Andre Norton - The Warding of Witch World

Inquit prowled back and forth along the crevice. Oddly enough, she never looked down, but rather stared across the width of the break. There was certainly no sign that a bridge of any kind had ever existed here.

“She fell. She is dead,” Trusla said at last. As the wind whipped around her, she felt as if she, too, would soon be gone, lapped forever in ice as had been the monster they had seen.

“No.” Inquit’s denial was flat. “There is still life essence to be sensed—the little one knows. But it is true that from where we stand we cannot now follow.”

“Where we stand we shall be frozen stiff,” Trusla returned. “What do you mean that Kankil knows? Knows what? Did Audha grow wings and is she off to the mountains?”

Inquit gave her a hard stare. “There is more than one kind of wings, Tor woman. I seek mine in sleep, and dreams can carry one afar.”

Trusla stamped her foot and a small ridge of ice cracked. “You cannot sleep and dream here! I do not believe that any Power would hold you so.”

“Exactly right. But dream I shall. Now we return; there are those already searching for us and we must not scatter our forces too widely. I do not know…” For another long moment she stood, gazing ahead across the crevice. “I would speak with the witch. We do not hold the same talents, but together… Well enough. Come child, before, as you threaten, you turn into a pillar of ice.”

So they turned their backs upon the crevice and started their retreat, again Kankil bouncing ahead as if she knew that they still needed a guide.

Suddenly, as they went, Trusla sighted two figures headed toward them. That was Simond! The cold which ate at her no longer bound her to shuffling, halting steps. She passed Kankil, taking only caution that she not make a misstep. Then Simond’s arms were around her. He was shaking her until her head bobbed on her shoulders and then he enveloped her in a hug which drove all that ice from her veins.

Audha floated in and out of the world through which she slipped and slid. Around her, she was dimly aware, were walls of dark ice within which shadowy things loomed now and then. Yet she was not conscious of cold. That drawing was fast upon her, and nothing mattered but that she finish this journey.

All which had been her earlier life faded and no longer had any meaning. She could not even remember now the faces of her shipmates, nor of those with whom she had recently traveled, even though now and then she had a moment or two when she glanced from one ice wall to the other expecting faintly to see forms she knew.

One thing she had not lost in this journey, and that was the avid need to see what waited at the end of it. She fell over bad footing, rose again to keep on.

Now she began to sense that she was not alone after all—yet who or what accompanied her was beyond her range of sight. She felt fear once or twice, and then that was wiped from her as a cloth might soothe her sweating face.

She hungered and thirsted, and now and then she absently picked at the ice of the wall and sucked at it. Still whatever drew her kept her going. She had brought no pack or supplies with her, only the spear which served her as a support and a staff, and the knife at her belt.

How long she walked in that daze within the crevice she did not know. The dusky light always appeared the same, as if it clung about her to give her sight, after a fashion.

Then the crevice began to narrow, until at last her shoulders were brushing walls and the footing was slanting more and more sharply upward. At length she drew her knife and dug in as best she could to draw herself forward, and at last floundered weakly into the open once again.

Vaguely she knew that to remain where her exertions had brought her was to fall prey to the cold, but she wanted nothing more than to remain where she was, to let the dullness close down upon her mind and forget all which lay behind, or might wait on her ahead.

Yet that compulsion would not release her. With the spear as a steadying staff, somehow Audha got to her knees and then hauled herself to her feet. Then she looked around.

The plain of the glacier stretched about, but, not too far ahead, a rocky rise split the ice flow. And to Audha’s blinking eyes there appeared a strange glow at one side—almost the reflection of a fire. Though how could such be here?

It must be more of this eerie weaving of thought patterns which suggested such a thing. However, because she had no other real goal, she started for that, taking one shaky step at a time, unable to keep going without digging in the spear.

The glow did not disappear. In fact, it was growing brighter. The girl almost believed she could feel a gentle warmth in the air.

Audha pulled herself around the edge of a rock pile and was met by warmth but not by any flames. She slumped rather than seated herself so she could hold out her mittened hands toward what stood there.

Her thoughts began to move again, as if they also had been frozen, and she was curious. Sitting on a flat base was a cone perhaps as high as her waist were she standing. The light from it did not flicker as would flame, but it appeared to Audha to be of some kind of metal, and iridescent lines crawled around its bulk.

She felt that this was no thing of Power on the level that the talented knew Power. Rather, like a ship, it was something built for a purpose. Yet she had never heard of any such form of light and heat before.

Who had set it here to succor her? Those she traveled with spoke always of the Dark in hiding ahead. And—memory was beginning to return with more force—the icebergs had herded her ship to the foul destruction of Dargh.

“You are a she…”

Audha started; her knife was out. Those words seemed to issue from the cone.

“I am Audha, wavereader.” She held on to what she could of her control. “Yes”—she was guessing at the meaning of what she had heard—“I am a woman.”

“She—woman,” the voice repeated as if learning new words. “You come to kill.” There was almost a disdainful note in that. “Kill—kill.”

The anger which filled Audha and had brought her on this mission might have been released by the heat. Once more her mind was swarming with broken memories of Dargh and their escape—and the death of those others, shipmates all.

“I am oathed by blood.” What was she doing, sitting here in the ice talking to a cone of metal? Perhaps it was only a death vision, as were sometimes said to be seen by those dying, and she really lay back in the crevice near the last Great Gate with no friend-hand to hold at her going.

“Kill—always—kill. Long—so long—to wait, and now kill—kill again!”

There was a strangeness to the voice. Audha’s awakened rage seemed too much to expend upon a voice and a bit of metal.

“Who are you?” she demanded now. She was sure that the cone was only a device for some Power and she must face the thing behind it for the sake of her own sanity.

A word was spoken in reply, but so tangled did it sound that Audha could neither have spoken it nor understood. It could be a name—or a rank—or an office. She hesitated and then tried again.

“I am a woman—what are you?”

There was no swift reply. Perhaps the other was either measuring Audha in some way or else did not quite understand.

“I am female,” the answer came at last. “Once I was—!”

Again a gabble the girl could not translate. Though somehow she received a strong impression of the sea—almost as if for a moment she had stood on board with a fair wind filling sails over her head. Sea… her memory made a small jump. Thar—that thing frozen in the ice—it was, the Power had told them, of the sea. “Female? Frozen there?”