Andre Norton: Sorceress Of The Witch World

Three times she repeated it before she was silent. And I was left with the belief that she herself was not trying to memorize our route, but rather reported it to another. Reported it! To whom, and for what reason?

Her people had been killed or scattered and taken captive by the sea raiders, and I did not believe that any among them could evoke the mind anyway. Her actions today had been those born in fear when she had seen the other tribe. Did they by chance have some seeress like Utta who had traced us thus? It could be true, but that was not the first and best answer I imagined.

Hilarion! He would not have tried to contact me, or my parents, knowing that any such contact, be it the most tenuous, would have been an instant warning. Then he would have had to try complete take-over. But Ayllia, by our standards, was a weakling, to be easily played upon by anyone learned in sorcery. Therefore he could reach out and work upon her—and now he was using her to keep track of us.

All my fears of what he might be or could do flooded back. But at the same time there was a weakness in me also, for I remembered that touch my mother had made for me, how I had tasted the terrible loneliness which had rent him as he understood what had happened to the world he had known and dreamed of returning to while he stood in Zandur’s pillar.

I had never believed him actively evil, only one of those who, following a trail which interested them, could be ruthlessly self-centered, acting recklessly out of curiosity and confidence in themselves. So had he been once, and if he remained so, then he was a threat to what was being built here anew in Escore. If he could track us to the Green Valley . . . !

We could mind block Ayllia completely again. But if we did so she would be only an inert bundle, needing to be carried and constantly tended. And there surely lay many dangers ahead which would make such a captive our bane and perhaps even our deaths. We could abandon her, but that, too, was unthinkable. And the final decision was not mine but to be shared by the three of us.

During the rest of my hours of watch I listened, not only to the noises of the night, but to any sound from Ayllia. She slept untroubled, however.

When I roused my father to take the final watch I warned him of what I had heard, that he might be alert in turn, even though there was certainly little more that she could report.

In the morning we took council together. My mother was very thoughtful as she considered my ideas.

“I do not believe in a tribal seeress doing this,” she said. “Your Utta must have been unique among those people. Hilarion is the more reasonable answer. Upon us may now rest an error in judgment for leaving him behind.”

“But—” I protested.

“Yes, but and but and but. There are many ifs and buts to be faced in every lifetime and we can choose only what seems best at the moment when the choice is to be made. We have the Power, which makes us more than some, but we must be ever on the alert not to think that it makes us more than human. I think we dare not mind block her. It would render her too great a burden on us. Also, I would set no rearguard cover spell. Such can be as easily read as plain footprints in muddy earth by one like Hilarion. Better to let him think we suspect nothing while we plan ahead for a defense needed at our journey’s end.”

My father nodded. “As ever, you put it clearly, my witch wife. Our first need is to cross this country to where we shall find friends. To be thought less than we are, not more, is a kind of defense in itself.”

They were logical, right. Yet as we started on in the first daylight, I had a feeling that I must now and then look behind me, almost as if some barely perceptible shadow crept behind, always fluttering into hiding just upon my turning so that I never saw it; only sensed it was there.

We found no more sweet and sunlit spots such as the orchard; neither did we again chance upon a pool of vileness as the wood. Rather we journeyed over what might have been a land where man had never set foot before. A wild country, yet not too difficult to travel. And for two days we headed steadily west over this. Each night we listened also as Ayllia reported in whispers her account of that day’s traveling, as if she had walked with a knowing mind and open eyes scout-trained to see. Nor when I urged that she be blocked did my parents agree, for fear of rendering her so helpless that we could not transport her.

On the third day distant blue lines against the sky to the north and west broke into individual mountain peaks. And I was heartened, for by so much were we closer to a land I knew, at least in part. And perhaps I could, within this day’s journeying or tomorrow’s, pick out some landmark which would guide us into a land the Valley riders patrolled.

We surmounted a ridge at midday, to look down and away into a meadowland, though the grass was now a drab, winter-killed mat through which only a few spikes of early green stuff broke. But man had been here, for there were very old stone fences, so overborne by time that they were mere lines of tumbled rocks. Yet those lines in one direction marked out a road, and the road ended in piers water-washed by a languidly flowing river, some planted in the water, jagged stumps above its surface, and one on an island midway between the two shores.

But it was what occupied that island which froze us, startled and staring, on the ridge crest, until my father’s fiercely hissed warning sent us down flat, no longer to be noted against the sky. What we had chanced upon was a sharp skirmish between two bands of sworn enemies.

On this side of the stream reared, pawed, galloped up and down, black keplians—those monsters with the seeming of horses that served the Sarn Riders. The Sarns—I had thought them all dead in the defeat of Dinzil, but it would seem that enough had survived to make up this troop at least—were human appearing, their hooded cloaks flapping about them. Padding along the margin of the water were the Gray Ones, pointing their man-wolf muzzles into the air as they slavered and screeched their hatred. But, as ever, running water kept them both from full attack. Not so the others of that Shadow pack. From the air shrieked the rus, those birds of ill omen, flying with talon and beak ready to harry the party on the island. And I saw, too, the troubling of the water as rasti swam in waves of furred and vicious bodies, struggling out into the jumble of rocks which was the only defense the island party had.

And running water did not hold others of that foul regiment. Well above its surface floated a swirl of yellowish vapor which did not travel fast, yet made purposefully for the island. Only the sharp crackle of the energy whips of the Green Riders on the island kept all these at bay. Yet perhaps what the forces of the Shadow fought for was only to hold until support came, since we could see movement on the ground at the other side of the river, an ingathering of more of the Sarn Riders and the Gray Ones. Behind those something else moved with intent, but was so covered by a flickering of the air that I could not truly see it. I believed it, however, to be one of the strong evils.

Once Kemoc and I had been so besieged in a place of stones, with a monster force ringing us in. Then Kyllan and the Green People had broken through to our rescue. But here it would seem that some of the Green People themselves were at bay.

Kemoc! His name was on my lips but I did not cry it aloud, remembering that such a betrayal of my recognition might be caught by one of the Shadow and used as another weapon against the very one I would protect. Now I saw a boiling of water about the island and wondered if the Krogan, alienated as they had been, had also now come fully under the Dark Ones’ banner.