Andre Norton - Witch World

Koris sensed that. Working his way back through the mass of men waiting to be landed, he found the captain of the ship and urged a quick thrust at the shore. Only to be reminded tartly that while the Captain of Estcarp’s Guard might be all powerful on land, he should leave the sea to those who knew it, and that the master of this particular ship had no intention of fouling his vessel with any of the hulks before them.

Simon continued to eye the shoreline, studying the mouth of each empty street, glancing now and then aloft to that blind hulk which was the heart of Sippar in more ways than one. He could not have said just what he feared — a flight of planes, an army emerging from the streets to the quays. To be met by nothing at all was more disconcerting than to face the high odds of Kolder weapons carried by hordes of their slaves. This was too easy, and he could not find full faith in the Game of Power; some core of him refused to believe that because a small image had ended with a melted head, they had defeated all that lay in Gorm.

They made the shore without incident, those of Sulcar landing farther down the coast to cut off any reinforcements which might be drawn from other points on the island. They scouted up the streets and lanes down which Simon had come days earlier, trying locked doors, investigating dark corners. But as far as they could discover nothing lived nor moved within the husk of Gorm’s capital.

And they were well up to the center hold when the first resistance came, not from the air, nor from any invisible wave, but on foot with weapons in hand as the men of this world had fought for generations.

Suddenly the streets were peopled with fighters who moved swiftly, but without sound, who voiced no battle cries, but came forward steadily with deadly purposes. Some wore the battle dress of Sulcarmen, some of Karsten, and Simon saw among them a few of the bird helms of Falconers.

That silent rush was made by men who were not only expendable, but who had no thought of self-protection, just as those in the road ambush had fought. And their first fury carried them into the invasion force with the impact of a tank into a company of infantrymen. Simon went to his old game of sniping, but Koris charged with the Ax of Volt, a whirling, darting engine of death, to clear a path through the enemy lines, and another back again.

The slaves of the Kolder were no mean opponents, but they lacked the spark of intelligence which would have brought them together to reform, to use to better advantage their numbers. They knew only that they must attack while any strength was left in them, while they still kept on their feet. And so they did, with the insane persistence of the mindless. It was sheer butchery which turned even the veteran Guardsmen sick while they strove to defend themselves and to gain ground.

Volt’s Ax no longer shone bright, but, stained as it was, Koris tossed it in the air as a signal for the advance. His men closed ranks leaving behind them a street which was no longer empty, though it was without life.

“That was to delay us.” Simon joined the Captain.

“So do I think. What do we expect now? Death from the air such as they used at Sulcarkeep?” Koris looked into the sky, the roofs above them gaining his wary attention.

It was those same roofs which suggested another plan to his companion.

“I do not think you will be able to break into the hold at ground level,” he began and heard the soft rumble of laughter from within the Captain’s helm.

“Not so. I know ways herein which perhaps even the Kolder have not nosed out. This was my burrow once.”

“But I have also a plan,” Simon cut in. “There are ropes in plenty on the ships, and grappling hooks. Let one party take to the roofs, while you search out your burrows, and perhaps we can close jaws upon them from two sides.”

“Fair enough!” Koris conceded. “Do you try the sky ways since you have traveled them before. Choose your men, but do not take above twenty.”

Twice more they were attacked by those silent parties of living-dead, and each time more of their own men were left as toll when the last of the Kolder-owned were cut down. In the end the Estcarp forces parted ways. Simon and some twenty of the Guard broke in a door and climbed through the miasma of old death to a roof. Tregarth’s sense of direction had not betrayed him; the neighboring roof showed a ragged hole, the mark of his landing in the plane.

He stood aside for the sailors who cast their grapples to the parapet of that other roof above their heads and across an expanse of street. Men tied their swords to them, made sure of the safety of their weapon belts, eyed that double line across nothingness with determination. Simon had recruited none who could not claim a good head for heights. But now when he faced the test he had more doubts than hopes.

He made that first ascent, the tough rope scraping his palms as he climbed, putting a strain on his shoulders he believed from moment to moment he could not endure.

The nightmare ended sometime. He uncoiled a third rope from about his waist, and tossed its weighted end back to the next man in line, taking a turn with the other end around one of the pillars supporting the hangar and helping to draw him up.

Those planes he had disabled stood where he had left them, but open motor panels and scattered tools testified to work upon them. Why the job had not been finished was another mystery. Simon told off four men to guard the roof and the rope way, and with the rest began the invasion of the regions below.

The same silence which had held elsewhere in the town was thick here. They passed along corridors, down stairs, by shut doors, with only the faint sound of their own quiet tread to be heard. Was the hold deserted?

On they went into the heart of the blind, sealed building, expecting at any moment to encounter one of the bands of the possessed. The degree of light grew stronger; there was an undefinable change in the air which suggested that if these levels were deserted now it had not long been so.

Simon’s party came to the last flight of stone steps which he remembered so well. At the bottom that stone would be coated with the gray walling of the Kolders. He leaned out over the well, listening. Far, far below there was a sound at last, as regular in its thump, thump as the beat of his own heart.

“Captain,” Tunston had moved up to join him, “what do we meet below?”

“Your foreseeing in that is as good as mine,” Simon answered half absently, for it was in that moment that he realized he did not sense any danger to come at all, even in this strange place of death and half life. Yet there was something below, or they would not hear that.

He led the way, his gun ready, taking those steps cautiously, but at a fast pace. There were closed doors which were locked against their efforts to open them, until they came into the chamber of the wall map.

Here that beat arose from the floor under their feet, was drummed out by the walls, to fill their ears and their bodies with its slow rhythm.

The lights on the map were dead. There remained no line of machines on the table, tended by gray-robed men, though metal fastenings, a trailing wire or two marked where they had rested. But at that upper table there still sat a capped figure, his eyes closed, immobile, just as Simon had seen him on his first visit to this place.

At first Simon believed the man dead. He walked to the table watching the seated Kolder alertly. To his best knowledge this was the same man whom he had tried to visualize for the artist of Estcarp. And he was fleetingly pleased at the accuracy of his memory.

Only — Simon halted. This man was not dead, though those eyes were closed, the body motionless. One hand lay upon the control plate set in the table top and Simon had just seen a fingertip press a button there.