Andre Norton - Witch World

Hardly daring to believe that the vessel was unmanned, they still kept in hiding. It was only when the third ship bobbed into sight and sent the other two whirling with the force of its emergence, that Simon accepted the evidence and got to his feet. Those ships were either unmanned or totally disabled. They drifted without guidance, two coming together with a crash.

No openings showed on their decks, no indications that they carried crews and passengers. The story that the quay told was different, however. It suggested a hasty loading of vessels, intended to attack, or to make a withdrawal from Gorm. And had only an attack been the purpose would the slaves have been killed?

To board one of those floating silver splinters without preparation would be folly. But it would be best to keep an eye upon them. The three went back to the cage which had brought them there. One of the ships struck against the wharf, sheered it off, and wallowed away.

“Will you remain here?” He asked a question of his men rather than gave an order. The Guard of Estcarp should be inured to strange sights, but this was no place to station an unwilling man.

“Those ships — we should learn their secrets,” one of the men returned. “But I do not think they will sail out from here again, Captain.”

Simon accepted that oblique dissent. Together they left the underground harbor to the derelicts and the dead. Before they took off in the cage, Simon inspected its interior for controls. He wanted to reach some level where he might contact Koris’ party, not return to the hall of the map once again.

Unfortunately the walls of that box were bare of any aid to direction. Disappointed they closed the door behind them waiting to be returned aloft. As the vibration in the wall testified to their movement, Simon recalled vividly the corridor of the laboratory and wished he could reach it.

The cage came to a stop, the door slid back, and the three within found themselves looking into the startled faces of other men, armed and alert. Only those few seconds of amazement saved both parties from a fatal mistake, for one of the group without called Simon’s name and he saw Briant.

Then a figure not to be mistaken for any but Koris shouldered by the others.

“Where do you spring from?” he demanded. “The wall itself?”

Simon knew this corridor where the Estcarp force was gathered: the place he had been thinking of. But why had the cage brought him here as if in answer to his wish alone? His wish!

“You have found the laboratory?”

“We have found many things, few of which make any sense. But not yet have we found any Kolder! And you?”

“One of the Kolder and he is now dead — or perhaps all of them!” Simon thought of the ships below and what they might hold in their interiors. “I do not believe that we have to fear meeting them here now.”

Through the hours which followed Simon was proved a true prophet. Save for the one man in the metal cap, there was no other of the unknown race to be discovered within Gorm. And of those who had served the Kolder there were only dead men left. Found, those were in squads, in companies, or by twos and threes in the corridors and rooms of the keep. All lay as they had dropped, as if what had kept them operating as men had suddenly been withdrawn and they had fallen into the nothingness which should have been theirs earlier, the peace which their masters had denied them.

The Guards found other prisoners in the room beyond the laboratory, among them some who had shared captivity with Simon. These awoke sluggishly from their drugged sleep, unable to remember anything after they had been gassed, but thanking such gods as each owned that they had been brought to Gorm too late to follow the sorry path of the others the Kolder had engulfed.

Koris and Simon guided Sulcar seamen to the underground harbor, and in a small boat, explored the cavern. They found only rock wall. The entrance to the pool must lie under surface, and they believed it had been closed to the escape of the derelict ships.

“If he who wore the cap controlled it all,” surmised Koris, “then his death must have sealed them in. Also, since he is the one you battled from afar through the Power, he might have already been giving muddled orders to lead to confusion here.”

“Perhaps,” Simon agreed absently. He was thinking of what he had learned from that other in his last few seconds of life. If the rest of the Kolder force were sealed into those ships, then indeed Estcarp had good reason to rejoice.

They got a line to one of the vessels and brought it alongside the wharf. But the fastenings of the hatch baffled them and Koris and Simon left the Sulcarmen to puzzle it out, returning to the keep.

“This is another of their magics.” Koris slid the door of the lift closed behind them. “But seemingly one the capped man did not control, seeing as how we can use it now.”

“You can control this as well as he ever did,” Simon leaned back against wall, weariness washing over him.

Their victory was inconclusive; he had an inkling of the chase yet before him, but would those of Estcarp believe what he had to tell them now? “Think upon the corridor where you met me, picture it in your mind.”

“So?” Koris pulled off his helm; now he set his shoulders against the opposite wall and closed his eyes in concentration.

The door opened. They looked out upon the laboratory corridor and Koris laughed with a boy’s amusement at an exciting toy.

“This magic I can work also, I, Koris, the Ugly. It would seem that among the Kolder the Power was not limited only to women.”

Simon closed the door once again, pictured in his mind the upper chamber of the wall map. Only when they reached that did he answer his companion’s observation.

“Perhaps that is what we now have to fear from the Kolder, Captain. They had their own form of power, and you have seen how they used it. This Gorm may now be a treasure house of their knowledge.”

Koris threw his helm on the table below the map, and leaning on his ax regarded Simon levelly.

“It is a treasure house you warn against looting?”

He picked that out quickly.

“I don’t know,” Simon dropped heavily into one of the chairs, and resting his head on his fists, stared down at the surface on which his elbows were planted.”I am no scientist, no master of this kind of magic. The Sulcarmen will be tempted by those ships, Estcarp by what else lies here.”

“Tempted?” Someone had echoed that word and both men looked around. Simon got to his feet as he saw who seated herself quietly a little from them, Briant beside her as if playing her shieldman.

She was helmed and in mail, but Simon knew that she could disguise herself with shape-changing and still he would know her always.

“Tempted,” again she repeated. “Well do you choose that word, Simon. Yes, we of Estcarp shall be tempted; that is why I am here. There are two edges to this blade and we may cut outselves on either if we do not take care. Should we turn aside from this strange knowledge, destroy all we have found, we may be making ourselves safe, or we may be foolishly opening a way for a second Kolder attack, for one cannot build a defense unless he has a clear understanding of the weapons to be used against him.”

“Of the Kolder,” Simon spoke slowly, heavily, “you will not have to fear too much. There was but a small company of them in the beginning. If any escaped here, then they can be hunted back to their source and that source closed.”

“Closed?” Koris made a question of that.

“In the last struggle with their leader he revealed their secret.”

“That they are not native to this world?”

Simon’s head swung around. Had she picked that out of his mind, or was that some information she had not seen fit to supply before?