Witch World Part 16

On its deck there was no sign of life as it bore on its wallowing way. From a Sulcar s.h.i.+p arched a ball, rising lazily into the air, dropping down to smash upon the deck of the derelict. Out of that ragged hole in the planking came red tongues of clean flame, feasting avidly on the tinder dry fittings, so the s.h.i.+p, burning, drifted on to sea.

Simon grinned at Koris, a brittle excitement eating at him. He could be sure now that they were past the first danger point.

"We have overrun your barrier?"

"Unless they have moved it closer to land, yes!"

Koris rested his chin on the head of Volt's Ax as he surveyed the dark fingers of wharves before what had once been a flouris.h.i.+ng city. He was grinning too, as a wolf shows its fangs before the first slash of the fight.

"It would appear that this time the Power worked," he commented. "Now let us be about our part of the business."

Simon knew a twinge of caution. "Do not underestimate them. We have but pa.s.sed the first of their defenses, perhaps their weakest." His first elation was gone as quickly as it had come. There were swords, axes, dart guns about him. But in the heart of the Kolder keep was a science centuries ahead of such weapons-which might at any moment produce some nasty surprise.

As they came farther into the harbor, faced now by the need for finding pa.s.sage to the wharves in and among the vessels moldering at anchor, there continued to be no sign of any life in Sippar. Only some of the brooding and forbidding silence of the dead city fell upon the invaders, dampening their ardor, taking a slight edge off their enthusiasm and their feeling of triumph at having pa.s.sed the barrier.

Koris sensed that. Working his way back through the ma.s.s of men waiting to be landed, he found the captain of the s.h.i.+p and urged a quick thrust at the sh.o.r.e. 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 s.h.i.+p had no intention of fouling his vessel with any of the hulks before them.

Simon continued to eye the sh.o.r.eline, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 pa.s.sed 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.

THE CLEANSING OF GORM.

"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 b.u.t.ton there.

Tregarth leaped. He had an instant in which to see those eyes open, the face beneath the metal twist in anger-and perhaps fear. Then his own hands closed upon the wire which led from the cap the other wore to the board in the wall behind. He ripped, bringing loose several of those slender cables. Someone cried out a warning and he saw a barreled weapon swing into line with his body as the Kolder went into action.

Only because that cap and its trailing veil of wire interfered with the free action of he who wore it was Simon to continue to live. He slapped out with his dart gun across the flat face with its snarling mouth which uttered no sound, its stark and hating eyes. The blow broke skin, brought blood welling from cheek and nose. Simon caught the other's wrist, twisting it so that a thin film of vapor spurted up into the vault of the ceiling, and not into his own face.

They crashed back into the chair from which the Kolder had risen. There was a sharp snap, fire flashed across Simon's neck and shoulder. A scream, muted and suppressed rang in his ears. The face beneath its sweep of blood was contorted with agony, yet still the Kolder fought on with steel-muscled strength.

Those eyes, larger, and larger, filling the hall-Simon was falling forward into those eyes. Then there were no more eyes, just a weird fog-streaked window into another place-perhaps another time. Between pillars burst a company of men, gray robed, riding in machines strange to him. They were firing behind them as they came, unmistakably some remnant of a broken force on the run and hardly pressed.

In a narrow column they struggled on, and with them he endured desperation and such a cold fury as he had not known existed as an emotion to wrack mind and heart. The Gate-once through the Gate-then they would have the time: time to rebuild, to take, to be what they had the will and force to be. A broken empire and a ravaged world lay behind them-before them a fresh world for the taking.

The beset fugitives were swept away. He saw only one pallid face flushed red about a wound where his first blow had landed. Clinging about them both was the smell of scorching cloth and flesh. How long had that vision of the valley lasted-it could not have been a full second! He was still fighting, exerting pressure so that he might crack the other's wrist against the chair. Twice he struck it so, and then the fingers relaxed and the vapor gun fell out of their grip.

For the first time since that one scream the Kolder made a sound, a broken whimpering which sickened Simon. A second fading vision of those fleeing men-a moment of pa.s.sionate regret which was like a blow to the man who involuntarily shared it. They thrashed across the floor to bring the Kolder up against a spitting wire. Simon slammed the other's metal cap hard against the floor. For the last time a fragment of recognition reached from the man to him and in that sc.r.a.p of tune he knew-perhaps not what the Kolder were-but from whence they had come. Then there was nothing at all, and Simon pulled away from the flaccid body to sit up. Tunston stooped and tried to pull the cap from the head which rolled limply on the gray-robed shoulders. They were all a little daunted when it became apparent that that cap was no cap at all, but seemingly a permanent part of the body it crowned.

Simon got to his feet. "Leave it!" he bade the Guard. "But make sure none touch those wires."

It was then that he was aware that that throb in wall and floor, that feeling of life was gone, leaving behind it a curious void. The Kolder of the cap might himself have been the heart, which, ceasing to beat, had killed the citadel as surely as his race had killed Sippar.

Simon made for the alcove where the elevator had been. Had all power ceased so that there was no way to reach the lower levels? But the door of the small cell was open. He gave command here to Tunston, and taking two of the Guardsmen with him, pushed the door shut.

Again luck appeared to be with those out of Estcarp, for the closing of the panel put into action the mechanism of the lift. Simon expected to front the level of the laboratory when that door opened once again. Only, when the cage came to a stop, he faced something so far removed from his expectations that for a moment he stood staring, while both of the men with him exclaimed in surprise.

They were on the sh.o.r.e of an underground harbor, strongly smelling of the sea and of something else. The lighting which had prevailed elsewhere in the pile was centered upon a runway washed by the water on both sides, pointing straight out into a bowl of gloom and dark. And on that quay were the tumbled bodies of men, men such as themselves with no gray robes among them.

Where the living dead who had met them in the street battles had gone armed and fully clad, these were either naked or wore only the tattered rags of old garments about their bodies, as if a need for clothing had no longer concerned them for a long time.

Some had crumpled beside small trucks on which boxes and containers were still heaped. Others lay in line as if they had been marching in ranks when struck down. Simon walked forward and stooped to peer at the nearest. It was clear that the man was truly dead, had been so for a day at least.

Gingerly, avoiding the heaped bodies, the three from Estcarp made their way to the end of the quay, finding nowhere among the dead any armed as fighting men. And none were of Estcarp blood. If these had been the slaves of the Kolder, they were all of other races.

"Here, Captain." One of the Guards lagging behind Simon had halted beside a body and was looking at it in wonder. "Here is such a man as I have never seen before. Look at the color of his skin, his hair; he is not from these lands!"

The unfortunate Kolder slave lay on his back as if in sleep. But his skin, totally exposed save for a draggle of rag about his hips, was a red-brown, and his hair was tightly curled to his scalp. It was plain that the Kolder had cast their man nets in far regions.

Without knowing why, Simon walked clear to the end of that wharf. Either Gorm had originally been erected over a huge underground cavern, or the invaders had blasted this out to serve their own purposes, purposes Simon could only believe were connected with the s.h.i.+p on which he had been a prisoner. Was this the secluded dock of the Kolder fleet?

"Captain!" The other Guard had tramped a little ahead, uninterested in the bodies among which he threaded a fastidious path. Now he stood on the end of that tongue of stone beckoning Simon forward.

There was a stirring of the waters; waves lapped higher on the wharf, forcing all three men to retreat.

Even in that limited light they could see something large rising to the surface.

"Down!" Simon snapped the command. They did not have time to return to the lift; their best hope was to play one with the bodies about them.

They lay together, Simon pillowing his head on his arm, his gun ready, watching the turmoil. Water spilled from the bulk of the thing. Now he could make out the sharp bow with its matching needle stem. His guess had been right: this was one of the Kolder s.h.i.+ps come to harbor.

He wondered if his own breathing sounded as loud as that of his men beside him did to him. They were more fully clothed than the dead about them; could sharp eyes pick out the gleam of their mail and nail them with some Kolder weapon before they could move in defense?

Only that silver s.h.i.+p, having once surfaced, made no other move at all, rolling in the waves within the cavern as if it were as dead as the bodies. Simon watched it narrowly and then started, as the man beside him whispered and touched his officer's arm.

But Simon did not need that admonition to watch. He, too, had sighted that second boiling upheaval of waves. In those the first s.h.i.+p was pushed toward the quay. It was plain now that she answered no helm.

Hardly daring to believe that the vessel was unmanned, they still kept in hiding. It was only when the third s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sengers. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps-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 wis.h.!.+

"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 s.h.i.+ps 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 ga.s.sed, but thanking such G.o.ds 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 s.h.i.+ps.

"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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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.