggletailed roamers as herself. She did not claim even a shadowing of true Power, but she had that sense which she could also use with animals in the wild, knowing where lay peril and where was only common hardship, such as she had long faced. This man would be true to this oath; he was no turncoat.

Thus they struck farther west, and the way was rough, leading up slopes where it was necessary to dismount, urge their snorting ponies to tread delicately over chancy footing, winding around drifts of season-old avalanches, halting at regular periods to rest their mounts and themselves.

By night they emerged upon a ledge half-roofed by an overhang. This certainly was a former camp, for at the back of the shallow cave was a smoke-blackened half-pit in which were charred ends of wood.

By all the signs, there had been none nighting here for some time: In the windblown ash Tirtha could trace the clear marks of paws. The gorex of the heights—and they were timid creatures—had padded freely about since the last fire. There was room enough at the far end of the cave to shelter the ponies. Pulling off the riding pads, they rubbed down the beasts with twists of coarse rags carried for such purposes. There was no herbage here, but both carried bags holding supplies Tirtha had frugally bargained for—grain out of Esland which she had found in Romsgarth market.

She divided portions scrupulously between the two ponies, though she must scant on what she would give them, since they had passed little grazing during the day’s trailing—sighting no valley or slope that gave root to fodder plants. Nor had they found water, so that this also must be rationed.

Having seen to their animals, they returned to hunker down on either side of the fire pit. Tirtha, willing enough to be guided by one she was sure knew this land, looked to her silent companion for a lead. Was it wise to risk lighting some of the small stack of wood? He had said that this portion of the country had been cleared by Estcarp forces. Still, during two months, another band could well have descended upon an empty territory, setting up its own holdship.

The wind, which had pushed and punished them in gusts throughout the day, died down, while the clouds lightened, turning gold and crimson to mark a sun that had been sullenly veiled. There was a clean, fresh taste to the air here. Oddly enough her spirits felt a lift—as if, having taken the first day’s journey successfully, she sensed that fortune was smiling. Yet she also knew that same fortune was fickle and had seldom favored her.

Tirtha’s fellow traveler fitted wood carefully into the fire pit, using his claw with dexterity now and then to snap some longer piece into place. Thus they had fire, a comfort to the eye, as well as for its limited warmth, as the dusk closed in.

They whittled sticks to spear pieces of the dried meat Tirtha had added to their provisions, toasting them between bites of journey bread, sliding the hot morsels directly from the improvised spits into their mouths.

Having finished, her new shieldman slid off his helm for the first time, so she could see the full face of the man she had taken on trust. He was neither young nor old—she could not have set any age on him. Though there was a gaunt youthfulness about his chin and thin-lipped mouth, there were also lines between his eyes and a great weariness in those eyes themselves.

His hair was as dark as her own, clipped tight to his skull like one of those woven caps the Hold Ladies wore abroad. For the rest, she thought he looked much as any man of the Old Race might—save that his eyes were not the dark, storm-gray of her people, but rather held in their depths a spark of gold—as might those of a bird of prey.

She learned this by quick glances, not wishing to reveal open curiosity. He seemed unaware of any regard from her, smoothing his forehead with his one hand as if to rub away an ache caused by the weight of the helm, his hawk’s eyes on the fire between them. He might be reading some message in those flames after the fashion of a Wise Woman, learned in far- or foreseeing.

“You have traveled this path before.” Tirtha made of that more a statement than a question.

“Once…” he returned absently, his attention all for the flames toward which he now stretched his single hand. “I was scout two years ago when there was some thought of return—” His voice trailed away—still he did not look at her. “There was nothing left.”

The finality of those last words came harshly, and for the first time, he raised his eyes to meet hers. In them the yellow sparks might be the fire of long controlled rage.

“We were caught by a mountain fall. These ways are still unsettled. That which the Witch Women stirred into life does not yet sleep. I was to the fore and so—” He made a small gesture with his hand, not enlarging on it but leaving it to her imagination.

“You have ridden alone since then?” Tirtha did not know just why she wanted to force him into some personal disclosure. This was no man of easy words; to pressure him at all might lead even to his withdrawal. All she knew of his race and kind argued that they held strictly aloof from those not of their blood.

“Alone.” With a single word he made answer and in such a tone as left Tirtha well aware that she must press no farther. However, there were other questions she could ask now, and those he could not deny answering, for they were no part of his own inner life.

“What do you know of Karsten? Men talk, but I have had only rumors to shift and those can be less than half-truths.”

He shrugged, setting the helm beside him on the rock, once more smoothing the band of furrowed skin immediately above the well-marked line of his brows.

“It is a land of battles—or rather petty skirmishes, one lordling against another. Since Pagar, their last overlord, fell, there have arisen none who can impose their wills—or the weight of their swords—enough to bring a binding peace. The Sulcar come, under arms, to deal with some merchants. The iron out of the Yost mines, the silver of Yar—those can pay any captain. But trade is near dead, while there are those who die for lack of food because none dare tend fields which may be at any moment trampled by raiders. The riches that were once here are plundered, hid, scattered to the winds. Thus it is, along the western coast and below the mountains. What lies farther east…” He shrugged. “There are not even rumors that seep back from that region. When Duke Yvian horned the Old Race, he began the rot and it spread, until now the whole land is half-dead and the rest forsaken.”

Tirtha wet her lip with tongue tip. “The Horning then began it—” Again she did not question, for her thoughts were quick and alive. Did the secret, which had brought her here, have such a root?

He shot her a measuring look, and she thought that, for the first time, she had shaken him out of that deep preoccupation with his own concerns which had held him since their first meeting. A fighting tool and an efficient one he had hired himself out to be, but he had shown no curiosity at all concerning what drew her south.

“The Old Race”—he paused, put out his claw to snap another length of wood and feed it to their fire—“they had their own secrets. Perhaps one of those was keeping a firm peace. It is said that, before Duke Yvian was possessed by the madness of the invading Kolder and turned into one of their mind-dead, men held the Old Race in awe, and their being there—few as they might seem—was a check upon lawlessness. Then the Duke proved that the Old Race could be killed—like any others—when he ordered their Horning, and there were those who had always hated and envied them. They wanted to appease that hatred. Also the Kolder, possessed, rode to push the slayings. But why do I say this—it is your blood that we speak of—is that not so?”

“Yes.” She could be as laconic as he. In her mind, Tirtha weighed impulse against prudence, not quite sure as yet which might serve her best. Then she added, “Hawkholme was of Karsten. As you see, I am of the blood Yvian strove to erase from a land where he and his were, to begin with, intruders and invaders.”

“You return to no easier a fate than was granted those who were horned. That still holds. Too many seized and killed and profited by that blooding.” He did not seem greatly moved, rather he spoke as if merely pointing out that they were two travelers united only for a limited purpose.

“We have learned something.” Tirtha bit off each word as one would bite upon a binding cord. “There is no such thing as trust in Karsten for us. Still, I have that which takes me there.”

Further than this she would not go. He had hand-grasped for his allotted time in her service. There was no reason to think that any further quest beyond the mountain-crossing would draw him. Nor, she thought, was he one with whom she would willingly share secrets, being who and what he was.

So Tirtha spread out her cloak and rolled in it, pillowing her head on one of her saddle bags before she resolutely closed her eyes, saying:

“We share night watch. Rouse me at the time the red star shines.”

He inclined his bare head, accepting, as she had wondered if he would, that they would share, as if they were comrades, the needful duties of any camp. While she settled herself to sleep, summoning that nothingness of mind as she was able to, he made no move to reach for the rolled blanket that was part of his own gear, only sat beside the fire which glinted red on his claw, alternately revealing and hiding his well-cut features, their emotionless mask as complete as that of the helm he had worn during the day.

Though Tirtha had willed herself to sleep, it was not a dreamless one. What followed was that vision, or series of visions, which had haunted her for years, until each detail remained so engraved even on her waking memory that she could have recited all she saw and something of what those sights meant. She knew that there was true dreaming, which was part of the Farsight. She might not be a Wise Woman, but she was a full daughter of the Old Race, and she never believed that all vestiges of the Power had vanished from any of her blood, even though her kin had not held grimly to such knowledge as had their cousins of Estcarp.

There the Power had made the race thin. For the Witches gloried in gifts that they would not surrender for any man. So, fewer and fewer children had been born, until the race came near an end through their pride. However, since the Witch Women had united in the Turning, their last great battle, and most of them had died of it (their bodies unable to hold and project the forces they summoned and still survive), there had come a change.

He who ruled in Estcarp now—Koris of Corm—was only remotely of the kin. There were also the Tregarths who guarded the marches of the north as once they had held these very mountains where she sheltered this night. Simon Tregarth was an Outlander, not of the kin at all. His Lady was a foresworn Witch who, in her day, had been outcast because of her choice of him, and who, by some quirk of strangeness, had NOT lost her Power when she married him. These three ruled Estcarp, and their influence was felt. So there was no longer any recruiting of Witches, save among those of such manifest talent that they withdrew from life by their own desire. There was more mingling, more wedding and bedding. Those from the Border shared blood with Sulcar and with their kin of Estcarp. There were more children in the holds, and also there was some traffic with the mysterious east—that Escore where the children of Simon Tregarth and his Lady had gone to seek the ancient foundations of their line. There was war there still, but it was with old evil. Had Tirtha not been who and what she was perhaps the east would have drawn her also.

Drawn her! She walked again easily down a hall—wide—only half lighted by dim, wall-set bars of light, the secret of whose ever-burning had been lost long since. There were shadows that moved among shadows, had a sometime life of their own. But what they did, when, or why, had no meaning for her.

Though she had never come this way except in a vision, still it was better known to her than many of the places into which her actual wandering had taken her. This was a part of her as no other place, waking or sleeping, could ever be. She had come here in dreams since childhood, and always it remained the same, save that its hold on her grew stronger and deeper, more real than all else in life.

This was the hall of a hold—a place near as long established as the ancient walls of Estcarp itself. There at the high table were the tall chairs of a lord and lady. Those shades she could not see clearly were tenuous, forming a company around her. Tirtha knew that this was a time of formal meeting, that though she could not hear, yet there was deep meaning in what was being discussed.

Most of her attention was for what stood on the table, midway between the two tall-backed chairs. That was real and fully visible! A casket gleamed with a light issuing from it, for the cover had been raised and thrown back. The carvings on it did not seem set or sustained as they should have. Rather they possessed a life or purpose of their own, appearing to change shape, to crawl and move, so that she could not ever be sure of them. Some, she realized in the moments when she could catch them at rest, were words and symbols of Power.

Nor had she ever seen what the casket held, for its lid was raised at an angle which prevented direct sight. Only—this was the very heart and substance of all she witnessed here—it was more alive than those who had cherished it.

Now the dream followed its set pattern. That wisp of half shadow which was the left hand of the lord and the one which was the right hand of his lady moved forward as one. Together they clasped the lid of the casket, closing it.

Tirtha felt the old and familiar rise of cold fear in her. Now was the coming of the evil. She could not escape it—ever—because for some reason it was necessary that she see—see and know—see and remember!

That shadow, which was the lord, held its grip on the lid of the casket for a long moment. The glow of life, which the girl had felt dwelling within it, dimmed. It might be that by some warning a flow of the Power had been alerted, was taking certain steps of its own for needed protection. Reluctantly—Tirtha always sensed that reluctance as sorrow or foreboding—the lord pushed his treasure toward the lady.

A pillar of mist she was, with only a round ball for a head, extensions which were not hands or arms, but served her as such, no more than fragments of fog. Yet she took up what her lord passed to her, arising while that flitting company stirred about the far edges of the wide hall as if hurried, pushed into action—and the lord stepped from his place to join them, moving out of the range of Tirtha’s vision.

She never followed him. No, it was the casket that was of importance and that drew her now as the mist woman raised it, pressed it to her unsubstantial form, close to where a human heart might beat. Then she, too, turned and went.

It would seem that Tirtha then also became a specter, a thing without body or form, for she followed that other as if she floated—shadow herself—in this half—and-half world. Down the hall they went to the space behind the high table. And the pace of the lady wraith was swift—she might have been running, time itself her enemy now.

Thus they came to a paneled wall against which the shadow flattened herself oddly—as though releasing a secret lock. A narrow opening was revealed, and she squeezed into a dark place—the power of the thing unseen drawing Tirtha with it.

This was a place where Tirtha felt, even though she possessed no body in her dream, the touch of Power—Power which had built up and lingered—drawn and fed by talent used for years, perhaps centuries, to guard the casket.

There was a stone table in that small windowless chamber; the walls were tapestried by misty hangings. The aura of this hidden chamber was enough to make known to any who came what it was, a place into which only the talent trained might come. Still—even though that be so—Tirtha in the dream was not walled out, forceless and empty-handed though she was.

The shadow lady, still holding the casket against her breast, freed one misty hand and raised it high, making a gesture that seemed to bring the edge of her palm and fingers to strike against the center of the stone table.

That massive block appeared to quiver on the very spot which she had struck. Now the lady looked as if she must free herself of any touch speedily, moving up her hand—or that wisp of mist which served her for such—into the air above. Tirtha, though she had never witnessed otherwhere any such ritual, knew well that this was mastery of an ancient kind in which mind controlled matter and made it obey.

The casket, set in place on the table, quivered as had the rock—rooting itself there, the envisioned girl believed. Still the shadow woman stood and wove her ensorcellments—she might have been locking and bolting unseen doors, making very sure that this place might not be breached.

And—

Tirtha stirred, the silence of her vision-dream broke—she was being touched, and she was again in the flesh, able to feel, even as she was able to hear a whisper very close to her ear where her cloak hood had fallen or been pulled away. There was a faint puff of breath against her cheek. She opened her eyes upon darkness, but she did not move, for a hand kept her pinned where she lay.

“Quiet!” The whisper came again.

She had been shaken so suddenly out of that other place that she was not yet truly aware she had returned to the camp on the ledge. There was no longer any sign of the fire. She roused enough to realize who knelt by her, holding her in place, perhaps even ready to slip his hand across her mouth to muffle any sound she might make, being so summarily aroused.

Tirtha was too well trained a rover to do that. She remained where she was, her ears straining now to pick up sound. He must have known she had been awakened, for his hand left her body speedily, and she had a flash of thought that to touch a woman, even for such a reason, would be difficult for a Falconer. But he did not move away.

One of their ponies stamped and blew. Then the man was gone in a flash of movement. Tirtha realized that he must be on his way to make sure that no sound from their two mounts might betray them. Still she listened.

At last a sound came from a distance, though she could not judge how far away. There was a scrabbling as if something strove to find a path across none too secure gravel or loose earth. She remembered that not far distant there was one of those mounds of debris left from a slide, such being still only too common in this shaken hill country.

Tirtha sat up, throwing off the enfolding material of the cape. She had her well-worn sword, her bow lay beside her, but night did not favor an archer. Slowly, with caution, she reached out, feeling for a pile of stones she had noted near their fire hole. They were still warm from the heat of the vanished flames as her fingers curled about the top one, which fitted well into her hand. It was heavy, and she had used just such a rough weapon before to good purpose.

The Falconer wore a dart gun at his belt. However, unless he was one of those legendary fighters trained to fire correctly at a sound, that weapon would serve him little better than her bow could aid her. He had a sword also, and she had little doubt that it was now in his hand. There was his claw also, and that—Tirtha could not suppress a small shiver, stupid though she knew any shadow of distaste might be—that was as able a weapon at close quarters as anyone could wish.

The scrabbling had stopped. Yet Tirtha was certain that whatever sniffed about had not gone. No, it had another way of locating its prey.

She did not gasp, she was struck too hard by the new attack to do more than reel back against the rock. The thing hunted with its mind! She had met that blow, which was meant to locate them, with the instant instinctive mind lock that was part of her heritage. But was the Falconer able to counter such a seeking? She knew very little of how his race thought or what defense he could raise against such a questing.

Unfortunately, a mind lock of this kind worked two ways. She dared not relinquish her tight mental cover to seek out the nature of the thing waiting in the dark. That it used mind-send at all meant that they had not been tracked by any outlaw raider, for it was only the Old Race who could seek thus. She herself could handle beasts so, but she had never attempted to trail one of her own kind. That was an abomination which was of the old evil, against which all her blood had stood since they had come into Karsten or into Estcarp.

Now there arose something else, wafted by a rising breeze—a thick animal odor. Not an honest one, such as any beast she had ever known would give forth. This was foul, as if dregs of filth had been stirred or some utter rottenness had breathed a great sigh.

No snow cat, none of the rare verbears rumored to have come into these mountains since the Turning, would so befoul the night air. This was something different. She sent a fraction of her thought to the ponies—surely all their instinct and fears would be speedily roused by that stench. But her would-be soothing thought met a barrier, and she was no longer left to wonder what the Falconer might do. Perhaps the long years in which his kind had schooled and lived with their birds had sharpened a native talent. He was holding a mind wall about their mounts, and to that Tirtha speedily lent her own strength of will.