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IV

CITY OF DEAD MEN

He had perhaps childishly expected to be whisked aloft, but the machine ran straight forward, gathering speed. Its nose plowed across the low parapet with force enough to somersault the whole plane over. Simon knew he was falling, not free as his tormenter had intended, but encased in the cabin.
There was another swift moment of awareness that that fall was not straight down, that he was descending at an angle. Hopelessly, he jerked once more at that lever, pulling it halfway up the slot.
Then there was a crash, followed by nothing but blackness without sight, sound, or feeling.
 
A spark of red-amber watched him speculatively out of the black. It was matched by a faint repetitive sound—the tick of a watch, the drip of water? And thirdly there was the smell. It was that latter which prodded Simon into action. For it was a sweetish stench, thick and sickening in his nostrils and throat, a stench of old corruption and death.
He was sitting up, he discovered, and there was a faint light to show the wreckage which held him in that position. But the hounding pressure which had battered him on the upper roof was gone; he was free to move if he could, to think.
Save for some painfully bruised areas, he had apparently survived the crash without injury. The machine must have cushioned the shock of landing. And that red eye out of the dark was a light on the board of the lever.
The drip was close by. So was the smell. Simon shifted in his seat and pushed. There was a rasp of metal scraping metal and a large section of cabin broke away. Simon crawled painfully out of his cage. Overhead was a hole framed with jagged ends of timbers. As he watched, another piece of roofing gave way and struck on the already battered machine. The plane must have fallen on the roof of one of the neighboring buildings and broken through that surface. How he had escaped with life and reasonably sound limbs was one of the strange quirks of fate.
He must have been unconscious for some time as the sky was the palid shade of evening. And his hunger and thirst were steady pains. He must have food and water.
But why had not the enemy located him before this? Certainly anyone on the other roof could have spotted the end of his abortive flight. Unless—suppose they did not know of his try with the plane—suppose they only traced him by some form of mental contact. Then they would only know that he had gone over the parapet, that his fall had ended in a blackout which to them might have registered as his death. If that were true then he was indeed free, if still within the city of Sippar!
First, to find food and drink, and then discover where he was in relation to the rest of the port.
Simon found a doorway, one which gave again on stairs leading downward toward the street level, as he had hoped. The air here was stale, heavily tainted with that odor. He could identify it now and it made him hesitate—disliking what must lie below to raise such a stench.
But down was the only way out, so down he must go.
The windows here were unsealed and light made fading patches on each landing. There were doors, too, but Simon opened none of them, because it seemed to him that around them that fearsome, stomach-churning smell was stronger.
Down one more flight, and into a hall which ended in a wide portal he thought must give on the street. Here Simon dared to explore and in a back room he found that leathery journey bread which was the main military ration of Estcarp, together with a pot of preserved fruit still good under its cap. The moldering remains of other provisions were evidence that no one had foraged here for a long time. Water trickled from a pipe to a drain and Simon drank before he wolfed down the food.
It was difficult to eat in spite of his hunger for that smell clung to everything. Although he had been only in this one building outside the citadel Simon suspected that his monstrous suspicion was the truth; save for the central building and its handful of inhabitants, Sippar was a city of the dead. The Kolder must have ruthlessly disposed of those of the conquered of no use to them. Not only slain them, but left them unburied in their own homes. As a warning against rebellion of the few remaining alive? Or merely because they did not care? It would appear that the last was the most likely, and that odd feeling of kinship he had for the flat-faced invaders died then and there.
Simon took with him all the bread he could find and a bottle filled with water. Curiously enough the door leading to the street was barred on the inside. Had those who had once lived here locked themselves in and committed mass suicide? Or had the same pressure methods driven them to their deaths as had been used to send him over the upper roof?
The street was as deserted as he had seen it from that same roof. But Simon kept close to one side, watching every shadowed doorway, the mouth of every cross lane. All doors were shut; nothing moved as he worked his way to the harbor.
He guessed that if he tried any of those doors he would find them barred against him, while within would lie only the dead. Had they perished soon after Gorm had welcomed Kolder to further the ambitions of Oma and her son? Or had that death come sometime later, during the years since Koris had fled to Estcarp and the island had been cut off from humankind? It would not matter to anyone save perhaps a historian.
This remained a city of the dead—the dead in body, and in the keep, the dead in spirit—with only the Kolder, who might well be dead in another fashion, keeping a pretense of life.
As he went Simon memorized route of street and house. Gorm could only be freed when the central keep was destroyed, he was certain of that. But it seemed to him that leaving this waste of empty buildings about their lair had been a bad mistake on the part of the Kolder. Unless they had some hidden defenses and alarms rigged in these blank walled houses, it might be no trick at all to bring a landing party ashore and have them under cover.
There were those tales of Koris’ concerning the spies Estcarp had sent to this island over the years. And the fact that the Captain himself had been unable to return because of some mysterious barrier. After his own experience with Kolder weapons Simon had an open mind. Only he had been able to break free, first in that headquarters room and secondly by the use of one of the planes. The mere fact that the Kolder had not tried to hunt him down was proof of a kind they must believe him finished for good.
But it was hard to think that someone or something did not keep watch in the silent city. So he kept to cover until he reached the wharves. There were ships there, ships battered by storms, some driven half ashore, their rigging a rotting tangle, their sides scored and smashed in, some half waterlogged, with only their upper decks above the surface of the harbor. None of these had sailed for months, or years!
And the width of the bay lay between Simon and the mainland. If this dead port was Sippar, and he had no reason to believe that it was not, then he was now facing that long arm of land on which the invaders had built Yle, ending in the finger of which Sulcarkeep had been the nail. Since the fall of the traders’ stronghold it was very probable that the Kolder forces now controlled that whole cape.
If he could find a manageable small craft and take to the sea, Simon would have to take the longer route eastward down the bottle-shaped bay to the mouth of the River Es and so to Estcarp. And he was plagued by the idea that time no longer fought upon his side.
He found his boat, a small shell stored in a warehouse. Though Simon was no sailor he took what precautions and made what tests he could to ensure its seaworthiness. And waited until full dark before he took oars, gritting his teeth against the pain of his bruises, as he pulled steadily, setting a crooked course among the rotting hulks of the Gormian fleet.
It was when he was well beyond those and had dared to step his small mast, that he met the Kolder defense head on. He saw or heard nothing as he fell to the bottom of the boat, his hands over his ears, his eyes closed against that raging tumult of silent sound and invisible light which beat outward from some point within his brain. He had thought his ordeal with the will pressure had made him aware of the Kolder power, but this scrambling of a man’s brain was worse.
Was he only minutes within that cloud, or a day, or a year? Dazed and dumb, Simon could not have told. He lay in a boat which swung with the waves but obeyed sluggishly the wind touch on its sail. And behind him was Gorm, dead and dark in the moonlight.
Before dawn Simon was picked up by a coastal patrol boat from the Es, and by that time he had recovered his wits, though his mind felt as bruised as his boat. Riding relays of swift mounts he went on to Estcarp city.
 
Within the keep, in that same room where he had first met the Guardian, he joined a council of war, retelling his adventures within Gorm, his contacts with the Kolder to the officers of Estcarp, and those still-faced women who listened impassively. As he spoke he hunted for one among the witches, without finding her in that assembly.
When he had done, they asked few questions, allowing him to tell it in his own way, Koris tight-lipped and stone-featured as he described the city of the dead, then the Guardian beckoned forward one of the other women.
“Now, Simon Tregarth, do you take her hands, and then think upon this capped man, recall in your mind every detail of his dress and face,” she ordered.
Though he could see no purpose in this, Simon obeyed. For one generally did obey, he thought wryly, the witches of Estcarp.
So he held those hands which were cool and dry in his, and he mentally pictured the gray robe, the odd face where the lower half did not match the upper, the metal cap, and the expression of power and then of bafflement which had been mirrored on those features when Simon had fought back. The hands slipped out of his and the Guardian spoke again:
“You have seen, sister? You can fashion?”
“I have seen,” the woman answered. “And what I have seen I can fashion. Since he used the power between them in the duel of wills the impression should be strong. Though,” she looked down at her hands, moving each finger as if to exercise it in preparation for some task, “whether we can use such a device is another matter. It would have been better had blood flowed.”
No one explained and Simon was not given time to ask questions for Koris claimed him as the council broke up, and marched him off to the barracks. Once within that same chamber he had had before they left for Sulcarkeep, Simon demanded of the Captain:
“Where is the lady?” It was irritating not to be able to name her whom he knew; that peculiarity of the witches irked him more now than ever. But Koris caught his meaning.
“She is checking the border posts.”
“But she is safe?”
Koris shrugged. “Are any of us safe, Simon? But be sure that the women of Power take no unnecessary risks. What they guard within them is not lightly spent.” He had gone to the western window, his face turned into the light there, his eyes searching as if he willed to see more than the plain beyond the city. “So Gorm is dead.” The words came heavily.
Simon pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed. He was weary to every aching bone in his body.
“I told you what I saw and only what I saw. There is life walled into the center keep of Sippar. I found it nowhere else, but then I did not search far.”
“Life? What sort of life?”
“Ask that of the Kolder, or perhaps the witches,” returned Simon drowsily. “Neither are as you and I, and maybe they reckon life differently.”
He was only half aware that the Captain had come away from the window, was standing over Simon so that his wide shoulders shut away the daylight.
“I am thinking, Simon Tregarth, that you are different too.” Again the words were heavy, without any ring. “And seeing Gorm, how do you reckon its life—or death?”
“As vile,” Simon mumbled. “But that shall also be judged in its own time,” and wondered at his choice of words even as he fell asleep.
 
He slept, awoke to eat hugely, and slept again. No one demanded his attention nor did he rouse to what was going on in the keep of Estcarp. He might have been an animal laying up rest beneath his hide as the bear lays up fat against hibernation. When he awoke thoroughly once again it was alertly, eagerly, with a freshness he had not felt for so long, since before Berlin. Berlin—what—where was Berlin? His memories were curiously overlaid nowadays with new scenes.
And the one which returned to haunt him the most was that of the room of that secluded house in Kars where threadbare tapestries patterned the walls and a woman looked at him with wonder in her eyes as her hand shaped a glowing symbol in the air between them.
Then there was that other moment when she stood sick at heart and curiously alone after she had made her sordid magic for Aldis, tarnishing her gift for the good of her cause.
Now as Simon lay tingling with life in every nerve and cell of him, the ache of his bruises, the strain of his hunger and his striving gone out of him, he moved his right hand up until it lay over his heart. But beneath it now he did not feel the warmth of his own flesh; rather did he cradle in memory something else, as a singing which was no song drew from him, into the other hand he had grasped, a substance he did not know he possessed.
Over all else, the life in the border raiding parties, the experience of Kolder captivity, did those quiet and passive scenes hold him now. Because, empty of physical action though they had been, they possessed for him a hidden excitement he shrank from defining or explaining too closely.
But he was summoned soon enough to attention.
 
During his sleep Estcarp had marshalled all its forces. Beacons on the heights had brought messengers from the mountains, from the Eyrie, from all those willing to stand against Gorm, and the doom Gorm promised. A half dozen Sulcar vessels, homeless, had made port in coves the Falconers charted, the families of their crews landed in safety, the ships armed and ready for the thrust. For all were agreed that the war must be taken to Gorm before Gorm brought it to them.
There was a camp at the mouth of the Es, a tent set up in it on the very verge of the ocean. From its flap of door they could see the shadow of the island appearing as a bank of cloud upon the sea. And, waiting signal beyond that point where the broken ruins of their keep were sea-washed and desolate, hovered the ships, packed with the Sulcar crew, Falconers, and border raiders.
But the barrier about Gorm must be broken first and that was in the hands of those who welded Estcarp’s Power. So, not knowing why he was to be one of that company, Simon found himself seated at a table which might have been meant for a gaming board. Yet there was no surface of alternate colored blocks. Instead, before each seat there was a painted symbol. And the company who gathered was mixed, seemingly oddly chosen for the high command.
Simon found that his seat had been placed beside the Guardian’s and the symbol there overlapped both places. It was a brown hawk with a gilded oval framing it, a small, three pointed cornet above the oval. On his left was a diamond of blue-green enclosing a fist holding an ax. And beyond that was a square of red encasing a horned fish.
To the right, beyond the Guardian, were two more symbols which he could not read without leaning forward. Two of the witches slipped into the seats before those and sat quietly, their hands palm down upon the painted marks. There was a stir to his left and he glanced up to know an odd lift of spirit as he met a level gaze which was more than mere recognition of his identity. But she did not speak and he copied her silence. The sixth and last of their company was the lad Briant, pale-faced, staring down at the fish creature before him as if it lived and by the very intensity of his gaze he must hold it prisoner in that sea of scarlet.
The woman who had held Simon’s hands as he thought of the man on Gorm came into the tent, two others with her, each of whom carried a small clay brazier from which came sweet smoke. These they placed on the edge of the board and the other woman set down her own burden, a wide basket. She threw aside its covering cloth to display a row of small images.
Taking up the first she went to stand before Briant.
Twice she passed the figure she held through the smoke and then held it at eye level before the seated lad. It was a finely wrought manikin with red-gold hair and such a life-look that Simon believed it was meant to be the portrait of some living man.
“Fulk.” The woman pronounced the name and set the image down in the center of the scarlet square, full upon the painted fish. Briant could not pale, his transparent skin had always lacked color, but Simon saw him swallow convulsively before he answered. “Fulk of Verlaine.”
The woman took a second figure from her basket, and, as she came now to Simon’s neighbor, he could better judge the artistic triumph of her work. For she held between her hands, passing it through the smoke, a perfect image of she who had asked for a charm to keep Yvian true.
“Aldis.”
“Aldis of Kars,” acknowledged the woman beside him as the tiny feet of the figure were planted on the fist with the ax.
“Sandar ofAlizon.” A third figure for the position farthest to his right.
“Siric.” A potbellied image in flowing robes for that other right-hand symbol.
Then she brought out the last of the manikins, studying it for a moment before she gave it to the smoke. When she came to stand before Simon and the Guardian she named no names but held it out for his inspection, for his recognition. And he stared down at the small copy of the capped leader in Gorm. To his recollection the resemblance was perfect.
“Gorm!” He acknowledged it, though he could not give the Kolder a better name. And she placed it carefully on the brown and gold hawk.

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IV

CITY OF DEAD MEN

He had perhaps childishly expected to be whisked aloft, but the machine ran straight forward, gathering speed. Its nose plowed across the low parapet with force enough to somersault the whole plane over. Simon knew he was falling, not free as his tormenter had intended, but encased in the cabin.
There was another swift moment of awareness that that fall was not straight down, that he was descending at an angle. Hopelessly, he jerked once more at that lever, pulling it halfway up the slot.
Then there was a crash, followed by nothing but blackness without sight, sound, or feeling.
 
A spark of red-amber watched him speculatively out of the black. It was matched by a faint repetitive sound—the tick of a watch, the drip of water? And thirdly there was the smell. It was that latter which prodded Simon into action. For it was a sweetish stench, thick and sickening in his nostrils and throat, a stench of old corruption and death.
He was sitting up, he discovered, and there was a faint light to show the wreckage which held him in that position. But the hounding pressure which had battered him on the upper roof was gone; he was free to move if he could, to think.
Save for some painfully bruised areas, he had apparently survived the crash without injury. The machine must have cushioned the shock of landing. And that red eye out of the dark was a light on the board of the lever.
The drip was close by. So was the smell. Simon shifted in his seat and pushed. There was a rasp of metal scraping metal and a large section of cabin broke away. Simon crawled painfully out of his cage. Overhead was a hole framed with jagged ends of timbers. As he watched, another piece of roofing gave way and struck on the already battered machine. The plane must have fallen on the roof of one of the neighboring buildings and broken through that surface. How he had escaped with life and reasonably sound limbs was one of the strange quirks of fate.
He must have been unconscious for some time as the sky was the palid shade of evening. And his hunger and thirst were steady pains. He must have food and water.
But why had not the enemy located him before this? Certainly anyone on the other roof could have spotted the end of his abortive flight. Unless—suppose they did not know of his try with the plane—suppose they only traced him by some form of mental contact. Then they would only know that he had gone over the parapet, that his fall had ended in a blackout which to them might have registered as his death. If that were true then he was indeed free, if still within the city of Sippar!
First, to find food and drink, and then discover where he was in relation to the rest of the port.
Simon found a doorway, one which gave again on stairs leading downward toward the street level, as he had hoped. The air here was stale, heavily tainted with that odor. He could identify it now and it made him hesitate—disliking what must lie below to raise such a stench.
But down was the only way out, so down he must go.
The windows here were unsealed and light made fading patches on each landing. There were doors, too, but Simon opened none of them, because it seemed to him that around them that fearsome, stomach-churning smell was stronger.
Down one more flight, and into a hall which ended in a wide portal he thought must give on the street. Here Simon dared to explore and in a back room he found that leathery journey bread which was the main military ration of Estcarp, together with a pot of preserved fruit still good under its cap. The moldering remains of other provisions were evidence that no one had foraged here for a long time. Water trickled from a pipe to a drain and Simon drank before he wolfed down the food.
It was difficult to eat in spite of his hunger for that smell clung to everything. Although he had been only in this one building outside the citadel Simon suspected that his monstrous suspicion was the truth; save for the central building and its handful of inhabitants, Sippar was a city of the dead. The Kolder must have ruthlessly disposed of those of the conquered of no use to them. Not only slain them, but left them unburied in their own homes. As a warning against rebellion of the few remaining alive? Or merely because they did not care? It would appear that the last was the most likely, and that odd feeling of kinship he had for the flat-faced invaders died then and there.
Simon took with him all the bread he could find and a bottle filled with water. Curiously enough the door leading to the street was barred on the inside. Had those who had once lived here locked themselves in and committed mass suicide? Or had the same pressure methods driven them to their deaths as had been used to send him over the upper roof?
The street was as deserted as he had seen it from that same roof. But Simon kept close to one side, watching every shadowed doorway, the mouth of every cross lane. All doors were shut; nothing moved as he worked his way to the harbor.
He guessed that if he tried any of those doors he would find them barred against him, while within would lie only the dead. Had they perished soon after Gorm had welcomed Kolder to further the ambitions of Oma and her son? Or had that death come sometime later, during the years since Koris had fled to Estcarp and the island had been cut off from humankind? It would not matter to anyone save perhaps a historian.
This remained a city of the dead—the dead in body, and in the keep, the dead in spirit—with only the Kolder, who might well be dead in another fashion, keeping a pretense of life.
As he went Simon memorized route of street and house. Gorm could only be freed when the central keep was destroyed, he was certain of that. But it seemed to him that leaving this waste of empty buildings about their lair had been a bad mistake on the part of the Kolder. Unless they had some hidden defenses and alarms rigged in these blank walled houses, it might be no trick at all to bring a landing party ashore and have them under cover.
There were those tales of Koris’ concerning the spies Estcarp had sent to this island over the years. And the fact that the Captain himself had been unable to return because of some mysterious barrier. After his own experience with Kolder weapons Simon had an open mind. Only he had been able to break free, first in that headquarters room and secondly by the use of one of the planes. The mere fact that the Kolder had not tried to hunt him down was proof of a kind they must believe him finished for good.
But it was hard to think that someone or something did not keep watch in the silent city. So he kept to cover until he reached the wharves. There were ships there, ships battered by storms, some driven half ashore, their rigging a rotting tangle, their sides scored and smashed in, some half waterlogged, with only their upper decks above the surface of the harbor. None of these had sailed for months, or years!
And the width of the bay lay between Simon and the mainland. If this dead port was Sippar, and he had no reason to believe that it was not, then he was now facing that long arm of land on which the invaders had built Yle, ending in the finger of which Sulcarkeep had been the nail. Since the fall of the traders’ stronghold it was very probable that the Kolder forces now controlled that whole cape.
If he could find a manageable small craft and take to the sea, Simon would have to take the longer route eastward down the bottle-shaped bay to the mouth of the River Es and so to Estcarp. And he was plagued by the idea that time no longer fought upon his side.
He found his boat, a small shell stored in a warehouse. Though Simon was no sailor he took what precautions and made what tests he could to ensure its seaworthiness. And waited until full dark before he took oars, gritting his teeth against the pain of his bruises, as he pulled steadily, setting a crooked course among the rotting hulks of the Gormian fleet.
It was when he was well beyond those and had dared to step his small mast, that he met the Kolder defense head on. He saw or heard nothing as he fell to the bottom of the boat, his hands over his ears, his eyes closed against that raging tumult of silent sound and invisible light which beat outward from some point within his brain. He had thought his ordeal with the will pressure had made him aware of the Kolder power, but this scrambling of a man’s brain was worse.
Was he only minutes within that cloud, or a day, or a year? Dazed and dumb, Simon could not have told. He lay in a boat which swung with the waves but obeyed sluggishly the wind touch on its sail. And behind him was Gorm, dead and dark in the moonlight.
Before dawn Simon was picked up by a coastal patrol boat from the Es, and by that time he had recovered his wits, though his mind felt as bruised as his boat. Riding relays of swift mounts he went on to Estcarp city.
 
Within the keep, in that same room where he had first met the Guardian, he joined a council of war, retelling his adventures within Gorm, his contacts with the Kolder to the officers of Estcarp, and those still-faced women who listened impassively. As he spoke he hunted for one among the witches, without finding her in that assembly.
When he had done, they asked few questions, allowing him to tell it in his own way, Koris tight-lipped and stone-featured as he described the city of the dead, then the Guardian beckoned forward one of the other women.
“Now, Simon Tregarth, do you take her hands, and then think upon this capped man, recall in your mind every detail of his dress and face,” she ordered.
Though he could see no purpose in this, Simon obeyed. For one generally did obey, he thought wryly, the witches of Estcarp.
So he held those hands which were cool and dry in his, and he mentally pictured the gray robe, the odd face where the lower half did not match the upper, the metal cap, and the expression of power and then of bafflement which had been mirrored on those features when Simon had fought back. The hands slipped out of his and the Guardian spoke again:
“You have seen, sister? You can fashion?”
“I have seen,” the woman answered. “And what I have seen I can fashion. Since he used the power between them in the duel of wills the impression should be strong. Though,” she looked down at her hands, moving each finger as if to exercise it in preparation for some task, “whether we can use such a device is another matter. It would have been better had blood flowed.”
No one explained and Simon was not given time to ask questions for Koris claimed him as the council broke up, and marched him off to the barracks. Once within that same chamber he had had before they left for Sulcarkeep, Simon demanded of the Captain:
“Where is the lady?” It was irritating not to be able to name her whom he knew; that peculiarity of the witches irked him more now than ever. But Koris caught his meaning.
“She is checking the border posts.”
“But she is safe?”
Koris shrugged. “Are any of us safe, Simon? But be sure that the women of Power take no unnecessary risks. What they guard within them is not lightly spent.” He had gone to the western window, his face turned into the light there, his eyes searching as if he willed to see more than the plain beyond the city. “So Gorm is dead.” The words came heavily.
Simon pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed. He was weary to every aching bone in his body.
“I told you what I saw and only what I saw. There is life walled into the center keep of Sippar. I found it nowhere else, but then I did not search far.”
“Life? What sort of life?”
“Ask that of the Kolder, or perhaps the witches,” returned Simon drowsily. “Neither are as you and I, and maybe they reckon life differently.”
He was only half aware that the Captain had come away from the window, was standing over Simon so that his wide shoulders shut away the daylight.
“I am thinking, Simon Tregarth, that you are different too.” Again the words were heavy, without any ring. “And seeing Gorm, how do you reckon its life—or death?”
“As vile,” Simon mumbled. “But that shall also be judged in its own time,” and wondered at his choice of words even as he fell asleep.
 
He slept, awoke to eat hugely, and slept again. No one demanded his attention nor did he rouse to what was going on in the keep of Estcarp. He might have been an animal laying up rest beneath his hide as the bear lays up fat against hibernation. When he awoke thoroughly once again it was alertly, eagerly, with a freshness he had not felt for so long, since before Berlin. Berlin—what—where was Berlin? His memories were curiously overlaid nowadays with new scenes.
And the one which returned to haunt him the most was that of the room of that secluded house in Kars where threadbare tapestries patterned the walls and a woman looked at him with wonder in her eyes as her hand shaped a glowing symbol in the air between them.
Then there was that other moment when she stood sick at heart and curiously alone after she had made her sordid magic for Aldis, tarnishing her gift for the good of her cause.
Now as Simon lay tingling with life in every nerve and cell of him, the ache of his bruises, the strain of his hunger and his striving gone out of him, he moved his right hand up until it lay over his heart. But beneath it now he did not feel the warmth of his own flesh; rather did he cradle in memory something else, as a singing which was no song drew from him, into the other hand he had grasped, a substance he did not know he possessed.
Over all else, the life in the border raiding parties, the experience of Kolder captivity, did those quiet and passive scenes hold him now. Because, empty of physical action though they had been, they possessed for him a hidden excitement he shrank from defining or explaining too closely.
But he was summoned soon enough to attention.
 
During his sleep Estcarp had marshalled all its forces. Beacons on the heights had brought messengers from the mountains, from the Eyrie, from all those willing to stand against Gorm, and the doom Gorm promised. A half dozen Sulcar vessels, homeless, had made port in coves the Falconers charted, the families of their crews landed in safety, the ships armed and ready for the thrust. For all were agreed that the war must be taken to Gorm before Gorm brought it to them.
There was a camp at the mouth of the Es, a tent set up in it on the very verge of the ocean. From its flap of door they could see the shadow of the island appearing as a bank of cloud upon the sea. And, waiting signal beyond that point where the broken ruins of their keep were sea-washed and desolate, hovered the ships, packed with the Sulcar crew, Falconers, and border raiders.
But the barrier about Gorm must be broken first and that was in the hands of those who welded Estcarp’s Power. So, not knowing why he was to be one of that company, Simon found himself seated at a table which might have been meant for a gaming board. Yet there was no surface of alternate colored blocks. Instead, before each seat there was a painted symbol. And the company who gathered was mixed, seemingly oddly chosen for the high command.
Simon found that his seat had been placed beside the Guardian’s and the symbol there overlapped both places. It was a brown hawk with a gilded oval framing it, a small, three pointed cornet above the oval. On his left was a diamond of blue-green enclosing a fist holding an ax. And beyond that was a square of red encasing a horned fish.
To the right, beyond the Guardian, were two more symbols which he could not read without leaning forward. Two of the witches slipped into the seats before those and sat quietly, their hands palm down upon the painted marks. There was a stir to his left and he glanced up to know an odd lift of spirit as he met a level gaze which was more than mere recognition of his identity. But she did not speak and he copied her silence. The sixth and last of their company was the lad Briant, pale-faced, staring down at the fish creature before him as if it lived and by the very intensity of his gaze he must hold it prisoner in that sea of scarlet.
The woman who had held Simon’s hands as he thought of the man on Gorm came into the tent, two others with her, each of whom carried a small clay brazier from which came sweet smoke. These they placed on the edge of the board and the other woman set down her own burden, a wide basket. She threw aside its covering cloth to display a row of small images.
Taking up the first she went to stand before Briant.
Twice she passed the figure she held through the smoke and then held it at eye level before the seated lad. It was a finely wrought manikin with red-gold hair and such a life-look that Simon believed it was meant to be the portrait of some living man.
“Fulk.” The woman pronounced the name and set the image down in the center of the scarlet square, full upon the painted fish. Briant could not pale, his transparent skin had always lacked color, but Simon saw him swallow convulsively before he answered. “Fulk of Verlaine.”
The woman took a second figure from her basket, and, as she came now to Simon’s neighbor, he could better judge the artistic triumph of her work. For she held between her hands, passing it through the smoke, a perfect image of she who had asked for a charm to keep Yvian true.
“Aldis.”
“Aldis of Kars,” acknowledged the woman beside him as the tiny feet of the figure were planted on the fist with the ax.
“Sandar ofAlizon.” A third figure for the position farthest to his right.
“Siric.” A potbellied image in flowing robes for that other right-hand symbol.
Then she brought out the last of the manikins, studying it for a moment before she gave it to the smoke. When she came to stand before Simon and the Guardian she named no names but held it out for his inspection, for his recognition. And he stared down at the small copy of the capped leader in Gorm. To his recollection the resemblance was perfect.
“Gorm!” He acknowledged it, though he could not give the Kolder a better name. And she placed it carefully on the brown and gold hawk.

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