Andre Norton - The Warding of Witch World

There was a copse of trees and then beyond, the open. Once more the odd reddish tint of the ground was changing until it ended abruptly in a band of the same baked clay over which they had earlier traveled. Save this was not open ground but a maze of rocky outcrops, slimed by the droppings of a huge flock of black birds, their naked raw red heads outstretched to the full as they cried out in a rising din.

Riding back and forth before this broken barrier was Aylinn, Kethan’s stallion faithfully at Morna’s heels. It was as if the girl were trying to force her way past a wall…

A warding!

Firdun’s mind-probe met a will-barrier so tight that the recoil actually caused him a small measure of pain. He had never struck against such before—though he had never really tried to pierce clear to the heart of Garth Howell’s defenses.

Now he rode to catch up with the girl, turning his mount so that she was forced to pull in her mare.

“There is a warding—

“As if that is not plain!” She almost snarled at him as if some of the were blood was also hers. “Yet look—

She pointed down to the yellow soil and Firdun caught plain sight of the tracks. Cat—pard—Kethan must have come this way.

The birds which had continued to circle and scream above the rocks now began to venture out toward them and the party which had ridden on their trail.

“Rus!” Elysha spat out. “This is their nesting place. But why?” She was leaning forward in the saddle and had caught sight of the pard tracks. Then under her guidance her horse sidled back a fraction, the rest of them withdrawing to give her room.

She dropped her reins and her mount stood statue-still. Raising both hands, with the gemmed wrists purple fire in the sun, she began to move them back and forth, gesturing as one might to draw a curtain.

There was a haze over those rock pinnacles now. The birds withdrew in frenzied flight, probably alighting somewhere beyond, since they were no longer on the wing.

Elysha’s groping gestures grew wider until with them her arms moved apart to their farthest extent. If she strove to sweep away that growing haze, her efforts worked in exactly the opposite fashion—it was thickening.

Before their eyes now there were no feces-stained rock spires, not even the yellow ground underneath. Elysha spoke a single word Firdun had never heard. They were looking at an entirely different stretch of country as if the sere desert land had never existed.

Here was the welcome green of newly growing grass, gem-studded with flowers of yellow and red wide open under the sun. And there was also a path of gravel as silver white as a moonbeam.

The path wove back and forth and around but eventually it reached not the forbidding walls of a keep, but rather the timber and plaster side of what might have been a Dales inn of the best sort. Around and over the door of the inn was an arch, vine-covered and boasting blood-red flowers.

All the while there seemed to flow toward them from that green and gracious land a welcome which grew stronger with every breath they drew until Firdun came alive to the danger.

“Glamorie!” Not a word—but a trap, even as Elysha’s castle had drawn him. Firdun wheeled his mount between that lure and his companions, even crowding against Aylinn’s mare to force the animal back.

Elysha let her arms fall. The fair country they looked upon was once more the filthy roosting place of the rus and those birds were rising again to circle and scream.

The pard lifted his head higher, brushing impatiently through the flowering bushes, petals clinging to his fur, since they seemed to be yet heavy with the dew of early morning. The scent was faint but not so faded that it did not hold true as he went. And this drew him as nothing had done before in his life. The man was buried deeper and deeper within him as he went, while the beast ruled on this trail.

It promised—he was not quite sure of what it did promise—but it was such a lure as he could not ignore. Then he came out of the moss-carpeted land and faced—

The pard blinked and blinked again, eyeing what lay before him. His astonishment was such that not even the scent which had pulled him here could hold. Man arose, beast disappeared, and Kethan stood at the beginning of a finely kept graveled path which led by a series of odd curves to such a building as certainly no one would expect to find in this stretch of country.

He had heard from traders that the Dales which attracted yearly fairs had such accommodation for those who traveled to them. Not holds in which any peaceful wayfarer could claim shelter for the night, but what they called inns, which were erected only for the comfort of travelers.

There were no walls here, no signs of any need for defense for those about. Even the wide door was open. Smoke curled up from chimneys at either end of the building and the breeze brought him a suggestion of freshly baked bread—the soft loaves of good living, not the hard journey cakes. Such as he had eaten at Reeth when Old Wife Zentha still ruled in the kitchen quarters there before she had left to take care of her motherless grandchildren.

But—there was Zentha! She stood in the doorway with her usual wide smile, even bearing the usual small smudge of flour on one apple-round cheek.

Deep in Kethan something strove to awaken, but when Zentha beckoned to him his man shape impatiently suppressed that prick.

“Zentha!” He might have returned to childhood—except that in his bleak childhood Zentha had played no role. Now he ran, following the odd curve of the path without any heed.

“Laws, now,” he heard her well-remembered voice. “Now, didn’t them as rides the breeze tell me as how I’d have a hungry man coming to put his legs under the table and hold out his hand for the nearest dish?”

Again that prick far inside, this time more insistent. But Kethan went on. Zentha was backing into the open door of the inn, still facing him.

He set his foot on the wide step, ready to follow. Her hand—no, no hand—rather a set of knife-sharp claws struck out. Before Kethan roused from the encirclement he had not known held him, those claws caught at the carved pard buckle of his belt as if they knew the exact trick of its fastening. The force with which it was torn from him sent him nearly whirling like a top.

Gone was the inn, Zentha—He reeled back against a befouled rock, fighting to protect his face and eyes from the rus screaming down in attack. All about him was the yellow of the outer Waste. In his flight from the birds, blood already streaming from his hands from a deep score on one cheek, he brought up bruisingly against a rocky pillar and rebounded to another.

The rus clustered and swooped, claws and beaks tearing at his clothing where they could not reach his flesh, though already they had wounded him well. Somehow he floundered into a kind of crevice between two of the pillars and did all he could think of in his confusion and bewilderment, cramming his body back into that hole.

At least he had defeated the birds for a breath or two. But he had no weapons and he had seen twice what such flying monsters could do at their will, picked bones and tatters of cloth left only to mark their feasting.

He heard a harsh crackle of laughter and peered out of his small shelter. There was no Zentha, of course. In the place of her wholesome self stood a creature he had heard described by Firdun: the bird-female which had been at Garth Howell, or at least one of the same species.

It seemed that she could not view him straight on, that her large eyes were set too far apart. Her beaked face kept turning from one side to the other. Now and again she loosed that evil cackling while the rus circled about her. And between her hands she flapped his belt back and forth as one displays a battle trophy.