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PART III: VENTURE OF KARSTEN

I

THE HOLE OF VOLT

Five men lay on the wave-beaten sand of the tiny cup of bay and one of them was dead, a great gash across his head. It was a hot day and shafts of sun struck full on their half-naked bodies. The smell of the sea and the stink of rotting weeds combined with the heat in a tropic exhalation.
Simon coughed, bracing his battered body up on his elbows. He was one great bruise and he was very nauseated. Slowly he crawled a little apart and was thoroughly sick, though there was little enough to be ejected from his shrunken stomach. The spasm shook him into full consciousness, and, when he could control his heaving, he sat up.
He could remember only parts of the immediate past.
Their flight from Sulcarkeep had begun the nightmare. Magnis Osberic’s destruction of the power projector, that core of energy supplying light and heat to the port, had not only blown up the small city but must have added to the fury of the storm which followed. And in that storm the small party of surviving Guards, trusting to the escape craft, had been scattered without hope of course keeping.
Three of those vessels had set out from the port, but their period of keeping together had lasted hardly beyond their last sight of the exploding city. And what had ensued had been sheer terror, for the craft had been whirled, pitched, and finally shattered on coastwise rock teeth in a period of time which had ceased to be marked in any orderly procession of hours and minutes.
Simon rushed his hands over his face. His lashes were matted with a glue of salt water and caught together, making it hard to open his eyes. Four men here—Then he sighted that half crushed head—three men, maybe, and the dead.
On one side was the sea, quiet enough now, washing the tangles of weed ripped loose and deposited on the shore. Fronting the water was a cliff face, broken, with handholds enough, Simon supposed. But he had not the slightest desire to essay that climb, or to move, for that matter. It was good just to sit and let the warmth of the sun drive out the bitter cold of storm and water.
“Saaa . . .”
One of the other figures on the strand stirred. A long arm swept the sand, pushing away a mass of weed. The man coughed, retched, and raised his head, to stare blearily about. Then the Captain of Estcarp caught sight of Simon and regarded him blankly, before his mouth moved in an effort at a grin.
Koris hunched up, his over-heavy shoulders and arms taking most of his weight as he crawled on hands and knees to a clear space of water-flattened sand.
“It is said on Gorm,” he spoke rustily, his voice hardly more than a croak, “that a man born to feel the weight of the headsman’s ax on his neck does not drown. And, since it has ofttimes been made clear to me that the ax is my fate—see how the oldsters are proven right once again!”
Painfully he moved on to the nearest of the still prone men, and rolled the limp body over, exposing a face which was grey-white under its weathering. The Guardsman’s chest rose and fell with steady breath and he appeared to have no injuries.
“Jivin,” Koris supplied a name, “an excellent riding master.” He added the last thoughtfully, and Simon found himself laughing weakly, pressing his fists against his flat middle where strained muscles protested such usage.
“Naturally,” he got out between those bursts of half-hysterical mirth, “that is an employment most needed now!”
But Koris had gone on to the next intact body.
“Tunston!”
Dimly Simon was glad of that. He had developed, during his short period of life with the Guard in Estcarp, a very hearty respect for that under officer. Making himself move, he helped Koris draw the two still unconscious men above the noisome welter of tide drift. Then clawed his way to his feet with the aid of the rock wall.
“Water—” That sense of well-being which had held him for a short space after his own awakening was gone. Simon was thirsty, his whole body now one vast longing for water, inside and out, to drink and to lave the smarting salt from his tender skin.
Koris shuffled over to examine the wall. There were only two ways out of the cup which held them. To return to the sea and strive to swim around the encircling arms of rocks, or to climb the cliff. And every nerve within Simon revolted against any swimming, or return to the water from which he had so miraculously emerged.
“This is not too hard a path,” Koris said. He was frowning a little. “Almost could I believe that once there were hand holds here and here.” He stood on tiptoe, flattened against the rock, his long arms stretched full length over his head, his fingers fitting into small openings in the cliff wall. Muscles roped and knotted on his shoulders; he lifted one foot, inserted the toe of a boot into a crevice and began to climb.
Giving a last glance at the beach and the two men now well above the pull of the water, Simon followed. He discovered that the Captain was right. There were convenient hollows for fingers and toes, whether made by nature or man, and they led him up after Koris to a ledge some ten feet above the level of the beach.
There was no mistaking the artificial nature of that ledge, for the marks of the tools which had shaped it were still visible. It slanted as a ramp, though steeply, toward the cliff top. Not an easy path for a man with a whirling head and a pair of weak and shaking legs, but infinitely better than he had dared to hope for.
Koris spoke again. “Can you make it alone? I will see if I can get the others moving.”
Simon nodded, and then wished that he had not tried that particular form of agreement. He hugged the wall and waited for the world to stop an unpleasant sidewise spiral. Setting his teeth, he took the upgrade. Most of the journey he made on his hands and knees, until he came out under a curving hollow of roof. Nursing raw hands he peered into what could only be a cave. There was no other way up from here, and they would have to hope that the cave had another opening above.
“Simon!” The shout from below was demanding, anxious.
He made himself crawl to the outer edge of the ledge and look down.
Koris stood there below, his head thrown far back as he tried to see above. Tunston was on his feet, too, supporting Jivin. At Simon’s feeble wave they went into action, somehow between them getting Jivin up the first climb to the ledge.
Simon remained where he was. He had no desire to enter the cave alone. And anyway his will appeared to be drained out of him, just as his body was drained of strength. But he had to back into it as Koris gained the level and faced about to draw up Jivin.
“There is some trick to this place,” the Captain announced. “I could not see you from below until you waved. Someone has gone to great trouble to hide his doorway.”
“Meaning this is highly important?” Simon waved to the cave mouth. “I do not care if it is a treasure house of kings as long as it gives us a chance of reaching water!”
“Water!” Jivin echoed that feebly. “Water, Captain?” he appealed to Koris trustfully.
“Not yet, comrade. There is still a road to ride.”
They discovered that Simon’s chosen method of hands and knees was necessary to enter the cave door. And Koris barely scraped through, tearing skin on shoulders and arms.
There was a passage beyond, but so little light reached this point that they crept with their hands on the walls, Simon tapping before him.
“Dead end!” His outstretched hands struck against solid rock facing them. But he had given his verdict too soon, for to his right was a faint glimmer of light and he discovered that the way made a right-angled turn.
Here one could see a measure of footing and they quickened pace. But disappointment waited at the end of the passage. For the light did not increase and when they came out into an open space, it was into twilight and not the bright sun of day.
The source of that light riveted Simon’s attention and pulled him out of his preoccupation with his own aches and pains. Marching in a straight line across one wall were a series of perfectly round windows, not unlike ship’s portholes. Why they had not sighted them from the strand, for it was apparent that they must be in the outer surface of the cliff, he could not understand. But the substance which made them filtered the light in cloudy beams.
There was light enough, however, to show them only too clearly the single occupant of that stone chamber. He sat at ease in a chair carved of the same stone as that on which it was based, his arms resting upon its broad side supports, his head fallen forward on his breast as if he slept.
It was only when Jivin drew breath in a sound close to a sob, that Simon guessed they stood in a tomb. And the dusty silence of the chamber closed about them, as if they had been shut into a coffer with no escape.
Because he was awed and ill at ease, Simon moved purposefully forward to the two blocks on which the chair rested staring up in defiance at the one who sat there. There was a thick coating of dust on the chair, sifting over the sitter. Yet Tregarth could see that this man—chieftain, priest, or king, or whatever he had been in his day of life—was not allied by race to Estcarp or to Gorm.
His parchment skin was dark, smooth, as if the. artistry of the embalmer had turned it to sleek wood. The features of the half hidden face were marked by great force and vigor with a sweeping beak of nose dominating all the rest. His chin was small, sharply pointed, and the closed eyes were deep set. It was like seeing a humanoid creature whose far distant ancestors had been not primates but avian.
To add to this illusion his clothing, under its film of dust, was of some material which resembled feathers. A belt bound his slim waist and resting across both arms of his chair was an ax of such length of haft and size that Simon almost doubted the sleeper could ever have lifted it.
His hair had grown to a peak-crest, and binding it into an upright plume, was a gem-set circlet. Rings gleamed on those claw fingers resting on ax head and ax haft. And about chair, occupant, and that war ax there was such a suggestion of alien life as stopped Simon short before the first step of the dais.
“Volt!” Jivin’s cry was close to a scream. Then his words became unintelligible to Simon as he gabbled something in another tongue which might have been a prayer.
“To think that legend is truth!” Koris had come to stand beside Tregarth. His eyes were as brilliant as they had been on the night they had fought their way out of Sulcarkeep.
“Volt? Truth?” echoed Simon and the man from Gorm answered impatiently.
“Volt of the Ax, Volt who throws thunders—Volt who is now a bogey to frighten children out of naughtiness! Estcarp is old, her knowledge comes from the days before man wrote his history, or whispered his legends. But Volt is older than Estcarp! He is of those who came before man, as man is today. And his kind died before man armed himself with stick and stone to strike back at the beasts. Only Volt lived on and knew the first men and they knew him—and his ax! For Volt in his loneliness took pity on man and with his ax hewed for them a path to follow to knowledge and lordship before he, too, went from among them.
“In some places they remembered Volt with thanksgiving, though they fear him for being what they could not understand. And in other places they hate with a great hate, for the wisdom of Volt warred against their deep desires. So do we remember Volt with prayers and with cursings, and he is both god and demon. Yet now we four can perceive that he was a living creature, and so in that akin to ourselves. Though perhaps one with other gifts according to the nature of his race.
“Ha, Volt!” Koris flung his long arm up in a salute. “I, Koris, who am Captain of Estcarp and its Guards, give to you greetings, and the message that the world has not changed greatly since you withdrew from it. Still we war, and peace sits only lightly, save that now our night may have come upon us out of Kolder. And, since I stand weaponless by reason of the sea, I beg of your arms! If by your favor we set our faces once more against Kolder, may it be with your ax swinging in the van!”
He climbed the first step, his hand went out confidently. Simon heard a choked cry from Jivin, a hissed breath from Tunston. But Koris was smiling as his fingers closed about the ax haft, and he drew the weapon carefully toward him. So alive did the seated figure seem that Simon half expected the ring laden claws to tighten, to snatch the giant’s weapon back from the man who begged it from him. But it came easily, quickly into Koris’ grasp, as if he who had held it all these generations had not only released it willingly, but had indeed pushed it to the Captain.
Simon expected the haft to crumble into rottenness when Koris drew it free. But the Captain swung it high, bringing it down in a stroke which halted only an inch or so above the stone of the step. In his hands the weapon was a living thing, supple and beautiful as only a fine arm could be.
“My gratitude for life. Volt!” he cried. “With this I shall carve out victories, for never before has such a weapon come into my hands. I am Koris, once of Gorm, Koris the ugly, the ill-fashioned. Yet, under your good wishing, oh. Volt, shall I be Koris the conqueror, and your name shall once more be great in this land!”
Perhaps it was the very timber of his voice which disturbed age-old currents of air; Simon held to that small measure of rational explanation for what followed. For the seated man, or man-like figure, appeared to nod once, twice, as if agreeing to Koris’ exultant promises. Then that body, which had seemed so solid only seconds before, changed in front of their eyes, falling in upon itself.
Jivin buried his face in his hands and Simon bit back an exclamation. Volt—if Volt it had really been—was gone. There was dust in the chair and nothing else, save the ax in Koris’ grip. Tunston, that unimaginative man spoke first, addressing his officer:
“His tour of duty was finished, Captain. Yours now begins. It was well done, to claim his weapon. And I think it shall bring us good fortune.”
Koris was swinging the ax once more, making the curved blade pass in the air in an expert’s drill. Simon turned away from the empty chair. Since his entrance into this world he had witnessed the magic of the witches and accepted it as part of this new life, now he accepted this in turn. But even the acquiring of the fabulous Ax of Volt would not bring them a drink of water nor the food they must have, and he said as much.
“That is also the truth,” Tunston agreed. “If there is no other way out of here then we must return to the shore and try elsewhere.”
Only there was another way, for the wall behind the great chair showed an archway choked with earth and rubble. And they set to work digging that out with their belt knives and their hands for tools. It was exhausting work, even for men who came to it fresh. And only Simon’s new horror of the sea kept him at it. In the end they cleared a short passage, only to front a door.
Once its substance may have been some strong native wood. But no rot had eaten at it, rather it had been altered by the natural chemistry of the soil into a flint hard surface. Koris waved them back.
“This is my work.”
Once more the Ax of Volt went up. Simon almost cried out, fearing to see the fine blade come to grief against that surface. There was a clang, and again the ax was raised, came down with full force of the Captain’s mighty shoulders.
The door split, one part of it leaning outward. Koris stood aside and the three of them worried at that break.
Now the brightness of full day light struck them, and the freshness of a good breeze beat the mustiness of the chamber away.
They manhandled the remnants of the door to allow passage and broke through a screen of dried creepers and brush out onto a hillside where the new grass of spring showed in vivid patches and some small yellow flowers bloomed like scattered goldpieces. They were on the top of the cliff and the slope of this side went down to a stream. Without a word Simon stumbled down to that which promised to lay the dust in his throat, ease the torture of his salted skin.
He raised dripping head and shoulders from the water some time later to find Koris missing. Though he was sure that the Captain had followed them out of the Hole of Volt.
“Koris?” he asked Tunston. The other was rubbing his face with handfuls of wet grass, sighing in content, while Jivin lay on his back beside the stream, his eyes closed.
“He goes to do what is to be done for his man below,” Tunston answered remotely.”No Guardsman must be left to wind and wave while his officer can serve him otherwise.”
Simon flushed. He had forgotten that battered body on the beach. Though he was of the Guard of Estcarp by his own will, he did not yet feel at one with them. Estcarp was too old, its men—and its witches—alien. Yet what had Petronius promised when he offered the escape? That the man who used it would be transported to a world which his spirit desired. He was a soldier and he had come into a world at war, yet it was not his way of fighting, and he still felt the homeless stranger.
He was remembering the woman with whom he had fled across the moors, unknowing then that she was a witch of Estcarp and all that implied. There had been times during that flight when they had had an unspoken comradeship. But afterwards that, too, was gone.
She had been on one of those other ships when they had broken out of Sulcarkeep. Had hers fared as badly on the merciless sea? He stirred, pricked by something he did not want to acknowledge, clinging fiercely to his role of onlooker. Rolling over on the grass he pillowed his head on his bent arm, relaxing by will as he had learned long ago, to sleep.
 
Simon awoke as quickly, senses alert. He could not have slept long for the sun was still fairly high. There was the smell of cooking in the air. In the lee of a rock a small fire burned where Tunston tended some small fish spitted on sharp twigs. Koris, his ax his bedfellow, slept, his boyish face showing more drawn and fined down with fatigue then when he was conscious. Jivin sprawled belly down beside the streamlet, fast proving that he was more than a master of horsemanship, as his hand emerged with another fish he had tickled into capture.
Tunston raised an eyebrow as Simon came up. “Take your pick,” he indicated the fish. “’Tis not mess fare, but it will serve for now.”
Simon had reached for the nearest when Tunston’s sudden tension brought his gaze to follow the other’s. Circling over their heads in wide, gliding sweeps was a bird, black feathered for the most part save for a wide V of white on the breast.
“Falcon!” Tunston breathed that word as if it summed up a danger as great as a Kolder ambush.

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PART III: VENTURE OF KARSTEN

I

THE HOLE OF VOLT

Five men lay on the wave-beaten sand of the tiny cup of bay and one of them was dead, a great gash across his head. It was a hot day and shafts of sun struck full on their half-naked bodies. The smell of the sea and the stink of rotting weeds combined with the heat in a tropic exhalation.
Simon coughed, bracing his battered body up on his elbows. He was one great bruise and he was very nauseated. Slowly he crawled a little apart and was thoroughly sick, though there was little enough to be ejected from his shrunken stomach. The spasm shook him into full consciousness, and, when he could control his heaving, he sat up.
He could remember only parts of the immediate past.
Their flight from Sulcarkeep had begun the nightmare. Magnis Osberic’s destruction of the power projector, that core of energy supplying light and heat to the port, had not only blown up the small city but must have added to the fury of the storm which followed. And in that storm the small party of surviving Guards, trusting to the escape craft, had been scattered without hope of course keeping.
Three of those vessels had set out from the port, but their period of keeping together had lasted hardly beyond their last sight of the exploding city. And what had ensued had been sheer terror, for the craft had been whirled, pitched, and finally shattered on coastwise rock teeth in a period of time which had ceased to be marked in any orderly procession of hours and minutes.
Simon rushed his hands over his face. His lashes were matted with a glue of salt water and caught together, making it hard to open his eyes. Four men here—Then he sighted that half crushed head—three men, maybe, and the dead.
On one side was the sea, quiet enough now, washing the tangles of weed ripped loose and deposited on the shore. Fronting the water was a cliff face, broken, with handholds enough, Simon supposed. But he had not the slightest desire to essay that climb, or to move, for that matter. It was good just to sit and let the warmth of the sun drive out the bitter cold of storm and water.
“Saaa . . .”
One of the other figures on the strand stirred. A long arm swept the sand, pushing away a mass of weed. The man coughed, retched, and raised his head, to stare blearily about. Then the Captain of Estcarp caught sight of Simon and regarded him blankly, before his mouth moved in an effort at a grin.
Koris hunched up, his over-heavy shoulders and arms taking most of his weight as he crawled on hands and knees to a clear space of water-flattened sand.
“It is said on Gorm,” he spoke rustily, his voice hardly more than a croak, “that a man born to feel the weight of the headsman’s ax on his neck does not drown. And, since it has ofttimes been made clear to me that the ax is my fate—see how the oldsters are proven right once again!”
Painfully he moved on to the nearest of the still prone men, and rolled the limp body over, exposing a face which was grey-white under its weathering. The Guardsman’s chest rose and fell with steady breath and he appeared to have no injuries.
“Jivin,” Koris supplied a name, “an excellent riding master.” He added the last thoughtfully, and Simon found himself laughing weakly, pressing his fists against his flat middle where strained muscles protested such usage.
“Naturally,” he got out between those bursts of half-hysterical mirth, “that is an employment most needed now!”
But Koris had gone on to the next intact body.
“Tunston!”
Dimly Simon was glad of that. He had developed, during his short period of life with the Guard in Estcarp, a very hearty respect for that under officer. Making himself move, he helped Koris draw the two still unconscious men above the noisome welter of tide drift. Then clawed his way to his feet with the aid of the rock wall.
“Water—” That sense of well-being which had held him for a short space after his own awakening was gone. Simon was thirsty, his whole body now one vast longing for water, inside and out, to drink and to lave the smarting salt from his tender skin.
Koris shuffled over to examine the wall. There were only two ways out of the cup which held them. To return to the sea and strive to swim around the encircling arms of rocks, or to climb the cliff. And every nerve within Simon revolted against any swimming, or return to the water from which he had so miraculously emerged.
“This is not too hard a path,” Koris said. He was frowning a little. “Almost could I believe that once there were hand holds here and here.” He stood on tiptoe, flattened against the rock, his long arms stretched full length over his head, his fingers fitting into small openings in the cliff wall. Muscles roped and knotted on his shoulders; he lifted one foot, inserted the toe of a boot into a crevice and began to climb.
Giving a last glance at the beach and the two men now well above the pull of the water, Simon followed. He discovered that the Captain was right. There were convenient hollows for fingers and toes, whether made by nature or man, and they led him up after Koris to a ledge some ten feet above the level of the beach.
There was no mistaking the artificial nature of that ledge, for the marks of the tools which had shaped it were still visible. It slanted as a ramp, though steeply, toward the cliff top. Not an easy path for a man with a whirling head and a pair of weak and shaking legs, but infinitely better than he had dared to hope for.
Koris spoke again. “Can you make it alone? I will see if I can get the others moving.”
Simon nodded, and then wished that he had not tried that particular form of agreement. He hugged the wall and waited for the world to stop an unpleasant sidewise spiral. Setting his teeth, he took the upgrade. Most of the journey he made on his hands and knees, until he came out under a curving hollow of roof. Nursing raw hands he peered into what could only be a cave. There was no other way up from here, and they would have to hope that the cave had another opening above.
“Simon!” The shout from below was demanding, anxious.
He made himself crawl to the outer edge of the ledge and look down.
Koris stood there below, his head thrown far back as he tried to see above. Tunston was on his feet, too, supporting Jivin. At Simon’s feeble wave they went into action, somehow between them getting Jivin up the first climb to the ledge.
Simon remained where he was. He had no desire to enter the cave alone. And anyway his will appeared to be drained out of him, just as his body was drained of strength. But he had to back into it as Koris gained the level and faced about to draw up Jivin.
“There is some trick to this place,” the Captain announced. “I could not see you from below until you waved. Someone has gone to great trouble to hide his doorway.”
“Meaning this is highly important?” Simon waved to the cave mouth. “I do not care if it is a treasure house of kings as long as it gives us a chance of reaching water!”
“Water!” Jivin echoed that feebly. “Water, Captain?” he appealed to Koris trustfully.
“Not yet, comrade. There is still a road to ride.”
They discovered that Simon’s chosen method of hands and knees was necessary to enter the cave door. And Koris barely scraped through, tearing skin on shoulders and arms.
There was a passage beyond, but so little light reached this point that they crept with their hands on the walls, Simon tapping before him.
“Dead end!” His outstretched hands struck against solid rock facing them. But he had given his verdict too soon, for to his right was a faint glimmer of light and he discovered that the way made a right-angled turn.
Here one could see a measure of footing and they quickened pace. But disappointment waited at the end of the passage. For the light did not increase and when they came out into an open space, it was into twilight and not the bright sun of day.
The source of that light riveted Simon’s attention and pulled him out of his preoccupation with his own aches and pains. Marching in a straight line across one wall were a series of perfectly round windows, not unlike ship’s portholes. Why they had not sighted them from the strand, for it was apparent that they must be in the outer surface of the cliff, he could not understand. But the substance which made them filtered the light in cloudy beams.
There was light enough, however, to show them only too clearly the single occupant of that stone chamber. He sat at ease in a chair carved of the same stone as that on which it was based, his arms resting upon its broad side supports, his head fallen forward on his breast as if he slept.
It was only when Jivin drew breath in a sound close to a sob, that Simon guessed they stood in a tomb. And the dusty silence of the chamber closed about them, as if they had been shut into a coffer with no escape.
Because he was awed and ill at ease, Simon moved purposefully forward to the two blocks on which the chair rested staring up in defiance at the one who sat there. There was a thick coating of dust on the chair, sifting over the sitter. Yet Tregarth could see that this man—chieftain, priest, or king, or whatever he had been in his day of life—was not allied by race to Estcarp or to Gorm.
His parchment skin was dark, smooth, as if the. artistry of the embalmer had turned it to sleek wood. The features of the half hidden face were marked by great force and vigor with a sweeping beak of nose dominating all the rest. His chin was small, sharply pointed, and the closed eyes were deep set. It was like seeing a humanoid creature whose far distant ancestors had been not primates but avian.
To add to this illusion his clothing, under its film of dust, was of some material which resembled feathers. A belt bound his slim waist and resting across both arms of his chair was an ax of such length of haft and size that Simon almost doubted the sleeper could ever have lifted it.
His hair had grown to a peak-crest, and binding it into an upright plume, was a gem-set circlet. Rings gleamed on those claw fingers resting on ax head and ax haft. And about chair, occupant, and that war ax there was such a suggestion of alien life as stopped Simon short before the first step of the dais.
“Volt!” Jivin’s cry was close to a scream. Then his words became unintelligible to Simon as he gabbled something in another tongue which might have been a prayer.
“To think that legend is truth!” Koris had come to stand beside Tregarth. His eyes were as brilliant as they had been on the night they had fought their way out of Sulcarkeep.
“Volt? Truth?” echoed Simon and the man from Gorm answered impatiently.
“Volt of the Ax, Volt who throws thunders—Volt who is now a bogey to frighten children out of naughtiness! Estcarp is old, her knowledge comes from the days before man wrote his history, or whispered his legends. But Volt is older than Estcarp! He is of those who came before man, as man is today. And his kind died before man armed himself with stick and stone to strike back at the beasts. Only Volt lived on and knew the first men and they knew him—and his ax! For Volt in his loneliness took pity on man and with his ax hewed for them a path to follow to knowledge and lordship before he, too, went from among them.
“In some places they remembered Volt with thanksgiving, though they fear him for being what they could not understand. And in other places they hate with a great hate, for the wisdom of Volt warred against their deep desires. So do we remember Volt with prayers and with cursings, and he is both god and demon. Yet now we four can perceive that he was a living creature, and so in that akin to ourselves. Though perhaps one with other gifts according to the nature of his race.
“Ha, Volt!” Koris flung his long arm up in a salute. “I, Koris, who am Captain of Estcarp and its Guards, give to you greetings, and the message that the world has not changed greatly since you withdrew from it. Still we war, and peace sits only lightly, save that now our night may have come upon us out of Kolder. And, since I stand weaponless by reason of the sea, I beg of your arms! If by your favor we set our faces once more against Kolder, may it be with your ax swinging in the van!”
He climbed the first step, his hand went out confidently. Simon heard a choked cry from Jivin, a hissed breath from Tunston. But Koris was smiling as his fingers closed about the ax haft, and he drew the weapon carefully toward him. So alive did the seated figure seem that Simon half expected the ring laden claws to tighten, to snatch the giant’s weapon back from the man who begged it from him. But it came easily, quickly into Koris’ grasp, as if he who had held it all these generations had not only released it willingly, but had indeed pushed it to the Captain.
Simon expected the haft to crumble into rottenness when Koris drew it free. But the Captain swung it high, bringing it down in a stroke which halted only an inch or so above the stone of the step. In his hands the weapon was a living thing, supple and beautiful as only a fine arm could be.
“My gratitude for life. Volt!” he cried. “With this I shall carve out victories, for never before has such a weapon come into my hands. I am Koris, once of Gorm, Koris the ugly, the ill-fashioned. Yet, under your good wishing, oh. Volt, shall I be Koris the conqueror, and your name shall once more be great in this land!”
Perhaps it was the very timber of his voice which disturbed age-old currents of air; Simon held to that small measure of rational explanation for what followed. For the seated man, or man-like figure, appeared to nod once, twice, as if agreeing to Koris’ exultant promises. Then that body, which had seemed so solid only seconds before, changed in front of their eyes, falling in upon itself.
Jivin buried his face in his hands and Simon bit back an exclamation. Volt—if Volt it had really been—was gone. There was dust in the chair and nothing else, save the ax in Koris’ grip. Tunston, that unimaginative man spoke first, addressing his officer:
“His tour of duty was finished, Captain. Yours now begins. It was well done, to claim his weapon. And I think it shall bring us good fortune.”
Koris was swinging the ax once more, making the curved blade pass in the air in an expert’s drill. Simon turned away from the empty chair. Since his entrance into this world he had witnessed the magic of the witches and accepted it as part of this new life, now he accepted this in turn. But even the acquiring of the fabulous Ax of Volt would not bring them a drink of water nor the food they must have, and he said as much.
“That is also the truth,” Tunston agreed. “If there is no other way out of here then we must return to the shore and try elsewhere.”
Only there was another way, for the wall behind the great chair showed an archway choked with earth and rubble. And they set to work digging that out with their belt knives and their hands for tools. It was exhausting work, even for men who came to it fresh. And only Simon’s new horror of the sea kept him at it. In the end they cleared a short passage, only to front a door.
Once its substance may have been some strong native wood. But no rot had eaten at it, rather it had been altered by the natural chemistry of the soil into a flint hard surface. Koris waved them back.
“This is my work.”
Once more the Ax of Volt went up. Simon almost cried out, fearing to see the fine blade come to grief against that surface. There was a clang, and again the ax was raised, came down with full force of the Captain’s mighty shoulders.
The door split, one part of it leaning outward. Koris stood aside and the three of them worried at that break.
Now the brightness of full day light struck them, and the freshness of a good breeze beat the mustiness of the chamber away.
They manhandled the remnants of the door to allow passage and broke through a screen of dried creepers and brush out onto a hillside where the new grass of spring showed in vivid patches and some small yellow flowers bloomed like scattered goldpieces. They were on the top of the cliff and the slope of this side went down to a stream. Without a word Simon stumbled down to that which promised to lay the dust in his throat, ease the torture of his salted skin.
He raised dripping head and shoulders from the water some time later to find Koris missing. Though he was sure that the Captain had followed them out of the Hole of Volt.
“Koris?” he asked Tunston. The other was rubbing his face with handfuls of wet grass, sighing in content, while Jivin lay on his back beside the stream, his eyes closed.
“He goes to do what is to be done for his man below,” Tunston answered remotely.”No Guardsman must be left to wind and wave while his officer can serve him otherwise.”
Simon flushed. He had forgotten that battered body on the beach. Though he was of the Guard of Estcarp by his own will, he did not yet feel at one with them. Estcarp was too old, its men—and its witches—alien. Yet what had Petronius promised when he offered the escape? That the man who used it would be transported to a world which his spirit desired. He was a soldier and he had come into a world at war, yet it was not his way of fighting, and he still felt the homeless stranger.
He was remembering the woman with whom he had fled across the moors, unknowing then that she was a witch of Estcarp and all that implied. There had been times during that flight when they had had an unspoken comradeship. But afterwards that, too, was gone.
She had been on one of those other ships when they had broken out of Sulcarkeep. Had hers fared as badly on the merciless sea? He stirred, pricked by something he did not want to acknowledge, clinging fiercely to his role of onlooker. Rolling over on the grass he pillowed his head on his bent arm, relaxing by will as he had learned long ago, to sleep.
 
Simon awoke as quickly, senses alert. He could not have slept long for the sun was still fairly high. There was the smell of cooking in the air. In the lee of a rock a small fire burned where Tunston tended some small fish spitted on sharp twigs. Koris, his ax his bedfellow, slept, his boyish face showing more drawn and fined down with fatigue then when he was conscious. Jivin sprawled belly down beside the streamlet, fast proving that he was more than a master of horsemanship, as his hand emerged with another fish he had tickled into capture.
Tunston raised an eyebrow as Simon came up. “Take your pick,” he indicated the fish. “’Tis not mess fare, but it will serve for now.”
Simon had reached for the nearest when Tunston’s sudden tension brought his gaze to follow the other’s. Circling over their heads in wide, gliding sweeps was a bird, black feathered for the most part save for a wide V of white on the breast.
“Falcon!” Tunston breathed that word as if it summed up a danger as great as a Kolder ambush.

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