Andre Norton - Witch World

She did not look away from the fog, watching it with the intentness of a laboratory assistant engaged in a crucial experiment.

“Blindness they may seek, but blindness can enfold two ways. If they will play at illusion — then let them be countered with their own trick!”

“Fight fog with fog?” the Captain commanded.

“You do not fight one trick with the same. They are calling upon air and water. Therefore we must use water and air in return, but in another fashion.” She tapped her thumbnail against her teeth. “Yes, that might be a confusing move,” she murmured as she swung around. “We must get down to the harbor level. Ask of Magnis a supply of wood, dry chips will be excellent. But, if he has them not, get knives that we may cut them. Also some cloth. And bring it to the center quay.”

The choked clamor of the gongs echoed hollowly across the heart of the harbor as the small knot of Sulcarmen and Guards came out on the quay. An armload of board lengths appeared and the witch took the smallest. Her hands plied the knife clumsily as she strove to whittle out the rude outline of a boat, pointed at bow, rounded at stem. Simon took it from her, peeling off the white strips easily, the others following his example as the woman approved.

They had a fleet of ten, of twenty, of thirty chip boats, palm-size, each fitted with a stick mast and a cloth sail the witch tied into place. She went down on her knees before that line, and, stooping very low, blew carefully into each of the tiny sails, pressed her finger for a moment on the prow of each of the whittled chips.

“Wind and water, wind and water,” she singsonged. “Wind to hasten, water to bear, sea to carry, fog to ensnare!”

Swiftly her hands moved, tossing one and another of the crude representations of a sea fleet out into the water of the harbor. The fog was almost upon them, but it was still not too thick for Simon to miss an amazing sight. The tiny boats had formed into a wedge-shaped line pointing straight for the now hidden sea. And, as the first dipped across the line of the fog curtain it was no hastily chipped toy, but a swift, gleaming ship, finer than the slim raiders Osberic had displayed with pride.

The witch caught at Simon’s dangling wrist to draw herself to her feet again. “Do not believe all that you see, outworld man. We deal in illusion, we of the Power. But let us hope that this illusion will be as effective as their fog, frightening off any invaders.”

“They can’t be real ships!” Stubbornly he protested the evidence of his eyes.

“We depend too strongly upon our outer senses. If one can befool the eyes, the fingers, the nose — then the magic is concrete for a space. Tell me, Simon, should you be planning to enter this harbor for attack and then saw out of the fog about your ships a fleet you had not suspected was there, would you not think twice of offering battle? I have only tried to buy us time, for illusion breaks when it is put to any real test. A Kolder ship which would try to lock sides and board one of that fleet could prove it to be what it is. But sometimes time bought is a precious thing.”

She was in a measure right. At least, if the enemy had planned to use the blanket of mist to cover an attack on the harbor, they did not follow through. There was no invasion alarm that night, neither was there any lifting of the thick cover over the city as the hour of dawn passed.

The masters of the three ships in the harbor waited upon Osberic for orders, and he could give none, save to wait out the life of the fog. Simon made the rounds of the Guards in Koris’ wake, and sometimes it was necessary for one man to link fingers in the other’s belt lest they lose touch, upon the outer stations of the sea wall. Orders were given that the gongs continue to beat at regular intervals, not now for the protection of those at sea, but merely that one sentry post keep in touch with the next. And men turned strained, drawn faces, half drew weapons as their reliefs came upon them, until one shouted the password or some identification ahead lest he be spitted upon the steel of a jumpy outpost.

“At this rate,” Tregarth commented as he side-stepped one rush from a Sulcarman they came upon suddenly, and so saved himself from a crippling blow, if not worse, “they will not need to send any attack force, for we shall be flying out upon each other. Let a man seem to wear a beaked helm in this murk and he will speedily be short a head.”

“So I have thought,” the Captain answered shortly. “They play with illusion, too, born of our nerves and fears. But what answer can we give except what we had already done?”

“Anyone with good ears could pick up our passwords.” Simon determined to face the worst. “A whole section of wall could fall to their control, post by post.”

“Can we even be sure that this is an attack?” counter-questioned the other bitterly. “Outworlder, if you can give better orders here, then do so and I shall accept them gladly! I am a man of war, and the ways of war I know — or thought I knew — well. Also I believed that I knew the ways of wizards, since I serve Estcarp with a whole heart. But this is something I have never met before; I can only do my best.”

“And never have I seen this manner of fighting either,” Simon admitted readily. “It would baffle anyone. But this I think now — they will not come by sea.”

“Because that is the way we look to have them creep upon us?” Koris caught him up quickly. “I do not think that the keep can be assaulted from land. These sea rovers have built shrewdly. It would need siege machinery such as would take weeks to assemble.”

“Sea and land — which leaves?”

“Earth and air,” Koris replied.”Earth! Those under passages!”

“But we cannot spread men too thinly to watch all the underground ways.”

Koris’ sea-green eyes glowed with the same feral battle light Simon had seen in them at their first meeting.

“There is a watch which can be put upon them, needing no men. A trick I know. Let us get to Magnis.” He began to run, the point of his sheathed sword clinking now and again against the stone walls as he rounded the turns in the keep corridors.

Basins were lined up on a table, of all sizes and several shapes, but they were uniformly of copper and the balls Koris was carefully apportioning, one to a bowl, were also of metal. One of the bowl and ball combination, installed in the portion of wall overhanging an underground way, would betray any attempt to force the door far below by the oscillation of ball within basin.

Earth was safeguarded as best they could. Which left — the air. Was it because he was familiar with air warfare that Simon found himself listening, watching, at the cost of a crick in the neck, the murk encasing the towers of the port? Yet a civilization which depended upon the relatively primitive dart guns, the sword, the shield, and a mailed body for offense and defence — no matter what subtle tricks of the mind they called in bolstering aids — could not produce airborne attack as well.

Thanks to Koris’ device of the bowls they had a few moments of warning when the Kolder thrust came. But from all five points where the bowls had been placed that alarm arose at nearly the same instant. The halls leading to each doorway had been stuffed during frenzied hours of labor with all the burnable stuff in the warehouses of the port. Mats of sheep wool and cowhair soaked in oil and tar, which the shipwrights used for the calking, were woven in around torn bales of fine fabrics, bags of dried grain and seeds, and oil and wine poured in rivulets to soak into these giant plugs.

When the bowls warned, torches were applied and other portals closed, sealing off from the central core those flame-filled ways.