Andre Norton: Three Against the Witch World

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.

WE WERE AS lean and vicious as those hounds the Riders of Alizon trained for the hunting of men, and, like those fleet beasts, we coursed through the narrow valleys and over mountains, faintly surprised each night that we still sat the saddle or tramped the narrow trails of the heights, and again in the morning when we awoke in our concealed camps, able to greet the dawn alive.

If Alizon and Karsten had made common cause, as all these years we had looked to them to do, Estcarp would have been cracked, crunched, and swallowed up. But it would seem that Pagar had no wish to drink cup-brotherhood with Facellian of Alizon—the why might stem from many causes.

Perhaps the heart of those was some use of the Power which we did not detect. For we did know that the Witches of the Council had their own way of dealing with a few men, whereas the Power weakened and lost control when it was spread too thin, or when it was put to a prolonged use. For such an effort needed the life force of many adepts working together, and would leave them drained for a perilous space thereafter.

However, it was that very act which they determined upon in the late summer of the second year after Kemoc left us. Orders came by sending to every post, no matter how remote, or how mobile the men who held it. And rumor followed directly behind, as is the way in armies. We were to withdraw, out of the mountains, down from the foothills, gather onto the plains of Estcarp, leaving the ground we had defended so long bare of all who wore Estcarp’s badge.

To the outer eye it was the folly of one wit-struck, but rumor had it that we were setting a trap, such a trap as our world had not seen—that the Witches, alarmed at the constant drain of our manpower in these endless engagements, were to concentrate their forces in a gamble which would either teach Pagar a lesson he would never forget, or let us all go down to a single defeat in place of this slow bloodletting.

But we were also ordered to retreat with skulker’s skill so that it would be a little time before their raiders would discover that the mountains were empty, the passes free. Thus we flitted back, company by company, squad by squad, with a screen of rear guard behind us. And it was a week or more of redeployment before the Old Race were all in the low lands.

Pagar’s men were cautious at first. Too many times had they been slashed in ambushes and attacks. But they scouted, they explored, and then they began to come. A Sulcar fleet gathered in the great bay into which emptied the Es River, some of the ships anchoring even at haunted Gorm, where no man lived unless under orders because of the terror that the Kolders had wrought there, others in the very river mouth. And the tale was that should our present plan fail, the remnants of the Old Race, those who could make it, would be taken aboard that fleet for a last escape by sea.

But that story, we thought, was only for the ears of any spies Alizon and Karsten might have among us. For this move was one born of extreme desperation, and we did not believe the Council were fools. Perhaps the story did bring the Karsten Army at a faster trot via the cleared passes, for they began to pour up into the hills and mountains in an unending river of fighting men.

Chance led my own company to within a few miles of Etsford, and we built our fire and set up a picket line in the later afternoon. The horses were restless, and as I walked among them, striving to sense the reason for their nervousness, I felt it also—a hovering feeling, perhaps not of doom, but of gathering pressure, of a juggling of the balance of nature. So that which was right and proper was now askew, and growing more so by the second, a sucking out of the land and those on it, man and animal, of some inner strength—

An ingathering! Out of nowhere came that thought and I knew it for the truth. That which was the life of Estcarp itself was being drawn in upon some central core—readied—

I reached the horses with what quieting influence I had, but I was very aware now of that sucking. No bird sound broke the oppressive silence, not a leaf or blade of grass moved under any touch of wind, and the heat was a heavy, sullen cover over us. Through that dead calm of waiting, perhaps the more acute because of it, flashed an alert to strike me like a Karstenian dart.

Kyllan—Etsford—now!

That unspoken summons was the same forceful call for help as the cry from Kaththea had been years earlier. I swung bareback on the horse I held lightly by the mane, jerked free his picket rope. Then I was riding, at a gallop, to the manor which had been our home. There was shouting behind, but I did not look back. I sent a thought ahead:

Kemoc—what is it?

Come! Imperative, no explanation.

The sense of deadening, of withdrawal, held about me as we pounded down the road. Nothing moved in all that land save ourselves, and it was wrong. Yet that wrongness was outside my private concern and I would not yield to it.

There was the watch tower of the manor, but no flag hung limp in the stifling air. I could sight no sentry manning the walk, nor any sign of life about the walls. Then I faced a gate ajar enough to make entrance for a single rider.