Andre Norton - Web of the Witch World

• Название: Web of the Witch World
• Автор: Andre Norton
• Жанр: Фэнтези

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For a long moment he stared at her and then he spoke: “For years have we sought that, lady. How comes it now into your hands that you can speak so, as if you held a map to it?”

“I have no map, but still a method to find it—or believe that this is possible. But time grows short, and this depends upon time.” And distance? her mind questioned. Could Simon get beyond the reach of their tie and she lose contact with him?

She twisted the roll of bark which had come out of Tormarsh, which had been an argument with the Guardians.

Her inner conflict might have been communicated to the great falcon, for now it mantled and screamed, even as it might scream in battle.

“You believe in what you say, lady,” Stymir conceded. “The Kolder base—” With his finger tip he traced a design on the table board between them. “The Kolder base!”

But when he raised his eyes again to meet hers there was a wariness in them.

“There are tales among us—that the Kolder have a way of distorting minds and so sending those who were once our friends, even our cup-comrades, to lead us into their traps.”

Jaelithe nodded. “That is indeed the truth, Captain, and you do well to think about such a risk. But, I am of the Old Race, and I have been a witch. You know that the Kolder taint cannot touch any of my kind.”

“Have been a witch—” He caught and held to that.

“And why am I not one now?” She brought herself to answer that, though the need for doing so rasped her raw. “Because I am now wife to him who is March Warder of Estcarp. Have you not heard of the outlander who helped lead the storming of Sippar—Simon Tregarth?”

“Him!” There was wonder in the captain now. “Aye, we have heard of him. Then you, lady, rode to Sulcarkeep for its last battle. Aye, you have met Kolder and you know Kolder! Tell me what you now devise.”

Jaelithe began her tale, the one she had set in mind before this meeting. When she had done the captain’s amazement was marked.

“And you think this we can do, lady?”

“I go myself to its doing.”

“To find the Kolder base—to lead in a fleet upon the finding. Aye, such a feat as that the bards would sing for a hundred hundred years to come! This is a mighty business, lady. But where is the fleet?”

“The fleet follows, but only one ship may lead. We do not know what devices these Kolder have in their below-water ship, how well they may be able to track anything on the surface. One ship above, not too close—that they might not suspect. A fleet could have but one meaning for them, and then, would they knowingly lead us to their den?”

Captain Stymir nodded. “Clearly thought, my lady. So then how do we bring in the fleet?”

Jaelithe lifted her hand to the cage. “Thus. This one has been trained by the Falconers to return whence it came, bearing any message. I have already conferred with those in authority. The fleet will assemble, cruise out to sea. When the message comes, why—then they will move in. But this is a matter of time. If the under-seas ship issues from the marsh river and has too great a lead, then I am not sure we can contact my lord, captive in it.”

“This river, draining from Tormarsh . . .” It was plain that the captain was trying to align points along the shore to make a picture he knew. “I would guess it to be the Enkere—to the north. We could pose as a raider on the course to Alizon and so reach that spot without raising any undue interest.”

“And may we sail soon?”

“Now if you wish, lady. The supplies are aboard, the crew gathered. We were off to Alizon today.”

“This voyage may be longer; your supplies for coast raiding are limited.”

“True. But there is the Sword Bride in from the south; she carries supplies for the army. We may trans-ship from her if you have the authority. And that will take but a small measure of time.”

“I have the authority. Let us be about it!”

The Guardians might not believe that she would retain this power of hers, but they had granted her backing for now. Jaelithe frowned. To have to use one of the Seakeep witches to transmit that request and her message had been galling, but she was willing to face any rebuff to gain her ends. And she had proved, when she had used the falcon and her new perception to confuse Simon in the flyer, that she did have something they could not dismiss as useless. Kolder would only die when its heart was blasted. And if she and Simon, working together, could find that heart, then all witchdom would back them to the limit.

Captain Stymir was as good as his boast. It still lacked several hours of nightfall when his Wave Cleaver skimmed out of the harbor, heading towards the black blot of Gorm and so beyond for the open sea. She had chosen better than she knew, Jaelithe decided, when she had picked Stymir from the four captains in the harbor. His ship was small, but she was swift, a cruiser rather than one of the wider-bottomed merchant carriers.

“You have been an opener of ways, Captain?” she asked as they stood together by the great rudder sweep.

“Aye, lady. It was my thought to try for the far north—had this war with Kolder not broken on our heads. There is a village I have visited—odd people, small, dark, with a click-click speech of their own we cannot rightly twist tongue around. But they offer such furs as I have seen nowhere else—only a few of them. Silver those furs, long of hair, but very soft. When we asked whence they came, this click-click speech folk said that they are brought once a year by a caravan of wild men from the north. They have other wares, too. Look you—”

He slipped from his wrist a band of metal and offered it to her. Jaelithe turned the ring about in her fingers. Gold, but a paler gold than she had ever seen before. Old, very old, and there was a design, so worn that it was merely curves and hollows. Yet there was sophistication, a degree of art in that worn design which did not say primitive but hinted of civilization—only what civilization?

“This I traded for two years ago in that village, and all they could tell me was that it came from the north with the wild men. Look you, here and here.” He touched with finger tip two points on the band, “That is a star—very much worn away and yet a star. And on the very, very old things of my people there are sometimes such stars—”

“Another trader of your people ages ago who made a voyage there and returned not?”

“Perhaps. But there is also another thought. For we have bard songs, also very old, of whence we first came—and that there was cold and snow, and much battling with monsters of the dark.”

Jaelithe thought of how Simon had come to Estcarp, and of that gate in another place through which the Kolder had issued to trouble them. These Sulcarmen, always restless, ever at sea, taking their families with them on such voyages as if they might not return. Only in the times of outright war were Sulcar ships other than floating villages. Had they, too, come through a gate which kept them searching with some hidden instinct to find again? She gave the band back to Stymir.

“A quest of value, Captain. May there be long years for each of us for the questing we hold in our hearts.”

“Well spoken, lady. Now we are approaching the mouth of the Enkere. Do you wish to hunt in your own way for the Kolder water sulker?”

“I do.”

She lay on the bunk in the small cabin to which the captain had shown her. It was hot and close and the mail shirt constricted her breathing. But Jaelithe strove to set aside all outward things, to build in her mind the picture of Simon. There were many Simons and all had depth of meaning for her, but it was necessary to forge those into one upon which to center her call.

But—no answer . . . She had been so sure of instant contact that that silence was like an unexpected blow. Jaelithe opened her eyes and gazed up at the roofing of the ship’s timbers so close above her head. The Wave Cleaver was truly cleaving waves and the motion about her—perhaps that was what broke the contact or kept her from completing it.

“Simon!” Her call searched, demanded. She had had long years of training as a witch, to center and aim her power through that jewel which was the badge of her office. Was this fumbling now because she must do it all without a tool, with the skepticism of those she had long revered eating at her confidence?

She had been so sure that morning when she had had that sending concerning Loyse and when she had ridden to Es with that flaming desire to be one of the Power again—only to find doors and minds closed against all her knocking. Then, because she had been so sure she was right, she had gone apart, as dictated by her past training, to study this thing, to strive to use it. And when she had had the tidings that Simon had acted against all nature, she had guessed that the Kolder blight had touched him, then she had used that new power, little as she knew about it, in the fight for Simon which dropped him into the forbidden tangle of Tormarsh. After that, she had tried again with purpose. But were the Guardians right, was this new thing she thought she had found merely the dying echo of the old power, doomed to fail?

Simon. Jaelithe began to consider Simon apart from a goal at which to aim thought. And from the fringe consideration of Simon she looked inward at herself. She had surrendered her witchdom to Simon when she wedded him, thinking this union meant more to her than all else, accepting the penalty for that uniting. But why then had she been so eager to seize upon this hope that her sacrifice had been no sacrifice at all? She had left Simon to ride to Es, to best the Guardians and prove that she was not as others, that she was still witch as well as wife. And when they would not believe, she had not sought out Simon, she had kept to herself, intent upon proving them wrong. As if—as if Simon was no longer of importance at all! Always the power—the power!

Was that because she had known no other force in her life? That what Simon had awakened in her was not lasting emotion, but merely a new thing which had been strange and compelling enough to shake her from the calm and ordered ways of her kind, but not deep enough to hold her? Simon—

Fear—fear that such reasoning was forcing her to face something harsh and unbearable. Jaelithe concentrated again on Simon: standing so, with his head held high, his grave face so seldom alight with any smile—and yet in his eyes, always in his eyes when they met hers—

Jaelithe’s head turned on the hard pillow of the bunk.

Simon—or the need to know that she was still a witch. Which drove her now? As a witch she had never known this kind of fear—not without—but within.

“Simon!” That was not a demanding summons for communication; it was a cry born of pain and self-doubt.

“Jaelithe . . .” Faint, far off, but yet an answer, and in it something which steadied her, though it did not answer her questions.

“We come.” She added as tersely as she could what she had done to further his plan for tracking.

“I do not know where we are,” he made answer.

“And I can hardly reach you.”

That was the danger: that their bond might fail. If they only had some way of strengthening that. In shape-changing one employed the common linkage of mutual desire to accomplish that end. Mutual desire—but they were only two. Two—no. Loyse—Loyse’s desire would link with theirs in this. But how? The girl from Verlaine had no vestige of witch power. She had been unable to perform the simplest spells in spite of Jaelithe’s coaching, having the blindness in that direction which enfeebled all but the Old Race.

But shape-changing worked on those who were not of the Old Race; it had once worked on Loyse in Kars. She might not be able to pull on the power itself, but it could react upon her. And was this still the power?

Without answering Simon Jaelithe broke the faint link between them, set in her mind instead the image of Loyse as she had last seen the girl weeks ago in Es and using that as anchorage she sought the spirit behind the picture.

Loyse!

Jaelithe had a blurred, momentary glimpse of a wall, a scrap of floor, and another crouching figure that was Simon! Loyse—for that single instant she had looked through Loyse’s eyes!

But possession was not what she wanted, contact rather. Again she tried. This time with a message, not so deep an identification. Foggy, as if that wisp of tie between them fluttered, anchored for an instant, and then failed. But as Jaelithe struggled to make it firm, it did unite and become less tenuous. Until it held Loyse. Now for Simon—Groping, anchorage! Simon, Loyse—and it was stronger, more consistent. Also—she gained direction from it! What they had wanted from the first—direction!

Jaelithe wriggled from the confines of the bunk, kept her footing with the aid of handgrips as she sought the deck. There was wind billowing the sails, the narrow knife of the bow dipped into rising waves. The sky was sullen where the sun had gone, leaving only a few richly colored banners at the horizon.

That wind whipped Jaelithe’s hair about her uncovered head, sent spray into her face until she gasped as she reached the post beside the rudder where two of the crew labored to hold the ship on course, and Captain Stymir watched narrowly sky, wind and wave.

“The course,” Jaelithe caught at his shoulder to steady herself at an unexpected incline of the decking. “That way—”

It was so sharp set in her head that she could pivot in a half turn and point, sure that her bearings were correct for their purpose. He studied her for a second as if to gauge her sincerity and then nodded, taking the helm himself.

The bow of the Wave Cleaver began to swing to Jaelithe’s left, coming about with due caution for wind and wave, away from the dark shadow of the land, out into the sea. Somewhere under the surface of all this turbulence was that other vessel, and Jaelithe had no doubts at all that they were going to follow the track of that, as long as that three-fold awareness linked Simon, Loyse and herself.

She stood now wet with spray, her hair lankly plastered to her skull, stringing on her shoulders. The last colors faded from the sky or were blotted out by the cloud masses. Behind them even the shadow of Estcarp’s coast had gone. She knew so little of the sea. This fury of wind and wave spelled storm, and could storm so batter them from the course that they would lose the quarry?

Jaelithe shouted that question to the captain.

“A blow—” His words came faintly back. “But we have ridden out far worse and still kept on course. What can be done, will be. For the rest, lady, it lies between the fingers of the Old Woman!” He spat over his shoulder in the ritual luck-evoking gesture of his race.

But still she would not go below, watching in the fast gathering darkness for something she knew she would not be able to see with the eyes of her body, making as best she could an anchor past breaking for the tie.

13 KOLDER NEST