Lost Lands of Witch World by Andre Norton
And I felt, though I did not add to it, the surge of will which emanated from him at that moment. From the tip of the wand leaped a blue spark which fastened to that line, sped down and up, running along it. There was a trembling through the floor on which we stood. Then the portal gave, very grudgingly, affording us only a narrow slit of passage. I pushed Ayllia through and followed myself, to have Hilarion bring up the rear.
We were in the dark passage through which I had groped with such care nights—days—earlier. In the narrow strip of light from the door I saw Hilarion aim the wand once more at the portal. Again blue light moved, and, as falteringly as it had opened, the door began to close. When a slit only the width of a finger remained, I saw a flash of blue, this time not aimed at the opening but along the floor, rising to run in the same fashion overhead.
“I do not believe they can force that too soon.” There was satisfaction in his voice, but something else, such a spacing of words and slurring of them as I have heard in the voices of men who have been pushed very close to the edge of endurance in both body and spirit.
“Kaththea?” he called. I could not see him in the dark.
“I am here.” I answered swiftly for it seemed to me that this was a call for either reassurance or aid. It astonished me greatly—unless the battle he had waged for his freedom, and incidently ours, had truly exhausted him.
“We . . . must . . . reach . . . the . . . surface—” The hesitation, the slurring were stronger. And I could now hear heaving breath, a rasping as a man might make after he had just climbed a steep rise at his best speed. I put out my hand, touched firm, warm flesh, and felt my fingers taken into a grasp which was not strong, but which held. Straightaway I sensed a draining from me into him.
“No!” I would have broken that hold but, weak as it seemed to be, there was no loosing of my fingers.
“Yes, and yes!” There was more energy in his denial. “My little sorceress, we are not yet out of this pit, and perhaps our first skirmish was the least of those to be faced. I must have what you can give me, as I do not think you could carry me if you would. Nor do you know the pitfalls herein as I do; remember I have been an unwilling part of them. I have been too many ages pent within that prison to be as able on my feet, or as fast as a master swordsman. You will give me what I need, if you truly wish to be free of Zandur.”
“But the machines—the fires—” I drew upon what had happened in the chamber to add to my stubborn resistance.
“No worse hit than they have been many times before. There are fast methods of repair, and Zandur will have already put those into action. Remember, this place was made to wage war, such a war as I do not believe you have dreamed of, my lady sorceress. For it is not a war those of our blood have ever seen. This place has many defenses and most of them shall now be turned on us, as speedily as Zandur can make the repairs to activate them. So give me of your strength and let us hurry.”
Then I, recalling that long descent which I had made, wondered if we could reclimb it. Ayllia came willingly enough, but as at first, she must be led. I did not try to control her mind again.
“Let him have what he now needs,” my mother’s thought rang in my head. “Feed, and we shall feed you! He speaks the truth: time now marches, heavily armed, against us all!”
So I let my hand remain in his grasp as we went on down that dark way, and felt the energy flow out, to be soaked up by him as a sponge soaks up water. But into me came what Jaelithe and Simon released to my aid, so that I was not drained as I might well have been. Again I wondered whether, had that not been so, Hilarion would have indeed plundered me, and then what he would have done with Ayllia and myself. My distrust of him grew the stronger.
We reached the foot of the long climb, but the adept did not turn to the stair. Instead, in the half-light (for there was no moon above, rather a clouded sky, very far away, gray and forbidding), he again raised the wand, pointed it at that part of the well which seemed to be cut by a half cap.
As slowly as the doorway had obeyed him, so did that segment begin to descend, and I recognized it as the platform which ferried the vehicles up and down. But it moved very slowly, and, though he said nothing, I knew that Hilarion was disquieted. He turned his head now and then as if listening. I could hear a humming, feel a vibration such as I had heard and felt in the tower. But of the clamor we had left behind there was no whisper, nor could I hear anything moving after us. I was afire to be away, and would even have attempted the curve of the stair had not a dependence upon the superior knowledge of Hilarion and the guess that he chose now the best and easiest way, kept me where I was.
The platform finally reached the bottom and we three scrambled onto it. Then it began to rise again, this time more swiftly than it had descended, and I felt a small relief. Once we were in the open we might be able to use the broken nature of the land as a cover for our escape—if we could cross the basin fast enough.
But we were not to reach the surface. We were still well below the point of possible leap or climb when the platform stopped. For a very short space I believed that halt only temporary. Then I saw Hilarion pointing his wand to the center of the surface beneath our feet. Only this time the spark of blue from its tip was gone before it touched. He tried again and the effort he made was visible. Yet the quickly dead flash did us no service. At last he turned to me.
“There is a choice left us,” he said, his face expressionless. “And it is one I shall make. I advise you to do the same.”
“That being?”
“Leap.” He pointed into the well. “Better that than be taken alive.”
“You can do nothing?”
“I told you, there are strong defenses here. We are now trapped, to await Zandur’s pleasure as surely as if he had put his force fields about us. Leap now—before he does do just that!”
Having said this Hilarion moved to carry into action exactly what he had suggested. But I caught at him and such was the drain which exhausted him that, though he was the larger and normally stronger, he swayed in my hold and nearly fell, as if my touch had been enough to destroy his balance.
“No!” I shouted.
“I tell you yes! I will not be his thing again!”
But my call had already gone forth and I was answered.
“The help I promised—it comes,” I told him, dragging him back to the center of the platform. “There are those who bring us aid.”
Though at that moment I could not have told what manner of aid came with my parents; I only had confidence that they would have it to give.
“This is folly.” His head dropped forward on his breast; he lurched against me as if at that moment the last drop of his strength had run from him. I was borne to the floor under the limp weight of his body. So I sat there, Ayllia dropping down beside me, Hilarion resting against my arm and shoulder. And I stared up at the rim of the well, tantalizingly out of reach, waiting for the coming of the two who sought us.
What outer defenses Zandur might have I did not know, and I began to fear that perhaps they were too many for any quick rescue. It could well be that Hilarion would be proved right and his solution, grim though it was, was the better one. As my mother said, time was our enemy.
And time, as it has a way of doing in moments of great stress, walked or crept on leaden feet as I watched that rim and waited. I listened, too, for sounds from below. And I watched the wall in quick sideward glances to mark whether we might be descending on some order from Zandur. To lose what distance we had gained might mean we had lost all.
Then I marked movement above. I waited in fear to learn who or what leaned over there to view us. The light was less dim than it had been. Perhaps we had come here at dawn and the day now advanced. So I at last saw what dangled toward us from above, striking the wall with a sharp metallic clink that I longed to order to silence lest it alert some lurker below.
When it came a little lower I saw it was a chain ladder such as had been in use in the transport cavern.
“Up, and speedily!”
“Ayllia—” First I turned my mind control on her. She rose and went to the ladder without question, began to climb.
“Well enough!” my mother applauded. “Now, hold to the adept.”
That I was already doing, but now I felt that inflow and outflow. This time it was not my own strength being so drained, but that which came from the two aloft. Hilarion struggled out of my hold, got slowly to his feet.
“The ladder—” I guided him to it. But once his hands closed on it he took on new life and, as Ayllia, he climbed, steadily, if more slowly than my impatience wanted to see him go.
As soon as he was well above my head I put my own feet and hands to use. I could only trust that the chain would support the weight of the three of us at once, for Ayllia, though continuing to move, was still well below the rim.
“Hold well!” My mother’s command came for the third time and I held. Now the ladder moved under me, not me over it, as if that tough but slender strand to which we all clung was being hoisted.
There sounded a grating noise from below. I looked down, startled, at the shadow which was the platform. Surely we were not ascending that swiftly? No, the platform was sinking, down into the depths where Zandur’s forces doubtlessly waited. We had left it just in time.
Up and up we went. I soon found it better not to look up, and surely not down, but to cling as tightly as I could to that swinging support and hope it would hold for time that was a measurement to lessen my fear. Thus it was that we came at last, one by one, into a gray and clouded day.
And for the first time in so long I looked upon those two from whose union I had come. My mother was as she had appeared in my mind picture, but Simon of Tregarth was so long lost in the past I had half forgotten him. He was there beside her, his head bare of helm, but about his shoulders the mail of Estcarp. He, too, had not aged beyond early middle life, yet there was a thin veil over his features which could be read as much weariness and endurance under great and punishing odds. He had the black hair of the Old Race, but his features were not the regular ones of inbreeding you saw in those men, being blunter, a little heavier. And his eyes were strange—to me—startling when he opened them wide to look intently upon one. As he did at me now.
It was a constrained meeting between the three of us. Though these were my mother and father, as a child I had never been close to either. Caught up as they had been in the duties of border guardians, they had spent little time with us. Then, too, our triple birth had prostrated our mother for a long time, and, Kemoc had once said, that had earned us our father’s dislike. Therefore, while our mother lay fingering the final curtain, not sure whether or not she would lift it to go beyond, he had not been able to look upon us at all.
Anghart of the Falconers had been our mother by care, not Jaelithe Tregarth. So that now I felt strange and removed from these, not racing to open my heart and my arms to embrace them.
But it would seem that it was not in their minds to make such gestures either, or so I then thought. My father raised one hand in a kind of salute, which straightaway altered into a gesture beckoning us all on to where stood one of those crawling machines which I had seen moving toward the towers.
“In!” he urged us, stopping only to coil together the ladder and carry it over his shoulder as he shepherded us before him. There was a door gaping in the side of the box and we scrambled in.
The interior was indeed cramped quarters. My father slammed the door and pushed past us to take his seat at the front behind such a bank of levers as I had seen under the screens below. There was a second place to his right, and in that my mother settled. But she turned halfway around to face the three of us where we sat upon the floor.
“We must get away fast,” she said. “Kaththea, and you, Hilarion, link with me. It will be necessary to maintain the best illusion we can lest we pull pursuit after us before we dare to turn and fight.”
In the half-light of that small chamber I saw Hilarion nod. Then he gripped his wand by one end, allowed the other to touch the back of Jaelithe’s seat. His left hand he put across Ayllia to me and I grasped it.
As we had linked, Simon, Jaelithe and I, so now did the four of us combine when my mother put the fingers of one hand on my father’s arm. And our minds came together with one purpose, though for Hilarion and myself it was merely a lending of thought force to be molded and used by those other two as they saw best. I do not know what they wrought outside our crawling box, but at least no attack came. I guessed that perhaps they had chosen to produce a simulation of our machine headed in another direction.
There was a screen set before the two seats at the front, and on this appeared a picture of the basin over which we traveled, so that while the window slits were too narrow to see through, the outer world was thus made plain to us.
I had been so intent upon what lay before me when I had tracked Ayllia hither that I had not noted much of the country. But I could see on the screen the crunched tracks of the transports that had gone out from the well and returned to it. We soon veered from that course, heading at an angle over ground which was not so marked. Would we not then leave tracks doubly easy to follow? one part of my brain questioned as I bent my energy to supplying what was needed for the weaving of the hallucination.
My father had a reputation for being a wily and resourceful fighter, a leader of forlorn hopes which usually ended in success, as he had gone up against the Kolder to bring an end to them. One must have confidence now that he knew what he was doing, even though it seemed errant folly to the onlooker.
Ayllia had lapsed into the same sleep or loss of consciousness which had held her in the underground, lying inert between Hilarion and myself. The adept sat with his back against the wall of the cabin. His eyes were closed and there were signs of strain on his face, even as they were painted upon my father’s. But his hold upon the wand, his grip on my hand, were firm and steady.
That we could depend upon his aid as long as we were in this haunted land I was certain, for failure would mean an even worse fate for him if we were taken. But what if he did activate the gate again and we won back into Escore? Could it be that his return would then bring upon my brothers and the people of the Valley such danger as they could not stand against?
I had no globe of crystal for foreseeing, nor had I Utta’s board to summon the possible future—for no one can see the future exactly so and say this and this shall be. There are many factors which can change, so one can see a possible future and perhaps alter it thereafter by some action of one’s own.
But I determined that I must speak in private with my mother, not trusting mind speech, which Hilarion could easily tap. And I would beg her aid and that of my father to make sure we did not bring new danger through the gate—always supposing that Hilarion could find and unlock it once more for us. I did not believe that I could find the place where we first burst into this world (unless by some concentration it could be traced by a mind search—such troublings of the fabric of time and space ought to leave a “scent” which the talented could perceive).
It was not an easy ride in that box, for once we crept from the basin there was a jolting, a slipping, a sickening up and down swing of the floor under us. Meanwhile, we were deafened by a throb which marked the life of the thing, and the acrid air of this world was rendered even worse to our nostrils by fumes which gathered in our close quarters. But all these discomforts we had to ignore, concentrating only on supplying the energy necessary to provide our flight with what cover we managed to maintain.
The screen now showed again those remnants of ancient buildings which ringed the basin. They were even more noticeable on this portion of the rim than they had been where I came in. Truly this must have been a city of such size that Kars or Es would have been swallowed up in one small district.
We followed a weaving path, keeping to what lower and clearer gro
Then, suddenly, we ground to a stop. And a moment later I saw what must have alerted my father, movement on the top of a crumbled wall. Not a man, no, but a black tube which now centered its open core upon us. My father stood on his seat, his boots planted firmly, his head and shoulders disappearing into an opening directly above. What he did there I could not guess, until fire crackled across the screen, struck full upon that tube. Under that lash of flame the tube was no longer black; it began to glow, first dull red, then brighter and brighter.
After that our weapon began a wide sweep over the ground from side to side as far as we could see on the screen. And it was several long minutes before my father settled back at the controls.
“Automatic weapon,” he said. “No hallucination can confuse that. It was set, I think, to fire at any moving thing which did not answer some code.”
In the world in which he was born my father had known such weapons, and it would seem that in this nightmare country he was fitted to conduct such an alien type of war.
“There are more?” asked my mother.
I heard my father laugh grimly. “Were there any around here we would know it by now. But that there are more between us and open land I do not doubt in the least.”
On we crawled and now I watched the screen for the least hint of movement which would mark the alerting of another metal sentry. Two more we found and destroyed in a like manner, or rather my father so destroyed them. Then we left behind the traces of that forgotten city and crawled into the open country he sought, where that ashy ground was broken only here and there by the withered vegetation which seemed either dead or filled with loathsome life.
Our journey appeared to continue forever. And the cloudy sky began to darken. Also, I was hungry and thirsty, and the supplies which I had drawn upon in the caverns had been left behind in our dash for freedom.